Contents Updated: Thursday, March 02, 2000
The cult of the Virgin Mary arose in the fourth century as a result of the Christian triumph under Constantine, and blossomed about 100 years later in the fifth.
The Collyridians were, according to Epiphanius in his Panarion, a Christian heretical sect which began in Thrace and, by the time he wrote in 375 AD, had spread to the whole of the area north of the Black Sea and also to Arabia. It was mainly a female sect whose priestesses led the worship of Mary as Queen of Heaven. Their ritual was to cover a throne with a linen cloth, place bread upon it and consecrate it to Mary, then consume the bread as a communion.
Epiphanius castigated them for their presumption because God had not given Mary any rights of blessing or baptism. His protests show the Collyridian women must have been claiming these rights.
The goddess began powerfully reasserting herself in the fifth century. A feminine presence was added to Christianity by the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD when the Virgin Mary was named Theotokos the Mother of God. The Emperor Zeno rededicated the temple of Rhea at Byzantium, not to the son or a saint, but to the Virgin Mary. Gradually she was to be heaped with all the titles of the goddess of old, including that of Queen of Heaven.
When the church began to suppress the cults of the Goddess, Roman goddess worshippers turned to the cult of the Virgin to replace Isis and Cybele. Cybele's son was hung on a pine tree, and the husband and brother of Isis, Osiris, was found in a tree in his myth. These images, together with the huge sense of loss of civilisation and growth of pessimism with the fall of Rome and the barbarity of Christianity, promoted the crucifixion images, and so the cult of the Virgin.
From this time, pictures of Christ on the cross began to appear. Earlier, Jesus had been shown as the Good Shepherd—an androgynous youth carrying a lamb in his arms or across his shoulders. The Western Empire fell to the Goths in 476 AD and the northern tribes were fond of the cross as a magic symbol. From then on, the Jesus typical of Catholic crucifixes became increasingly common.
Paradoxically Bishop Cyril, murderer of Hypatia, was a passionate advocate of the reverencing of the Virgin Mary and 15 years after the butchery of Hypatia was instrumental in defeating Nestorius and asserting Mary worship within the church. Theoretically the outsome was a compromise but in practice the Nestorians were outlawed and became a deviant sect of Christianity which gradually lost ground. Nestorians believed that Jesus was a man who served as a container for the god, Christ. Jesus died and corrupted but the god ascended to heaven where he had dwelt for all eternity.
Cyril was canonized for his efforts and the Ephesians rejoiced, able once more to worship a goddess but now Mary instead of Diana. The Church of Mary was opened in Ephesus for the flourishing cult of Theotokos. Ephesus had been the home of the cult of Cybele the Great Mother in the guise of Diana or Artemis. But the role of the new Mother Goddess was heavily restricted and included none of the fertility component present in Pagan religions.
Once the veneration of the Virgin was accepted, the old temples and shrines devoted to goddesses were given over to churches dedicated to Mary. The church of Santa Maria Maggiore replaced the temple of Cybele on the Esquiline hill. Another church to Santa Maria replaced the temple of Tanit, a Phoenician goddess, on the Capitoline hill. Temples to Isis near the Pantheon and to Minerva (Athena) also became churches to Mary.
Elsewhere the temple of Athena at Athens had the same fate and another at Syracuse. Lesser shrines everywhere were converted and re-dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, Mary Theotokos, Mater Dei, Mother of God. And in the process Mary took the attributes of the goddesses she replaced. Like Juno she was the patron of pregnant women and their unborn children, like Isis, the Stella Maris, she protected sailors.
An edict of 754 AD from Constantinople condemns any orthodox Christian who does not:
confess the holy Ever-Virgin Mary, truly and properly the Mother of God, to be higher than every creature whether visible or invisible and does not with sincere faith seek her intercessions, as one having confidence in her access to our God.
The Pagan sea goddess was called Marian and wore the blue cloak and pearl necklace which gave the normal artistic inspiration to painters of the mother and child and such pictures.
The sea goddess by then was Aphrodite who rose from the surf in a scallop shell. Aphrodite was the Babylonian Ishtar and she was probably the Phoenician mermaid goddess, depicted as a sea goddess. The moon goddess Eurynome was depicted at Phigalia in Arcadia as a mermaid. Aphrodite is Venus and therefore the morning and evening stars, and as the sea goddess she is the Stella Maris or Star of the Sea. A pun on this is Stilla Maris which is Myrrh of the Sea—myrrh is sacred to the goddess and to Mary.
Ishtar is Ashtaroth and the Collyridians of Arabia used to make the same offerings to the Virgin Mary as they had made to Ashtaroth. Revelation 12 depicts a woman, symbolically Israel, escaping into the desert where she remains for a time, times and half a time or 1260 days. Revelations makes the woman into a female Elijah who was in the desert nourished by ravens. James declares Elijah to be of "like nature to ourselves" meaning an Essene since James surely was one. Indeed in 1 Kings 19, Elijah is the sole representative of the faithful remnant of Israel holding out against Baal, and is told to anoint a new king, Jehu, but leaves it to Elisha.
Is this an allegory of the Essenes escaping into the wilderness pursued by the wicked priest? The period quoted is interesting, coming apparently from Daniel but harking back to 1 Kings 17:1-6 (echoed in Luke 4:25, in Jas 5:17 and in Rev 11:6). Elijah, like Enoch, did not die but was taken up in a sun chariot like Mithras. The Jewish patriarchs and prophets might well be gods reduced to human form to leave only Yehouah in the elevated place. Curiously Elijah was considered forever a virgin and was often linked in the Middle Ages with Mary, even by the Moslems. Herodotus mistook Mithras for the goddess Anahita, the Persian name for Ashtaroth. These brief glimpses are tantalising.
The crusaders found some heretical Christian sects in the Middle East and tolerated by the Moslems, perhaps because they were respected for having influenced Mohammed. The Ebionites might have been among them. Some of them had a cult of Mary and it was brought back to Europe via Santiago de Compostela in Spain and ultimately to Britain as the cult of St Mary of Egypt, or Mary Gypsy. She was dark skinned and dressed in the blue robe of Marian, the sea goddess. She appears often in the ballads of Robin Hood because she was adopted by Richard Lion Heart.
The Protestant revolution was a call to reject Pagan additions to the old Essenic base of Christianity and this plainly meant the rejection of the Virgin as a goddess.