The
Priest's Madonna
Q&A
Q: What brought you to
this story? How did you come to write the
book?
A: In 2000, I took a
seminar at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on
Love, taught by James McPherson. Professor
McPherson happened to mention in passing one
day, as if it were a well-known fact, the
notion of a bloodline descended from Jesus
and Mary Magdalene. I was intrigued. When I
asked him about it, he referred me to a book
called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by
Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry
Lincoln. The book opens with a brief summary
of the life of Bérenger Saunière, who at the
turn of the nineteenth century was parish
priest in Rennes-le-Château, a tiny village
in the Pyrenean foothills. Saunière became
mysteriously wealthy while he was restoring
the village church and built a large estate,
including a villa, tower, and promenade, as
well as a garden and grounds adjacent to the
villa. Saunière’s descent into worldliness
fascinated me. I wondered what that had been
like for him, how he had gone from idealism
into an obsession with wealth. Later in the
book, I read of Marie Dénarnaud, his
long-time servant, companion, and, as it was
rumored, lover, who was known in the village
as the priest’s Madonna. Eventually, I
realized I wanted to tell her story: how she
came to love such a priest, and what her
response was to his worldliness.
Q: Holy Blood, Holy
Grail. Aren’t the authors of that book
the ones who sued Dan Brown?
A: Yep.
Q: So were you inspired
at all by The Da Vinci Code in the
writing of your book?
A: No. The Da Vinci
Code came out in 2003, after I was deep
into drafting my manuscript. My editor sent
me an email at the time suggesting I check
it out. At first, I despaired because I
thought I’d been scooped. But once I read
it, I was relieved. It was obvious that we
shared Holy Blood, Holy Grail as a
source, and that we’d addressed some similar
themes, but Brown’s treatment was completely
different than mine.
Q: One of those themes
is of the role of Mary Magdalene in
Christianity, right? What inspired you to
include her story as part of your book?
A: Well, Mary Magdalene
was what got me interested in the story to
begin with. She just seemed like a natural
fit with Marie. I had always been intrigued
by her. The orthodox Christian tale has it
that Mary Magdalene’s passionate love for
Jesus transformed her from a sinner into a
devout saint. But the physical aspect of
their love is always denied or not
addressed. I wanted to explore that
question. What if they were physical
with each other? What would that have been
like for her and for Jesus? I’ve always
found stories of Jesus’s humanity
particularly touching, and this was a way to
explore that. The parallels with the Marie
narrative are obvious, of course: forbidden
love between a woman and a holy man, the
themes of spiritual sickness and health, of
faith and doubt, the search for what is
meaningful and holy in the physical world.
Q: Why isn't your Mary Magdalene a
prostitute?
A: That's a popular image of Mary Magdalene
that's evolved over the centuries. Pope
Gregory the Great started it in the sixth
century, when he declared that three women
mentioned in the New Testament gospels—the
women from whom Jesus cast out seven devils,
identified as Mary Magdalene; Mary of
Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus;
and the woman known as the “sinner” who
anoints Jesus’ feet as he dines at Simon the
Pharisee’s table—were actually one person.
So Mary Magdalene, the woman who had been
possessed by seven devils, became identified
with the "sinner," which was understood to
mean "whore." But in the gospels there's
actually no evidence that she was a
prostitute. Matthew, Mark, and Luke agree
that Mary Magdalene was a follower of Jesus,
was present at his crucifixion, witnessed
the resurrection, and was among the first to
be charged with spreading the Christian
message. John states that not only did she
witness the resurrection, but that she was
the witness, the only person who saw
the risen Christ and spoke with him.
Gnostic writings dating from the first and
second centuries refer to Mary Magdalene as
a disciple of Christ, “the woman who knew
the All,” and the chief link between Jesus
and the rest of the apostles. The Gospel of
Philip names her as Jesus’s companion, or
koinonōs in the Greek, a word that,
according to Susan Haskins, is more
accurately translated as partner or consort.
Q: What do you mean by
Gnostic writings?
A: Gnosticism was a
movement in early Christianity that believed
that salvation arose through gnosis,
or secret knowledge derived from an
individual, personal experience of God.
Early Christian Gnostics wrote dozens of
gospels that described the work of Jesus,
his sayings, and his relationships to his
disciples. Many of these gospels were found
in the 1940s by an Egyptian farmer who was
digging in the hills for a certain soil that
he used to fertilize his fields. He came
across an ancient earthenware jar, and
inside found these papyrus books. He brought
them back home and put them beside the
stove, and his mother afterward used some of
them to stoke the fire! But the ones that
survived made it into the Egyptian black
market, and finally got into the hands of
scholars, who call them the Nag Hammadi
Library—a collection of early Gnostic
gospels. In the second and third centuries,
when Christianity was becoming an orthodox
religion, some Christian leaders perceived
Gnostics as a threat to the developing
church, and denounced them in their
writings. But the Gnostic gospels represent
a prevalent strain of thought in early
Christianity.
