"I'm surprised that after all you've been through, you still keep the faith."
"I haven't kept it. I lost it and recovered it."
"But a faith in virgins? In impossible things and in fantasies? Haven't you had an active sex life?"
"Well, normal. I've been in love with many women."
To my surprise, I felt a stab of jealousy. But my inner battle seemed already to have subsided, and I didn't want to start it up again.
"Why is she 'The Virgin? Why isn't She presented to us as a normal woman, like any other?"
He drained the few drops remaining in the bottle and asked if I wanted him to go for another. I said no.
"What I want is an answer from you. Every time we start to speak about certain things, you try to talk about something else."
"She was normal. She had already had other children. The Bible tells us that Jesus had two brothers. Virginity, as it relates to Jesus, is based on a different thing: Mary initiated a new generation of grace. A new era began. She is the cosmic bride, Earth, which opens to the heavens and allows itself to be fertilized.
"Because of the courage She showed in accepting her destiny, She allowed God to come down to earthand She was transformed into the Great Mother."
I didn't understand exactly what he was telling me, and he could see that.
"She is the feminine face of God. She has her own divinity."
He spoke with great emotion; in fact, his words almost sounded forced, as if he felt he was committing a sin.
"A goddess?" I asked.
I waited for him to explain, but he couldn't say anything more. I thought about his Catholicism and about how what he had just said seemed blasphemous.
"Who is the Virgin? What is the Goddess?"
"It's not easy to explain," he said, clearly growing more and more uncomfortable. "I have some written material with me. If you want, you can read it."
"I don't want to read right now; I want you to explain it to me," I insisted.
He looked around for the wine bottle, but it was empty. Neither of us could remember why we had come to the well in the first place. Something important was in the air—as if what he was saying were part of a miracle.
"Go on," I urged him.
"Her symbol is water—like the fog all around us. The Goddess uses water as the means to manifest Herself."
The mist suddenly seemed to take on a life of its own, becoming sacred—even though I still didn't understand what he was trying to say.
"I don't want to talk to you about history. If you want to learn about the history, you can read the books I brought with me. But you should know that this woman—the Goddess, the Virgin Mary, the Shechinah, the Great Mother, Isis, Sofia, slave and mistress—is present in every religion on the face of the earth. She has been forgotten, prohibited, and disguised, but Her cult has continued from millennium to millennium and continues to survive today.
"One of the faces of God is the face of a woman."
I studied his face. His eyes were gleaming, and he was staring into the fog that enveloped us. I could see that I no longer needed to prompt him.
"She is present in the first chapter of the Bible—when the spirit of God hovered over the waters, and He placed them below and above the stars. It was the mystic marriage of earth and heaven. She is present in the final chapter of the Bible, when
the Spirit and the bride say, "Come!"
And let him who hears say, "Come!"
And let him who thirsts come.
Whoever desires, let him take the
water of life freely."
"Why is water the symbol of the feminine face of God?"
"I don't know. But She normally chooses that medium to manifest Herself. Maybe because She is the source of life; we are generated in water, and for nine months we live in it. Water is the symbol of the power of woman, the power that no man—no matter how enlightened or perfect he may be—can capture."
He paused for a moment and then began again.
"In every religion and in every tradition, She manifests Herself in one form or another—She always manifests Herself. Since I am a Catholic, I perceive Her as the Virgin Mary."
He took me by the hand, and in less than five minutes, we had walked out of Saint-Savin. We passed a column by the side of the road that had something strange at the top: it was a cross with an image of the Virgin in the place where Jesus ought to have been.
Now the darkness and the mist completely enveloped us. I began to imagine I was immersed in water, in the maternal womb—where time and thought do not exist. Everything he had been saying to me was beginning to make sense. I remembered the woman at the conference, And then I thought of the girl who had led me to the plaza. She too had said that water was the symbol of the Goddess.
"Twenty kilometers from here there's a grotto," he was telling me. "On the eleventh of February, 1858, a young girl was baling hay near the grotto with two other children. She was a fragile, asthmatic girl who lived in miserable poverty. On that winter's day, she was afraid of crossing a small stream, because if she got wet she might fall ill. And her parents needed the little money she made as a shepherd.
"A woman dressed in white, with two golden roses on her feet, appeared. The woman treated the child as if she were a princess, asked if she might return to that place a certain number of times, and then vanished. The two other girls, who were entranced by what had happened, quickly spread the story.
"This brought on a long ordeal for the girl. She was imprisoned, and the authorities demanded that she deny the whole story. Others offered her money to get her to ask the apparition for special favors. Within days, her family began to be insulted in the plaza by people who thought that the girl had invented the story in order to get attention.
"The girl, whose name was Bernadette, had no understanding of what she had seen. She referred to the lady who had appeared as 'That,' and her parents, concerned as they were, went to the village priest for assistance. The priest suggested that when the apparition next appeared, Bernadette should ask the woman's name.
"Bernadette did as she was asked, but received only a smile in response. 'That' appeared before her a total of eighteen times and, for the most part, said nothing. During one of her appearances, though, she asked the girl to kiss the ground. Without understanding why, Bernadette did as she was asked. During another visitation, she asked the girl to dig a hole in the floor of the grotto. Bernadette obeyed, and there immediately appeared a hole filled with filthy water, because swine were kept there.
" 'Drink the water,' the woman said.
"The water was so dirty that although Bernadette cupped it in her hands, she threw it away three times, afraid to bring it to her mouth. Finally she did, despite her repugnance. In the place where she had dug, more water began to come forth. A man who was blind in one eye applied several drops of the water to his face and recovered his vision. A woman, desperate because her newborn child appeared to be dying, dipped the child in the spring—on a day when the temperature had fallen below zero. And the child was cured.
"Little by little, the word spread, and thousands of people began to come to the place. The girl repeatedly asked the woman her name, but the woman merely smiled.
"Until one day, 'That' turned to Bernadette, and said, 'I am the Immaculate Conception.'
"Satisfied at last, the girl ran to tell the parish priest.
" 'That cannot be,' he said. 'No one can be the tree and the fruit at the same time, my child. Go there, and throw holy water on her.'
"As far as the priest was concerned, only God could have existed from the very beginning—and God, as far as anyone could tell, was a man."