CHAPTER ONE THE PAGAN GODDESS AS A CONCERN FOR CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

During the sixteenth century Reformation, Protestants accused the Roman Catholic Church of harboring ideas and practices which had been taken over from the Greco-Roman world. This was considered to be a serious charge, since the goal of Christia­nity, so the accusers claimed, was to replace paganism with the vera religio (true religion), not to continue it under a different name.

In its veneration of the Virgin Mary, not only did Roman Catholic Christianity absorb many elements of the cults of Greek and Roman goddesses, but Mary in effect replaced these deities and continued them in a Christian form. This is the view to which the Jesuit scholar Karl Prumm responded in his book Der Christliche Glaube und die altheidnische Welt.^[7] Prumm investigated the similarities between the ancient goddesses and Mary and quoted many scholars who asserted that in Mary the ancient “mother of the gods” had returned in new glory. After reviewing these mother goddesses and discussing extensively the philosophy of their cults, he concluded that the Marian dogma cannot be de­duced from pagan precedents and, furthermore, it was not even encouraged, promoted, or sidetracked by them for one simple and obvious reason: the fundamental principle of Mariology is the motherhood of Mary and this is the greatest argument supporting the full humanity of Jesus.

A similar view concerning the origin of Mariology was forwarded from an unexpected side. Leonhard Fendt, in his Gnoslische Myslerien. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Christlichen Gottes- dienstes,'^[10] investigated the Gnostic communion feasts and com­pared them with Christian developments. In discussing the Gnostic Markos, he analyzed the role of Markos’ “Charis,” whom Fendt called “a Hellenistic form of the mother of gods.”^[11] This led him to explore the role of Mary in orthodox Christian theology as contrasted with the female figures in Gnostic systems;^[12] he concluded that the cult of Mary grew out of Christianity quite independently. Fendt specifically rejected the possibility that the cult of Mary had anything to do with the syncretistic cult of the Great Mother.^[13] But he, too, was faced with problems: the Kolly- ridians, for example, about whom he could say only that they were an exception and an isolated phenomenon, identified Mary with the Great Mother. He also quoted a number of Ophite hymns from Origen, Contra Celsum 6.31, “which could be in a Catholic prayer book if one replaces ‘Charis’ with ‘Mary.’”^[14] Fendt’s book is so rich in insights that even now, sixty-five years after its publi­cation, it is still widely read. In this book, Fendt concluded that while there is nothing new under the sun, new things can come into the world from above and this is exactly what happened in the case of Jesus Christ.

Today, however, one would be hard put to find any secular historian or historian of religion who would make the fine distinction proposed by such distinguished scholars as Prumm and Fendt. Almost all authors quoted in the present volume in connection with this particular theme would point to Marian piety as the natural outgrowth of the goddess-cults in the ancient world. But just what is the connection? Is it correct to say that the cult of the Virgin was merely “influenced by pagan practices,’⁵ or that it simply “absorbed” and “assimilated” some ideas that were cur­rent among people who embraced Christianity? To point out simi­larities, interesting parallels between the cults of fertility god­desses and the cult of Mary, would be a waste of time because it would not demonstrate anything that has not been known in the past. But I hope to show that there were powerful causative influences from Greco-Roman religions that shaped the form of Mariology. The biblical roots of Mariology have been sufficiently analyzed; I intend to inquire into some extra-biblical sources of Marian piety, belief, and doctrine. I propose that there is a direct line, unbroken and clearly discernible, from the goddess-cults of the ancients to the reverence paid and eventually the cult accorded to the Virgin Mary. This cult I shall call “Mariology” (by a slight extension of the term) as distinct from “Mariolatry,” the excessive worship of Mary as a supernatural power in her own right. I propose, therefore, that Mariology does not simply re­semble pagan customs and ideas, but that it is paganism baptized, pure and simple. I am fully aware that this is a controversial state­ment and may generate some spirited opposition, so I should like to point out that most of our ancestors in the Christian faith were baptized pagans; from the second century on, Jewish converts seem to have been relatively few.

