Dr. Luis Dias
Had God blessed me with a daughter, for sure her first name would have been Maria. This is true of most Catholic girls and women, a tribute to Mary, mother of God.
But the name ‘Mary’ (or Mariam, Miriam in the Hebrew and Greek equivalents) was also by far the most common Jewish given name for girls and women around the first century.
The major highlight for me of the 10th edition of Serendipity Arts Festival last month was the presentation of ‘Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy / Maddalena in Estasi’ (1606), the stunningly beautiful painting by Italian baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571 – 1610). As it was displayed at the Fazenda, the former Director of Accounts building a short walk from my home, I visited and revisited it several times through the duration of the festival.
Mary Magdalene had already been on my mind as a few weeks earlier I had read a long essay (‘Mistaking Mary Magdalene’, April 19, 2025) in The New Yorker by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Eliza Griswold, which provided much food
for thought.
Due to the prevailing popularity of the name Mary, there are at least six women by that name mentioned in the Bible.
There aren’t that many explicit references to Mary Magdalene in the canonical Gospels. In Luke 8:2, we learn that “seven demons were cast out” of her. She is then mentioned in the context of the crucifixion (Matthew 27, Mark 15, John 19), burial (Matthew 27, Mark 15) and resurrection (John 20, Mark 16) of Jesus.
After reading the New Yorker article, I came upon an insightful documentary (‘Who Was the Real Mary Magdalene? Art’s Scarlet Woman’) on YouTube, in which Polish-British art critic and television presenter Waldemar Januszczak enumerated “all the Marys in the Bible”: the Virgin Mary; Mary Magdalene; Mary Salome (Mother Mary’s sister in some accounts); Mary Cleophas, another female disciple of Jesus, (and taken by some to be another sister). Januszczak should also have included Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead; and Mary of Jacob (mother of James the Less, one of the Twelve Apostles).
To confuse matters further, different combinations of Marys are called “the Three Marys”, referring to the women present either at the crucifixion, or at the tomb on Easter Sunday, or the three daughters of Saint Anne, all named Mary.
I often find it difficult to concentrate or even stay awake at some sermons, so it is remarkable how a sermon delivered centuries ago could have such an impact.
An Easter sermon in 591 AD by Pope Gregory I conflated Mary Magdalene with the unnamed “sinful woman” who anointed Jesus’ feet in Luke 7:36–50, resulting in the unfair, belief (unsupported by any evidence, Biblical or otherwise) that Mary Magdalene was a repentant prostitute or promiscuous woman.
Another reason could be that Magdala (a fishing village on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee) where Mary “Magdalene” is said to have been born, was infamous for its inhabitants’ alleged vice and licentiousness. So the ill-repute of the region tainted her reputation as well. (By that twisted logic, Goa’s sad reputation for alcohol, gambling, drugs, and sex should rub off on every Goan! The tired Bollywood stereotype of the Goan is well-known).
Adding further insult to injury to Mary Magdalene’s image was the conflation with yet another Mary: Mary of Egypt, fifth-century Egyptian grazer saint (whose historicity is sometimes questioned), said to have lived in Byzantine-era Palestine. ‘Grazers’ were a category of Christian hermits (male and female) in the first millennium in the ‘Christian East’, mainly in Palestine and Syria, but also Pontus, Mesopotamia,
and Egypt.
Mary of Egypt’s story, a woman given to prostitution driven by insatiable lust rather than financial necessity, who underwent a dramatic conversion, and then lived in the desert with only the flowing tresses of her hair to cover her modesty, was transferred to the myth surrounding Mary Magdalene.
This idea of the “repentant harlot” quickly entered any artistic depiction of Mary Magdalene. The English word ‘maudlin’, meaning “sickly sentimental or emotional” comes from her widespread representation in tears, seen also in Caravaggio’s painting.
Another Magdalene attribute in art is the colour red, the “colour of love.” Although Januszczak says the term “scarlet woman” arose from artistic representations of Mary Magdalene, it actually originates from the Book of Revelation, describing the “Whore of Babylon” as a symbolic, immoral figure arrayed in scarlet and purple, representing corruption or false religion.
Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalene has a red cloth enveloping her lower body. His Magdalene is brunette, and apart from a long tress draped down her right shoulder onto her clothed torso, the rest of her head hair blends into the featureless dark background. Her left forearm rests on a skull, meant to represent her deep repentance and contemplative solitude. He dispenses with the ointment jar, another artistic
Magdalene attribute.
The semi-reclining pose, the upward tilt of her head and half-closed, tear-filled eyes and the “ecstasy” title refer to the legend that Mary Magdalene moved to southern France after Christ’s death, living as a hermit in a cave at Sainte-Brune near Aix-en-Provence, where she was transported seven times a day by angels into the presence of God, “where she heard, with her bodily ears, the delightful harmonies of the celestial choirs.”
This was depicted by earlier artists as an outdoor supernatural experience. Caravaggio moves it into a nondescript interior.
In ‘Paradoxical Bodies : Femininity, subjectivity and the visual discourse of ecstasy’ (University of Leeds), Victoria Elizabeth Turvey Sauron says of this painting that “[Magdalene’s] body’s abandon invites readings on many different levels and it produces many different meanings; as a result, it both fascinates and disturbs viewers…..The threat posed by the Magdalene is that of excessive empathy with an emphatically corporeal body, experiencing an ecstasy which is ambiguous in its physical and spiritual pleasure or pain, of mysterious and ineffable origin and which may be too ‘real’ to be safely viewed.”
Dan Brown’s 2003 bestseller ‘The Da Vinci code’ only added to the erroneous ideas about Mary Magdalene, too many to enumerate and lacking any scholarship.
In Aramaic, ‘Magdala’ means ‘tower’, ‘elevated’, ‘great’, ‘magnificent’. She may have been called Magdalene because she was a ‘tower’ of faith, the first to see the risen Jesus, and called “the apostle to the apostles” as she brought the news to the resurrection to them. She almost certainly was highly regarded by the nascent church until the defamation campaign and
conflations began.
In ‘Picturing the Magdalene: How Artists Imagine the Apostle to the Apostles’ (September 2010), Benedictine oblate Robert Kiely observed, “No figure in the Christian Pantheon except Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist has inspired, provoked, or confounded the imagination of painters more than the Magdalene…. a woman who, through no fault of her own, lost her importance as a beloved friend of Jesus and her stature as ‘apostle to the apostles’—not to mention her virtue—in the eyes of many men and women
for centuries.”
