Around the Feast of Mary Magdalene, I could not help but return to the author of a series of dull books I had perused twenty years ago and put down, Margaret Starbird, and it turns out this is not a made up name. Her books hypothesize, though one wonders who you can get multiple books from this, that Jesus's mission was to restore the Sacred Feminine and Mary Magdalene was his wife, and that the two of them performed the hieros gamos (sacred marriage). At the time of the Crucifixion Roman soldiers were busy trying to kill the family of Jesus and so Joseph of Arimathea found Mary Magdalene and smuggled her away where she had Jesus's baby. The baby, a daughter, was the Sacred Bloodline of Israel, the Holy Grail.
Now, there is so much ridiculous about this premise, starting with the fact that Starbird borrowed it in large part from a highly fictional work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. As legend it is lacking and as history it is ludicrous. It is also mythologically lacking because it is theologically lacking, meaning, the story has no real implication on Christianity.
And yet, there does seem to be some wonderful truth to it. For twenty centuries we have been presented with the rather incongruous couple of Jesus and his mother, and the image of the Bride, the Church has been symbolized by his mother as well, but this isn't quite right. It isn't appropriate. So many of the images and titles which have been heaped on the Virgin, change our approach to theology and humanism and great deal, if they make their way to Mary Magdalene, the woman who seems to be very much the partner of Jesus and the first to see him rise. She even carries in her iconography an egg, which is seen to be a symbol of resurrection, but of course, eggs mean birth. In many stories the world is hatched from an egg. Helen of Troy and her siblings hatched from eggs and the egg is not simply birth, but divine birth, or if it is resurrection, is the resurrection of everything.
Now, there is no story that tells us Jesus and Mary were husband and wife, and in fact Margaret Starbird's idea of hieros gamos is so wrong because husbands and wives did not perform it, if it was performed at all. The idea of Mary as the Radha to Jesus's Krishna, Mary as Divine Lover, carries great steam. The new creation is not about sex or marriage. It is spiritual and its spirituality can be celebrated through sex or marriage. Nuns are called the brides of Christ, those set aside for Christ alone are called his brides and it seems very much as if Magdalene is the first of these, even in legend she becomes a hermit and a healer. If we see Magdalene not as the wife of Jesus, but the spiritual bride who met him mentally and psychically, we can see her as the Mother of the New Creation.
This means making a mental shift in the idea of Our Lady. The Catholic churches have see Mary Jesus's mother as Our Lady and some people more on hope than scholarship imagine that this title originally belong to Mary Magdalene. I don't know that this is true, but we can apply it to her. The more I look at icons of Mary of Nazareth, the more I see how many can belong to Magdalene, or even should. There is of course, that strange icon of Mary that seems principally the domain of the Virgin Mother, and that is the Madonna and Child. But at a closer inspection, even this is not necessarily the image of the Virgin.
Isn't it strange, that the Lord who taught and suffered and died and is considered the King of Glory is endlessly represented, even in the company of other saints, as a baby in his mother's arm's? Isn't it strange that even Saint Anthony carries a Baby Jesus? What if the baby is not Jesus? What is the baby is the New Creation, the Church? In the very confusing Book of Revelation, a Woman Clothed in the Sun is chased by a Dragon and gives birth to a Child. In Catholicism we are roughly told the Woman is the Virgin Mary giving birth to the Church or Jesus. Some say the Woman is the Church, but what is she giving birth to? The Apocalypse of John though is a vision, not a forecast, and we might not want to spend so much time trying to solve it, but certainly Mary Magdalene, chased from the mainstream vision of Christianity and hiding out in desolate places could be giving birth to her Child, which is the New Creation, the Secret Church, Us. What if Mary did have a baby by Jesus? What if that baby is us, is the new creation we can barely see, the Secret Church? What if it is our task to become Magdalene, to not go off on our own, or to be ever subject to a divine will, but to meld our will and our love with that Will and that Love and bring for this Child ourselves. What if Mary is the Mother of Alchemy?
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