Helena and the True Cross

However the events of her life played out, Helena has to be one of the more ambivalent and contentious figures from history. Revered as a saint by the Church, she also is implicated in the murder of her daughter-in-law Fausta, the wife of her son Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor. Contention seems to have run in this particular family: Constantine himself not only orchestrated the [1]death of his wife at his mother’s instigation, but for good measure also murdered his own son, Crispus.

An alleged fragment of the True Cross mounted as a crucifix and presented as a relic. Such religious relics challenge us to accept their worth at face value or not. When all other means of proving their veracity are lacking, believing in what is claimed for them is a matter of individual faith.

These dark family doings apparently are outweighed in (or perhaps conveniently [2]overlooked by) the eyes of the Church by what Helena accomplished in her later years. Considerably later, as it turns out. Helena was reputed to be eighty years old when she journeyed to the [3]Holy Land, there to found churches on the sites of the Nativity and the sepulchre of the crucifixion. But it was what Helena brought back with her to Constantinople that resonated with an aura of legend. In her baggage was a sizable remnant of the True Cross.

In this 15th-century fresco by Piero della Francesca, Helena (far left) supervises the unearthing of the True Cross from the place of its secret burial in Jerusalem. The sincere intentions of the artist are not in themselves enough to convince us of the incongruous improbability of laying bare the perfectly-intact cross after three centuries of burial in the earth.

We can better understand the full import of the acquiring of this precious wood if we view it from the perspective of Helena’s own time and the centuries which immediately followed. For new churches, the acquisition of a holy relic meant status for an individual church, and such status carried with it an enhanced legitimacy – and additionally acted as a draw card for a potential swelling of that church’s [4]congregation. Inspired by such early examples as Helena’s, the acquiring of holy relics reached its peak in the Middle Ages.

With Helena’s help Constantine ruthlessly disposed of his wife, then having installed his mother in his palace to be his consort in all but name he underscored her status to the populace by having this coin struck in her honor: a state of affairs which we now would view as bizarrely Freudian.

Many churches claimed to possess fragments of the True Cross – enough wood, as it was wonderingly remarked at the time, from which to fashion several houses. Seven churches across the Empire boasted the only genuine skull of Mary Magdalene, and no less than thirteen churches laid claim to possess the tiny (and presumably much desiccated) foreskin of the Saviour. Perhaps there was a sense that things in this direction had gone a bridge too far when one nun insisted upon wearing the bizarre trinket as a fleshy ring on her finger to symbolize her marriage to Christ.

This [5]excess of holy relics seems in the end to have become an embarrassment of riches for these early churches, with a growing common-sense awareness of the impossibility of them all being genuine. But if at least some of these relics, and perhaps even most of them, must have been spurious, could any of them be what was claimed for them? Just how historically likely would it have been for Helena, the apparent initiator of this fevered craze for holy relics, to have both found and possessed a portion of the actual cross upon which Jesus had been crucified? To use the contemporary term: how sure can we be of the provenance of Helena’s prize?

An artistic curiosity fashioned by different hands over time, this statue of the seated Helena was originally carved as a portrait statue of an unknown Roman noblewoman. Some two hundred years later the face was re-carved to transform it into a likeness of Helena.

Helena set foot upon the soil of the Holy Land some three hundred years after the events of the crucifixion. We now view those events as momentous because we see them through the lens of the faith which has grown up around them. But this clearly is not how they would have been perceived at the time. Jesus received the sentence which the occupying Roman authorities reserved for those who were tried for sedition. Such offenders could be made to carry the heavy crossbeams to the place of execution, where the wooden uprights, held fast in the ground by large wedges front and back, awaited them. The wood was then reused for other such executions. There would have been no keeping portions of such crosses as mementos, and no recognition at the time that such keepsakes might have been worth preserving.

The crucifixion of insurrectionist slaves, as portrayed by the artist Fyodor Bronnikov. The tau (‘T’-shaped) cross would have been the most likely form of cross for execution because of the readily-changed crossbeam and the way in which the crossbeam supported the weight of the condemned. Death was mainly caused by slow and prolonged asphyxiation due to pressure on the lungs.

This is history applied with common-sense. Even had followers of Jesus, who would have had reason to regard him as special, requested such a keepsake, would the Roman authorities have allowed them to do so? A man charged with sedition against those very authorities needed to be swiftly forgotten for the sake of civic order, not have his memory and his principles [6]kept alive in the form of such a treasured memento by his followers.

This fanciful painting by Paolo Veronese portrays Helena contemplating a vision of the True Cross, which is here helpfully supported by a winged cherub. Fanciful, because the artist depicts the serene Helena of legend who went to the Holy Land in search of Christian truth, rather than the ruthless Helena of history, who conspired with her son to murder his wife and take her place at his side.

Whatever it was that Helena [7]brought back with her to Constantinople a full three centuries later, it hardly could have been what she claimed for it. Neither will we ever know what the wood actually was. Eager-to-please locals could just as easily have supplied her with a lintel from an old door frame or some such piece of worn building material no longer in use. Or perhaps given her dubious and ruthless past, Helena herself might not have been above knowing that what she brought back with her to Constantinople was not the real deal. Her own status as the mother of the emperor would have served as guarantee for the wood’s shady provenance. But faith – true faith – is not in things. All the relics in all the churches in all the world cannot amount to a truth which is experienced in the heart, and it is there that for many the True Cross may be found.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Fausta (right), the wife and consort of Constantine, apparently was murdered by the bloodless yet gruesomely cruel method of confining her in an overheated bath. Constantine's son Crispus was poisoned.

[2] In its entry on ‘Saint’ Helena, the Catholic Encyclopedia makes no mention whatever of her implication in her daughter-in-law’s murder.

