This is why of all the gods, Isis is the one to whom women turn, no matter whether they are Galilean or Judean, Greek or Roman, Syrian or Egyptian. She understands women as only a wise woman can. Two of her greatest titles are the Lady Who Saves and the Great Sorcerer, for she is the mistress of the art of medicine—the one invoked by village healers and by women in childbirth. She has the grief of a wife in mourning, the midwife's concern for life, the healer's compassion, a lover's devotion, the tenderness of a nursing mother. She is everything a woman is, which is why women in all manner of trouble call on her, offering a lock of a child's hair, or an oil lamp lit in her name, or just a simple prayer. They draw comfort and strength from her presence.
Salome has told many stories about Isis over the years, and as is the way with stories of the gods, not all the versions agree with each other. No matter. Each story has its own mystery, and there are further, multiple mysteries contained within the contradictions. In some, Osiris plays a triple role: not only lover and brother to Isis, but also her son—a pattern which will be echoed two centuries later in the gnostic gospel of Philip, which will call Maryam "sister, mother, consort" of Jesus. In others, Horus takes the place of Osiris, and even while she is still pregnant, Isis says of him, "He shall rule over this earth. He will be our master, this god who is but an embryo."
Maryam, just thirteen, places her hands around the bulge of her belly and repeats the words softly, wonderingly. To know the fate of your child, to know that you are carrying greatness . . . She closes her eyes, and dares to imagine herself saying the words of Isis. And for the first time, feels the baby kick.
She offers up a quiet prayer of thanks. "Myrionymos," she murmurs, the Greek name for Isis that always makes her smile, echoing as it does the sound of her name. Myrionymos—She of Many Names.
She has no idea that hundreds of years after her own death, she too will become myrionymos, with many of the same names as those used for Isis: Queen of Heaven, for instance, or She Who Is Crowned with the Stars, or Star of the Sea. Or that Isis Lactans—the popular image of Isis suckling the infant Horus in paintings and statues—will merge with the classic representation of herself and her as yet unborn son. Or that a version of herself called the Virgin Mary will eventually take the place of the Virgin Isis—literally take her place, with Isis temples being rededicated to Mary.
If you had told Maryam any of this, she would have been shocked, offended, even terrified. One did not take the powers of gods so lightly as to aspire to usurp them.
In the convent school I attended as a child, we were taught to think of pagans as godless creatures living in benighted ignorance of all things holy. Never mind that all the great thinkers of antiquity were pagan, and that they lacked neither soul nor faith nor a sense of the sacred. To the contrary, they possessed all those things to a far larger degree than most of us do today. A sense of the sacred permeated every aspect of everyday life; it was integrated into the everyday, and awe and wonder were part of being.
Not that those great thinkers thought of themselves as pagan. Then as now, the word was used derogatively. It came from the same root as the word for "peasant" (pagus in Latin, meaning a country district), so that to the Roman aristocracy, a peasant was by definition a pagan, and vice versa. High-born Athenians or Spartans or Romans would never for the life of them think of themselves as pagans; they were believers, men and women of good faith. And they believed in many gods.
I would be many years out of the convent school when I realized that paganism really means polytheism, and that most polytheists acknowledged one god above all. Whether this god was called El or Uranus, Zeus or Jupiter, Lah or Yahweh, he was so great and so remote that direct address was impossible. Instead, people turned to a vast array of more accessible gods who would be willing to intercede on their behalf.
Even in the west, people still do. If we could let go of our preconceptions—our lubricious association of paganism with nymphs dancing around naked in the sunrise, for instance—we would have to acknowledge that for all our pride in monotheism, we are still far more polytheistic than we might think.
A degree of polytheism is built into Catholicism in the idea of the Holy Trinity, for example, and in the vast panoply of saints to whom believers pray. Saints—indeed, Maryam herself—have become intercessors, called on for a purpose, in the same way people called on Isis for healing two thousand years ago. Whether we call them lesser gods or prophets, saints or holy men and women, they are sacred figures with whom one can have a relationship. They listen to humans and can do some special pleading, and they can be wooed for this purpose with flowers and candles and gifts: offerings. They are the manifestations of the persistent need to humanize the divine—to give it a name that can be spoken, a face that can be seen.
