"…myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things: in it, things lose the memory that they once were made" (Roland Barthes, Mythologies, p.142)^b.

The method I have chosen to explicate the figure of the Madonna involves an examination of the historical forces that shaped the rise of Marian devotion, and an attempt at an analysis of the figure of the Madonna as myth shaped by ideology.   I am not so conceited as to think such a method explains the Marian cult in all its aspects, or that such an enquiry is the only legitimate approach to the subject.   If I do not look at the role the Virgin plays from a religious^c viewpoint it is because I am manifestly unqualified to do so.   The Virgin Mary can be understood as simply a religious phenomenon, but such an understanding takes the Marian cult at face value as a basic assumption or fact.   The interesting questions that can be asked of this cult can all be answered from a secular perspective^d.   Why is the Marian doctrine constructed in the way it is?   What are the essential features of this doctrine?   How does Mary operate as an agent of social control?^e   How is this control mediated?

Protestant theologians have always had two strong objections to the Marian cult.   The first is that there seems little or no basis for such a cult in the New Testament.   Mary is mentioned in only about a dozen passages, and, when she is mentioned, remains very much in the background.   The Gospel of Mark, generally taken to be the earliest of the four Gospels, mentions Mary only once (Mark 6:3), and the earliest record of the Christian Church, the Acts of the Apostles, also has only one reference to her (Acts 1:14).   When we search for the historical Mary, the woman of Nazareth, we search in vain.   The elaborate detail that surrounds Mary – subtleties that have delighted some of the liveliest minds in the church – is the accretion of centuries.   The second objection brought against Marian devotion is historical: there is little evidence that adoration of the Virgin existed during the first four centuries of the Christian Church.   There are four pieces of evidence that have been cited in support of an early Marian cult: Mary is alluded to in the Apocrypha, notably in the Protoevangelium of James (probably written in the 2nd century A.D.); there is a reference in the late fourth century to an apparition of the Virgin to a certain Gregory the Wonderworker; there is a papyrus fragment, dating from the early fourth century, which appears to record a prayer asking for Mary’s intercession; and the Byzantine church seems to have introduced a feast of the Madonna sometime before the beginning of the fifth century.   These four, rather scrappy, pieces of evidence do not constitute good grounds for widespread Marian devotion in the early Christian Church.

It is only after the Council of Ephesus in 431 that we see a dramatic increase in devotion to the Virgin Mary.   At this meeting, Mary was given the title Theotokos (the God-bearer, the mother of God), an honour that gave immediate impetus to Marian devotion.   A few years after the Council of Ephesus the first Church in the city of Rome was dedicated to the Virgin.   Marian shrine was apparently a sanctuary near Constantinople, where there is a record that the "veil of the Virgin" was venerated from about the middle of the sixth century onward.   The first feast of the Virgin, the Purification, dates from the latter part of the seventh century, and was swiftly followed by the introduction of feast commemorating the Assumption, the Annunciation, and the Nativity of Mary.   If one attempts to find an explanation for the conciliar decision to proclaim Mary Theotokos, one can only conclude that it emerged from quarrels in the upper echelons^f of Church and state involving the two disparate traditions centred in Constantinople and Alexandria.   The ancient and inflammatory rivalry was manifesting itself, in the fifth century, in a heated dispute over complex Christological issues.   The decision of the pope to support Cyril of Alexandria proved decisive in the dispute, leading to the excommunication of Nestorius^g, the patriarch of Constantinople, and ensuring that a final blow was struck at the pragmatic, restrained religious tradition centred in Antioch.

The political and religious wrangling was not ended by Ephesus, however, and in 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, the fourth Ecumenical Council of the Church, the two natures of Christ were reasserted, in an effort to heal the divisions between Constantinople and Alexandria.   The Virgin was officially given the title Aeiparthenos (ever-virgin) and her virginity at the conception, in_partu (during birth), and post partum (after birth) thereby affirmed.   Some two hundred years later, in 649, at the Fourth Lateran Council, Pope Martin I (d.655) declared Mary’s perpetual virginity a dogma of the Church.