[3] The church historian Eusebius, while writing in detail about the deeds of Helena in Jerusalem, curiously makes no mention of her discovery of the cross, which was said to have been found intact and complete with nails at the site of the Holy Sepulchre.

[4] This marble bust of the principal Roman god Jupiter (left, housed, perhaps ironically, in the collection of the Vatican) would not have been viewed by the Romans as the god himself, any more than statues of the Virgin are by Catholicism. This makes the line between the veneration of statues and holy relics on the one hand, and idolatry on the other, a hazy one, if it exists at all. From a Catholic point-of-view the argument tends to be looked at backwards: that it was assumed that the so-called idols of indigenous and non-Christian cultures were true idols, that these images made by human hands literally were the actual gods. In reality such pagan and indigenous images functioned in the same way as their Church counterparts: as a focus for acts of veneration. The gods themselves remained discreetly invisible, as gods tend to.

[5] The hand of a 16th-century Jesuit missionary (right), severed from his corpse in India and brought to Rome to be lavishly displayed under glass as a holy relic. As the obsession to harvest such relics gathered pace during the Middle Ages, eager pilgrims actually exhumed the corpses of supposed saints and martyrs to be dismembered and distributed as relics, with the trade in such lugubrious remains being practiced on an almost industrial scale. The theft of relics from one church to be exhibited in another, with the returning successful thieves being greeted as heroes, also became common practice. Whether we regard such relics as objects of veneration or the morbid and distastefully ostentatious displaying of human remains is a matter of individual faith.

[6] The story which Helena is said to have encountered while in Jerusalem, that the cross was deliberately buried by Jews to prevent it becoming an object of Gentile veneration, is clearly a historical nonsense. For one thing, the Roman overlords would not have permitted such an act for the reasons explained in this post. The cross, or any cross used for execution purposes, was in this sense Roman property. For another, there was at this time no concept of separation between Jewish and Gentile beliefs among Jesus’ followers, which seems to have been an idea advocated later by Paul.

[7] According to the account, most of the recovered cross was erected in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, with Helena taking back smaller pieces to Constantinople and Rome. We must wonder why such a massive sacrilege of faith as carving up the True Cross by Helena for distribution as relics went apparently unquestioned. Again the common-sense answer must be: because Helena knew that it was not what it was purported to be. The cross (or whatever the wood actually was) was removed from the Basilica in a Persian invasion, later to be recovered and returned, only to be broken up still further and widely distributed as individual relics. The last remaining Jerusalem fragment was captured by Saladin (left) during the crusades and defiled by his Muslim forces, after which it disappears from history.

Sources:

Thomas F. Madden: The New Concise History of the Crusades. Rowman & Littlefield Inc. 2005.

Susan Haskins: Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. Harcourt Brace and Company for Harper Collins, 1993. Chapter IV of this title comprehensively covers the phenomenon of relic collection and acquisition by the early Church. It is perhaps difficult for us now to comprehend the bizarre and often macabre nature of this phenomenon, and the sheer scale on which it was practiced. A variety of objects, individual items, corpses and body parts were exhumed, traded and stolen to supply market demands, with scant attention being given to bona fidé provenance.

Fyodor Andreyevich Bronnikov: Cursed Field.
Click on the image to view the full-sized version.

True Cross fragment relic in  the collection of the Weltliche Schatzkammer, Vienna. Fresco of the Recovery of the True Cross by Piero della Francesca in the Church of San Francesco, Arezzo. Coin of Helena from the Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. Helena statue in the Capitoline Museums, Palazzo Nuovo, Rome. The painting Cursed Field: The place of execution in Ancient Rome, painted in 1878 by Fyodor Andreyevich Bronnikov. The painting The Vision of Saint Helena, painted in 1580 by Paolo Veronese.

The Pope's Exorcist

Gabriele Amorth is perhaps not a name which springs readily to mind when considering the pastoral affairs of the church, but he has a clearly-defined function nevertheless. Father Amorth is exorcist-in-residence to the Vatican, and in this capacity he is reputed to have performed over one hundred and sixty thousand exorcisms in the decades-long practice of his office. The notion of an official exorcist is intriguing in itself, but the mere existence of such an office in the Catholic Church raises questions whose answers are perhaps disturbing.

Whatever their nature, demons belong to the realm of the supernatural. It follows, then, that any claims to know what is actually happening to someone who is possessed, and who is therefore allegedly ‘cured’ by the act of exorcism, falls within the bounds of personal belief. We take these things on trust, and depending on our own beliefs, exorcism is either a first option or a last resort.

As soon as the existence of demons is acknowledged as a literal fact, which it must be in Father Amorth’s case, then we have crossed over a line which separates our everyday reality from the realm of the supernatural. We are in a place which science shuns, for the evidence for such things is not in a form acceptable to science. You cannot put a demon under a microscope. You cannot classify a demon as a species or subspecies. You cannot visit a museum and see a demon with a descriptive label in a glass showcase.

This is not to say that such supernatural entities do not exist; just that rational scientific method is not equipped to deal with them. In short: all such things lie in the realm of belief. As this also includes religious belief, demons would indeed seem to belong in the same province as Father Amorth. Indigenous beliefs would concur with the Vatican: these are worlds in which spirits both good and bad are an accepted part of reality. There are some spirits who wish to help you, there are some who might be uppity and need to be placated with offerings to persuade them to treat you right, and there are others who just want to yank your chain in pursuit of their own dark and inscrutable agendas.

Father Gabriele Amorth, the appointed exorcist to the Vatican. When demons become part of one’s job description it is easy to overlook the fact that, as denizens of the supernatural realm, their actual nature remains an unknown to us. Some cases of attempted exorcism actually seem to exacerbate the situation, leaving the apparently afflicted person worse off than before.

