The Quest for Mary Magdalene

by Michael Haag

  There is another version of the legend not mentioned by Voragine but still alive today at the fishing village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, about seventy miles west of Marseilles. Here, they say, Mary Magdalene landed with Mary the mother of James the Less and Joses, and Salome who was the wife of Zebedee and the mother of his sons the disciples James and John. These are the three Marys, all of them witnesses to the crucifixion, after whom the village is named. With them was Mary Magdalene’s brother and sister, Martha and Lazarus, their companion Maximin, as well as Sarah who was a servant to the women, and several others. The event is celebrated by a gypsy pilgrimage every year on 24–25 May, as the gypsies identify with Sarah, who is said to have been an Ethiopian and dark-skinned like themselves.

  Carved in 1536, this wooden altar decoration at the church of Saint-Maximin in Provence shows Mary Magdalene and her companions being driven from Palestine by their persecutors. They are forced into a boat without sail, rudder, oars or provisions and left to perish. But miraculously they are borne safely across the Mediterranean to Marseilles in the South of France.

  Mary Magdalene altar decoration at Saint-Maximin. Wikimedia Commons.

  The Greek Orthodox Church tells a completely different story, that Mary Magdalene retired to Ephesus with Mary the mother of Jesus and died there. Her relics were transferred to Constantinople in 886 and are preserved there.

  But the French Catholic tradition is that recorded in the Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine that Mary Magdalene sailed to the South of France and came to Marseilles (the people of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer would say via their village) where she personally converted the governor of the province and his wife, convinced them to destroy their pagan temples and build churches in their place, and then with Lazarus, who became the first bishop of Marseilles, and Maximin, who was made the first bishop of Aix, she converted the whole of Provence.

  When these things had been accomplished, and wishing to devote herself to spiritual contemplation, Mary Magdalene retreated to the remote wilderness where there were no streams, no grass, no trees, where she lived unknown for thirty years – but where everyday at the seven canonical hours angels carried her aloft to hear the celestial chants so that she nourished herself on paradise. And then when she felt her time had come she was taken by the angels to Maximin at Aix-en-Provence where, hovering in spiritual lightness two or three cubits above the floor, she asked for holy communion and the last rites. ‘And Mary Magdalene received the body and blood of our Lord from the hands of the bishop with great abundance of tears, and after, she stretched her body before the altar, and her right blessed soul departed from the body and went to our Lord.’ Maximin anointed her body with precious ointments and buried it, commanding that after his death his own body should be buried by hers.

  The Movable Relics of Mary Magdalene

  The Golden Legend says that Mary Magdalene was buried at Maximin’s seat in Provence, but it goes on to say that in Charlemagne’s time, in 769, Gerard the duke of Burgundy built a great abbey church at Vézelay and sent a monk to Aix – which had been ruined by the Arabs – with instructions to return with the body of Mary Magdalene.

  And so Vézelay is where the bones of Mary Magdalene were said to lie when Jacobus de Voragine wrote the Golden Legend in 1275. But only four years later, in 1279, the body of Mary Magdalene was found buried back in Provence; it seems there had been some mistake, that the monk from Vézelay had never taken the body away, or had taken the wrong one, but it was now agreed by the Church that Mary Magdalene lay not at Vézelay but in the crypt of a church dedicated to St Maximin, twenty-five miles east of Aix-en-Provence. Not that the church had been dedicated to Maximin the companion of Mary Magdalene but to the fourth-century bishop Maximin of Trier in present-day Germany, a problem which the medieval flair for free association easily surmounted, making one Maximin as good as another.

  The mystery of what happened between 1275 when the bones of Mary Magdalene lay at Vézelay in Burgundy and 1279 when they appeared instead at the church of St Maximin in the village of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume (Sainte Baume being a range of mountains nearby), three hundred and fifty miles to the south in Provence, is explained by the way the Church and religious orders and kings used saints’ relics for financial gain and to advance their political objectives.

