In view of mysticism and the Hebrew alphabet, the mystery of the Virgin Mary is the mystery of the origin of the universe, of the creation of matter from what has not been explained, the infinite, the that science has not yet been able to discover. Delving into this mystery is very delicate. It involves finding a way between the dogmas of the Church and popular devotion, and this, precisely, is what the philologist Lola Josa tries in La medida del tiempo. Word and feminine principles
Mary symbolizes the woman who is ready to receive and give birth, the birth of what is physical, but also of knowledge, wisdom and progress, of everything that precedes being.
The Hebrew sources teach us that childbearing from a female womb places the woman at the center of creation. “Mary is the body and the womb – writes Josa -, the measure of the human being”. It also symbolizes the origin, everything that is infinitely possible, the birth of matter and the spirit that precedes it.
The Church, however, subordinates it to God and Jesus, that is to say, to man. Paul VI announced in 1974 that the Virgin was “the perfect woman” thanks to her traditional values; the main one, submission. The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir then replied that “the Virgin kneels before the son and accepts his inferiority”.
The first Mary, as Josa and Bendahan maintain, was Miriam, the sister of Moses, who saves him from the wrath of Pharaoh and then helps him guide the Jews in their escape from Egypt. “MÃriam is of enormous importance – points out Bendahan-. Not only because he saves Moses, but also because he is the one who finds water in the desert and then celebrates with his tambourine the crossing of the Red Seaâ€.
Women, very powerful in the Old Testament, take a back seat in the New Testament. Christianity associates power with men, not with women. Sara, MÃriam and Esther fade away in a patriarchal society.
We know little about Maria. There is hardly anything about her in the scriptures. Only the apocryphal texts value her and compare her with God himself.
“The Virgin marks the hierarchical and political order”, points out Marina Warner, author of Tú sola entre las mujeres, a work on the myth and cult of Mary. “The Church uses it to present the social order as a divine code”, he adds.
The Virgin, despite her theological instrumentalization in favor of the patriarchy, has a life of her own. “It’s a true popular creation,” says Warner.
“The cult of the Virgin – according to the historian Miri Rubin – explains the history of Christianity. His figure is essential for understanding European, Western and Christian civilization”.
Rubin, author of Mother of God gives the example of how Latin America serves both the colonizers and the colonized, how it inspires the cathedrals of Chartres and Strasbourg, the poetry of Dante, Petrarch and Yates, the painting of Giotto, Caravaggio, Raphael, Titian and Velázquez and many other artists.
While Byzantium represents her as a hieratic queen, an image that has prevailed in the Eastern Orthodox churches, in Western medieval Europe she appears as a closer, more expressive and human mother.
In some Latin cultures, such as the Spanish for Holy Week, the Virgin goes out in procession bejeweled and made up, dressed in luxurious fabrics.
Few people know, however, what the Spanish intellectuals of the 16th century, such as Friar Luis de León and Saint John of the Cross, learned about her from the Hebrew sources of the Bible. In the primitive and eastern churches – which used the texts in Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek – they saw Mary as the means of the incarnation and the mother of the oneness, that is, of what is divine in what is human and of who is human in what is divine.
This uniqueness, which, according to Josa, is well defined in Genesis, implies that at the origin, in the space prior to the material revelation, that is to say, at the creation of the human body, each being is male and female at the same time. “In the origin of humanity there is no male or female because everything is one – he explains-. At the moment of conception, each being has male and female potentialities”, as biology has shown.
The Jewish Bible, Genesis in its original source, as well as the Torah, begin with two words: Bereshit Bará, which mean “In the beginning (God) created”. The letter b is bet in the Hebrew alphabet, and in its stroke, as Josa explains, “draws a belly like that of a pregnant woman” from which emerges a head, a crown, the letter reish that goes after bet . “The beginning of reading the Bible – says Josa – means attending a birth, the birth of the word, head and crown of humanity”.
One is born, Jesus is born from the womb of Mary, and to accept it like this, as Josa maintains, is to admit “the femininity that is in God, the divinity in its feminine facet, something that the Spanish mystics of the century ‘ or they already knew”.
