632 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
has often been discussed by anthropologists under the head of religious survival, 
may be judged if we recall that there falls under it such an article of belief as 
the Incarnation of God with all its consequences of expression—the immaculate 
conception, atoning death, and bodily resurrection. Neither this belief nor any 
of its expressions, | need hardly say, make their appearance for the first time in 
Christianity. They are to be recognised as forms—necessary cdtegories of creed 
if you will—under which races of the Nearer East and of other regions of the 
world also have conceived the relation between the human and the divine as far 
back as we know anything of their history. But since anthropological knowledge 
concerning this delicate and difficult instance has been set forth lately in full 
- detail by a distinguished student of religious persistences, Mr. J. G. Frazer, in his 
‘ Adonis, Attia, and Osiris,’ I feel no obligation to deal with it further than to 
remind you that, apart from all question whether Christian tradition states 
historical facts in this matter, nothing which Anthropology has collected in the 
way of comparative facts from other creeds serves to place either this belief or its 
form of expression among religious: survivals in the narrower sense—that is to 
say, among religious elements which appear in Christianity merely because they 
existed in earlier religions. Much accidental circumstance has beyond doubt 
attached itself to this Christian tenet from the previous cult observances and 
ritual of the many races which it has convinced ; and to certain of these I shall 
call attention presently when I come to deal with another class, more properly to 
be called religious survivals ; but as for the essentials of the belief, they have as 
much right to be regarded as independent conceptions of Christianity, despite their 
earlier appearance in other religions, as history proclaims them to have been 
endued by Christianity with a wholly new ethical significance. 
But in order to fortify my generalities with a particular example, I may be 
allowed to deal in brief detail with another, though related, religious conception 
of the same class, which has not been so exhaustively treated by anthropologists. 
As a student of Mediterranean races and a frequent observer of their actual 
representatives, I have often been struck by the persistent dominance of 
femi inity in their conception of the Divine, and equally by the distinction 
which that fact makes between their instinctive creeds and those of other races 
domiciled contiguous to them, but round an outer radius. In fact, it would not 
be difficult to draw a broad frontier line at a certain distance inland round the 
Mediterranean area from the Atlantic to the African deserts, within which a 
Goddess has always reigned supreme in the hearts of the unsophisticated folk, 
with a God occupying only a subordinate, and often demonstrably a less 
primeval, throne; while without it the God has been dominant and feminine 
divinity secondary. Within the frontier lie the peninsular and other littoral 
districts with a broad hinterland of mountainous or hilly regions. With the 
great continental plains begins the outer and contrasted circle. The predominance 
of a great Nature Goddess among all the races of the East Mediterranean basin 
in the earliest historic time is well known; and to what had been ascertained of 
her among the Semites, under her many names, Tanith, Al-Lat, Baalit, Ishtar, 
Atta, Ashtaroth—these last but variants of one appellation; among the Nilotic 
peoples also under many names, e.g., Neith and Isis; among the Anatolian races 
as the Great Mother, Kybele, Ma, and the unknown ‘ Hittite’ title; among the 
historic inhabitants of Greece and the Ajgean as Rhea, Artemis, Britomartis, and a 
score of other appellations ; among the Italic tribes, as Diana or local variants, there 
has been added latterly the discovery that a Goddess of character and attributes, 
readily to be compared with those of the Nature deity in various parts of the 
surrounding area, was dominant in the religion of that important artistic race 
which occupied the Aigean in the prehistoric age, and had so much influence on 
the momentous civilisation of its later time—that race which has been rescued 
from long oblivion by Schliemann in Greece and Troy, and by Evans and others 
in the Isles. The more we learn of this great Nature- or Mother-Goddess, the 
more primeval and predominant is the position she is seen to hold, All round 
the Eastern Mediterranean she was before all created things: she became the 
mother of a son by spontaneous generation or some other process independent of 
