shall be uncovered, yea, thy shame shall be seen; sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans; for thou shalt no more be called the lady of the kingdoms."
Jeremiah says of Babel (I:12):
"Your mother shall be sore confounded; she that bare you shall
be ashamed."
Strong, unconquered cities are virgins; colonies are
sons and daughters. Cities are also whores. Isaiah says
of Tyre (xxiii:16):
"Take an harp, go about the city, thou harlot; thou hast been
forgotten."
And:
"How does it come to pass that the virtuous city has become
an harlot?"
We come across a similar symbolism in the myth of
Ogyges, the mythical king who rules in Egyptian Thebes
and whose wife was appropriately named Thebe. The
Bœotian Thebes founded by Cadmus received on that
account a surname, "Ogygian." This surname was also
given to the great flood, as it was called "Ogygian" because
it occurred under Ogyges. This coincidence will be
found later on to be hardly accidental. The fact that
the city and the wife of Ogyges bear the same name indicates
that somewhere a relation must exist between the
city and the woman, which is not difficult to understand,
for the city is identical with the woman. We meet a
similar idea in Hindoo lore where Indra appears as the
