The Return: Endings, Beginnings and Chaos in the Heart of Extraordinary Time

For the first time in years, I return to the Jewish prayer book. Everything around me is changing and I am stuck doing old dead rituals. In this part of Extraordinary time, the switch from Catholic opening ritual to Jewish is like when the Christmas lights are finally put away and I stop hiding from the season and burying myself in something which was, for a time appropriate, but no longer is. There is a feeling of disease about the way I’ve been doing things. I have felt trapped, bitter, tired, afraid, cynical, wingless. I need to change and work through these old dark feelings. Moving into the Jewish liturgy there was a lightness of heart which disappeared when I went back to the wintertime and spring Catholic ones to usher in the night. In a time where prayers must move beyond words, the Hebrew which is not my language serves the language of prayer much as when Saint Paul would say the Spirit speaks in groans for those deep longings we cannot express, the deep longings, the desire which becomes will which is the source of the Craft. There is a dizzying openness in the Siddur which spins me to the place I need to be in this changing season.

Chaos magicians do the same thing, though their source, their goals and their philosophy is different from 1734. They recognize in the words, the ways and the names expressed, different energies bringing us to different realizations. Perhaps in the change of formats they realize that they are, foremost, not priests of Isis and Ra or Wiccan clergy, but magicians. And so with me. For some weeks I have felt myself moving to the Siddur and all sorts of little anxieties have plagued me. I first entered Judaism for mystic knowledge and stayed in it quite a while. I also left it in time and returning to the old words brings old memories, much like Catholic memories. Both ways represent traditions where I learned knowledge, earned wisdom, met loved ones, suffered more than I needed to from unloving ones and never wish to return. All of that comes up as I recite the Siddur as it came up the first time I began to take up Catholic practices again.  

When I move from the Catholic ritual it is good to remember I am not a Catholic. I am a witch using Catholic ritual. When I come back to these old Hebrew words I have to remember I won’t ever be joining a synagogue or count myself as a Jew again. There was a time when these two faiths kissed. It was not in the long long ago of prehistory, but in the first centuries of our current era before either religion took their current forms, and in their kissing, in that strange nexus there were many other expressions of worship and power that would be accepted by neither group. It is in that bright and liquid nexus I dwell with Hebrew words on my lips, The Blessed Virgin, Mary Magdalene and Hermes on the altar and a wand of witchwood in my hand.

This nexus which could be the door to fear is the brilliant place most shrink from where I have the opportunity to make something beautiful for myself, to interpret things which have arisen in dreams or remain on my altar unexplored, the Glass Sun, the sun at night with the candle behind it on the altar, the charm of making from Excalibur, the Doctrine of the Dragon from that same film, the Mermaids who come to me in dreams and story and grace a separate altar as well as the Mermaid Lantern on that altar. Now, with new eyes, we approach the Castle Beneath the Sea, the Castle of the South which we look upon at Lammas.  Now is the time to come to those things which are my revelations, which are interpretations not of old traditions, but of the dreams and revelations that come to me personally. This is the final frontier.

Mary Magdalene: Conclusion

So we know that Mary is the woman who anoints Jesus’s feet, and in anointing them prepares him for his burial, that she weeps with love for him and doesn’t stint from doing extravagant and sometimes heedless things in her love for him. She does nothing by halves in regard to her devotion and, what is more, Jesus is pleased by this. We know that earlier when she is supposed to be helping Martha serve Jesus, performing in the role proper to a woman, something happens, the word of the presence of Christ compels her and she stops work to sit at the feet of Jesus. Her sister Martha demands that Jesus make Mary get up and help her serve, but she is also asking Jesus to insist that Mary behave more like a proper woman, and Jesus refuses.

There is something very special about the story of the resurrection of Lazarus. Saint Martha should be loved and praised because when Jesus finally arrives in Bethany, it is she who goes out to see him and she who tells Jesus he could have saved Lazarus but even now he can do what he wishes. Martha is worthy of praise because, like Peter, she declares that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. But the interesting thing is in this story, Mary does none of these things. She stays in the house. She is so broken that the arrival of Jesus, her beloved, her master. does not make her go out to him. She may even be angry, for they sent for him and he did not come. But it is when she receives the private message that Jesus is calling for her that Mary finally runs out to him. Jesus is often full of cool, almost robotic, answers and in the Gospel of John is the coolest Jesus ever. When his own mother charges him to do something he says, “What is this to me, woman?” The Jesus of John is above regular human emotions, but when Mary sees him, she says nothing holy. She throws her rage at him and says, “If you had been here, my brother would not have died!”

            And Jesus does something very shocking. The shortest verse in the Bible tells us.

            Jesus wept.

