Mary and the Divine Feminine: Was the Goddess Ever Really Gone?

I woke from a dream recently with one word running through my mind: Hermetic.

In the dream, I had been looking at seashells that had been glued tightly shut. Once I was properly awake, the vulval symbolism seemed almost comically obvious.

And somebody had glued them shut.

Hermetically sealed.

Very funny, Anima Mundi.

The dream arrived while I was thinking intensely about Mary and the Divine Feminine, the many early Christianities, and my own attempts to keep history, theology, magic and mystical experience in tidy separate boxes.

This is, therefore, a Thinking about Thinking essay as much as it is an essay about Mary.

The question is not simply whether the Goddess survived Christianity. I’m more interested in what happens when Reason and Imagination are allowed to look at the same mystery together.

Jump to The Open Shell Tarot Spread

I Left the Church. Mary Came With Me.

I left the Catholic Church around the time of my first Saturn return, but I was never willing to leave Mary.

She represented a kind of comfort that I later sought in Pagan Goddesses. Hekate gave me a face of the Divine Feminine capable of meeting me at crossroads, in darkness and transformation. Isis offered another face: magical, maternal, sovereign and ancient. Sekhmet, Freya and Nephthys showed yet other faces.

Neither displaced Mary.

I never completely stopped praying the rosary. More importantly, whenever life became too much, some part of me still wanted to crawl beneath the sky-coloured cloak of Mother Mary and disappear into its folds.

Catholic theology is perfectly clear that Mary is not a Goddess. The problem, if it is a problem, is that my soul has never seemed terribly interested in that fact.

I experience Mary as Goddess.

Which leaves me with a much more interesting question than whether I’m theologically correct:

Why does the Divine Feminine arise in my soul wearing Mary’s face?

The Miraculous Medal and Vulval Symbolism

Around my neck I wear a second-hand Miraculous Medal made from tarnished sterling silver that I bought from a monastery in Ireland a few years ago.

Not long after buying it, I read something by someone with a better eye than mine who pointed out the vulval form of the image. I had never noticed it before.

Then, of course, I could not unsee it.

Mary stands within an oval field, rays pouring from her hands towards the world. Once the vulval shape had been pointed out, the symbolism clicked.

The Mary on my medal hangs over my heart as an opening: receptive, generative and strangely familiar.

Recently that image began speaking to another symbol that has become central to my magical practice.

The ankh.

Mary as the Missing Loop of the Ankh

Within my magical practice, I experience the upper loop of the ankh as receptive and generative: womb, vulva, opening, possibility. Its vertical axis becomes the penetrating Light of Source descending into matter.

Contemplating this made me look at the Miraculous Medal differently.

Mary is the missing loop.

The ordinary Christian cross is all axis: descent, penetration, incarnation into matter. But Light alone does not gestate itself. Incarnation requires reception, flesh, blood, womb and birth.

And Christianity’s own central story gives us the missing piece.

Mary.

There Is a Dick in the Room

When I first tried to articulate this, I described Christianity as belonging to a predominantly patriarchal religious imagination.

True, but rather polite.

There is an actual penis in the foundational covenant story.

Genesis 17 commands Abraham and the males of his household to circumcise their foreskins. The covenantal sign is placed directly upon male genital flesh in the same chapter that promises offspring, generations, fatherhood and the birth of Isaac.

So yes, I use the word phallic deliberately.

The penis is actually involved.

Circumcision does not simply glorify male potency. The penis is cut, marked and subjected to covenant. Male generative power belongs to God.

But whichever theological interpretation we favour, the bodily sign of the covenant is male.

This is rather more than a vague background atmosphere of patriarchy.

God has put the covenant on the male member.

“Place Your Hand Under My Thigh”

The strange biblical instruction to place one’s hand “under my thigh” makes the picture even more interesting.

The Hebrew word ordinarily means thigh, hip or side, but it can carry reproductive associations. An important Jewish interpretive tradition connected Abraham’s oath in Genesis 24 specifically with circumcision.

What we can say with some certainty is that the passage may carry considerably more genital and procreative resonance than the English word thigh suggests to a modern reader.

The phallic imagery in the Bible was not invented by modern feminist theologians. It belongs to the symbolic and genealogical world of the text itself.

That matters because patriarchy is much older than Christianity. The Christianities arose within cultures already structured, to varying degrees, around male household authority, lineage and inheritance.

Institutional Christianity did not invent the problem, nor the cultures where inequality was already rife.

