To-day in Morocco at the festival of Eid-el-Kebir, corresponding
to the Christian Easter, the Mohammedans sacrifice
a young ram and hurry it still bleeding to the precincts
of the Mosque, while at the same time every household slays
a lamb, as in the Biblical institution, for its family feast.

But it will perhaps be said, "You are going too fast and
proving too much. In the anxiety to show that the
Lamb-god and the sacrifice of the Lamb were honored
by the devotees of Mithra and Cybele in the Rome of the
Christian era, you are forgetting that the sacrifice of the
Bull and the baptism in bull's blood were the salient
features of the Persian and Phrygian ceremonials, some centuries
earlier. How can you reconcile the existence side
by side of divinities belonging to such different periods, or
ascribe them both to an astronomical origin?" The answer
is simple enough. As I have explained before, the Precession of
the Equinoxes caused the Sun, at its moment
of triumph over the powers of darkness, to stand at one period
in the constellation of the Bull, and at a period some
two thousand years later in the constellation of the Ram.
It was perfectly natural therefore that a change in the
sacred symbols should, in the course of time, take place;
yet perfectly natural also that these symbols, having once
been consecrated and adopted, should continue to be
honored and clung to long after the time of their astronomical
appropriateness had passed, and so to be found side by
side in later centuries. The devotee of Mithra or Attis
on the Vatican Hill at Rome in the year 200 A.D. probably