            And weeping, he demands to go to the tomb and raises up Lazarus. The relationship between Jesus and Mary of Bethany is not that she is the greatest disciple because she is the smartest, most active and has the best answers. Here there is clearly nothing but love between Mary and Jesus. Mary of Bethany is the person who can move Jesus to action, make him weep, understands him well, perhaps even shames him a little. Perhaps the incident with the oil sometime later. where she is called the Penitent Woman, is her repentance for her anger. Mary is the disciple par excellence because she is the lover and the beloved par excellence. Between she and Jesus is great love, affection and attraction, and the matter of discipleship is not about getting it right, or behaving in perfection. It is, clearly, a matter of love.

            I read an article where someone is asking, “Is Martha an invention meant to suppress Mary Magdalene? This is stupid, and simply an offshoot of the Virgin-Whore dichotomy.  There can only be two important women in the Bible. It makes little since that Lazarus had two sisters named Mary, and the one who does not resemble anything of Mary Magdalene is Martha. But as I began to meditate on Mary Magdalene another possibility seemed to insist itself. There is no saying it is right or absolute truth, but it is right for me and seems true to me. Mary of Bethany is deeply important to Jesus. She is a disciple of Jesus who sits at his feet. She is castigated by the disciples, by Simon the Leper/Pharisee and by her sister, but always upheld by Jesus who is quick to rebuke her accusers. She is an iconoclast. But oddly enough, Mary of Bethany disappears from the narrative right before Passover. She is not mentioned at all during the Passion. Aside form Mary the Mother of Jesus, the only other Mary who is mentioned at the Passion is Mary Magdalene. At Golgotha, Mary Magdalene weeps at the feet of Jesus the same way Mary of Bethany did earlier, and she brings myrrh and spices to the tomb. On Easter it is she whom Jesus greets. Mary of Bethany is gone, and that is strange for a woman so beloved by Jesus.

            What else is strange is Mary Magdalene is named once in the Gospels in the list of women who followed Jesus, and in this list we never hear of Martha and Mary of Bethany. What else is strange is though Mary Magdalene is named quite early, we never hear of her doing anything until the Passion story. In short, wherever Mary of Bethany is, Mary Magdalene is not, and vice versa.

            The life of Christ has been novelized and dramatized many times, and always in it, these two Marys have a strange place, both characters seeming unfinished. What if, minus the prostitution business, the medievalists had the right of it? We know that Simon Peter was Simon Bar Jonah of Capernaum, that Jesus made up this name, and the story of Jesus calling Simon the Rock has been made much of by many. It is correct to say many men have made much of it in order to bolster the claims of their churches and their positions in them. But there are many who point out that Mary is only sometimes called Mary of Magdala, and that Magdala can be the name of many places or no place. Where her Magdala is, is uncertain. Scholars also go further and point out that Magdala is a Latinized form of Migdol, or The Tower. If this is so, then Mary Magdalene may very not be a woman who comes from Magdala, but a woman who is (literally) christened by Christ  making Mary of Bethany’s epithet Magdalene. This is why looking at Mary of Bethany, and her relation to the personal avatar of God called Jesus is so vital.

Not only in the Latin tradition are the two women the same, but as early as the first centuries of the church there was a monastery dedicated to the Lady Mary, and this Lady Mary was not the Virgin, but the Companion of Jesus. So from very early on in the East these two women, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Bethany, are seen as one. It is hard to believe that in the east, where Magdalene is reverenced, they would so easily forget Mary of Bethany whose place is so much more prominent. What is more, the treatment of Mary of Bethany in the canonical Gospels is the same as Mary Magdalene’s treatment in the Gnostic ones. The New Testament makes a great deal of Peter’s naming because, narrowly, it was seen as a way to assert the authority of bishops and popes and broadly, all men and all priests. The renaming of Mary of Bethany as Mary Magdalene would have been well known, but not well celebrated. Why would it be? From the standpoint of earthly power it did nothing for men. But from the standpoint of true power, which is based in love and grace and relation to the Divine it does everything. For all of us.

The Feast of Mary Magdalene Part Two: The Other Mary

While writing about Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany, I stopped and looked up The Two Marys. The concept of the Three Marys is very old in Christian iconography, but when I looked up the two Marys what I got was the usual business about the two main Marys in Christianity, Mary Magdalene and Mary the Virgin.  Some articles were about the reconciling of the two, as if these two women actually had some debate between them. Many of the articles in the last few years about Mary Magdalene have attempted to rehabilitate her and make a new image, but at the end of the day, all of this business of the Virgin Mary contrasted to Mary Magdalene is just a recycling of the old dichotomy of Virgin versus Whore. No matter what we say, most of Mary Magdalene’s current gas comes from her old reputation. We are still obsessed with her sexuality, so obsessed that in speaking of these two Marys we have intentionally forgotten the Other Mary, Mary of Bethany.