  This story begins with the Arabs, who in the name of Islam had invaded and occupied the entire Middle East and North Africa, all of which had been Christian, during the seventh century and crossed the Mediterranean into Spain and southern France and Italy in the eighth century. Owing to Muslim hostility and periods of instability and disorder in the East, pilgrimages to the Holy Land like that undertaken by Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine in the fourth century, became increasingly difficult, often dangerous and sometimes impossible, factors that encouraged the development of pilgrimage sites within Europe itself.

  Various well-known New Testament figures were suddenly and conveniently discovered to have travelled to the West and died there, their bones unearthed by enterprising churches. Glastonbury had already laid claim to Joseph of Arimathea in this way; in Paris they announced the discovery of the bones of St Denis, a convert and student of St Paul; while St James, the son of Zebedee, had turned up in the far north of Spain at Compostela; and the remains of St Mark had been smuggled out of Alexandria in a barrel of pork and brought to safety at Venice. As well as providing new pilgrimage destinations in Europe, away from the hostile Middle East, the enthusiasm for relics also reinforced apostolic Christianity; the most favoured bones were those of the apostles themselves or people intimate with Jesus and his inner circle of followers.

  A 1927 photograph of a gypsy encampment by the church of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue where according to one variant of the Mary Magdalene tradition she stepped ashore after her voyage from Palestine. Among her companions was Sarah, an Ethiopian with whom the gypsies identify themselves, making a pilgrimage to this fishing village every May.

  Gypsies at Les Saintes-Maries. Wikimedia Commons.

  But originally the great ninth-century Romanesque church at Vézelay had been dedicated to the Virgin Mary and she had risen bodily to heaven at her assumption so unfortunately there could be no question of possessing her relics. But Vézelay lay along the lucrative pilgrimage route from Germany to Compostela, and the profits to be gleaned from the passing trade, not to mention the prestige and the protection to be had, made the happy discovery of some suitable remains all but unavoidable. And who better than Mary Magdalene, the very essence of the redemptive power of the Church, both as witness to the crucifixion and the resurrection, and as a fallen woman saved by her submission to Jesus.

  With her relics in their possession, the Benedictine’s abbey at Vézelay, now renamed for Mary Magdalene, became immensely popular, but how, the faithful wondered, had her bones come to Burgundy? The monks response – ‘All is possible to God who does what he pleases’ – had theological strengths, but as pilgrim traffic grew, and their curiosity became insistent, they offered various explanations. An early tale was that Mary Magdalene’s bones were brought back from the Holy Land by Vézelay’s ninth-century abbot St Badilo. Later, the monks settled on the fiction that her relics had been buried in Provence but were threatened by Arab raiders, and so were removed and brought to Vézelay for safekeeping. This new version of their story pushed the date of Vézelay’s acquisition of the relics back to the eighth century, to the time of Charlemagne, and was repeated in a written account by Sigebert of Gembloux in the 1050s which was happily endorsed by a timely papal document dated 27 April 1058. But even now the monks rarely displayed Mary Magdalene’s remains (not that Vézelay had a lot to show – just a few rib fragments in reliquaries looking more like a dried insect collection), telling pilgrims that their faith alone should suffice.

  Still the pilgrims were not satisfied. Even if the relics at Vézelay were real and they had been brought from Aix, they wanted to know how her bone
s had come to Provence in the first place. Another legend was invented to conveniently explain that Mary Magdalene and her companions had escaped from the Holy Land by sea and landed at Marseilles, or in an alternative version at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, from where she made her way inland to live a solitary life of repentance and spiritual contemplation. At her death she was buried by Maximin at Aix and it was from there that a monk from Vézelay had dug up her bones and taken them for safekeeping to Burgundy.

  An engraving from 1493 shows Mary Magdalene being taken by angels to heaven. Below is the massif where she dwelt in a cave for thirty years and where the Dominicans later built themselves a friary, declaring that Mary Magdalene was their mother, their sister and their daughter. The Dominicans were the inquisitors who helped destroy the Cathars and this was their deliberate response to the Cathars who had claimed Mary Magdalene as their own as the bride of Christ.

  Mary Magdalene being taken by angels to heaven. Wikimedia Commons.

  The industry of the monks at Vézelay also ensured that Mary Magdalene’s bones began performing miracles; she was associated with the liberation of prisoners, assistance with fertility and childbirth, spectacular cures and even the raising of the dead.