Even this simple comparison is enough to indicate that Father Amorth’s world and the world of (for example) an Amazon Basin tribal community are not as far removed from each other as we might at first assume. The differences are in the trappings of external appearances, but the interactions with such forces, and what those interactions involve, are much the same. Both priest and shaman petition a higher power for aid in such a situation, and communicate directly with these lower forces during the exorcism. During his term in office Pope John Paul II allegedly performed three exorcisms, and his successor Pope Benedict XVI increased the number of Catholic-sponsored exorcists globally. An exorcist is still an exorcist, and an exorcist functions as an intermediary between these realities, whether in the rain forest or in the marble corridors of the Vatican.

 Taita Querubin Queta. As the widely-respected spiritual leader and shaman healer of the Cófan people of Colombia, Taita Querubin Queta not only acts as intermediary on behalf of his people to the world of the spirits, but also to global representatives at the United Nations and other institutions, where he speaks to raise awareness of the pressures which the Cófan face from outside cultures.

Apparently Father Amorth also instructs bishops on how to distinguish cases of genuine possession from those individuals in need of psychiatric help, and refuses to perform an exorcism upon those whom he considers to be faking the symptoms. As far as I have been able to determine, and for all his dealings with these claimed supernatural entities, Father Amorth himself has no credentials whatever that would allow him to make such a professional judgement call. Even a qualified and experienced [1]psychiatrist whom I have seen interviewed admitted that it is at times extremely easy to be persuaded by someone who is afflicted with some form of mental psychopathy that they are in fact entirely reformed. Many such individuals can – and do – go their whole lives functioning in society to a greater or lesser degree. We have to wonder how many of those who have needed an entirely different sort of treatment have slipped through the net to be blessed with holy water rather than with symptom-reducing medication.

The first card used in the series of the Rorschach inkblot psychology test. There are no right or wrong answers to what these randomly created images might be. As with religious belief, individuals will see their own truth, and the evaluation of that subjective truth might indicate some form of emotional dysfunction or psychosis.

The Vatican’s resident exorcist certainly has his opinions about other matters. He has stated that he considers the Harry Potter stories harmful because of their magic elements, giving his reason as making no distinction between white and black magic, because all magic is “…a turn to the Devil”. It strikes me that the line between true magic and exorcism, if it exists at all, is a distinctly blurred one, although the priest seems not to be aware of this particular irony. Harry Potter is perhaps a relatively harmless target, but where things become several shades less politically (and morally) correct are his views on Hindu beliefs and yoga. These beliefs and practices are, says the priest, “Satanic”, because “…all Eastern religions are based on a false belief in [2]reincarnation.” I would suggest to Father Amorth in particular, and to the offices of the Vatican in general, that widespread and endemic pedophilia by the Catholic priesthood is somewhat more likely to be weighed as the heavier evil when the Last Trump sounds than these sincere expressions of another faith.

Meditation as a form of yoga. Studies have indicated that consistent meditation appears to increase emotional empathy and compassion, with the appropriate areas of neural activity in the brain showing increased sensitivity. The practice of yoga is reported to have multiple health benefits, on the heart, on blood pressure, and on regular sleep patterns.

Acknowledging the existence of demons, and therefore of Satan, opens up an ethical question over which philosophers and theologians have furrowed their brows for centuries, namely: does evil exist of itself? Are some people just ‘bad’, or is there darker stuff involved? We must each decide for ourselves what the answer might be, but the problem about accepting these things as real, whether they are so or not, is that our beliefs make them real to us individually. Father Gabriele Amorth claims to have performed in excess of 160,000 exorcisms during the course of his long term of office. Assuming that all those circumstances were and are real, there could well be a small army of seriously disgruntled demons waiting on the other side just jumping for the chance to even the score with the man who gave them all the push. In Father Amorth’s shoes, I for one would not fancy such a prospect.  

Hawkwood 

1st Postscript: In concluding this post I feel the necessity to emphasize that it is often the things we take for granted which are the least understood. We confidently use such terms as 'demon', 'spirit', 'ghost', 'poltergeist', 'elemental', etc. as if we know what these entities are, how they differ from each other, and what their precise nature and purpose is. We do not. Any attempts to define what the supernatural is, and the various forms in which it appears to manifest itself, remain speculative. It is our beliefs which lend these things an aura of familiarity, of belonging to phenomena that we can classify, as if they were different types of lightning or clouds or other phenomena of the natural world. But the paranormal, like death, is an unknown. Who knows what Father Amorth and others like him have been dealing with, and who knows what truly takes place during an exorcism, and what the real consequences are?

2nd Postscript: Twenty months after this post was written, on 16 September, 2016, Father Gabriele Amorth died. He was aged 91. 

Notes:
[1] Dr. Tom Powell in an interview with the BBC in the documentary Psychopath.

[2] The Eastern belief that the reincarnating soul occupies a succession of corporeal bodies, known as saṃsāra, is also found in Ancient Greece in the writings of Plato, where it is known as transmigration, and in many indigenous cultures as well as in some contemporary beliefs such as Theosophy. The orthodox forms of Christianity, Judaism and Islam reject the concept of reincarnation, although individuals within these religions accept it, and the mystic forms of these religions such as the Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Catharism and some branches of Sufism also accept the concept. 

Sources:

David Goldenberg: 10 Secrets of the Vatican Exposed, in The Week, March 13, 2013. Retrieved March 31, 2015.

Nick Pisa: Hitler and Stalin were possessed by the Devil, says Vatican exorcist, in The Mail Online, August 2006. Retrieved March 31, 2015.

Nick Squires: Harry Potter and yoga are evil, says Catholic Church exorcist, in The Telegraph, November 25, 2011. Retrieved March 31, 2015.