My studies have brought me to the conclusion that in Mario- logy the Christian genius preserved and transformed some of the best and noblest ideas that paganism developed before it. Rather than being a “regression” into paganism, Mariology is a progres­sion toward a clearer and better understanding of the feminine aspect of the divine and the role of the female in the history of salvation. Of course, over the centuries there were many aberra­tions into Mariolatry, but this does not mean that in its basic principle Mariology is a superstition. On the contrary, I hope to show that Mariology is a necessary part of Christianity. In Marian piety, the Christian Church did not simply adopt the pagan structures and forms of worship of the Mother Goddess. In this sense, Prumm, Fendt, and other defenders of the exclusively Christian origins of Mariology are correct: Mariology is not the same as the worship of Cybele or Isis or Caelestis. If this were indeed the case, then Mariology would be outdated, archaic, and irrelevant: there is no place today for maenads or for the celebra­tion of an orgia, to mention only two examples. Christianity did not simply adopt pagan ideas and cult practices, but transformed them by merging them with elements peculiar to itself.

The cult of the Mother Goddess entered the Christian Church in typically Christian categories, such as the Ecclesia, represented as the spiritual mother of Christians, or as “the Second Eve,” whose divine motherhood is responsible for mankind’s rebirth. It was through such Christian concepts that the idea of the divine feminine took root in Christianity, and it was a long and often confusing process until Mary was declared to be the Mother of God. But it is the primordial mystery of generation and child­birth, the appearance of life, and the age-old belief that mother­hood is part of a cosmic order upon which both the pagan and the Christian versions of the cult of the theotokos rest. This reverence for motherhood and childbirth is the basic principle of Mariology, a principle which Christianity inherited from its pagan fore­runners.

Veneration of motherhood brings us to the fact of sexual differentiation and the question of the relation of male and female to each other. The universal human experiences of sex, genera­tion, fatherhood, and motherhood, when viewed sub specie aetemi- tatis, become ingredients of the divine order. Here the contribu­tion of Mariology is considerable. Let us look briefly at some of the issues involved.

1. We cannot say “male” without at the same time saying “female.” This is obvious, yet in Christian theology, the image of God that emerged from Judaism is of a God solely male. Even in its Trinitarian form (Father, Son and Holy Spirit), it is, at least in Latin Christianity, an exclusively male God, since the Holy Spirit is a “he”: the word spiritus in Latin is a masculine noun.^[16] This

THE PAGAN GODDESS AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY 7 was not the case in paganism, where the many goddesses gave expression to the feminine aspect of the divine image. From this point of view, Christianity had an obvious shortcoming. Reso­lution was sought through the elevation of the Virgin Mother of God, Mary, to higher and higher levels in the divine economy. That the divine cannot be conceived of as exclusively male or female was clearly understood by the pagans, who sensed that in the absolute all opposites and contraries are present and recon­ciled. In paganism such primordial unity was widely discussed as early as Hesiod (ca. 700 B.C.), who explained the existence of the world as a result of a series of separations.^[17] In one of his comedies, Aristophanes (ca. 457-ca. 385) developed the same theme,^[18] and in many of the Near Eastern cosmogonies, which we will briefly mention later, the image of a primeval unity from which everything else developed is also present. These discus­sions do not conflict with the biblical creation narratives. Al­though in Genesis, creation is referred to as the activity of a God who is above the universe and creates not with his body but with the agency of his word, yet the net result — a series of separations and multiplications — is the same.

2. For both paganism and Christianity sex is a reality; how­ever, sexual separation is a condition which did not exist “in the beginning.” Originally there was unity and to return to that unity (which includes the communio dei el hominis) is the aim of religion. Early Christian theology — both orthodox and heterodox — strove to point out a way toward overcoming such separation in order to arrive at unity. Indeed, the eucharistic feast may conceal an ob­scure element of the ancient hieros gamos, the sacred intercourse which reenacts the primeval unity that existed prior to creation.^[22] In the New Testament Jesus is reported to have said that in heaven there will be no sexual differentiation because all will be “like angels.”^[23] This thought also appears outside the canonical gospel narratives. According to the Gospel of Thomas, it was with refe­rence to little children that Jesus told his disciples how they can enter the Kingdom: “When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female... then shall you enter (the Kingdom).”^[24] According to these canonical and aprocryphal sayings of Jesus, in the kingdom of God sexual differentiation will no longer exist; a condition will prevail that existed before the sexes were sepa­rated. This state is the result of redemption, which for many church fathers meant the restoration of God’s creation to the condition that existed prior to the destructive consequences of sin.^[25] Complete redemption, a perfect restoration of the kingdom of God, cannot take place without the reuniting of female and male. The result is a “new creation” in which the universe undergoes a process of cosmic rebirth.^[26] Here Mary has her fundamental role. Her figure, as Desire Hirst has expressed it, “mirrors the Divine Nature itself, especially in its most hidden and profound facet... that of Motherhood which is the comple­ment of the Fatherhood of God.”^[27]

