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