Excuse me, but Augustine is a great example of how someone grows in grace. Starting from a pagan culture, towards the end of his life he understood the nature of God so well that he provided the groundwork for the Reformation. Today, many Catholics seem to have this reverse. They start out as Christians but end up with all this mumbo-gumbo hoo-ha; going from Christianity to paganism.
As far as paintings on the cave walls go, you can find lots of those in all sorts of pagan cults. Am I suppose to be impressed that a bunch of Greeks Christians misguidedly decided to make Mary the new Aphrodite? They should have spent more time reading the scriptures rather than paint pictures.
Whatever the early Church thought about Mary it got from the Scriptures directly, from Old Testament prophecy and from New Testament typology, particularly Revelation 12 and the implications of what it meant to be the “New Ark” and the “New Eve”. Read the Church Fathers on this.
The idea that it was merely lifted from paganism is pure poppycock and historical revisionism.
And I don’t think the Reformation understood Augustine quite as well as it thought it did...else it would not have embraced errors he roundly condemned, such as the denial of free will.