Ron Dicker: Gabriele Amorth, Catholic Priest And Exorcist, Says He’s Done More Than 160,000 Exorcisms, in The Huffington Post, May 21, 2013. Retrieved March 31, 2015.

Image of Father Gabriele Amorth adapted from a photo by Stephen Driscoll for CNA. Images of Taita Querubin Queta and yoga meditation adapted from photos from uncredited sources. The Rorschach test card is in the public domain. Demon painted for this post by Hawkwood for the ©David Bergen Studio.

The Gospel of Mary

Sometime in the late 6th-century a misconception about certain passages in scripture came to be seen as an entrenched truth. What happened seems simple enough: Pope Gregory I, known as Gregory the Great, made a confused assumption that in Luke’s gospel the [1]unnamed ‘repentant sinner’ who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears was Mary Magdalene. Exactly why the pope might have thought this is unclear, as there is no indication whatever in the gospel that connects the woman in the story with Mary Magdalene. But things did not stop there.

Mary Magdalene. The image of Mary in the gospel which bears her name is of a woman of great dignity, leadership, personal courage and deep spiritual insight: a view of the Magdalene as remote from her misguided portrayal down the centuries as is possible.

Mary the sister of Martha, the ‘woman with the alabaster jar’ who anoints Jesus’ feet as related in [2]Luke's and John’s gospel, was also assumed by the pope to be Mary Magdalene, although Luke’s retelling of Jesus’ visit to the house of these two sisters in the town of Bethany makes it clear that the woman referred to is Martha’s sister, and not Mary Magdalene. Even given the possible misattribution caused by two women having the same name (Mary was then one of the most frequently-encountered of women’s names) it is the gospels themselves which clear up any possible confusion about the separate identities of these three women: the unnamed ‘repentant sinner’, Mary the sister of Martha, and Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene, as envisaged in the 15th-century by Rogier van der Weyden: a Magdalene holding the alabaster jar of ointment but nevertheless very much of the artist’s own time, and set in a landscape of rolling Flemish hills. What our own age might miss, but what would have been apparent to the artist’s audience, is that the elaborate dress with its embroidered red sleeves, and the hair flowing loosely over her shoulders, would have been clear signals that this Magdalene was portrayed as a high-class prostitute.

And yet Pope Gregory decided that these different women actually were one and the same. These passages in Luke’s and John’s gospels, according to the pope, all describe Mary Magdalene. So why is it that such an obvious misreading of the gospels has survived for fourteen long centuries? Contemporary scholarship now recognizes the pope’s error, but the image of Mary Magdalene as the repentant sinner who washed the feet of Jesus still endures in the popular imagination.

Why does the Church of Rome not correct such an obvious fallacy by a previous pope in some sort of official edict? Perhaps because countermanding this mistake would undermine the dogma of papal infallibility? Or alternatively, perhaps because it has been expedient for the Church to perpetuate, and in doing so, to exploit, such a female stereotype? I’ll leave you to decide. What is the case is that the image of Mary Magdalene as a redeemed whore has been the subject of countless depictions in art and popular culture ever since. Images are powerful things. They influence the way we think about something, even if we might not be aware that they are doing so. Mary Magdalene, as the woman who holds the alabaster jar which contains the precious [3]ointment used to anoint the feet of Jesus, also has been a much-portrayed figure in art – all on account of Pope Gregory’s mistaken assumption.

The penitent Magdalene, by Paul Jacques Aimé Boudry. By the 19th-century portrayals of the Magdalene had descended into mawkish picture-postcard sentiment, and the unfounded legend that she had spent her last years as a [4]naked recluse was seized upon by such artists as an excuse to portray some pseudo-classical nudity disguised as lofty religious ideals.

Where there can be no doubt is when Luke actually mentions Mary Magdalene by name, as being the woman from whom Jesus casts out ‘seven devils’. Luke specifies her as being ‘Mary called Magdalene’. But what does this curious verse mean? Was Mary possessed in some way? Did Jesus perform a kind of exorcism? It is a passage from Luke’s gospel which has caused much speculation. To find an answer, and also to reach beyond Pope Gregory’s misunderstandings, we need to push back even further in time, to three centuries before that particular pope went astray in his assumptions.

This fragment in Greek of the Gospel of Mary was discovered along with many other texts in an ancient refuse dump near Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. It gives an indication as to how much painstaking restoration work has been necessary to make these texts live again after so many centuries of obscurity.

We have three surviving fragmentary copies of the text known as the Gospel of Mary, all of them from Egypt. One discovered near the town of Akhmim is from the 5th-century and written in Coptic, and the other two from the 3rd-century and written in Greek were discovered in an ancient refuse dump at Oxyrhynchus – a valuable archaeological site which also has yielded some of the poetry of Sappho. It is perhaps an irony of history that both the writings of Mary and Sappho have been discovered in the same location. In a man’s world Sappho was widely regarded as the [5]greatest poet of her age, and history confirms her identity. The Gospel of Mary is the only known gospel to be attributed to a woman. Unlike the verses of Sappho, we cannot know who wrote it, any more than we can ascertain who really wrote the four canonical gospels. What we can say is that its unknown author wrote from a viewpoint that is so sympathetic to a woman’s perspective, so insightful, that it could indeed have been written by a woman, which would have been entirely feasible in an early Christian Gnostic community.

Oxyrhynchus and Akhmim: the two discovery sites of the three copies which we have of the Gospel of Mary.

