Mary Magdalene Wants A Baby
I had an unpleasant shock earlier this week when I managed to find myself in a Palm Sunday mass.
I’d been looking for one of my favourite Madonnas, a particularly maternal and wise-looking Lady who happens to be situated in an abbey. I am getting married and this would be the last time I could visit her before the big day. Mass was in progress so I sat quietly, twirling the flower I’d brought the Lady between my fingertips. Afterwards, I made my way to the back of the abbey to find her in a bodybag. My breath stopped. I looked over and saw another statue was also in a bodybag. A parishioner approached me and began speaking to me, and all I could say, holding my flower out helplessly was; “I came to see the Madonna, but they’ve put her in a bag”
This parishioner asked the deacon why this had happened, and she explained that they covered up the statues during holy week so the impact of Easter Sunday would be even greater. I was speechless, my stomach hurting, and I went outside and sat under a tree. Logically I knew there was nowhere I could be that the goddess was not, and told myself that perhaps a tree was a better place to commune with her anyway. But I was devastated.
Scripturally, it did not even make sense. How can Our Lady midwife the death and rebirth of the lord from within a bag?
The Jesus story, of the word made flesh, is like many other goddess mystery stories. The goddess gives birth to the god who is her son, brother, lover and father. He dies. She resurrects him from the dead so that he can make love with her and impregnate her again. When the word is made flesh, when we are saying these events literally happened, how can this be? The Jesus story solves this conundrum and splits the role of the goddess into two human women. We have Mary of Nazareth, the mother and lover of god the father, and Mary Magdalene, sister-preacher and lover of god the son.
In another goddess story, Inanna the sumerian goddess descends into hell to meet her shadow sister and reclaim her lover, Dumuzi. Dumuzi the shepherd, who she urges to “plow her vulva” as their union renews the land in spring. In another story, the goddess Isis searches the lands for the scattered pieces of her dead lover Osiris and reassembles him, in some tales reconstructing his lost phallus with her magic. In paganism, the green man rises in spring and impregnates the spring maiden.
As the sacred king, the chosen one, Jesus is anointed by Mary Magdalene in preparation for his death. During Jesus’s death, he is witnessed by the three Marys, the triple goddess personified. After his death he is lowered into his mother’s arms, into the arms of the death crone. It is the bride, however, who must resurrect him. His sister-lover carefully tends his body in the womb of the cave, the womb where we all return to and are birthed from. On Easter morning she arrives to find him gone. Mary Magdalene weeps and asks the angel “where is my lord?”
Mary Magdalene, like all the goddesses before her, wants a baby, to bring life to earth. The story of Easter is a courtship story between lord and lady as old as time. The angel is the lord’s messenger in the love story of the annunciation, and now the angel has returned for another wedding. The church is broken because without this feminine half it has constructed a myth of salvation to make the story even remotely make sense. It doesn’t because it’s synthetic. It is the bride’s blood that brings life. What do all animals want to do in the springtime? They want to play in earth’s garden and fall in love.
Humans are no exception;
“I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees” says love poet Pablo Neruda.
The church has replaced the bridal veil with a bodybag that obscures beauty and truth when all we long for is to see, to touch the one that we love. Some of the most cutting words in the new testament are issued from Jesus to Mary where he says, noli me tangere, do not touch me. A prophecy and a warning, for the bride and bridegroom will be separated in the story for the next 2000 years. There will be no renewal. There will be no baby. Jesus will become the posterboy for the patriarchy and the bride will go to sleep, frozen in time like a fairytale princess under an evil spell.
The song of songs, my favourite part of the bible that could have been written by Barry White, talks of the bride’s anguish at this separation and how she is abused and degraded until reunited with her lover. The resurrected Jesus calls Mary by name, a name meaning beloved. Beloved by a lover who refers to himself frequently in the gospels as “the bridegroom”. And the gospel says “she thought he was the gardener”. Could it be? The same gardener who is also a king who is also a shepherd who the goddess Inanna entreats to “plow my vulva, man of my heart!”
The corn god, who like the corn is cut down dead in the field, yet returns as risen bread?
Like Isis before her, Mary has sung over the bones of her beloved until he, ahem… rises again.
