the deities was not invited to the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis, revenged herself by throwing among the guests a Golden Apple inscribed "To the fairest," and Paris awarded it to the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite or Venus.
The story of the Garden of the Hesperides is at heart one with that of the Garden of Eden; for it is obvious that the same phallic meaning underlies each, and that they are but different versions of the same allegory.
It may here be called to mind that it has this century been discovered from the cuneiform inscriptions of Western Asia, that Eden was the name given by Babylonians in days of old to the plain outside Babylon, whereupon, according to the legends of that city, the creation of living beings took place. Also that much evidence has accrued which, impartially weighed in the balance, leads clearly to the conclusion that the all-important commencement of Genesis, which forms as it were the very basis of both the Jewish and the Christian Scriptures, was borrowed by the Jews from Babylon. And that it was in reality a Babylonian tradition or series of traditions of far older date than any writing of purely Jewish origin, has not only been amply
proved by recent discoveries, but might indeed have been guessed from its reference to the Tower of Babel or Babylon.
Nor is this all, for among the age-old relics discovered in Western Asia is a pictorial representation of the allegorical Temptation and Fall.
Upon this noteworthy piece of evidence the Tree of Knowledge or Life, with which the figure of the cross was identified by the early Christians; the Serpent, which in all countries and every age has been more or less identified with the sexual powers; the Man; the Woman; and the Apple; are all represented. And it is important to note that, according to the cuneiform inscription upon another time-worn relic in the British Museum, the Babylonians of old, at a time when the descendants of Jacob or Israel were without scriptures of their own, had a tradition to the effect that the fate of our first parents—who, thanks to a wicked Serpent of Darkness, tasted of the forbidden fruit which grew in the "Garden of the Gods"—was placed in the hands of "their Redeemer."
It should also be pointed out that this voice from the dim and distant past distinctly states that the Redeemer in question was—the Sun-God.
In ancient days the so-called forbidden fruit or apple seems to have borne somewhat the same symbolic meaning that the egg did. But while the apple not only represented Life, but also, and primarily, that union between two sexes or principles which produces life, the egg more or less lacked the latter meaning, and, on the other hand, signified Existence in a wider sense than the apple did.
The Cosmos itself was an egg according to the conceptions of many of the ancients; and few ideas were more widely spread, or can be traced further back, than the one that the whole visible creation emerged from the original Chaos or Darkness in the shape of an egg.
The egg also, and above all, signified the Sun-God, as the acknowledged Giver of Life and Saviour of Life. Hence the prominent part which it played in the various religious mysteries of the ancients, and also the fact that the Egyptians represented the Sun-God Ra as giving forth such utterances as "I am the Creative Soul of the celestial abyss. None sees my nest, and none can break my egg." The egg referred to, was of course the Sun itself.