The word "virgin" has been used this way both throughout history and throughout the world. In Babylon, infants born to single mothers were called "virgin births." In ancient Greece, a woman remained a maiden—kore or parthenos—until marriage, when she became a gyne, a woman. Pregnancy and childbirth made no difference. And in the twentieth century, anthropologist Edmund Leach found that in the Trobriand Islands just off what is now East Timor, a widow became a "marriageable maiden" when she finished her mourning period. As two thousand years ago, virginity was a social role, not a physical fact.
The linguistic argument doesn't hold up. Worse, the very fact of its being made leaves something of a bad taste in the mouth. To reduce the whole issue of virginity to a mere translating error—let alone one that may or may not have occurred—is to lose all sense of the grandeur of paradox. And the virgin mother is the supreme paradox. Its fascination lies in the fact, known as widely two thousand years ago as it is now, that a pregnant woman is not a physical virgin. We are talking a human impossibility, and that is precisely the power of the notion. It occurs at the interface between the human and the divine, the place where the mind reels, drunk with impossible possibility.
Claude Levi-Strauss maintained that the human imagination is trapped in a web of dualisms: the raw and the cooked, to quote his best-known example, or virgin and whore, good and evil, love and hate, sacred and profane. Every myth, Levi-Strauss argued, is driven by the obsessive need to solve a paradox—a contradiction in terms that cannot, by definition, be solved. If a solution were possible, it would no longer be a paradox, and so would lose its power to haunt and hold the imagination.
But for Maryam, as for everyone in her time, there was no such obsessive need. They had no expectation that everything could be explained. And they maintained a far greater sense of humility in the face of the unknown. Instead of being a challenge to reason and science, the paradoxical was cherished as the source of awe and mystery.
Today, if we talk at all about mysteries, it's usually about mystery novels—an elementary but safe form of mystery, where we know before we even open the book that it will have a resolution. Yet even on this everyday level, there is an inkling of a sense of religious mystery. Beyond the simple page-turner aspect, beyond escape from the humdrum facts and pressures of everyday life, each mystery offers the excitement of coming face to face with the incomprehensible, even the impossible, like the murdered man found inside a room locked from the inside. In fact it is almost a disappointment when the resolution comes. The detailed explanation of whodunnit and how it was done is supposed to be the climax of the story, but it generally feels distinctly anticlimactic. The reader's delight is in the exploration, not in the explanation.
But where mystery novels are essentially spoiled by the convention that they must have a resolution, religious mystery thrives on its defiance of such resolution. That is precisely why it lasts, and why it continues to exert its hold on us. It offers a glimpse, or perhaps just a glimmer, of something far beyond our ken. Something that is by definition not just unknown, but unknowable, and that we therefore call sacred.
As with a Zen koan, one cannot understand a paradox, but one can apprehend it. Throughout the centuries, mystics of all faiths, including Christian gnostics, Islamic Sufis, and Jewish kabbalists, have delved into the paradoxical to reach beyond literal meaning to its underlying mystery, in the hope of at least a brief moment of epiphany. Using techniques such as allegorical interpretation, deep meditation, and even ecstatic dance, they aim at breaking down the dualistic intellect—or rather, leaping beyond it—to approach the ineffable. The paradoxical becomes not just a conundrum, but an essential tool to revelation.
In fact you could argue that a real religious sense cannot exist without paradox. Divinity must be paradoxical, or it loses its power to hold the imagination. Pascal maintained that the only lasting religion is one that goes "against nature, and against proofs." For what is the grandeur of the divine if it does not supersede the known and the human?
Dogma and forms of worship are merely the exterior characteristics of particular religions. They do not even begin to touch the interior, which is the religious sense or spirit: the sense of the sacred, the apprehension of the divine. And since the divine is by definition beyond the physical—metaphysical—the only way we can come close to it is indirectly, through paradox, metaphor, and allegory. That is, through poetry.