The establishment of Mary as Mother of God encourages us to see her as simply the latest in a long line of mother goddesses who have dominated Mediterranean religions over the past several millennia. This is an impulse that should be resisted, for Mary is not only Mother of God, she is the Virgin Mother of God.   Thus she is different from almost all earlier mother goddesses in at least one very important aspect; she is completely disassociated from sexuality.   In Catholic doctrine, the association of Mary with virginity means three distinct things: it refers to the "Virgin Birth", the belief that Mary conceived Christ as the result of divine intervention and without the aid of sexual intercourse; it refers to Mary’s in partu virginity, the belief that Mary’s hymen was not ruptured despite giving birth to Christ; finally, it refers to the belief that Mary abstained from sexual intercourse even after the birth of Christ.   The first of these beliefs, that of ‘Virgin Birth’ is, perhaps, traceable to the great many myths in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world where a virgin is impregnated by a god and gives birth to a human (or semi-divine) hero.   The most famous story incorporating this motif concerned Romulus (the legendary founder of Rome), and his twin brother Remus, who were supposedly born to another who had been impregnated by the god Mars.   It is the two other beliefs, that of Mary’s in partu and perpetual virginity, that set the Virgin apart from all likely antecedents, and thus form a central element in her cult.   Those who have compared the Marian cult with those surrounding the great virgin mother goddesses of the Near East, neglect^h the fact that though these were often seen as in partu virgins, they were invariably associated with sexual promiscuity.   (At this point the modern rationalist will point out that it is a nonsense to talk of a goddess who is sexually promiscuous and yet who remains a virgin – to which "the rationalist of the Near East" might respond that it makes no nonsense to say that Mary can give birth and yet preserve her maidenhead intact).   Nevertheless, the important point remains that the feature that makes the Marian myth wholly distinctive is her complete disassociation from human sexuality, conjoined with her divine motherhood.

There are four articles of faith in Roman Catholic doctrine concerning Mary: her divine motherhood and her virginity (as we have seen, declared dogma by councils of the early Christian church); her Immaculate Conception (established in 1854); and her Assumption body and soul into heaven (declared official in 1950).   We may now look at the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which proclaimed that Mary was the only human being to ever have been born without Original Sin.   On December 8th, 1854, Pope Pius IX declared in the Papal Bull Ineffabilis Deus that belief in the Immaculate Conception was mandatory for all those who acknowledge the spiritual authority of Rome.   The doctrine meant that the Virgin Mary was incapable of sin, and was, therefore, the most perfect created being after Jesus Christ.   The consequence of her exemption from the burden of original sin was a completely unblemished life, though such a condition did not apparently undermine her humanity; she retained her free will, though not her concupiscence.   The genealogy of this doctrine was a long and respectable one stretching from the delicate scholastic arguments of the medieval philosopher and theologian Duns Scotus (1265-1308).   During the sixteenth century the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was altered so that it accorded with the allegorical interpretation of the Bible recommended by the patristics.   But when, during the eighteenth century, the Church was abandoned for the first time by the intellectual elite of Europe, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception became an act of defiance against rationalism on behalf of the old, a priori methods of deduction, a believer’s blow struck for faith against the dangers of reason and the new empiricism.   When Pope Pius IX proclaimed Ineffabilis Deus, he was declaring that the pope’s authority to command the beliefs of Christendom had not been shown by the philosophical and political turmoil that characterised the age of scepticism.   By proclaiming dogma a belief that had been energetically discussed since Duns Scotus, he also asserted the position of the pope as the one, divinely sanctioned headⁱ of the Church, and implied that the Church alone was the one true spiritual and intellectual guide and not the individual conscience, as Protestant theologians had maintained since the Reformation.   Thus the interests of the papacy were intimately bound up with the Marian cult, the Bull being an important strategic move by Rome against its detractors.   It was only logical then that Pius IX followed Ineffabilis Deus with another Bull, in 1870, proclaiming the infallibility of the pope as an article of faith.

