Elsewhere I have very fully alluded to the prevailing sentiment among the ancients, that the Supreme Deity was bisexual, or hermaphrodite, including in the essence of his being the male and female principles, the generative and prolific powers of nature.  This was the universal doctrine in all the ancient religions, and was very naturally developed in the symbol of the phallus and cteis among the Greeks, and in the corresponding one of the lingam and yoni among the Orientalists; from which symbols the masonic point within a circle is a legitimate derivation.  They all taught that God, the Creator, was both male and female.

Now, this theory is undoubtedly unobjectionable on the score of orthodoxy, if we view it in the spiritual sense, in which its first propounders must necessarily have intended it to be presented to the mind, and not in the gross, sensual meaning in which it was subsequently received.  For, taking the word sex, not in its ordinary and colloquial signification, as denoting the indication of a particular physical organization, but in that purely philosophical one which alone can be used in such a connection, and which simply signifies the mere manifestation of a power, it is not to be denied that the Supreme Being must possess in himself, and in himself alone, both a generative and a prolific power.  This idea, which was so extensively prevalent among all the nations of antiquity,[133] has also been traced in the tetragrammaton, or name of Jehovah, with singular ingenuity, by Lanci; and, what is almost equally as interesting, he has, by this discovery, been enabled to demonstrate what was, in all probability, the true pronunciation of the word.

In giving the details of this philological discovery, I will endeavor to make it as comprehensible as it can be made to those who are not critically acquainted with the construction of the Hebrew language; those who are will at once appreciate its peculiar character, and will excuse the explanatory details, of course unnecessary to them.

The ineffable name, the tetragrammaton, the shem hamphorash,—­for it is known by all these appellations,—­consists of four letters, yod, heh, vau, and heh, forming the word [Hebrew:  yod-heh-vau-heh].  This word, of course, in accordance with the genius of the Hebrew language, is read, as we would say, backward, or from right to left, beginning with yod, and ending with heh.

Of these letters, the first, yod, is equivalent to the English i pronounced as e in the word machine.

The second and fourth letter, heh, is an aspirate, and has here the sound of the English h.

And the third letter, vau, has the sound of open o.

Now, reading these four letters, [Hebrew:  yod], or I, [Hebrew:  heh], or H, [Hebrew:  vau], or O, and [Hebrew:  heh], or H, as the Hebrew requires, from right to left, we have the word [Hebrew:  yod-heh-vau-heh], equivalent in English to IH-OH, which is really as near to the pronunciation as we can well come, notwithstanding it forms neither of the seven ways in which the word is said to have been pronounced, at different times, by the patriarchs.[134]