"Mary, as the mother of Jesus, is documented in Roman catacombs: paintings from the first half of the 2nd century show her holding the Christ Child. Excavations in the crypt of St Peter's Basilica uncovered a very early fresco of Mary together with Saint Peter. The Roman Priscilla catacombs depict the oldest Marian paintings from the middle of the 2nd century: Mary is shown with Jesus on her lap; they are next to a man in a tunic, his left hand holding a book and his right hand pointing to a star over his head, the latter being an Old Testament symbol of messiahs and/or the Messiah." Source: Wikipedia.
The transformation of Mary into a Christian demi-goddess or minor deity seems to have started with the apocryphal Gospel of James, aka The Proto-Gospel or Protoevangelium of James. Thought to have been written sometime during the 2nd century AD, "It tells of the virginal conception of the Virgin Mary, her upbringing and marriage to Joseph, the journey of the holy couple to Bethlehem, the birth of Jesus, and events immediately following. It is the earliest surviving assertion of the perpetual virginity of Mary, meaning her virginity not just prior to the birth of Jesus, but during and afterwards, while defending Jesus against pagan and Jewish accusations of illegitimacy." (Wikipedia)
Jesus' miraculous birth or Immaculate Conception was a common theme in ancient mythology, but the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity leads to various theological difficulties for the Christians who believe in it. According to the New Testament, Jesus had four brothers: James, Joseph (Joses), Judas (Jude), and Simon. (He apparently had sisters as well, but they're not named.) If Mary was indeed a perpetual virgin, this obviously means that all of Jesus' siblings were also sons and daughters of a virgin, so there wasn't anything special about Jesus in this regard. To get around this problem, believers in Mary's perpetual virginity end up having to argue that Jesus didn't have any biological sisters and brothers at all. They all just kind of grew up together or something.
Mary is venerated by Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans and the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches. According to Wikipedia, "this veneration especially takes the form of prayer for intercession with her Son, Jesus Christ." This makes Mary a kind of intermediate deity who along with the other saints and angels can intercede in God's divine council. Mary has considerable powers in her own right, however. She can perform miracles, heal the sick, etc., and when she died, God raised her body into heaven, according to Catholic and Eastern Christian teachings. In another version of this story, she never died at all but was assumed directly into heaven while still alive. The exact nature of her assumption is a matter of theological debate:
"Many Catholics believe that Mary first died before being assumed, but they believe that she was miraculously resurrected before being assumed. Others believe she was assumed bodily into Heaven without first dying. Either understanding may be legitimately held by Catholics, with Eastern Catholics observing the Feast as the Dormition." (Wikipedia)
Note: The Dormition is an Eastern festival which "commemorates the 'falling asleep' or death of Mary the Theotokos ('Mother of God', literally translated as God-bearer), and her bodily resurrection before being taken up into heaven."
There are a couple of problems here. For instance, if Mary is the "mother of God," then who got her pregnant in the first place? And if the Son and the Father are "one substance, essence or nature" did the Son in the form of the Father come down to Mary and give birth to himself? (The doctrine of the Trinity has never made any sense to me).
According to early sources, Mary was what we would now call a child bride:
"Some apocryphal accounts state that at the time of her betrothal to Joseph, Mary was 12–14 years old. According to ancient Jewish custom, Mary could have been betrothed at about 12. Hyppolitus of Thebes says that Mary lived for 11 years after the death of her son Jesus, dying in 41 AD." (Wikipedia)
"The earliest extant biographical writing on Mary is Life of the Virgin attributed to the 7th-century saint, Maximus the Confessor, which portrays her as a key element of the early Christian Church after the death of Jesus."
The details of Mary's life are sketchy. So is the date of her death (if it actually occurred) and her resurrection. These are all details, however. The real question is whether she actually existed.
The Tattoo Theory Of Social Collapse
"Tattooing has been practiced across the globe since at least Neolithic times, as evidenced by mummified preserved skin, ancient art, and the archaeological record. Both ancient art and archaeological finds of possible tattoo tools suggest tattooing was practiced by the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe. However, direct evidence for tattooing on mummified human skin extends only to the 4th millennium BC." Source: Wikipedia.
"... tattooed mummies have been recovered from at least 49 archaeological sites including locations in Greenland, Alaska, Siberia, Mongolia, western China, Egypt, Sudan, the Philippines, and the Andes." In 2016, Nature reported the discovery of "[a] mummy from ancient Egypt ... heavily tattooed with sacred symbols, which may have served to advertise and enhance the religious powers of the woman who received them more than 3,000 years ago."
