Vectors of Erasure: Early Marian Epiclesis and the Forgetting of a Goddess

It has become commonplace for scholars to imagine, in the epithets of the Christian Madonna, a vector for the survival of earlier cultic ontologies. This paper argues that in the honorifics associated with Mary during late antiquity we witness, not the survival of earlier cultic identities but, rather, their deliberate erasure. The paper explores representations of the Madonna Stella Maris and the extent to which such representations might have served as a vector for the erasure of pre-existing goddess worship.