Virgin Mary and the Goddess Durga: The Sacralization of War and the Ambivalence of Divine Feminine Iconography

The Russo-Ukrainian war has prompted the creation of a great deal of marian iconography, where the Virgin is depicted as protecting and fighting. A notable example is the Javelin Madonna mural, with Mary carrying an anti-tank weapon, which was criticized by Ukrainian religious leaders as blasphemous. Although this critique rightly resists the politicization of religion, the accusation of blasphemy ignores the military symbolism within religious art of various traditions. I use Eastern Christian iconography of the Virgin Mary (which I compare with the Hindu representations of the goddess Durga), to illuminate some of the military features of the divine feminine. The key question I am trying to address is: what does a marian, i.e. feminine, military representation add to our understanding of religion and violence. Mary as Sophia, the Church/Polis and Women of Apocalypse allows us to keep the sacred and mundane together, and avoids an easy de-politicization of religion.

I argue that the imagery of the Javelin Madonna mural, with Mary carrying an anti-tank weapon, resembles the iconography of the Orans Virgin, in the St Sophia Cathedral of Kyiv (Lady raising her hands in prayer) more than it might appear at first glance. The raised hands of Mary resonate with Moses raising his hands to heaven in the battle of Israel against the Amalekites. The figure of the Virgin, short and almost squat, resonates with one of the Akathistos Hymn’ titles of Theotokos, the “unbreakable wall”— a protective barrier against the forces of evil [Peltomaa]. The inscription in the apse around the mosaic of the Virgin, “God is in the midst of her” (from Ps. 46) might refer to Mary, but also to the city (as the original sense of the psalm indicates), thus suggesting a tautology between Mary and the City, both Kyiv and heavenly Jerusalem.

I will explore three lines of inquiry, suggested by iconography, to make sense of Mary’s apparent violence. First is the tautology between Mary and Sophia, the Wisdom, which quite clearly appars in Kyivan iconographical tradition [Florensky; Bulgakov; Averintsev]. Sophia is linked to divine action in creating and sustaining the universe, and, as Soloviev puts it, represents an “ideal, perfect humanity”. But in the Greek tradition, Sophia is also related to practical wisdom: shipbuilding and even warfare. There is an interesting parallel between Mary-as-Sophia and Durgā: the latter has been often represented as supreme knowledge, and linked to creation of the universe and the principle of creation [Sarkar; Bose]. In this sense, both Mary and Durga transcend the separation between spiritual/otherworldly and the mundane, sacred and profane. Violent traits of the divine feminine, read through a sophianic lens, reveals violence as a sad but seemingly unavoidable part of the postlapsarian human condition, which demands to be integrated rather than ignored.

Second, Mary as the Church/Polis. The Orans of Kyiv Mosaic, where Mary stands without a child, has been interpreted as the church praying to God for the protection of the city. Mary’s protective features were important in Byzantium, where they were associated, in particular, with the Blachernae shrine. There Mary was venerated as the protector of Constantinople, where she appropriated some of the features of the pagan goddesses Athena, Tyche and Victoria [Mango, Benko, Cameron]. In the Homily on the Siege of Constantinople in 626 by Theodore the Syncellus “sabre” and “shield” in the hands of Mary are used as synonyms (xiii). In other words, an act of violence and an act of protection are one and the same. The logic of Mary’s intervention (sometimes explicitly violent) exudes responsibility to protect the vulnerable, and represents not only a savior from death, but also from an unhappy existence, in slavery and sexual abuse. I would argue that any military connotations of Mary-as-Church/Polis imagery can be interpreted not as God taking weapons to fight for a given community, but rather as a community itself fighting to defend the most vulnerable, and praying to God for its protection. Mary’s position in providing political legitimacy to the ruler in Byzantium [Pentcheva, Limberis] echoes the importance of Durga in the rhetoric of ancient Indian kingship [Sarkar].

Third, Mary as an eschatological figure. The idea of Mary as a protector is intrinsically linked to the eschatological image of the Woman in a violent enmity with the serpent, promised in the Book of Genesis, and the Woman of Revelation [Fastiggi]. Eschatological tones are made explicit both in St Andrew the Fool’s vita [Rydén] and the literature of Ancient Rus’ [Pliukhanova], and are abundant in the early modern Ukrainian iconography of Pokrova [Plokhii, Aleksandrovych]. In this context, a parallel with Durga, slaughtering the buffalo demon, Mahisha, is very apparent here [Doniger]. Durga wins the battle because Mahisha considers her to be helpless. In other words, vulnerability is made into an asset, capable of disrupting normalized social structures—and thus saving the cosmic order [Kinsley]. A major problem with an apocalyptic vision, is that oftentimes the end-time battle between good and evil gets transposed onto history, as is the case with the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war (cf. Patriarch Kirill’s reflection of Russia as katechon, or the demonization of Putin by some Ukrainian religious leaders).

Recently, Quast-Neulinger proposed “disarming” Mary as a correction to the “imperialist instrumentalization of Mary” in Byzantium. She notes the return of Mary as the “warrior goddess” in the Russo-Ukrainian war and invites us to “withstand the seduction of introducing divine power into immanent conflicts”. While I agree with her overall argument about the need to be cautious when ascribing any imperial bloodthirstiness to the divine, I wonder whether it is ever possible, and theologically opportune, to purge religions imagery of the divine from any shade of violence. Is not the responsibility to protect the vulnerable (if not legitimate self-defence)—which may, unfortunately, involve theuse of force—something that can claim divine sanction, and thus something that can respond to God’s call? The fact that a rhetoric of this sort can be abused by imperialist motives, does not invalidate the principle itself, but rather its abuse.