Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [152]
The Goddess is also the Great Earth Mother, who was worshipped for millennia around the world. As Jackson relates:
The earliest important religious cult was the worship of the earth in the image of the Great Mother. Mother Earth was the first great terrestrial deity. Among other terrestrial cults were the worship of plants and animals. At a later date Sky Worship developed, and Father Sky became the consort of Mother Earth.66
And Carpenter states:
There is ample evidence that one of the very earliest objects of human worship was the Earth itself, conceived of as the fertile Mother of all things. Gaia or Ge (the earth) had temples and altars in almost all the cities of Greece. Rhea or Cybele, sprung from the Earth, was "mother of all the gods." Demeter was honored far and wide as the gracious patroness of the crops and vegetation. Ceres, of course, the same. Maia in the Indian mythology and Isis in the Egyptian are forms of Nature and the Earth-spirit, represented as female; and so forth. The Earth, in these ancient cults, was the mystic source of all life, and to it, as a propitiation, life of all kinds was sacrificed. . . . It was, in a way, the most natural, as it seems to have been the earliest and most spontaneous of cults-the worship of the Earth-mother, the all-producing eternal source of life, and on account of her neverfailing ever-renewed fertility conceived of as an immortal Virgin.67
When the Father Sky cult usurped that of the Mother Earth, the Goddess was demoted in a variety of ways, including eventually being made into "Saint Mary." Walker also says, "Biblical writers were implacably opposed to any manifestation of the Goddess ..."'A So completely was she purged that there is no word for "Goddess" in biblical Hebrew.
The Saints
Like Mary, many other Christian "saints" are not historical personages but are, in fact, the gods of other cultures, usurped and demoted in order to unify the "Holy Roman Empire." Of this saintmaking Walker says, "The canon of saints was the Christian technique for preserving the pagan polytheism that people wanted, while pretending to worship only one God."6') The Catholic Encyclopedia itself admits, "It has indeed been said that the `Saints are the successors to the Gods.' Instances have been cited of pagan feasts becoming Christian; of pagan temples consecrated to the worship of the true God; of statues of pagan Gods baptized and transformed into Christian Saints."70
In the saintmaking process, Christians took goddesses and gods such as Artemis (St. Artemidos/Ursula) and Dionysus (St. Denis), among many others, modified their names, and gave them great "historical" exploits. In addition, the Pagan temples or "tombs" of gods were converted into Christian churches. For example, the "tomb of Dionysus/Bacchus" was transformed into the church of St. Baccus.7' As Higgins relates:
On the adoration of saints Bochart says, "They have transferred to their saints all the equipage of the Pagan Gods: to St. Wolfgang the hatchet, or hook of Saturn; to Moses the horns of Jupiter Hammon; to St. Peter the keys of Janus. In brief, they have chased away all the Gods out of the Pantheon at Rome, to place in their rooms all the Saints, whose images they worship with like devotion as those of the Pagan Gods sometimes were. They dress them up in apparel, they crown them with garlands of flowers, they carry them in procession, they bow before them, they address their prayers to them, they make them descend from heaven, they attribute to them miraculous virtues."72
All these phony saints were highly profitable, of course, as fake relics such as their hair, fingers and other bones and body parts proliferated. As Walker states: