Mary Magdalene

by Bruce Chilton

  Primeval androgyny—the conviction that human beings embrace both sexes in their primordial state—is well represented in ancient mythology, including the book of Genesis, Aristophanes, and the Upanishads. Thomas, however, sets out male androgyny as a condition of future salvation. Females need to become male, but not the reverse.

  Sex changes were not considered totally impossible in antiquity, even when they were depicted as unnatural and bizarre. The Metamorphoses of Ovid (4.285-389) tells the sorry tale of Hermaphroditus. The inexperienced young man made the unfortunate error of skinny-dipping in a pool guarded by the crazed nymph Salmacis. She was on him like a limpet, and she cried out to the gods never to let the two of them be separated. They indeed became one body, neither woman nor man and yet both, their permanent coitus producing a weak hermaphroditic hybrid.

  Obviously, Mary’s metamorphosis in The Gospel According to Thomas is not intended to be like that of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis. In fact, it inverts the result of the change. Where Hermaphroditus is weakened, Mary is to be strengthened. But whether you take the language physiologically or spiritually—and I do not think either can be excluded—the fact remains that females here are not merely the weaker sex but the reprobate sex, in need of masculine redemption, the filling of empty space, whether in their souls or in their bodies.

  Mary Magdalene presided over the domain of vision in the minds of the many Gnostic practitioners who read John’s Gospel, The Gospel According to Thomas, and The Gospel According to Mary as their Scripture. She inspired visionary disciplines for centuries after her death and became the indispensable guardian of those techniques.

  Gnosticism persistently held up Mary as the ideal model of visionary mysticism, in which the Gnostic could know Jesus personally in his living reality after the Resurrection. But at the same time, she stood for female sexuality, which Gnosticism identified with equal persistence as the source of the corruption of the world. The tension between those two poles marks every Gnostic presentation of Mary, with deep consequences for the way she has been viewed ever since in the Christian West.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE GODDESS AND THE VIXEN

  The golden legend of Jacobus de Voragine shows how medieval devotion transmuted both Christian and Gnostic images into its own distinctive piety. At the close of this thirteenth-century text, Mary reaches the apogee of her vision, as a priest sees her levitating to heaven during her hours of meditation. That capacity to transcend her body enables Mary to relocate miraculously from her cave in the cliff of La Sainte-Baum in order to receive Communion in the church at Saint-Maximin at the moment of her death. The Legend goes on to record other, postmortem sightings of Mary.

  Well before her death, Mary is presented in the Legend as the special protectress of a noblewoman, saving both her and her newborn from shipwreck and starvation, appearing to the woman in vision and miraculously transporting her to the city of Jerusalem and back. Mary Magdalene protected pregnant women and became the patron saint of fertility and childbirth.

  Gender and vision had both long been linked to Mary Magdalene, so that she fell between flesh and Spirit, the negative and positive poles that charged the religious environment of Gnosticism—and, increasingly, of Christianity. Ambivalence toward Mary, who saw beyond this world and yet also embodied it, made her both a goddess and a vixen. These images have shaped her memory in the West to this day. As a key Gnostic text has a woman in Mary’s image say, “I am the whore and the holy one, I am the wife and the virgin.” Although Gnosticism and the medieval piety represented by The Golden Legend did everything possible to stress Mary’s connection with the Spirit rather than flesh, the anointing she had practiced in Galilee—an element of her biography that was never forgotten— bound her irrevocably to the physical life of this world.

  For all Gnosticism’s stress on the deception of this world, anointing, in fact, remained a central concern in many of its sources. The Gospel According to Philip, a third-century Coptic text, goes so far as to say (II.3.74.13-23), “Anointing is superior to baptism, for it is from the word ‘anointing’ that we have been called ‘Christians,” certainly not because of the word ’baptism.“ ” Taking off from the basic meaning of the term Christ (Christos in Greek, “anointed one”), this teaching discovers the essence of Christianity in the spiritual ointment offered by Jesus and his followers. The esoteric meaning of being anointed, a prominent Gnostic sacrament, proves central to the portrayal of Mary Magdalene in Gnosticism and to her legacy in our time.

  The Gospel According to Philip speaks of salvation as a matter of uniting with one’s heavenly image an eternal double provided by God: This is the inner meaning of unction. The Gospel According to Thomas (saying 22) also specifies the union of what is above with what is below, the interior with the exterior, as the aim of the Gnostic quest, but Philip is more practical. It provides a detailed commentary on this process of union, specifying by means of symbolic language how and where this marriage with a divine image can occur (II.3.67.29-34):

  The Lord did everything in a mystery, a baptism and a chrism and a Eucharist and a redemption and a bridal chamber. The Lord said, “I came to make the things below like the things above, and the things outside like those inside, I came to unite them in that place.”

  The “bridal chamber,” the apex in the sequence of mystery, is the “place” where above and below and outside and inside are reconciled, where one merges with one’s heavenly counterpart.

