Mary Magdalene: Not a Prostitute, But Deliberately Maligned As One

In honor of Marys everywhere, and mindful of the Goddess Eostre holiday coming soon, this, from The Washington Post!

On Easter, Mary Magdalene will be maligned as a prostitute. Except she wasn’t

Petula Dvorak, Columnist April 13 at 6:02 PM

Here’s who Mary Magdalene was: one of Jesus Christ’s original followers, the last to stay with him while he was nailed to the cross and, Christians believe, the first to see his empty tomb and his resurrection.

Here’s who she wasn’t: a reformed or forgiven prostitute. Yet on Easter Sunday, Christianity’s holiest day, that’s exactly how she will be described in some sermons and how she continues to be portrayed in much of popular culture. The woman dubbed in the Bible the “Apostle of the Apostles” has spent two millennia being reduced to a seductress.

In some ways, Mary Magdalene’s story is the story of modern women everywhere.

From the relentless focus on the looks of female leaders to the nude photos being circulated of female Marines, women who dare to work among men as equals get sexualized and marginalized.

In Mary Magdalene’s case, it’s a 2,000-year-old slut-shaming that a group of Christian women is trying to stop. The Junia Project, a California group preaching egalitarian theology, is using social media to spread its public service announcement: “As you preach this Sunday, please note: Mary Magdalene was NOT a prostitute. Thank you.”

They have to be proactive. Even a popular Easter sermon on the Sermon Central website repeats the myth. “Mary Magdalene was a forgiven prostitute,” reads the second line of the sermon reminding people what to remember about the first Easter.

Hollywood loves casting Mary Magdalene as a sex worker. She was a hooker in “Jesus Christ Superstar” in 1973, in “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1988, in “The Passion of the Christ” in 2004 and even in last year’s “Risen.” It’s a delicious story, Jesus being so cool that he even forgives a prostitute. It’s “Pretty Woman” in the tunics-and-sandals age.

Gail Wallace, one of the co-founders of the Junia Project, hates the way Mary Magdalene gets maligned. "For me, the bottom line is that we are fed up with the way women’s stories in the Bible have been retold in a way that sexualizes them unnecessarily and in ways that aren’t supported by the biblical texts,” she said.

Biblical scholars and historians have been trying to make the same point for decades. The Catholic Church acknowledged and tried to correct the widespread misperception in 1969 [after having spent only 1,500 years or so lying about Mary to their ignorant parishioners]. But somewhere along the telephone game that is Christian history, the prostitute label stuck.

“Women looking to the Bible for inspiration already have limited choices of female role models,” wrote Chicago nun and professor Barbara Bowe, before her death in 2010. “When we suddenly cut Mary Magdalene off at the knees and turn her into some kind of evil sex pervert, we deprive men and women, but especially women, of a figure with whom they can identify.” Kate Wallace Nunneley, another of the Junia Project’s co-founders, said she saw the Mary Magdalene myth repeated in modern seminary texts, too.

That’s okay, though. Because now Team Mary’s got the Internet. And every year, after the Junio Project runs their PSA about Mary Magdalene on social media, they hear from people about what was said in church. “Around Easter is really one of the only times in general evangelicalism that women get preached about,” Nunneley said. “After we first ran that PSA . . . we heard from so many women who said they still heard [the myth]. One woman told me, ‘I sent this to my pastor and he still preached about her being a prostitute.’ ” This is, of course, part of a larger debate about the way women are treated in other arenas.

Take those women in the Marines who have been serving their country in the most macho branch of the military. How did the guys who couldn’t handle their success deal with it? They circulated nude pictures of them. Even after they were busted, they kept at it.

Nunneley considers that the modern parallel to Mary Magdalene. “As we see with the story about the women in the Marines, their personhood gets overlooked and the men want to only focus on their sexuality,” she said.

It’s an old story. A tired story. And it’s time for it to end.

Spring Equinox on March 20, 2011

And, per usual in Wisconsin, crappy weather follows!  Thunderstorms - and up to half an inch not needed rain, as with the spring melt-off the sewer treatment plants are claiming they are being overwhelmed with waste because of "leakage" of storm water (and melt-off from our snow) into sanitary sewer pipes.  Yeah, right.  Like, if such leakage was actually occurring, it only goes one way?  Oh please - water doesn't only leak in, it also leaks out.  So why is Milwaukee County NOT floating in a gigantic pool of people's poop if the Sewerage District is telling the truth, heh?  It's not rocket science, folks, but apparently some politicians in my home town buy this b.s. because it's coming from "experts."  Well, you all know what I think of "experts."

