"Christianity would not have become the successful, creative and all-inclusive synthesis it finally became if it had not found a satisfactory role for the feminine impulse to play. Christianity, first of all, inspired love, a new departure in psychological disposition in that this love was ostensibly divorced from sex... The Savior God loves his worshippers, who in turn are admonished to love one another. This new love was no longer an urbane benevolence such as characterized the best among the Greek philosophies and religions; it was a feeling of overpowering strength, with all the Judaic will behind it - but an outgoing, generous will to be concerned with mankind at large...
To this new feeling of ardent love was added an original element: unlike Adonis, Attis, Osiris, and countless others, Christ was not a mythical figure, acknowledged as such. He was a real man of flesh and blood; His Crucifixion was not a ritual reenacted year after year, but a "once for all time" historical and unrepeatable event. The grand cyclical theme of the yearly Redeemership was acknowledged, taken over, and incorporated into linear history as a unique event, never to be repeated. In other words, Christianity brought down from the plane of acknowledged mythology the great drama of death and rebirth and introduced it as a historical event - Attis was an artificial effigy fastened to a tree; Christ was a real, bleeding human being nailed to an actual wooden cross.
Very much like passing from the dreamlike state to the state of wakeful being, Christianity set forth a new mystery: the Incarnation of the Son of God...
...At the end of the fourth century, the last taurobolia took place in the Phrygianum in Rome on the very same spot where the Vatican basilica of Saint Peter stands today." - Amaury de Reincourt, Sex and Power in History, 1974.
