I’m a young girl no older than ten. My Catholic school has just celebrated May Crowning, and many children brought flowers to place before the statue of Mary at our mass for the day. However, my family didn’t have any flowers growing on our rose bush in time for the day. I felt sadness as I couldn’t place something in the view of her adoring eyes with the rest of the congregation, no gift of mine nestled in the forest of bouquets.
When I arrived home, however, I began searching for flowers in the yard. I carefully surveyed the selection of yellow and grabbed the best dandelions, leaving behind those with blemishes. I also picked several purple dead nettle, wanting to offer a variety to the Blessed Virgin. Cradling them delicately, I placed the selection at the feet of the small plain statue of Mary on my nightstand. A rosary snaked around her and the blooming weeds, and I thought I could make out a smile by the lamp light.
Continuing A Devotion To Mary As Witch
When I first discovered Wicca in online spaces, many of the pieces of my Catholic upbringing began to fall into place. I could clearly see the Beltane influences in May Crowning. The flowers of spring adorned the principle divine feminine figure of Christianity: Mary. In Catholicism, Mary as the mother of Jesus supplants the figure of the May Queen as a fertility figure for the coming year. And Mary’s celebration at May Crowning is certainly more tame than the games and spectacles around the goddess Flora and her self-entitled spring festival of Floralia. No theatrical performances or nudity are featured but the bouquets upon bouquets of flowers and the spirit of community remain.
For several years in my practice, I fell away from calling upon Mary. I focused instead on a growing devotion to the goddess Isis. The two have extremely similar iconography with Isis and her divine child Horus likely forming a familiar template in early Christianity of Mary with the Jesus upon her lap. I also reasoned that if I was to be a witch, then at least I’d try to be as logically consistent as possible. If the Bible says to not suffer a witch to live, then why carry baggage forward from my old religion into my future?
In the fullness of years, however, I slowly noticed that I missed my devotion to Our Lady. Few other parts of the Church appealed to me, but the sensation of her as my divine mother carried forward. I slowly began accumulating statues of her again, but I found the placement of her in my practice awkward. I didn’t feel comfortable just inserting her into sabbats and esbats, and calling on her as “goddess” with her son Jesus just seemed wrong given the fertility dualism I mentally worked with at the time. I also on many levels had and still have pain and suspicion working the Christian egregore that dominates the country and is being used to pass cruel laws that deny sovereignty.
With all of the above, a pagan praying to Mary made little sense until I gained a new perspective into prayer: what if sometimes it doesn’t matter so much who is praying but who is being prayed for?
Prayer As A Bridge Between Faiths
I long ago read on a blog (whose name I unfortunately cannot recall) an account of another witch praying and working magic for a close relative. Nothing seemed to be working, so they went in vision to the hospital bedside. Around the bed were a host of entities waiting to help but they were being refused by the relative. So instead, the witch prayed to a saint instead. Instantly, the health of the person improved, much to everyone’s joy.
The idea of saints, angels and the Blessed Virgin as beings that can intercede on our behalf and take the healing where it belongs has stuck with me since then. At the time of this writing, Pew estimates the percentage of Christian Americans at 63% of the population. Though that percentage is likely to decline in coming years, having a Christian entity by your side can be critical in working effective healing and aid for Christian relatives. We have to work with people in their comfort zone rather than expecting them to be comfortable with the same gods and goddesses that we are.
So even though my primary faith has changed, I still work with Mary as an intercessory figure. Particularly whenever a new mass or school shooting plasters the headlines, I call on her to intervene and bring comfort to the victims and their families. I call on her to love the children as she loved her son Jesus and offer them any help passing on that she can.
And intercession aside, I still have a soft spot for her as my first spiritual mother. While I frequently struggled as a child with the idea of prayer to an abstract male identified God and his son, I could lift my eyes to heaven and see just a tiny bit of divinity made in my image. The fathers in my life failed me. Mothers came through, though, and she was no exception. Ave Maria!