Mary the Mother Goddess

246 The Testimony, June 2004 Mary the mother goddess

Tony Benson

ROM THE earliest times pagan religion has involved the worship of a great mother god- Fdess. We meet her in the Bible on many occasions as part of the false worship of the nations around Israel, and as part of the false worship which the Israelites themselves all too often followed to their condemnation. The mother goddess appears in the Old Tes- tament in the following designations: Ashtaroth/Ashtoreth/Astaroth. This name occurs nine times in the Old Testament as the name of a mother goddess widely worshipped amongst the Canaanites and other nations. Other forms of the name are Astarte in Phoe- nician texts and Ishtar in Mesopotamian texts. It is from the name of this goddess that we get the word ‘Easter’. Asherah. This is the name specifically of a Ca- naanite mother goddess. It occurs forty times in the Old Testament, and is always trans- lated ‘grove’ in the AV. This may well be because most occurrences of the word seem to refer to an image of this goddess rather than to the goddess herself. Queen of heaven. This phrase occurs only in Diana of the Ephesians Jeremiah (7:18; 44:17-19,25) and appears to be another designation for Ashtaroth. has no special status, to the present position in In the New Testament we have Diana of the which Mary has been exalted to a divine status Ephesians mentioned in just one passage (Acts which is quite unwarranted from Scripture. How 19:27-41). The reference is rather misleading, did this come about, and why? It came about however, since the Greek is ‘Artemis’, whose because pagan beliefs about the great mother Roman equivalent was Diana. However, Artemis goddess were introduced into the Church as part was the goddess of hunting and depicted as a of a wide-scale importing of pagan beliefs and virgin, and it seems that Ephesus was the centre practices. How it came about is for further con- of the cult of an Asia Minor mother goddess, the sideration in this article. worship of which seems to have been (rather confusingly) merged with that of Artemis/Diana. The return of the goddess The above is merely a very simple outline of Much of the material for this article has been the facts as they relate to Scripture. There are taken from a book entitled The Myth of the God- many version of the great mother goddess fig- dess: Evolution of an Image.1 The joint authors’ ure in ancient religions, sometimes rather con- basic theory is that the worship of the mother fusing, as with Artemis/Diana. A mother goddess was the original religion, but that this goddess figure is worshipped today by some in worship got pushed into the background by what the Western world, though sometimes rather they term ‘Judaeo-Christianity’. This theory does secretively, often under the name Gaia. not, of course, accord with what we believe from The mother goddess is effectively worshipped today also in the guise of the Virgin Mary. It is a far cry from the simplicity of the Apostolic 1. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, Book Clubs Associ- Church of the New Testament, in which Mary ates, 1991. The Testimony, June 2004 247 the Bible, namely, that the worship of the one ders how adherents to these doctrines today can true God was corrupted, resulting in a belief in a justify them, bearing in mind their dubious ori- multitude of deities, among which was the great gin, quite apart from their unScriptural nature.) mother goddess in her various forms. However, It is significant that it was at Ephesus that what they say regarding the worship of the Vir- Mary was given the title Theotokos, bearing in gin Mary as the great mother goddess is of inter- mind that Ephesus was the centre of worship of est to us. the great mother goddess Artemis. Her worship Significantly, chapter 14 of the book is enti- had been banned in 380 by the Emperor Theo- tled, “Mary: The return of the goddess”. In it we dosius, and here it was coming back in another read: form. “Mary is the unrecognized Mother Goddess of the Christian tradition. Apart from the first Development of the cult chapter of Luke, where she holds the centre Once the worship of Mary became accepted by of the stage in the story of the Annunciation, the Church, her image was frequently repre- Mary appears very infrequently in the Gos- sented in ways reminiscent of the great mother pels, and then she plays a completely subor- goddess in all her forms. Baring and Cashford dinate role to her son. Yet within 500 years of comment: “It [took] less than a century for Mary her ‘death’ a pantheon of images enveloped to take over the role of Isis, Cybele and Diana, her until she assumed the presence and stat- the remaining goddesses, whose cults had dwin- ure of all the goddesses before her—Cybele, dled with the decline of the Roman Empire and Aphrodite, Demeter, Astarte, Isis, Hathor, were, in any case, often suppressed, with their Inanna and Ishtar”.2 temples closed and their teachers and priests The authors quote another writer as saying: “And banished”.4 They bring out some remarkable facts so it came to pass that, in the end and to our day, to show the development of the cult. For exam- Mary, Queen of Martyrs, became the sole inheri- ple, in a one-hundred-year period in France dur- tor of all the names and forms, sorrows, joys, ing the Middle Ages, eighty cathedrals were and consolations of the goddess-mother in the dedicated to Mary, and between 1928 and 1971 Western World”.3 there were 210 reported visions of Mary. After Constantine adopted Christianity in the The following are some of the ways in which fourth century A.D. many pagan ideas and cus- the Virgin Mary has been depicted over the cen- toms were adopted by the already doctrinally turies, as identified by Baring and Cashford: corrupt church. Among them was the worship The Great Mother. This is illustrated by the of the Virgin Mary, who became acknowledged statue of Mary at Ravensburg in Germany by many as Theotokos, which means ‘Mother of dating to about 1480. It depicts Mary gather- God’ or ‘God-bearer’. This, to us, shockingly blas- ing people in the folds of her cloak like chil- phemous title for a human being would not have dren with their mother. been strange to those recently coming from pa- The Protectress of Sailors. Mary is depicted in a ganism, where the idea of deities emerging from ship, taking on the role of the Egyptian god- human mothers was not unusual. dess Isis. Worship of the Virgin Mary was in fact the The Spinner of Destiny. Mary is sometimes de- subject of some dispute in the Church, being picted as spinning thread, picking up the im- rejected by Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantino- agery of pagan goddesses who spin and ple, and the Syrian bishops, but accepted by weave the destiny of men and women. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria. A council of The Earth Goddess. Mary is depicted on a bed Church leaders was called at Ephesus in A.D. of corn, or surrounded by sheaves, or with 431, with Cyril as president. Cyril and his sup- a tree of life, images of the old pagan god- porters got there early, declared the Council open desses and their perceived role as bringers of before Nestorius and his supporters arrived, ex- fertility. communicated Nestorius, and declared Mary to be Theotokos, making it the official doctrine of the Church. (Such skulduggery was all too typi- 2. pp. 547-8. cal of the church councils of those times, coun- 3. Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology, p. 45. Cited cils that approved some of the basic doctrines by Baring and Cashford, p. 549. held by mainstream churches today. One won- 4. Op. cit., p. 551. 248 The Testimony, June 2004

