the English Church Candlemas, and was originally celebrated at Sais in Egypt as the feast of Lights, in honor of Ceres (or Isis), the mother of the Sun. The celestial sign of the Virgin and Child was in existence many thousand years before Christ. Upon the front of the temple of Sais, under the well-known inscription to Isis, was another, which read, "The fruit which I have brought forth is the Sun." The mysteries of Ceres represented Proserpine, her daughter, as carried away by Pluto to the realms of the dead, where Ceres finds her installed as Queen of Darkness. Proserpine, Madonna, and the celestial Virgo are all often depicted as carrying ears of corn or wheat. Albumazar, the Arabian philosopher, says: "In the first decan of the Virgin rises a maid, called in Arabic Aderenosa, that is, the Immaculate Virgin, holding two ears of wheat, sitting on a throne, and nursing a boy called Jessus by certain nations, Christ in Greek." Now the Milky Way (so called by the Greeks, who, as usual, invented a story to account for the name) was originally called the Strawy Way; the celestial Virgin, pursued by Typhon, having let fall some of the wheat she carried.

Lady-Day, or the feast of the Annunciation, is celebrated on the 25th of March. In the Roman calendar that day was consecrated to Cybele, the mother of the gods, and was called Hilaria, to testify the joy of the people at the arrival of the vernal equinox. On the same day the Phrygians worshiped Atys (the feminine personification of Bacchus), whom they called the mother of God. The Pamylia (a Coptic word for annunciation) were on the 25th of the month Phameoth, and on the new moon of that month the ancient Egyptians celebrated the union of Isis and Osiris. Nine months afterwards (December 25th) they celebrated the birth of Harpocrates, and one meaning of Harpocrates was 66 the sun in winter."

The Assumption of the Virgin is set for the 15th of August. This day is marked in the Roman calendar of Columella as that of the death or disappearance of Virgo. "About the eighth month, when the sun is in his greatest strength, the celestial Virgin seems to be absorbed in his fires, and she disappears in the rays and glory of her son." The calendar above quoted says that the sun passes into Virgo the 13th before the kalends of September. The Christian festival of the Assumption, or the reunion of the Virgin with her Son, used to be called "the feast of the passage of the Virgin.”

The mother of the Virgin Mary, we are told, was St. Anna. The Romans had a festival at the beginning of the year for Anna Perenna, and the Hindu goddess Anaitia, the wife of Siva, is also called Annapurna and Kanya the Virgin, while the Roman Catholic Church to-day teaches the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary herself. The name Anna is said to come from the Chaldean ana, heaven.

Isis Multimammia (identical with the Diana of Ephesus), Cybele, Ceres, and many others, being all forms of the same idea, were each in turn addressed as Queen of Heaven" and "Mother of God." From Rome to Greece, from Greece to Egypt, from Egypt to India, we may trace the figure of the Virgin and Child, and under every phase we find it, in its exoteric aspect, corresponding to the astronomical symbol of the celestial Virgo, the mother of the God of Light, the Sun.

So much for the form of the representation; now for the color. Were the black Madonna of Loreto and numer ous others of the same hue so colored as the mere fantasy of some early painter, or can we trace that symbolism also to its source? We find in all the histories of mythology many instances where both gods and goddesses are represented as black. Pausanias,

who mentions two statues of the black Venus, says that the oldest statue of Ceres among the Phigalenses was black. Now Ceres, like Juno and Minerva, like the Hindu Maia and the Egyptian Isis, stood for the maternal principle in the universe, and all these goddesses have been thus represented. Ceres is the same as Here (Juno), and Here became in German Hertha, or the mother Earth. In the different Greek dialects, Here took various forms, and changed into Ere, Re, Ree, Rhea, and Res, all names of the earth. In Latin Res was retained, to signify matter (or mater), the mother of all things, and, figuratively, every quality and modification thereof. MiMinerva Aglaurus, the daughter of Cecrops, another similar personification, was represented at Athens as black. Corinth had a black Venus, so had the Thespians. The oracles of Dodona and Delphi were founded by black doves, the emissaries of Venus. The Isis Multimammia in the Capitol at Rome is black.

Nor is it the goddesses alone who are shown to be of this sable hue. In all In all the myths connected with light, or with the sun and moon, the sex is ever changing, and the moon becomes masculine or the sun feminine, or the two sexes are blended into one, as the allegory varies. Bacchus, Hercules, and Apollo have all been worshiped under a feminine form, and their statues have all been carved from black marble. Several black figures of Cybele have their pedestals inscribed with "Mother of the Gods" or "Mother of the Sun." Isis and Horus, the Egyptian form of the Mother and Child, are continually represented as black. Christna was worshiped as a black god in Egypt, under the name of Kneph or Knuphis. sebius speaks of the Demiurgos Kneph, who was represented as dark blue or black. It was formerly supposed that many of these old statues were made of a dark-blue stone because black could not be procured; but it is now said that in

