What is striking in the gospel accounts is that Jesus does not have this fear. His followers fear the hemorrhaging woman and the leper as unclean; he does not. When he tells his disciples that neither the blind man nor his parents have sinned, he reveals a down-to-earth awareness of natural cause and effect—an awareness that he must have learned from the experts who raised him. That is, the village wise women.
But though Jesus did not see individual illness as just punishment for some past sin, he did see the sorry state of the body politic that way. The power of casting out demons had a wider metaphorical meaning. As he and other healers and preachers used it, it also meant casting out corruption and foreign rule. It meant purifying the temple, and freeing Judea and Galilee from the influence of Hellenism, Rome, and Herod. Expelling the human demons, that is.
In this, Jesus was very much in the classical prophetic tradition. The metaphor of physical sickness and health was national as well as personal, and was used this way throughout the great prophetic writings. "The eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped," said Isaiah. "Then the lame man shall leap like a hart and the tongue of the dumb sing with joy."
Illness and cure were used repeatedly as metaphors in the apocalyptic writings of the Essenes, whose very name probably came from the Aramaic asa—to heal—meaning not only physical healing, but also, in a forerunner of the latter kabbalistic idea of tikkun olam, healing the ills of the world. God will "release the captives, make the blind see, raise up the downtrodden," says the first-century B.C. Messianic Apocalypse, as well as "heal the sick, resurrect the dead, and announce glad tidings to the poor."
Healing was thus heavily politicized. There was no escaping that fact. The fusion of medicine, religion, and national aspiration was built into the culture.
In such a world, the hardest won knowledge was Maryam's: that both health and sickness were natural and that there was no divine reward or punishment involved. No magic tricks, either, such as she'd seen in the marketplace of Magdala, where self-proclaimed miracle workers chanted nonsense while slitting a chicken's throat, then twirled the bird over a sick woman's body, spattering her with blood. Maryam pitied those who lined up to spend what little they had on ornate amulets with prayers and seeds inside them, or on potions made out of powdered lizard tails or frogs' eyes or bats' wings. And she'd turn away, sick to her stomach, from apothecaries who put hair cut from the head of a crucified man inside a bag to be sold as a necklace against fever, or nails from the cross as a charm against attack.
"Charlatans," her grandmother would say, spitting on the ground in disgust. "Crooks. Profiteering scum. Listen to me, child: there is no need to kill in order to heal. No need for sacrifice, not even of a lizard or a chicken, let alone a good man crucified for his courage in speaking out and resisting injustice. No magic here," she'd say, tapping her head with her forefinger. "Just knowledge. The will of God? Knowledge is the will of God."
That is why Eve ate the apple of the Tree of Knowledge, of course. Not in rebellion against God, but as part of the divine plan to bring human beings to life—to real, conscious, knowing life instead of the temporary artifice of Eden. Thus her name, Hava in Hebrew, meaning "life."
To play the role of Eve, however, could be as difficult in Maryam's time as it had been for Eve herself. Though the wise women made no claims to divine inspiration, their ability threatened those who claimed a sacred monopoly on healing. The apocryphal first-century Book of Enoch attacked them head on, saying that fallen angels—devils—had taught "the daughters of men" poisons, medicines, spells, invocations, and sorcery.
Such attacks exemplified the nervousness of the temple priesthood. Bad enough that healing power was being practiced by anyone other than they, with their scrolls of spells and medicinal recipes closely guarded in the temple archives. Worse still that it was being done by illiterate peasant women. But most seriously, village healers constituted a political challenge to the authority of the temple priesthood.
The very phrase "healing power" contains the issue: to be able to heal was to exercise power. It meant that the dictates of fate, whether divinely or humanly determined, did not have to be passively accepted.
The phrases you can still hear in peasant villages throughout the Middle East—"That's the way it is," "What can you do?" "It's the will of God"—were put in question by the skill of wise women. There were indeed things that could be done. The will of God could be guided in a different direction by human intervention. Humans, that is, could affect fate. They could assert independence.
To a temple establishment clinging to power and privilege, that was a dangerous message. Two thousand years ago as now, religion was threatened by science. The difference is that then, the scientists were those who practiced alternative medicine: the folk healers. It was establishment medicine, under the temple authorities, that sought to keep healing firmly within the bounds of religion.
Galilee wise women like Salome and Maryam were fortunate in living so far from Jerusalem; they could continue their work without harassment. Others farther south, in Judea, had less freedom to practice With healing claimed as a divine function by the powers-that-be, their work risked being seen as magic—and if it failed, as it inevitably sometimes did, as black magic, or the work of demons. The most infamous instance of this happening would be sixteen centuries later in colonial America, when many of the women persecuted in the Salem witch trials were midwives and healers. Caught in the seemingly never-ending politicization of healing, their skill was attributed to fallen angels instead of good ones.
There is a terrible irony in this. If Maryam was indeed a midwife and a healer—and her son's powers and style of healing strongly indicate that she was, and that it was she who taught him his skills, breaking the line of female transmission in order to empower her son—then she was fortunate to have lived in first-century Galilee and not later and elsewhere. In seventeenth-century Massachusetts, she would have risked being burned at the stake, in full religious fervor and in the name of her own son, as a witch. Still more disturbing, she might well be the target of similar zealots in American society today: those who kill and yet call themselves pro-life.
