individual was of no importance when it clashed with the welfare of the clan.  The family—­centred round the mother—­and the tribe were the real individuals, in the same way as the swarm of bees, and not the individual bee, makes the whole.  They lived in complete harmony with nature; they had no spiritual life, no history, for civilisation and the creation of intellectual values which are the foundation of history depend on the rise of a community above primitive conditions.  Differentiation had hardly begun to exert its modifying influence; all men (not unlike the Eastern Asiatics of our day) resembled each other in looks, character and habits.

In the countries on the Mediterranean (as well as in India and Babylonia) the first stage of sexual intercourse, irresponsible and promiscuous, was systematised by religion.  The annual spring-festivals in honour of Adonis, Dionysus, Mylitta, Astarte and Aphrodite, celebrated unbridled licentiousness.  The whole community greeted the re-awakening vitality of the earth by an unrestrained abandonment to passion.  Man aspired to be no more than the flower which scatters its seed to the winds.  The incomprehensible lords of cupidity and rank vegetation did not suffer the individualisation of desire.  The complete union of the male and female qualities, as manifested both in nature and man, was solemnised in the Orgies, and not by any means the relationship of an individual man to an individual woman, or sexuality connected with individuals and dominated by them.  Nor was this unfettering of instinct a symbolical act; for it to be so, man must have stood over against nature as an intellectual being, mirroring and transforming her acts by his own deeds.  He was as yet far from this.  His ambition did not reach beyond the desire to fulfil nature in himself.  Before the majesty of sex—­worshipped in the vague, shadowy mothers of mankind, Rhea, Demeter, Cybele, and their human offspring, the phallic Dionysus and the hundred-breasted goddess of Ephesus—­the individual with his piteous limitations shrank into insignificance.  Sex was immortal, sex and primary matter, the [Greek:  ule] contrasted by Aristotle with the [Greek:  eisos], the form.  “The female principle is the mother of the body, but the mother of the spirit is the male.”  The substance of those ancient cults was birth and death, meaningless, purposeless, apparently without rhyme or reason; their sacrament the perpetual union of the sexes.  Between the succeeding generations there was but one bond, the natural bond of motherhood.  It was the first tie realised by mankind, a tie not felt as a concrete relationship between two individuals, but as a general, maternal, natural force.  The presiding divinities were the “mothers,” the eternal, incorporeal deities, enthroned outside time and space, and therefore immortal givers of life and preservers of mankind.  Before their silent greatness the desire of man to know his whence and whither, to win shape and individuality, became blasphemy.  They had given immortality to sex, but upon the individual they had laid the curse of death.