Episode 30: Revisiting the Virgin Mary – with mythographer Marina Warner

The Discussion

Amy Allebest: Today we’re going to discuss a figure who, according to the writer Marina Warner, “represents a central theme in the history of Western attitudes to women. She is one of the few female figures to have attained the status of myth. A myth that for nearly 2000 years has coursed through our culture as spirited and often as imperceptible as an underground stream.” Who might this figure be? So influential on our culture, but often invisible. Why, it’s the Virgin Mary, of course. She is a figure who inspires great faith, yet embodies countless contradictions. She’s a sacred female figure created by men. She’s venerated for being a mother, and also for being a virgin. She’s an ancient icon that’s withstood the centuries, but her myth and meaning has shifted constantly through the course of time. All of this is why, as longtime listeners will know, we’ve actually discussed the Virgin Mary before, way back in episode four of our very first season. The only subject we discussed before her was the creation of patriarchy itself. And the reason for giving the Virgin Mary such a foundational spot in our podcast is because of the foundational spot that the myth and the cult of the Virgin Mary occupy in our culture, in our faith traditions, and in our gender politics. The Virgin Mary remains a critical figure in the way our world considers women. And somewhat surprisingly, her influence only seems to have grown over time. Today I am excited to revisit the book that we discussed in season one, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. This time I’ll be discussing the book with the author, Dame Marina Warner. Welcome, Marina!

Marina Warner: Hello. Very nice of you to invite me. 

AA: I’m so, so honored and really excited to chat with you. This is a topic that I have thought so much about and I learned so much from your book, so I’m very excited to dig in. But first, I’ll read your professional bio and then we’ll have you introduce yourself a little more informally after that. 

Marina Warner is an English historian, mythographer, art critic, novelist, and short story writer. She’s best known for her many award-winning non-fiction books relating to feminism and myth. She has written for many publications, including the London Review of Books, The Sunday Times, and Vogue. She’s also a professor of English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2017, she was elected president of the Royal Society of Literature, the first time the role has been held by a woman since the founding of the Royal Society of Literature in 1820. She’s also a distinguished fellow of All Souls College at Oxford. And, of course, she’s the author of the book we’ll be discussing today, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary.

Again, welcome Marina. I would love it if you could talk a little bit about where you’re from, some influential features of your growing up, and what led you to do the work that you do today. 

MW: My mother was Italian and she was a Catholic, and my father made the promise that men are asked to make when they marry a Catholic, he was a Protestant, that he would bring up his children Catholic. But he also thought, as he told me very clearly, that it was a very good religion for a girl. 

AA: Oh, wow. 

MW: It became clear to me later why he thought that, and that’s really because the Virgin Mary epitomized all the qualities of feminine grace, obedience, submission to her husband and so forth, and possibly also maternity and general good behavior. And that, of course, is what I rebelled against in the ‘60s and found very suffocating. I was sent to a Catholic school, which had a huge influence on me. We were really like little nuns. We went to Mass every morning, we went to Benediction twice a week, we went to confession once a week. We had communion every day, we had sermons, retreats, and the nuns raised us and surrounded us. They were not wicked, cruel nuns, as we’ve heard a lot about. They were kind and they were good teachers, but it was a very, very intense upbringing. 

And Jesus was not as prominent as Mary. Mary occupied the whole horizon of our life. There were statues, there were prayers to her, there were holy pictures of her, there were icons. She completely saturated the atmosphere and the environment when I was young, and I absolutely adored her. I was a complete Mary worshiper. You’re not meant to worship, you’re meant to venerate, but we were worshipers. So it was a very strong break for me when I began to dissent intellectually. I mean, I retained a lot of the emotional bonds, I still do to some extent, but intellectually I rejected so much of it. I rejected it morally, I rejected the dogma, the doctrine. 

AA: Can I ask you a question? I’ve always been a little bit jealous of that aspect of Catholicism. I’ve always, not always, but I guess as an adult, realized the absence of a female figure, like a divine feminine. And I’ve wondered what it would have felt like to grow up Catholic and to be able to have a real, an embodied figure of the divine feminine that I could relate to. And I wondered what impact that would have on a girl’s psyche growing up. Do you feel like it was influential in your identity formation as a woman? 

MW: Oh, very, very strongly. It was probably the strongest influence on me. And I agree, I mean, the Protestant Christian Church was not as attractive because it had no female figure. Islam, on the other hand, has a very strong worship of Mary. She’s a saint in the Quran and she’s and the mother of the prophet Isa, Jesus. There’s a whole chapter dedicated to her, which is more than there is in the New Testament, where we only have little fragments. We don’t have a whole chapter. So there, there is a kind of sacred feminine. And there was a sacred feminine, but it was the way the feminine was drawn up for me that I found limiting, which is that it was drawn up along certain emotional and occupational lines. There was no room for heroism, for example, in Mary’s story, which is why I later wrote a book about Joan of Arc, because Joan of Arc offered the idea of female heroism. She was a kind of countervailing force. 

