The Gospel of Mary

Who was Mary Magdalene? Thanks to a misguided assumption about a passage in Luke's gospel by Pope Gregory I in the 6th-century, the erroneous tradition that Mary was a redeemed whore has persisted for fourteen long centuries. But the text of the Gospel of Mary, written three centuries earlier, reveals a very different Mary. The image of Mary in the gospel which bears her name is of a woman of great dignity, leadership, personal courage and deep spiritual insight: a view of the Magdalene as remote from her misguided portrayal down the centuries as is possible.

We have three surviving fragmentary copies of the text known as the Gospel of Mary, all of them from Egypt. One discovered near the town of Akhmim is from the 5th-century and written in Coptic, and the other two from the 3rd-century and written in Greek were discovered in an ancient refuse dump at Oxyrhynchus – a valuable archaeological site which also has yielded some of the poetry of Sappho.

The Gospel of Mary is the only known gospel to be attributed to a woman. Unlike the verses of Sappho, we cannot know who wrote it, any more than we can ascertain who really wrote the four canonical gospels. What we can say is that its unknown author wrote from a viewpoint that is so sympathetic to a woman’s perspective, so insightful, that it could indeed have been written by a woman, which would have been entirely feasible in an early Christian Gnostic community.

Being closer to the source, this text offers us perhaps a more authentic Mary: a Mary who is indeed a wise and profound teacher, and who is even the closest to Jesus and most deserving of his disciples. This Mary is a very long way indeed from the redeemed whore perpetuated by the Church, and the time for her overdue and deserved reinstatement is now.

You can read more about the Gospel of Mary on my other blog here.

Sword Dancer

Below the ochre cliffs tall grasses

stir to the wind’s slow dance, 

move graciously in time

to the measure of the years.

And I, now grown old, make my own 

movements in time,

retrace those years,

return to the Emperor’s golden court

and another age, full fifty years before

as the cliff, the grasses, all that is around me

grows vague with an old longing

and momently disappears.

She moves as a sword sweeps:

her long sleeves carve an arc

through the mythic space

of her court performance

that is the arena of her mind:

a space as invisible as the traceries

of the coursing stars, and as defined.

Shaking clouds of dark anger

from those same sleeves,

the rolling thunder growls:

a beast slipped from its leash,

rampaging, raging, until the storm is done.

And I, stunned to silence among her audience

can only watch, wait for the storm to pass,

wait for the sleeves to shake out calm reprieves:

the still air, and the high silence of birds

grazing the bronze face of a late and courtly sun.

Rustling pearled tiara, layered silk brocade

and the very air we breathed 

slit by the passage of her pliant blade:

Lady Gongshun, the sword dancer

from the city of the White Goddess,

moves in silence, moves in thunder,

her feet frame questions

as her sword gives answer:

one world is created, another splits asunder.

The west wind veils the golden court

with dust from the inland plains.

The Lady, the grasses: all I see around me

grows vague with an old longing

and only the dance remains

in the arena of my mind:

a dance as invisible as the traceries

of the coursing stars, and as defined.

© David Bergen 

Thecla

The companion of Paul the Apostle, Thecla seems in every way to have been a woman in her own right. Almost all that we know about her comes from a damaged apocryphal manuscript in Coptic known as The Acts of Paul, in which is recounted her seemingly miraculous deliverances from death in the Roman arenas of two cities. On the first occasion in the city of Iconium, while being tied to the stake with the pyre beneath her feet having been already set to the torch, a deluge of rain poured out of a clear sky and extinguished the flames. The following apparently miraculous deliverance found place in the arena of the city of Antioch, when a group of lionesses formed a protective circle around her and fought off the aggressive male lions.

How to unravel these more legendary aspects of her life from the Thecla of history? What these stories about her express – and the apparent esteem in which she was held by her followers – reveal to us a beautiful, charismatic and principled woman who enjoyed the respect and loyalty of her community. Copies in Greek of the damaged text of the Acts indicate that in later years she became a recluse, dedicating herself to a life of prayer and meditation, and living into her 90’s. Perhaps somewhere between the miracles and the meditations is the true Thecla, the Thecla of the spirit: a Thecla who still can touch us with her grace if we open ourselves to her.

You can read more about Thecla and her times in my post: Thecla: A Woman between Rain and Fire.

My painting of Thecla also features in my video: Invocation.

