Mother of God cult

93:7.3But the task was so great and the tribes were so back­ward that the re­sults were vague and in­def­i­nite. From one gen­er­a­tion to an­other the Salem gospel found lodg­ment here and there, but ex­cept in Pales­tine, never was the idea of one God able to claim the con­tin­ued al­le­giance of a whole tribe or race. Long be­fore the com­ing of Je­sus the teach­ings of the early Salem mis­sion­ar­ies had be­come gen­er­ally sub­merged in the older and more uni­ver­sal su­per­sti­tions and be­liefs. The orig­i­nal Mel­chiz­e­dek gospel had been al­most wholly ab­sorbed in the be­liefs in the Great Mother, the Sun, and other an­cient cults.

98:3.5This for­mal and un­emo­tional form of pseu­dore­li­gious pa­tri­o­tism was doomed to col­lapse, even as the highly in­tel­lec­tual and artis­tic wor­ship of the Greeks had gone down be­fore the fer­vid and deeply emo­tional wor­ship of the mys­tery cults. The great­est of these dev­as­tat­ing cults was the mys­tery re­li­gion of the Mother of God sect, which had its head­quar­ters, in those days, on the ex­act site of the pres­ent church of St. Pe­ter’s in Rome.

98:7.74. The mys­tery cults, es­pe­cially Mith­ra­ism but also the wor­ship of the Great Mother in the Phry­gian cult. Even the leg­ends of the birth of Je­sus on Uran­tia be­came tainted with the Ro­man ver­sion of the mirac­u­lous birth of the Ira­nian sav­ior-hero, Mithras, whose ad­vent on earth was sup­posed to have been wit­nessed by only a hand­ful of gift-bear­ing shep­herds who had been in­formed of this im­pend­ing event by an­gels.

95:1.5Never did the Salem teach­ers fully over­come the pop­u­lar­ity of Ishtar, the mother of gods and the spirit of sex fer­til­ity. They did much to re­fine the wor­ship of this god­dess, but the Baby­lo­ni­ans and their neigh­bors had never com­pletely out­grown their dis­guised forms of sex wor­ship. It had be­come a uni­ver­sal prac­tice through­out Mes­o­po­ta­mia for all women to sub­mit, at least once in early life, to the em­brace of strangers; this was thought to be a de­vo­tion re­quired by Ishtar, and it was be­lieved that fer­til­ity was largely de­pen­dent on this sex sac­ri­fice.

98:5.5At first it was a re­li­gion only for men, and there were seven dif­fer­ent or­ders into which be­liev­ers could be suc­ces­sively ini­ti­ated. Later on, the wives and daugh­ters of be­liev­ers were ad­mit­ted to the tem­ples of the Great Mother, which ad­joined the Mith­raic tem­ples. The women’s cult was a mix­ture of Mith­raic rit­ual and the cer­e­monies of the Phry­gian cult of Cy­bele, the mother of At­tis.

89:9.2In con­nec­tion with the Mother of God cult, in Mex­ico and else­where, a sacra­ment of cakes and wine was even­tu­ally uti­lized in lieu of the flesh and blood of the older hu­man sac­ri­fices. The He­brews long prac­ticed this rit­ual as a part of their Pass­over cer­e­monies, and it was from this cer­e­mo­nial that the later Chris­tian ver­sion of the sacra­ment took its ori­gin.

94:10.2These sim­ple-minded Ti­betans would not wholly give up their an­cient magic and charms. Ex­am­i­na­tion of the re­li­gious cer­e­mo­ni­als of pres­ent-day Ti­betan rit­u­als re­veals an over­grown broth­er­hood of priests with shaven heads who prac­tice an elab­o­rate rit­ual em­brac­ing bells, chants, in­cense, pro­ces­sion­als, rosaries, im­ages, charms, pic­tures, holy wa­ter, gor­geous vest­ments, and elab­o­rate choirs. They have rigid dog­mas and crys­tal­lized creeds, mys­tic rites and spe­cial fasts. Their hi­er­ar­chy em­braces monks, nuns, ab­bots, and the Grand Lama. They pray to an­gels, saints, a Holy Mother, and the gods. They prac­tice con­fes­sions and be­lieve in pur­ga­tory. Their monas­ter­ies are ex­ten­sive and their cathe­drals mag­nif­i­cent. They keep up an end­less rep­e­ti­tion of sa­cred rit­u­als and be­lieve that such cer­e­mo­ni­als be­stow sal­va­tion. Prayers are fas­tened to a wheel, and with its turn­ing they be­lieve the pe­ti­tions be­come ef­fi­ca­cious. Among no other peo­ple of mod­ern times can be found the ob­ser­vance of so much from so many re­li­gions; and it is in­ev­i­ta­ble that such a cu­mu­la­tive liturgy would be­come in­or­di­nately cum­ber­some and in­tol­er­a­bly bur­den­some.