314 On Scriptural and profane Accounts 
which, in their primary acceptation symboli- 
cal, bécame afterwards the cause of the gross- 
est licentiousness. 
When philosophy first began to assume an 
existence separate from theology, which it 
did in Asiatic Greece, we find it occupying 
itself with theories respecting the element 
from which all things had been formed, and 
water and fire respectively proposed for this . 
office. The same ideas had no doubt been 
current, in a different form, many centuries 
before, but in the garb of mythology instead 
of philosophy. One of the most ancient of 
these theories appears to have been, that 
which considered a watery chaos as the prim- 
eval condition of the universe; we find it in 
Phoenician cosmogony, (**) and it has even 
the sanction of the venerable authority of 
Scripture. (*°) Asa mythological legend, 
it assumed several forms ; one, the most im-' 
mediately connected with our present subject, 
was the representation of the great goddess, 
the general mother, in a shape half female 
half fish, bearing the name Atargatis, 
(Addir-dag, the great fish,) as a symbolical 
representation that water was the parent of 
all things. (*’7) Softened down into the 
name Derceto, she is the reputed mother of 
Semiramis, the heroine of the Ctesian ro- 