All the great religious writings came into being not as "texts," but as oral poetry. And the power and endurance of the prophetic and wisdom writings in the Bible lie in the spirit of poetry. For poetry thrives on the enigmatic. It creates room for the imagination to soar, for the senses to expand, for the mind to marvel. The essence of the religious spirit is poetic; the rest—the legalistic side of what we now call organized religion—is prosaic.
This is why modern fundamentalism is so tragic a distortion of religion. By restricting itself to the most literal interpretations of poetic texts, it becomes blind to the religious spirit. It becomes, in fact, antireligious. The sacred is reduced to a set of legal strictures; awe and mystery to obedience and punishment. Lacking all sense of the poetic, fundamentalism hates paradox, and denies mystery. Enigma is anathema. It is religion made harsh, and at the same time—why not be paradoxical about it?—made bland.
Perhaps this loss of metaphor was inevitable. The further a religion travels from its roots in place and time, the more it depends solely on the written word. The word becomes sacrosanct in exile, like love letters pored over for every minutia of meaning when a couple are separated by distance. The greater the distance and the longer the separation, the more meaning is read into every word. And each word then becomes over-burdened. It goes stiff under the burden of so much emotional weight, fossilizes under the pressure of need and desire, loses all its seductive ambiguity, all flexibility, all sense of the enigmatic. It gets pinned down to one mundane, literal meaning.
In his Poetics, written nearly four centuries before Maryam was born, Aristotle wrote that "the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities." So too should anyone seeking a glimpse of the divine. It is precisely the knowledge that a virgin birth is not possible that makes the idea so powerful. Indeed, as the question "But was she really a virgin?" makes clear, most Catholics of faith do not literally believe that Mary was a virgin; rather, they nurture the idea of it. Otherwise they would not have to even ask the question. They know one thing rationally, and believe another with the deeper kind of knowledge we call faith: the power of trust over proof, of imagination over physical reality. Or, as Aristotle called it, the willing suspension of disbelief.
To seek proof that virginal conception is either possible or impossible, then, is to miss the point. It could be said that those who argue that Maryam was definitely not a virgin have no imagination, while those who maintain that she definitely was, have no sense of reason. And since to be human is to be possessed of both imagination and reason, the one without the other leaves us impoverished, deprived of an essential part of our own humanity.
Surely we need to recognize that the virgin mother represents a metaphysical truth, one that thrives in the realm of poetry, not of physics. It seems a sad comment on our own times that this was appreciated far more two thousand years ago than it is today.
Maryam was born into "a world full of gods," to quote the title of British historian Keith Hopkins' history of belief in the first century—a world full also of goddesses, who had been revered for hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. These were virgin goddesses. And virgin goddesses were fertility goddesses.
Few were remotely virginal in the modern sense of the word. They had, to put it mildly, active sex lives. But their virginity was never defined in terms of the existence of a hymen. Instead, they were manifestations of what Italian classicist Giulia Sissa calls "the enigmatic virgin." They existed in a state of "maidenhood without maidenhead."
Take sex out of the picture, in other wo
rds—however shocking that may be to the modern mind—and virginity becomes something infinitely grander and more mysterious than the presence of a membrane.
Isis was the greatest of the great virgins. By Maryam's time, she had been worshipped for some three thousand years, and her renown had spread far beyond Egypt, becoming so powerful in Rome that the emperor Nero would eventually order all her temples destroyed as a threat to the existing order. Not that she needed temples. Throughout the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean, women in villages like Nazareth worshipped her in small, everyday ways as the wisest of the wise women, the one who understood their most intimate lives.
But the goddess whose legend gave birth to all the others was not Isis; it was her mother, Nuth, who ruled the sky. In Egypt, Nuth was always shown in an extraordinarily sensuous pose: arched over the earth, long-limbed and long-bellied, with a series of bright yellow disks running the length of her torso. These disks represented the round orb of the sun entering her mouth, traveling through her body, and emerging between her thighs, for as the goddess of all birth and rebirth, she swallowed the sun each evening at sundown, and each dawn, gave birth to it again.
