And not only the 'Queen of Heaven' but other 'goddess' and 'gods' where brought in and 'christianized'.......
Here are a few:
Demeter is a goddess of many festivals but most important, the Thesmophoria, which fell in late October. She became St. Demetrios, a masculine warrior saint, whose fd. is 10/26.
Aphrodite became St. Aphrodite, of which there are several, all with saints' tales that tell how she became a "repentant harlot."
Nike was picked up as Saint Nicholas, who was extremely popular wherever shipping was important. He is the patron saint of Russian, Holland and Germany, all on the north sea coast.
The Roman god Mars was originally a god who guarded wheat fields. He became St. Martin (esp. St. Martin-in-the-fields). Although March is the month associated with Mars (it was the beginning of the military campaigning season in Roman times), the major festival for him in Christian times now usually falls in February, called Mardi Gras "Great Mars."
The Roman god Quirinus became St. Cyrinus, of which there are various "equestrian warrior saints" such as St. Cyr in France, and St. Quirina, mother of St. Lawrence. The element quir- means (or was understood to mean) `horse.' These saints were very popular and widely worshiped in the Middle-Ages, in France, Holland and also eastern Christian countries.
The Roman gods known as the Lares became St. Lawrence, esp. St. Lawrence beyond-the-wall. The Lares were field gods who protected the grain growing in the fields. In Italian, he became St. Lorenzo beyond the Walls, meaning outside of the walls of the city, for which there is still a church in Rome, with many "daughter" churches which developed from it.
The Roman goddess Venus became St. Venera (with a feminized ending to her name since -us looks like a
masculine ending in Latin). She had a major church in Rome in early Christian times, but that didn't last long.
The Roman gods known as the Gemini, who were protectors of sailors in Roman pagan times, became the Sanctos Geminos, with a number of forms in the various Christian religions. Santiago de Compostela, (St. James in English) became the protector of pilgrims during the Middle Ages. Forms of St. James all seem to be christianized from various forms of the Proto-Indo-European god *Yama. This god was repeatedly christianized in most of the Indo-European language groups.
Bacchus became St. Bacchus, and Dionysius became St. Denys or Denis." -(Charles G. Berger, Our Phallic Heritage
[NY, NY: Greenwich Book Publishers, Inc., 1966],
p. 154-155).
The ancient Romans worshiped gods and goddesses involved with every aspect of life. Jupiter, the chief of the gods, was the god of rain and storms, while his wife, Juno, was the goddess of womanhood. Minerva was the goddess of handicrafts and wisdom; Venus, of sexual love and birth; Vesta, of the hearth and sacred fires; Ceres, of farming and harvests.
While the Romans would call generically on "the gods," each major deity still had its own cult, and worshippers would pray and conduct religious ceremonies to a specific god or goddess to implore help.
"The Virgin [Mary] was given the title Queen of Heaven and is depicted wearing a blue robe decorated with stars and
standing on a crescent Moon. This image is almost identical to pagan representations of the goddess of love Ishtar who was worshipped by the Babylonians." -(Michael Howard, The Occult Conspiracy)
Here is the explanation of what happened.....
'In attempting to retain new converts from paganism and bring in more, devotion to all the various gods was at length replaced by devotion to "saints."
Yet it should be realized that all members of the early Christian Church were regarded as saints, meaning people sanctified or set apart to God. Paul greets the church at Philippi as "all the saints in Christ Jesus" (
Philippians 1:1). However, it wasn't long before "saints" in the Roman tradition began to take on the meaning of a special class of martyrs or performers of heroic virtue.
In the second and third centuries it became common for local congregations to honor the death of a martyr by celebrating the anniversary of his or her demise. The congregations, by this time having accepted the pagan Greek falsehood of the immortality of the soul and having lost the biblical understanding that those dead in their graves "know nothing" (
Ecclesiastes 9:5,
10), would then offer prayers to the dead for intercession with God.
Thus the meaning of "saint" changed from the biblical use of the word to refer to any member of the Church to referring to a deceased person declared to be a saint by the bishop of Rome. The evolution from the early Church's recognition of all members being "saints" to the veneration and worship of the dead is rooted in the early mixture of paganism with Christianity. The populace throughout the Roman Empire was not only accustomed to the worship of the Greek and Roman pantheon, but to cultic worship of local deities. It was an easy step for Christian congregations rife with paganism to replace the customs of local cults with the worship of dead martyrs.'
The list of 'saints' grew as each area with new converts were given their local dieties or 'martyrs' or anyone they could get someone to say something to qualify him or her as a 'saint' and a process set for it, and it just goes on and on from there....https://www.ucg.org/the-good-news/st-valentine-cupid-and-jesus-christ