But Mary was meek. Mary was epitomized by the words she says to the angel, which is “That it be done unto me according to thy word.” That is known as her fiat, “That it be done unto me according to thy word.” People have extolled it as a position of great negotiation and kindness and generosity, but it was presented to me as a little girl in the ‘50s and ‘60s as a message of obedience and submission to authority. But things have changed, you know, Mary is not at all immobile. I predicted at the end of my book that her cult would die with all this sexual emancipation and freedom that was happening, sexual liberation. In fact, not at all. The cult of Mary is stronger worldwide now than it was probably since the 19th century. For different reasons, it is no longer as a virgin mother, but as a patron of the poor, as a symbol of the oppressed, as a mother of mercy. 

AA: That is really interesting, and I’d love to circle back to that question at the end of the episode about her role in the world today. But I have more questions about your journey first. I’m curious at what point you started to question and started to realize the problems within the veneration of Mary as this symbol. How old were you, and what prompted those questions? 

MW: Well, I was about 16 or 17. It was when the first sexual stirrings were beginning for me, and I really did not feel that it was just to blame women for being occasions of sin, which we were always being warned against, when the men sinned because women made them sin. And Eve was the counterpart of Mary, Eve was the woman who’d lost the world and Mary came along and saved the world. But we were all little Eves, we were all about to tempt Adam to eat the apple. And this seemed to me to be, I mean, it was a moment of tremendous, optimistic sexual liberation, and we’ve seen a lot of difficulties around that since, so things are not quite as simple and limpid as they were then. But then it seemed that we needed to be sexually free, and I wanted to be free of this taint of sin. And also I disagreed, I mean, it sounds a bit precocious, but I did disagree intellectually with the whole doctrine of original sin. And although there’d been some very fine studies of how that was a turning that might not have happened. I mean, Augustine decided that the original sin was transmitted sexually, like a new disease, and that it might not have happened. Elaine Pagels has written very well on this, that it could have taken another direction if other thinkers had been followed. 

AA: Hmm. So as a teenager and late teen, you started having these questions that were kind of propelled by your own awakening and maybe your own psychological needs. And then where did you go to college, how did you become the scholar that you became, and why did you start to write about Mary specifically and make it a focus of your work? 

But then I read the New Testament, I thought, “Well, I’ll have a look and see what it is,” and I was completely bowled over, because there’s very little about the Virgin Mary in the New Testament. I realized that all this lore that I had, all this knowledge, I had all the stories, all the characters that she has, all the different intercessions and powers that she had were an accretion, had grown over time, attributed, projected by people’s imaginations and desires. And that interested me a great deal. I was very, very interested in myth. I’d always been interested in myth, so it suddenly struck me that the Virgin Mary, which I had thought was a blazing truth, nothing to do with mythology, was actually created over time in a similar way to the way a myth develops over time. And then I wrote the book. I wrote the book in the Library of Congress. 

AA: Really? 

MW: My husband had a fellowship, and I didn’t get one. I applied for it as well, but I didn’t get it. So we came to Washington, DC, and the Library of Congress was an absolute miracle. It was organized thematically, they gave me a carrel in the dome, and I read my way through the drawers that were called the Virgin Mary.

AA: That’s really amazing. How long did it take you to do all that research? How long were you in Washington, DC?

MW: We were probably there for a year, and I went on writing the book after that. But my primary, my main research, all on card index files, which is sort of antique, kind of an archeological fossil, card index files.

AA: I have to say, I discovered your book because I was doing a master’s degree, and why did I think of the idea of writing about the Virgin Mary? I don’t even remember. Because, as you know, I didn’t grow up Catholic, but I was kind of fascinated with her. And my professor, this was at Stanford in California and I was doing my master’s degree, and my professor recommended your book to me, and I think I read it three times over, cover to cover. I was so fascinated and wanted to absorb every part of it. 

MW: Thank you.

AA: Yes. And like I said, I learned so much and it was hugely influential on my thinking and my understanding of history, really. And that’s why it had such a foundational place in the first season of the podcast when we were going chronologically trying to understand how patriarchy was created. I thought it was so, so important. I’m curious, knowing your book as I do, how it was received when you published it, and then did that change the course of your career and kind of take you into the academy more? I know that you currently teach at Oxford and at other universities, so how did that happen?