In a similar manner, observant Jews revere the burial sites of biblical ancestors—Abraham's tomb in Hebron, Rachel's tomb in Bethlehem—and of famous rabbis, to whose tombs Sephardi Jews in particular make pilgrimage on their feast days, setting up barbecues and picnic tables for festive celebrations in the graveyards. And despite all strictures against idolatry, ultra-Orthodox Jews revere the stones of the Western Wall. Never mind that it was never, strictly speaking, part of the temple, but merely a section of the retaining wall built by Herod; modern Jews pray before it, kiss its giant ashlar stones, push written prayers and pleas into the crevices between the limestone blocks.
Throughout the Mediterranean, remnants of ancient pantheistic cults survive in pagan beliefs absorbed into monotheistic ones. The fruit of a fig tree in a West Bank monastery, for instance, cures infertility, despite the fact that women are barred from crossing the threshold. A healing spring in southern Galilee is revered by local Moslems who have named it after an early-twentieth-century Jewish settler. The leaves of an acacia tree growing beside a Moroccan rabbi's grave heal crippled limbs.
None of this is so strange when you consider that in the west, pagan traditions are built into the most agnostic everyday lives. Take the names of days, for instance. In English and German, most of them come from those of Norse gods; in French and Spanish, from Roman gods. We honor pagan deities each time we arrange a meeting or make a date.
Perhaps one of the best descriptions of paganism comes from biblical scholar Paula Fredriksen, who calls it "the rich native religious stew of traditional society in the Mediterranean." And a stew it was, a feast of sacred variety. "In the pre-Christian epoch," as religious historian Walter Burkert wrote, "the various forms of worship . . . are never exclusive; they appear as varying forms, trends, or options within the one disparate yet continuous conglomerate of ancient religion."
The gods of old, in short, were remarkably tolerant. Much more so than the cruel exclusive gods invoked by modern fundamentalists, whose thirst for blood—whether in Moslem suicide bombings, in Christian executions of abortion providers, or in Jewish attacks on Palestinian villagers trying to pick olives—seems primitive by comparison.
Yahweh was far more accepting of other gods than were his high priests and his prophets. Maryam was right: "no gods before me," not no other gods at all. Primacy, not exclusivity. In fact one can read the whole of the Hebrew bible as the history not of monotheism but of its failure, with the prophets railing again and again at their people for following other gods.
Canaanite, Egyptian, Babylonian, and smaller, more local traditions persisted in Maryam's time. They still do. A wealth of Middle Eastern superstitions and small rituals have their roots in far older religions: spitting against the evil eye, for instance, or the open hand held up to ward off evil—the familiar hamsa amulet. And religions still crossbreed and interconnect in ways we are hardly aware of.
Jews who avoid walking under a ladder or who cross their fingers for luck are acting out Christian rituals, since both the ladder and the fingers refer to the cross of the crucifixion. Christians who consult the daily horoscope in the newspaper are acting out Babylonian beliefs, where the stars and the planets are the gods of f
ate. Moslems who face east to pray in the direction of Mecca are facing the rising sun, the focal point of ancient Egyptian sun worship.
Islam is clear in its recognition of the Hebrew prophets who went before Mohammed, as well as Jesus and Mary. Christianity not only acknowledges its basis in the Hebrew bible; the gospels go to great length to establish Jesus as the manifestation of Hebrew biblical prophecy. The Judaic practices in Herod's temple were heavily influenced by temple religions throughout the eastern Mediterranean and central Asia.