She was the ultimate mother not only of the sun, but of all creation. And as one of her priests recorded, she doubled—perhaps even tripled—the ante of virgin motherhood by giving birth even to herself: "It was Nuth, the mighty mother, who was the first to give birth to anything, and she did so when nothing else had been born, and when she herself had never been born."
Nuth would metamorphose into innumerable other goddesses, taking on different names as her legend traveled through central Asia and the Mediterranean. In one manifestation or another, the virgin goddess held sway throughout the virtual Babel of ancient cultures and beliefs, all borrowing from each other, influencing each other, fusing and separating in constant flux. In Sumer, she was known as the Virgin Inanna, goddess of sex and procreation, whose many lovers included legendary kings. In Babylon, the Virgin Ishtar was not just the firstborn of the gods, but the mother of all gods and all men, proudly insistent on her independence from any male. "It is I alone who gave birth to the people," she proclaimed. She alone, too, who would bring her dead lover, Tammuz, back to life. And in the land of Canaan, Asherah, also called "The Maid" and "She Who Gives Birth to the Gods," was yet another manifestation, as was her daughter Anath, who further defied all human conventions by being the goddess of the exclusively male realms of war and the hunt, as well as the exclusively female one of childbirth.
Anath's legend follows that of Isis as it relates how her lover and brother, the storm god Baal, died and descended to the world of Mot, the god of death and sterility. In deep mourning, she descended to the underworld herself in search of him, as the Greek goddess Demeter would later do in search of her daughter, Persephone. When Anath found Baal's body, she brought it back up to the surface of the earth, ground it up, sowed his seed far and wide, and thus resurrected him.
Meanwhile, in what is now Turkey, a particularly gruesome detail developed in the legend of the Virgin Cybele, who became known in Rome as Magna Deum Mater, the great mother of the gods. She had taken a young human lover, Attis, but youth being as callow and hormones as irresistible then as now, he had been unfaithful to her with a nymph. The wrath of the goddess exacted a high price: in repentance, Attis castrated himself. As he died from the ensuing loss of blood, his seed fell all over the earth, and seeing this, Cybele forgave him, and resurrected him as the god of vegetation.
Again and again, the great virgin and the great mother are one and the same. Defying human preconceptions, she is chaste and promiscuous, tender and bloodthirsty—as contradictory, in short, as only a goddess can be.
Even as she gradually lost supreme power, becoming just one of several deities in the Greek and Roman pantheons, the great virgin still retained her paradoxical nature. Artemis was the goddess of childbirth, yet she was also worshipped as the goddess of the hunt, and so of death. The paradox lived on in the herb named after her, artemisia, which depending on the dosage could be either a fertility drug, or one to prevent or terminate pregnancy. When the Romans appropriated Greek theology, she would become Diana, the virgin goddess whose most famed statue, Diana of Ephesus, shows her positively bursting with fertility, multiple rows of breasts spilling across her chest like a huge bunch of grapes swollen with juice. And later, as Christianity gained ascendance, the great temple of Diana at Ephesus would be rededicated, like many of the Isis temples, to the Virgin Mary.
But no matter what name the great goddess bore, where she was worshipped, or what unique details her legend contained, her virginity was essential. It signified her power. The virgin was her own person, unpossessed and unpossessable by any man, whether god or human. She took lovers, but was never taken herself; she never married. Far from being barren or unfruitful, she was virgin in the same way we still talk of virgin forest or virgin territory. She teemed with life. Untamed, untouchable, uncontrollable, she was the wild, fecund source of creation. Soil, rain, sun; seed, harvest, sustenance; man, woman, child—every form of life began with her.
She was the essence of fertility, and her power was life itself. Throughout the peasant agricultural societies of the Middle East, her legend was the enduring metaphor for the revolution of the seasons. During her grief at the loss of her dead lover or brother or child, the soil lay barren; her resuscitation of the loved one brought the soil back to life again. Male gods or humans provided the seed, but only she could make it fertile.
