that life and the universe had a female origin in contrast to those who believed in the theory of male origin.  Ishtar is identical with Nina, the fish goddess, a creature who gave her name to the Sumerian city of Nina and the Assyrian city of Nineveh.  Other forms of the Creatrix included Mama, or Mami, or Ama, “mother”, Aruru, Bau, Gula, and Zerpanitu^m.  These were all “Preservers” and healers.  At the same time they were “Destroyers”, like Nin-sun and the Queen of Hades, Eresh-ki-gal or Allatu.  They were accompanied by shadowy male forms ere they became wives of strongly individualized gods, or by child gods, their sons, who might be regarded as “brothers” or “husbands of their mothers”, to use the paradoxical Egyptian term.  Similarly Great Father deities had vaguely defined wives.  The “Semitic” Baal, “the lord”, was accompanied by a female reflection of himself—­Beltu, “the lady”.  Shamash, the sun god, had for wife the shadowy Aa.

As has been shown, Ishtar is referred to in a Tammuz hymn as the mother of the child god of fertility.  In an Egyptian hymn the sky goddess Nut, “the mother” of Osiris, is stated to have “built up life from her own body".[129] Sri or Lakshmi, the Indian goddess, who became the wife of Vishnu, as the mother goddess Saraswati, a tribal deity, became the wife of Brahma, was, according to a Purana commentator, “the mother of the world ... eternal and undecaying".[130]

The gods, on the other hand, might die annually:  the goddesses alone were immortal.  Indra was supposed to perish of old age, but his wife, Indrani, remained ever young.  There were fourteen Indras in every “day of Brahma”, a reference apparently to the ancient conception of Indra among the Great-Mother-worshipping sections of the Aryo-Indians.[131] In the Mahabharata the god Shiva, as Mahadeva, commands Indra on “one of the peaks of Himavat”, where they met, to lift up a stone and join the Indras who had been before him.  “And Indra on removing that stone beheld a cave on the breast of that king of mountains in which were four others resembling himself.”  Indra exclaimed in his grief, “Shall I be even like these?” These five Indras, like the “Seven Sleepers”, awaited the time when they would be called forth.  They were ultimately reborn as the five Pandava warriors.[132]

The ferocious, black-faced Scottish mother goddess, Cailleach Bheur, who appears to be identical with Mala Lith, “Grey Eyebrows” of Fingalian story, and the English “Black Annis”, figures in Irish song and legend as “The Old Woman of Beare”.  This “old woman” (Cailleach) “had”, says Professor Kuno Meyer, “seven periods of youth one after another, so that every man who had lived with her came to die of old age, and her grandsons and great-grandsons were tribes and races”.  When old age at length came upon her she sang her “swan song”, from which the following lines are extracted: