As one pours over the history books of the early church, it is not really clear how
Mary emerged as the new symbol of the feminine component of
God...
Whatever was good was Christian. If the good was somehow mixed with the bad, that was no problem; the
bad could be swept away and the Christian remain whole and clean.
So the various local deities were transformed into
saints, and the feminine goddesses were integrated, rehabilitated, and transformed into
Mary. Did there seem to be some similarity between Mary and Diana or Juno or Athene or
Aphrodite? The early Christian shrugged his shoulders. So what?
We know very little of the precise history of the
transformation of the pagan Queen of Heaven into a
Christian Queen of Heaven. It was certainly linked with the decision of the early church to absorb all that was good,
useful, and beautiful in paganism... the popularity of the Queen of Heaven was such that she surely was going to
emerge in Christian dress.
It might well be argued that the
fertility rites prepared the way for Easter, that
Nut (the tender Egyptian goddess of the underworld) prepared the way for
Mary. It had to know the tender Nut and the life-giving Demeter
before it could know Mary the virgin mother. Mary, indeed, is part of the tradition of feminine deities... One
need only compare the art inspired by Mary with that inspired by her predecessors to see both the
similarities...
It would be wrong to think that there was no anticipation in the pagan worship of the Queen of Heaven to
the Christianization of that cult in the honoring of
Mary. On the contrary, despite the sexual excesses and
the persistence of human sacrifices beyond boundaries of the empire,
there were strains in the pagan cult of the Queen of Heaven which almost seemed to demand
transformation. One can almost go so far as to say that
if Mary had not come along, the pagans might have had to invent
her.
The early medieval Church remained pliable enough to
accommodate to some degree the widespread need
for myth. The major manifestation of this was
the cult of the virgin, which elevated the inconsequential figure
of Mary to a stupendous symbolic stature. Here was the mother goddess Christianity
lacked, worked up out of the meagerest historical material by the mythic
imagination -- a triumph of collective visionary power at times
so sweeping that the virgin nearly crowded out the official
trinity. ...the virgin rapidly occupied the psychic
ground that had always been held by Isis, Cybele, Magna Mater, and their ageless
sisterhood.