Alexandria and Jerusalem

Mary’s own first-person account, the embedded heart of the Life of Mary of Egypt: Alexandria from the age of twelve and the seventeen years there, told with the Life‘s unflinching frankness and with the text’s own statement of her motive — not poverty but “an insatiable passion”; the voyage to Jerusalem among the pilgrims; the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross and the invisible power that barred her at the church door; the icon of the Theotokos in the courtyard and the vow she made before it; her entry to venerate the Cross; the voice that sent her across the Jordan; and the three loaves and the crossing. Quoted throughout from the standard English translation, as the Life tells it.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

How to Read This File

What follows is the first-person narrative the Life places in Mary’s mouth, “perhaps one-third of the whole” (Kouli, in Talbot, Holy Women of Byzantium, 1996, 67), quoted from Maria Kouli’s standard translation with chapter and Patrologia Graeca column given. It is reported as the Life reports it, not as documented autobiography; on the developed Life’s relation to its sparer sixth-century kernel — in which Mary is a former singer, not an Alexandrian harlot — see The Source Situation (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Alexandria From Age Twelve

Yielding to Zosimas’ plea, and first making him swear to keep praying for her (Life 17; PG 87:3709, trans. Kouli, 80), Mary began: “My homeland, dear brother, was Egypt. When my parents were still alive and I was twelve years old, I rejected my love for them and went to Alexandria. I am ashamed to think about how I first destroyed my own virginity, and how I then threw myself entirely and insatiably into the lust of sexual intercourse” (Life 18; PG 87:3709–12, trans. Kouli, 80). The Life does not soften the account, and its frankness is one of its marked features (Kouli, 66, on the transformation of the kernel’s singer into “a prostitute with an insatiable sexual appetite”). Mary states the duration herself: “For more than seventeen years . . . I was a public temptation to licentiousness” (Life 18; PG 87:3712, trans. Kouli, 80).

The Text’s Own Psychology: Not Poverty but Desire

A point the Life is at pains to make, and which the compendium reports as the text’s own self-interpretation, is that Mary’s life of sin was driven not by need but by appetite. She insists it “was not for payment, I swear, since I did not accept anything although men often wished to pay me. I simply contrived this so that I could seduce many more men, thus turning my lust into a free gift”; and lest poverty be supposed, she adds that she was not rich either, but “lived by begging and often by spinning coarse flax fibers” (Life 18; PG 87:3712, trans. Kouli, 80). The Life then gives her diagnosis of herself in the words that have fixed her memory: “The truth is that I had an insatiable passion and uncontrollable lust to wallow in filth. This was and was considered to be my life, to insult nature” (Life 18; PG 87:3712, trans. Kouli, 80). The motive the text assigns is thus deliberate and psychological, not circumstantial — a chosen and craved disorder of the will, which is precisely what makes the later reversal, in the Life’s design, so total.

The Voyage to Jerusalem Among the Pilgrims

The turn begins, in the narrative, by accident. One summer day Mary saw “a huge crowd of Libyan and Egyptian men running toward the sea” and learned they were sailing “to Jerusalem for the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross” (Life 19; PG 87:3712, trans. Kouli, 80). Having no fare, she announced her means of passage with the same shamelessness: “I have no money for passage or expenses. But I shall go and get on one of the boats they have hired, and they shall feed me whether they wish it or not, for they will accept my body in lieu of the passage money”; and she states plainly that she went “so that I could have many lovers, ready to satisfy my lust” (Life 19–20; PG 87:3712, trans. Kouli, 80–81). Of the voyage and the days in Jerusalem before the feast the Life gives only her recoil from describing it: “How can I possibly describe to you what followed? . . . There is no kind of licentiousness, speakable or unspeakable, that I did not teach those miserable men” (Life 21; PG 87:3712, trans. Kouli, 81). She kept to her ways in the city until the feast (Life 21; PG 87:3712, trans. Kouli, 81–82).

The Barred Door at the Exaltation

The pivot of the whole Life comes at the church door on the feast day. Drawn along with the crowd “hurrying to the church” — Kouli identifies it as the church of Constantine on Golgotha, where the wood of the Cross was housed (Kouli, 82 n. 48) — Mary reached the threshold and was stopped: “as soon as I stepped on the threshold of the door, all the other people entered unhindered, while some kind of divine power held me back, not allowing me to pass through the entrance” (Life 22; PG 87:3713, trans. Kouli, 82). She forced herself into the crowd and tried again and again — “just as if a large company of soldiers were arrayed for this purpose, with orders to prevent my entering, so did some kind of overwhelming power hold me back” (Life 22; PG 87:3713, trans. Kouli, 82). After “three or four times” she withdrew, exhausted, to a corner of the courtyard, and there understanding came: “a salvific word touched the eyes of my heart, showing me that it was the filth of my actions that was barring the entrance to me. Then I began to cry, lamenting and beating my breast” (Life 23; PG 87:3713, trans. Kouli, 82).

