Note 171.1 — Chapter IX · Purity a Divine Attribute.

If we search the other parts of the Asia-Minor littoral, neither in the prehistoric nor in the later periods before Christianity is the concept we are seeking clearly to be traced. I cannot find the Leto-Artemis, the goddess who was at once essentially a virgin and a mother. What we discern in Crete is a great mother-goddess and a virgin, Ἀφαία or Britomartis, “the Sweet Maid.” That the prehistoric or later Cretans mystically combined the two concepts in one personality we do not know. When we examine legends and ritual, usually dateless, of early Hellas, we are aware that a goddess who was worshipped as a Maid in one locality might be worshipped as a Mother in another; or the same goddess at different times of the year might be worshipped now under one aspect, now under another. Hera of Argos yearly renews her divinity by bathing in a certain stream. Kore, the young earth-goddess, was probably an early emanation from Demeter. How powerful in pre-Hellenic days was the appeal of the virginal aspect of certain goddesses, is shown by the antiquity and the tenacity of the dogma concerning the virginity of Artemis and Athena. Yet the latter was called Μήτηρ at Elis171.1. But it would be very rash to declare that here at last the Virgin-Mother is found in old Greece. Athena has no offspring; there is neither loss nor miraculous preservation of her virginity. Only the Elean women, wishing themselves to be mothers, pray to the Virgin-goddess for offspring, and strengthen their prayer by applying a word to Athena of such powerful spell-efficacy as “Mother.” It would be a misinterpretation of the method of ancient hieratic speech to suppose that Athena Μήτηρ was mystically imagined as herself both Virgin and Mother.171.2