  The Gospel According to Philip never gives a prosaic description of the “bridal chamber,” but insofar as a bride is involved, she is definitely associated with Mary Magdalene. The briefest of statements about her in this Gospel has spawned a diverse progeny of interpretations {Philip II.3.59.6—9): “There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary his mother and her sister and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion.” The term companion has provided an incentive for modern legend: Jesus and Mary were married, or everything but married, and their offspring grew up in France and fed the French royal line—culminating, so one version goes, in Diana, Princess of Wales! (We encounter the inevitable conspiracy theory when an electronic site claims that Diana was murdered to prevent her marriage to a non-Christian.) But the word companion does not mean “bride,” just as reference to a “bridal chamber” needn’t imply a sexual relationship. Some of those who seek evidence to support their view of Mary as Jesus’ consort have foisted their conclusions onto The Gospel According to Philip.

  Gnostics did not talk about sexual intercourse in a roundabout way; bluntness was the rule, especially in agricultural Egypt. The word companion (koinonos) represents the common Semitic term chaber, referring to a companion at meals, rather than in bed. The term is frequently used for male colleagues in the Mishnah, and here, in The Gospel According to Philip, it means what Luke’s Gospel said in other words: that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ disciple from their early days in Galilee.

  Yet the fact remains that Mary’s gender, taken in itself, offers the potential that Jesus showed a sexual interest in her. The Gospel According to Philip also says—in so many words, most scholars think—that Jesus liked to kiss Mary on the “mouth”; she had to have been a favorite disciple (II.3.63.34—64.5):

  And the companion of the Savior is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed their disapproval. They said to him, Why do you love her more than all of us? The Savior answered and said to them, Why do I not love you like her?

  Notice how this reference reminds us that Mary was the woman “companion” and compares her in that status to “the rest of the disciples.” That confirms that the term is being used in the sense of chaber, colleague. But the real point for many modern interpreters is not the companionship at all, but the kiss.

  The Gospel According to Philip frequently mentions kissing, an activity that is by no means limited to marriage or moments of sex
ual intimacy. Then, as now, one could kiss without having intercourse; Jesus kissed his male disciples, and he pointedly observes at the close of this passage, “Why do I not love you like her?” Evidently, he does with Mary what he does with them, only more often and no doubt with greater pleasure. The confusion between kissing and intercourse is not his problem or The Gospel According to Philip’s, but a sign of overwrought modern interpretation when sex is involved—or might be involved or could be involved.

  In fact, just before Mary Magdalene first appears in this Gospel, The Gospel According to Philip comments on the inner, spiritual sense conveyed by the kiss (II.3.59.2-5): “For it is by a kiss that the perfect conceive and give birth. For this reason we also kiss one another. We receive conception from the grace that is in each other.”

  The grace-conceiving kiss was mouth-to-mouth, as in the old Galilean custom of greeting. The Gospel According to John details the practice as part of the ritual of earliest Christianity, when the risen Jesus (20:19) greets his disciples with the traditional greeting in Aramaic, Shelama, meaning “Peace.” A kiss on the mouth often went with this greeting, and John shows that is the case here, because Jesus next “breathes on” his disciples, infusing them with Holy Spirit and the power to forgive sins (20:21-23). The breath of Spirit went with the exhalation of one practitioner into another in an ancient Gnostic practice that stretched from the Gospel According to John through The Gospel According to Philip.

  Recent popular writing has given a distorted impression of lusty, earth-loving Gnostics in contrast to their allegedly dour counterparts in the early Church. The holy kiss was, in fact, prevalent throughout the practice of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Wherever the kiss was practiced, there was the possibility it might look less like one person spiritually conceiving and giving birth to another than like foreplay. Both Gnostics and Catholics were accused by their opponents of promiscuity, their services written off as pretexts for orgies (and even infanticide and cannibalism, as we shall see). Hippolytus, the third-century Roman liturgist, reserved the kiss solely for those already baptized, and set out a period of three years for those who prepared for baptism; during that time, they listened to the liturgy without participating in the Eucharist or the kiss.

  The Gospel According to Philip explains the kiss in purely spiritual terms, relating the practice to understanding the nature of true intercourse (II.3.78.25-31): “The human being has intercourse with the human being. The horse has intercourse with the horse, the ass with the ass. Members of a race usually are associated with those of like race. So spirit mingles with spirit, and thought consorts with thought, and light shares with light.”

  By the simple expedient of taking such statements out of their context, you could, of course, claim that this Gospel was intended to promote orgiastic practices. Gnostics have been accused of diverse sexual crimes for centuries. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, revisionist historians and pop-culture gurus have turned that accusation into a virtue, recommending the alleged sexual freedom of Gnosticism. But The Gospel According to Philip militates against that interpretation, because the union it seeks takes place in the symbolic “bridal chamber” (II.3.82.2—24), where one meets Christ as the bridegroom.

  Yet The Gospel According to Philip does not quite dispel the possibility that Mary and Jesus went beyond kissing. Prior to the scene when the disciples complain about Jesus’ favoritism, it says, “As for the Wisdom who is called ‘the barren,” she is the mother of the angels“ (II.3.63.30-32), explicitly coordinating the Magdalene with Sophia. By calling her ”barren,“ one might think this excludes sexual contact or procreation, until we realize that the book of Isaiah (54:1) promises that one day the barren woman will bear more than her married counterpart by becoming more fecund. In its richly allusive, metaphorical presentation, The Gospel According to Philip evokes a host of possibilities but shies away from making firm historical statements.