MW: Well, it was received with controversy, especially in Ireland, where I think I was almost excommunicated. 

AA: Oh, wow. 

MW: A lot of very blistering attacks. But there was also another line of attack, which actually hurt me more, because I had expected the clergy not to like it, which was that people scoffed at it being by a journalist who writes for Vogue. 

AA: Oh, interesting. 

MW: There was a lot of very male condescension to this girl from Vogue, and that hurt me. I’ve only recently really begun to own up to the fact that for a while I worked for Vogue, because it used to kind of taint me. But actually I’m now rather interested in that period of my life, because it was the ‘60s and Vogue was absolutely the center of Carnaby Street. Everybody came through the office, and I was the features editor. I had access to all these people. It was a real education, actually. I saw and interviewed many, many interesting people. And then the book precipitated me into scholarship because I was invited by the Getty to be in the very first cohort of visiting scholars in California. And that came as a huge surprise to me, a major, major surprise. And it totally changed my life, actually, because it gave me status, added approval. It legitimated me. I got some good reviews for Alone of All Her Sex, it wasn’t badly received and it sold well. The American edition in particular was very beautiful.

AA: It is beautiful. It is a beautiful book, and one downside of trying to present it on the podcast, I remember, was that there are so many visuals. We were trying to describe these sculptures where Mary was encircling even Jesus Christ, showing that she was kind of superior to him, and it was just very hard to describe the art. It would’ve been much better in a visual format, but it is a beautiful book, and you do include a lot of art in the book. 

MW: Yes, I use art a great deal. I still do in all my writing, and that’s another legacy of Catholicism for which I’m very grateful. Catholicism is a very icon-worshiping religion. Which isn’t iconoclastic, I mean, Low Church Protestantism wants to get away from images, but Catholicism revels in the power of images. And we were very much raised on that with the contemplation of scenes from the Passion, scenes of Mary’s life, and the rosary, which is the main prayer to Mary. It’s a series of images that are conjured up in the mind’s eye as you meditate on the sorrowful mysteries and the glorious mysteries. You see the pictures come up in your mind’s eye and you are trained to do that. That was one major practice that I’ve certainly benefited from. And the other major practice that’s also deep in Catholicism is the examination of conscience. The idea that every night before you go to sleep, you are meant to go over the events of the day and think about your reactions and your behavior and tally up your sins. And though I don’t believe in that remorseless sense of guilt that they wanted to induce in us to make us good people, make us mint our souls in a better coin, it’s very good training for a writer to commit to memory things that you’ve done and to think about them. I think so. 

AA: That’s very interesting. 

MW: Well, anyway, it’s certainly something I’ve used. 

AA: Wow, I’ve never thought of it that way. I was trained that way also. We would say “repent of your sins” that day so that you didn’t let yourself forget any and leave them unrepented and then have it be on your report card when you got to the other side, like, “Oh no, I forgot that one!” And I’ve always thought of the harm that that does to ruminate so much on, like, “What did I do wrong today?” But I love that you said it was good training as a writer. That’s fantastic. You’re creating a story at the end of every day, right? 

MW: Well, you are also trying to think about what the repercussions were, what the effects were, thinking about other people’s psyches, too. And I tried to remove the burden of guilt, and I do think I’ve escaped it completely. They say “once a Catholic”, but I haven’t gone back. Everybody predicted that I would go back, but I haven’t.

AA: To the Church?

MW: Yeah. And people do go back, of course, even after rejecting it quite strongly. I have a lot of friends who are, you know, lapsed Catholics. We’re a clan. 

AA: Yes. Yes, I can relate to that. I have one more question about you personally before we dig in to the Virgin Mary. I did mention in your bio the title Dame, that you are technically Dame Marina Warner. If you could explain to an American audience who maybe has heard of Dame Maggie Smith or Dame Judi Dench, we hear this title and it sounds very fabulous and very British, but I’m guessing that some listeners don’t know what that actually means. Can you tell us about it? 

MW: You did find it slightly comic. 

AA: No, not at all! I think it sounds amazing.

MW: There’s nothing like a dame. In England we have the pantomime dame who’s always played by a man, so there is an edge to the title. But as you’ve said, quite rightly, it’s often given to female actors and sometimes given to female writers. And it’s because it’s not that common for it to be given to a writer or anybody in the arts and humanities, it’s usually given to people in the military and the civil service, that I accepted it, sort of, I hope, on behalf of my community. But I find it very embarrassing 

AA: Why do you find it embarrassing? You said it seems a little comic, or is it like an honor that you would feel like it was bragging to use it too much? What’s the discomfort with it? 

MW: It’s a bit pompous. 

AA: I see. 

