In China, this figure was transformed into a goddess of mercy, Kwan-Yin. Represented in a variety of gracious postures, often with a child, she expresses a madonnalike maternal feeling.

His character and doctrines have received still greater injury from those who pretend to be his special disciples, and who have disfigured and sophisticated his actions and precepts, from views of personal interest, so as to induce the unthinking part of mankind to throw off the whole system in disgust, and to pass sentence as an impostor on the most innocent, the most benevolent, the most eloquent and sublime character that has ever been exhibited to man.

Psalms xlvi. 9 He breaketh the bow, and knappeth the spear in sunder.

The novel itself suggests that Huxley knew about this attempt to go beyond gender, that the earliest Christian priests had Agapetae, or female ritual lovers, and that both the early Christian Gnostics and the later Catholic moralists permitted a form of coitus reservatus, the latter claiming that it was known to Adam in the Garden and therefore a part of Paradise.