In this gospel it is Mary who rallies the fearful and demoralized disciples after Jesus takes leave of them following his last resurrection appearance. It is Mary who then is forced to defend herself in the face of accusations by Peter that, being the disciple whom Jesus loved the most, Jesus told her things to which only she was privy. And it is the disciple Levi who comes to her defence against the ‘wrathful’ and hot-headed Peter. But other passages in the text describe Mary’s deep understanding of the visions of the mind, the perceptions of the spirit, and the ascent of the soul. It is Mary who offers this profound wisdom to the other disciples (who notably are addressed by her as her ‘brothers and sisters’, making it clear that [6]female disciples also were present, and therefore also were among this inner circle of followers). Reading this text as a whole, it is difficult to avoid the impression that Peter reacts out of mere jealous pique and bruised male ego.

Magdala (Migdal), the birthplace of the Magdalene, was in Galilee, and Bethany, the location of the house of the sisters Martha and Mary, was to the south in Judea. Between these two lay Samaria, which needed to be traversed when making journeys to Jerusalem for the Jewish feast days.

And what of those ‘seven devils’? It is ironic that it is a non-canonical text which supplies us with the answer to the identity of these ‘devils’ which otherwise would be left unexplained. Ascending through the various levels or ‘powers’, Mary describes the soul as encountering the power which has “…seven forms. The first form is darkness; the second is desire; the third is ignorance; the fourth is zeal for death; the fifth is the kingdom of the flesh; the sixth is the foolish wisdom of the flesh; the seventh is the wisdom of the wrathful person. These are the seven powers of Wrath.” Jesus’ action towards Mary can now be seen for what it truly is: not some trivial and all-too-literal exorcism, but an indoctrination into the inner mysteries, which Mary in her turn masters. It is known that Luke drew upon older texts for some of his material, and the ‘seven devils’ episode would seem to be a scrambled version of these older mysteries whose true meaning was lost on Luke, remembering that the Gospel of Mary would itself have been copied from older texts. 

These texts were in circulation before the Bible as we know it existed. There were no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ texts as orthodoxy later labelled them. And the Gospel of Mary was of course written long before Pope Gregory muddied the waters with his misconceptions. Being closer to the source, it offers us perhaps a more authentic Mary: a Mary who is indeed a wise and profound teacher, and even the closest to Jesus and most deserving of his disciples. This Mary is a very long way indeed from the redeemed whore perpetuated by the Church, and the time for her overdue and deserved reinstatement is now.

Hawkwood 

  

Notes:

[1] See Luke 7:36-50 for the passage about the unnamed ‘sinner’ who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, then wipes them with her hair before anointing them with ointment from an ‘alabaster box’.

[2] See Luke 10:38-42 for the passage in which Jesus is received in the house of Martha and Mary, and John 11:1-2 for a further mention of the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet.

[3] The ointment was probably spikenard, one of the costliest of all the spices.

[4] This legend seems to have arisen out of more confusion with yet another Mary: Mary of Egypt, who did indeed spend her life living as a repentant naked hermit in the desert around the Jordan. Please see my post Mary of Egypt: A Heart in the Wilderness.

[5] No less a person than Plato even described Sappho as ‘the tenth muse’. To read more about Sappho and the remarkable ways in which her works have been rescued from obscurity, please see my post Sappho.

[6] Among its other themes, the book below tackles the question of the Vatican’s total refusal to admit that women (therefore also Mary) were among the disciples, quoting a letter by Pope John Paul II to the then Archbishop of Canterbury that the pope was “firmly opposed to this development.” Well, of course he was. The entrenched sexist policies of the Church of Rome must be held to, even if this means flying in the face both of what scripture itself says and what is now accepted scholarship. The pope ends his letter by stating that he views it “as a break with tradition of a kind we have no competence to authorise.” But if the pope himself has no competence to authorise it, then who in the Vatican does?

Sources:

Susan Haskins: Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. Harcourt Brace and Company for Harper Collins, 1993. This title gives a detailed overview of the many ways in which our image and perceptions of Mary have changed over the centuries. 

Complete translations of both the Coptic and Greek versions of the Gospel of Mary, introduced and translated by Karen L. King, together with comprehensive annotations, can be found in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer. Harper Collins, 2008. This gospel is also available separately as: The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle, by Karen L. King. Polebridge Press, 2003.

Mary Magdalene, by Rogier van der Weyden, is in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The Oxyrhynchus fragment is from the Oxyrhynchus website. My imagined portrait of Mary Magdalene which heads this post is intended to express the Magdalene as she is portrayed in the Gospel of Mary. The maps have been created for this post by the © David Bergen Studio.

Jesus in India

Even the staunchest Christian has to concede that what scripture tells us about the life of Jesus hardly amounts to a comprehensive biography. For any details at all we rely almost solely upon the four gospels. These collectively (and at times conflictingly) inform us of his birth, his early childhood (but even this only partially), and his ministry, which effectively took place over the last two years of his life. All texts are strangely silent about what happened in between – a hiatus of almost twenty years.

Did Jesus once walk in the shadow of the mountains of the Hindu Kush, perhaps to seek new forms for the Spirit that were then unknown in his native Galilee?

In other words: most of Jesus’ life, and what he did during those many years, is a total unknown. Why are all the gospels so strangely silent about those intervening years? Or perhaps more to the point: why is this stark fact so summarily brushed aside within Christianity itself? It is as if this yawning void of non-information is considered to be a minor inconvenience in our knowledge of the Saviour: something perfunctorily acknowledged before swiftly moving on to more familiar events. Jesus, the young boy encountered in Luke’s gospel going [1]‘about his Father’s business’ in the temple, a few verses later emerges as the adult Jesus being baptized by John in the waters of the Jordan. It is as if a biographer of the Duke of Wellington were to describe his early boyhood in a brief introductory chapter – and then begin the next chapter by describing his victory against Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo.

This timeline graphically illustrates how little is known about the life of Jesus. The gospels collectively describe only the light areas on the line; the rest of the intervening years are a total unknown. Conflicting dates make the exact span of Jesus’ life uncertain, although it is usually taken to be 32-33 years.