But I am happy for Spring to spring, although my poor old body has yet to have adapted to Daylight Savings Time.  I lost an hour of sleep and I'm still feeling it - badly!  Until the level of sunlight in the morning peeking through my window says TIME TO GET UP IT'S 5:30 A.M., I struggle out of bed as close to 7 a.m. as I dare - and I HATE that because then I don't have time to make my coffee, feed the squirrels, and sit down and read the news like a civilized human being.  I'm out the door by 7:25 a.m. regardless in order to catch my bus to downtown and make it to the office by 8:30.  For 21 years, I've not yet shown at the office with pajama bottoms still on instead of dress slacks - but it gets harder every day...

You know, I was always under the impression - obviously mistaken - that Spring sprang forth on March 21st.  Have we lost a day somehow???

Whatever - this news gave me a pick-me-up!  A band of latter-day Pagans running around the Black Hills of South Dakota (can you imagine???) has a large celebration planned in honor of the Goddess Ostara (known by various other names, depending upon the incarnation, such as Oestre or Eostre, for which the Roman Catholic holy day of obligation of Easter is named).  Well, good for them, and I do hope the National Rifle Association isn't holding a convention anywhere nearby - those gun-toters do like to kill bunnies...

From the rapidcityjournal.com
Asatru group to honor goddess Ostara
Mary Garrigan Journal staff Rapid City Journal | Posted: Saturday, March 19, 2011 7:00 am

Black Hills area heathens, neo-pagans and witches will hold sabbats, blots and other ritual gatherings this weekend to mark Ostara, or Eostre, more commonly known as the spring equinox.
Spring begins Sunday, March 20, and polytheistic, nature-based religions such as Asatru, which is practiced by the Sigruna Kindred, a Germanic heathenry group in Rapid City, will celebrate today with a blot and feast in honor of Ostara, the goddess of spring. A gathering of Wiccans will take place at 6:30 p.m. today. The Black Hills Pagans and Heathen group will hold an Ostara Ritual and Feast at 6 p.m. Monday. The locations of those gatherings are available by registering at the meetup.com website.


In honor of the holy day, I've taken off work Monday and I'll munch an egg sandwich or two in honor of the Goddess while I work on my income taxes - you know, those forms that the IRS tells you will only take 3 hours to fill out and it ends up taking 3 days...

Happy Easter!

I am hot on the trail of some French Newton side of the family ancestors, thanks to help from Rose, who is married to a descendant of my Grandfather Newton's sister!  We "met" at ancestry.com

This is an amazing journey.

But I promise later today I will do more posts - Isis has sent me a ton of stuff and I have some items I want to post about, too.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these chocolate bunnies :  I feel like a cannibal looking at them...

Hatching the World Egg...

The official first day of Spring will be here soon.  Unusually (at least as far back as I can remember, which isn't very far these days), spring has sprung in Wisconsin very early this year.  With the advent of the month, temperatures were in the low to mid-30s, and then sprang up to the high-30s.  After a sunny Saturday and Sunday, for the past four days the temperatures have been consistently in the 40s -- today when I left the office at 5 p.m. it was 49 degrees F!  But it is clouds and gloom, rain and lots of fog, ground fog caused partly by the quickly disappearing snow cover that was a couple feet deep in some parts of the city (and in my front and back yards) - oh, and FOUL AIR ALERTS (that is not the official terminology) for the past week, with no signs of disappating due to some strange convection of upper-air currents.  Being seasoned Wisconsinites, we are alll expecting the other shoe to drop, probably in April, perhaps on Easter.  Yep, we're all expecting the Big Blizzard.  LOL!  And then flooding.  And then a new cryptospiridium outbreak (like we had in 1993, the last unseasonably warm and early melt-off in March). 

That's spring in Wisconsin.  This year we've got an April Easter.  I don't seriously start hoping to work outdoors (although I yearn to from the end of February onward, sigh) until the beginning of May, if we're lucky weather wise.  I still remember in 1990, while this house was half-built, another early spring.  The trees were fully leafed out, including a massive Norway Maple near my south lot line.  Boom - on May 15th a huge ice storm.  I lost a quarter of that tree, and that loss started a slow decline that ultimately ended in my having the tree entirely removed in 2001.  I was relatively lucky, though.  Trees were devastated throughout the state, we lost trees hundreds of years old.  Entire gardens were wiped out too, for the season, crushed under the cold wet weight of the ice.

But let us hope for better things this year, Jan, old gal! 

