Not to the mother is the child indebted
     For life; she tends and guards the kindling spark
     The father lighted; she but holds his pledge.——­

he explains.  And the answer is the lament of the Erinnys: 

     Thus thou destroy’st the gods of ancient times!

Athene, the virgin goddess, the motherless daughter of Zeus, appearing as mediator between the opponents, decides in favour of the new dispensation which places the father’s claim above the mother’s.  Orestes is free of guilt; his deed was justifiable according to the canons of the new law.  The tragedy is the symbolical commemoration of the victory of the male principle in Greece.  But Athene is the embodiment of the new hermaphroditic ideal of the Greek which stood in close connexion to their homosexuality, and with which I propose to deal later on.

There is a psychical law ordaining that nothing which has ever quickened the soul of man shall be entirely lost.  Were it not so, the storehouses of the soul would stand empty.  New values are created, but the old verities endure; as a rule they are relegated to a lower sphere, to inferior social layers, but they persist and frequently merge into the new.  This law applies without exception to the relationship between the sexes; we shall come upon it again and again.  During the second stage, characterised by the spiritual love foreign to the ancients, the purely sexual impulse continued as an unimpaired force, but it had lost its prestige and was not only regarded as ignoble and base, but also stigmatised as sinful and demoniacal.  The hearts of men were stirred by new ideals.

A similar attitude, perhaps not quite so uncompromising because the contrast was less pronounced, existed in classical Greece.  The more highly developed, self-conscious Hellenic genius, shrinking from promiscuous intercourse, had systematised the instinct and set up a new ideal in Platonic love.  But below the surface raged the unbridled natural force, and in perfect harmony with the Greek spirit—­it was not hysterically hidden, but assigned a place in the new system.  Wrapped in the obscurity of the Mysteries, concealed from the gaze of the new gods of light, it attempted to assuage its inextinguishable thirst.  The Mysteries were the annual tribute paid as a ransom by Apollo-worshipping Hellas to chaotic Asia, so that she might be free to pursue her higher psycho-spiritual aims.  The brilliant civilisation of Athens was based on the dark cult of the Mysteries.  On the festivals of the hermaphroditic Dionysus and Demeter, which are identical with the cults of Adonis and Mylitta, the impersonal, generative elements were worshipped.  Thus, below the surface of the Greek State, founded on masculine values and attempting to restrict intercourse for the benefit of a more systematised progeniture, flourished the orgiastic cult of the ancient Eastern deities, who had vouchsafed to mortals a glimpse of the great secret of life in