3. Mary was impregnated by the creative word of God: this is what we call “virgin birth.” The phrase^[28] means that Mary “did not know man,” i.e., a male, prior to the conception and birth of Jesus. This point is important because her virginal condition means that Mary’s unspoiled purity and innocence parallels the

11 unspoiled state of creation when “the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”^[29] Accordingly, the gospel of Luke emphasizes that the angel Gabriel was sent to a virgin in Nazareth; the Spirit of God overshadowed her and entered into her as into pure soil; thus the new creative word of God was sown.^[30] The Christian recorder of the prologue to the Gospel of Luke thus established a parallel with Genesis 1 which would be more fully developed by later authors who would draw a parallel between the “virgin earth” and the virgin condition of Mary’s body. Neither did it escape their attention that both in Genesis 1 and in the conception of Jesus the “word of God” was the seminal agent.

A virgin, as someone who is not engaged in sexual activity either as male or female, is in a sense “neither male nor female,” as the sayings of Jesus describe those entering the kingdom of God. Virgins are thus in that state of paradisaical innocence which existed before sin entered the world and man was sepa­rated from God. Not subject to the same limitations of the human condition as others, they are, in a manner of speaking, between humanity and God. A virgin stands “for continuity in its most pure state” because “she remain [s] as she had been first created.” Her body is “a clear echo of the virgin earth of Paradise — un­touched earth, that bore within itself the promise of undreamed-of abundance.”^[31] The Virgin Mary was the “virgin earth,” and thus a perfect choice for the female counterpart in the process of the “new creation.”

What happened in the “Virgin Birth”? Two elements — hea­ven and earth, spirit and flesh, holy and profane — commingled and a second creation took place: the “second Adam” was caused to appear, he “who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility... that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace.”^[32] Without Mary, this could not have happened; here her figure reaches those cosmic proportions that will more fully appear in Revelation

12. Protestants like to point out that the Virgin Birth is a statement about Jesus and not about Mary. That is only partly true. Those who wrote down the infancy narratives of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke may have had Jesus at the center of their attention,^[33] but they could not possibly ignore Mary. In Christian belief the conception and birth of Jesus is a cosmic event and Mary is a necessary part of that event.

The apocryphal Gospel of Bartholomew reflects the popular belief in the importance of Mary’s motherhood. Here the disciples ask her how she conceived and carried “him who cannot be carried or how she bore so much greatness.” At first she refuses to answer and warns the disciples that such a mystery cannot be spoken of without great and dangerous consequences. When the disciples insist, Mary begins the story, but she can go only up to the point where the angel came to her. “As she was saying this, fire came from her mouth, and the world was on the point of being burned up. Then came Jesus quickly and said to Mary: ‘Say no more, or today my whole creation will come to an end.’”^[34] According to this passage, Mary conceived and bore more than the human side of Jesus; she bore the creator of the world. Her image is that of the divine mother, the female who is part of the cosmic creative process. And this is not far from the image of the “Great Mother of the gods” to whom our ancestors were so deeply devoted.

Christianity did not add a new element to religion when it introduced into its theology such concepts as “virgin” and “mother”; rather, it sharpened and refined images that already existed in numerous forms in pagan mythology. If these images are archetypes, then they belong to the “collective unconscious” of humankind; each generation inherits them; they are perma­nent parts of the human species, biologically determined. Those who find this Jungian theory unacceptable would say that these images are learned and not inherited, but in either case it cannot be denied that here we are dealing with universal human ex­periences.^[35] Our earliest memories are likely to come from our

13 mothers; our concept of life is inseparable from that of the womb; our concept of nurturance is female, and everybody has some understanding of the mother-child relationship.