The more interesting question is what the different Christianities did with it.

And Then God Needed a Woman

Christianity does something fascinating with this inheritance.

Paul opposes requiring physical circumcision of gentile Christ-followers. In Galatians, baptism into Christ is followed by the declaration that there is neither Jew nor Greek, enslaved nor free, “male and female”. Those who belong to Christ are then named Abraham’s seed and heirs of the promise. The relationship between baptism and circumcision is more complicated than a neat one-for-one replacement, but the movement away from a male-only bodily covenant marker matters.

Yet Christianity retains overwhelmingly masculine language for Father, Son and Lord, and the forms that became institutionally dominant eventually restricted priestly and episcopal office to men.

Yet right at the start of the Christian story, masculine symbolism reaches a limit.

God needs a woman.

Never mind that God technically “needs” nothing, theologically speaking.

The Incarnation story does.

The Logos becomes flesh through a woman. Whatever one believes about the supernatural claims surrounding the conception, the story requires pregnancy, gestation and birth.

Descending Light alone does not make an Incarnation.

It requires an opening.

Mary and the Incarnation

Galatians simply calls Christ “born of a woman”. Matthew and Luke develop birth narratives, while Luke places the Spirit’s generative activity within Mary’s body.

This is where my medal, the ankh and my dream begin talking to one another. Mary is the opening. The ankh gives me the loop joined to the descending Light. Christianity gives me the Logos entering matter through gestation and birth.

And my dreaming mind gives me a vulval shell.

Glued shut.

Before Mary, There Were Goddesses

The feminine face of Divinity certainly did not begin with Christianity.

Isis, Hekate, Artemis, Aphrodite, Cybele and Inanna belonged to different cultures and cults. Sophia belongs to another strand again: Divine Wisdom personified in Jewish literature and developed in fascinating directions by several Christianities. Barbelo, Epinoia and feminine expressions of Spirit likewise belong to particular texts and cosmologies.

I have no desire to pour all of them into one enormous THE GODDESS smoothie. Their differences are part of what makes them interesting.

But mysticism permits another question:

What if the Many participate in the One?

For me, the Anima Mundi offers one way of thinking about that possibility. I experience the Soul of the World as an imaginal matrix through which the invisible becomes image, dream, symbol and possibility.

The Anima Mundi speaks through the symbolic vocabulary available to a particular soul.

Perhaps that is why she speaks Mary to me.

There Was Never One Christianity

I deliberately speak of early Christianities, plural.

There was no single uniform Christianity gliding serenely through the first centuries while miscellaneous “heretics” occasionally wandered off course. Followers of Yeshua developed strikingly different ideas about revelation, salvation, authority, cosmology, gender and even the nature of Christ.

Nor do I like speaking casually about “the Gnostics” as though they all belonged to one religion. The Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Mary, Valentinian Christianities and the mythological worlds represented by texts such as the Secret Book of John cannot simply be bundled together.

Once we allow that diversity to remain visible, something else becomes obvious.

Women start appearing everywhere the later institutional story does not quite prepare us to expect.

Women in Early Christianities

Paul names women among his co-workers. Junia is associated with the apostles in Romans 16:7. Women pray and prophesy in 1 Corinthians, while Acts gives us Philip’s four prophesying daughters. Prisca participates in instructing Apollos, and Phoebe is called diakonos and prostatis.

Beyond the texts that eventually became canonical, the picture grows more varied. Thecla teaches in the literary Acts of Paul and Thecla. Perpetua receives visions. Prisca and Maximilla exercise prophetic authority within the New Prophecy movement. Mary becomes recipient and interpreter of revelation in the Gospel of Mary and Pistis Sophia.

Early Christianities were not feminist utopias. But women prophesied, taught, patronised communities and transmitted revelation.

So the interesting question is not whether women possessed spiritual authority.

It is what happened to that authority.

Yeshua and Women

My own conviction is that Yeshua’s Way was liberating, and the surviving Gospel traditions give me plenty of reason to think so.

Women appear as followers, supporters, learners and theological interlocutors. They remain through the crucifixion and burial traditions when the male disciples scatter. Women become the first discoverers or witnesses of the empty tomb and resurrection. In John, Mary Magdalene is commissioned to announce the risen Christ.

Yeshua’s Way was liberating but the Christianities that arose around his teachings did not all preserve that liberation equally.

And that brings us to Peter.

Mary Magdalene, Peter and Who Gets to Speak

The Gospel of Mary makes the problem of authority wonderfully visible.

