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 Nicaea (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
Assyr