“Tokarczuk researches her short stories and novels with academic intensity. She digs up forgotten, esoteric myths and legends and shows how this esoterica is woven into the warp and woof of European culture. Beneath a Europe of rational, religious, racial, and ethnic dogmatisms, she unveils a continent rife with ethnically and linguistically syncretic visionaries, mystics, and half-pagan storytellers”
“Tokarczuk didn’t have a particularly religious upbringing. Nor had she encountered Emerentia in a catalogue of saints’ lives; instead, she found the name, whose thread she followed, in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.”
“Tokarczuk went hunting for Emerentia’s namesakes. She searched for them online, in libraries, in Thomas Mann’s unpublished letters and archives. As many of her searches came up empty, she realized that few historical women have ever borne that name. Most of the ones who did, including a distant relative of Mann’s, adopted it upon receiving monastic orders. Emerentias tended to hail from the Netherlands or from some of the regions neighboring Tokarczuk’s native Silesia, including Bavaria. Tokarczuk began to discover religious artworks from these regions depicting an older woman bearing that name”
“Nowhere to be found in early Christian apocrypha, Emerentia is first named in the Flemish Peter van Diest’s fifteenth-century life of Jesus. News of her spread from Flanders to Burgundy and Germany through the works of Jodocus van Asche Badius, a Flemish writer residing in Paris, and of Johann Maier von Eck, a German Catholic prelate known for his quarrels with Martin Luther”
“The fifteenth century witnessed the culmination of a centuries-long debate over the way the Virgin Mary was conceived by her parents. This debate has its roots in the second-century apocryphal Gospel of James, a collection of stories attributed to the apostle James that did not end up entering the biblical canon. This unauthorized gospel mentions in passing that God had allowed Mary’s mother, Anne, who was barren, to conceive Mary without sexual intercourse”
“Catholic theologians had long established that Mary herself was a virgin, but could virgin birth have run in her family?”
“Behind this funny-sounding question lay a deeper worry about the moral purity of Mary’s body: Could the flesh that bore the Messiah have required something as sinful as lust for its conception?”
“In 1477, the idea that Mary had not been tainted by humanity’s original sin won out: the Pope established a feast to celebrate Mary’s Immaculate Conception inside Anne’s womb. By that point, theologians were using the term immaculate to describe Mary’s freedom from sin in a much more abstract, mystical sense; still, in many people’s minds, Mary’s purity remained literally contingent on her ancestors’ sexual conduct”
“For these more literal-minded believers, the papal decree thus opened a new possibility—of a sequence of Jesus’s women ancestors who also might have procreated without men”
“Tokarczuk found out these historical facts, and others. But as she examined paintings and sculptures of Emerentia, she realized that Mann’s interest in her could not be explained by theology alone. Few depictions of Emerentia exist, and those that do tend toward the bizarre as they attempt to explain visually the matrilineal logic that made her relevant to churchgoers”
“Like figures in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Emerentia and those around her seem chimerical, caught midtransformation into a tree, a dog, a mountain. These metaphors for nonsexual human reproduction rapidly exceed their immediate theological purpose, embedding Emerentia in a surprisingly pagan-seeming, matriarchal framework”
“One fifteenth-century painting, commissioned by the Carmelites, who were major proponents of the idea that Mary was immaculately conceived, and painted by the Flemish Master Johannes, represents Emerentia as the bottom of a literal family tree”
“Titled Vision of the Descent of Saint Emerentia at Mount Carmel and currently held at the Museo Lázaro Galdiano in Madrid, it depicts Emerentia on all fours at the center of the image. She has just given birth. The belt tied around her waist—or is it an umbilical cord?—begins to transform into the root of a plant; this plant rises into the air through Emerentia’s lower back. This tree produces one large, ornate blue flower, which spreads in the middle of the painting to seat a middle-aged Saint Anne holding a small, apparently teenage Virgin Mary. Mary has her hand wrapped around the stalk, which continues to climb through her heart and above her head. Crowned by a flower high above Anne’s and Mary’s heads, the plant hoists up a childlike Jesus with a cross already slung over his shoulder”
“In a more recent icon Tokarczuk showed me—which she believes was made in imitation of an older, Greek Orthodox predecessor—Emerentia is a giantess who towers over a regular-size Saint Anne, who in turn holds a diminutive Mary, in whose hands we see an even smaller baby Jesus. Nested inside each other, they resemble a set of matryoshka dolls”
“Gigantic, matronly, and protective—and magical-seeming—Emerentia does not merely assert the possibility of a virginal birth or two. She heads an alternative, matriarchic holy family with Emerentia-like matrons all the way down”
“Carried away by the idea of her, these late medieval painters inadvertently transform Catholic doctrine into something that looks more like pagan worship of an omnipotent Earth Mother. Or perhaps Emerentia awakens a somnolent matriarchal impulse within Christianity itself”
“Emerentia represents a world that The Magic Mountain cannot let into itself: a world in which crises of masculinity, and of masculine creativity in particular, are not an existential concern”
“These alternatives to patriarchy seem to have quietly coexisted for centuries with the male-centric world whose passing Mann fears. And yet paradoxically, in humiliating Emerentia, Mann brought her back to life, back into circulation, so that Tokarczuk could discover her and, in her novel Empuzjon, write a new version of The Magic Mountain with Emerentia and her daughters at its center”
“Everything will be as it is now, just a little different” Note: Walter Benjamin
“At any moment, an unexpected presence from our collective past might appear before us. Once we notice this presence, everything changes. The change is small, but its impact feels enormous”