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 Assyria and of Persia, became mingled and confused in a simple demonology."[21]

In addition to the condemnation of Pagan deities and their ritualistic worship, there was a force inherent in the very nature of Christianity which worked toward the degradation of the sex life.  After the death of Christ, his followers had divorced their thoughts from all things earthly and set about fitting themselves for their places in the other world.  The thought of the early Christian sects was obsessed by the idea of the second coming of the Messiah.  The end of the world was incipient, therefore it behooved each