Mary Magdalene
© Richard Stodart
Interlude: Eggsistential
By: Stella MarisDate: Saturday, March 29, 2008
You probably won't have heard of Mary Magdalene Smith yet, but I can tell you that it's only a matter of time before she becomes a household name.
Mary Magdalene is our dear Sophia's daughter, the fruit of her marriage to the Z-list failed pop star ex-husband. However, Smith isn't actually MM's real last name – we’ve changed it to something overtly pseudonymous for obvious reasons.
Smith just happened to be the most anonymous-sounding moniker we could come up with, although we toyed around with various convolutions, trying out colorful Gaelic and French variations for literary effect, before we decided that plain old "Smith" had a kinda raw honesty to it that perfectly suited MM.
But, of course, there’s also the deeper hermetic levels of meaning, which was an essential requirement for our purposes. Mythologically, a Smith is the master of iron and fire, presided over by the Roman god Vulcan (according to Paracelsus), who later became acknowledged as the patron deity of Alchemy, overseeing the transformation of Man.
Even our non-existent cosmic mentor, Fulcanelli, takes his own nom-de-plume from this reference - Fulcanelli translating literally as "Little Smith", or Paulus Vulcanus in Latin.
Then, there's an entire bonkers lecture on the relationship between Vul'cain and the biblical Cain and Thoth-Hermes and Set or Seth and how this cabalistically transmutes into Chiram-Cain, or "Son of the Widow", said to be the name that Hermes signed the Emerald Tablets with - which I'll spare you from. For now.
But the Mary Magdalene bit is real.
Do you remember, way back when, that I said I immediately knew as soon as I met Soph that she was the one, out of all the more qualified applicants, that I would hire to be my personal assistant? Well, this was because she happened to mention during her interview that her recent divorce from Z-list had reduced her to bringing up her daughter Mary Magdalene on her own as the Ex gallivanted around the globe with groupies glorying in his mid-life crisis, which is why she was seeking employment.
When I asked the obvious question about how her daughter had gotten such an unusual name, Soph explained that she had read Holy Blood, Holy Grail while she was pregnant. In her delicate condition, she had been so deeply touched by the revelation proposed by the authors, that Jesus himself had been married to Mary Magdalene, that she insisted on naming her daughter Mary Magdalene in honor of the experience, much to her husband's dismay. In fact, this was probably the beginning of the end of Sophia’s marriage, as "Zee" increasingly began to refer to Soph's newly-inspired religious beliefs as "that rot".
Therefore, it's probably no surprize to anyone that Mary Magdalene quickly developed into a problem child. And it certainly didn't help being dragged around recording studios, backstage parties, gothic cathedrals and sacred stone circles during her impressionable years by her mother and her Auntie Stella.
So I suppose it was inevitable given the circumstances, that MM would grow up thinking that she had some kind of sacred planetary mission to fulfill. That the Goddess had somehow deliberately chosen this dysfunctional lifestyle for MM as her exalted spiritual training.
And what better way to manifest the sacred planetary mission that Mary Magdalene had been uniquely groomed for than for her to become a pop star, in order to enlighten the planet through music?
So, that’s how Mary Magdalene came to surprize us by presenting us with her demo tape out of the blue… we hadn't even realized that she had been recording during downtime in the studio for months on end. Lighting votive candles and burning incense in the control room, as if she was performing a sacred ritual, MM solemnly played the entire one-hour tape to us at an ear-splitting volume.
To be completely honest, it was possibly the worst demo tape that we had ever heard, and I've heard a lot of bad demos in my time. It was so bad that it was actually embarrassing.
After the excruciating experience finally ended, Soph and I had looked at each other through a haze of incense in mute astonishment while, mistaking our cringeing silence for awe, Mary Magdalene then embarked upon a long explanation of the concept to us in minute detail.
The album was called The Egg, after the ancient tradition of the biblical Mary Magdalene's confrontation with Tiberias Caesar after she had witnessed Jesus' resurrection at Easter. The Magdalene had picked up an egg from the dinner table in order to helpfully explain the theory of a resurrection, whereupon Caesar had responded that a human being could no more rise from the dead than the egg in her hand turn red.
At this, the egg in Mary Magdalene's hand miraculously turned red, MM gravely intoned, handing us red-dyed Easter eggs to drive home the point. We half-expected her to annoint us with spikenard oil next.
And now you'll probably have guessed that it fell to me to try to get this wretched album signed. But not even the ever-faithful Jason, who had become a well-respected record company exec in LA following the dismantling of the MemoryMap studios after my own divorce, could pull sufficient strings this time.
So I promised Mary Magdalene that I would plug The Egg in my Mania column from time to time, in case a visionary producer happened to be reading along and wanted to take advantage of this unique opportunity. Maybe Chip will even let us upload a couple of tracks here on the site, for your listening pleasure.
Gawd help us all.
Newton Coordinate: Feast Day of the Fools of April, April 1st, on the Greenwich Meridian.