Maryam certainly knew as much about how to prevent childbirth as how to assist it. Contraception was widely used throughout the Mediterranean of her time. The most popular methods were coitus interruptus (advocated by Hippocrates, and later approved by Palestinian rabbis as "threshing within and winnowing without"), anal sex ("he plowed in the garden and poured out on manure piles," in a later Talmudic reference), extended breast-feeding, estrogenic herbs taken orally, and spermicidal resins used vaginally in pessaries and sponges. And, if all else failed, abortion.
Aristotle and Plato both advocated early termination of pregnancy. "The proper thing to do," wrote the former in his Politics, "is to limit the size of each family, and if children are then conceived in excess of the limit so fixed, have miscarriage induced before sense and life have begun in the embryo." This idea was so enthusiastically adopted by the well-to-do that by the first century, the Roman aristocracy was suffering a major problem of infertility, which is why so many emperors adopted male heirs; they didn't have any surviving ones of their own.
Plautus, Cicero, and Ovid all refer to douching after sex. Saint Jerome in his twenty-second epistle would later speak of young girls who "savor their sterility in advance and kill the human being even before its seed has been sown." Polybius wrote in the second century B.C. that Greek families limited themselves to one or two children—clearly using contraception backed up by abortion.
The famed second-century gynecologist Soranus of Ephesus listed numerous contraceptive and abortive methods using plants we now know to have active properties. His favorite was giant fennel root—Ferula silphium—which turned out to be unfortunate for that particular plant. Discovered by the Greeks on the north African coast in the seventh century B.C., it became so sought after as a contraceptive and an abortion drug (the effect
depending on the dosage, much as most modern "morning-after" drugs are simply intensive doses of contraceptive estrogen) that it became extinct by the fourth century A.D. Different species of fennel are still used to induce abortion by village folk practitioners throughout Asia.
Other contraceptive herbs included artemisia—wormwood—named after the virgin goddess Artemis for its ability to keep women without the most visible sign of non-virginity: pregnancy. Similarly, the berries of the chasteberry bush did not keep you chaste; they kept the appearance of chastity thanks to their contraceptive action. The seeds of wild rue—the same rue Ophelia hands out in Shake speare's Hamlet, and certainly with the same associations—were crushed and brewed to promote labor, and in a stronger dose, to induce abortion. Rue is still used this way by Beduin, Mexican, and Indian village women.
In addition to herbs, animal secretions were sometimes used, like foam from a pregnant camel's mouth. Absurd? Disgusting? Not when you consider that an extract of pregnant mare's urine is today one of the best-selling pharmaceuticals in the western world, marketed as estrogen under the trade name Premarin and used as a contraceptive, a "morning-after" drug, and hormone replacement therapy.
If such widespread use of contraception and abortion two thousand years ago seems surprising, it is worth remembering that the current religious bias against contraception and abortion is relatively recent. In the eleventh century, the famous Islamic physician Ibn Sina, known in the west as Avicenna, prescribed abortion drugs in early pregnancy, and Arab physicians recommended contraceptive barriers of wool soaked in olive oil, linseed, cedar gum, or opobalsam, as well as irritant pessaries using such items as ground pine bark as abortifacients. The third- and fourth-century Talmudic rabbis who wrote of "winnowing within and threshing without" approved early abortion using "root potions" since they considered a fetus viable only after forty days from conception. Besides, in their odd misogyny, they considered the commandment to "be fruitful and multiply" to apply to men but not necessarily to women. Or maybe they simply had the wisdom to accommodate to accepted practice.
In our twenty-first-century hubris, we tend to imagine that the world was ignorant before the advent of modern science, and that knowledge advances in a linear progression. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. The very fact that "creationism" is being advanced as a science equal to evolution in some American schools should make us realize that knowledge progresses and regresses according to the social mores of the time and place. Thus American arbiters of morality and "good taste" would doubtless be shocked at a particularly beautiful thirteenth-century-B.c. statuette in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem; it is of a woman—a Canaanite fertility goddess—with the front of her torso cut away to reveal twin infants in her womb, each one reaching up toward a breast while she reaches down and with long, elegant fingers, opens her vagina for childbirth.
How life began was no secret. There are no storks carrying infants in their bills in ancient legend. The gods were sexual creatures in the image of their creators—those who believed in them. If the precise physiology of sperm and ova was not yet known, people certainly had a good concept of seed, how it was planted, and how it grew. Any farmer would. Sperm was seed, as in Onan spilling his in the Hebrew bible. The womb was the incubating soil. In a peasant culture, it's easy to see how women's fertility would be equated with that of the earth, with the seed being nourished, growing, bearing fruit. Like healing, fertility itself carried intimations of the miraculous and the divine, intimations you can still see reflected in the face of any woman bearing her first child.