So whether or not we care to address this issue of Jesus’ missing years, whether we choose to sweep it under the carpet as being ‘unimportant’ or ‘not the point’, the issue is still there. And the existence of the issue leaves us free to speculate upon what he might have done, and where he might have been. He might, of course, simply have spent those years in Galilee as an itinerant sage and healer, perhaps performing local exorcisms (‘casting out devils’, to use the scriptural phrase), or just keeping a low profile in preparation for the momentous final years of his life. Or perhaps he journeyed farther afield, even as far as India.

Seeking an answer to whether the footsteps of Jesus ever were imprinted in Indian soil must begin with the question: how feasible would the journey itself have been? Just how do-able was it at the time to get from Galilee to the distant Hindu Kush? It seems a long way, but startlingly, the answer is: entirely possible, even plausible. If we follow the trade routes of the time, we ourselves can plot a likely route on the map. The Silk Road had principal connecting points in the port city of Antioch and in Damascus. From Damascus the Silk Road then went eastward via Palmyra to Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia, where two alternative routes presented themselves. Either by a river and sea voyage, first down the Euphrates and then by sea to Hormuz in Persia, or farther south to the Indian port of Barbaricon. Either option would have allowed for a direct connection inland to northern India along principal known trade routes.

Following the Silk Road and other major trade routes, either overland or by land and sea, would have made a journey from Galilee to India entirely feasible.

The second alternative would have been overland, journeying east from Ctesiphon along the Silk Road to Bactra northwest of the Hindu Kush, then southeast through the Khyber Pass to [2]Taxila in the foothills. These alternatives all followed time-tested trade routes. Join a caravan, and off you go. After all, Alexander the Great trod the same route in his conquests of three centuries before, and we know that Alexander at any rate left his own footprints in Taxila. So for Jesus the journey itself was entirely feasible, and would have needed no arduous trailblazing as such. The next question should be: can we detect any signs of such a sojourn accounting for his [3]missing years, both in his teachings, which thereafter presumably would have been Eastern-influenced, and in [4]India itself? Again the answer, startling perhaps for some, could be: yes.

The mountains of the Hindu Kush. Mountains have always exhorted us to reach out for the Divine. Often they have been seen as the dwelling places of gods and spirits, and for many, treading their snowy fastness feels like walking on sacred ground.

For those long unaccounted-for years, Jesus simply vanishes from the record. If at least part of that time was spent in India, then we would expect his own ministry to be informed by [5]Buddhist influence. It has been [6]suggested that Jesus’ lifestyle resembled that of a Cynic philosopher. Cynicism (not to be confused with our own contemporary use of the term) was a Greek school of philosophy, a lifestyle, which urged its adherents to live a simple life, to wear simple garments and not pay heed to worldly possessions, and peaceably to live in harmony with their surroundings. Galilee and regions northward were subject to Hellenist influence (Paul’s first language was Greek), and Jesus actually urges his apostles to embrace such a [7]lifestyle.

A lake in Srinagar, Kashmir. Did these same contemplative reflections offer their silent mirror to Jesus two millennia ago? Places far from home often invite us to gain new insights. When we return from such sojourns we might view the familiar in unexpected ways, and discover our own native soil anew.

But Cynicism in its turn, however coincidentally, closely resembled the lifestyle of Buddhist monks. Such a monk as well lived a life of utter simplicity and devotion, depending for his or her existence on the charity of others. The precepts of Jesus to a way of non-violence, to loving your neighbour, to placing yourself in the service of others, which were revolutionary for and otherwise unknown to other teachings in Palestine, and which otherwise seem mysteriously to have emerged from a social milieu utterly foreign to them, were the very fabric of Buddhism. Buddha also healed the sick and fed multitudes with a few loaves of bread, not as magic tricks, but as manifestations of his divine Buddha nature. Were these ideas, so novel for the near East, imported from a farther East by Jesus himself? Did Jesus sojourn in a Buddhist monastery in the very shadow of the Hindu Kush? 

We are left to wonder. The ease of travelling the trade routes, and the quietly-spoken and deeply-human teachings of Jesus himself, so radically different for his social environment, makes such speculation at least plausible. As to any protests that Jesus never visited India because there is no firm proof that he did, the only reasoned response must be that there also is no proof that he did not.

Hawkwood 

Notes:

[1] Luke 2: 41-49. In this passage relating the boy Jesus’ visit to the temple in Jerusalem, his age is given as twelve (Luke 2: 42). The following chapter mentions that Jesus is ‘about thirty years of age’ (Luke 3: 23). The few intervening verses between these two quotes concern themselves with John the Baptist. No mention whatever is made of Jesus’ activities or whereabouts in the intervening eighteen years of his life.

[2] The city of Taxila is now within the borders of present-day Pakistan.

[3] There is the further claim that Jesus was in India – but travelled (or perhaps returned) there after his presumed resurrection, living as a respected foreigner in the community as ‘Yuz Asouf’. This person lived into old age, and was buried in a tomb according to the Jewish tradition (that is: orientated east-west) in Srinagar, Kashmir (left): a tomb which still exists and can be visited. The clear implication is that Jesus did not die on the cross, but passed into coma before being taken down and was secretly revived in the tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea. Accepting this possibility means that the ‘resurrection’ in Christian terms never actually happened, which if true would undermine the very cornerstone of Christian belief. This heretical idea is too complex to be examined here, and will be covered in a future post.

