Artemis, Diana (4Th Century Pagan Goddesses), Pachamama, and Mary

Everett Ferguson writes,

In the Latin west and in the Greek east the church won only by detouring the traditional piety [pagan] to other objects. The martyrs and the saints received the homage once given to the heroes and nature and household spirits. The similarity between the cult of heroes and spirits in ancient Greece and Rome and the cult of the saints in medieval Christendom (Roman and Greek) has often been observed.

…. When Christianity replaced paganism, the saints took over the functions of the specialized local deities. The situation may be described as “the old firm doing the same business at the same place under a new name and a new management”. This perhaps says too much. It was not the ancient religion itself that survived but the mentality that was part of it. (Ferguson, “Backgrounds of Early Christianity”, pg 182.)

Every emperor, every municipality, every household, in fact, had its own “gods”, its own statues. The people of the ancient Roman empire didn’t wish each other “good luck”. They wished each other, instead, the good will of the “gods”.

The conservative and traditionalist Roman Catholics who are all up in arms about the Pachamama statue ought to keep this mind, and they ought to stand back and watch as the current hierarchy of the Roman Church invokes a process of “development” that will bring the Pachamama into its pantheon of “saints” in just the same way that such “development” brought the Greek goddess Artemis (Roman Diana) into that same pantheon as “the Virgin Mary” in the fourth century.

It is a tradition of the early church that Mary, the mother of Jesus, moved to Ephesus later in life with the Apostle John. As early as the (late) second century, Mary the mother of Jesus was the object of a great deal of speculation. The late second century “Protoevangelium of James”, for example, recounts her early life, but it does so in a biblically- and historically-confused framework.

But that city, of course, was well known to be the site of the Temple of Artemis (“Artemis of the Ephesians”). Like “the Virgin Mary”, Artemis, too, was a virgin, and she was worshipped by a large throng who not only wished for her good will, but they also earned a nice living from the Artemis business as well.

Here is the account from the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 19:23-35):

About that time there arose a great disturbance about the Way. A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought in a lot of business for the craftsmen there. He called them together, along with the workers in related trades, and said: “You know, my friends, that we receive a good income from this business.

And you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole province of Asia. He says that gods made by human hands are no gods at all. There is danger not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited; and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty.”

When they heard this, they were furious and began shouting: “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” Soon the whole city was in an uproar. The people seized Gaius and Aristarchus, Paul’s traveling companions from Macedonia, and all of them rushed into the theater together. Paul wanted to appear before the crowd, but the disciples would not let him. Even some of the officials of the province, friends of Paul, sent him a message begging him not to venture into the theater.

The assembly was in confusion: Some were shouting one thing, some another. Most of the people did not even know why they were there. The Jews in the crowd pushed Alexander to the front, and they shouted instructions to him. He motioned for silence in order to make a defense before the people. But when they realized he was a Jew, they all shouted in unison for about two hours: “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”

The city clerk quieted the crowd and said: “Fellow Ephesians, doesn’t all the world know that the city of Ephesus is the guardian of the temple of the great Artemis and of her image, which fell from heaven?

What happened to these businesses when Christianity became legalized, and even mandated, by the emperor Theodosius? Where did the Artemis business go?

Through a process of “development”, which seems, as yet to be documented properly, “Artemis of the Ephesians” became, for all practical purposes, “Mary the Virgin Mother of God”. Mary was not “Theotokos” until the fourth century.

When Christianity was legalized (and mandated) in the Roman Empire, the cult of Artemis simply adopted the cult of the Virgin Mary – not item by item, but “with the greatest of ease”, one may say.

It was not a one-to-one identification, as Ferguson emphasizes, but, as Gordon Liang wrote, in “Survivals of Roman Religion” (1963, part of the our Debt to Greece and Rome” series), the worship of Artemis and the “hyper-dulia” of Mary both took root in the same fertile ground. “the old firm doing the same business at the same place under a new name and a new management”, one may say:

The Temple of Diana was very near to Rome.

