A goddess was an ever-present figure in the society in which the first Christians lived.

To familiarize ourselves with the role of a goddess in the religious and social life of the Greeks and Romans and to understand better the heritage Gentile Christians brought with them to the new faith, we will study those goddesses who were particularly influential during the early Christian centuries.

Caelestis, Isis, the Syrian Goddess, and Cybele were worshipped in areas which were also home to influential Christian communities. They were also closely linked with many other great goddesses of the ancient world, Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern, and thus they are good representations of what is generally called a “goddess.” Because of its close relationship to the cult of Cybele, we will also briefly review the cult of Dionysus.

There were many goddesses in the ancient world, as there were many gods. Different conditions, natural environments, and historical experiences created differences in peoples’ perception of the nature of the divine. So we find that the goddess-figure also appeared in numerous forms, that the divine feminine revealed herself in many goddesses, among them, Isis, Athena, and Juno. And yet it is possible to study the problem of “the goddess” in a general way. Religion is the human endeavor to approach, understand, and somehow express that which is divine. But we can do that only by employing images already familiar to us, and the number of these is limited to the phenomena that are available to us through our senses, that is, what we can see and hear and otherwise perceive in the world around us. And the world around us is much the same no matter where we live: regardless of the many differences among cultures and peoples, the sky, the earth, the realities of birth and death are roughly the same for all peoples everywhere. Three of these universal experiences are sex, motherhood, and birth. The mystery surrounding these three generates most religious thought among all peoples whose history is available to us and as far back in history as we can reach.

Besides, it would be wrong to assume that the peoples of the Mediterranean—Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and others with whom we are mostly concerned — had developed their religious ideas independently of each other. To do this they would have to have lived in total isolation from one another, which they did not. In fact, there was substantial interaction among these peoples in ancient times,^[42] sometimes as peaceful trade, other times as war and conquest, all of which resulted in an exchange of cultures, customs, and religious ideas. As German Chancellor Bismarck supposedly said, “Ideen sind zollfrei''^[43] And wherever there is Kulturkontakt there is also syncretism. Thus, eventually, the process of influencing and being influenced led to mutual accommodation of various religious ideas. By the time of the Christian centuries, many originally different images of divinities had blended into each other. But each time a goddess was venerated, fundamental to that veneration was recognition of the feminine present in the divine.

To understand this means to become sensitive to the issue of Mariology. Comparing present day Marian devotions with Greek and Roman expressions of piety directed to a goddess shows only how local pagan customs merged into new Christian practices. But it does not answer the question why either pagans or Christians turned to feminine dimensions of God in addition to masculine ones. The study of the history and theology of the goddesses we have chosen as examples will reveal the basic principles that underlie their worship. This in turn should illuminate the basic principle of Christian Mariology.

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Source: Benko Stephen. The Virgin Goddess Studies in the Pagan and Christian Roots of Mariology. Leiden: Brill, 2003. 2003

A goddess was an ever-present figure in the society in which the first Christians lived.

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