            Mary of Bethany is neither virgin nor whore, and what is more, we cannot even call her forgotten, for anyone who knows their Bible knows her well. She actually has a much larger role than Mary Magdalene. So great is Mary of Bethany’s role, that her stories are appropriated to become Mary Magdalene’s.

We have to look at one story first, and we are not entirely sure who the protagonist is. It is the story of the Sinful Woman who comes to Jesus while he is at the home of Simon the Pharisee. She weeps and wipes his feet with her hair. Simon is outraged that a sinner would do this, crashing his party, but Jesus chides him.

            There is another story a little more famous. In ths story, positioned near Passover, which Saint John tells us is right after the resurrection of Lazarus, Mary, his sister, comes to the house of a man called Simon the Leper. Here she pours spikenard on Jesus’s feet, and it is Judas and the disciples who chide her for such a waste of wealth. Jesus chides them.

            I suppose it is entirely possible that twice Jesus went to the house of a man called Simon and every time he went a woman came in sobbing and anointing his feet with her hair, but it isn’t likely. It is more likely Mary of Bethany is the woman in both stories. A lot of misogynistic reinvention decided that Mary’s sin was sexual and not simply sexual but prostitution, and that this Mary was, somehow, also Mary Magdalene. We won’t deal with that last bit right now. Let’s deal with the first bit. Many men in the Bible confess themselves as sinful. When Isaiah is confronted by God in the temple he cries “Woe am I,  a sinner and a man of unclean lips.” No one believes that Isaiah was a male prostitute. What is more, the proper title for Mary in the first story is not Sinful Woman, but Penitent Woman, and everyone coming as a disciple to Jesus was supposed to be penitent. Simon asked why this sinner was in his house, but given the misogyny of Judaism, and Greece and ancient Rome and the societies Jesus lived among, sinner could have been synonymous simply with her being a woman crashing a men’s gathering.

It is fun to imagine that Mary is weeping at Jesus’s feet because she’s sorry for sinning, or sorry for being a whore, indeed this is the way she is betrayed in Franco Zefferilli’s Jesus of Nazareth. But it isn’t very realistic. It isn’t sensible. It makes far more sense that she is weeping because Jesus had brought her brother Lazarus from the dead and she has truly seen something new, a new way of life, a new revelation about life and death and Christ, in other words, she is making a revolution and starting again. Penitence. Though penitence may include sorrow, what it means is beginning again.

Hail Marys, the Feast of Mary Magdalene and the Silent Sister

The Feast of Mary Magdalene is the bright spot in that thing the Church calls Ordinary Time, and which I am calling the Extraordinary Time. Though there are some who would stop and say, why in the world talk about any church, the truth is the history of the Catholic Church is the history of the shaping of the Western world, so a few moments to talk about Saint Magdalene in that context are necessary.

These days, the kinder, gentler face of the Church is fond of calling Mary Magdalene the Apostle to the Apostles, which sounds nice, but the Mass and the services for her are still those celebrated for common days and commemorations. So far, among women, only the Virgin Mary ever ranks three readings and a Gloria, the full compliment of a high day in the Catholic Church. Looking up hymns and readings for Magdalene, I was greeted by several things, hymns for the Virgin Mary, esoteric videos by voodoo priestesses, Gnostic teachers and Catholic silence. If the Virgin Mary is the safe face of the feminine that the Church raises up, much as Athens raised up their own Virgin, then the Magdalene is something else entirely.

And this isn’t to disregard the power of the Virgin, for she herself has always been treated warily, and the Church has been careful about how she is reverenced. Movements to revere her come up from the ground rather than the church official, but the time for Mary Magdalene seems to be arriving, and her movement is coming up from the ground too.

There is another issue about Mary Magdalene. How many of her are there? In something that is not quite innocence, many women have been conflated to make her. The nameless Sinful Woman who wipes Jesus’s feet with her hair is conflated with Mary of Bethany, that most excellent saint and mystic, who wiped Jesus feet with spikenard and foretold his death,  and then, for reasons unknown, that Mary is conflated with Mary of Magdala who was at the foot of the Cross, the disciple of the Lord who was first to witness his rising. So we are confronted with at least two Marys, and two goes against the conventional urge of the Church toward mono everything. It would seem that from the very beginning, Mary Magdalene was the Lady off the Mysteries of the Church, she whose presence guarded the door to deeper and more personal truths. If the Virgin was the mother of the baby Jesus, Mary was the companion, and the mother of the Resurrection. But it is only natural that the easiest and most proselytizing form of the Church would be the successful one, the one which went with the order of the day, insisting on the supremacy of the male and the supremacy of what was already supreme. Such a church, which had no room for mysticism, could not readily accept such Marys, the midwives of the Resurrection and the arch disciples and beloveds of God. In a streamlining church of one God and one way, there was only room for one woman, and this comes to be the Blessed Virgin. Counter to all this, holding no baby, but a red egg, and not veiled in blue, but in red, the color of resurrection and sunrise, is Mary of Magdala. Equally brilliant, though nearly visible, stands beside her, Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus who sat at Jesus’s feet. The most visible of Jesus’s many women disciples.

