#mother mary

[froggbones]

Pray for us sinners

[luckydiorxoxo]

First look at David Lowery’s ‘MOTHER MARY’ starring Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer and FKA twigs.

Described as an epic pop melodrama following a fictional musician and her relationship with an iconic fashion designer.

[catholicmemoirs]

It would be like the Book of Hours people in the medieval times had.

Mary Queen of Scots mini prayer book

Antique French missal

[wolfythewitch]

Commission

[catholike]

[banishedchildofeve]

Virgin Mary Barbie doll from Argentina

[psalmlover]

mary in a flower crown, st gabriel of the sorrowful mother, pennsylvania, usa

[angelunderheaven]

[rottendust]

[artmialma]

1936

[dollykiller]

[guillotin3d]

[haggishlyhagging]

The New Testament scarcely mentions Mary. She is brought into the story mainly to emphasize Jesus's divine conception and birth. Her presence is noted once or twice, but little is made of it. In the centuries that followed, however, Mary was exalted to ever-higher positions of glory. She is the subject of many of our most famous and beautiful works of art. In light of what we have learned about the Goddesses of the ancient Near East, it is interesting that Mary is shown not only as the Madonna with her child, but standing on the crescent moon or with stars circling her head. She takes on many of the ancient Goddess symbols and is often painted as a larger-than-life figure. She is also shown being crowned Queen of Heaven, absorbing the title of the Goddess. It may be that the need of the people for a female deity was so great that the Christian Church might not have survived without the elevation of Mary to this exalted position. We need to look carefully, however, at just what aspects of the Goddess Mary was allowed to retain and what the results were in the lives of women.

Mary was taken up to heaven and seated with god the father and his divine son Jesus. She became the main intercessor between human beings and the divine. She was called Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, but she was not made a full-fledged member of the Godhead. The Church used her to satisfy the need for a female presence in Christianity but also to keep women in a subordinate position. Her purity as a virgin was exalted and women were taught to strive for that purity and to obey the divine (male) will. At the same time she is, of course, a mother, and women were taught to bear as many children as possible. But Mary did it while remaining a virgin; other women, in order to be mothers, must be tainted by sexuality. If they remain pure they cannot be like Mary the Mother; if they become mothers they cannot be like Mary the Virgin. No matter what they do they are guilty and inferior.

Mary's stance is: "Let it be to me according to your word." She is passive, obedient, and pure. She sits on a throne but has little power, certainly none of the power or independence of the earlier Goddesses or their free sexuality. Nevertheless, the doctrine of her virginity gave women a way out of the role of submissive wife and bearer of children. When the cult of Mary was at its height, thousands of women escaped into convents, communities of women. There they developed skills and talents in the arts and in the administration of large estates. Many abbesses wielded significant power and controlled sizable amounts of wealth.

It is interesting that, just as the veneration of Mary reached its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Protestant Reformation reasserted the dominance of the male divinities. One of Luther's major reforms was the closing of nunneries, and Mary is notably absent from all formulations of Protestant theology and ritual. Whereas Catholic women have suffered from their attempts to imitate an impossible model, Protestant women have had no exalted female model of any kind. Mary's presence has been used by the Catholic Church to reinforce the subordination of women, and her absence has been used by Protestantism to reinforce their insignificance.

-Shirley Ann Ranck, Cakes for the Queen of Heaven

[wolfythewitch]

son. my son

[trap-str]