ing the Gospels is that after the birth of Jesus Mary had normal marital relations with Jo- seph and had a number of children by him (Mt. 1:25; 13:55,56). These children then had to be explained as the children of Joseph by a previous marriage. The Dormition. This means ‘falling asleep’, and refers to the idea that Mary did not die but merely fell into a literal sleep. In 600 the Feast of the Dormition was established to celebrate this on 15 August each year. The Immaculate Conception. In the twelfth century the idea began to develop that Mary herself was miraculously conceived in her mother’s womb. This doctrine was officially adopted by the Roman Catholic Church in 1854. The purpose of this was to remove Mary from all association with sin. It became accepted that Mary was miraculously born with a nature incapable of sinning. The Bodily Assumption. This doctrine asserts that Mary ascended bodily to heaven after the pattern of her Son, except of course that, unlike with Jesus, there were no witnesses to this supposed event. This was made the official doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church in 1950, after a petition signed by eight mil- lion Catholics. This appears to be a development from the doctrine of the Dormition referred to above, with Mary ascending to heaven after a short period in the grave in “Mother of the Church”—one of the many titles which her body did not experience corrup- of Mary. Source: Bible Magazine tion. Queen of Heaven. In 1954 Mary was proclaimed Goddess of the Animals. Here Mary is depicted to be Queen of Heaven by the Roman Catho- surrounded by animals, especially lions, as lic Church and worshipped as such. pagan goddesses often were. These developments in doctrine have progres- The Black Virgin. Mary is often depicted in black sively removed Mary from being a normal mem- wood and with black robes, as pagan god- ber of the human race, albeit a woman of great desses were, including, significantly, Artemis faith who will one day be raised from the dead (Diana) of Ephesus. and receive eternal life from her Son, and have New beliefs about the Virgin Mary developed made her a divine figure with many of the at- in the Church over the years. The following new tributes of the great mother goddesses of old. doctrines emerged: Thus did paganism find its way back into the Perpetual Virginity. The Council of Chalcedony Church after the Church, already much corrupted in 451 declared that Mary remained a virgin, in doctrine, had apparently triumphed over pa- despite the fact that the natural way of read- ganism.

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