The Cult of Diana was of Italian origin and in all probability was introduced into Rome from Aricia (along the Via Appia on the slopes of the Alban Mount near Rome; [see the map nearby]). Both in Roman and in Aricia she was especially, though not exclusively, a goddess of women. Even before her identification with the Greek divinity Artemis, she had other functions, and after that identification, the range of her activities was still further extended (Laing p. 92).

It's important to note that the identification isn’t an identical identification, but a “kinda-sorta-but-real-close” identification. We are, after all, not dealing in doctrines at this point, but the fealty and the behaviors of people who were being “converted” (forcibly or not) from paganism to Christianity.

Much of the functionality of “the Virgin Mary” is covered in the following:

The epithets applied to her show in how many fields she [Artemis/Diana] was believed to be active. She is called the goddess of childbirth, the guardian of the mountains and the woods, the queen of the woods, the lover of streams, the huntress, the goddess of the moo, the glory of heaven, the goddess of night, the queen of the skies, the virgin goddess, and the immaculate one.

Some local epithets also, like those referring to her cult on the Aventine Hill [in Rome], on Mount Difata near Capua, and at Ephesus, are applied to her.

Some of these numerous phases of the cult may still be found in the cult of the Madonna. For example, there are indications that the veneration of Diana as a virgin goddess has contributed something to the [hyper-dulia] of the Virgin Mary.

We know that one of the earliest churches erected in honor of Mary occupied the site of the famous temple of Diana at Ephesus. For although the original divinity of the sanctuary was an Asiatic goddess, she had been identified with the Greek Artemis and ultimately with the Roman Diana. Possibly the tradition that Mary had once stayed in Ephesus was an element in the foundation of this church, which Cyril in one of his letters calls the Great Church (Ecclesia Magna).

It was at Ephesus that the synod was held (431 AD) at which Mary was first designated “Mother of God”, and it is of some interest that the procession with which the populace celebrated the deification of Mary reproduced in such essentials as smoking censers and flaring torches the processions which for so many centuries had been an important part of the worship of Diana. Such processions have continued down to modern times on the occasion of the crowning of the Madonna in various parts of the world …(Laing pp. 92-94).

Laing again here cautions that there was not a one-to-one identification of Mary with Diana/Artemis, but the “kinda-sorta” elements were thick. “There were many virgin goddesses in the ancient religions besides Diana”, including Minerva, Bona Dea (like Mary called sancta and sanctissima); and among the Greeks, Artemis and Athene Parthenos”.

If that were not enough, I’ve provided a fairly comprehensive list of all the feast days (and different identifications) that have been attributed to “the Virgin Mary” over the centuries. Many of them are from the fourth and fifth centuries.

[O]ther pagan divinities had contributed their quota to the establishment of this idea in the minds of the people. The Roman [goddess] Juno had been called queen the Greek Hera had borne the same title. The Carthaginians had their queen of heaven (Dea Caelestis); the Egyptian Isis, the Phoenician Asarte, and the Babylonian Mylitta had all been queens of heaven. The source of this appellative as applied to Mary is as multiplex as the title of “immaculate virgin” (Laing p. 95).

The titles given to Mary, too, have been borrowed either in similar or exact language, from local “goddesses” in Rome:

To the local epithets of Diana given above there are parallels in the case of the Madonna. For just as the ancients spoke of Diana of the Aventine or Diana of Tifata or Diana of Ephesus, modern churchmen speak of the Madonna of Monte Verigne, the Madonna of ompee, the Madonna of Einsiedln, and many others (Laing p. 95).

Not to mention Mother of God, Mother of Divine Grace, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of the Pillar in Spain, Our Lady of Fatima, The Black Virgin of Czestochowa, and many others.

See also the list that I provided just below: A fairly comprehensive list of all the various manifestations of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church.

There were lots of them. But during the 4th century, the cities of Rome and Ephesus – two key sites of “Marian devotion”, provided fertile soil for the (coincidental?) rise of 4th century devotion to Mary.