Whatever its source, a study of ancient history shows that goddess-worship has been an important aspect of human religion from earliest times. The diversity of pagan divinities must not be denied: Sekhnet was goddess of plague and punishment, Bellona of war, etc. However, what those usually called “fertility god­desses” represented was the same in every age and every place. Thus, it cannot be said that Isis and Cybele were historically identical; obviously they were not; functionally, however, they were in some respects equivalent. The best proof of this fact is the syncretism which was generally accepted by everyone during the early centuries of Christianity; if such functional equivalency had not existed among the goddesses, the later syncretism could never have happened. Already in the fifth century B.C. Herodotus

identified the Greek gods with those of the Egyptians,^[36] and by the second century A.D., Apuleius could assertively make Isis iden­tify herself with most of the major goddesses known at that time. Apuleius was a devotee of Isis. That his claim could have been accepted by those devoted to the other goddesses is unlikely. But at the least he shows us how syncretism could be used to claim for one or another cult far wider validity than it previously had been thought to have. For Apuleius, Isis is “the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements.” Only the names under which she is worshipped are different.^[37] So did Lucius invoke her help “by whatever name or fashion or shape it is lawful to call upon thee”^[38] until she came and restored his corrupted shape back to its original unspoiled form; from an ass he became a man again.

If we change the name Isis in the story of Lucius’ conversion to Mary, we are already speaking in a Mariological context. Even though the dramatis personae clearly belong to the pagan world, the function of Isis is that of the great goddess through whom a “new creation” takes place, the effects of a “curse” are reversed, and Lucius is saved. When Apuleius wrote this tale, Christians were already comparing the Virgin Mary to Eve and were beginning to draw parallels between the woman who was the cause of mankind’s fall and the woman who was the cause of redemption. Pagan and Christian concepts of the role of the “woman” here run side by side until the pagan concept converges with the Chris­tian one and Mary emerges supreme.

To demonstrate this development, to show how the pagan “queen of heaven” gradually became the Christian “queen of heaven,” we must follow a chronological method of investigation to illustrate our thesis adequately. A topical treatment of Mario- logy is a legitimate approach;^[39] my point in this book, however, is to show the continuity of the reverence paid to the female aspect of God. This can best be done by proceeding along chronological lines.

This procedure will also reveal that the goddess-cult of most decisive influence on the emerging Christian Church was that of Magna Mater, that is, Cybele, and therefore, that the geographic center of nascent Mariology was western Asia Minor. This does not mean that other goddesses, such as Isis, did not play a forma­tive role in Christianity. The study of Christian iconography, to mention only one field, has shown how much we inherited from the pious worshippers of Isis. On the level of popular devotion Isis left many marks of the cult of Mary.^[40] However, it seems to me that Mariology was more substantially determined by the theo­logy of the Great Mother than by any other fertility goddess. It was the motherhood of Mary which became the point of connec­tion between her figure and the pagan goddess concept, and I should like to recall once more that the basic principle of Mario­logy, from which everything else flows, is the fact that she was the mother of Jesus. I will, therefore, attempt to show how the early Christian theologians used the motherhood of Mary to connect her with the events described in Genesis 3 and how this then led to the use of such epithets for Mary as “the cause of salva­tion” which eventually raised her image into a cosmic perspec­tive. The vehicle by which many ideas connected with Magna Mater were transferred into Christianity was the Montanist move­ment. Obviously, there were other important movements in the second century. One of these in which the feminine element also played a significant role was Gnosticism, which, as has been shown, may also have absorbed ideas from the worship of Cybele. The impact of the Gnostic understanding of the feminine element upon mainstream Christianity, however, would require another study.^[41]

We shall proceed in the following way.

First, we shall investigate a few characteristic pagan goddesses: their stories, their cults, and their impact upon their worshippers

Pheme Perkins, “Sophia and the Mother-Father: The Gnostic Goddess,” in Carl Olson, op. ciL, pp. 97-109; Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, op. cit.\ Charles W. Hedrick and Robert Hodgson, Jr., eds., Nag Hammadi, Gnosticism and Early Christianity, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1988.

