Under these symbols our Lord and Lady have been worshipped by an overwhelming majority of the human race.  They swayed the ancient world, from the Indians by the Ganges, and the Tartar tribes, to the Britons and Laplanders of Northwestern Europe,—­having their representatives in every system of faith,—­in the Hindu Isi and Isana, the Egyptian Isis and Osiris, the Assyrian Venus and Adonis, the Demeter and Dionysus of Greece, the Roman Ceres and Bacchus, and the Disa and Frey of Scandinavia,—­in connection with most, if not all, of whom there existed festivals corresponding, in respect of their meaning and use, with the Grecian Eleusinia.

Moreover, the various divinities of any one mythology—­for example, the Greek—­were at first only representatives of partial attributes or incidental functions of these Two Presences.  Thus, Jove was the power of the heavens, which, of course, centred in the sun; Apollo is admitted to have been only another name for the sun; AEsculapius represents his healing virtues; Hercules his saving strength; and Prometheus, who gave fire to men, as Vulcan, the god of fire, was probably connected with Eastern fire-worship, and so in the end with the worship of the sun.  Some of the goddesses come under the same category,—­such as Juno, sister and wife of Jove, who shared with him his aerial dynasty; as also Diana, who was only the reflection of Apollo,[d] as the moon of the sun, carrying his power on into the night, and exercising among women the functions which he exercised among men.  The representatives of our Lady, on the other hand, are such as the ancient Rhea,—­Latona, with her dark and starry veil,—­Tethys, the world-nurse,—­and the Artemis of the East, or Syrian Mother; to say nothing of Oreads, Dryads, and Nereids, that without number peopled the mountains, the forests, and the sea.

[Footnote d:  This connection of Diana with Apollo has led some to the hasty inference, that the sun and moon—­not the sun and earth—­were the primitive centres of mythological symbolism.  But it is plain that the sun and moon, as active forces referable to a single centre, stood over against the earth as passive.]

The confusion of ancient mythology did not so much regard its subjective elements as its external development, and even here is easily accounted for by the mingling of tribes and nations, hitherto isolated in their growth,—­but who, as they came together, in their mutual recognition of a common faith under different names and rites, must inevitably have introduced disorder into the external symbolism.  But even out of this confusion we shall find the whole Pantheon organized about two central shrines,—­those of the Mater Dolorosa and the Dominus Salvator,—­which are represented also in Christendom, though detached from natural symbols, in the connection of Christianity with the worship of the Virgin.