The sacred whore may have largely ceased to exist in the mundane world of matter, but she still exists in the human unconscious. And in the West, it has pleased her for a number of centuries now to work under the stage name Mary Magdalene. – “Magdalene’s Day”
Today is the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene, who was almost certainly not a whore; however, as I’ve explained before, that hardly matters. Most people raised in the Christian tradition think of her as the patroness of whores, and that’s more important than any official designation.
Saint Mary Magdalene
July 22, 2015 by Maggie McNeill
You mean she did that hair-foot fetish stuff because she liked it?
Oh well, takes all kinds I guess.
Seems to me the only evidence we have that MM even existed is the various gospels that mention her (including the excluded one allegedly written by her) and as we know the gospels make multiple unlikely claims and disagree with each other on major points so I think it’s probably fair to say we know nothing historical about her.
But as you say, that’s not particularly important. What matters is the place her mythos holds in our society.
You can see the same thing going on today with the cult of celebrity. The truth about the lives of celebrities is mostly irrelevant. We don’t know the real people. We know the myths our society has constructed around them. They are what we need them to be. Or as Alice Cooper says “Ninety percent of what you hear about rock stars is bullshit. Except for Keith Moon. Everything you’ve heard about him is true and you’ve only heard ten percent of it.”
Hmm, that portrait makes me wonder if “Titian” was an ironic pseudonym.
You could look him up on-line. It’s his name, sort of: Tiziano Vecello, abbreviated to Tizian, then anglicized to Titian. (I think the “z” was pronounced “ts” or “ch”.) The resemblance to the English word teats/tits is just a fortunate coincidence.
And he didn’t put naked women in every painting. He also painted portraits, mythological scenes, and battle scenes with only men – sometimes nude, often clothed. Sometimes (for pay) he even painted fully clothed women:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tizian_Violante_dsc01834.jpg
However, his paintings of nude women do seem to have been the most popular over the centuries. Most of the art critics were men, and not so many of them preferred the nude men (or would admit to that).
I once got to discuss Mary Magdalene with Bishop John Shelby Spong, who believes she and Jesus was married. I suggested to him that if she was a prostitute, she had been one forced into it at a young age, rescued by her family, and then married to the ‘bastard’ Jesus bin Miriam, as both would have been considered damaged goods in 1st century Judea. He found the idea possible, but like you thought that the prostitute was added later to denigrate that she was actually Jesus’ wife.
I read your reference to how prostitutes were treated in Ireland and other countries by illegal imprisonment. I found it fascinating. It really brought home how much sex workers are in the front lines of the war on women. I guess in many ways they are the least under the domination of men and so are the greatest threat to us. That is understandable since real equality for women is a clear threat to our power and we can’t have that.