Customer Reviews

Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor

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It's a silly shame that this wonderful book is out-of-print when the Code Mania would sell it like hotcakes. It is, without a competitor, the best all-around book on Mary Magdalene. Buy Karen L. King's translation of the Gospel of Mary if you want an intense but engaging lesson in theology, Jane Schaberg's *The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene* if you want a solid feminist critique, or Margaret Starbird's *The Woman with the Alabaster Jar* if you are looking for New Age speculation, but it's Haskins who pulls it all together.

Tracing the idea of Mary Magdalene from the Biblical (and "heretical") sources to present-day manifestations in film and novel, she provides a survey of the changing role of women and sexuality in Occidental culture, generously illustrated with depictions of the Magdalene. She shows how the "shamed prostitute" myth got its start, examines the claims of connection between Mary and France, and provides a very funny account of the Church supported habit of "relic snatching" that accounts for Mary's "relics" moving here and there from this monastery to that church.

All in all, it is a heavy but interesting read, with no polemic axe to grind. Start here.

Haskins does an excellent job in bringing us virtually every relevant piece of useful information about Mary Magdalene. It's all discussed here -- Mary Magdalene in Scripture, non-canonical Christian literature, artwork, history, myths, and legends. An important work about an important historical and spiritual figure.

It's tempting to call Susan Haskins' book the most definitive work about Mary Magdalene currently on the market. So much information is presented that it takes awhile for the casual reader to wade through all of the details. The density of the information provided could place it in a "reference" category, but there is definitely enough serious research and intriguing conclusions to make reading it from cover to cover a worthwhile endeavor.

This is THE MOST AMAZING book on Mary Magdalen. Susan Haskins goes through the image/personna of the magdalen from the Biblical roots to our pop-culture. The primary references are excellent, it is well put together, it is PERFECT!

This is truly a brilliant dedication and devotion from Susan Haskins to the modern surfacing of Mary Magdalene. I believe that she has made an inspirational and scholarly entry into a field which is conspicously absent of female theologians. With this book as reference, the interested reader can find numerous starting points into the dark and tangled woods which, for two thousand years, have been blocking the paths leading to Mary Magdalene and a balanced spirituality.

It was Pope Gregory who began the notion that Mary Magdalene was a fallen woman and the story stuck even after Vatican 2 in 1969. This is a pre-Da Vinci code take on the historical Mary Magdalene. There have been many edits to the Bible, to church history, to the lives of key figures from the earliest origins of Christianity ... and in sorting out fact from fiction ... one must seek to understand the context of teachings first before just blindly believing anything presented to them. Mary Magdalene became an icon of the fallen dangerous women and was used to subjugate women in many levels of church politics. Her history is one of the most controversial topics in the church .... and well worth exploring to understand the intention behind her image.

If we search the New Testament, Mary of Magdalene is mentioned in each of the gospels as being present at the crucifixion and at the resurrection. Indeed, John says that it was Mary who was first at the tomb of Jesus and ran to tell Peter that the tomb was empty, then returned to find and speak to the risen Christ. Luke says that Jesus had cast seven devils from her. She does not appear in Acts, nor is she mentioned in any of the letters. So how come we have such a rich and elaborate mythology about this woman? This is what Haskins seeks to work out. Throughout most of history, Mary Magdalene is considered in the popular view to be a reformed prostitute. At the simplest level, this notion may have been fostered by the adjacent passages in Luke 7 : the casting out of devils and the episode of the unnamed sinning woman who washed Jesus' feet in the house of Simon the Pharisee. The proximity of these two events led to the conflation of Mary with the unnamed sinner, and the idea that she had been a prostitute stuck. But Mary Magdalene was also conflated with Mary of Bethany, who sat at Jesus' feet to the irritation of her busy sister, Martha. But there is no suggestion that Mary of Bethany was a prostitute, reformed or otherwise. And there apparently is nothing in the apocryphal gospels and acts to warrant labeling Mary a prostitute, except the gnostic spin that all females were sexual beings, and only by losing their femaleness, could they become spiritual. However, it could have been through the gnostic and Manichaean tradition that Mary Magdalene assumed her importance. It was reported that one of the heresies of the Albigensians centered on their alleged insistence that Mary was Jesus' concubine. The early church downplayed Mary's role at the resurrection, preferring to emphasize Luke's version that the risen Christ first appeared to Peter.

According to Haskins, Mary Magdalene became the favorite female saint of the middle ages. First, she appeared in the Gospel settings (already she was conflated with the sinning woman in the Pharisee's house, and with Mary of Bethany). But in the 13th century, she emerged in her own right. Her popularity arose from her role at the resurrection as depicted by the Gospel of John, and the Churches' emphasis on sin and redemption. There was considerable embroidery around the sparse accounts in the gospels, the upshot being that the general consensus of medieval commentators was that she was the "beatra peccatrix"--blessed sinner, and "castissima meretrix (most chaste whore), converted by her great love for Christ from the depths of carnal sin to the heights of spiritual love.

The larger portion of the book follows Mary's career as an icon--in art and literature-- through history down to the present day. There is very much material here. Haskins also addresses the symbolism of Mary as it applies to current feminist thinking, particularly with respect to women's becoming coequal to men in the church. Haskins believes that the Virgin Mary (who is championed by the still-patriarchal church) is the real rival to a Magdalene aspiring to be free from gender restrictions.

Ignore my rating as I have only just begun reading this book but I did not want to alter the overall rating given to date. I have posted this 'review' simply to let it be known on Amazon that the book is back in print and is now published by PIMLICO with the ISBN 1-8459-5004-6.

Myth and Metaphor is an apt description. The book was a fun read about an unknown (little known) name from the New Testament. Full of interesting history.