MW: It’s a bit pompous. And also, in our country it’s related to royalty. It’s given by, well, now the king, but mine was given by the queen. And you have a different relationship to royalty because you haven’t got a long history of it. I mean, I used to be a Republican, but I’m not anymore, because unfortunately the kind of people who get elected don’t give one comfort or belief in the justice of Republicanism. But at the same time, it’s a very old fashioned system, royalty and this honor system. And then there’s also, I mean, really not in my case, but sometimes it’s people who’ve given money that have interest at stake, so that’s worrying. But of course, writers like me don’t really have any money, so that can’t have been the reason. 

AA: Yes. You did not buy the title?

MW: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that could have been imputed to me at all. 

AA: Yes. Wow. So did you meet the queen? Is it conferred in person? 

MW: Yes it is, but in my case, I was given it by William, when he was Prince of Wales. What is he now? No, when he was not Prince of Wales. Now he’s Prince of Wales. Sorry, I forget what he was, duke or something. And he is a charming person. I managed to say something to him, which was difficult. And he said that he was working for the homeless and he was very interested in the homeless and helping the homeless, and many of the homeless were refugees. 

AA: That’s good to know about him. Well, that is just a fascinating story and I think it deserves congratulations. But if it’s better, I will de-emphasize the dame part and just call you Marina, if that’s better. 

MW: Haha, thank you. 

AA: Well, thanks for indulging that interest. Let’s dive in and talk about the book a little bit more, and you’ve done such a wonderful job setting up the conversation and giving us some foundational information. But I did still want to ask the question, especially for those who are listening who may not have been raised within Christianity in any sect, Catholic or Protestant, or others who might not be familiar with the Virgin Mary, I’d be curious to know what we kind of “know” historically about if there was a figure that historians would even agree if she existed. And then you did mention that there aren’t very many verses at all in the New Testament, and that that was a later development within the early Christian Church. So if you could walk us through what we do know, what’s in the Christian holy scripture, and then how exactly did the myth and the cult of the Virgin Mary develop over time?

MW: We have the infancy gospels, as they’re known, which is Matthew and Luke, which tell the story of how Jesus was born. And Mary plays a prominent role in both those stories, which are slightly different. The angel appears to her and tells her that she’s going to have a child, and she says, “How can this be, since I know not a man?” At that point, she’s engaged to Joseph. Joseph then wants to repudiate her because she’s pregnant, but an angel tells him not to. There’s a revelation that this is a sacred child, the redeemer, savior. And then there’s the story of the flight into Egypt because Herod hears that the Messiah has been born and will be king of the Jews, and he’s been born in Bethlehem, and he decides to kill all the firstborn babies. So an angel comes and tells Joseph that this is going to happen and tells him to take the baby and Mary and to flee to Egypt. And they flee to Egypt for three years until Herod dies and then they go back. Then there’s a period of calm, of hiatus until Jesus begins his ministry when he’s about 30. 

We don’t know anything about this period and we don’t know anything about Mary in that time at all. We just know her as a young girl in Nazareth, engaged to Joseph the carpenter, and an angel has told her that she will have this miraculous baby. Then when he begins his ministry, she does make several appearances, but very fragmentary and often very ambiguous. For example, she tells him they’ve run out of wine at the miracle of the wedding feast in Cana. She points out to her son and asks him to do something about it, and he changes the water into wine. That’s been interpreted as her role, as the intermediary, the all-important, all-powerful intermediary with Jesus. That’s part of her role for us on earth, that she can tell Jesus what he should do and she’ll turn to mercy, that’s the origin of that. 

Then she makes several more appearances, especially at the end and the Passion, and he’s condemned to death and she stands at the foot of the cross. This is in St. John’s Gospel. There’s no infancy gospel in St. John, but at the end there’s quite a lot about her. In some interpretations, she’s present when the Holy Ghost descends at Pentecost. That scene, when the Holy Ghost descends and the apostles all speak in tongues, that’s meant to be how she is at the center of the fledgling Church and has received the spirit of God and is also one of the apostles. That’s one of the pillars of how later she becomes such a significant figure for the Church. 

The reason she emerged in the fifth century, really there was a huge amount of controversy and discussion about the nature of Jesus. Catholics now accept pretty calmly, so do Protestants, that Jesus was both half man and half God, but he was both. He was completely man and completely God, but this required tremendous philosophical hair splitting. There were hundreds of heresies or hundreds of alternative versions. Was he actually a man who became God, i.e., he wasn’t fully God, he became God? Or was his will human and his mind divine? And it was settled by defining Mary’s role. Mary was a human woman who had the baby in a human way, but miraculously, there was no father, there was only a God. So she was called Theotokos, which means mother of God, i.e., she was a human woman, a mother who actually gave birth to a baby who was God. And this was defined in 431 at the Council of Ephesus, and that really triggered the whole worship of Mary. She suddenly became incredibly important in defining that he was a divine and human being. 

