Interview with Elizabeth Cunningham on The Passion of Mary Magdalen

 

Q:The Passion of Mary Magdalen is the centerpiece of The Maeve Chronicles. What is it about Mary Madgalen that makes her a compelling subject for you?

A: I first encountered the character I came to know as Mary Magdalen in the summer of 1990. I had just finished writing The Return of the Goddess, A Divine Comedy, and I decided to take a break from writing and explore art. Madge, as she introduced herself, appeared as a simple line drawing of an ample woman sitting naked in a kitchen. She quickly took on color. I drew with magic markers and her hair required a neon shade called fiery orange. Soon the drawings had captions, for her voice was as fresh and irrepressible as her image. Here’s my next character, I thought. I proposed a novel about a retired prostitute who moves to Maine to be a painter. Madge said, "Honey, I’m not ready to be a retired anything. Then one strangely balmy full-moon night in February (near the time of the Celtic feast of Brigid), it came to me, out of nowhere, that Mary Magdalen was a red-headed Celt. The next moment I had goose bumps all over, because I knew: That’s who Madge is! When I asked her if she would star in a novel about the Celtic Mary Magdalen, she smiled hugely and said, "Finally, you figured it out!"

After fifteen years of research and writing I understand more about Mary Magdalen, why she is so compelling not only to me but to many people. In most religions and myths the prototype of the incarnate god is male. He is the one who, like Jesus, is born, acts, suffers, dies a redemptive death, rises, while the goddess remains in the realm of the eternal. I wanted to tell the story of the divine incarnate as a woman who shares our human nature and predicament. Or rather the story of a woman who, through her very humanness, grows into her divinity—as any of us might, for the capacity to mediate the human and divine is a peculiarly human quality.

On a more personal note, writing from the point of view of this particular Mary Magdalen gave me a way to love Jesus even though I have stepped outside of Christian orthodoxy. Jesus’s actual teachings are quite stark and simple—though not easy! Many people who do not—or cannot—call themselves Christians still attempt to live by the essence of his life and words. I hope this story will be a help to them.

 

Q: How far-fetched is your premise that Mary Magdalen is a Celt? What do we actually know about the Magdalen, and her origins?

In fact, precious little is known about the actual Mary Magdalen. Most believe that she came from Magdala, an important fishing town on the Sea of Galilee not far from the apostle Peter’s house in Capernaum, but some people disagree even on that. There is also difference of opinion about whether or not Mary Magdalen and Mary of Bethany were the same person. In my book, obviously, they are not. Mary Magdalen was supposed to have been possessed of seven demons, which Jesus exorcised. There is no scriptural evidence that she was a prostitute, though she does appear to have been unmarried, and she did accompany Jesus to Jerusalem.

In the synoptic Gospels, she is one of the women who discovers the empty tomb and receives the message that Jesus is risen. In the Gospel of John, she is the first one to encounter him face to face. The non-canonical Gospel of Mary indicates she was a favored disciple, and that Peter, especially, resented her.

Based on the textual evidence, Mary Magdalen was probably Jewish and a disciple. In writing a historical fantasy, I’ve taken an imaginative leap, departing from all scripture, interpretation, and legend by presenting her as an unrepentant Celtic whore who never converts or becomes a disciple but is a charismatic figure in her own right. That I portray her as Jesus’s female counterpart is a far more radical departure from the conventional treatment of Mary Magdalen than my depiction of her as a Celt.

As a novelist, my intent is to tell a powerful, transformative story. Though I make no claims to historicity, neither is a Celtic Mary Magdalen an historical impossibility. The first century worlds of the Celts and the Jews were linked by the Roman Empire that occupied both Judea and Gaul. There were Celtic mercenaries in the Roman Army, and Celtic warriors taken in battle were on display in Roman circuses. There were also networks of trade that spanned the empire, and the Celts of the British Isles exported gold, tin, and beef. So a Celt could have traveled, as Maeve does, from the British Isles via Rome to Palestine.

 

Q: Tell us a bit about your research for this book.

A: For the first half of the book, which is set in Rome, I read many books on various aspects of life in first century Rome: the role of women, civic and exotic religions —the cult of Isis and Judaism were both considered foreign and suspect— slavery, and the astonishing varieties of prostitution, from women of the senatorial class registering as prostitutes to avoid marriage, to baker’s girls advertising their wares with cakes shaped like genitalia. I also visited Rome, Pompeii, and the Lake of Nemi, site of the legend of the Golden Bough, which also figures in the first half of the novel.

For part of the story that is set in the terrain of the Gospels, I read, re-read, and continued to read the Gospels themselves as well as books about them by prominent scholars such as Bruce Chilton, A.N. Wilson, and many others. I also read the non-canonical gospels and various Gnostic writings. I made a trip to Israel, and in so far as it was possible, I visited all the locations that appear in the novel. With all the books, I have found that geography has its own contribution to make to the story.

