How Mary became Mary

A long story, briefly told

by Prof. Dr. Ralf Frisch

The Villa Mary of Bethlehem

Actually, the story of the Villa Maria begins in the stable of Bethlehem. Or in other words: the stable of Bethlehem is the Villa Maria. At least, if one follows the narrative of Luke's Gospel. There it says that the young woman and her husband had no other room in the inn. So the Saviour of the world came into the world in a place where ox and donkey were eating from the manger. This manger became the cradle of the little Son of God. In the history of art and, of course, in the history of kitsch, there are countless depictions of this scene. Almost every one of these depictions is surrounded by an aura of poverty and romance, of exclusion and election, of misery and of nobility. "There is room in the smallest hut for a happy loving couple", Friedrich Schiller wrote. The Christmas story knows that in the smallest hut there is even room for the Creator of all things. And a look back through two thousand years of Christian history to the cradle of the Christ Child shows what became of the two - of the mother and her infant. The one made it to God himself in the Christian Church. The other made it all the way to the Mother of God. These are undoubtedly two amazing, rather steep careers that, according to the story of the unknown evangelist, began in a shelter not meant for humans at all.

The secret of the cattle

But perhaps that is precisely the point of the story. The divine child is not too refined for the company of cattle. And where else but in the midst of the cattle, if we are all ultimately cattle, should the saviour of the cattle, man, come into the world. By the way, there is another point. In the Old Testament, in the prophet Isaiah, it says: "An ox knows his master, and an ass his master's manger, but my people know it not." No wonder, then, that the little Messiah is drawn to the animals. They seem to be the better people.

But be it as it may: the fact that the Christ Child came into the world in the middle of the world makes the world, and with it the Villa Maria of Bethlehem, a very special and a very symbolic place. So, dear readers, when you stay at the Villa Maria, consider what kind of place you are in and what hour strikes in this place. It is a place where it is actually always Christmas - even and especially when it may not seem so in yourself - just as it was in Mary and Joseph's time on the night of labour that became Christmas. The parents of the Saviour must have felt the shelter of the Villa Maria at that time as an unexpected and unexpected gift from heaven. Actually, one can only feel at home in such a place. Because it is a place of refuge and a place of rescue. A blessed place. A place of grace and power. A place where you can be confident and put aside everything that worries you, torments you and weighs you down. A place where you can take a deep breath and sigh: "Thanks be to heaven (or God)!". Or even: "It's like Christmas here!" Even if it is spring, summer or autumn. I could imagine that those with whom you have found shelter would also be quite happy if you said something like that.

Gynaecology and mythology

With the birth of Jesus in this story by the evangelist Luke, however, neither the story of Jesus nor the story of Mary has come to an end. It is only beginning. The young Galilean woman was to undergo some spectacular transformations over the next two millennia. The mother of little Yeshua became the epitome of a human being endowed by God with a great privilege. She was allowed to give birth to his son. She lost her virginity neither through his conception nor through his birth. The Church Fathers deduced this from the Greek translation of Isaiah 7 verse 14, the text that was already used by the evangelist Matthew to refer to the mother of Jesus. The original Hebrew text speaks of a young woman who becomes pregnant and gives birth to a son. In the Greek version, from which the Greek-writing Matthew obviously borrowed, it becomes a virgin. Well. That's how it can work.

In the eyes of Roman Catholic theology, Mary remained a virgin even after the birth of Jesus. Right into the grave. Or rather until her bodily assumption into heaven. From a gynaecological point of view, things get a little complicated in this context. So it is advisable to take the whole thing mythologically, that is, in the sense of a deeper truth. I leave it to you, dear guests of Villa Maria, to decide whether what is impossible in biology, but not in theology, can nevertheless be true. Is the myth of the gifted Virgin Mary who becomes pregnant by the Holy Spirit without the need for a rutting Zeus animal or any other male image to sleep with her more or less forcibly for this purpose, in contrast to many ancient myths, too good to be true? Or is the story of Mary's conception too beautiful not to be true?

From the cradle of the history of the Christian faith, the young woman not only advanced to become a virgin full of graces. She also became a pure, innocent, sinless and holy figure. She became someone whom you can ask to put in a good word for you with God on the basis of his or rather her impeccable authority. And she became something even more unheard of, namely the Mother of God, the Queen of Heaven and Earth, that is, nothing less than a deity. Mary became virtually the fourth person of the divine Trinity - at least in Roman Catholicism.

Under the breasts of Artemis of Ephesus

Incidentally, a milestone in the ascension career of Mary, who was transformed many times, was the year 431 AD. In that year, a famous council, i.e. an assembly of Christian bishops, clergy and scholars, took place in the city of Ephesus in Asia Minor. At this council, a rather bizarre question was discussed - namely, whether Mary, the mother of Jesus, could or even should be called the God-bearer. After all, said the one who prevailed in the end, Mary had given birth to the Son of God. And if this Son of God was consubstantial with the Father, i.e. God-like, then his mother could not simply be called the mother of Jesus in an unspectacular way. Rather, she had to be called Mother of God, that is, God-bearer. The Council Fathers fell for this idea under the impression of one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, which obviously overwhelmed their senses. In Ephesus, the young woman from the New Testament and the bishops of the early Church encountered the Temple of Artemis. So a lot came together at the Synod of Ephesus. And a lot also came together in the voluptuous figure of the goddess Artemis. For the ancient Artemis was not only an imposing, but also a rather dazzling, not to say multifaceted goddess. The Greeks worshipped her as a virginal and chaste deity of hunting, the forest, birth, the moon and as the guardian of women and children. In Anatolia, she was regarded as a mother goddess, in a sense the epitome of fertility, care and custody. The upper part of the Artemis statue in Ephesus, which looks a bit like a sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, is covered with breasts that some say could also be bull's testicles. To be honest, we don't really know what they are. If they are breasts, then they would also suit Artemis because they would make her appear even more clearly as the nourisher of all living beings and as the mother of all life. We do not know what the wise Church Fathers, who met in Ephesus in 431, thought of sexuality. But one thing seems clear: in view of so many different images of women and Mary in their minds, their eyes must have glazed over.