This article made me happy, anyway.  I guess I'm just feeling bitchy because my doctor insisted on putting me back on cholesterol medication, and after resisting for the last 6 months she said look, lose 42 pounds or go on the meds.  So I'm supposed to fricking wave my magic wand and lose 42 pounds just like that, after I lost 15 since the summer of 2008 and have kept it off.  The woman is a Nazi! 

The Vernal Equinox: Hatching The World Egg
Donna HenesUrban shaman, eco-ceremonialist and ritual expert
Posted: March 11, 2010 10:07 AM

Dog Sacrifice in Medieval Hungary

After the rise of christianity, the church fathers were gradually successful in "demonizing" dogs for the most part, that faithful canine companion of the Goddess from earliest times. It is surprising to the discovering archaeologists, then, to find that what appears to be a sort of hybrid propitiatory sacrifice both to the Goddess and to the God Jesus Christ, was rather commonplace in a town called Kana, a 10th-13th century CE town on the outskirts of modern-day Budapest. Could there possibly be a connection of KANA to CANINE? An interesting "coincidence," heh? Was something else going on - something which we don't understand at all? Story from the National Geographic News Dog Sacrifices Found in Medieval Hungarian Village Charles Q. Choifor National Geographic News April 6, 2009 A medieval Hungarian town full of ritually sacrificed dogs could shed light on mysterious pagan customs not found in written records from the era, a new study suggests. Roughly 1,300 bones from about 25 dogs were recently discovered in the 10th- to 13th-century town of Kana, which had been accidentally unearthed in 2003 during the construction of residential buildings on the outskirts of Budapest. Researchers found ten dogs buried in pits and four puppy skeletons in pots buried upside down. These sacrifices probably served much like amulets to ward against evil—for instance, to protect against witchcraft or the evil eye, said study leader Márta Daróczi-Szabó, an archaeozoologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. [No explanation given for why she believes this to be so]. About a dozen other canines were found buried under house foundations. These animals likely served as "construction sacrifices," Daróczi-Szabó said. During the Middle Ages it was customary in Hungary to lock sacrificial animals inside new houses or to slaughter the beasts as people moved in. Sometimes dogs were beaten to death on the doorsteps or a chicken's throat was slit. [And which Goddess or God was being honored by such particularly gruesomely rendered sacrifices? Sacrificing an animal by slitting it's throat for a quick and relatively painless death is one thing; sacrificing an animal by beating it to death is ridiculously cruel - how could this be pleasing to any deity?] Dogs were popular sacrificial animals in medieval Hungary, Daróczi-Szabó said. They were seen two different ways: They symbolized loyalty, but they also stood for the deadly sin of envy. "There was a very big difference between the hunting dogs of the nobility and the scavenging pariah dogs of everyday life," she said. [Which dogs were used as sacrifices? Was one type of dog preferred over another? Were the "noble" dogs spared and the "pariah" dogs beaten to death?] Surprisingly Widespread Previous evidence of animal sacrifices—seen even under churches, in Budapest and elsewhere in Hungary—had been mostly isolated cases, Daróczi-Szabó noted. But the new findings, described this month in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior, show that "sacrifices were not a rare phenomenon, as one may have thought from isolated finds," she said. "It was practiced regularly in a Christian village." ["Christian" in the same sense that the Spanish "Conversos" were "Christian?" Could there by any possible linkage between this evidence of wide-spread dog and puppy sacrifice in Kana and the puppy sacrifice that took place in ancient Mesopotamia thousands of years earlier?] The fact that pagan customs such as animal sacrifice persisted for centuries side-by-side with the church is surprising, noted University of Edinburgh archaeozoologist László Bartosiewicz. Christianity came to dominate the region after the first king of Hungary, Stephen I, began his rule in A.D. 1000. Under his reign, pagan rituals such as animal sacrifices were explicitly banned. "One wouldn't expect these practices in Christian times," said Bartosiewicz, who did not participate in the new study. "It's exciting to see what was sacred and profane back then. "The great number of sacrifices we see [in Kana] will significantly improve our chances of interpreting what their meaning was," he added. "It's probably the find of a lifetime. I can't imagine lucking upon anything else of this scope."

**************************************************************************** If archaeologists are surprised by "pagan" customs persisting hundreds of years after the advent of "christianity," what do they think about the fact that around the world people still serve hot-cross buns served at Easter? Hot-cross buns, for those who are not aware, are descended from an ancient devotional offering to the Goddess during the Spring Equinox and pre-date christianity by thousands of years! What about the Easter Bunny - another ancient pagan symbol of fertility, and Easter eggs, another pagan fertility symbol?

