MODERN MAN, SO IT HAS BEEN SAID, is an infant
crying for his mother; at least that is what we are told is the
basis for the American cult of 'Momism'. ¹ Canadians have not
been much affected by 'Momism' but not having been able to
invent symbols for their own psychology, they have accepted
their neighbours'--without knowing the difference. Here, then,
close to the centre of being, there may perhaps be found the
first of the gods we really worship. ²

Man has invariably sought a symbol-goddess. In the middle
ages he made a stem masculine Deity share His place with
a woman, the Mother of God. Mary received short shrift from
the Protestant Reformers, whose Calvinist branches, especially
prominent in Canada, suspected her sex in nearly all of its
aspects. Yet paradoxically it was this Calvinist continent which
gave woman her fling, and made its civilization into an altar
to the feminine. In woman's hands, thanks to the wills of
deceased husbands and fathers, were the majority of shares in
its great corporations. Much of its economic life turned about
woman, her necessities and her desires--'the shops', 'shopping',
the vast domain of feminine adornment. On a more earthy
level, the masses, intent on the life-force, welded to the ele-
mental, to the ewig weibliche which is both mother and wife,
had once again brought back the love-goddesses: crude versions
of them, to be sure, and links with Aphrodite rather than with the
Virgin and Child. But back the love-goddesses had come, and
their images, multiplied a thousand times, might be worshipped in
any collection of drug-store pornography. Aphrodite, born
anew from the sea foam of photographic puffery, had become
one of the great goddesses of our new paganism. The reflec-
tion of their dreams, the masses had made her, as they always
make religion, as in 1273 they forced transubstantiation on a
reluctant papacy.

It may be that the female masses play just the same role in
fashioning male gods. Once it was Apollo, the beautiful youth:

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