A Thealogy Of Mary: The Non-Christian Myth Of Mary, The Shadow Of Mary And An Individual Connection To The Divine Self Through Mary.

Abstract

My work on the thealogy of Mary conveys a largely subjective way of thinking, it does not claim to present the view of any group, and it does not profess a theoretical agenda for a cult or a religious movement of Mary. The framework of this work is grounded in symbolic (legends, fairy tales and images), psychological (the structure of the psyche according to Carl Gustav Jung: the Self, the conscious, the unconscious, the Shadow) and imaginative (individual interpretations of narratives and images) spheres that are combined with feminist spirituality theories, religious philosophy and literary analysis. In my thesis, I offer a non-Christian myth of Mary which I form out of the folklore narratives about Mary. In my work, Mary is understood as the female divine archetype on the collective level, and as an expression of the Self on the individual level. Following Jung’s theory, the archetypes are forms and not contents, that is, an archetype can be comparable to an empty shell, which we fill with our own experience or with narratives that are meaningful to us. I take the image of Mary out of the Roman Catholic context and give it a new mythological narrative. This means to me a possibility not only to acquire a non-Christian myth of Mary but also to develop an individual relationship with the divine in its female personification. On the collective level, the thealogy of Mary creates a spiritual and psychological sphere in which the female divine has a possibility to outweigh the one-sidedness of the past few thousand years of the male predominance in the religious philosophy in the West.