by Anna Šípová
Translated from Czech to English
“My memories of my girlhood hold a double self. I had two bodies – the body of the body and the
body of the mind. The body of the body was flaccid and forgotten. It was a body that was wet with
dirty fluids, withholes that couldn’t be closed, full of smells and curdled milk. But the flesh of the body was not bones. This body was surrounded and enveloped by the bones, a protective shell of flesh, just to the other side of the wall, which I call skin. Filled with infectious contagious fluids we hold blood, water, mucus, wax, hair, pus, breath. Everything that is ours to let go, to release onto this earth, is held back, stored. I am the cauldron of dangerous substances.” 1
The body of a woman is twofold. One worshiped, adored, cherished for its most sacred beauty and
riches. This sacred body does not exist. It appears only in the imagination of intellectuals, artists,
clerics and men of “good taste”. They impose their noble ideas and fetishes on women as their true
and only essence. But as poet and filmmaker Lynne Sachs noted in House of Science: A Museum of
False Facts (1991), the real body – the body of the body – is not like that. It is human, natural, animal.
It ages, it performs functions, it dies and decays. It is constantly in motion towards extinction, never
freezes in a moment of absolute beauty, light and chaste immobility.
Some women are not entitled to have a human body. It has been stolen from them and denied them
for a higher purpose, to serve as a model of goodness and virtue. Such was the fate of the Virgin
Mary. The Marian cult has fascinated me since I was a child. Cold Sundays spent in church did not
offer many acceptable heroines for a young girl. The Virgin Mary is a special idol for me: she is
celebrated as the Queen of Heaven, even though her role is consistently reduced to that of a passive
bearer of the “divine seed.” She is a woman who never makes up her mind and accepts everything
with humility – including her motherhood heralded by the archangel Gabriel. Mary encompasses all
the Western ideal of womanhood: motherhood and virginity, chastity, beauty, devotion, gentleness.
Mary has no body. And it is as if she never had one. According to the Marian tradition, both her soul
and her physical shell were assumed after death. In mythology, this prevented her main attribute,
beauty, from succumbing to decay and extinction. Mary died in her sleep at about the age of 50.
Believers of many centuries know her as a beauty in early adulthood. On her deathbed she is often
depicted as a young girl, which cannot be explained other than that she is not considered a realistic
historical figure. Her symbol is a luminous beauty that every artistic tradition and culture has
interpreted in its own way. In our context, she is anachronistically depicted as a pale European
woman with blue eyes. It doesn’t matter who Mary really was.The model for women believers
remains her supreme beauty and universal goodness, which are the keys to a right and virtuous life.
There is no point in further explaining how dictatorial and dysfunctional this pattern of life is.
In addition to erasing the individual imperfect body, the Goddess is denied access to all carnal
pleasures. As a perpetual virgin with one “immaculate” conception, the saint is precluded from
indulging in sex (even in marriage). Sexual pleasure was denied her, as were the pains of childbirth
and the convulsive delirium of the deathbed. The defilement inherent in the biological body, the
excretion, amniotic fluid and menstruation are symbols of sin. The only acceptable thing is to shed tears over the passion of the son Jesus. Women who are exemplary in this tradition tend towards
incorporeality and abstinence. In both Jewish and Christian tradition, the custom was maintained
that a woman is unclean after childbirth or during menstruation and is not allowed to enter society.
In our folklore, for example, women were not allowed to leave the room for six Sundays after
childbirth and their beds were veiled in the common rooms. Not only does the Virgin Mary not have
an individual body in Christian iconography, but her earthly experience is purely disembodied,
mystical.
But one strangely carnal feminine symbol does occur in (medieval) religious practice. It is the
depiction of the wounds of Christ, which was very popular in the illumination of prayer books from
the 13th to the 16th century. The curious fragment of the human body looks like nothing more than
a vulva. The wounds of Christ represent the five wounds with which Jesus was tortured on the cross.
Macabrely devotional practices led to an act of physical meditation in which these representations
were kissed, rubbed, and licked. Some finds suggest that believers, following the example of the
unbeliever Thomas, cut through the parchment and penetrated the symbol with their hands in
religious rapture. The striking similarity of the wounds depicted to the vulva refers to Christ’s death on the cross. This suffering is symbolically the birth of the Church – a mystical birth. The fluids in the wounds also evoke female cyclical physiognomy: menstruation and other urges.
How is it possible that the saints are wrapped in fragile and cherished shells of beauty, but the torn
fragment of their bodies is ecstatically worshiped as part of the Savior’s body? I cannot explain this
devotional fetish except as the ravings of a perverse patriarchal logic that knows no bounds.
As Lynne Sachs writes, the female body is territory. A territory divided into areas of interest. It’s
functional integrity is disrupted. Movement, purpose, direction. That’s how the masculine has
“defined” itself. But they have divided their little idols into small areas of artificial mystique. Divide et
impera!
1 Lorenz Lit, Christ’s Womanly Wounds. Recycled Origins Cataloque, září 2014. Dostupný na
https://issuu.com/lizlorenz/docs/recycled_origins_essay [vyšlo 2. 10. 2014; cit. 24. 11. 2023].