Anyone who has experienced the first rain in the arid Middle East will understand how powerful an impression is made by this annual return to fertility. Even in the twenty-first century, it induces an almost primordial sense of awe.
In the Galilee, the first rain comes in early autumn, around the time of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year—literally, the head or start of the year. Sometimes, it even occurs on the day itself, and then it seems like all the ancient traditions have magically come together to create new life.
You sense it first in the air. The earth is baked and cracked from the long summer drought; the dust in your nose and ears and mouth is so constant that you barely notice it. But something is different, and you lift your head to what you slowly realize is the first hint of moisture after months of dryness. An hour passes, perhaps two, and then you hear the sound: like someone dropping marbles onto flagstones outside the window. You don't know what it is at first, it's been so long since there was rain. And then you look outside and you see it: huge, heavy drops coming down one by one, hitting the bone-dry ground and bouncing off it as though each drop were solid. Then more come down, and more, until within a few minutes they're beating on the ground with the rhythm of a tabla player, the rapid heavy beat of the Middle East. Only the first rain is ever so loud.
Birds wake out of their torpor and join in like flutes to the drumbeat. Thunder rolls over the hills, adding in bass. Giant black clouds move over the landscape, sweeping in as the wind picks up. And then suddenly the rain is slashing across the valleys in huge white curtains, water is running down the rocky hillsides, spilling over stone terraces, cascading through dry wadi beds in flash floods that seem to have come from nowhere. Hillside alleys become streams, waterfalls splash down off roofs. Children run outside and turn in slow circles with arms spread, mouths wide open and faces turned up to the sky to drink the rain as it falls.
An hour later, it's over. Only the smell remains—the smell of damp earth, of bushes and trees coming back to life, of seeds long dormant pushing up through the stony soil. It's the scent of renewal, the primal knowledge in the air that new life, a new year, has begun.
This is the ancient gift of the virgin—the powerful pulse of life in the making. Hers is the mystery of fertility, the wild unpredictability of it, which we acknowledge even today when we call droughts or floods or other natural disasters "acts of god." As any villager in Nazareth could have told you, when you live on the land, you can never take it for granted.
One way or another, fertility is always miraculous.
VI
If she could—if there were such things as time and luxury in her life—Maryam would sit for hours at a time with her hands folded across her belly, feeling the child growing inside her. She is surprised at this. After all, she is used to birth. She has pulled lambs and kids out of their mothers' wombs—released them from their placentas, wiped off the blood and tissue, massaged the mothers' teats until the milk began to flow. She's done the same for women and their newborns, countless times. But she's always been so focused on birth that she never really thought about the months that went before.
She thinks of how pregnant women look as they straighten up to rest their backs in the fields, or pause on the way back from the well—of the way they stare down at their swollen bellies, eyes wide in a kind of tender amazement. "Look what I have done," they seem to be saying. And when she searches for the word to describe that look on their faces, what she finds is "awe."
But now Maryam realizes that there's no understanding the depth of that feeling until it happens to you, until it's your own belly you look down on, your own skin stretching, your own knowledge that there is another being growing inside you. Now she knows it be-basara, as the saying goes—on her own flesh. A different kind of knowledge. And with this new knowledge comes an immense sense of both pride and humility.
She didn't have to tell Salome. All the old woman needed was one glimpse of her granddaughter sitting with her hands across her belly, and she knew. "Blessed be the Name," she said, and the ritual phrase rang fresh in Maryam's ears as the old woman hugged her close. "Blessed be the woman."
And Maryam truly feels blessed. A new life is growing inside her, a small miracle growing larger by the day. As her belly swells and the village sees she is pregnant, the child is welcomed even before it is born into the world. The ritual yet heartfelt words are repeated—she is blessed and blessed again—because every pregnancy offers the hope of new life, and each new life is hope.
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