Mary possesses teaching received from the Saviour. Andrew challenges what she reports. Peter then questions whether the Saviour would really have spoken privately with a woman and preferred her to the male disciples. Levi rebukes him.

Similar tensions recur elsewhere. Mary Magdalene repeatedly interprets revelation in Pistis Sophia, where Peter complains about women speaking so much. The Gospel of Thomas gives us the most notorious example of all.

Whether or not these scenes preserve actual quarrels between historical individuals is almost beside the point. Early Christians repeatedly found Peter useful as the man who challenges female revelatory authority.

Why Peter?

The historical irony is irresistible because Peter later becomes the great symbol of institutional authority in Western Christianity.

Mary knows.

Peter wants to know who authorised her to know.

What happens when a religion of revelation becomes a religion of office?

Gospel of Thomas 22 and 114

At the end of the Gospel of Thomas, Peter says Mary should leave because women are not worthy of Life.

Yeshua replies that he will guide her and “make her male” so that she becomes a living spirit like the males, concluding that every woman who makes herself male will enter the Kingdom.

Well.

Thanks, Jesus.

Except Thomas has already given us Logion 22, where entering the Kingdom involves making the two one, including male and female becoming a unity in which the distinction no longer remains.

So part of me hears Logion 114 like this:

She’s disqualified because she’s female, Peter? Fine. I’ll make her male. Happy now?

I desperately want Yeshua to be taking the piss.

Scholars disagree wildly over what to do with this saying, which seems only fitting.

I know which Yeshua I prefer.

But if the Lord himself was comfortable with ambiguity, then so am I.

When Revelation Becomes Office

It would be tempting to construct a lovely binary here: egalitarian Jesus people on one side, nasty patriarchal bishops on the other.

Unfortunately, history ruins that one too.

Some early Christianities were thoroughly androcentric. Women also continued exercising authority within increasingly institutional forms of Christianity as patrons, martyrs, ascetics, deaconesses, monastic founders and visionaries.

But as office hardened, some forms of female authority became increasingly regulated.

The third-century Syrian Didascalia Apostolorum is particularly revealing. It centres authority on the bishop, restricts widows from teaching and forbids women from baptising, while simultaneously recognising women deacons for certain ministries to women.

And prohibitions are interesting.

People seldom prohibit things nobody is doing.

The real question, then, is which Christianities resisted the patriarchal cultures surrounding them, which accommodated those cultures, and which eventually gained the power to define Christianity itself.

Meanwhile, Mary Became Enormous

And here is the paradox I cannot stop thinking about.

While living women found certain forms of teaching, ritual and institutional authority increasingly restricted, Mary got bigger.

Much bigger.

She becomes Theotokos, Mother of God. Christian devotion clothes her in an extraordinary constellation of images and titles: Ever-Virgin, Queen of Heaven, Stella Maris, Mother of Mercy, Our Lady of Sorrows.

She is crowned, enthroned, surrounded by stars, associated with the Moon and imagined sheltering humanity beneath her mantle.

A Woman becomes enormous.

Yet her symbolic power does not translate into equivalent ecclesiastical power for ordinary women.

Idealising Woman is not the same thing as empowering women.

And this is where I begin wondering whether Christianity removed the Goddess at all.

Perhaps it just divided her and sealed her off.

Isis, Mary and the Divine Mother

This is where Isis inevitably enters the picture.

Images of Isis with the infant Horus, sometimes nursing him, were widespread in Egypt before Christianity. Egyptian Christianity later produced images of Mary nursing Christ, the Maria Lactans.

The visual resonance is hard to miss.

I am less interested in proving that Mary is Isis wearing Christian drag than in asking why the sacred Mother and Child remain such powerful images of Divine meeting human, eternity entering embodiment, heaven arriving through birth.

Perhaps religious imagination keeps returning to certain forms because those forms still carry something we need.

Which brings me back to the sealed seashell.

The Impossible Virgin

Mary’s perpetual virginity developed over time and is not the same thing as the virginal conception of Yeshua in Matthew and Luke. By the second century, the Protoevangelium of James is already intensely interested in Mary’s bodily purity.

Virginity could also offer women real freedom. Ascetic women could avoid marriage, repeated childbirth and male household authority, sometimes gaining considerable spiritual influence in the process.

The cultural image we inherit is still peculiar.

The supreme sacred Woman is both Mother and sexually untouched.

