(460) The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be. Yes, he said, that must be done if the breed of the guardians is to be kept pure. They will provide for their nurture, and will bring the mothers to the fold when they are full of milk, taking the greatest possible care that no mother recognises her own child; and other wet-nurses may be engaged if more are required. Care will also be taken that the process of suckling shall not be protracted too long; and the mothers will have no getting up at night or other trouble, but will hand over all this sort of thing to the nurses and attendants. You suppose the wives of our guardians to have a fine easy time of it when they are having children. Why, said I, and so they ought. Let us, however, proceed with our scheme. We were saying that the parents should be in the prime of life? Very true. And what is the prime of life? May it not be defined as a period of about twenty years in a woman’s life, and thirty in a man’s? Which years do you mean to include? A woman, I said, at twenty years of age may begin to bear children to the State, and continue to bear them until forty; a man may begin at five-and-twenty, when he has passed the point at which the pulse of life beats quickest, and continue to beget children until he be fifty-five.

(19) The Ideal Principles entering into Matter as to a Mother affect it neither for better nor for worse.

Their action is not upon Matter but upon each other; these powers conflict with their opponent principles, not with their substrata- which it would be foolish to confuse with the entrant forms- Heat annuls Cold, and Blackness annuls Whiteness; or, the opponents blend to form an intermediate quality. Only that is affected which enters into combinations: being affected is losing something of self-identity.

In beings of soul and body, the affection occurs in the body, modified according to the qualities and powers presiding at the act of change: in all such dissolution of constituent parts, in the new combinations, in all variation from the original structure, the affection is bodily, the Soul or Mind having no more than an accompanying knowledge of the more drastic changes, or perhaps not even that. but the Matter concerned remains unaffected; heat enters, cold leaves it, and it is unchanged because neither Principle is associated with it as friend or enemy.

So the appellation "Recipient and Nurse" is the better description: Matter is the mother only in the sense indicated; it has no begetting power. But probably the term Mother is used by those who think of a Mother as Matter to the offspring, as a container only, giving nothing to them, the entire bodily frame of the child being formed out of food. But if this Mother does give anything to the offspring it does so not in its quality as Matter but as being an Ideal-Form; for only the Idea is generative; the contrary Kind is sterile.

This, I think, is why the doctors of old, teaching through symbols and mystic representations, exhibit the ancient Hermes with the generative organ always in active posture; this is to convey that the generator of things of sense is the Intellectual Reason Principle: the sterility of Matter, eternally unmoved, is indicated by the eunuchs surrounding it in its representation as the All-Mother.

This too exalting title is conferred upon it in order to indicate that it is the source of things in the sense of being their underlie: it is an approximate name chosen for a general conception; there is no intention of suggesting a complete parallel with motherhood to those not satisfied with a surface impression but needing a precisely true presentment; by a remote symbolism, the nearest they could find, they indicate that Matter is sterile, not female to full effect, female in receptivity only, not in pregnancy: this they accomplish by exhibiting Matter as approached by what is neither female nor effectively male, but castrated of that impregnating power which belongs only to the unchangeably masculine.

(91) Thus also in Christ; the Will [to the Child] was the Mother's, when the Angel declared the Message to her, and the Tincture (which received the Limbus of God, and brought it into the Will that she was thus impregnated in the Element) that was also the Mother's, and thus the Deity was conceived, in the Mother's Tincture, in her Will, like another natural Child.

(41) And she said unto him : " Give them to me until thou dost send me my hire " ; and he said unto her : " I will send unto thee a kid of the goats " ; and he gave them to her, (and he went in unto her,) and she conceived by him.

(16) And (that) when we returned to her at a set time, she would have conceived a son.

(111) Among the gods who were her sons, inasmuch as he had given [her support

(5) After all of the above talking, the maiden returned directly to her home, having immediately conceived the sons in her belly by virtue of the spittle only. And thus Hunahpú and Xbalanqué were begotten. And so the girl returned home, and after six months had passed, her father, who was called Cuchumaquic, noticed her condition. At once the maiden's secret was discovered by her father when he observed that she was pregnant. Then the lords, Hun-Camé and Vucub-Camé, held council with Cuchumaquic. "My daughter is pregnant, Sirs; she has been disgraced," exclaimed Cuchumaquic when he appeared before the lords. "Very well," they said. "Command her to tell the truth, and if she refuses to speak, punish her; let her be taken far from here and sacrifice her." "Very well, Honorable Lords," he answered. Then he questioned his daughter: "Whose are the children that you carry, my daughter?" And she answered, "I have no child, my father, for I have not yet known a youth." 'Very well," he replied. "You are really a whore. Take her and sacrifice her, Ahpop Achih; bring me her heart in a gourd and return this very day before the lords," he said to the two owls.

(72) And though the child be in the mother's house, and the mother nourish the child with her food, and the child could not live without the mother, yet both the body and the spirit, which are generated out of the seed of the mother, are the child's proper own, and it retaineth its corporeal right to itself.

(41) Wherefore the claims of God predominate over the mother's, Whoso acknowledges not God's claims is a fool. He who made mother and breast and milk United mother to father also, despise Him not! O Lord, O Ancient of days, Thy mercies, Whether known to us or unknown, are all from Thee! Thou hast commanded, saying, "Remember thy God," Because God's claims are never exhausted! Since thou hast been led astray by faithless men, I am free from error and all faithlessness;

(74) But the quality externally without them, or externally without their bodies, viz. their mother, is not their propriety, as also their mother is not the child's propriety; also the mother's food is not the child's propriety; but the mother giveth it to the child out of love, seeing she has generated the child.

On account of this it is said concerning her that she said, I am part of my mother, and I am the mother. I am the wife, I am the virgin. I am pregnant. I am the midwife. I am the one who comforts during labor pains. My husband produced me, and I am his mother, and he is my father and my lord. He is my potency; what he desires he speaks with reason. I am becoming, but I have borne a lordly man. Now these things were revealed by the will of Sabaoth and his Christ to the souls who will come to the fashioned bodies of the authorities. Concerning these the holy voice said, “Multiply and flourish to rule over all the creatures.” And these are the ones who are taken captive by the chief creator according to their destinies, and thus they were locked in the prisons of the fashioned bodies until the consummation of the age.

(17) And an angel of God, one of the holy ones, said unto her, " Why weepest thou, Hagar? Arise, take the child, and hold him in thine hand ; for God hath heard thy voice, and hath seen the child."

(90) Now thus the Child qualifies [or mixes] with the Mother, and with all Essences, till it kindles the Light of Life, and then the Child lives in its [own] Spirit, and the Mother is its Dwelling-House. But now seeing the Soul of the Child is generated out of the Limbus, and out of the Essences of the Mother, therefore it is indeed half the Mother's, though now it is become the proper own of itself.