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By Cathy Lynn Pagano, M.A.

OpEdNews.Com

Before I saw Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, I read countless reviews and heard opinions from various friends, family and acquaintances.   I also thought about what I learned as a child going to the Stations of the Cross every Friday during Lent, although I am now an ex-Roman Catholic.   What I discovered is that everyone takes out of the film something that they brought into the movie theater.  The responses seem to fall into two camps.  Those who have a negative reaction see anti-Semitism, see anti-feminism, see too much violence, see stereotyping and idiocy, see hypocrisy, and see the fanaticism of the ‘born again alcoholic’.  Those who have a positive reaction feel a love for Jesus and a sorrow for His suffering, feel a need to return to their spiritual lives or their churches, feel the power of the story to uplift their own lives so they could bear their own crosses and face their own demons, and feel that they can take heart that spirit is more powerful than both evil and the limits of our human nature.  I can understand all of these viewpoints.  

 We all carry something of ourselves into this film.  But isn’t it true of any work of art, and most especially religious art, which is created to help us project ourselves into the story of humanity’s relationship to the Divine?   I certainly saw my own version of the film. But I also saw the archetypal story of the Passion, the very ancient story of the dying and rising god.

I went to see how Mel Gibson himself saw the story of Christ’s Passion.  Although Mr. Gibson tells us the Gospel version of the last 12 hours of Christ’s life, he also tells us his version of that version.  I gather he based his film on the visions of the 19th Century mystic, healer, visionary and stigmatic Anne Catherine Emmerich’s Dolorous Passion of Our Lord, a very detailed vision of Christ’s Passion.   He went to a mystic for his version of the Passion, a mystic with a passion for detail.  Her visions were very detailed and sensual – of the senses.

And so after all the opinions I heard, I was surprised to find that The Passion of the Christ is a vision of the power of the Feminine aspect of God to give the love and strength that sustains Jesus in his darkest hours.  

The film begins with Jesus of Nazareth in the Garden of Gethsemane.  He knows what is about to happen to him, and he is alone with that knowledge, for his followers are all asleep.  In his aloneness, he is attacked by fear and doubt and he asks God if the cup of his suffering can be taken away.   Satan appears and tells him,  “One man cannot save the whole world.”  He tempts Jesus to deny his spiritual purpose, his divine mission.  But Jesus ultimately refuses to despair and prays to God, “Not my will but Thy will be done.”  Then he crushes the serpent that Satan sends to him, which recalls the prophecy in Genesis that says that the seed (child) of the Woman (Eve) will crush the serpent’s head beneath his heel.   The Catholic Church has also associated that woman with Jesus’ mother, Mary, the new Eve.  

Mr. Gibson’s Satan embodies Evil as the force that Jesus needs to triumph over, and we see that he does when Satan howls his defeat after the Crucifixion.   As Satan moves through the movie, inciting the Sanhedrin to reject Jesus’ message, inciting the mob to ask for his death, inciting the Romans to their utmost cruelty, he is tempting Jesus to doubt his purpose and doubt the love of God. He is tempting Jesus to forsake his mission to save the world because humanity is so often ignorant and cruel and unloving and it is these qualities that let Evil ultimately triumph over us.  It is human weakness that chooses the Evil that is easier than the Goodness that has to bear up under our trials.    Satan walks through the crowd with the deformed child during the scourging scene.  He is taunting Jesus with this idea that humanity itself is deformed and abhorrent, twisted by our willingness to stay childlike and helpless in the face of Evil.

     As Jesus experiences his physical suffering, the rejection of his message and his death on the cross, it is Mary, his mother, who gives him the strength to bear it all and ultimately defeat Evil and his own despair.   As Jesus’ mother Mary and Mary Magdalene both follow and bear witness to Jesus’ suffering, Mr. Gibson has Jesus remembering and recognizing the love and compassion of his mother and it is these memories that help give him the strength to go on, and to reject Satan’s vision of humanity as inherently evil.  It is the love of both women and their strength that can bear witness to his suffering (their own cross to bear if you will) - when all his other followers except John desert him - that helps Jesus fulfill his destiny.  Both the memories and the realities that sustain Jesus during his Passion are those of the love and compassion and strength of women, as they follow him on the way of the cross and minister to him whenever possible.