Pregnancy, birth, nursing, milk, grief and maternal embodiment remain visible, while sexual womanhood and holy motherhood become strangely separated.

The perfect Mother is the woman no ordinary mother can be.

And suddenly I remember what is hanging against my chest.

Mary within the opening.

The medal. The ankh. The seashell.

Then my dreaming mind gives me multiple vulval shells and glues them shut.

Not absent.

Sealed.

Reason and Imagination

The old pop-neuroscience cliché that the left hemisphere is rational while the right is creative is much too crude. Iain McGilchrist offers a far more interesting model based on differing modes of attention: one more focused, explicit and abstracting; the other more contextual, relational and open to the whole.

That describes something I recognise.

Reason isolates so that we can examine. Imagination reconnects so that we can perceive relationship.

Without Reason, symbolism can disappear up its own backside. Without Imagination, we can construct a perfectly categorised universe from which the living mystery has been removed.

The shell becomes hermetically sealed.

The Anima Mundi Has a Sense of Humour

There was another dream that night.

I saw pieces of labradorite flashing brilliant electric blue. Somehow the flashes made me realise I was dreaming, and I became lucid. I tried to fly or project myself out of the dream but couldn’t. Eventually, I pushed through a wall and found a cityscape beyond it.

After waking, that electric blue reminded me of Mary’s cloak.

Labradorite is dark until the light catches it at the right angle. Then something hidden flashes into visibility.

Perhaps some truths are like that. You change the angle of attention and suddenly see what was already there.

This has particular resonance for me now because I am approaching an age at which women are routinely informed, explicitly or otherwise, that we are becoming invisible.

I am beginning to find invisibility rather useful.

Let the world look elsewhere. I’ll be underneath Mary’s azure cloak getting on with the Work.

There is something rather delicious about discovering this at the age when women are supposedly becoming less generative.

Biological fertility ends.

Creativity does not.

The womb simply changes jobs.

Who Glued the Goddess Shut?

When I first woke from the dream, I wanted to know who had glued the shell shut.

Peter? Paul? The Church? Rome? Patriarchy? Men?

That would make for a satisfyingly simple essay.

Unfortunately, history refuses to cooperate.

Institutions preserve as well as restrict. Traditions contain countercurrents. Christianities inherited patriarchal worlds but responded to them differently. Mary herself can be used to prescribe impossible femininity while simultaneously becoming the Queen of Heaven beneath whose cloak women like me still hide.

So perhaps the better question is:

What happens when the shell opens?

What happens when Mary Magdalene is allowed to speak? When Mother Mary is allowed to be generative without ordinary women being measured against impossible purity? When Isis can stand beside Mary without us having to declare them either identical or unrelated?

Can Sophia escape the theological filing cabinet?

Will the cross receive its loop?

Mary and the Divine Feminine

I still don’t know whether Mary is a Goddess.

I only know how I relate to her, and that is plenty to be getting on with.

The historian knows that the Mary who comes to me carries centuries of theology, art, liturgy, folklore and devotion.

The mystic crawls beneath her blue cloak.

The magician notices that the old medal around her neck looks rather like a vulva.

None of them needs to have the final word.

Reason tests what Imagination reveals. Imagination reveals what Reason alone cannot conceive.

The Sun gives the Work direction.

The Moon gives the Work imagination.

Mission asks what all this is for. Magic asks what might yet become possible.

The Open Shell Tarot Spread

This 6-card Divine Feminine Tarot spread explores the parts of ourselves we have sealed away in order to become acceptable.

Before shuffling, ask:

Where have I sealed away part of my own sacred nature in order to become acceptable?

1. The Sealed Shell — What Have I Closed Away?

What part of your nature, spirituality, creativity or knowing have you contained or denied?

2. The Glue — What Keeps It Sealed?

What inherited belief, fear, cultural expectation or internalised authority maintains the division?

3. The Moon — What Does Imagination Know?

What have dreams, intuition, symbolism, emotion or embodied knowing been trying to tell you?

4. The Sun — What Does Reason Reveal?

What becomes visible through evidence, discernment and conscious examination?

5. Temperance — How Can I Make the Two One?

How can these apparently opposing ways of knowing enter into relationship without either being erased?

6. The Open Shell — What Wants to Be Born?

What becomes possible once the energy consumed by division is released?

Pay particular attention to Cards 3 and 4. If the Moon and Sun appear to contradict one another, resist the urge to decide immediately which is right.

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Deo Gratias et Serviam