Mystical Androgyny: Annihilation and Deification in Medieval Women's Visionary Literature

Abstract

In women’s visionary literature dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Latin Christendom, a clear pattern emerges when one analyzes the trajectory of self-annihilation to authoritative self-assertion as a result of their mystical encounters with God. It seems that the self who is encountered by God thus realizes her need for annihilation before the Face of God. After this encounter with God ultimately leads to the mystical annihilation of the self, the self is then built back up as one completely fused and integrated with the Godhead, ultimately resulting in an authoritative reassertion of the self as “I,” though this new “I” is always and at once fused to the Selfhood of God. This process of encounter, annihilation, fusion, and reassertion is a pattern followed by several female mystics during the medieval period in order to legitimize themselves as authoritative sources of God’s mystical revelations. While a conservative reading of these texts may suggest a masculinization of the self resulting from mystical annihilation of the feminine self, a close reading reveals that female mystics are not holy because they are becoming more masculine – rather, they are holy because they are becoming Divine. In seeking to destroy the feminine self, women such as Beatrice of Nazareth, Marguerite Porete, and Margaret Ebner were not attempting to become more manly, but more Godly – and the deification of the female mystic opens up fresh understandings of the ways in which medieval women viewed their embodiment in relation to the Divine.