The extraordinary increase in Marian devotion in the nineteenth century can only be understood against the background of the Church’s continuing struggle with the forces of "modernism" ("modernism" being defined by Pius IX as "an amalgam of secularism, materialism and atheism"(1)).   By the middle of the nineteenth century,^j it was overwhelmingly women who came to confession and filled the pews of parish churches on Sunday mornings.   When the church fathers sought allies in the good fight against the forces of "modernism" it was only natural that they should call on the help of the self-sacrificing, pious women whose energies were being expended on behalf of family and church.   To this end, by far the most important model of womanhood was the Virgin Mary.   It is against such an historical background that one should set the phenomena of the great age of Marian devotion: the official pronouncements of the church from the definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1854 to that of the Assumption of the Virgin in 1950, and the Church’s acceptance, endorsement, and sponsorship of Marian apparitions, with the associated mass movement of pilgrims to the newly formed shrines.

Pope Pius IX, and his successor, Leo XIII (1878-1903), were personally devoted to the veneration of Mary.   They approved coronations, whereby old statues of Mary received crowns in impressive ceremonies.   They also confirmed the validity of new apparitions and miracles, and granted special indulgences for mass pilgrimages.   They thoroughly believed, as the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception had indicated, that the Virgin Mary could help the Church in its time of dire need.   In the first of his decrees in 1883, Dupremis_Apostolatus, Leo XIII reminded Catholics that the rosary had saved the Church from heresy and from the Turks in the sixteenth century.   The implication, clearly, was that Marian intercession would similarly defeat the contemporary evils of "secularism" and "materialism" (the Church’s manqué word for socialism).

The Marian apparitions that seemed to proliferate in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries had a prophetic mission, but this prophetic mission had an explicit political, and anti-modernistic, content.   Although these visions consistently appeared to the peasantry of feudal or early capitalist societies, they never carried a message of social transformation, or suggested that the coming of Christ would mean an end to economic exploitation and political oppression.   Indeed, the political direction augured by these visitations was consistently reactionary: in favour of political legitimacy and fearful of change.   This defensive anti-modernism is the most characteristic legacy of the Church defined Marian cult that emerged in the nineteenth century.   The admonitory tone of the Virgin seen by the three children at Fatima in 1917 echoed the warnings given by Our Lady of La Selette in 1846.   On each occasion the messages given to the children were emphatically political, i.e. if at La Salette it was the Anti-Christ of secularism that threatened the Church, at Fatima it was the spread of Russian Communism.   Belief in these messages helped inform Marian piety with an unpleasant, strident cold war anti-communism in the years preceding^k Vatican II.   The Blue Army of Our Lady, formed in 1947 to fulfil the command of Fatima, at one time enrolled twenty million people, who by prayer alone hoped to conquer the ‘red army of atheists’. (2))   The rosary, said in order to conquer the Turks in the sixteenth century, and against impiety in the nineteenth, was again being said over radios throughout Europe in the 1950’s against a new enemy, Soviet Russia.

Historical explanations of the Marian cult do help illuminate the function of myth, but such myths, while they provide an historical viewpoint and an ethical code for their adherents, also follow certain characteristic, but easily overlooked patterns of thought.   For instance, the Christian equivalence between the spiritual impurity and bodily decay underpins the doctrine of the Assumption, which declares that the all-pure Virgin was spared the corruption of the flesh common to all living things.   In such patterns the sacred and the profane, primordial human desires and fears, can, to some extent, be discerned.

