The God-Idea of the Ancients, page 229 by Eliza Burt Gamble
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Patrick, and who probably early in the fifth century of our era amused themselves by chiseling from the Irish monuments many of the symbols of the female power, removed also the figures of serpents which had for ages appeared in connection with the emblems of woman, and by this act won the plaudits of an admiring Christian world; chiefly, however, for the skill manifested in "banishing snakes from Ireland." In addition to this dignified amusement, we find that the same person or set of persons ordered to be burned hundreds of volumes of the choicest Irish literature, volumes which contained the annals of the ancient Irish nation, and in which, it is believed, was stored much actual information concerning the remote antiquity of the human race.
The extent to which the worship of the male emblems of generation prevailed in the Christian Church even as late as the 16th century, proves that it was not the particular symbols connected with the worship of fertility upon which the Western Christian missionaries made war, but, on the contrary, that it was the recognition by them of that detested female element against which, even before the erection of the Tower of Babel, there had been almost a constant warfare. The rites of Potin, or Photin, Bishop of Lyons, who was honored in Provence, Languedoc and the Lyonais as St. Fontin, also the rites performed in many of the Christian Churches as late as the 16th century, prove that the devotees of the Christian system were not at this time a whit behind their Pagan predecessors in their zeal for "heathen abominations." The only difference being that the Druids, a people who still retained a faint conception of ancient Nature worship, had not become entirely divested of the purer ideas which in an earlier age of the race had constituted a creative force.
That the war of the sexes was revived, and that for many centuries much strife was engendered over the exact importance which should be ascribed to the female element in the Deity may not be doubted.
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