Speaking about the Goddess, or Mother Goddess (in the singular and with a capital G and M) is a convenience but the dispute still goes on whether it is legitimate or not.James J. Preston (op. cit. pp. 325-343) argued spiritedly supporting the “multivariant” and the “polymorphous” character of the god­desses. According to him mother deities may be “1. reflections of socio­cultural realities, 2. models to be imitated by humans, 3. opposites inversely related to their human counterparts, 4. idealized extensions of motherhood as conceived and practiced in empirical reality.” (p. 337). This may all be true (and it should be remembered that Preston argues against the arche­typal feminine principle) but A.H. Armstrong’s definition provides an operational basis on which the phenomenon of female deities can be dis­cussed. This is what he says:

“The actual figures in most mystery cults of any spiritual importance are female divinities who can be grouped under the title of Goddess or Mother. What do we mean when we speak of the ‘Goddess’? It is, of course, a modern generalization covering a great multiplicity of cults and stories in the Mediterranean area. But they all have something in common that is very difficult to apprehend and perhaps impossible even to understand fully. The feminine aspect of divinity in the world can mean so many things. The nearest approach to a successful statement of what it may be is perhaps what Zuntz says when speaking of an early form of the cult of the mother, that of the great Neolithic Temple of Malta: ‘These men of an age from which not one word reaches us perceived and worshipped in their goddess the wonder of life unending, embracing death as a stage and step to its eternity.’” A.H. Armstrong, “The Ancient and Continuing Pieties of the Greek World” in A.H. Armstrong’s Classical Mediterranean Spirituality, New York: Crossroad, 1986, p. 72. The quotation is from G. Zuntz, Persephone. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, p. 53.

Urs Winter, Frau und Gottin, Gottingen: Vandenhoeck &: Ruprecht, 1983, p. 199, makes this remark concerning female statuettes in the Syrian-Pales­tinian area: “Selbst wenn sie zu einem bestimmten Zweck... und in Zusam­menhang mit magischen Praktiken verwendet worden sein mochten, immer verkorpern sie einen Aspekt einer ‘Idealfrau,’ deren Ausstrahlung die syrisch-palastinische Frau verklärte. Wenn diese ‘Idealfrau’ in ihren zeitlich und lokal verschieden ausgeprägten Aspekten im Mittelpunkt der Diskussion steht, finde es legitim, schlechthin von der ‘syrischen Gottin’ zu reden.” The point is well taken. While not many scholars today would reduce the problem to a simple proposition that the “Mother Goddess” was worshipped in ancient times (E. O. James, The Cult of the Mother Goddess, London, 1959, gives this impression), it is true that the “eternal feminine,” the female face of God, was the object of those various approaches which we know as a bewildering multiplicity of cults. In this sense we should be able to talk about “the” goddess. (See to this, V. Pestalozza, Eterno Feminimo Mediterraneo, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1954).

17 when they were pagans and after they became Christians. The many goddesses in the Roman Empire varied considerably according to the place of their origin, their initial area of respon­sibility in life and their position in the divine hierarchy. These details, while important for the historian of religion, are less so for our study which is concerned with the feminine aspect of the divine in general rather than the differences among its various forms. Futhermore, the period of time we are studying was a time of syncretism when the images of many originally independent goddesses had merged and were functionally indistinguishable. While in the day-to-day practice of paganism by ordinary people the many goddesses continued to have their proper functions and peculiar shrines, and therefore, their specific established cults, there was in philosophy an increasing tendency to treat the more important ones as aspects of the one, abstract philosophical divi­nity. The potentialities of this attitude went well beyond the old syncretism presented by Herodotus, who merely identified the deities of different cultures who had similar functions, con­veniently but simplistically supposing that they “must have been” the same being. The new, primarily Stoic, and later neo-Platonic, syncretism was spread among the upper classes by teachers of philosophy and their popular followers, the teachers of rhetoric. When Christian clergy began to come from the educated classes, Mary was brought into the process, with the result we shall describe. We must keep in mind that such rigid definitions of subtle theological nuances as we are used to in Christian dog­matics (e.g., the Trinitarian controversies) were alien to the pagans. They felt considerably freer to express the varieties of their religious experiences than did Christians later on. There­fore, in the following pages I will use the simple, all-inclusive term “Goddess,” “Queen of Heaven,” or “Mother Goddess” to de­note this manifestation of the divine; I believe this is a conve­nience we can afford and to which the ancients would not object.

