What lay behind the reformers' uneasiness about the place of the Virgin was not an upsurge of entirely new views. As Beattie comments, they believed indignantly that "the ancient goddesses and their female devotees still whisper[ed] and beckon[ed] in the cult of Mary," and saw their attacks as a return to the principles of the early Church.
A century before, 1520s, the German Protestant Andres von Karlstadt had likewise become more vehement a destroyer of idols when he noted his own fear before the images: "a harmful fear," he records, "has been bred into me" from which he would be delivered, "but cannot." Those sentiments haunt the century of iconoclasm and epitomize the "traces" and "fades" of the virgin in England.
Beattie comments that is odd that Christianity and psychoanalysis have not come together more frequently to pose the questions of being since they both claim humanity is "marked by originating experience of catastrophic loss that gives rise to an insatiable yearning for restoration and wholeness."