Q: You must have done a
great deal of research, on nineteenth
century France as well as ancient
Israel/Palestine. Not to mention all the
information in the book on earlier French
history: the Merovingian period and the
Cathar heresy. How did you go about doing
your research?
A: Writing a historical
novel is something of a stop and start
process. Kind of like a football game (from
someone who has seen maybe three football
games, ever). You can only go one down in
your writing before you have to stop and
regroup in your research. I started out by
writing a very sketchy draft of the first
scene and I got about two pages into it when
I realized I couldn’t go any farther until
I’d read more about the history of the
region. So, I read: histories of the
Languedoc region and France, accounts of the
relationship between the Catholic Church and
the French state in the nineteenth century,
Languedocian folklore, as well as narratives
describing the Cathar heresy and the
Albigensian Crusade. I reread the gospels,
including some Gnostic ones, and scoured the
libraries for sources that might help evoke
life in ancient Galilee and Judea. I also
brushed up on my French. Then, armed with
three months of solid reading and about
fifty tentative pages of early draft, I
traveled to Rennes-le-Château.
My main objective on
that trip was to absorb: I wanted to soak up
the setting, get a sense of the light, just
be in the place fully enough to be able to
imagine it well. I expected it to be
charming and lovely. It was absolutely
breathtaking. Undulating fields, bordered by
rivers, bunches of stucco houses with
red-tiled roofs, castles that seemed to grow
out of the hilltops. I visited the church
that Saunière renovated—pretty gaudily—and
gazed at the bizarre pastel patterns on the
arches and the black and white tiled floor.
I walked through the moldering villa he
built for Marie, trying to imagine the
wallpaper before it began to peel, the
ceilings before they were marred by
watermarks. I took in the view from the
promenade and the tower, and looked over the
few volumes that were left in the tower
library. I hiked over the red dirt,
fingering the scrubby trees and broom. On
the wetter days, I drove through the
countryside, stopping now and then to marvel
at the ruined castles. The host at my B&B
was wonderful: she acted as my translator on
a couple of occasions, and helped me talk
with Antoine Captier and Claire Corbu, who
knew Marie in her old age.
Q: What about the Miryam sections, the story
of Mary Magdalene? How did you go about
researching and writing those?
A: I wasn't able to
visit Israel, so those sections came from
doing lots of reading and imagining. I drew
on the Hebrew Bible and the gospels, as well
as on recent historical research into the
life of Jesus. I read books by Susan
Haskins, John Dominic Crossan, Paula
Fredriksen, and Elaine Pagels. James
Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword was
particularly helpful.
In writing the Miryam
sections, I wanted to faithfully represent
the ancient Jewish world that Jesus was
entrenched in. That's why I chose to use the
Hebrew names (Yeshua and Miryam for Jesus
and Mary). My most useful source was
probably Daily Life in Palestine in the
Time of Jesus, by Henri Daniel-Rops.
Q: The book is deeply
concerned with religion and spirituality.
Where does this interest in religion come
from? Are you religious yourself?
A: Religion regularly
featured in the family stories I heard as a
child. My great-grandmother on my mother’s
side was a devout Presbyterian who refused
to go to church on Easter and Christmas
because that’s when all the “heathens” would
go. Her sister, a flighty artist, used to
invite neighborhood drunks into the family
living room during the Depression and make
them sit through an impromptu sermon before
doling out bowls of soup. My maternal
grandmother, a woman I loved and admired
deeply, was also a devout Presbyterian. Her
faith compelled her to participate in one of
the civil rights marches in Selma, Alabama
in 1965 when the threat of violence was very
real. My father’s side is Catholic; he went
to Catholic school and was slapped on the
wrist by nuns with rulers. Though my father
and his siblings have taken their religion
with a grain of salt, their mother—my
grandmother—remained a devout Catholic her
whole life.
I grew up in the
Congregational church—one of the most
liberal of the mainline Protestant
churches—and in high school and college fell
into the typical questioning period, from
which I have never completely emerged. I am
currently a Unitarian Universalist—a path
that comes out of a liberal Christian
tradition, but has evolved into a creedless
religion, one that embraces a diversity of
paths and is guided by moral principles
rather than doctrinal ones. Having come from
an interfaith marriage—Protestant/Catholic,
which was a big deal for my parents’
generation—I entered into one myself: my
husband is a non-observant Jew, brought up
largely as a Vedantic Hindu. My
father-in-law is a devout Vedantist,
meditating for up to four and five hours a
day. So I guess I’ve been surrounded by
religious people of one kind or another,
with varying degrees of devotion—and it’s
caused me to think quite a bit about faith
and religion, Christianity in particular.
Q: What’s your next
project?
A: I have in mind
another novel, which is still very much in
the preliminary stages. |
