Provence (Mary Magdalene), Wed. Aug. 25-Fri. Aug. 27, 2010
With my arrival on Tuesday night, Aug. 24, in the city of Bezier to spend the next day in the area, I reached not only the outer perimeter of Cathar country (Bezier was the first frontier city to fall to the Crusaders in 1209) but also the gateway to an unexpected sequence of shrines and sights commemorating the enigmatic biblical character of Mary Magdalene. But the two are not unrelated. The Crusader attack on Bezier, the opening salvo of a cruel war that would go on for the next 35 years, occurred on July 22nd, the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene; and the battle’s tragic denouement was the torching of the cathedral dedicated to her, with all those taking refuge there, Catholics and Cathars, killed in the conflagration. It is said that Arnaud-Amaury, abbot of Citeaux, a commander of the crusade and the Papal Legate, when asked by his troops how to tell Catholics from Cathars once they had taken the city, callously replied, “Kill them all, God will know His own.”
The Legend of Mary Magdalene in Provence
Despite its distance from the traditional biblical land, Mary Magdalene’s initials were inscribed across the beaches, towns and caves of southern France well before Dan Brown, in The Da Vinci Code, exploded the “secret” that Mary was married to Jesus and they had a son from whom the Merovingian dynasty derived. Brown, it turns out, was scooped by the Cathars themselves. An anonymous attachment to the Treatise against Heretics, states: “Also they [the Cathars] teach in their secret meetings that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Christ.”
While the jury remains hung on this hypothesis that contradicts Christian teachings, an alternate legend, hardly less conventional, is alive and celebrated as fact throughout Provence, where a full complement of shrines, cathedrals and annual celebrations grace the places where it said Mary Magdalene lived, taught, prayed and eventually died.
The traditional story is that Mary, her brother Lazarus, and Maximinus, one of the Seventy Disciples, and her band, mostly woman, of primordial Christian evangelists, were expelled by persecutions from the Holy Land and miraculously crossed the Mediterranean in a frail boat without rudder or mast. The party landed on the Mediterranean coast at the place now called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (the Holy Marys of the Sea, a reminder that the name “Mary” was a title of honor for a woman in biblical times, rather than the first name it later became). Mary Magdalene then went to Marseille and converted the whole of Provence, finally retiring to a cave on a hill called La Sainte-Baume (“holy cave”), where she gave herself up to a life of prayer and meditation for her remaining years. She received the last rites, died and was buried in the oratory of Saint Maximinus, her travelling companion, over which there stands today a magnificent Gothic cathedral dedicated, of course, to Saint Mary Magdalene.
The Magdalene Sites
During the next three days, August 25-27, the concept of pilgrimage, which was present when I started out from New York, came to the fore, especially with the news from home that my mother’s condition was growing more critical. During this time I was privileged to visit several of the monuments built in Mary Magdalene’s honor: the church in Bezier, the town and cathedral in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, and on Friday the crypt containing her remains in the cathedral in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. A fortuitous event I captured on video, it happened that my 95-year-old mother passed away in Colorado as I entered the cathedral in Sainte-Baume to the sounds of an organ recital. I took that synchronicity as a personal sign from that valiant lady, our mother of ten, who sought solace and strength in the Catholic religion throughout her life, that she had finally reached that place of peace and rest for which she had so thirsted in her later years of failing health.
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Have you more details of the “Treatise against Heretics”? Presumably it was a medeival document at the time of the Cathars? Thanks.
My direct source for this is Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene.
Medieval dualism
The 13th-century Cistercian monk and chronicler Peter of Vaux de Cernay claimed it was part of Catharist belief that the earthly Jesus Christ had a relationship with Mary Magdalene, described as his concubine. Quote: “Further, in their secret meetings they said that the Christ who was born in the earthly and visible Bethlehem and crucified at Jerusalem was ‘evil’, and that Mary Magdalene was his concubine – and that she was the woman taken in adultery who is referred to in the Scriptures; the ‘good’ Christ, they said, neither ate nor drank nor assumed the true flesh and was never in this world, except spiritually in the body of Paul. I have used the term ‘the earthly and visible Bethlehem’ because the heretics believed there is a different and invisible earth in which – according to some of them – the ‘good’ Christ was born and crucified.”]
A document, possibly written by Ermengaud of Béziers, undated and anonymous and attached to his Treatise against Heretics, makes a similar statement.
Also they [the Cathars] teach in their secret meetings that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Christ. She was the Samaritan woman to whom He said, “Call thy husband.” She was the woman taken into adultery, whom Christ set free lest the Jews stone her, and she was with Him in three places, in the temple, at the well, and in the garden. After the Resurrection, He appeared first to her.
Hey, you inspired me to crack open Jane Schaberg’s book – The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene. I am about half way thruogh and wow am I ever getting a different perspective than the one I got a few years ago. Perhaps I have matured a bit. What I am sensing is that she was alot more than the Da Vinci Code romance which so many women have glommed onto. She is much more than a lover of Jesus. Very interesting. I had dismissed xanity, but women searching the texts and finding other ways of seeing it is fascinating.
Thanks, Melvis for bringing my attention to Jane Schaberg’s book. Despite considerable research on Mary Magdalene, I missed it. After checking it out on Amazon, it goes right to my reading list. The “editors” of the New Testament seem to have had a definite hidden agenda to keep MM as far from center stage as possible. Her resurrection comes none too soon. In my next novel, the one after The Perfect, I hope to delve into and develop her role in a way that contributes to her “coming out.”
Vic, if you read The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene, let me know your impression. Sounds very interesting, but then it all is. Lauri