Chapter IX · Purity a Divine Attribute.

From these phrases, then, seems to emerge the conception of a virgin-mother. Only we must not press it too far, or suppose at all that it crystallised into a dogma. It is characteristic of the ecstatic Babylonian imagination that in the swoon of rapture the intellect does not sharply hold contradictions apart, and the mystic enthusiasm reconciles contrary ideas as fused in one divine personality. Thus even a divinity naturally and properly male, might be mystically addressed as Father-Mother, for the worshipper craves that the godhead should be all in all to him. Thus motherhood is the natural function and interest of the goddess; therefore the Babylonian supplicated his goddess as mother, even as mother of the gods, without thinking of any divine offspring or of any literal genealogy or theogony. Virginity is also beautiful, and a source of divine power and virtue. Therefore the mother Bau might rejoice to be addressed occasionally as maid. As for Ishtar, she was aboriginally, perhaps, a maid, in the sense that no god entered into her worship; and this idea shaped the early spiritual conception of her. But as a great goddess she must show her power in the propagation of life; therefore she must be recognised in prayer and supplication as a mother; the adorer wishing to give her the virtue of both states, probably without dogmatising or feeling the contradiction. This explanation appears more likely, when we consider the psychologic temper of the Babylonian poetry, its often incoherent rapture, than the other obvious one that Ishtar the virgin happened in many places to appropriate to herself the cult of a mother-goddess, though this might easily happen.