The Truth About Easter

Thanks to the internet, the truth about the spring festival of Easter is now widely disseminated, and around Easter every year there are a host of new articles on the ancient origins of this yearly celebration. Here is one: World Net Daily Exclusive The truth about Easter Posted: March 23, 20091:00 am Eastern By Richard Rives© 2009 The renowned Oxford English Dictionary informs us that the name "Easter" is derived from the name of a goddess whose festival was celebrated at the time of the vernal equinox. We are told that she was originally known as the dawn goddess – no doubt the origin of sunrise celebrations at the time of Easter. According to Venerable Bede, a seventh century Anglo Saxon theologian, the English word "Easter" is derived from the name of the pagan fertility goddess Eostra. He tells us that "the heathen Anglo-Saxons called the fourth month "Esturmonath" after their goddess Eostra – another name representing the spring fertility goddesses such as Astarte or Ashtaroth, the goddess who was introduced into the British Isles by the Druids. In all actuality, Easter is just another name for Beltis or Ishtar of the ancient Babylonians and can be traced all the way back to Hathor, the cow goddess of Egypt that was associated with the building of the golden calf at Mount Sinai. Rest of article.

Happy Easter!

The real meaning of Easter. From Barbara Walker's "The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets" Easter Springtime sacrifical festival named for the Saxon Goddess Eostre, or Ostara, a northern form of Astarte. Her sacred month was Eastre-monath, the Moon of Eostre.(1) Saxon poets apparently knew Eoester was the same Goddess as India's Great Mother Kali. Beowulf spoke of "Ganges' waters, whose flood waves ride down into an unknown sea near Eostre's far home."(2) The Easter Bunny was older than Christianity; it was the Moon-hare sacred to the Goddess in both eastern and western nations. Recalling the myths of Hathor-Astarte who laid the Golden Egg of the sun, Germans used to say the hare would lay eggs for good children on Easter Eve.(3) (See Cat.) Like all the church's "movable feasts," Easter shows its pagan origin in a dating system based on the old lunar calendar. It is fixed as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, formerly the "pregnant" phase of Eostre passing into the fertile season. The Christian festival wasn't call Easter until the Goddess's name was given to it in the laste Middle Ages.(4) (See Menstrual Calendar.) The Irish kept Easter on a different date from that of the Roman church, probably the original date of the festival of Eostre, until the Roman calendar was imposed on them in 632 A.D. Nevertheless, the Columban foundation and their colonies in Britain kept the old date for another fifty years.(5) The Persians began their solar New Year at the spring equinox, and up to the middle of the 18th century they still followed the old custom of presenting each other with colored eggs on the occasion.(6) [See post on Persian New Year]. Eggs were always symbols of rebirth, which is why Easter eggs were usually colored red - the life-color - especially in eastern Europe. Russians used to lay red Easter eggs on graves to serve as resurrection charms.(7) In Bohemia, Christ was duly honored on Easter Sunday and his pagan rival on Easter Monday [which would actually be the third day after death on "Good Friday"], which was the Moon-day opposed to the Sun-day. Village girls like ancient priestesses sacrificed the Lord of Death and threw him into water, singing, "Death swims in the water, spring comes to visit us, with eggs that are red, with yellow pancakes, we carried Death out of the village, we are carrying Summer into the village."(8) Another remnant of the pagan sacred drama was the image of the god buried in his tomb, then withdrawn and said to live again. The church instituted such a custom early in the Middle Ages, apparently in hopes of a reportable miracle. A small sepulchral building having been erected and the consecrated host placed within, a priest was set to watch it from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. Then the host was taken out and displayed, and the congreagatin was told Christ was risen.(9) A curious 16th-century Easter custom was known as "creeping to the cross with eggs and apples," a significant use of the ancient female symbols of birth and death, beginning and ruition, the opening and closing of cycles. The Ceremonial of the Kings of England ordered carpets to be laid in the church, for the comfort of the king, queen, and courteriers was they crept down the aisle on hands and knees.(1) The penitential implication of the creeping ceremony is clear enough, but the female-symbolic foodstuffs are a bit mysterious. Germany applied to Easter the same title formerly given to the season of the sacred king's love-death, Hoch-Zeit, "the High Time." In English too, Easter used to be called "the Hye-Tide."(11) From these titles came the colloquial description of any festival holiday as "a high old time." Notes: (1) Knight, D.W.P., 157. (2) Goodrich, 18. (3) de Lys, 117. (4) H. Smith, 201. (5) de Paor, 70. (6) Hazlitt, 201. (7) Gaster, 603. (8) Frazer, G.B., 362. (9) Hazlitt, 281. (10) Hazlitt, 153. (11) Hazlitt, 316.