According to Smithsonian Magazine (2007), "... the earliest known examples [of tattoos] were for a long time Egyptian and were present on several female mummies dated to c. 2000 B.C. But following the more recent discovery of [Otzi the Iceman] from the area of the Italian-Austrian border in 1991 and his tattoo patterns, this date has been pushed back a further thousand years when he was carbon-dated at around 5,200 years old."
Otzi had 61 tattoos, apparently. Whether these are still the oldest known tattoos remains to be seen:
"Although Ötzi is the oldest tattooed human ... this will likely change: Ötzi’s tattoos are indicative of social and/or therapeutic practices that predate him, and future archaeological finds and new techniques should someday lead to even older evidence of tattooed mummies." Source: Smithsonian (2015).
"Some tribal cultures traditionally created tattoos by cutting designs into the skin and rubbing the resulting wound with ink, ashes or other agents; some cultures continue this practice, which may be an adjunct to scarification. Some cultures create tattooed marks by hand-tapping the ink into the skin [next video] using sharpened sticks or animal bones (made like needles) with clay formed disks or, in modern times, needles." Source: Wikipedia.
Otzi the Iceman's tattoos may have been a form of acupuncture. According to the International Business Times (2015), "eighty per cent of [Otzi's] tattoos had been found along acupuncture meridians used to treat back pain and abdominal problems, which Otzi suffered from ... If correct, the tattoos would predate the first recorded use of acupuncture in China by 2,000 years."
"Pre-Christian Germanic, Celtic and other central and northern European tribes were often heavily tattooed, according to surviving accounts, but it may also have been normal paint. The Picts may have been tattooed (or scarified) with elaborate, war-inspired black or dark blue woad (or possibly copper for the blue tone) designs. Julius Caesar described these tattoos in Book V of his Gallic Wars (54 BC). Nevertheless, these may have been painted markings rather than tattoos." Source: Wikipedia.
Note: According to Caesar, "All the Britons dye their body with woad, which produces a blue color, and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and upper lip." (The Conquest of Gaul, Book V.14)
In Greece and Rome, tattoos were mostly used for identification purposes -- much like brands on cattle -- but this changed over the centuries, at least among certain classes of society:
"... amongst the Greeks and Romans, the use of tattoos or 'stigmata' as they were then called, seems to have been largely used as a means to mark someone as 'belonging' either to a religious sect or to an owner in the case of slaves or even as a punitive measure to mark them as criminals. It is therefore quite intriguing that during Ptolemaic times when a dynasty of Macedonian Greek monarchs ruled Egypt, the pharaoh himself, Ptolemy IV (221-205 B.C.), was said to have been tattooed with ivy leaves to symbolize his devotion to Dionysus, Greek god of wine and the patron deity of the royal house at that time. The fashion was also adopted by Roman soldiers and spread across the Roman Empire until the emergence of Christianity, when tattoos were felt to 'disfigure that made in God's image' and so were banned by the Emperor Constantine (A.D. 306-373)." Source: Smithsonian Magazine.
Closed-captions helpful.
Comment: Tattoos, piercings and scarification are usually associated with barbarian tribes and the lower orders of society. In the classical world, tattooing as a decorative art seems to have been practiced mostly by the more primitive cultures of Europe, Asia and the Orient. In a way, the popularity of tattoos in any given culture could be seen as an indicator of that culture's social development. The more barbaric the culture, the more tattoos. There also seems to have been an inverse relationship between tattoos and social status. In Greece and Rome, for instance, soldiers, slaves, criminals and some priests and acolytes were frequently tattooed, but I'd be amazed to find out that someone like Tacitus had a tramp stamp.
Tattooing seems to become more widespread in civilizations on their way down. For instance, "the decline of the Ptolemaic dynasty began under the reign of Ptolemy IV," the tattooed Egyptian pharaoh, according to Wikipedia. This is just a theory, but I'd say that the rising popularity of tattoos is a symptom of cultural decay. For example, I don't think it's an accident that the use of tattoos "spread across the Roman Empire until the emergence of Christianity" or that tattoos are becoming a cultural norm in modern Europe and the United States. I guess you could call this the Tattoo Theory of Social Collapse. As a civilization declines into the Third World, more and more people start to cover themselves with body art. I have no idea why this would happen, but maybe the masses are responding in an unconscious way to the barbarism that is slowly engulfing them.
Or maybe it's just a form of masochism.
Posted at 07:00 AM in Art, Barbarians, Collapse, Commentary, Culture, Greece, Rome, Videos | Permalink