CarnalNation

Mary Magdalene, one of the biggest enigmas of Christianity, is celebrated with a feast day on July 22nd. In a religion with limited roles for women – virgin, whore, reformed whore (usually worded “penitent sinner”), wife, mother, and wicked temptress and corrupter of men – she has managed to be called all of them except wicked temptress. The temptresses that made it to that level of infamy, like Delilah and Salomé, always seemed to have a dead body somewhere nearby.

Sainthood, however, is an even more exclusive club – leaving out all those fun roles as it does – and Mary Magdalene is a member of it, too. If you look at the many hagiographies of women saints, you find three primary ways females can earn sainthood in Christianity: by being a virgin, often by refusing marriage to a Pagan; becoming a penitent sinner (Were there any whose sin was not sex?); or by supporting the church, financially and politically.

Of course, the conventional understanding is that Mary Magdalene made it into the saints books through the penitent sinner route. She was a whore from whom Jesus “cast out seven demons.” She anointed his head with expensive oil that could have been sold to feed the poor. She washed his feet with her hair. She was at the foot of the cross when Jesus was crucified, and she was the first to find the empty tomb as well as the first to see Jesus risen from the dead.

These scenes come from episodes in the Gospels that may or may not have actually involved the same woman, but all these activities are attributed to Mary Magdalene. This conflation was first made official by Pope Gregory I in the 6th century, and it has persisted.

Another revisionist story, which has been quietly kicking about for all these centuries, became popular in mainstream culture a few years ago when The Da Vinci Code was bestselling its way up the New York Times list and then in movie theaters. The Da Vinci Code's main premise is that Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married and that the Holy Grail was an allegory for the hereditary bloodline of Jesus. It is based on a theory advanced in several scholarly works, the best of the batch being Holy Blood, Holy Grail (by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln) and The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail (by Margaret Starbird).

There is a lot of evidence to support this claim, and both books present a solid case for an historically significant royal marriage between Jesus, of the House of David, and Mary Magdalene, of the House of Benjamin. If you are interested in the details of this theory, read The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail for a first-person story of discovery by a conservative Catholic looking to disprove the theory, and read Holy Blood, Holy Grail for a scholarly presentation with extensive documentation.

Starbird, in Alabaster Jar, takes the theory further and claims that the real message of Jesus was the divine value of Sacred Marriage – Hieros Gamos – the physical and spiritual mating of male and female as equals in the processes of creation and fertility. Starbird describes the desert blooming, the wasteland healing, and other ripely beautiful happenings, which would occur in the presence of equal partnership between the divine counterparts. By uniting the Yin and the Yang both within us and with our partner, we bring God and Goddess into form on earth.

Starbird tells us that these descriptions come from the ancient Goddess “cults” that held the Hieros Gamos rites to ensure the fertility of the land and its people. These cults had temples in the Middle East and Greece until well into the 5th century CE. This Hieros Gamos included ritual sex enacted by the High Priestess, embodying the Goddess, and the King, who often was considered the incarnate God.