Tag: Mary Magdalen

Potpourri for Sunday, 11/12/23

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Potpourri

Unlike real potpourri, this post won’t make you sneeze. If it does, please consult a psychologist or, possibly, a conjure woman.

  • Since I grew up in Florida, I see the Florida Panther as “Florida’s Buffalo.” They used to be found throughout the Southeast. When my family moved to Florida in 1950, they were still roaming throughout the Florida Panhandle. Now, those that remain are confined (mostly) to a refuge in South Florida just north of Alligator Alley. In the old days, there was a bounty on them for about the same reasons there’s often a bounty on wolves–a threat to livestock. Now, development is the primary threat to the Panther. You can become a member of the Friends of the Florida Panther for $25.  I’m happy to say I have seen one. Magnificent! Sadly, it was in an outdoor zoo.
  • I hope most people take a moment or so to think about Veterans Day. I like this poster from 2018 because it brings back the ambiance of the time when the holiday was created as Armistice Day in 1938, before expanding into Veterans Day in 1954. I called it Armistice Day for years because that was its name when I was a kid. I know this is “flip,” but we kept saying “Armistice Day” and “Boulder Dam” instead of “Hoover Dam” for the same reason that many of us still refer to aluminum foil as “tin foil.” The name doesn’t matter as much as an acknowledgment that we owe a lot to those who came home.
  • 1922 Ad

    As was thinking over the old names that got engraved in stone, I realized that many of my friends (and sometimes me, horrors) still refer to the refrigerator as the “ice box.” Yes, we called our Frigidaire the ice box when were were kids because ice boxes were still common. My parents bought our Frigidaire when the brand was still made by General Motors and, it was still running many decades later (outlasting my parents). Now, like the word “cellophane,” often used to refer to any clear wrap, many people call their refrigerator a Fridge even though it’s not a Frigidaire.  It’s rather like calling any facial tissue a “Kleenex.” We always use Kleenex so we’re in the clear when we refer to our tissues and “Kleenex.”

  • As I continue re-reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail, I wonder how many of the “hoaxes” (or unproven speculations) in the book and Dan Brown’s subsequent novel are really hoaxes and how many are coverups for organizations that really exist. (Nothing to see here, that’s all been faked.)  For example, the Priory of Sion (which some say was the parent of the Knights Templar and which others say was founded in 1956 and made to appear older than it was), probably wasn’t the nasty child of the Vatican as portrayed in The Da Vinci Code. Well, fooey. But unlike the real or imagined Priory, I do think the evidence suggesting Mary Magdalen probably was Jesus’ wife is correct. Margaret Starbird’s The Woman with the Alabaster Jar is for me, the most definitive on that point.

–Malcolm

Mary Magdalen Painting in ‘The Little Mermaid’

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn beliefs, writing2 Comments

I saw “The Little Mermaid” (1989) several years after it came out and after I had read Margaret Starbird’s 1993 book The Woman With the Alabaster Jar about Mary Magdalen. Having focused on Mary Magdalen, who would receive a greater public interest after The Da Vinci Code appeared ten years later, I recognized a famous painting of the Magdalen in Ariel’s grotto of treasures and wondered how it came to be there.

Called “The Penitent Magdalene,” (or “Magdalen with the Smoking Flame”) the painting is one of several with that name by French artist Georges de La Tour done in 1640. In the Disney film, Ariel is shown looking at the painting, most especially the candle, as she tries to figure out the nature of fire–not something she would know about under the sea. Was Disney, for reasons unknown, comparing the red-haired Ariel with the red-haired Mary Magdalen?

Not really, at least not intentionally (that we know of). Writing in his blog on uCatholic in 2019, Billy Ryan says that animator Glen Keane “picked out that painting because he wanted a picture, an image, of a fire underwater to go with the lyric.” (Click on the word “blog” above to see a still and a video clip of Ariel looking at the painting.)

Regardless of what Disney and/or Keane intended, Starbird–whose focus is the sacred feminine–saw a deeper meaning in the painting in the film in her 1999 article: “Of all the possible pictures available from art galleries around the world, it is incredibly significant that the directors of the Disney® film chose to place Mary Magdalene at the bottom of the sea, for it is SHE who represents the lost Bride and the archetype of the ‘Sacred Feminine’ as partner in Christian mythology.” (Click on the word “article” to read the entire article.)

Perhaps Keane, who was Catholic, was aware of the painting because of his faith. It would surprise me if, in 1989, he was consciously thinking of the sacred feminine for that terminology and line of thought hadn’t come into the national consciousness (other than scholars) yet.

We may never know whether the painting was a convenient prop or whether it was intentionally used to make a larger point. Starbird thinks the painting’s use was more than coincidental, however it got there. I hope she’s right.

—Malcolm