The Theotokos Icon and the Vow

In the courtyard Mary saw “the icon of the all-holy Mother of God standing above the place where I stood” — an image Kouli notes is independently attested as displayed before the church of Constantine by the Piacenza Pilgrim (c. 570) and by Epiphanius the Monk (Kouli, 83 n. 49). To it Mary made the prayer and the vow that are the hinge of her conversion: “Virgin Lady . . . I know, I know well that it is neither decent, nor reasonable for me who is so filthy and utterly prodigal, to look upon Thy icon. . . . But since . . . God to Whom Thou gavest birth became man for this reason, in order to summon sinners to repentance, help me. . . . Command that I, too, may be allowed to enter the church” (Life 23; PG 87:3713–16, trans. Kouli, 83). She bound herself by a pledge, naming the Virgin as its guarantor: “I name Thee before God . . . as a worthy guarantor, that I shall no longer insult this flesh by any shameful intercourse whatsoever, but from the moment I look upon the wood of Thy Son’s cross, I shall immediately renounce the world and all worldly things, and I shall go wherever Thou shalt instruct and guide me” (Life 23; PG 87:3716, trans. Kouli, 83). The motif of the Theotokos as “guarantor” (the one with whom her “bond of guarantee” is signed) recurs through the rest of the Life as the thread of Mary’s perseverance.

The Entry and the Cross

The vow made, the barrier was gone: “No longer did anyone push me this way and that, nor did anyone prevent me from approaching the door. . . . In this way I entered the church without any effort. Thus I found myself inside . . . and I was deemed worthy to see the life-giving cross” (Life 24; PG 87:3716, trans. Kouli, 83). She venerated the Cross and the holy ground — “I threw myself to the ground . . . and after I kissed that holy ground” (Life 24; PG 87:3716, trans. Kouli, 83–84) — then returned to the icon to fulfill the vow, giving herself wholly to the Virgin’s guidance: “Be the teacher of my salvation and guide me toward the path which leads to repentance” (Life 25; PG 87:3716, trans. Kouli, 84).

The Voice, the Three Loaves, and the Crossing

As she prayed, the Life records the call that set her course: “While I was saying these words, I heard someone crying aloud from afar, ‘If you cross the river Jordan, you shall find a fine place of repose.’ When I heard this voice, believing that it was addressing me, I tearfully shouted and called out to the Mother of God, ‘Lady, Lady, do not abandon me’” (Life 25; PG 87:3716, trans. Kouli, 84). Leaving the courtyard, she received from a stranger three copper coins — Kouli notes the Greek folleis, large copper coins of the sixth–seventh centuries (Kouli, 84 n. 50) — and with them “bought three loaves of bread that I took with me as a provision of blessing” (Life 26; PG 87:3716, trans. Kouli, 84). Directed to the gate that led toward the Jordan, she walked the rest of that day and at sunset reached the church of John the Baptist near the river (Kouli notes the church built by the emperor Anastasius I, near the traditional baptism site; Kouli, 84–85 n. 51). There she washed in the Jordan, communed “of the undefiled and life-giving sacraments in the church of the Precursor,” ate half a loaf, and spent the night on the ground (Life 26; PG 87:3716, trans. Kouli, 84–85). “The next day I found a small boat there and crossed the river to the opposite bank” — and so passed into the desert where, by the Life’s reckoning, she would remain forty-seven years before meeting Zosimas (Life 26–27; PG 87:3716, trans. Kouli, 85). She carried, she says, “two and a half loaves of bread, which little by little dried up and became hard as rock,” eating of them in small portions for years (Life 27; PG 87:3716, trans. Kouli, 85).

The Life continues into Mary’s long desert struggle — seventeen years assailed by the memory of meat, wine, and “lascivious songs,” matched against the seventeen years of her sin, before peace came (Life 28–29; PG 87:3716–17, trans. Kouli, 85–86; and Kouli’s note, 87 n., on the symmetry). For the source-critical reading of this narrative, and for the relation between these celebrated elements and the Life’s sparer sixth-century kernel, see The Source Situation.

References

Kouli, Maria, trans. “Life of St. Mary of Egypt.” In Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation, ed. Alice-Mary Talbot, 65–93. Byzantine Saints’ Lives in Translation 1. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996. (All quotations and chapter numbers; the Alexandria account at 80; the “insatiable passion” at 80; the barred door and icon at 82–83; the church of Constantine note at 82 n. 48; the Theotokos icon attestation at 83 n. 49; the voice and the three loaves at 84; the folleis and the church of the Forerunner at 84–85 nn. 50–51.)
Life of Mary of Egypt (BHG 1042). PG 87:3697–3726. (The Greek text underlying Kouli; columns cited inline: Alexandria and the voyage at 3709–12; the Exaltation, the barred door, the icon, the vow, the voice, and the loaves at 3713–16.)
The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, 447–63. London: Faber and Faber, 1977. (The liturgical setting in which this narrative is read each Great Lent.)
METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, this repository.