Eu

the mystic language of colors dark blue and black had the same significance, and were therefore used indifferently. Now dark blue melting into black is the color of the sky at midnight, especially in southern countries, where the velvety blueness of the heavens is very striking; and here, it seems to me, we may find the clue to the indiscriminate use of these colors. The worshipers of the Sun, in the tropical climates where that worship began, observed that his destructive power was exerted most by day, when his fierce rays tortured men and animals, dried up rivers, and generated putrefaction and disease; while by night fell the vivifying dews, tempered by the warm air. They worshiped the nocturnal sun, therefore, as the productive power or maternal element, and the deity that symbolized it, whether Apollo Didymæus, Bacchus, or Hercules, took on, . for the time being, a feminine shape and attributes. Night itself was personified as the Universal Mother in the person of Hathor, or the Isis of the lower world, often represented as suckling Horus. On a monolith from Karnac, now in the British Museum, Hathor has inscribed on her throne "The Divine Mother and Lady, or Queen of Heaven;" also "The Morning Star" and "The Light of the Sea."

Black, then, we see to be the symbol of the productive power of night, and of that Darkness from whose bosom springs the Sun; and this color, as chosen for the old statues and paintings of the Divine Mother, simply intensified the idea of maternity that the artist desired to express. But underlying the astronomical symbol was always a deeper esoteric significance, known only to the priests. and initiates; and the further back we go in the study of the ancient faiths and their symbols, the more complete become the resemblances between them, until we are forced to conclude that the primitive religions had but one fountainhead. No matter how complicated the

systems of polytheism may be, we find that they resolve themselves, under the microscope of comparative mythology, into a few simple allegories that in the beginning expressed one and the same idea. In religion the same law of progression must obtain that holds good in every other department of human thought and science, - the universal order of development from the simple to the complex. The conception of an ineffable mysterious Power behind every manifestation in nature, Unnamable, Absolute, and Unique, must have preceded, for the priests at least, the elaborate systems of Egypt and of Greece that appointed to every phase of physical being its appropriate deity. For as far back as we can trace any religious organization, there is always the symbolism for the people, the hidden meaning thereof for the priests; and this hidden meaning, so far as we are able to catch glimpses of it here and there, seems to be always the same.

Back of the black Madonna, then, the copy of the black goddesses of the earlier faiths; back of the blackness of night, symbol of the darkness from which is born the sun, we find a deeper symbolism still. In Lenormant's Beginnings of History, he tells us that upon one of the earliest Chaldean tablets deciphered by the famous scholar, George Smith, is the following inscription: "When above the heavens were not yet named, and below the earth was without a name, the limitless Abyss was their generator, and the chaotic Sea she who produced the whole." Among the teachings said to have been given to Pythagoras by the Chaldeans, we find the conception of the Absolute, the Eternal Cause, manifesting itself as Father and Mother in one, the father light, the mother darkness; to light belonging heat and dryness, to darkness cold and moisture. "There are these two divinities of the universe: the chthonian (water), producing all that is born of earth, and the

celestial (fire), sharing the nature of the air; and it is from these two in one that proceeds the creative principle, the Logos, or Word.

So in Genesis we read: "Darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." And in the Gospel of St. John: "The Word was in the beginning with God" (as the second person of the mystic Trinity). "All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made."

The basic idea of the productive power of Nature, giving birth to all things without change in herself, underlies every conception of the Virgin Mother; and behind the earthly form of Mary, the mother of Jesus, we can trace the grand, mysterious outlines of the Universal Mother, that Darkness from whence cometh the Light, that chaotic Sea that produceth all things. Water, as referred to in such allegories, is, of course, something quite different from the element we know, and represents that primordial matter whose protean shape so constantly eludes the grasp of science.

Representing the productive power of Nature as darkness, therefore, the old gods and goddesses were made black, and the Virgin Mother of the early Christian Church was painted of the same color for the same reason. When water was the symbol, water (or moisture) in combination with fire (or heat), then the lotus, offspring of heat and moisture, floating upon the surface of the waves, became identified with the maternal element; and the celestial messenger who announced to Maia the coming birth of her divine son, Gautama Buddha, bore in his hand the sacred lotus, transformed by the Christian Church into the lily of the Annunciation. So the Hathor of the Egyptians, the goddess of the night, on account of this association with water, was called "the Light of the Sea," as the Madonna

is worshiped as the "Stella del Mare," and Venus is said to have risen from the foam of the ocean.

In the mystic philosophies, darkness was also used as the symbol of the Infinite Unknown. Light, as we recognize it, being material, could be considered only as the shadow of the divine, the antithesis of spirit, and the SelfExistent, or Light Spiritual, was therefore worshiped as darkness. And water, considered as the source of all things, came to be also the type of wisdom or truth. All symbols depend upon their

correlation, and must be interpreted according to the character of their surroundings. The black Madonna of Loreto means to-day a portraiture of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to the Protestant; to the Romanist, "the Daughter, Spouse, and Mother of God;" while to the ancients the figure of the black Mother and Child represented the mysterious forces of the universe. Truly, as the cynic philosopher Antisthenes said, nearly five hundred years before Christ, "the gods of the people are many, but the God of nature is one."