In her masterly study of the Marian cult, Alone of All Her Sex, Marina Warner states of Mary that though she "cannot be a model for the New Woman, a goddess is better than no goddess at all; for the sombre-suited masculine world of the Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentlemen’s club to which the ladies are only admitted on special days." (p. 338)   Yet in Ann Douglas’s justly famous treatment of the feminization of religion, The Feminization of American Culture (1977), it is revealed that American Protestantism was far more sensitive to women’s influence than Roman Catholicism has ever been.^l   In Douglas’s discussion of Protestantism we can distinguish three stages of the feminization process: a growing preponderance of women in congregations; the consequent power that this gave women over religious practices; and a "softening" of theology and religious^m symbolism that reflected this change in power relations.   In the Roman Catholic experience only the first and third features of this feminization process have taken place.   Crucially, it has been the influence exerted by the Marian cult that has exerted powerful pressures that help ensure that women in the Catholic Church do not exert influence over their own religious practices.   The male Catholic hierarchy has not only maintained but extended control over religious life by validating and popularizing certain affective religious practices, and, by binding them to the sacramental system, they have ensured their own hegemony.

The revival of the Marian cult can and has been interpreted as a "softening" of the religious symbolism or a resurgence of the feminine.   Yet it must be recognised that the definition of Mary as both Virgin and Mother presents women with an ideal that they cannot fulfil.   For some women, this can only have the effect of denying female power, or the positive power of sexuality in human life.   At the same time, of course, the Virgin Mother provides a male, celibate clergy with a secure, unchallenging object of contemplation and adoration.   Nevertheless, Catholic women throughout the centuries have responded to Mary as the most powerful and ideal of mother figures, who knew the glories and tragedies of maternity without having had to experience its often painful and bloody traumas.   This empathy is encouraged by the Church, and, for many Catholic women, Mary is the focus of a lifelong veneration.   Most young Catholic girls are told to model themselves on their Blessed Mother, encouraged to join her sodality, the Children of Mary, and wear its special livery, the Miraculous Medal, for the rest of their lives.   But as powerful as Mary can be for women, her male-defined cult imposes serious limitations on a women’s role within the Church.   These limitations become clear when we consider what the Virgin does not represent.

As we have seen, the Virgin Mary has no connection with fertility and sexuality, the two most common features found in any of the pagan symbols of female divinity.   This connection can only belong to a heretical interpretation of Mary’s role in the Church.   Although this connection is often maintained in localised Marian cults, it went unrecognised (officially at least) in the cults of the Black Virgins, some of whom certainly derived their colouration from their relation with the pagan figure of the Earth Mother.   Seen from the perspective of these earlier myths, that the conventional blue and white Madonna is likely to seem not only immaculate, but also to be without vigour, disconnected from Nature and the experiences of real women.   In short, the female divinity who has no control over fertility, is likely to have little autonomy within "her" Church.

The figure of the Virgin Mary who appears briefly in the Bible usually appears alone, as an intermediary who has been bequeathed all her privileges by a loving son and a prescient Father.   Her active co-operation with God’s plan is never apparent: she is a vassalⁿ rather than the first disciple.^o   These are unsurprising facts given that in Catholicism, discipleship and its historical successor, priesthood,^p belong exclusively to males.   In such circumstances a female model for sacramental and public leadership roles remains inconceivable.   Mary the pure and passive vassalⁿ remains a crucial part of the interested interpretation because, first and foremost, Mary as myth must fit a celibate priesthood’s sense of fitness and propriety.

What is it we find when we interrogate the Marian myth?   We find what we find when we explore all myths: that human actions have succeeded in transforming the profoundly historical into a harmonious display of essences that mankind is pleased to call "natural".   When we examine the concentration of human actions that have constructed Mary the Virgin Mother we find that ideology "has emptied the myth of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance.   The function of myth, in short, is to empty reality…" (Roland Barthes, Mythologies, pp 142-143)   This seems to me an extraordinarily penetrating analysis of the forces that have made Mary what she is, forces that can only be comprehended by a reassertion of the historical realities that lie behind the development of myth.   In such a reassertion we see the attempt of a progressive humanism to scour nature, its "laws" and its "limits" in order to discover History there, and at least to establish Nature itself as historical.^q