AA: Okay, so this was defined in, you said, 431. And then how did what you label a cult arise, and what different forms did it take throughout Europe in the intervening centuries? How did that develop?

MW: Well, there was a tremendous need for relics in order to create shrines and sanctuaries in established churches. Mary’s relics became important now, as she had been assumed into heaven. It was believed that she had not died a natural death and been buried, but had been taken up to heaven with her body. The only people in heaven who have bodies are Jesus and Mary, because Jesus also ascended into heaven with his body. We’ll all be united with our bodies on the Last Judgment, the Last Day. But at the moment, those in heaven are souls, spirits. So it’s very difficult, I mean, to accept these mysteries literally is impossible. The relics that remained were what are called technically contact relics. There were things like the tunic she wore at the Annunciation, the belts that she wore, her slippers, sometimes even her hair. Her milk in Bethlehem, where she gave birth to Jesus, there’s the milk grotto because miraculously the lining of the grotto turned white because of her wonderful milk, her magical milk. 

These things spread, and I think you could say that existing cults were transferred to Mary. Sometimes you can see it very literally. In Syracuse, in Sicily, the temple to Athena– I think it’s Athena. Anyway, the temple of one of the Greek goddesses was literally turned into a very early Christian Church. So sometimes you see the literal taking over. But many, many sacred sites in glades, springs, wells, hilltops, these had been sites of pagan worship, Roman goddesses, Greek goddesses, and they became gradually assimilated into the cult of Mary. She really became an equivalent of a magna mater. But the big difference is that in these pantheons, of the Celtic Pantheon, or the Greek Pantheon, or the Roman Pantheon, there were many, many goddesses and they represented or embodied a whole fan, a whole gamut of different qualities and possibilities. You have Athena, who’s a warrior goddess, you have Aphrodite, who’s a sex goddess, whereas Mary narrowed all these possibilities. She was certainly not a sex goddess, she was not a warrior goddess. She embodied a certain number of the previous functions of these goddesses, like fertility. She was a mother and wife like Juno, although she’s not wickedly jealous like Juno, who was pursuing Zeus’s girlfriends and doing terrible things to them. But Mary doesn’t do that. She’s a good wife and mother. 

You have Athena, who’s a warrior goddess, you have Aphrodite, who’s a sex goddess, whereas Mary narrowed all these possibilities.

AA: Yeah, she’s too pure to do anything like that. And that’s that dichotomy that’s really tricky that you talk about in the book a lot, which is that it’s a really problematic role model for women if you’re supposed to be pure and asexual, an asexual woman who has no sexual desire because that would taint you, but also be a mother. You’re supposed to do both. It puts you in an impossible position. 

MW: It’s an ideal that is necessarily impossible, therefore you’re condemned. I called it Alone of All Her Sex, it’s a quote from an early Latin Christian poet, and it’s “Alone of all her sex, she pleased the Lord.” So all other women are condemned, all other women are sinners, all other women lead men into temptation and cannot live up to the ideal. And then this idea that she was uncontaminated by sex, so it started going into infinite recession. They had to discover how she was spared. She couldn’t have had original sin if she was all good. And the savior could not have been born from a woman who was tainted with original sin. So they then had to spare her from original sin, and that’s called the Immaculate Conception. So when she was born to her parents, Anne and Joachim, who are legendary, she was actually spared this deep stain, which I used to think of as a child as literal, so something inside me like a black cloud. 

AA: Oh, that’s very sad. Yes, I do remember learning that she was also conceived without sin and it was not just Jesus’s conception. So interesting.

This is kind of in line with that previous question. I know that praise for the Virgin Mary is sometimes used as a defense of Catholicism’s treatment of women, that Catholics do venerate Mary. So it’s argued that the Church is exempt from accusations of sexism or gender bias because they have this goddess, right? You write in the book a lot, one of the major themes is the ways that she does empower women, but then also ways that she is used as an instrument of patriarchy. And when I say she, it’s just the image, like this mythologized figure. How does she empower women and how has she been used as an instrument of patriarchy?

MW: She obviously provides a point of sympathy. I mean, she is a mirror image for a woman, often a young woman because Mary is almost always portrayed young. She never ages, really. And her beauty is often quite incipient actually, even in the great painters. She’s an image of ideal, youthful beauty. But nevertheless, she offers an example of sympathy, she’s a kindred spirit. So it’s not just looking at God the father, or looking at a religion in which there is a female present. 

