“One-in-herself Mary” is an art work which represents the gesture of holding a child coming out of an empty golden frame. The gesture refers to the Virgin Mary holding Jesus as a baby, while the empty golden frame refers an ideal that isn’t real.
A virgin in ancient times meant a person who is not married, a person who does not belong to/ depend on someone else. It was a term of strength used to describe most Goddesses and Gods. Even in Ancient Greece, the virginity of the Godesses symbolizes their authonomy and had no moral conotation.
In Sumer, a virgin person belonged to themselves, therefore the “one-in-themselves” translation.
The notion of virgin birth was familiar throughout the Roman Empire as vestals could have children, whom were considered holy. Turns out that Romulus and Remus were born of a vestal virgin. Vestals were cautioned about relationships, as the potential fathers of their children could profit since vestals were the only women in Rome who held any kind of power. They weren’t supposed to be chaste as we understand it today. Chastity is a 13th century concept and was therafter imposed as sole meaning for a variaty of ancient metaphorical terms which had several meanings to begin with. The original word “castus” meant “separated” and led to the word “caste” which has a closer meaning to the initial word meaning “an exclusive group (of men)”. At any rate, the latin word had no moral or gender conotation, and when it was applied to the vestals it was only because they were indeed separated from the rest of society.
Christianity turned the terms “virgin” and “chaste” into ones of oppression and control against women. However, the clerics in charge of the Catholic Church could hardly agree that Mary was a virgin in the sense of not sexually active, until 1854. The concept of virginity is not Jewish, but Roman. It might actually even be Syrian. “The book of James” has it’s origin in Syria and is the only gospel which is concerned with Mary’s virginity, or with her at all for that matter.
Actually, the word used to refer to Mary in the orginal Hebrew bible is “almah” which means “girl of marriageable age”.
Christianity developped an obsession with women’s virtue which men weponized to control us. Despite honouring virtue in women, almost all female saints were abused sexually or died to escape that abuse caused by men.
The missing mother and child from the frame also refer to the maternal deaths due to the obsessiveness over virginity and control of women’s bodies emphasizing how society came to value a form ignoring the contents or, otherwise, disregarding the consequences.
Book sources:
- Alone of All Her Sex – Myth and Cult of Virgin Mary by Marina Warner
- The Moon and the virgin : reflections on the archetypal feminine by Nor Hall
- The Goddess obscured” by Pamela Berger
- Mother Right by Johann Jakob Bachofen
The joy of creating 