In the first century, the people who would be called Christians called themselves, among many things, the Way, and it appears that, unlike the streamlined version of Christian development offered in the Bible, there were many and generous versions of that Way, often quite startling to modern eyes. In that same sense, the two Marys still stand at the entrance of that Way, sphinx like, and await our coming.

The Gravity of Heaven

These days have been stifling. Yesterday afternoon I go on the only walk I’ve taken during daylight hours. It is raining a bit, and I come back in and the clouds begin to clear. I knew that before the hour passed. the pleasant but wet 70 degree weather would skyrocket back to the heat we’d been living in, and it is around 90 degrees in the nighttime. In the Midwest we do not have the blessing of deserts which take the heat away every night so we can have a fresh start. The heat and the humidity accumulate like a hothouse.

During the esbat, the days are so hot that by the time the moon is out, I want nothing but a shower and a lie down. But, at last, I slip on shoes at two in the morning and go out to see the full moon and be in the actual air that I had not experienced the whole day. I am surprised that the air has cooled, information I would not have known, and I am surprised by the breeze and how connected I feel by it, not just to it, but by it, linked to myself and all that’s going on in me, linked to the world about me. The moon is hidden for most of the time while I chant and pray, and it is only in the end that she reveals her bright white face.

            For the witch, the Moon has a special place. It isn’t that the moon is a little sun. IUt isn’t at all.. If the magic of the moon is that it reflects the light of the sun, then the second magic which we rarely speak of is that ir reflects the magic of the earth. The moon is a mirror of us, a planetoid that had been pulled into our orbit, and circles us as we circle the sun. Witches become witches by being outside, by being in the world and feeling the pulse of nature. Our power is not different than the growing power in the trees and flowers, than the animal power of the birds and the beasts. The power in the witch is that which moves in the water and the wind. As witches we are grounded when we are grounded in the reality of the earth. We are pulled in by the gravity of the ground beneath our feet. The Esbat is so important, and the moon matters because it is then we are reminded of the gravity of heaven which grounds us as well. Earth and heaven, the witch is of both. We are pulled by the moon, as is the sea, as is the earth, and the moon is pulled by the earth, the two pulling each other, one circles the other in an unending dance, and all the time the earth circling the sun, the sun the galaxy, the greatest Spiral Castle we know, all of us pulled to each other and pulling. This is the power of the moon which we enter into at the Esbat.

The Witch Craft

The Work expresses itself through many things. Often the expression may occur through the very mundane workings of life, the simple duties, but very, very often, the witch experiences the work through acts of art and music and ritual, through sex, through strange biddings be new moods and voices to do the impractical, the seemingly ornamental. Once such bidding was to craft a boat for the Sea Altar which has been coming to fruition in the living room. In the midst of working on this simple ship, it becomes apparent that its crafting is Crafting, This is a work. I blow upon it, sing and pray over it, move it about along the currents of the air, remembering that another term for a boat or for anything built for travel is a craft. This little ship I am making is a witch craft. It is my witchcraft. We talked of the Craft being a skill, worked on and practiced continuously, and it is, but we are quick to forget that our Craft, our devotion is the vehicle through which we traverse the Creation.

Witches are voyagers before we are anything, and we know how many approached this road briefly, but were scared or lazy or both and did not go very far. We may have been that person ourselves, content to shudder at mystery, fill our houses with crystal balls and Tarots, dress in black and leave it at that. But the witch is the opposite of orthodoxy. This is not religion that takes comfort in assumed truths and worn out assumptions, nor is the Craft vague and untested hope. We are not camping down in the blessed security of the dogma we have been taught or for that matter, the emptiness of an unexamined mind.

The first impulse of the Craft is to move past what we have been handed and search for something new on the edges of things. Surely there must be more. Surely the something we have felt on the edge of our mind and right outside the church doors must be explored. Surely there is something beyond the subtle and not so subtle versions of an Michelangelo’s old Italian in a pink nightie God, the God, something to the tantalizing whispers in the back of our mind. And so we begin our journey, and though years later I light candles on the Sea Altar, and honor our Lady of the Lake, though I make trips to the water to honor her and bring back sand and shells, that lake points to a deeper water, the water from which we all came and to which we all return, in which we have our being, at this very moment. That thing which upholds us, following an internal North Star, taking us farther and farther from the barren shore where there was really nothing for us, is what Christians call grace, and what I will call, for now, the Witch Craft.

Dun Mor Druid Order: Commentary