I happened to visit Jerusalem during Ramadan when the city was full of Muslim pilgrims, many in traditional middle-eastern dress in stark contrast to the Israeli soldiers standing guard just where Roman soldiers might have stood during the Passover festival in the time of Jesus. The parallels were eerie, and time travel was not at all difficult.

 

Q: Maeve’s narrative voice is very contemporary and she often makes references to the contemporary scene. She also addresses the reader directly. Her voice is always consistent but moves in and out of the story’s time. Why did you choose this narrative device?

A: There are a number of reasons. First, that lively, in-your-face voice is the one I first heard and continue to listen for as the story unfolds. (I am now at work on the third novel.) As I mentioned, the character first presented herself as a contemporary woman named Madge, and she wanted to be able to speak directly to us as well as to narrate her first century adventures.

I like her narrative voice for its freshness, frankness, and freedom. The Maeve Chronicles are not conventional historical novels, and even if they were, I would not be writing in first century Celtic, Greek, Latin, or Aramaic, the languages spoken by Maeve and her contemporaries. Her voice prevents me from falling into a false, stilted archaism. Her voice is fun, and has full range from sassy and brassy to oracular and lyrical.

 

Q: Why did you choose to contradict current scholarly and popular opinion by making your Mary Magdalen an unrepentant prostitute?

A: Unrepentant, that’s the key word. The old orthodoxy sees her as a penitent whore while her new proponents insist she was not a prostitute, she was a disciple. She should have succeeded Jesus as leader, not Peter. She’s also sometimes regarded as Jesus’s secret wife and progenitrix of a not very inspired line, I must say, if you’ve read The Da Vinci Code. But in all these versions, she remains a cipher with very little character of her own, and prostitution is defined as something bad—whether it’s something to be repented of or an accusation she needs to be defended from.

Everyone seems to forget that Jesus himself did not despise prostitutes and even announced that they would enter the kingdom of heaven before the people who counted themselves pure. So what is our problem?

In a college class I guest taught, a young woman asked me why I use the word whore so freely in the novel. "If someone called me a whore," she said, "I would be so insulted." "That’s exactly why I use it the way I do," I explained to her. "As long as people can insult us with that word—and play on our fear of it—they can control us and our sexuality." I want to reclaim the word. And I do not see prostitutes as "other." I think that is a mistake some feminists have made, and it makes them strange bedfellows with the religious right. If we insist on distancing ourselves from prostitutes, even demonizing them, we are not facing ourselves or our sexuality fully. It’s time to stop projecting our fear or judgment onto others. I hope the novel will help people to be less conventional and more self-examined in their attitudes towards sexuality.

As Maeve remarks, there is a difference between a stereotype and an archetype—and the holy whore is an archetype. It is my hope that Maeve embodies that archetype, and transcends all stereotypes, old age and new age. In the novel, I wanted to take a complex look at prostitution. Like many people, male and female, Maeve is initially forced into prostitution. She is a victim, a slave, as many people are today. But she also discovers a vocation as a priestess-whore, and when she is free, she founds a holy whorehouse that is also a community—like the church at its best—that welcomes anyone who needs to be fed, clothed, healed and allowed simply to be.

 

Q: Your father was an Episcopal priest, and you were raised as an Episcopalian. How has that relationship and that religious upbringing influenced your writing of The Passion of Mary Magdalen, which is after all a racy and sometimes irreverent look about the intimate details of the love relationship between Magdalen and the Savior. Would your father have approved?

A: I was not only raised a Creed-saying Christian, but I grew up, literally, in the church or anyway the rectory and the church yard, the parish house. Only recently have I made the connection between the parish church of my childhood and Temple Magdalen in my novel. In both places, everyone was welcome. No questions asked.

Before I could read, I had heard over and over the rich language and rhythms of The Kings James Version of the Bible and of The 1928 Book of Common Prayer. This was and is a great gift, but it could also be quite terrifying. In the general confession, Episcopalians say "we" but a child thinks "me." As in "We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickednesses which we from time to time most grievously have committed provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us." An alternate confession reminds us: "We have done those things we ought not to have done and we have left undone those things we ought to have done, and there is no health in us." I believed in my essential unworthiness, and at the same time I rebelled. My earliest memory (age three) is of plotting to kill God and Jesus by rolling a boulder onto them, as in a Roadrunner cartoon.

I have always been wrestling with the Divine. And though as a small child I wanted to flatten the father and son both, in time I came to love Jesus passionately and I continued to love him even when I found I could no longer be a Creed-saying, church-going Christian.

