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~ MARY ~

It's hard to know where to start to reveal Mary, as she is the Christian embodiment and the distillation of many myths of the divine-mother and life giver. Like those that went before, she has been called the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God, Our Lady, and Madonna. She is perhaps the greatest feminine myth of Western civilization. Her story has been written and rewritten so many times, for so many reasons, that her cult is strong even though her power and attributes have been diminished through two thousand years of Christian influence. The fact that both the mother of Christ and his principle consort were called Mary is a key to where her origin lies. She is the mother -lover of man, his creator and his co-creator.

Fathers of the Christian church strongly opposed the worship of Mary because they were well aware of her pagan forerunners and her powerful influence on her followers. Christian patriarchs therefore sought to humanize and belittle Mary, proving her unworthy of adoration. Up to the 5th Century the church persecuted as heretics a sect calling themselves Marianites, who claimed that Mary possessed the true quality of divinity. The fact that Mariolatry has plagued Christianity throughout its history, is a strong testament to the human need to worship the Mother-figure.

Some early church fathers sought a way out of this dilemma by attacking Mary's motherhood, to prove her neither divine nor really maternal. Thus the claims that Jesus wasn't born in the ordinary way but suddenly materialized before Mary. Or the concept advocated by the Marcionites that Jesus could never touch the vulgar female flesh, therefore he was never born, but rather descended from heaven as a fully formed adult.

People of the Middle Ages often perceived God as their persecutor and Mary as their defender. Early 16th Century woodcuts depict God shooting arrows representing the evils of pestilence, war, and inflation at the world, while the inscription pleads with Mary to restrain him. It was said that Mary stands for mercy, and it is only her influence, not because of love or goodwill on God's part, that heaven is within our reach. During the first five centuries, Christ's church discovered that no amount of force would make people renounce their Mother

Goddess. Thus she had to be preserved in some form.