Princess Andromeda

This is my second version of this subject, and the one which I personally prefer. When I first came to tackle the subject I had the option either of being ethnically correct or of going with the traditional portrayals of the 'Grecian' princess who was rescued from the sea monster by the hero Perseus - although my interpretation then, as now, holds the implication that the monster is in reality Andromeda's protector in defiance both of Perseus and a familiar reading of the myth. When it came to portraying Andromeda I opted for tradition, and have regretted it ever since. Now I have chosen to be faithful to her ethnicity. Andromeda was, after all, a princess of Ethiopia.

The Lovers

This silence is not the silence

of the vast space between the stars.

Neither is it the silence

of the dim grey light before the dawn.

This is the greater silence of lovers

that has no need of words.

A wide cloth, spread between two

as easily covering as removed:

a white membrane –

both birth-sack and winding-cloth

for past selves left far behind:

forever changed by these infinities

of transformation, gold and white

uniting in an alchemical wedding.

White queen, red king,

and all the world their court.

Glistening, new-formed:

these are no masks they wear

but their true selves

with all else burned away

in the white fire

of love’s simple existence.

For love has no need of masks

and acceptance is all

and everything.

Text © Emma Bergen

Lucy Westenra

Where lies the true horror? In the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula we tend to think of the horror of blood and vampire fangs. Such things are the thrill of 19th-century sensational melodrama, but what makes such gothic classics endure is the way in which they tug us towards deeper truths that we all at some level recognize, and we recognize them because they somewhere lie within our own personal experience. 

In Stoker’s narrative it is the events which occur both to and around Lucy Westenra that form a pivotal focus in the story. In spite of the heroic efforts of the Dutch vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing to prevent the encounter, Lucy is stalked and bitten by Dracula. She wastes away and apparently dies, but her coffin is later discovered to be empty. Lucy has become one of the ‘Un-Dead’; has herself become a vampire.

It is the true horror of possession, of desiring total mastery over another, which we recognize. Lucy is no longer ‘Lucy’. She becomes a sad walking puppet, a thing of unnatural desires neither living nor truly dead. We ourselves perhaps know of someone in our own circle of acquaintances whom we feel has been ‘taken over’ by another, who has become so compliant to the will of that other person that they adopt that person’s mannerisms, figures of speech, ways of dressing, view of things. Just think of the many religious cults and the way in which they maintain their members. Vampirism of the mind is still vampirism, and the legions of these particular 'undead' are real enough.

My video of Dracula featuring this painting of Lucy can be viewed on YouTube here: Dracula: Darkness Rising.

Anthony of the Desert

What drives a man to walk away from his wealthy estate and march off into the unforgiving dunes of the North African desert? I find it difficult to recognize such a bravura gesture as an act of faith in any conventional sense. Were that so, then Anthony would have continued to bow to an acceptably orthodox Church authority. But he walked away from that as well. Others seeking to find grace among the desert’s terrible purity had left their footprints in the sand before him, but their tracks went no farther than the outskirts of Alexandria.

What made Anthony different is that he went farther than any before him. Far to the south of Alexandria Anthony settled into the rough shelter that was to become his hermitage, there to undertake what we would now perhaps more readily recognize as a vision quest.

Anthony’s beliefs were an intensely personal form of Gnosticism – of a seeking for a direct experience of the Divine through privation-induced visions. It was these beliefs which cut him loose from the authority of the Church hierarchy, and which therefore presented the Church with a problem. Over the years the hermit’s fame spread, and his devotional asceticism captured the popular imagination of the time.

What to do about Anthony? For the Church to chastise the wayward hermit in such a climate of popularity was an unfavourable option. The solution was found after Anthony’s death by Athanasius, the influential bishop of Alexandria. The bishop wrote a presumed biography of Anthony, reinventing the hermit, not as the lettered scholar which Anthony truly was, but as a humble and illiterate monk who devotedly upheld the very principles of obedient orthodoxy which the real Anthony in his life abjured. Athanasius even appended a wholly fictitious ending in which the hermit presents the bishop with his cloak as his worthy successor.

For centuries the biography by Athanasius was accepted as literal fact; so much so that the very Gnostic Anthony, as we know, has even received sainthood. It was only after Anthony’s own letters came to light that the bishop’s subterfuge has been realised, and his own agenda has been revealed as a maneuver of the power politics of the Church of that time.

