In Luke’s gospel (1:46–53), shortly after Mary becomes pregnant with Jesus she visits her cousin Elizabeth, who is six months pregnant with John the Baptist, and perhaps stays on to help her with the birth. This joyful encounter of the two pregnant women is known as the Visitation and is celebrated in the church’s liturgy on May 31st. In the quickening that takes place in middle pregnancy Elizabeth’s baby ‘leaps in her womb’ just as if recognising and greeting Jesus, just as John will acknowledge and proclaim Jesus when they are both grown men.
When the angel Gabriel had visited Mary to tell her she would become pregnant with Jesus, ‘the Son of God’, he said: ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will over-shadow you.’ Mary will also be present at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descends ‘like tongues of fire’ on Jesus’s followers, gathered in the upper room where they have retreated after Jesus has gone away. So she not only gives birth to Jesus but takes part at Pentecost in the birth of the church, ‘the body of Christ’.
When Elizabeth sees Mary coming she cries out in delight: ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb’; Mary responds with her song, Magnificat. It is a finely crafted poem echoing the psalms, so perhaps not exactly what she said at the time, but an elaboration of her rejoicing.
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour.
For he has regarded the lowliness of his servant
so from now on all generations will call me blessed.
He that is mighty has done great things for me
and holy is his name.
His mercy is on them that fear him:
throughout all generations.
He has shown strength with his arm
and scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has put down the mighty from their seats
and lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things:
and sent the rich empty away.
Mindful of his mercy, he has comforted his servant Israel,
as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham
and his descendants for ever.
Women’s voices are not often heard in the Old Testament but Mary’s Magnificat recalls the victory songs of the prophetesses Miriam and Deborah, their political metaphors before celebrating the return of Yahweh from Egypt. Mary begins her song: ‘My soul magnifies the Lord’ or ‘My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord’, quoting Miriam. After Yahweh has led the escaping Israelite slaves safely over the Red Sea towards the promised land, Miriam sings: ‘Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. He has thrown horse and rider into the sea.’ The Israelites were lowly slaves and the proud and mighty Egyptians were ‘put down’, ‘scattered in the imagination of their hearts’. (It is such a shame that when the ‘lowly’ become the ‘mighty’, they quite often become the oppressors.)
For example, during the Argentine dictatorship (1976–1983) thousands of people were ‘disappeared’ in hidden killings. The Mothers of the Disappeared sang the Magnificat in protest and put it on poem posters in the Plaza de Mayo (the most important public square in Buenos Aires). So the government of that Catholic country outlawed it. Mary’s words were a threat to the regime. The Magnificat was also banned from being sung by the Guatemalan government in the 1980s. Even the British in India banned it from being sung in church there (kairoscenter.org).
The Divine Feminine
As the Israelites enter the Promised Land, their Lord Yahweh commands them to wipe out the local gods and destroy their shrines, including those of the great mother goddess Asherah. He is a jealous God: ‘You shall have no other gods but me,’ he says. And he is decidedly male. By the time of Jesus, Yahweh has become more fatherly and tender, but he is still male.
The Greco-Roman culture of the Roman Empire, to which Palestine belonged, would have found it hard to believe that the divine is exclusively male. Motherhood is one of the strongest ongoing creative forces on Earth. Paul was one of the first to preach the Christian gospel beyond Palestine. When he reached Ephesus, a port city in modern-day Turkey, there was a riot. One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the temple of the mother goddess Artemis, was at Ephesus and the silversmiths, who did a good trade making icons of their goddess, were angry that their business would be destroyed by this rival religion. The silversmith leader Demetrius said: ‘And there is a danger not only that this trade of ours may fall into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be scorned, and she will be deprived of her majesty that has caused all Asia and the world to worship her’ (Acts 19:27).
The Ephesian Artemis had taken over some of the attributes of another local mother goddess Cybele, mother of the gods (theotokos) and Queen of Heaven. Gradually, the mother goddess found her way into Christianity. At the Council of Ephesus in 431 the Catholic Church proclaimed Mary theotokos (mother of God) and she became Queen of Heaven. Although she was not hailed as an actual goddess, Mary took on many of the attributes of the ancient mother goddess, who had been worshipped for centuries in the ancient world under various names (including Cybele and Asherah).