  Such wonderful tales demanded yet wider circulation which they received from Jacobus de Voragine in his Golden Legend. To his account of Mary Magdalene in his compendium of saints’ lives he added the plethora of new miracles put about by Vézelay and produced what very quickly became a medieval bestseller. And here the date of Voragine’s work – 1275 – is important. For its immediate and immense popularity attracted the attention of King Charles of Anjou who was in need of associating himself with a powerful legend. Within four years of Voragine giving his account of Mary Magdalene, Charles appropriated both the relics and the legend to his own purposes.

  In the 1270s Charles of Anjou was establishing a Mediterranean empire based on Naples, Sicily and his newly-acquired territory of Provence. Learning from the Golden Legend that Mary Magdalene’s bones had originally been associated with St Maximin, he went to have a look for himself. And what did he find? The bones of Mary Magdalene. On exactly 12 December 1279, as Charles was quick to let all the world know, at the church of someone called St Maximin. Clearly the monks at Vézelay had been mistaken. Charles and thr Vatican agreed to install the Dominican Order as caretakers of Mary’s shrine, and they in turn boldly broadcast the importance of their mission by fabricating the Book of Miracles of Saint Mary Magdalene, documenting and backdating all the miraculous intercessions and cures the saint had wrought at her Provençal sanctuary, a publication whose success was measured by the fact that Vézelay as a centre for the miraculous soon went into decline.

  A wedding party emerges from the Basilica of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte Baume which contains the skull of Mary Magdalene. According to Father Henri Lacordaire, who reestablished the Dominican Order in France after the French Revolution, ‘The tomb of Mary Magdalene at Saint-Maximin is the third most important tomb in the world. It ranks immediately after that of our Saviour in Jerusalem and of Saint Peter in Rome’.

  Wedding at the Basilica of Mary Magdalene at Saint-Maximin. Photograph by Michael Haag.

  The new shrine, however, endured. Indeed, pilgrims still come to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to see where Mary Magdalene came ashore and visit St-Maximin-la-Ste-Baume to kneel before her bones.

  The Bride of Christ

  But the manipulation of Mary Magdalene’s relics and the invention of her cult served a vastly more important purpose than making money for Vézelay or conferring legitimacy and prestige on the House of Anjou. Above all else Mary Magdalene was brought into play by the Church and by its enforcers, the Dominican order, to combat the oldest and most dangerous opponent of apostolic Christianity, the gnostics, who flourished especially in Languedoc in the South of France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the form of the Cathars.

  The Cathars were influenced by ideas emanating from the East which first took root in Europe among the Bogomils of Thrace and Bulgaria. The Bogomils were dualists who some trace back to the gnostics of Egypt with their belief that a portion of oneself came from God, while the material world and all its acts were evil, including the Church and its preachings about the cross, which the Bogomils rejected because they saw the cross only as the instrument of Jesus’s torment.

  Bogomil means Loved Ones or Friends of God; they found refuge and freedom in the mountains, but only for a while. Their rejection of the Church invited a vicious reaction from the Bulgarian and Byzantine authorities, who despatched thousands of soldiers and priests into the mountain regions where they plundered, burnt and killed everything in their path. But even as the Bogomils were being exterminated, their heresy spread westwards.

  Though the Cathars were influenced by the Bogomils, they were also a native movement, disaffected from the Church which lacked anything like real sanctity, asceticism and humility, and perhaps also they were remnants of those ancient heretics mentioned by the late second-century Church Father Irenaeus of Lyons in his book Against Heresies where he charged that gnostics were active in his own district of the Rhone Valley. If that is so then Mary Magdalene, portrayed as the leader of the apostles in the Pistis Sophia, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and other gnostic works, might have made herself felt in France long before the legends of Vézelay.

