636 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 
primary nor the secondary authorities for the first two centuries of Christianity 
supply any warrant for the position which she was to hold later. They are, 
in fact, almost silent about her. Nor has Christian archeology discovered 
any better evidence of her glorification above other holy women during that time. 
It seems established that it was not till the third century that she began to assume 
semi-divinity. By the fourth her position was sufficiently exalted to cause the 
schism associated with the name of Nestorius, whatever the real views of that 
ecclesiastic may have been; but it was not till a.p. 431 that she was officially 
acknowledged by a General Council to be divine in virtue of her Theotokia, her 
Motherhood of God. It is difficult not to believe that this is one of the examples 
of the general fact whick I have just quoted from Dr. Bigg, and that the bishops 
assembled at Ephesus on that occasion were tardily conceding a demand for the 
recognition of the feminine principle in divinity, made ever more and more openly 
by the voice of the common people all round the Eastern Mediterranean. We are 
told indeed in a contemporary Jetter written by one present in Ephesus at the time 
that the populace of the city itself, that immemorial seat of a Virgin-Goddess, 
gathered about the church while the Council was sitting, and put pressure on 
the bishops when they showed signs of wavering in their decision to proclaim the 
Theotékos by condemning Nestorius; and that when the decree had at last gone 
forth the Ephesians went wild with joy. Their Great Mother had come again to 
her own. 
Once established, or, more probably, little by little while she was gaining 
recognition, the Christian Virgin appropriated the festival dates, the holy places, 
and even the rites of her predecessor. Here we approach a third class of 
survivals, The great August feast of Artemis, as I have said, became that of 
the Assumption of Our Lady; temples, groves, sacred springs, and other holy 
spots of Nature-worship were transferred to the new patroness of all life and 
fertility. There are hundreds of places in Anatolia, Greece, and Syria which 
might be called to testify. One of singular interest I visited a few years 
ago, that wild spot in the Lycian mountains where the ever-burning gaseous 
flames of the Chimera break out in a clearing of the forest. Here, on the 
foundations of a temple, stands the ruin of a church built over the largest 
vent of the fire, Islam has decreed that the goddess of the earth-flames be 
no longer openly adored, but all the bushes which grow about the ruin I 
found hung with mouldering rags of quite modern date, witnesses that her 
cult is not yet dead in the hearts of shepherds and woodmen. On the wall 
of a ruined convent hard by is a half-effaced fresco of Mary. And for persistent 
rites and ceremonies let me quote once more the anointing of the great corner- 
stones of the ruined shrine of Paphian Aphrodite—the ‘Queen,’ as she is called 
shortly in inscriptions in the old Cypriote character. This observance takes place 
on the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, to whose honour, under the name 
Panaghia Chrysopolitissa—the Lady of the Golden City—a church stands hard by 
in the precinct of the Temple. Even Moslems in Cyprus at times of stress reveal 
the pre-Islamic secret of their souls and bow down before the holy icon of the 
Virgin, painted, it is believed, by St. Luke, wafted oversea to the same Paphian 
shore as Venus of old, and kept by the Monastery of Kykko, to be carried in proces- 
sion round fields to bring rain and bless their increase, So too do they in the 
remoter parts of Egypt. When I was being taken over the Church of the 
Convent of St. Gemiana, in the marshland of the Northern Delta, I saw a 
woman kneeling and muttering prayers before an icon of the Virgin. It struck 
me she was no Copt, and I put a question to the monk who acted as guide. He 
shrugged his shoulders apologetically: ‘She is of the Muslamin,’ he said. ‘ Her 
son is very ill. Why should she not? Who knows?’ 
Finally, let me return to Ephesus, whose cult with its environment I have 
peculiar reason to know. A phenomenon has taken place there latterly which 
illustrates singularly well both kinds of religious transference, the conscious and 
the unconscious. About fifteen years ago a Catholic priest of Smyrna who had 
been reading Clement Brentano’s ‘ Life of the Virgin,’ which is based on visions of 
the German mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich, and contains the story that Mary 