We will then turn to a review of the image of the “Queen of Heaven” in the New Testament in order to show how the biblical image corresponds to that of her pagan counterparts. In this chap­ter I rely heavily upon basic research of many scholars. After reviewing their works, I shall give my own interpretation.

In the fourth chapter I shall discuss the Christian sect of the Montanists who absorbed and diffused in the Christian Church many elements of the cult of Magna Mater, the Great Mother Goddess, Cybele.

After this, we shall investigate the story of the Kollyridians, an obscure Christian sect which actually replaced the pagan goddess with Mary and offered sacrifices to her. How significant were the Kollyridians? Because they quickly disappeared from history, it would be easy to dismiss them as being of no consequence. However, they are a link between paganism and Christianity and that suggests what Christianity could have become had not orthodox Christian theology (whatever “orthodox⁵’ may mean) developed its own Mariology. The Kollyridians disappeared only when the veneration of Mary became universally accepted in the church Had Mary not been adopted by the church as an alterna­tive to the goddesses of the pagans, would the Kollyridians have developed a larger following and perhaps a rival Christian church? This is idle speculation, but church history provides us with many examples of how sects developed when the church failed to meet the needs of its members.

Chapter VI will treat the role of popular piety in the growth of Marian devotion through discussion of the Protoevangelium of James, the idea of the earth-mother, and the development of the image of the queen of heaven into an established article of faith.

Finally, I shall investigate the development of Mariology in official, orthodox Christian theology. This begins with the Eve- Mary parallelism in which Christian theologians reached back to the old theory of primordial creation to explain their theory of the “new creation.” Since they could not use the image of a goddess, they substituted for the female face of God the spiritualized image of Ecclesia — the church — which they gradually identified with Mary. All that is very confusing, often contradictory, and not at all clear, but this was the best they could do without falling into paganism.

In this way, Mary was eventually declared to be “Mother of God,” which is a wholly pagan term filled with new Christian meaning. Did Mary become a goddess when this declaration was made? The answer of Christians was, and still is, an indignant No! — but in fact Mary assumed the functions of pagan female divinities and for many pious Christian folk she did, and does, everything the ancient goddesses used to do.

Such is the scope of this book. It is less a study in the history of

19 religions than what German theology calls Dogmengeschichte, i.e., history of dogma, in this case that of Mariology. Since the topic is obviously close to feminist concerns, many books apparently inspired by the current feminist concerns but dealing with strict­ly historical or theological problems were very helpful in my work. I list these books at their proper places.

But I should like to emphasize that these essays were not intended to be contributions to feminist sutdies; there are many excellent works on women’s experiences in early Christian times to which anyone interested can turn. These essays were written over many years, sometimes independently from each other, but always within the framework of historical theology. Many people read parts of this manuscript and offered their criticism. I am indebted to all of them, but here I should like to mention two who are no longer with us. Dr. David Scheidt, former editor of Fortress Press in Philadelphia, gave me invaluable advice and professional help. Professor Morton Smith of Columbia University read and criticized the manuscript with his usual wit and akribia. He and I disagreed on many things in life, but when the chips were down he was always a friend.

Finally, I should like to mention that the problem with which this book deals is far too complex to be dealt with in a single volume. I am taking up for study one single thread that runs through the fabric of that coat of many colors that is called Christianity. Therefore I ask scholarly readers not to judge my book by their own special fields of expertise; rather, I invite pursuit of our main line of thought. The extensive bibliographies attached to the end of each chapter are meant to enable the reader to fill in whatever information may be missing from the text. These biblio­graphies contain only titles that I have personally consulted.

I hope that what I present here from its pagan background will contribute to the understanding of certain aspects of Christianity: that is my primary concern.