[Mr. Gibson has Mary Magdalene play a supporting role to Mary the Mother. Although many people now believed that Mary Magdalene could have been Jesus’ wife and we know that she was considered the Apostle to the Apostles, Mr. Gibson chooses the more traditional Catholic understanding of Jesus’ relationship to the Feminine and makes Mary, the Mother, the source of feminine wisdom and compassion.  To go into whether this is a correct interpretation is another article.]  

Mary the Mother has to bear up to the horrible suffering of her beloved child for his sake, despite the fact that her heart is breaking.  Every time Jesus is hurt, every time he falls, his mother is there to give him strength and courage.  She is the one who stands firm for him so that he can go on and bear his suffering.  It is she who helps Jesus defeat Satan, by loving him and suffering with him and giving him a vision of the potential we humans have to become conscious and compassionate.  For in the end, it comes down to who can keep Jesus’ attention during his Passion – Satan or Mary.  Everyone else in the movie becomes extraneous.   It is Mary’s triumph as well as Jesus’ that we see.  This is the story that I see in Mel Gibson’s The Passion.

This mystery is very old.  It is the mystery of the sacrifice of the Mother’s Son/Daughter, told and retold throughout religious history.  It is the story of Cybele and Attis, Aphrodite and Adonis, Isis and Osiris, Demeter and Persephone.  The Mother must bear the pain of separation, while her child is sacrificed to bring a deeper knowledge of life to the world.  The Mother is ultimately the Earth and our humanity is what needs to change and grow through suffering into a conscious co-creator of life on Earth.   This mystery asks us to sacrifice our selfishness and unconsciousness for the good of all people and of the Earth Herself.  Many people complain that Mary’s suffering in silence is an old attitude that has kept women subservient and docile for many centuries.  I believe that we need to remember the symbolic value of these archetypal stories and see that it is the Feminine Spirit, which embraces endurance and patience, which sustains us as we make our way through the many trials and wounds of our life.  As a culture, we tend to see the literal at the expense of the symbolic.  We need to understand our symbolic life if we want our life to hold meaning.  And most especially, we need to understand art symbolically – whether you want to believe that this film is art or not.

Even though Mr. Gibson sees Christ’s Passion as a unique story in history, we know that there were many myths, religious cults and mystery religions that had this same story and belief in the necessity of sacrificing the God or the King for the good of the people. The Roman Catholic Church integrated many aspects of ancient religions into its beliefs as well as disregarding many truths that we now know about the early church.  Many of its saints were really ancient gods and goddesses, such as the Irish St. Bridget, as well as many aspects of the Virgin Mary herself.  Many of the details of Christ’s life are similar to that of Mithra, the Persian god who was born on December 25th, the Winter Solstice, to a Virgin in a cave.  Catholics weren’t taught this part of our history, but these stories contain essential truths that these other religions also taught throughout past ages.  

 Our version of these ancient religious stories came down to us by way of Jesus Christ and Christianity during the Piscean Age.   This is the deep story about how the Spirit incarnates on Earth and becomes Humanity.   It is a story of how we are all God’s (whoever and whatever you might believe that to be) children and that we all suffer here on Earth.  This archetypal story helps us bare up under our own suffering by telling us that Spirit will ultimately sustain us and bring us to consciousness. And overcome Evil.

One part of the movie that was especially poignant for me was when Simon of Cyrene was chosen to help Jesus bear the cross.  Mr. Gibson’s vision of them holding each other up was heartfelt and, at least for me, deeply moving.   I always felt that the most important thing I could do as a Christian was to help Jesus ‘carry his cross’ – that is, take responsibility for my life and for the life of the world.  As an ex-Catholic, I still feel that responsibility.  As do many other Christians and Jews and Muslims and Buddhists and Native Americans and all people of good will.    

