While doing some research on the serpent-worshippping Ophites, I came across a reference to the Kollyridians - and found out some fascinating information about the now obscure sect.
The name Kollyridians (also Collyridians) comes from Greek collyris, a little cake. Leontius of Byzance had a different name for them. He called them "Philomarianites", meaning Mary-lovers (PG 87, 1364). (Image: Mary in the Notre Dame du Cap, Cap-de-la-Madeleine, Quebec, Canada. Crowned in 1904 at the orders of Pope Pius X, it is the only statue of Mary to be crowned in all of Canada. The title of Queen of Heaven can also be found in scripture, but not in reference to Mary).
From Epiphanius we learn the group was composed mainly of women and led by women priestesses. The sect may have originated in Thrace, and had extended to Upper Scythia (roughly to the west and north of the Black Sea) and into Arabia by the fourth century, but it could have roots in Syria (Astarte) or Asia Minor (Ceres).
The sect was perhaps inspired by the Gospel events, combined with an Elias-type legend of Mary's purity and "non-death." Epiphanius states that the "priestesses of Mary" worshipped her as a goddess in her own right, the Queen of Heaven, with rituals far older than Christianity, and "adorn a chair or square throne, spread a cloth over it, and at a certain solemn time, place bread on it and offer it in the name of Mary." The worshippers also partook of the sacred cakes (sounds rather like "Holy Communion" where believing Christians partake of the "bread" of "Christ's body").
Recalling the Jews condemned by the Prophet Jeremiah who made similar offerings to the "Queen of Heaven" (Astarte/Ashtoreth/Asherah/Ceres), Epiphanius warned against the worship of the Virgin. This is the seventy-ninth heresy in a long list, challenged by Epiphanius, a religion harking back to the ancient pagan worship of the Goddess, under her new manifestation: "Mary."
According to Jonathan Kirsch: "[In] the Book of Jeremiah, a community of Jews in Egypt worshipped a goddess that he calls the 'Queen of Heaven,' a deity that scholars identify with Anath or Astarte, both of them goddesses in the pantheon of the ancient Near East. Like other goddess worshippers, the Jewish women in the Egyptian diaspora light altar fires to the Queen of Heaven, bake and eat 'crescent-cakes marked with her image' (Jer. 44.19) (NEB), pour out libations as drink offerings to the goddess, and burn incense or perhaps even sacrificial animals in her honor. They are joined in these rituals by their menfolk--'And is it we that offer to the Queen of Heaven without our husbands?' they taunt the old prophet (Jer. 44:19)--but it is clearly the women who serve as priestesses. And when Jeremiah calls on them to return to orthodoxy at the risk of their lives--'High and low alike will die by sword or by famine,' he quotes God as saying, 'and will be an object of execration and horror, of ridicule and reproach' (Jer. 44:12) (NEB)--they boldly and flatly refuse."
Geoffrey Ashe puts forward in his book The Virgin the opinion that the Collyridians represented a parallel Marian religion to Christianity, founded by first-generation followers of the Virgin Mary, whose doctrines were later subsumed by the Church at the Council of Ephesus in 432.
Like other "heretical" sects, the Kollyridians were stamped out - or, as Ashe argues, subsumed into the Roman Catholic Church as it adopted into its tenets many of the pagan beliefs about the "Mother of God" and the "Queen of Heaven," and pragmatic pagans were baptized and became nominal "Christians."
Today, of course, it is quite acceptable for Roman Catholics, approximately 1 billion strong, to worship their Mother of God, even if they no longer offer her sacred bread from the seat of a "chair or throne."
Information on the Kollyridians compiled from the following sources:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/HOMELIBR/COLLYRID.TXT Patrick Madrid, October, 1994 issue of "This Rock"
Philip Schaff, History of the Christian church, Vol 4, Ch 3
A dictionary of Christian biography and literature to the end of the sixth century a.d., Henry Wace, Collyridians, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wace/biodict.html?term=Collyridians
Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collyridians
The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of The Jewish People, by Johnathan Kirsch, http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=00CbuJ
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