Under such circumstances, abortive drugs were not given lightly. If the mother's life was threatened, her life was chosen over that of her fetus, with the midwife acting in the true sense of her profession, as the one who is, in the word's German origin, mit or "with" the wife. If a young girl was pregnant as a result of rape—and at a time when there was no distinction between combatants and non-combatants in warfare, rape was dismayingly frequent—no village healer would be cruel enough to insist that she carry the child to term. And if a family was so impoverished that they simply could not afford to feed another mouth, induced miscarriage was an accepted way out. The same reasons, in short, that women still seek abortions worldwide.
As a healer, Maryam would certainly have been as expert in contraception and abortion as she was in midwifery. And we would do her far greater honor by recognizing this—recognizing her as a woman of real knowledge and power—than by ignoring or denying it, for it is precisely this knowledge that places her in sympathy with women throughout the world. Her herbal expertise not only saved women's lives; it made her a strong advocate for the poor and the downtrodden, for those who looked to her for some measure of control over their own lives, as, in a sense, they still do. She was the one who held the power of choice. And she held it as much for herself as for others.
Feminist Catholic scholars have made much of the idea that she willingly assented to her conception and pregnancy. As one Jesuit scholar in Jerusalem put it, "God needed Mary's 'yes.' Her willingness to bear the child is the prophetic act par excellence." But though this is certainly true for Mary the legend, it vastly underestimates the real Maryam. Her "yes" was far more active than mere assent. She had a real choice. She could choose whether to become pregnant. And if for any reason the choice of pregnancy was not hers, she could still choose not to carry the pregnancy to term. She knew how.
Maryam, in short, embodies the resolution of the so-called abortion controversy. Knowledgeable in both contraception and abortion, she chose pregnancy and birth. She was, in modern terms, both pro-life and pro-choice.
V
Once a month, on the eve of the new moon, Maryam makes offerings. She cherishes this time of day. The light glows gold on the hills, varnishing them into warm, deep color, and then the sky slowly deepens into itself: first an intense blue, then a gentle, dark purple that gathers almost imperceptibly into black. "The hour of the goddess," Maryam calls it.
She uses her own, simple altar: three flat stones placed one on top of the other beneath her favorite oak. Her offerings too are simple. Sometimes she brings libations: a goat's first milk, still warm from the udder, perhaps, or virgin olive oil from the first pressing of the year. She holds the bowl out from her body and tips it slowly so that the liquid pours down in a fine line, spreading over the top stone and then slowly dripping down the sides. Other times she'll bring fruit: three ears of the tender first wheat, bound with straw into a small bouquet, or a sprig of the first vine blossom. She lays them on the top stone, knowing that during the night either the breeze or some small creature, the spirit of the goddess, will whisk them away. And once a year, on the shortest and darkest day of winter, she brings small triangular cakes filled almost to bursting with pomegranate or poppy seeds: the special cakes of the Virgin, ripe with the seeds of fertility.
These are offerings, not sacrifices. You sacrifice out of fear, with the flesh and blood of the animal standing in for your own flesh and blood. You tender offerings out of love. Those who placate the divine with sacrifice do so to avert disaster; those who please the divine with offerings, seek fruitfulness. "Nourish the divine, and the divine will nourish you," as Salome says.
Women throughout the villages of Palestine make their offerings this way, bringing the fruits of their own labor. There are no priests to intervene between them and the divine. This is private, and personal, and it exists in a different realm from that of Yahweh and his temple far away in Jerusalem. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," says the commandment, not "Thou shalt have no other gods at all."
Maryam still remembers the first time she heard the story of the Great Virgin. She listened wide-eyed, thumb in her mouth, a three-year-old scarcely daring to breathe as Salome chanted the song of Isis, who made the power of women equal to the power of men. It was a song of life and death and life again. A song of the mystery of life.
Long before anything else existed in the land of Egypt, far t
o the south, Nuth, the great goddess of the sky, and Geb, the father of the earth, brought forth twins, a girl and a boy. They named them Isis and Osiris. The two were so closely intertwined that they became lovers even before they were born, in their mother's womb, and so they remained in life too. In time, they had a younger brother, Seth, but he was consumed with jealousy at their closeness. So he killed Osiris, cut up his body, and scattered his parts over all the earth. The penis fell with the seed of Osiris into the great river they call the Nile, and this is why that river creates fertility wherever it floods over the earth.
Isis went into deep mourning for her lover and brother, keening and wailing as she searched high and low for the parts of his body. She gathered him up, organ by organ, limb by limb, until she had found all of him except that one vital part the great river had claimed as its own. Then she brought him home and put his body back together again. And when she had finished, she made love with him. In so doing, she brought Osiris back to life, for this is how their son, the god Horus, was conceived.
Maryam has heard this story countless times since she was three years old, but she would willingly have Salome repeat it countless times more. She is in thrall to the power of the story, to the grieving sister, the resurrected brother, the two twinned, mated aspects, female and male, of the one divine mystery. It has never occurred to her to ask exactly how Isis made love to the dead Osiris; this is a divine story, and gods can do what humans can not. That is the point of having gods. A missing penis is no obstacle to physical love. And neither is the most essential aspect of Isis' mystery: her virginity. For only the virgin can resurrect the dead, creating and re-creating life. Only the virgin can distill the essence of fertility.
Mary Page 10