The Ascent to the Queen of Heaven

Mary, who was revered in the first Christian communities as an authority and at some point also as a saint, and who in later Christian imagery, thought and belief is pretty much stripped of all sexual, erotic and maternal attributes, did not really fit in well with the sensual goddess, not to say sex bomb of Ephesus. But perhaps she is. Or, to put it another way: the Christian Council Fathers developed the ambition to put the pagan Artemis in the shade in Christian terms and to make her look old, so to speak. And so it came about that the Mother of Jesus, who was gradually placed on an ever higher pedestal by the Marian dogmas of perpetual virginity, immaculate conception, i.e. sinlessness, the Assumption into heaven and God's motherhood, also had the Artemis of Ephesus incorporated into her, so to speak, and Mary was thus "crossed" with Artemis. The result was a new Christian deity, which, to put it bluntly, came at the right time for the lords and perhaps also the women of the early church. This was because in the Christian faith and in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity of God, the female element was very underrepresented, not to say not really present. And perhaps also because the infant of Bethlehem, born among the cattle, the son of Joseph the carpenter and his wife Mary, began to seem ever more distant to the faithful through his dizzying theological promotion to the true God, the second person of the Trinity and the All-Ruler over the cosmos. Mary, on the other hand, seemed humanly more approachable, more accessible and less enraptured. She seemed somehow more sympathetic, empathetic and friendly. The fact that her meteoric rise to become the Mother of God and the Queen of Heaven of the Christians made her just as raptured as her Son and God the Father is another matter.

The Forgotten Spouse of God

Speaking of the Queen of Heaven. There are archaeological finds on the Sinai Peninsula that suggest that the utterly unique, strictly monotheistic and imageless God of the Old Testament, YHWH, was not so lonely in the eyes of some ancient Israelites. It could be that a YHWH-wife named Asherah was worshipped together with him. However, there is hardly a trace of Asherah, the so-called Queen of Heaven, who is actually a Syrian-Canaanite sea goddess of Sumerian origin, in the Hebrew Bible, and certainly no benevolent mention of her. On the contrary. Because of her threat to the Israelites' strict belief in one God, Asherah met the fate of damnatio memoriae, eradication from the cultural memory of Judaism. In Christianity, on the other hand, she was brought home in the form of Mary. There are countless traces of the Queen of Heaven, Asherah, especially in the images and sculptures of Catholicism. In Munich, for example, there is not only a Hofbräuhaus, but also a shining golden Marian column on the eponymous Marienplatz in the heart of the old town. And it is no wonder that the one who stands on a crescent moon in such a sublime and radiant manner with a crown of stars and a sceptre and the barely visible baby Jesus in her arms is at some point worshipped more fervently as the mistress of the world than the one she gives birth to.

Nightly sleep aids

At this point in the story of Mary, I make a point, or rather a comma, and draw a small conclusion with regard to the Villa Maria. In the end, Mary is both: she is the one who finds refuge in the Villa of Mary of Bethlehem and who is unexpectedly granted the unavailable divine grace of giving birth to the Son of the eternal Father. And she is the one in whom the faithful can find refuge when they are beset by hardships. Perhaps Mary is also the one to whom you, dear readers, if you are staying at Villa Maria, send a nightly nudging prayer when you are at a loss in the darknesses of the world and of life that is sometimes not very Christmassy. And of course I hope that your life will have a happy ending like the life of Mary, who became a star under the star of Bethlehem!

Mary Mother Earth?

One last thought. Especially in a world that is becoming more and more ecologically sensitive, it is actually only a short way from the veneration of Our Lady to the veneration of Mother Earth. With a wink of the eye, but by no means just ironically, it is therefore to be expected that the next transformation of Mary is imminent. Just as more than one and a half millennia ago she entered into a connection with Artemis of Ephesus that was as involuntary as it was unavoidable, she could soon become Gaia, i.e. the religion-transcending synonym for Mother Nature, the originator of all life and in the end not so much Queen of Heaven as Earth Queen and Earth Deity. Seen in this way, the Villa Maria would then be our house of the earth itself, as maternal as it is endangered, the only shelter we have in this world. And just as she, Mother Earth, gives birth to us, brings us forth and offers us shelter in the inhospitable universe, it could be up to us to protect her, Mary, from the inhospitalities of the world night and from the monster of man, and to bring her to safety. - Will we succeed? In any case, Villa Maria is a good place to think about this. But please do so in such a way that it does not rob you of your sleep and the joy of your stay in Mary's lap ;-)

Prof. Dr Ralf Frisch
teaches theology and philosophy
at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences Nuremberg.