Let’s Talk About Mama Mary

*Picture credit to Seven Sisters Mystery School who offers Mary and Magdalene Priestess Training

the rest of the story …

An excerpt from Return of the Divine Sophia: Healing the Earth through the Lost Wisdom Teachings of Jesus, Isis, and Mary Magdalene by Tricia McCannon

Tricia writes in Chapter 14, the Many Faces of Mary The Eternal One:

Years later I read a book called Meetings with Mary: Visions of the Blessed Mother. In the foreword, the chair of the Pontifical Gregorian University writes, “The Blessed Virgin, of course, has nothing divine about her; she is not God. Mary is just a human being. She has the stature of a creature. However, she is the Mother of Jesus Christ, who does have divine, as well as human status. Thus she is the Mother of God. She has no power of her own, but she is, and always will be, the mother of the most powerful person who ever walked on earth.” I understood then what Shasta had meant: The patriarchal powers would do all they could to marginalize the divine Feminine and, by association, the value of all women everywhere.

Yup. You said it Shasta (Tricia). Let’s back it up a bit in this Chapter…

As you can see,” Shasta continued, “there have been many expressions of the great Mother Mary, and today you will be meeting some of them.  But before we begin, who can tell me anything interesting about Mary?  Any facts?  Any ideas about her?”

I thought back to what I knew from my many years in the church. I could think of nothing, nada, zip, zero. …

…I found myself reflecting on all the appearances that Mary had been making all over the world for the past two hundred years, especially since the events at Fatima in 1917.  That was when three young Portuguese children, Lucia dos Antos and her cousins, Jacinta and Francisco Marto, had seen a brilliant lady appear over their grazing fields on May 13 of that year …

…In recent times, the French Benedictine monk Bernard Billet had calculated that between 1928 and 1975 there had been some 232 appearances of the Divine Mother in about thirty-two counties, although the church had only sanctioned 15 of these. ⁵” …

…I returned to my thoughts on Mary’s miracles . I knew that this Lady of Light had appeared near mosques, churches, and synagogues, but often she had appeared in the country, hovering over hawthorn, willow, and oak trees, linking her to the Tree of Life.  She had been seen in open fields, at the mouth of caves, and besides rivers, all images linked to the perennial Mother.  One of the oddest things about these visions was that the Lady seemed to take on the appearance of the people she appeared to.  In Korea she looked Korean, in Italy she appeared Italian, to the indigenous people of the Americas she seemed to be native, and to the Africans she was black.  She also spoke the languages and dialects of the people of that region.

Despite all this, the church largely tried to ignore her or to minimize her importance in the world.

… “It is not by accident that both of these women were called Mary, for the Hebrew Mari or Miriam has long been a title of initiation across the world for female shamans who were often distinguished by their blue robes.  Mary Magdalene was also called Maryam, a name that begins and ends with the Hebrew letter mem, indicating water.  Mary also contain the concept mar, meaning mastery in Hebrew.  The sea is called la mare in Latin, perennially linking both women to the healing waters of the Cosmic Ocean, for they are both aspects of the Divine Mother who appears from age to age.”

…Hmm .. I had long suspected that Mary was some sort of title, especially since there were so many women in the Bible with that name.  …

…Shasta continued.  “Semitic people called her Mariamne, the Mother Goddess: in the Pyrenees she was Mari the eternal spirit of the land; in Syria she was Aphrodite-Mari; and in Asia she was Maya, maker of the world.  In Celtic tradition she encompassed all three fates, or morerae, who spin the past, present, and future, and the three myrrhophores, women who anoint the deceased in Hebrew traditions, ¹⁴ something that Mary Magdalene went to the tomb to do for Yeshua.

These are all aspects of the Great Mother who oversees the cycles of life, death, and rebirth.  But these names – Mary, Mata, and Mataria – are simply different titles for Isis Sophia, the great Queen of Heaven.  She was honored by the early Christians until the Council of Nicea replaced her with only the masculine version of God. 

But Gnostics teach that the spirit of Christ cannot be realized until the feminine face of God is once more honored across the world.  Then men and women will stand together as equals.”

Note: I have kept the footnote numbers from the footnotes in Tricia’s book.

⁵ Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone with Giuseppe De Carli, “the Mystery of Fatima,” U.S. New & World Report (March 2010): 86.

¹⁴ Starbird, Mary Magdalene, 21.

Mother Mary by Nina Lee.
“I’m the Mary of this Crowd…
Open to the Unknown”

She’s Been Waiting by Nina Lee
She’s been waiting so long
She’s been waiting, waiting, waiting
For her children to return

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