[4] There are two further issues which I have chosen not to cover in the body of this post. The first is the claim by the 19th-century Russian adventurer Nicolas Notovitch (right) that he discovered a manuscript in a northern Indian monastery relating the deeds of a certain foreigner named as ‘Issu’ who healed others, which at face value seems to hint at evidence of Jesus’ presence in that monastery. But this story is too clouded by controversy and accusations of hoax to be included in a post in which I have concentrated only on ‘plausibles’. The second issue is the Hindu manuscript known as the Bhavishya Maha Purana, which mentions a Messiah-like individual named as Issa Masih, who had taught a doctrine of peace, and who had fled east from his homeland due to persecution. Being therefore post-resurrection, this also relates to my ‘resurrection’ point in note [3] above.

[5] Buddhism was founded some five hundred years before the time of Jesus.

[6] The idea that Jesus actually was a Cynic philosopher is mentioned (among others) by Paula Fredriksen in her book Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Professor Fredriksen points out that dressing in simple garb was one of the features of the Cynics. So if you tend to picture Jesus in a humble coarsely-woven garment, rather than in the tassel-fringed robes that were normal Jewish attire, then you are picturing him as a Cynic philosopher. But the hints are not in appearance alone. The at-times enigmatic and koan-like wisdom of Jesus, which is so in evidence in that source for the canonical gospels of the teachings of Jesus, the Gospel of Thomas, and which predates them, is also typical of the Cynic style of teaching – and also of Eastern mysticism.

[7] Mark 6: 7-9. “And he called unto him the twelve, and began to send them forth by two and two; and gave them power over unclean spirits; and commanded them that they should take nothing for their journey, save a staff only; no *scrip, no bread, no money in their purse: but be shod with sandals; and not put on two coats.” K.J.V. (*‘Scrip’: a bag.)

Sources:

Paula Fredriksen: Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999.

Hindu Kush mountains photo by Hindu Kush Adventure. Srinagar lake adapted from a photo by Singh Suninder Jeet. 'Jesus in the Hindu Kush' painting, Silk Road map and Life of Jesus timeline by Hawkwood for the ©David Bergen Studio.

The Dude Abides

This week has marked something of an event in my life: I have become an ordained minister. This particular ministry I currently share with more than 250,000 other like-minded individuals worldwide – that’s something over half of the total estimated number of Catholic priests. Mind you, [1]ordination into the ministry of The Church of the Latter-day Dude is accomplished with a few mouse clicks by merely applying for a certificate of ordination on their official [2]website. But the smooth ease of the process does not in itself explain the phenomenon that has come to be known as Dudeism.

Begun in 2005 by the journalist Oliver Benjamin, Dudeism takes its inspiration from The Dude, the ultra-laid-back character portrayed by Jeff Bridges in the Coen Brother’s 1998 film The Big Lebowski.  Dudeism draws heavily upon Ancient Chinese Taoist beliefs and philosophy, and its statement that ‘the Dudeness which can be known is not the real Dude’ is typical of its style. As with the Tao, The Dude simply goes with the flow of any situation in which he finds himself, and we also can find his existential attitude mirrored in the practices of Zen. The Dude does not ‘do’. The Dude simply ‘is’.

The point with Dudeism, however, is not to wilfully emulate the Dude’s lifestyle (a gesture of mere mimicry which would be considered un-Dude-like), but to take his lead in simply being yourself – whatever that ‘self’ happens to be. That, and to resist (or perhaps more accurately, to be impervious to) the social pressures which come at us from all sides to conform to the expectations of others, to consume stuff we don’t really need, to pursue a need for status, recognition and respect from those who in their turn are too busy pursuing these goals for themselves to have time for us anyway.

For whatever reasons the movement began, it has gone on to project itself as an urban counter-culture that finds its expression in disdain for (or, again perhaps more correctly: indifference to) all the doctrinal issues which have caused such deep division between denominations in conventional religious expression. A church which has no doctrine also has no potential causes for friction within its ranks. It has largely been disagreements over points of doctrine which have created the 30,000-odd different Christian denominations, most of whose adherents probably would not worship in the church of a different denomination.

Is it possible to be a Dudeist and still maintain one’s own existing personal beliefs? Certainly. Dudeism, like Taoism, is more of an expression of a way of life, a stance towards one’s own existence, than a religion as such. And unlike one or two of the religions which currently dominate our world, it is gender-blind. Men and women have equal status. A sexist ‘glass ceiling’ does not exist within Dudeism in the way in which it does in, for example, the Catholic Church, in which by Vatican decree the aspirations for women are swiftly reached at the lowly level of the mother superior of a local convent.

In seeking answers as to why Dudeism has taken off in the way in which it has, we might find one possible answer in the alternatives. The current major players in world religions have been with us for millennia. On the one hand this might be seen as a sign of their staying power. But looked at from a different angle, their very longevity seems to square awkwardly with our mercurial 21st-century world. Social concerns and moral values which applied – literally – to the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, and which were intended to address the issues and the world views of those distant times, do not sit well in a world of apps and wifi.

In stark contrast, Dudeism is very much a product of the Internet age. It not only sits comfortably in our contemporary urban environment: it addresses the issues which make that environment the pressure-cooker of stress which it has become for so many. Attempts to update existing religions only seem to produce churches whose [3]architecture is stridently ‘modern’, or the toe-curling embarrassments that are overtly-Christian rock and metal bands. And other beliefs which have arisen in our own time, and which do come with a body of doctrine, seem not to be able to shake off their cultish mind-control image. I’m sure you can think of one or two examples without too much prompting from me.

