This double number—male and female—is symbolized also in some well-known idols; for instance:
Ardhanârî-Îshvara, the Isis of the Hindûs, Eridanus, or Ardan, or the Hebrew Jordan, or source of descent. She is standing on a lotus-leaf floating on the water. But the signification is, that it is androgyne or hermaphrodite, that is phallus and yoni combined, the number 10, the Hebrew letter Yod (י), the containment of Jehovah. She, or rather she-he, gives the minutes of the same circle of 360 degrees.
“Jehovah,” in its best aspect is Binah, the “Upper mediating Mother, the Great Sea or Holy Spirit,” and therefore rather a synonym of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, than of his Father; that “Mother, being the Latin Mare,” the Sea, is here, also, Venus, the Stella del Mare, or “Star of the Sea.”
The ancestors of the mysterious Akkadians—the Chandravanshas or Indovanshas, the Lunar Kings, whom tradition shows reigning at Prayâga (Allahabad), ages before our era—had come from India, and brought with them the worship of their forefathers, of Soma, and his son Budha, which afterwards became that of the Chaldeans. Yet such adoration, apart from popular Astrolatry and Heliolatry, was in no sense idolatry. No more, at any rate, than the modern Roman Catholic symbolism which connects the Virgin Mary, the Magna Mater of the Syrians and Greeks, with the Moon.
Of this worship, the most pious Roman Catholics feel quite proud, and loudly confess to it. In a Mémoire to the French Academy, the Marquis De Mirville says:
It is only natural that, as an unconscious prophecy, Ammon-Râ should be his mother's husband, since the Magna Mater of the Christians is precisely the spouse of that son she conceives.... We [Christians] can understand now why Neïth throws radiance on the Sun, while remaining the Moon, since the Virgin, who is the Queen of Heaven, as was Neïth, clothes the Christ-Sun, as does Neïth, and is clothed by him; “Tu vestis solem et te sol vestit” [as is sung by the Roman Catholics during their service].
We [Christians] understand also how it is that the famous inscription at Saïs should have stated that “none has ever lifted my veil [peplum],” considering that this sentence, literally translated, is the summary of what is sung in the Church on the Day of the Immaculate Conception.[630]
Surely nothing could be more sincere than this! It justifies entirely what Mr. Gerald Massey has said in his Lecture on “Luniolatry, Ancient and Modern”:
The man in the moon [Osiris-Sut, Jehovah-Satan, Christ-Judas, and other Lunar Twins] is often charged with bad conduct.... In the lunar phenomena the moon was one, as the moon, which was two-fold in sex, and three-fold in character, as mother, child, and adult male. Thus the child of the moon became the consort of his own mother! It could not be helped if there was to be any reproduction. He was compelled to be his own father! These relationships were repudiated by later sociology, and the primitive man in the moon got tabooed. Yet in its latest, most inexplicable phase, this has become the central doctrine of the grossest superstition the world has seen, for these lunar phenomena and their humanly represented relationships, the incestuous included, are the very foundations of the Christian Trinity in Unity. Through ignorance of the symbolism, the simple representation of early time has become the most profound religious mystery in modern Luniolatry. The Roman Church, without being in any wise ashamed of the proof, portrays the Virgin Mary arrayed with the sun, and the horned moon at [pg 423]her feet, holding the lunar infant in her arms—as child and consort of the mother moon! The mother, child, and adult male, are fundamental....
In this way it can be proved that our Christology is mummified mythology, and legendary lore, which have been palmed off upon us in the Old Testament and the New, as divine revelation uttered by the very voice of God.[631]