ABSTRACT
The Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos, completed before ad 619, recounts one woman’s attempt to enter the Church of the Anastasis in Jerusalem.2 The story highlights the Theotokos’s control over sacred boundaries. On the night of Holy Sunday (probably the eve of Easter), Kosmiane, the wife of a patrician named Germanos, tried to enter the ‘holy and life-giving sepulchre of our Lord Jesus Christ’ in order to worship. ‘When she approached the sanctuary (ἱερατεῖον), our Lady the holy Theotokos, met her in visible form (ὁφθαλμοφανῶς), together with other women, and said, “Since you are not one of us, neither enter [here], nor join us.”’3 Moschos supplies the reason
1 Although I am only tangentially dependent on them, the classic anthropological accounts of the significance of the limen or threshold remain A. van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. M.B. Vizedom and G.L. Caffee (Chicago, 1960); V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca NY, 1969), esp. 94-130; and M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), esp. 114-28. For a broad view of Mary’s place in the cultural imagination, see A. Cameron, ‘The cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: religious development and myth-making’, in R.N. Swanson, ed., The Church and Mary, Studies in Church History 39 (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Rochester NY, 2004), 1-21.
