Modern psychology has given us an explanation of the difficulty of eradicating the worship of such a goddess as the Great Mother of Asia Minor from the religion of even martial peoples who fear the contamination of woman's weakness; or from a religion obsessed with hatred of woman as unclean by men who made the suppression of bodily passions the central notion of sanctity. The most persistent human relationship, the one charged with a constant emotional value, is not that of sex, which takes manifold forms, but that of the mother and child. It is to the mother that the child looks for food, love, and protection. It is to the child that the mother often turns from the mate, either because of the predominance of mother love over sex or in consolation for the loss of the love of the male. We have only recently learned to evaluate the infantile patterns engraved in the neural tissue during the years of childhood when the mother is the central figure of the child's life. Whatever disillusionments may come about other women later in life, the mother ideal thus established remains a constant part of man's unconscious motivations. It is perhaps possible that this infantile picture of a being all-wise, all-tender, all-sacrificing, has within it enough emotional force to create the demand for a mother-goddess in any religion.
To arrive at the concept of the Madonna, a far-reaching process of synthesis and reinterpretation must have been carried out before the Bible could be brought into harmony with the demands made by a cult of a mother goddess. Just as the views brought into the church by celibate ideals spread among heathen people, so the church must have been in its turn influenced by the heathen way of looking at things.[[17]] One of the great difficulties was the reconciliation of the biological process of procreation with divinity. But there had for ages been among primitive peoples the belief that impregnation was caused by spirit possession or by sorcery. This explanation had survived in a but slightly altered form in the ancient mythologies, all of which contained traditions of heroes and demi-gods who were born supernaturally of a divine father and a human mother. In the myths of Buddha, Zoroaster, Pythagoras and Plato, it was intimated that the father had been a god or spirit, and that the mother had been, and moreover remained after the birth, an earthly virgin. These old and precious notions of the supernatural origin of great men were not willingly renounced by those who accepted the new religion; nor was it necessary to make such a sacrifice, because men thought that they could recognize in the Jewish traditions something corresponding to the heathen legends.[[18]]
The proper conditions for the development of a mother cult within Christianity existed within the church by the end of the second century. At the Council of Nicæa (325 A.D.) it was settled that the Son was of the same nature as the Father. The question of the nature of Mary then came to the fore. The eastern fathers, Athanasius, Ephraim Syrus, Eusebius and Chrysostom, made frequent use in their writings of the term Theotokos, Mother of God. When Nestorius attacked those who worshipped the infant Christ as a god and Mary as the mother of God rather than as the mother of Christ, a duel began between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius "which in fierceness and importance can only be compared with that between Arius and Athanasius."[[19]]
In 431 A.D. the Universal Church Council at Ephesus assented to the doctrine that Mary was the Mother of God. Thus Ephesus, home of the great Diana, from primitive times the centre of the worship of a goddess who united in herself the virtues of virginity and motherhood, could boast of being the birthplace of the Madonna cult. And thus Mary, our Lady of Sorrows, pure and undefiled, "the church's paradox," became the ideal of man. She was "a woman, virgin and mother, sufficiently high to be worshipped, yet sufficiently near to be reached by affection. ... If we judge myths as artistic creations we must recognize that no god or goddess has given its worshippers such an ideal as the Mary of Christian art and poetry."[[19: p.183]] [[20: v. ii., pp.220f.]]
Although Christianity thus took over and embodied in its doctrines the cult of the mother-goddess, at the same time it condemned all the rites which had accompanied the worship of the fertility goddesses in all the pagan religions. The power of these rites was still believed in, but they were supposed to be the work of demons, and we find them strictly forbidden in the early ecclesiastical laws. The phallic ceremonials which formed so large a part of heathen ritual became marks of the devil, and the deities in whose honour they were performed, although losing none of their power, were regarded as demonic rather than divine in nature. Diana, goddess of the moon, for example, became identified with Hecate of evil repute, chief of the witches. "In such a fashion the religion of Greece, that of Egypt, of Phoenicia and Asia Minor, of Assyria and of Persia, became mingled and confused in a simple demonology."[[21]]
In addition to the condemnation of Pagan deities and their ritualistic worship, there was a force inherent in the very nature of Christianity which worked toward the degradation of the sex life. After the death of Christ, his followers had divorced their thoughts from all things earthly and set about fitting themselves for their places in the other world. The thought of the early Christian sects was obsessed by the idea of the second coming of the Messiah. The end of the world was incipient, therefore it behooved each and every one to purge himself from sin. This emphasis on the spiritual as opposed to the fleshly became fixated especially on the sex relationship, which came to be the symbol of the lusts of the body which must be conquered by the high desires of the soul. Consequently the feelings concerning this relation became surcharged with all the emotion which modern psychology has taught us always attaches to the conscious symbol of deeply underlying unconscious complexes. In such a situation man, who had come to look with horror on the being who reminded him that he was flesh as well as spirit saw in her "the Devil's gateway," or "a fireship continually striving to get along side the male man-of-war to blow him up into pieces."[[22]][[A]]
Dr Donaldson, translator of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, says: "I used to believe ... that woman owes her present position to Christianity ... but in the first three centuries I have not been able to see that Christianity had any favourable effect on the position of woman."
With the rejection of the idea of the sanctity of sex as embodied in the phallic rituals of the pagan cults, the psychic power of woman became once more a thing of fear rather than of worship, and her uncleanness was emphasized again more than her holiness, even as in primitive times. The power of woman to tell the course of future events which in other days had made her revered as priestess and prophetess now made her hated as a witch who had control of what the Middle Ages knew as the Black Art.[[23]] The knowledge of medicine which she had acquired through the ages was now thought to be utilized in the making of "witch's brew," and the "ceremonies and charms whereby the influence of the gods might be obtained to preserve or injure"[[21: v.1, p.12]] became incantations to the evil one. In addition to her natural erotic attraction for the male, woman was now accused of using charms to lure him to his destruction. The asceticism of the church made it shameful to yield to her allurements, and as a result woman came to be feared and loathed as the arch-temptress who would destroy man's attempt to conform to celibate ideals. This sex antagonism culminated in the witchcraft persecutions which make so horrible a page of the world's history.