She’s also very powerful as a consoler. There’s a strong message of consolation, especially in her role as the mother of the dying or dead Christ. The image of the Pietà, the pity, with the dead Christ across her knees, there are some marvelous sculptures, both Medieval and later, like Michelangelo and also paintings. These are harrowing pictures of human suffering, both the physical suffering of Jesus and the psychological suffering of the mother. And that has provided a huge focus. For example, when in Argentina there were a lot of disappearances, the desaparecidos, there was a movement of women who’d lost their men, lost their husbands and their fathers and their sons. And they very much invoked this idea of the mater dolorosa, the mother of sorrows, the woman who knows what it is to lose her menfolk. So in that sense, she’s been very powerful. 

And she’s also changed. When I was brought up, before Vatican II, there were lots of reforms. And the last pope, Pope Francis, was extremely keen on women and emancipation and he gave women positions of authority within the Vatican. He did not go as far as to admit women to the priesthood. That, of course, is a barrier that has not been crossed by the Catholic Church. It has been very successfully crossed by the Anglican Church in this country, in the UK, and you in America have many female prelates, including that magnificent bishop of Washington D.C., who gave that speech to Trump. She is an eloquent, heroic woman. It would be a great thing to have female clergy in the Catholic Church, but that isn’t going to happen. I mean, not even Francis would contemplate that. 

AA: Yes. I did an Instagram post about that actually, because I was having similar thoughts to the ones you just expressed. Wonderful. That was really a beautiful meditation on the empathy and the consolation, like you said, the comfort that Mary has offered to specifically mothers, as you said, throughout the generations. And I had not thought of the desaparecidos and the grieving women in Argentina. That’s a really powerful image, 

MW: I think in Mexico, with these women disappearing in the gang wars, drug wars, there’s also an element of the Guadalupe, the Our Lady of Guadalupe, Saint of Mexico. She’s not a kind of virginal, meek figure at all. I mean, she’s absorbed a lot of the former goddesses of Mexico into her being, and she has that function for the Mexicans. She extends her approval and protection of the oppressed, she’s not a tool of the patriarchal authority. 

AA: Interesting. 

MW: But anthropologically, there’s a problem because when you have a religion that offers consolation, do you actually disempower people because you comfort them? You draw off their rage by offering comfort and the promise of heaven. Is this a way of actually controlling in the end? It’s a problem. I mean, I’m not answering it. I’m not suggesting, but it’s a question. 

AA: Yeah, I think that’s a really important question. You’re right. Even you, if I’m understanding you correctly, for example, if I were to have problems with the doctrine of the Church, then it could be, “Turn to Mary. She’s a woman, she understands your pain that you’re experiencing with the Church,” and then it’s a way to subvert and not have to face the difficult questions that are being asked. 

MW: Exactly. 

AA: To placate women a little bit. And exactly what you mentioned before, in the very top of the episode, talking about Mary’s features that were praised by the Church and she’s held up as an example of subservience and obedience. And like you said, the only words she speaks in the New Testament are… What are they, Marina? “Be unto me as you have–” 

MW: The first thing she says to the angel is, “How can that be?” And then she says, “Let it be done unto me according to thy word.” And she doesn’t speak at the foot of the cross, but Jesus says to John, “Behold thy mother.”  And he says to Mary, “Behold thy son.” So that’s when she adopts John, the beloved disciple. I always thought that she adopts John and John looks after her. She might have died in John’s house. 

AA: I was going to say, it seems to me, but I think honestly these thoughts were really informed by your book, as I’ve reflected on it in the years since I read your book. The fact that the words were written in the New Testament by men, the myth and the cult. I mean, I’m sure it was influenced by everyone together, including women, but if the Church is always led by men, they determine the doctrine. They determine what’s canonical. 

MW: And remember that they were celibate men. 

AA: Oh yeah, true. 

MW: They were men vowed to celibacy. Not so much the evangelists, they haven’t yet happened. But the prelates and the poets. There’s marvelous, marvelous early poetry to Mary. Marvelous hymns and glorious liturgy, but this is all written by celibate men. This is the idealization of a figure of a woman that is desexualized or sublimated in such a way that it isn’t realistic. And it makes it very hard for women. That’s what I argued. It makes it very hard for women brought up in this image to attain that. We would constantly fall short and feel guilty. So, I was rebelling against that. 

