It’s a little-known
fact – an increasingly little-known fact since the ecumenicalisation of the
Catholic Church – that the month of May is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin
Mary. Like many of the more ‘earthy’ and Marian Catholic celebrations it has
its origins in popular belief rather than Vatican dogma which is reason enough
for the excruciatingly handsome María Inés de la Cruz and me to pour ourselves a
couple more girt, humungous G&Ts.
It
was a subject we pondered during an exquisite, sun-baked hike that took us over
the deliciously horizontal levels of Somerton Moor then up and along the Polden
Hills where we followed the almost-eponymous Polden Way and reminisced about
last year’s Camino. It was, observed María,
a year to the day since we set out on the long journey – we took the train,
then the boat, then the train to get to St Jean Pied de Port; something else to
celebrate.
You don’t have to be a student of Mariology
to work out the connection between May and Our Lady. Several years ago I wrote
a paper entitled – with more than an eye for the controversy – Our Lady of the Libido: Towards a Marian
Theology of Sexual Liberation which was published in the Journal of
Feminist Theology. In it I mused that ‘a fortnight after Easter the earth was
finally involved in its own delicious and sensual resurrection and in popular
tradition, of course, May is the month of Mary.’
The relationship between Mary and the month
of May emerged in Medieval and Tudor England and flourished throughout Europe
from the eighteenth century. I can even recall celebrating May pageants at my
own, fervently Catholic primary school in the mid-1970s but within a decade the
custom had all but died out. The passing was only part-mourned by one parish priest
who wondered if it were not wiser ‘to encourage people to have a strong
devotion to Mary through imitating her in their own lives instead of focusing
on statues’ (The Tablet 2001:577).
Such thinking seems to permeate a strand of contemporary thought that seeks to
rein in the more pagan aspects of Marian devotion – and with garland and petal
strewn processions and maypole dances there can be little doubt that there
exists within these May revels a strong link to fertility rites.
Dr Sarah Jane Boss of the Marian Study Centre
suggests that the identification of Mary with the month of May was an attempt
to rescue it from the pagan festivities that marked the beginning of summer. In
her seminal – and I do mean seminal –
work on the Cult of the Virgin, Alone of
all her Sex, Marina Warner writes ‘all over medieval Europe on May Day, the
Queen of the May was crowned and sometimes married to the Green Man, in an
ancient fertility rite, that in some places, has survived all bans, Catholic
and Protestant alike.’ It was, she suggests, this ‘frivolous’ aspect of
Catholicism the Reformers loathed and tried to stamp out (Warner 1976:283).
And if the Reformers loathed it, you can bet
your bottom Euro that the insufferably handsome María Inés de la Cruz and I will
love it to bits.
 |
| 'Les Tres Riches Hueres du Duc de Berry: a hunting party of elegent and decorative young courtiers set out in a wood bright with new young leaf. They\wear budding branches in their broad-brimmed hats and some wear bright green surcoats too - the vert gai - the traditional leit-motif for the beginning of summer on the first of May' (Warner 1976:283). |
In Our
Lady of the Libido I argued that the discontinuation of these syncretistic
practices has been to the detriment of a feminist Mariology as they represented
an intimate communal celebration of the fecundity of nature: fecundity and
desire, Our Lady of the Landscape, imbued with a sensual, erotic magic.
But before I come over all Glastonbury-ish, an important caveat
from Ms Warner: ‘The fact that the cult of the Virgin was
capable of assimilating so much classical fertility worship reveals that much
thinking on the connection between mother Goddesses and matriarchs is erroneous:
it is conventional wisdom among some mythographers and feminists to invoke a
golden age when the social power and position of women were recognised and reflected
in mythology and worship’. There is, insists Ms Warner, ‘no logical equivalence
in any society between exalted female objects of worship and a high position of
women’ (Warner 1976:283).
Sadly, both Maria and I feel compelled to
agree. No Golden Age, not yet, anyway. And as Ms Warner admits, ‘a goddess is
no better than no goddess at all, for the sombre-suited masculine world of
Protestant religion is altogether too much like a gentleman’s club to which
ladies are only admitted on special days’ (Warner
1976:338).
Bibliography
Sarah
Jane Boss – Empress and Handmaid: On
Nature and the Gender of the Virgin Mary – Cassell (2000)
Marina
Warner – Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth
and the Cult of the Virgin Mary – Vintage (1976)