This crossbreeding seems to me cause for celebration. The religions that we think of as dividing us, in fact bind us together. No religion rises new, out of nothing, entirely unaffected by the existing religions of the culture in which it arose. In the words of Harvard theologist Harvey Cox, "Every religion is like Peer Gynt's famous onion. If you tried to peel away all they have absorbed from other faiths, which are in turn already conglomerates, you would find only more and more layers underneath . . . The genius of a faith is found more in its characteristic ways of combining things than in some induplicable inner essence."
An Israelite daughter of Yahweh making offerings to Isis was not being unfaithful to the one great god. She was speaking with one form of the divine, with the goddess of the most important thing of all in a peasant society: fertility. And what is the essence of Maryam's story as it has come down to us if not miraculous fertility?
"But was Mary really a virgin?" It's a deceptively simple question, asked sincerely by the faithful, and teasingly, even mockingly, by the cynical. The former want to know if it's possible; the latter take it for granted that it's not.
In modern terms, virginity has been reduced to an either/or matter: Either she was or she wasn't. Given that we define virginity by the hymen, this seems reasonable enough. The hymen is either intact or not—a basic physical fact, but one that even in the twenty-first century, comes laden with immense cultural weight.
The very language we use when we talk about virginity is loaded. Though it seems oddly dated, we still talk of "losing one's virginity," a phrase that implies not just loss, but hapless passivity. A man "takes" a girl's virginity, the implication being that she is the deceived or seduced victim. As in Victorian pornography where innocents are "taken" sexually by ruthless roues, there is a certain lasciviousness in such talk, a sense of swooning female helplessness and rapacious male power that does credit to neither gender.
We still think of being virgin as being innocent. Innocent, that is, of sex. But this surely begs the question of why we should be innocent of sex. To be innocent is to be free from moral wrong, to be guiltless, to have done no evil. Do we then think of sex as morally wrong, guilty, and evil? Whatever modern reason says, our language betrays us. This may be the twenty-first century, but some part of us still subscribes to the antiquated dualisms of virgin and whore, good girl and bad girl, innocent and slut—terms that exist in abundance for girls and women, but hardly at all for boys and men, among whom sexual experience is at least tolerated and usually appreciated.
The idea of virginity as a precious commodity that can be lost—not through carelessness, but more in the sense of a "lost soul," doomed and damned—is often rationalized by the idea of wholeness. From this point of view, an intact hymen is the visible evidence of a state of perfection. Once it is gone, the female body is no longer whole, but becomes used or damaged goods.
Leaving aside the very idea of the female body as goods, used or not, the contradictions built into this viewpoint should give pause to those who hold it dearest: the fundamentalist guardians of purity. If you support the politicization of private life currently known as "family values," motherhood should surely be seen as a state of wholeness and completion. So too, in that case, should the sexual activity that leads to motherhood.
The problem is that sexual activity itself has been politicized, which is why a small biological detail—a mere membrane—assumes such giant proportions. This is also why the hymen has become a far more fetishistic object than a similarly slight male membrane, the foreskin. The absence of a foreskin does not indicate sexual experience; the absence of a hymen usually does.
"The hymen and the foreskin are biologically insignificant tissues that represent momentous psychological issues," say psychoanalysts Deanna Holtzman and Nancy Kulish. At least we assume they are biologically insignificant. The truth is, nobody knows. Holtzman and Kulish did a thorough search of gynecological publications for information on the biological significance of the hymen, and found . . . nothing. They concluded that "there is no known anatomical or physiological function for the hymen."
Something that is not understood becomes both intriguing and alluring, a fertile field for myth and superstition; when it has to do with female sexuality, the myths and superstitions are infinitely multiplied. In the lack of a known physical function, especially in a culture such as ours where it is assumed that everything does indeed have a function, the hymen maintains an aura of mystery. Thus the assumption of "momentous psychological issues." In Maryam's time, however, attitudes toward the hymen were far more down-to-earth.