One of the reasons I left the church is that its teachings did not address sexuality in any way that made sense to me. Sexuality is inherent; it is the life force, and when it is not recognized and honored, when, in fact, it is feared, dismissed or reviled, it can wreak havoc—and it has, witness the rampant sexual abuse in The Roman Catholic Church. To say sexuality belongs in heterosexual marriage only, and everything else is sinful, leaves a lot of people stranded and ultimately alienated. Commercial and religious culture both, in different ways, alienate us from our sexuality by objectifying it, whether the purpose is to exploit it or to control it. I do not think I am alone in yearning for a reunion of sexuality and the sacred.

The mystical tradition has always recognized Jesus as a lover in every sense, as the writings of Saint Theresa make clear. I am not, by any means, the first writer to imagine there might have been a sexual relationship between Mary Magdalen and Jesus. I wanted to combine those two perhaps unorthodox strains. In the novel, a prophecy is made over Maeve and Jesus: "You are lovers, but not only of each other: You are the lovers of the world." We all know about God the Father, and many people now invoke God the Mother. I want to invoke, God the Lover, Goddess the Lover, as well as telling the story of a very human love affair.

Would my late father have approved? Ultimately, I think he would have. I believe he was very wounded, in part by the Church he served and by his father before him and no doubt his father before him, back many generations. My father and his father both wanted to write, but writing was considered self-indulgent—not the selfless service of others that was held up as the only true Christian life. My father’s father shamed him out of his ambition to write, and my father tried but did not succeed in shaming me. I believe that my father in the fullness of who he could have been, and may now be, would rejoice in this book. I believe that part of its purpose is to heal my lineage backwards in time. I can’t prove that, of course, but to me it feels like gospel truth.

 

Q: You mention having left the Episcopal Church. Where are you now and how did you get there?

A: When I met my husband, I was still an active Episcopalian, but he was completely unchurched. He told me that attending Episcopal liturgies made him feel like an anthropologist observing a bizarre cult. We decided to go to Quaker Meeting where the silence of unprogrammed Friends’ worship provided us with more neutral ground. Unexpected revelations can come in that holy, expectant silence, and it was in Meeting that I first recognized my longing for goddess and realized that I had always been seeking her in my fiction writing. (My first novel is called The Wild Mother.) Though I have deep love and respect for The Religious Society of Friends, I eventually followed my leading (a Quaker term) to become an Interfaith minister, a path that has led me to integrate my Christian roots with my pagan leanings. I was ordained in 1997 in an interfaith ceremony at the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and have been in private practice as a counselor ever since. I also lead earth-centered celebrations at the small community center I direct. So I have ritual in my life again, ecstatic, embodied ritual, complete with singing and dancing and feasting—much like the joyful, unorthodox Shabbat feasts at Temple Magdalen.

 

Q: 50 years ago your novel would have been banned; 400 years ago it would have constituted a work of heresy. In fact, you would have been burned at the stake. Do you see yourself in that tradition?

A: I suppose I’ve always been a heretic at heart, if by that you mean someone who questions orthodoxy. Many saints and mystics were considered heretics in their time. The church has given a great deal of energy to deciding who is a heretic and what constitutes heresy and what do you do about it—and it does not strike me as energy well spent. In the rise of fundamentalism in all the world’s religions, I fear we might be seeing a resurgence of that desire to control others that inevitably leads to persecution. Jesus said, "Take the beam out of your own eye, before your try to get the mote out of your brother’s eye." He also told us to regard the least of his brethren as himself and to care for him or her accordingly. If we follow Christ’s teachings, how on earth do we find time to concern ourselves with other people’s heresies or sins? In terms of discerning whether or not something is good or evil, Jesus said, "Know the tree by its fruits." I hope the fruits of The Passion of Mary Magdalen will be nourishing, that the book’s effect will be healing. That is my intention, to reconcile what some people have seen as irrevocably at odds: paganism and Judeo-Christianity, spirituality and sexuality, male and female divinity.

 

Q:. What’s next for you? What goals do you still wish to accomplish?

A: I want to finish Bright Dark Madonna, the sequel to The Passion of Mary Magdalen, in which Maeve must contend with the early church and ultimately find her own way to love and remember Jesus—and to live without him, at least without his physical presence. As a woman in my fifties, who has survived raising teenagers and caring for parents in their last illnesses, I can’t help feeling that Jesus, a man who died at thirty-three, missed some of the commonplace challenges many of us face. Maeve is not going to get out of life so early. So I want to see her story through to the end. She’s got a lot more to say.

I also have a sense that I need to go out into the world to stand with Maeve’s story, to speak, to sing, to embody her spirit as best I can. I feel called to spread her gospel, her good news, not in the sense of proselytizing, which is anathema to Maeve and to me, but in the sense of opening up new possibilities, new ways to be faithful—and joyful. When I say joy, I don’t mean a denial of suffering or injustice but something that is so wide and deep and mysterious that it can embrace it all.

 

 

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