But it has changed, because the Church has been engulfed in sexual misconduct and abuse problems, and that has really lessened its moral authority in that sphere of life. So the pronouncements about how women should be this, or the women should be that, have really diminished. I mean, there’s still the law against contraception, there’s still, of course, a ban on abortion. And so many things deny women any kind of control or autonomy of their reproduction because the natural order is God-given, and that women should have babies when it happens. They should not control it. So, all that is still present, but is not nearly as forefronted in their discourse because they can’t speak with authority in these biological and sexual matters anymore.

AA: That’s very interesting. What I retained from the book was possibly because of my lenses from my own faith tradition and my own disillusionment on different topics, the all-male leadership of the church that I grew up in granting women more autonomy at sometimes and then rescinding it later and then saying, “Yes, isn’t this great news? Now we are saying that women can do X, Y, Z. Oh, nevermind. You can’t. Too much power.” And I saw that same pattern in the book, even with some of the art that we talked about earlier, where Mary would start to get a lot of power and then some church leader would crack down and say, “No more of that. That’s inappropriate.” But it was all the men who had all the power to give or take that kind of autonomy. 

MW: Where male authority, priestly authority, bishops’ authority still matters very much and still affects what happens is in the area of visions. Because one of the ways that Mary still lives in the world very, very vividly is, of course, that she appears to people here and there, and that has been going on since the 19th century. It was as if having had the first period, there were sort of long memories of what had happened when Jesus was alive. Then there was the medieval period when there were still relics, there was a sense of being connected through these bodily fragments of saints or garments that belonged to Mary and Jesus. But then as we got more and more distant, the touch, the contact had to be renewed and it was renewed through apparitions, through Mary herself appearing and coming and saying to people, “Do this for me. Make a church, build a church here, keep a feast day for me,” or “I will look after you forever. I will always take care of you.” 

And these apparitions had to be ratified by the local bishops. And very, very often they weren’t. They denied and censured, often young visionaries, saying they were making it up and they weren’t truthful. But in some cases, very famously at Lourdes, of course it was recognized eventually out of tremendous struggles. And Lourdes grew up with this immense shrine of healing. And Mary, there, is a very different kind of person. She said to Bernadette, “I am the Immaculate Conception,” and she appeared alone without a baby. So there, she’s divorced from motherhood and that’s a strong trend in contemporary veneration of Mary, that she’s very rarely any longer primarily a mother. She’s primarily a kind of spirit, as you mentioned, a feminine principle. 

AA: Hmm. Yeah, that’s very interesting. On that same topic of how things have changed, I’d love to talk a little bit about your changes, even as you view her. Alone of All Her Sex was originally published in 1976, I think– 

MW: 50 years old. 

AA: Oh, wow! That’s amazing. Yes, coming up on 50. Oh my goodness. But you did release a revised version more recently in 2013, and that’s the one I read. And in the preface to the 2013 edition, you wrote, and I’ll read the quote, you write, “Looking back at my own book, after over 30 years, I’m dismayed by my hubris in taking on such a vast subject. Also, if I were to return to it now, I would write about different things. It’s the work of a young woman absorbed in questions of sexuality, transgression, and obedience, purity and pollution. Far less interested in motherhood or in grieving and solitude, aging and loss.” That’s your quote. I wouldn’t say it’s a work of hubris, certainly not. But I wonder if we could explore some of those overlooked questions now, maybe talk about whatever you think to talk about. I’m specifically curious about grief and aging. 

MW: Yes. Well, I think we touched on it a little bit when talking about Mary as an icon for the suffering of the persecuted and of political violence. She definitely has emerged as that. Even Pussy Riot, I mean, Pussy Riot, who’ve been horribly punished and sent to labor camps, they invoked the Virgin Mary, and not entirely ironically. 

AA: Wow. 

These do not emphasize the virgin side at all, nor, as I said before, really the mother side, except that she’s the mother of us. She’s our mother. I think she’s strongly developing into a figure of, I mean, the flight into Egypt is, to my mind, an important element of the myth in that she’s a refugee with Joseph and the baby. Rembrandt, in many drawings and paintings he did of the Flight into Egypt, portrays them as contemporary beggars, contemporary vagrants, contemporary homeless. I think that’s strong. I’ve written about this in my book on sanctuary actually, that they are, in a way, the archetypal refugees. They’re just fleeing the massacre in Bethlehem. 

AA: Yeah. That was actually going to be my next question, actually, so it was a perfect segue. Because we’ve been focusing on Mary and Alone of All Her Sex, but I would love it if we could now turn to some more recent writing of yours. And you just mentioned your book Sanctuary, and it explores the cultural tradition of sanctuaries, of safety, home, and freedom of movement. And I’m excited to get a copy of this book. Has it been released yet? 

MW: Coming on next week. 