Katharine Hillard.

PROFESSOR ABBOTT'S book deserves a hearty welcome. It has a character and value of its own as an original work. If it be attempted to indicate in a single sentence the merits of the new history, it may be said to combine the clearness, the wise caution, and the fairness of Grote with all Curtius' grace of style, while through every page are felt an exquisite delicacy, and a scholar's love of literature, of the Divine Philosophy, of the contemplative life, characteristics which are the author's own, except as we are wont to associate them with the best Oxford culture. This first installment is nearly as large, and covers almost the same ground, as the first of Curtius' three volumes. Of Grote's edition in twelve volumes, three and a half are consumed in reaching the same point. It is evident at once that Mr. Abbott has no expectation of supplanting that historical masterpiece of the last generation. Indeed, the Greek history of Mr. Grote (though greatly in need of a considerable mass of notes, made necessary by the excavations and investigations of the

1 A History of Greece. By EVELYN ABBOTT, M. A., LL. D. Part I. From the

last decades) is probably still unequaled in any language as a general picture of Hellenic political life.

Professor Abbott has made a faithful effort to record all the important results of that indefatigable special research which has its chief seat in Germany. Of the Teutonic literary or far more properly, unliterary-spirit he has imbibed (may we not say, "Thank God”?) little or nothing. The works of German specialists in any field are usually not intended to be read, in any proper sense of the word, at all. Even in outward form, they resemble more than anything else Merlin's magic book, as described in Tennyson: the little square of text, almost lost in a tangled wilderness of cross-references, notes, citations, etc.

Busolt's Greek History, to take a brilliant example, is exhaustive in all senses, a marvel of learning and patience. The author has undoubtedly cited and given due credit to every one of his predecessors and co-workers, great and small. A student finds here all his materials accumulated and laid before Earliest Times to the Ionian Revolt. London: Rivingtons. 1888.

him. But to speak of reading such a book is as incongruous as to propose a pleasure-walk through a swampy trop ical jungle.

There is, perhaps, some ground for a suspicion that the Oxford don set about his own history, or at least jotted down the brief and modest preface, after a prolonged struggle with some such Chalkenteros as Busolt. There is a gentle weariness suggested in the sentence, "It has been written in the belief that an intelligible sketch of Greek civilization may be given within a brief compass, not with the hope of throwing light on old obscurities, or quoting fresh evidence where all the evidence has long ago been collected."

It may be remarked in passing that the phrase in the book most likely to provoke just criticism is, curiously enough, the first line of the preface "Though we can add nothing to the existing records of Greek history." A disappointing remark printed a few years ago by Mr. Abbott's great Balliol colleague, Professor Jowett, on the trifling value of inscriptions as historical evidence, will recur to many readers' minds. Yet Mr. Abbott probably did not intend to belittle, he certainly does not ignore, the new light constantly thrown by numismatics, epigraphy, and archæology generally on many dark corners of Greek history. His appreciation of all these sister studies is clearly indicated in the preface written by him for the interesting volume of Humanistic essays, from the hands of various English scholars, issued a few years ago under the title Hellenika. The same appreciation is revealed yet more adequately by numberless passages throughout the present volume.

Mr. Abbott is courteous in the extreme to all his predecessors, though he of course quotes them most frequently when not in full agreement with them. Grote's history has been satirically described as "an attempt to fight the

battles of English liberalism under the guise of a defense of the Athenian democracy." There is a large grain of truth in the remark, as Mr. Grote himself would have been the first to admit. In the work before us such disapproval is conveyed only by a hint, if it be indeed even a hint, in a passing phrase: "If we cannot apply the lessons which Greek history offers directly to modern politics," etc. Our author's curtest word of disapproval is reserved for the audacious conjectures of writers like Duncker, when treating of matters where no evidence at all is at present attainable. Indeed, a cautious conservatism is one of the most prominent and comfortable traits of the book. In regard to a long succession of problems much fought over, Professor Abbott briefly sums up the evidence, mentions the opposing views, refers to works like Busolt's for the full bibliography of the subject, but hardly ever suggests any hypothesis of his own; preferring rather to intimate that the question is insoluble without more evidence, which may probably never be obtained. The student, for instance, will be struck with his fair treatment of the mysterious much-discussed Pelasgians, who were the aboriginal predecessors, or the ancestors, or the neighbors, or all three, of the historic Greeks,

and also of the doughty king Pheidon of Argos, who certainly played a very aggressive part in his day in Peloponnesian politics, but whose tall, dim figure lies strangely extended by the various chroniclers through several successive centuries of semi-mythical Hellenic annals. Though he does not give up so unequivocally as Grote all attempt at connecting "legendary Greece" with the historical period proper, yet Mr. Abbott is fully aware that very little, if any, trustworthy data can be sifted out from the heroic epics of the Hellenes, or from their traditionary legends. The latter are related, somewhat apologetically, because there is usually nothing