Mary Henlin—a Marian artist who, along with her sister Sahra Henlin, is a member of the Temple of Mary—also shares this view. Mary Henlin creates small statues of Isis, Hecate, and Kali using a classic Marian mold. As she said in the Healing Home podcast in 2024, “The Divine Mother is woven through everything in the world. And in every culture, she’s touched everything, and everyone has their interpretations of her, whether it be Kali, … the Black Madonna, … [the Virgin of] Guadalupe.”
Thérèse also sees Mary as an archetype repeated throughout many cultures. “I think there are certain things built into the human consciousness that appear a lot and that we come up with new shells for, and I think she’s one of those,” Thérèse said in an interview with me. “She embodies the energy of the God Mother, the God Queen. She’s somehow Hera, Persephone, and Demeter at the same time.”
Unlike Grobler and Mary Henlin, Thérèse believes Mary started out as a human and was given a divine nature by people who adore her. “As Christianity blew up and as Marian devotion blew up, I feel like she became a goddess in that way, in the minds of the people,” she says.
But whether goddess worshippers see Mary as a deity or a human, they must still grapple with the fact that Mary has often been wielded as a weapon to oppress women.
RECLAIMING MARY FROM THE PATRIARCHY
In the Bible, Mary is described as a virgin who has found favor with God, which is why she has been chosen to miraculously give birth to the son of God. In the Gospel of Luke, Mary agrees to bear Jesus, calling herself a humble servant whose “soul glorifies the Lord.” She then praises God through what feminist biblical scholar Amy-Jill Levine has called a “manifesto of social justice,” saying that God has brought down the proud, rich, and powerful, and lifted up the poor, hungry, and pious.
The Bible says very little else about Mary. Because she is described briefly and ambiguously, Mary is open to interpretation.
Those interpretations have often harmed women. In Catholicism, Mary is believed to have remained a virgin throughout her marriage. “The ever-Virgin diminishes women’s sexuality and makes the female body and female sexuality seem unwholesome, impure,” writes religious scholar Dorothy Ann Lee.
In Latin America, colonial missionaries imposed a cultural construct called marianismo, which sends a message to women that they should be like Mary: chaste, maternal, submissive, and self-sacrificing. Studies have found that marianismo may be associated with poorer health outcomes for some women, including increased symptoms of depression. In addition, the portrayal of Mary as White has been leveraged to enforce racism and falsely equate Whiteness with goodness.
But starting in the late 20th century, feminist theologians have been reexamining Mary’s story through the lens of liberation theology. Religious scholar Mary McGovern Treyz writes that “Mary as prophetic disciple … is not the passive, humble handmaiden of traditional Catholicism, but a revolutionary prophetic voice calling out for the liberation of all who suffer the indignity of poverty and the inhumanity of oppression.”
