Journey with Me Blog Series
Location: Turkey
My experience there
Sitting on a low stone wall in the ruins of the Church of the Virgin Mary, I closed my eyes and meditated on the dramatic crossroad in spiritual history that happened here, in the year AD 431. This is the date of the Council of Ephesus, an assembly of the early Christian bishops, that declared the following: Jesus of Nazareth was both human and divine in nature and, therefore, the Virgin Mary had given birth to a God. Anyone who thought differently was to be considered a heretic and excommunicated. As I tuned into this key event in Christian history, I could sense how this place was the theater of a big milestone in the troubled history of the Feminine within Christian society and culture.
The Council of Ephesus marks the beginning of a theological process deeply affecting the figure of Mary the mother of Jesus. This century-long journey somehow culminated in 1950, when Pope Pius XII proclaimed that the Virgin Mary was “to be taken up body and soul to the glory of heaven where, as Queen, she sits in splendor at the right hand of her Son, the immortal King of the Ages.” We begin with a mortal woman giving birth to a teacher and guide in the land of Judaea; we end up with a Divine Couple made of a man and his mother, sitting on the thrones of heaven.
And yet, as I continue meditating on this incredible journey that Mary has been through, this is my first realisation: through all the spiritual debates that brought her from mortal woman to divine being, Mary, and therefore the Feminine, was not there. She wasn’t consulted, and couldn’t express for herself, whether she was human or Divine, or anything else in between.
Of course, in AD 431, the year of the Council of Ephesus, the historical Mary was long dead. But if the Christian bishops that convened in the Council trusted themselves to channel the wisdom of Jesus long after he had died, why could they not have trusted a woman to be there with them, and speak in the name of Mary? The bishops spent weeks debating through arguments and counter-arguments whether Mary was human or divine, but didn’t think that it was important to consult a woman, a mother, on the matter.
The theological battle at Ephesus was literally waged on Mary’s skin, and it affected our understanding of the Feminine for centuries to come. On a surface level, the Council elevated Mary as an eternal symbol of the Light Feminine: pure, virginal, radiating light. But on a deeper level, the fully embodied, healthy, human Light Feminine—the one that we can perceive, for example, in a fully human and embodied mother that just gave birth to a child—was removed from the spiritual and ultimately psychological landscape of Western culture.
The Light Feminine is being stripped of any concrete, embodied power, and turned into a merciful and consoling, but also strangely helpless archetype. By becoming a symbol of a bloodless, sexless, disembodied, perfected Feminine, the Virgin Mary unwillingly becomes an unattainable standard, an unreachable ideal of perfection that all pious Christian women, and many secular women too, are going to be measured against.
The culmination of this process in 1950, with the coronation of the Virgin Mary as Queen of the Heavens, brings to an end what was initiated in Ephesus fifteen centuries before. By being elevated to the status of Goddess, perfected and polished through a Masculine lens, Mary and therefore the Feminine is paradoxically defeated, forever robbed of the right to be embodied, complex, mutable, rich, diverse—and powerful.
As I meditate on this, tears start running down my cheeks.
If you want to read a more in-depth contemplation of the journey of the Feminine archetypes in the Western world, check out my paper Visions of Mary.
A little bit of history:
In one of the many legends surrounding the events of the Crucifixion, the dying Jesus would have entrusted his disciple John with taking care of his mother Mary. When Jesus’s disciples scattered after his death, one version of the facts tells us that John went to Ephesus, possibly with Mary, who died there just a few years later.
But Ephesus had been an important center of culture, trade, and worship, for centuries before the birth of Jesus. It was the site of the Temple of Artemis, considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World and now sadly destroyed; and it was the site of one of the main libraries of antiquity, whose magnificent façade is still visible.
Even though Ephesus is in modern Turkey, it was part of Ionia, one of the regions of Ancient Greece. Ionia has an important place in the history of philosophy: Miletus, one of its main cities, was the birthplace of philosophers Thales and Heraclitus, the first to propose natural causes to explain the manifested world. Samos, an island in Ionia, was the birthplace of Pythagoras, the philosopher-sage-shaman who was one of the most influential figures in the development of Western mysticism.
The Western part of Turkey, including the Aegean coast, is littered with temples, sacred sites, and powerful places of worship such as the Temple of Hecate, Pergamon, and Ephesus itself. Scouring the coast south of Izmir has been a constant source of delights and revelations for me. The Mediterranean Sea, with its century-long history as a connective waterway between different cultures and populations, has served as a fertile womb for philosophical and spiritual seeds to be spread all around Europe. Even though today, the Mediterranean has become perhaps the most deadly sea in the world, a trap and oftentimes a coffin for hundreds of migrants looking to escape their harrowing realities in search of a better life, its glorious past still lives and breathes in the ruins of Ephesus and other sacred sites.
When you are there
Ephesus is a fairly touristic place, but most of the tourists tend to gather around the façade of the Library, and the Basilica of St John. The Church of the Virgin Mary is a much less spectacular site for Instagram feeds, so it is usually more quiet and reserved. I suggest that you get away from the tourist streams as soon as you can, and treat yourself to a time of contemplation and meditation inside the ruins of the Church of Mary. Let her history speak to you, without any assumptions or prejudices. Allow your memory to go back in time, to the Council of Ephesus, and even before, to the possible storyline in which Mary spent her last days here.
I recommend that, whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs are, you allow yourself to contemplate the existence of a real, embodied woman named Mary, who had a unique and difficult existence. What does she represent to you? How does her story, between reality and legend, affect your relationship with the Feminine, inside and outside? Perhaps all that this contemplation will bring is new questions and new doubts. This is what, sometimes, happens when we allow the archetypal world more space in our daily experience. Let those questions and doubts expand you, soften you, and welcome any revelations that may come. This place has a story to tell, and it only takes a few minutes of quiet and concentration to be able to listen to it.
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