In 401, a mob led by St. John Chrysostom destroyed one of the holiest monuments of ancient Greece: the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. The city of Ephesus had been a center for goddess worship since the city's dedication to the Phrygian mother goddess, Cybele, or mountain mother. Under the Greek Empire, and later the Roman Empire, Ephesus continued to be a center for goddess culture, with sites dedicated to Artemis and her Roman equivalent, Diana. After Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, during the reign of Emperor Theodosius I in the year 380, pagan temples were destroyed. The pagans converted to Christianity and abandoned the pagan mother goddesses. In addition to the destruction of places of worship, Christian ceremonies with similar themes took the place of pagan ones. The feminine face of God in Europe was not restored until 431, when Mary was declared Theotokos at the First Council of Ephesus. The events that took place in Europe in the early 4th and 5th centuries parallel those that took place in Peru during the conquest of the Andes region by the Incas in the mid-15th century and the subsequent conquest of Peru by the Spaniards in the 1530s. The cosmologies of the pre-Inca Andean peoples focused on the cult of a mother goddess, who required a male deity to implement her powers. Gender complementarity is also evident in the social organization of the first Andean peoples; men and women had distinct, but mutually valuable roles. When the Inca Empire gained power, it imposed its new state religion on the people of the Andes. In Inca cosmology, the complementary relationship shared by the gendered deities of previous cultures was still quite evident. As empire…middle of paper…gain progresses, the correlation between the two is tenuous and perhaps even ephemeral, but as Christianity moves away from defining God as a He, society is also moving toward gender equality.Works CitedAnton, Ferdinand. Woman in pre-Columbian America. New York: Abner Schram, 1973.Brundage, Burr C. History of the Incas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963. Chapman, John. "Council of Ephesus". In the Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909.Chasteen, John C. Born in Blood and Fire: A Concise History of Latin America. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2206.Imel, Dorothy. Goddesses in world mythology. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1993.Karen, Powers V. "Andes and Spaniards in the Contact Zone." American Indian Quarterly, 2000: 511-536. Silverblatt, Irene. Moon, sun and witches. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987.