Will Dudeism survive? Even to care about the answer to this question seems a distinctly un-Dude-like thing to do. What matters is what is ‘now’. And Dudeism, like Zen, values the Now: the precious present moment which we are all-too-ready to sacrifice in pursuit of those phantoms with which a consumer society distracts us. Dudeism is live-and-let-live. Dudeism is being kind and decent to your fellow human beings without attempting to force your own lifestyle and beliefs upon them. In the catchphrase from the film: The Dude abides. Perhaps he might yet confound us all by ‘abiding’ longer even than his creators might have imagined.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Dudeist ministers actually are allowed to officiate at weddings and other civic functions, local laws permitting. The official website (below) offers support with providing any necessary further credentials. Dudeism has been described as an 'open source' religion. Its adherents may input their own thoughts about it. Put another way: If you prefer to have your thinking done for you by someone else, then you're probably best off with the top-down autocratic structures of existing conventional religions.

[2] Dudeism.com. Go for it.

[3] I am thinking of my local examples here in the Netherlands. We have one new church on the outskirts of town which looks like nothing so much as the vertical stern of the Titanic just before it plunges beneath the waves: an unintended and unfortunate symbolism which apparently was lost upon those who approved this particular architect’s plans. Every time I drive past I half-expect to see Rose and Jack clinging to the roof.

Sources:

Photos from The Big Lebowski, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, featuring Jeff Bridges as The Dude and John Goodman as Walter, distributed by Polygram Filmed Entertainment, Working Title Films.

Pandora's Box

We might think that we know the myth. Pandora, the first created woman, arrives from Olympus in the world of mortals together with a box. The box contains all the evils and pestilences which otherwise would plague humankind, but as long as they remain safely shut away then the world is a peaceable place. In her innocence, Pandora peeks inside the box to see what it might contain. Bad idea. The terrible contents are released into the world, and humankind has been afflicted with them ever since. Pandora just has the time – and the presence of mind – to shut the lid before the last thing escapes. That thing is Hope: only Hope is preserved safely, to be nurtured for the times when it is needed.

Pandora opens the box, as imagined by John William Waterhouse in the 19th-century.

The story has a familiar echo. We need only think of that other first woman to be awake to the parallels of both stories. Eve in the Book of Genesis also had her problems with human curiosity, of crossing the line of deific instructions to release blight and death upon all of humankind. In a [1]previous post I have mentioned that this literal reading of Genesis points us towards only a superficial truth. And yet it is this ‘storybook’ truth which has dominated Western thinking – and our attitudes towards womankind – ever since. Eve the Woman is the cause of all our misery, and the active agent in releasing evil into what up till then had been blissful paradise. 

Such shapers of early church doctrine as [2]Augustine and [3]Tertullian were in their writings only too eager to hammer this particular nail home. Woman is evil. Woman is a temptress. Woman is only good for bearing children. That canonical texts appeared to support such rampant chauvinist views gave enough legitimacy to such conclusions, even to the extent that right here in the twenty-first century the ideas of guilt, shame and sin still leave their traces on the minds, not only of the ‘faithful’, but also on the minds of those who seldom if ever set foot in a church.

The sign above this languidly reclining Pandora, painted by Jean Cousin in the 16th-century, makes the parallel with Eve crystal clear. The artist is actually correct in showing this Pandora with a vase or jar. The original myth specifies that it was a jar. It was a mistranslation from the Greek that turned it into a box, and the mistranslation has endured ever since.

That the story of the Fall in Eden can be interpreted in profoundly different [4]ways, and in ways which do not weigh down all womankind with the crushing burden of guilt, has gone largely unnoticed for centuries – mainly because the texts of these other versions were destroyed by the Augustines and the Tertullians of their world. What remains of these other texts has been down to the [5]chances of history, of surviving against all the odds. But we do have them, and they are in our world. But if it is possible to redeem Eve, to come at the story from a radically different angle, might the same be possible for the story of Pandora’s box? Does the apparently over-curious Pandora, that other first woman of Ancient Greek myth, actually display a profound wisdom?

A repentant Eve portrayed by Anna Lee Merritt in the 19th-century. But is such deep and bitter contrition by Eve - and also by Pandora - misplaced? 

All we humans who have come after Pandora might have continued to live in a state of carefree bliss. But is this truly what is intended for us? How can we progress if for us sorrow remains an unknown? How can we taste sweetness if bitter regret also is not part of the human condition? So carefully, carefully, Pandora opens the box, and the world becomes as we experience it, with all its joys and its sorrows, its pains and its heartaches. It is not that we experience pain and loss. It is what we do with these emotions which potentially opens the door to growth of the spirit. But what of Hope?

Hope is left behind, sealed shut. Wise Pandora knows the folly of hope. Hope can be a false god, for so often hope can foster false expectations. Only by relinquishing hope are we truly free to act from a position of strength. With hope we might be fighting with one hand tied behind our backs. Without hope our actions are unlimited by any thoughts of ‘wishing for’, that otherwise might constrain us. As with Eve and her forbidden fruit, perhaps we instead should be grateful to Pandora for opening her box – and also for shutting it just in time.

Hawkwood

Notes:

[1] Please see my post Eve's Story.

[2] Writing in the 5th-century, Augustine said: “What is the difference whether it is in a wife or a mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman... I fail to see what use woman can be to man, if one excludes the function of bearing children.” Augustine was instrumental in propounding the doctrine of original sin specifically as being sexual sin, and the fault of the Woman for seducing the Man. Before Augustine, the sin of Eden was principally viewed as being disobedience to God.

[3] Writing in the 3rd-century, Tertullian tersely commented that “Woman is the gateway of the Devil.” Tertullian is now viewed as the originator of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity – a concept nowhere mentioned in scripture – although the idea of the Trinity is found in the pre-Christian (and therefore pagan) mystery schools.

[4] Please see my posts Adam, the God who Failed, and The Enlightened Insight of the Woman, for two of these ‘profoundly different ways’.

[5] Those chances happened as recently as last century, when many Gnostic texts, both Christian and pre-Christian, were discovered by chance, having been buried in a sealed jar in the Egyptian sands for sixteen long centuries.