“Jupiter is the king of the gods, that’s why the Emperor puts his image on his coins.”
“But the Christians say that all deities except the god of the Jews are demons,” offered Tertia, the sandal-maker’s daughter.
“That is very true, and so I ask you, how many gods are there?”
This elicited a babble of discussion, until I held up a hand for silence once more. “You are all correct, according to our way of thinking. Every land and district has its own deities, and in the Empire, our practice has been to honour them all. But consider this, the greatest of our own philosophers and poets speak of a supreme divinity. Some call this Power “Nature”, and others “Aether”, and still others, “the High God”. The poet Maro tells us,
“Know first, the heaven, the earth, the main,
The moon’s pale orb, the starry train,
Are nourished by a Soul,
A Spirit, whose celestial flame
Glows in each member of the frame,
And stirs the mighty whole.”
“But what about the Goddess?” asked little Portia, pointing towards the altar in the corner of the sunny chamber we used as a classroom, where a lamp was always kept burning before the relief of the Mothers. Sometimes, when no one else was present, I would pat the head of the dog in the fourth Mother’s lap, and feel it warm and smooth beneath my hand as if Hylas had come back to me.
I smiled, having hoped that someone would raise this point.
“Certainly, it makes more sense to see the Highest Power as female, if one must assign a gender to Deity, for it is the female who gives birth. Even Jesus, whom the Christians say was the son of God, or even God himself, had to be born from Maria before he could take human form.”
“Well of course!” answered Portia. “That’s where the heroes and demi-gods come from—Hercules, and Aeneas, and the rest of them.”
“But the Christians say their Jesus was the only one,” observed Lucretia. The rest of the girls contemplated this lack of logic and shook their heads.
“Let us return to the original question,” I said when the discussion came to an end. “Pythagoras tells us that the supreme Power is ‘a soul passing to and fro, and diffused through all parts of the universe, and through all nature, from which all living creatures which are produced derive their life.’ This is very much the same teaching as I received among the Druids, except, as I said, that we tend to think of this Power as being female when we give it a gender.
“This being so,” I gestured towards the matronae once more, “why do we feel impelled to make images of that which cannot, in truth, be pictured, and divide it up into gods and goddesses and give them histories and names? Even the Christians do it—they say their Jesus is the Supreme God, and yet the stories they tell about him are just like our own hero tales!”
There was a long silence. In a way, I thought, it was unfair to ask these girls to answer a question whose solution had eluded the theologians and philosophers. But perhaps, just because they were female, they might find it easier to understand.
“You have dolls at home, don’t you?” I added. “But you know they are not real babies. Why do you love them?”
“Because…” Lucretia said hesitantly after another pause, “I can hold onto them. I pretend they are the babies I will have when I grow up. It is hard to love something that has no face or name.”
“I think that is a very good answer, don’t you?” I asked, looking around the circle. “In our minds we can understand the Highest God, but so long as we are in human bodies, living in this rich and varied world, we need images that we can see and touch and love. And each one of them shows us a part of that supreme Power, and all the parts together give us a glimpse of the whole. So the people who insist there is only One God are right, and so are those who honour the many, but in different ways.”