Just as Mary’s Magnificat transforms the Song of Miriam from a victory song celebrating the killing of enemies into a joyful triumph of new life, she also transforms the role of Artemis from a great high goddess into a ‘lowly servant’. God has ‘regarded the lowliness of his servant’… He has put down the mighty from their seats and lifted up the lowly… The Magnificat announces God’s ‘preferential option for the poor’, expressed, for example, in the Nicaraguan popular song The Christ of Palacagüina, where Mary is imagined as an ordinary peasant girl. Here is my translation of the first two verses:
So now Christ is born in Palacagüina His parents are Joe Bloggs and just another Mary: Very humbly she is going to iron the dress the landlord's beautiful wife will enjoy putting on.
In December 1531, ten years after the Spaniards had invaded Mexico and destroyed their capital city Tenochtitlan, a poor indigenous man, who had been converted to Christianity by the Spaniards and given the Christian name Juan Diego, was heading on his way to confession and passing the hill of Tepeyac on the outskirts of what is now Mexico City. Tepeyac was the holy hill of the indigenous great mother goddess Tonantzin (which means ‘Our Mother’). On Tepeyac Juan Diego encountered a Lady, dark-skinned, indigenous and very beautiful. She spoke to him in Nahuatl, his mother tongue. She told him: ‘I am the Ever Virgin Holy Mary, Mother of Teotl Dios [God in Nahuatl], Mother of all nations that live on this Earth.’ She identifies herself with both the Christian mother Mary and the indigenous mother goddess and subverts the narrative of conquest. She tells Juan Diego: ‘I am your kind mother and the mother of all the nations that live on this Earth who would love me. Here I will listen to their weeping and sadness, to remedy and cure all their miseries, misfortunes and sorrows.’ A beautiful basilica was built on Tepeyac Hill in honour of the Lady, whom the Spaniards called Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the indigenous continued to call Tonantzin. Today an estimated 10 million worshippers visit her basilica annually – still whispering ‘Tonantzin!’ Many of them come to say prayers (with no difficulty combining them) – making it the most popular shrine to ‘Our Lady’ in the world.
A similar process of syncretism took place in Latin America as had taken place in ancient Ephesus. The Ephesian Artemis had begun the process by assuming some of the characteristics of other mother goddesses of the region. Then the same process was continued when Mary the mother of Jesus assumed some of the characteristics of Ephesian Artemis, just as in Mexico and Latin America Mary assumed some of the characteristics of the indigenous mother goddess Tonantzin.
Some Protestants vigorously oppose any devotion to Mary, with a furious reference to Yahweh’s destructive rage against the mother goddess Asherah in the Old Testament. Ironically, however, the Catholic Church, which has produced glorious music and poetry for its devotion to her (as well as a considerable amount of dross), is the most reactionary in admitting women to any positions of authority in the church’s ministry.
In 1950 Pope Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of Mary’s ‘Assumption’ into heaven: ‘We pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory’ (Apostolic Constitution, Munificentissimus Deus, November 1st 1950). It is not surprising that many people in Britain and elsewhere (probably including Catholics) found the idea that Mary floated bodily up to heaven somewhat absurd in the modern world. It seems ridiculous. It is flatly contradicted by a twentieth century cosmology.
This dogma is asserting exactly the same as what the Christian creeds assert about Jesus’s ascension. And both creeds are still recited today in many churches. The only difference is that Mary was a woman. On a Sofish view these are not a bunch of historical facts but of our imagination or poetic genius; both these stories are equally unbelievable literally. So are other ‘magic tales’ about a supernatural being. Perhaps the proclamation of Mary’s Assumption in 1950 gave a strong jolt towards realising this.
In the Christian epic Mary the mother of Jesus, who was then present at Pentecost, at the birth of the church, the ‘body of Christ’, can be seen as the mother of humanism. She, as theotokos, mother of Jesus Christ, the firstborn and eponymous hero of a transformed humanity. Like Jesus’s New Testament, Mary’s Magnificat is well worth bearing in mind if we are trying to create a kinder and fairer society here on Earth.