  This Gospel does contain one down-to-earth remark: “No one will be able to know when the husband and the wife have intercourse with one another except the two of them” (II.3.81.34-82.1). The same observation applies to unmarried couples under most circumstances. Because their rituals were private and involved at least the intimacy of a kiss, enemies of the Gnostics frequently accused them of promoting promiscuity. The most infamous accusation comes from Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, in Cyprus, during the fourth century. He claimed that one Gnostic group engaged in wife swapping and even went to the extreme of consuming semen and menstrual blood within their celebrations of the Eucharist. In spreading this rumor, Epiphanius was adapting a calumny that used to be directed against Christians during the second century, who were accused by pious pagans of engaging in nighttime orgies.

  Epiphanius also cited a bizarre variant of the story of Jesus’ Transfiguration, which he claimed he’d gotten from a Gnostic group. In this story, Jesus takes Mary Magdalene up a mountain and, in her presence, extracts a woman from his own side—evidently a reenactment of the primordial creation in chapter 2 of Genesis. Then he begins to have intercourse with the woman, ejaculates in his hand, and offers his semen to Mary, telling her, “We need to do this in order to live.” Weird though this account is, it agrees with Epiphanius’s accusation that this group practiced orgiastic sex (lubricated by anointing and alcohol), coitus interruptus, abortion when physical conception resulted, and the consumption of unwanted fetuses.

  How well informed was Epiphanius? His specific charges have not convinced many scholars. But at least he showed, whatever the merit of his particular accusations, that in Gnostic worship actions that skeptics could portray as sexual were involved in the practice of their communal illumination.

  The comparison of Mary Magdalene to Sophia (Wisdom) lies at the heart of both Gnosticism and Catholic Christianity. But that connection results in deep ambivalence, because divine Wisdom attracted both praise for her powerful knowledge and trenchant criticism for her female sexuality. Sophia’s kingdom was, after all, a corrupted realm. The world we live in from a Gnostic perspective constitutes humanity’s problem, rather than the key to a solution. Like Sophia, Mary could be portrayed in terms of her involvement with the physical dimension of human life; her devotion to the flesh meant that Sophia/Mary sometimes even sold her sexual wares. The Magdalene’s association with anointing made her contact with fallen flesh undeniable. From there, it was only a short, albeit fateful, step to turn her into a whore.

  Catholic sources make the same connections among Mary and Sophia, flesh, and prostitution, so that in the sixth century, Pope Gregory could easily make Mary Magdalene the emblem of sexual penitence in the city of Rome. From Gregory, medieval Europe learned of Mary as the goddess of contrition, who had begun her career in the brothel of this world. The interplay between Gnostic and Catholic theology, the practices that went with them, and Mary’s simultaneous sublimation to a goddess and her degradation to a whore can be traced in a chronological reading of some frequently overlooked but compelling texts.

  Mary Magdalene occupied the liminal territory between transgression and enlightenment. The Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic text from the fourth century, reflects an awareness of her liminality and uses Mary as a symbol of that awareness. As the title indicates, the Pistis Sophia builds on the ancient Gnostic figure of Wisdom (Sophia), the goddess of this world, also called Pistis (Faith). Faith and Wisdom together are divine, yet they are only partial realities. Ancient Gnostics struggled with the perennial issue of how belief and knowledge relate to each other. Each complements the other, but even Faith and Wisdom, when fused, amounted to a flawed and fallen deity. This is expressed in a bizarre variant of the Genesis story of creation in the Pistis Sophia.

  In this myth, Faith/Wisdom was a divine being who tried to create something entirely on her own in a failed effort to imitate the divine Father’s spiritual creation. This explains why physical reality is in the mess that it is. Anything material is by definition an abortive product of Faith/Wisdom’
s misconceived gambit to produce what she was incapable of producing. Faith/Wisdom became pregnant with the world, but not by intercourse: Her pregnancy was literally hysterical. Her womb swelled due to her envy of the creative power of the divine Father. The universe we live in is all afterbirth without embryo, the failed tissue of Faith/Wisdom’s hysterical female ambition.

  This basic Gnostic myth of Faith/Wisdom’s desperate need for redemption, a restoration to her true place in submission to the divine Father, forms the operating premise of the Pistis Sophia. This premise had been long established in Gnostic lore by the fourth century, but the Pistis Sophia contributed something new. It connected Mary Magdalene to the image of Faith/Wisdom by portraying Mary as an ideally obedient recipient of revelation. When she questions the risen Jesus, he replies, “Mary, blessed one, whom I will complete in all the mysteries of the height, speak openly, you are she whose heart is more directed to the Kingdom of Heaven than all your brothers” (Pistis Sophia 1.17; see also 24 and 25). Mary’s questions and the discourses she herself eventually delivers concern both the redemption of Faith/Wisdom and the purification of individual souls. Faith/Wisdom must be freed from the corruption she herself created if her progeny are to receive illumination.