  The Cathars insisted on spiritual purity in a world they regarded as totally evil and like the Bogomils they felt themselves especially close to God. But whatever their origin, the Cathars displayed the familiar spiritual outlook of the gnostics of a thousand years earlier in Egypt. They could not accept that if there were only one God, and if God was the creator, and if God was good, that there should be suffering, illness and death in his world. As in Egypt, the Cathars’ solution to this problem of evil in the world was to say there were really two creators and two worlds. The Cathars were dualists in that they believed in a good and an evil principle, the former the supreme creator of the invisible and spiritual universe, the latter the demiurge who created our defective material world of suffering and pain, that is Jehovah, the God of the apostolic Church, the punishing God of the Old Testament. They called themselves Bons Hommes, meaning Good Men; they were the good Christians who worshipped the good God.

  This thirteenth-century illumination shows two Cathar perfecti administrating the consolamentum to a dying credente. The ritual will purify his soul, ensuring that he will escape reincarnation into this world and will ascend to Christ in heaven.

  The consolamentum. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

  But what Catharism certainly did not get from the Bogomils was the Cathar belief that just as there are two gods, good and evil, so there are two Christs, one celestial, the other terrestrial, the one good and the other evil. The Christ born in earthly Bethlehem and crucified in Jerusalem was an evil Christ and Mary Magdalene of the gospels was his concubine. The good Christ was born in celestial Jerusalem and Mary Magdalene was his wife. These ideas seem not to have come from the Bogomils; they came either from the gnostics in Egypt or were an original Cathar tradition initiated and developed by themselves.

  But though all matter was evil, the ideal of renouncing the world was impractical for everyone, and so while most Cathars lived outwardly normal lives, pledging to renounce the evil world only on their deathbeds, a few lived the strict life of the perfecti. Cathar perfecti travelled about Languedoc, ministering to ordinary believers, the credentes, by healing and caring for the sick and distributing money to the poor. One of their main tasks was to administer the consolamentum to the dying, the consolation which purified the soul, ensuring its release from the cycle of rebirth and reincarnation and allowing it to ascend to Christ in heaven. Their activities won them the support of all classes of people in Languedoc, from peasants and villagers to merchants and aristocrats. As Jesus did in the gospels, so they walked from place to place, holding services and staying in the houses of the believers. The perfecti were believe
d to have transcended the material as much as any human could and were looked upon almost as divine.

  Women Among the Cathars

  The belief that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were united in marriage was an assertion of the Cathar view that the divine world, the heaven of the ultimate creator god, brought the polarities of male and female together as one. And as in heaven so on earth, not only men but many women were perfecti. This was in contrast to the Catholic Church where women could hold no office and served only as nuns and was probably one reason for the popularity of Catharism in which a woman could achieve the prestigious and spiritualised status of the perfecti.

  But how far the Cathars in their everyday lives went towards gender equality is uncertain; declared heretics by the Church which initiated a series of inquisitions against them, so much of what the Cathars believed was destroyed along with their bodies on the pyres that it is difficult to know their lives with certainty. Nevertheless, and despite the role played in their cosmology by Mary Magdalene, it is probably wishful thinking to see the Cathars as an early form of feminist society.

  The best evidence comes from the inquisitor Jacques Fournier, then the local bishop of the area round the village of Montaillou in the Pyrenees; later he became Pope Benedict XII. His meticulous records were kept at the Vatican where they proved a valuable resource for the present-day historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie whose Montaillou builds up a picture of every aspect of the villagers’ daily lives over the course of thirty years, from 1294 to 1324. In fact because of the records made by Jacques Fournier more is known about this small village in the Pyrenees than about thirteenth-century Paris or London.

  Ladurie makes the point that Catharism was limited by the weight of tradition in the influence it could bring to bear on peoples’ lives. ‘The position of a young bride in Montaillou and the other villages of the region was not a particularly attractive one’, writes Ladurie of Cathar and Catholic women alike. ‘Every married woman could expect a fair amount of beating some time or another.’ Nor were conditions better for women of the aristocracy or the middle class and those living in the towns; their husbands too ‘were heavy-handed’. Certain enlightened Cathars advocated more humane treatment of women, yet one perfectus, Guillaume Bélibaste, familiar to the people of Montaillou, who kept a mistress despite his vow of chastity, declared that a woman could never be permitted into paradise; she would first have to be reincarnated as a man. ‘A man is worth nothing unless he is his wife’s master’, Bélibaste said, while his friend Pierre Maury, a Cathar of the village, remarked, ‘Women are devils’.