AA: Oh, that’s so exciting! Wonderful. Well, I’d love it if you could talk about that a little bit. What led you to want to explore the idea of sanctuary? And maybe give some teasers about some of the most exciting bits of research that you did

MW: Well, I wanted to write about sanctuary when the crisis of people dying in the Mediterranean as they tried to cross into Europe became really acute. The Mediterranean became what people were calling a liquid cemetery. Fishermen were finding bodies in their nets. I mean, it was just horrendous. It’s still horrendous, but it’s less in the news now because there’s so much other horror that’s happening. So I began thinking, how did this rite operate in the past, this rite of sanctuary? For a thousand years in Europe, if people were fleeing, they could arrive at a church door and cry “Sanctuary!” and be let in, and then it was against the law of God and the law of man to violate sanctuary and to seize them. The word “asylum” comes from Greek meaning “not to be seized.” So the sanctuary is asylum, and I just wanted to look at this in history. 

I write to find out things that interest me, I write to discover things. It took me on quite a journey. I’ve been writing it for 10 years, actually, and it took me on a tremendous journey with some surprises along the way. It took me back to a lot of territory that connects to the Virgin Mary. I have told you that I wrote about the fight into Egypt because the holy family were kind of refugees. And in the Quran, Mary also is in Egypt and goes into solitude in the desert. There are traces of the same kind of story in the Quran as well, and that interested me because there are pilgrimages in the Nile Valley that are places where the holy family rested, and both Muslims and Christians go to these places, they believe in these places. They’re healing shrines and they’re shared by the faiths. That interested me as a possibility, a way of withstanding, resisting the current demonization of other religions. But then the greatest revelation to me in terms of Mary and the traditions of Mary was the shrine of Loreto. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Loreto. 

AA: I haven’t. 

MW: Loreto is a shrine in Italy where the Holy House, the Santa Casa, is enclosed in a huge, beautiful baroque church. And the Holy House was carried by angels from Nazareth, it was the house where Mary lived when she was a child and where she brought up Jesus. And then when the Ottomans occupied the Holy Land and pilgrims couldn’t go to the holy places anymore with any ease, without any safety, angels stepped in, picked up the Holy House, and flew it to Italy. Ha, I can see you smiling. 

AA: Well, I love it! It’s very whimsical. 

MW: I went to see it because it struck me that this was a home that was being carried to another place, and maybe it would have something of interest to say about refugees and losing their homes and how they could reconstruct their homes. And when I went, first of all, it’s a very beautiful baroque church, but what is very, very striking and extremely moving is this little hut. It’s a kind of shepherd’s shack made of higgledy-piggledy brick and dust, and it’s stuck in the middle of this unbelievable, glorious totally Catholic Counter-Reformation statement. And somehow it seemed to me that it really was a symbol of home. This relic, this preposterous relic, it’s not even big enough for one person to live in, let alone the Holy Family. Even if they were dirt poor, it’s a shack, and yet it was one of the richest pilgrimages in Europe. Until Napoleon sacked it, he sacked the treasury, which was a very rich treasury, to pay his troops. And since then, it’s still a pilgrimage, but it doesn’t have quite the stature that it was. But it was incredibly popular and very, very wealthy, and all kinds of interesting people went there and gave money to it. But I was very interested in this idea of the home, the displaced home being the center of a cult. That interested me, and I think that could be applied to displaced people. Do you see what I mean? That one can symbolize the lost home. 

AA: Oh, that’s beautiful. And it does have such a practical, relevant application today. I can’t wait to read it. That sounds absolutely fascinating. And that sadly brings us to the end of our conversation, Marina. This has been just an absolute delight, and again, it’s such an honor to talk with you. Your work has influenced me so much. I’ve learned so much from you. I’m wondering, just for my last question, if you could tell us any takeaway that you’d like to leave with listeners, and then where listeners can go to learn more about you and follow your work.

MW: Well, the takeaway I think is that what I’ve learned is that we do make up our stories and our myths, and that actually is a valuable thing because it means we can make more of them. We shouldn’t kind of deplore it and think, “Oh, it’s fake news because it’s been made up.” It’s actually a resource, but it needs to be invested in as a resource by people who have justice on their minds. 

AA: That’s really powerful. 

MW: Well, then if you want to know more about me, I do have a website. 

AA: Yes, please tell us what the website is. 

MW: It’s marinawarner.com. Very simple. 

AA: Perfect. And I will recommend again to readers, both books, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, and also the upcoming book. And by the time this episode is released, the book will, I’m sure, be available in any local bookstore, Sanctuary: Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling. Thank you again, Marina Warner, for a lovely conversation today. 

MW: Thank you very much, Amy. Thank you.

Listen to the Episode

here

&

Share your Comments with us below!