It is to the mother that the child looks for food, love, and
protection. It is to the child that the mother often turns from the
mate, either because of the predominance of mother love over sex or in
consolation for the loss of the love of the male. We have only recently
learned to evaluate the infantile patterns engraved in the neural tissue
during the years of childhood when the mother is the central figure of
the child's life. Whatever disillusionments may come about other women
later in life, the mother ideal thus established remains a constant part
of man's unconscious motivations. It is perhaps possible that this
infantile picture of a being all-wise, all-tender, all-sacrificing, has
within it enough emotional force to create the demand for a
mother-goddess in any religion.
To arrive at the concept of the Madonna, a far-reaching process of
synthesis and reinterpretation must have been carried out before the
Bible could be brought into harmony with the demands made by a cult of a
mother goddess. Just as the views brought into the church by celibate
ideals spread among heathen people, so the church must have been in its
turn influenced by the heathen way of looking at things.[17] One of the
great difficulties was the reconciliation of the biological process of
procreation with divinity.
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