Lessons from the Goddess Mary, Mother of Jesus

The Virgin Mary is not, doctrinally, a goddess. She is the mother of Jesus Christ, and in many Christian traditions, it would be heretical to worship her above God himself.

And yet the Virgin Mary is beloved by Christians and non-Christians the world over. To this day, she is represented in art, figurines, and even tattoos by people who adore her. In their book Evolution of the Goddess, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford discuss the plethora of art centered on Mary and point out that “in art, for the most part, Jesus is either a newly born infant or dead!”

Yearning for the Ancient Goddess

The Goddess has been worshiped all over the world as long as people have been around to imagine. While there have been plenty of religions that have centered a male god, Christianity was a powerful social force that converted huge swaths of the globe (often by force). As the world’s people were forced away from their pagan and goddess-worshiping traditions, they found solace in Mary, a figure of compassion, gentleness, beauty, and care that they could pray to when they missed their older goddesses.

It is interesting to note that the canonical Bible doesn’t say that much about Mary, Mother of Jesus. A lot of the details about Mary that are seen in art or told in stories around Christmas are actually from an apocryphal source called the Gospel of James, a piece of writing that is related to Biblical material but not included in the standard versions of the Bible.

Magic and Miracles of the Goddess

In the Gospel of James, we learn that Mary was born when her mother, Anna, a barren woman, was blessed by God. In her gratitude, Anna offered Mary to the service of the church, and she became a temple virgin at three years old, growing up with priests and other temple virgins. In this story, it is said that Mary was fed every night by angels and was beloved by God. When it became time for her to marry, a disembodied voice spoke to the head priest from within the temple and told him to gather all the widowers of the town and to bring a staff or branch with them. Only Joseph’s staff flowered, and a dove landed on his shoulder, marking him as Mary’s chosen protector.

Sure enough, Mary becomes pregnant miraculously, and an angel helps her and Joseph through that experience. At one point she is held to a trial called the Test of the Bitter Water to see if she has cheated on Joseph. This was an ancient test of purity (and there’s a very similar ritual shown in the recent movie Dune: Part II) that included a substance that may have been slightly hallucinogenic and also abortifacient. It was given to women who were accused of cheating on their husbands, and the bitter water may have helped them abort if they had become pregnant out of wedlock.

Mary passes this test easily, and the two move on to Bethlehem, where Mary starts to have labor pains. They find a cave (an ancient symbol of the goddess), and Mary gives birth in a flash of light, avoiding the curse of painful labor brought on by her ancestor, Eve, who tasted the fruit of knowledge at the beginning of time. A midwife tries to check Mary to see if she is indeed still a virgin, but the nurse’s hand withers. She repents and touches the baby Jesus, and her hand is restored.

This story is so full of magic and miracles centered on Mary. Some of the motifs in this story are common in Greek mythology, which was present around the time of the rise of Christianity. Heroes often had “virgin births,” where a human woman would conceive a child fathered by a god, usually Zeus. The cave, the flowering staff, and Mary’s traditional color, blue, are all symbols of older goddesses. She fits neatly into the evolution of the image of the goddess.

Mary as the Archetypal Mother

As a model for real women, Mary is not so useful. She is “perfect,” eternally a virgin, obedient to God and her husband. She doesn’t even feel a wince while giving birth. She’s not particularly relatable, and literally impossible to emulate.

But as a goddess, she can be much more helpful. She can represent the archetype of an ideal mother, one who loves unconditionally, has infinite patience, and is filled with compassion. She has the capacity to witness our most intense emotional and physical pain and feel it with us, cry with us, hold us in that pain. We can ask for her help when we need to be seen and felt.

The energy of the goddess has always been about witnessing. While male gods tend to reward or punish, goddesses are more about showing up when we need them. The Virgin Mary can certainly be prayed to, and many believe she can grant wishes. But she can also shed tears with us, sit with us when we are in pain, and help us understand what’s happening in our lives. When we don’t know what to do, we can always ask for Mary to be with us, to hold us as if we were her beloved children, even and especially when our human mothers can’t. In all these ways, the Virgin Mary may indeed be just the goddess we need.

Explore what lessons you can learn from the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna.