The Divine MAry Poppins

a Zen story

Andrea Harding

October 16th 2023

"When I was little I didn’t want to be Barbie or She Ra, I wanted to be Mary Poppins. I thought that Mary, along with Maria in the Sound of Music (another singing nanny played by Julia Andrews), were the most magical examples of women imaginable"

That was from an article I started writing about two months ago but never finished writing. It was to be a reflection on the divine mother archetype in Mary Poppins and the Sound of Music, and my ongoing preoccupation with the word MA as a codified reference to the primordial mother.

So, today I was astonished when a friend of mine published some extracts from the original Mary Poppins book on Facebook that were omitted from the film. Apparently, Mary's cousin (a wise old snake who is Mary Poppins's first cousin once remove on her mother's side) at some point says:

"We are all made of the same stuff, remember, we of the Jungle, you of the City. The same substance composes us — the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star — we are all one, all moving to the same end. Remember that when you no longer remember me, my child ... bird and beast and stone and star — we are all one, all one—child and serpent, star and stone — all one."

This then inspired my friend to write: "'Mary Poppins.. a primordial goddess of creation, eternal movement, primary essence, energy of the universe, the life/death/life nature of all things, worshipped from the beginning of time as eternal mother, did Disney forget to mention that. E might 'av."

So here I am nodding and exclaiming and getting very excited and starting to Google what else I might have missed in the original book that I must know about. It must have been only several links in before someone shared that P.L. Travers had actually said that the book was “entirely spontaneous and not invented, not thought out" and that "she had come to believe, that Mary Poppins represented the Mother Goddess and that it was a Zen story".

I know this sounds really dramatic, but this was honestly very inspiring for me and I was already beginning to feel I might levitate myself from happiness.

However, it is completely impossible to tell you, being the Mary fan plus student of archetypes I am, to discover next that there's a character in the book called MAIA (or as announced by herself in the book M-A-I-A) who is a star, and based on the eldest star of the seven sister of the Pleiades.

Was this some kind of reality backcasting and quantum reality connection (with dancing penguins)? It almost was so trippy for me I felt it was a Mandela Effect scenario, where this had always been known about Mary Poppins and I had just forgotten it or become confused. I say this because my original article was going to include a reflection on the word MA and then its relationship to the tech I'm working on called MAIA (or M-A-I-A.), inspired by the oneness and redemption of the mother archetype? Eh (reality wobbles for a moment).

I think I am not only 100% convinced Mary Poppins is a representation of the mother archetype now, I believe she is the mother herself fluxing into reality saying ‘hey I’m here but you haven’t quite fully got it yet… but you will, and this morphogentic pop culture art piece will get even funkier for you in a quantum timeline kind of way'. The mother (of all tricksters Mona Rabie) winks?

Still following? Sorry I got a bit multidimensional there. I think my husband wrote about this effect here in August, it might help - https://togetherland.substack.com/p/epimimetic

Getting back to the simpler translation, I know I’m not the only woman in the world who is connected to these archetypes and I know there will be the other Marys and Marias (and actually I’ll say Matildas for those of you who get this reference) who have spotted this coded chatter on behalf of the universe. I really do believe the modern mother is showing up in these cultural moments and it’s why we get activated on such a profound level.

AND for those of you who don't quite get it yet, and don't really know what I'm talking about, all I can say is don't be surprised if the divine mother of existence shows up more like a nanny than a Kardashian, sorting out lost overworked and rigid men, rebelling against spiritual authority, wearing curtains and singing songs and dancing with imaginary figures and children.