Now I’d like to talk about the violence.  When I was a child, I had to go to the Stations of the Cross every Friday during Lent.  I heard the story of the Passion, and I lived it, because I have a great imagination, and because I really loved Christ.   And as I grew older and read about our Western history, I realized that men in power have tortured and killed many people, people who didn’t have the deep knowledge that they were the son of God and that it was their mission to die for the world.  And we are still killing people – not just men but women and children.  We are the most violent species on the planet.  And we live in a society that glorifies violence, even as we deny any part in it.   We need to look at our appetite for violence, and who better to show us than the God Christianity believes in.  Part of the true message of Jesus is that we have to stop the violence and repay it with compassion and forgiveness.  Jesus, as the representative of God, wanted the violence to stop with him.  That would be what the Passion was about.  “Look at what we do to each other.  How could we be this cruel?  Doesn’t it break your heart?”  It is not a message that America took to heart after 9/11.   We excuse the violence to our troops and to the Iraqi people as a necessity of peace.  Who is really being violent?

Perhaps Mr. Gibson showed this extreme violence to Jesus because our culture is so immune to violence that it wouldn’t affect us in the way he felt that this ‘passion’ of God needed to affect us.  And all the blood was very much part of the idea of sacrifice – which means ‘to make sacred’.  The blood of Christ heals, just as every sacrifice ever made was supposed to heal the relationship between humans and the gods.  We might have become too civilized to consider sacrificing someone in a religious sense, but we are letting the big corporations sacrifice lives and the environment every day.  Maybe we do need to see how much sweat and blood our lifestyle inflicts on the rest of the world.  And maybe we need to acknowledge how this wounds and hurts the Divine Spirit in the world.  

Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ also came out right on time according to the cosmic clock of astrology.  Astrology is a many-faceted metaphysical science, and one of its branches deals with the symbolic understanding of the evolutionary unfolding of collective consciousness.  So according to this astrological theory, the film is the first fruit of the combination of three cosmic aspects that will be working together until around the year 2012.  The first aspect is the planet Pluto, which represents the energy of death and rebirth.  First this energy stirs up the depths, the darkness within people or cultures or institutions, and brings it to light so the dead elements can be discarded and new life emerge.   Since 1996, Pluto has been in the sign of Sagittarius, which itself symbolizes our laws, our religious beliefs and our foreign policy.  It’s time to look at these aspects of our collective life and see the Truth of what is going on in our world and bring our reality in line with our beliefs.  We can do it as terrorists or we can do it as grown up, responsible compassionate human beings.  Which brings me to the second cosmic aspect: the planet Neptune, in the sign of Aquarius since1998, will bring forward compassion and imagination in the group mind.  And the third aspect is the planet Uranus, which moved into the sign of Pisces in January of 2004.  Uranus represents the energy of awakening and individual responsibility and Pisces represents what Carl G. Jung called the collective unconscious, which contains all the collective longings of humanity to access the Spiritual essence of life.   And this longing and search is best described by dreams, visions and art.   This film came out just a few days after the Sun and Moon and Mercury joined Uranus in Pisces.  It is one of the first works of art to speak to the collective consciousness about our relationship to Spirit in this cycle.  (The other is all three parts of The Lord of the Rings, which speaks in the language of fantasy about the need to regenerate our culture.  Many thanks to Peter Jackson and his people for this wonderful story about courage and compassion in the face of overwhelming Evil.)

    It is important to look back and see where we’ve been, so we can decide where we want to go in the future.  We need to look at our beliefs and see if they still sustain us.  If not, we need to let go of them, so that new beliefs can arise that can and will sustain us.  We need to take responsibility for learning about our spiritual heritage and decide what it is we believe.  Many people are longing for this spiritual renewal.  And some people need to experience the Passion, although others have moved on to the Resurrection.  Whatever you think about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, you are thinking about what you believe about life and your relationship with the Divine.   And that’s what art is supposed to do for us.  Thank you, Mel.

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Cathy Lynn Pagano, M.A., www.fountainofdreams.net, is a Jungian psychotherapist, mythologist, writer and teacher in private practice in Wickford, RI.  This article is copyright by Cathy Lynn Pagano, but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media so long as this entire credit paragraph is attached. Originally published by OpEdNews.com