There are many depictions of Anthony from various periods of art history, from the soberly contemplative saint of Albrecht Dürer to the bizarre visions of Hieronymus Bosch. But generally these opt for a portrayal of the grizzle-bearded hermit in advanced years in the setting of his retreat, surrounded by a lurid phantasmagoria of grotesque monstrosities and tempted by equally phantom wanton females. But what compels me more than these is the Anthony who walked away, the young man (he was then in his early thirties) who turned his back on his considerable earthly wealth to pursue his own intensely personal vision of things.


Sources:
Samuel Rubenson: The Letters of Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint. A&C Black, 1995. Just how profoundly Gnostic Anthony actually was is revealed in Professor Rubenson's book, an extract of which can be read here. Anthony was not the only Gnostic to be 'reinvented' by the orthodox Church to drive its own agenda. Both Clement of Alexandria and Paul himself were subjected to the same process.

Gustave Flaubert: The Temptation of Saint Antony. Translated and with an introduction by Kitty Mrosovsky. Penguin Classics, 1983. Flaubert's daring experiment with the literary form, using Anthony's visions as inspiration, and written as a play not intended for actual performance.

More about the conflict of truth between Anthony and Athanasius can be read at: Anthony of the Desert: Life as Fiction.

Portrayals of Anthony and his visions by a variety of artists can be seen at: Temptations.

Andromeda and the Monster

It was, of course, asking for trouble. When Queen Cassiopeia made the claim that she considered herself more beautiful even than the sea nymphs of Poseidon, the god who was the sea demanded retribution. Chained to an offshore rock, her daughter Andromeda now waits in helpless terror for the arrival of the sea monster that will devour her. In myth, victorious rescue is preordained, and the hero Perseus will arrive from the skies to do battle with the monster and win fair Andromeda’s hand.

Perhaps the myth hints at other possibilities. Perhaps the princess is more powerful than this traditionally masculine reading of the myth allows her to be. Andromeda, with all the power she commands, has made a pact with the serpent, who is really her guardian. Entwining her in its radiant coils, the monster will protect the princess against all threats.

Understanding none of this, brash Perseus in his glinting armour wings towards the pair above the moonlit Mediterranean waves, and the monster, to protect its mistress, knows that it must join battle with the meddlesome hero. Andromeda, princess of monsters, must wish that the outcome will favour her protector, although the myth dictates otherwise. And yet she must hope against hope that, for once, the myth will be rewritten in the monster’s favour.

The Four Elements: Symbols

Traditionally there are [1]four winds, four cardinal directions, [2]four temperaments and four elements. These symmetries stemmed from the enquiring minds of the Classical World, and were further developed by the philosophers and mystics of later centuries in the application of alchemy. The four elements were said to form from the interaction of the further four qualities of hot, cold, wet and dry, and also represented four different phases of the alchemical work.

The traditional symbols for these elements are simple and direct: the four triangles in my painting above (left to right: water, fire, air and earth). When these four symbols are overlaid upon each other they form a six-pointed star. Our contemporary view recognizes this symbol as the familiar Star of David, but in traditional mysticism it represents the Hermetic ideal of ‘as above, so below’, with the combined triangles pointing both upwards to the heavens and downwards to our own world.

My painting is based upon the engraving of these personified symbols in D. Stolcius von Stolcemberg’s 17th-century Viridarium Chymicum. The figures have been adapted from Eadweard Muybridge’s 19th-century sequence of photographs of the dancer Isadora Duncan. I first considered using the photographs themselves, but from a reference point-of-view the quality of the images was too degraded, and I ended up completely repainting them. 

Notes:

[1] Also Four Gospels? With considerably more presumption than logic, Irenaeus, the influential bishop of 2nd-century Lyons, taking the examples of four winds and four cardinal directions as his model, decided that there also should be four gospels. He then selected the four texts of his choice - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - to become canonical, and which now appear in the New Testament. This in turn meant that some thirty-odd other popular gospels then in circulation which in the bishop’s personal opinion did not measure up, and which otherwise would have made the New Testament as substantial as the Old Testament, hit the cutting room floor. It is an irony of history that Irenaeus’ bizarre reasoning was actually based upon Classical Greek – and therefore pagan – teachings.

[2] Choleric, sanguine, melancholic and phlegmatic.