The word itself is ancient Greek for a membrane, and saw double service as the name of a bridal song or hymn. It was personified by Hymen, the god of marriage, a lissome youth shown carrying a flaming torch and a veil, who died on his wedding night. The symbolism of flames/sex and veil/hymen is clear enough. It would be almost laughable to a modern audience were it not that brides still raise their veils to be kissed at the conclusion of the marriage ceremony, that we still talk of women "taking the veil" when they become nuns, and that made-for- television movies still cut away to flames rising in an open hearth when the action begins to get steamy. But what is most fascinating is the gender of the god involved. It is as though the hymen were the one part of a woman's body that made her somehow not-female, and that is why Hymen had to die. Only then was the woman fully female. Only then could she become pregnant. Only then, fertile.
This would surely indicate that virginity was a liability rather than an asset two millennia ago, especially with such high maternal and infant mortality rates. The earlier a girl began sexual activity, the greater her potential fertility. And the more children she gave birth to, the higher the probability that at least two might survive to adulthood.
An intact hymen did have one singular value, however: it guaranteed that the first-born was indeed the child of the father. In a peasant culture such as Maryam's, where family continuity on the land was the prime value, the hymen was the only absolute assurance of paternity (and would remain so until two millennia later, with the advent of DNA testing). Thus the dire punishment in Deuteronomy, ignored in Maryam's time along with most of the other Deuteronomical strictures, of putting a false virgin to death by stoning. The offense was a legal one. If the woman's first child was male, the hymen determined inheritance rights. By misrepresenting herself, a sexually experienced woman put the system of inheritance in doubt. Physical virginity was not a moral issue, but an economic one.
This is the essence of the legendary emphasis on Mary's virginal conception of Jesus. It was essential to her son's future identity: a guarantee of divine paternity.
But though this may help explain why Mary had to be a virgin—had to become one, as it were—it does not help with the question of whether the real Maryam could possibly have been one. What does seem clear is that our modern emphasis on physiology may be misleading; we may be asking the wrong question. But those who claim to have found the answer elsewhere, in linguistics, appear to be asking merely another version of the wrong question.
The most mundane way of dealing with the virginity question is to focus not on the hymen, but on a detail much noted by biblical scholars: that the author of Matthew's gospel made an error in translation. He used numerous references to the Hebrew bible in order to prove that Jesus was indeed the messiah foretold by the great prophets. But since he wrote in Greek, not in biblical Hebrew, he ran into trouble when he quoted the famed verse fr
om Isaiah rendered in the King James bible as "Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel."
The original Hebrew uses the word alma, which referred to any unmarried woman, albeit usually a girl at the age of puberty. Matthew uses the Greek word parthenos, which generally meant physical virginity. The difference in meaning was not exactly Matthew's fault. The Hebrew bible had been translated into Greek three hundred years earlier, in Alexandria. That edition, known as the Septuagint after the seventy scholars who reputedly spent their respective lifetimes working on it, was the one the Matthew author would have used, since it's highly unlikely that he knew Hebrew. And the error, insofar as there was one, was one that all translators still know and tussle with: cultural differences give subtly different meanings to specific words, so that there are often no direct equivalents in another language.
This seems a convincing argument at first, though it's hard to think of a more disappointing one. If the whole question of Maryam's virginity can be boiled down to something as elementary as a mistranslation, we are left feeling oddly foolish, if not downright bereft. Reason has been satisfied, true, but something in us suspects that reason alone can be utterly unreasonable. And in this case, that something is right.
It may be convenient to argue that parthenos meant a physical virgin, but that was not always the case. The word was also used for a girl who had been raped or was an unmarried mother. In that sense, it was used much as we use the word "parthenogenesis" today when talking about basic plant forms: reproduction without fertilization. Faced with an evident pregnancy and no known father, the language allowed for there having been no father at all, despite the physical evidence. In short, parthenos was an ancient euphemism.
The Romans would later adopt the same attitude, as they adopted so much else in Greek culture. The Latin word virgo was used for any woman who was not married, no matter her age and no matter if she was pregnant. A widow could be as virgin as a young girl.
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