Dear Readers,

There are many ways to read a book—one of my preferred methods is to read in the bathtub while sipping tea or wine. (All my best-loved books have crinkled and stained pages.) A well-loved story becomes a companion. Whether or not you know an author personally, minds meet. We often have an impulse to share a book that has stirred us, and so those stained, dog-earred pages get passed from friend to friend.

Book groups are burgeoning these days, perhaps because people hunger for community that is nourished and sustained by imaginative experience. With novels you can travel backwards and forwards in time, to places you’ve never seen; you can live whole other lives. What a wonderful journey to make with friends—and no need to book flights or hotel rooms. No jet-lag or blistered feet to make you snappish and irritable.

Maeve is ready to take you with her on what one reviewer described as “nothing less than a full-body experience.” Wherever Maeve goes, even when in the most dire of circumstances, she manages to find or create community. Like all of us, she gets by with a little—or a lot— of help from her friends. If you are not already part of a reading group, why not start one with The Passion of Mary Magdalen?

Below is a list of questions to help generate book group discussion. They are the ones that occurred to me; I am sure you will think of others. The root of the word question is quest. For me writing a novel is a quest; I begin with questions, like: what if a goddess was fully incarnate as a human being? Can you love Jesus without being a disciple or even a Christian? What if Mary Magdalen was a Celt? Those are just a few of the questions that started me on the greatest adventure of my life. I found and am still finding others. In any treasure hunt, one question leads to another.

But I can feel Maeve getting a little impatient. “Discussion?” She is saying. “People are going to form book groups to have discussions?! What about parties, rituals, celebrations? Why not have people come to the group dressed as whores and priestesses? Be sure to tell people to bring sumptuous, sensual food and drink—oil-cured olives, goat cheese, fresh figs. Someone better remember chocolate. If it had been invented in the first century we would have been eating chocolates at the whores’ bath everyday. And don’t forget music, dancing, story-telling. People, please! Don’t just talk about my story: tell each other your own. Laugh, cry, argue, sing! Paradise is here now, in your midst.”

Maeve has always had a lot to say. I refer you now to her story and to each other. So read the book and party on!

Elizabeth Cunningham

 

Reading Group Guide for The Passion of Mary Magdalen

Before you read this novel, did you have your own concept of Mary Magdalen? If so, how is your image of her different from or similar to Elizabeth Cunningham’s Maeve?

 

Why do you think the author chose to depict Mary Magdalen as a Celt? Does her outsider’s pagan perspective add to your understanding of Jesus’s life and times?

 

Modern scholars agree that there is no scriptural evidence that Mary Magdalen was a prostitute. Why do you think the author chose to return to this legend? Maeve insists there is a difference between a stereotype and an archetype. What is that difference?

 

Maeve has life circumstances that many contemporary women don’t share—living in a Roman brothel, founding a temple of sacred prostitution, not to mention loving a man some consider to be the Son of God? How do you or don’t you identify with Maeve?

 

The first half of the novel takes place in Rome, and Jesus appears only in Maeve’s memory. Why does the Roman story matter? How does it foreshadow what happens in the rest of the novel? What is the theological significance of the Paulina story?

 

Cunningham describes Temple Magdalen as a kind of utopian community. How is it similar or different from your vision of utopia?

 

Do you believe prostitution can be sacred? Would you ever consider serving in a temple of prostitution? Would you ever seek out a priestess-whore?

 

Do you have your own concept of Jesus of Nazareth? Cunningham presents him as being very human and quite capable of making mistakes. Do his fallibility and vulnerability trouble you? Comfort you? Do Cunningham’s reinterpretations of specific Biblical stories make sense to you? Would you have been angry with Jesus for blasting a fig tree?

 

Many people think that Mary Magdalen and Mary of Bethany were the same person. In Cunningham’s novel, they are quite distinct. Maeve suspects that Mary B would like to cast herself as Spirit and Maeve as Flesh. How does Cunningham deal with these dichotomies and stereotypes?

 

Cunningham gives a different and sympathetic twist to the story of Judas. She even holds Jesus partly responsible for their rift. Why? She also directly addresses the anti-Semitism of the canonical Gospels. Does her re-telling of the arrest and crucifixion challenge any of your assumptions?

 

What is your understanding of the Resurrection? How does Cunningham’s version depart from the Biblical story? However radical her re-telling, Cunningham leaves the Resurrection largely unexplained, mysterious. Why do you think she made this choice?

 

By the end of the story, Maeve undergoes her own apotheosis, becoming the incarnation of the goddess Isis. Is Cunningham suggesting that Maeve is Jesus’s divine counterpart? Is the novel blasphemous?

 

 

 

           

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