Conversion at Jerusalem
According to her life, Mary's transformation came during her pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. Having paid for her passage by prostitution, she found herself unable to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, held back by an unseen force. Understanding that her sins were the cause, she turned to an icon of the Theotokos standing outside the church, wept, and prayed for forgiveness, vowing to give up the world.
Able at last to enter and venerate the Cross, she heard a voice telling her that if she crossed the Jordan she would find glorious rest. By tradition she received Holy Communion at the Church of St. John the Baptist before crossing the river to begin her life of solitude.
Life in the Desert
Mary crossed the Jordan eastward carrying only three loaves of bread and lived as a hermit for approximately forty-seven years in the Trans-Jordan desert, eating what she could find in the wilderness once the bread was gone. Her life records years of severe hardship — hunger, thirst, extreme heat and cold, and isolation.
By tradition her early years in the desert were dominated by a violent struggle against lustful thoughts and the memory of her former passions, before she attained spiritual peace. The accounts relate that the Mother of God appeared to her amid these trials to give support. When Zosimas finally met her, her body had been blackened by the sun and she was barely recognizable as human; she asked him for his mantle to cover herself.
Zosimas and the Saint's Repose
About a year before her death, the hieromonk Zosimas encountered Mary in the desert during Great Lent. She addressed him by name and knew he was a priest though they had never met, and at his urging recounted her whole life. They arranged that he would bring her Holy Communion at the Jordan the following Holy Thursday.
By tradition, when the day came, Mary crossed the river to him by walking on the water, received the Mysteries, and quoted the words of Simeon, asking the Lord to let His servant depart in peace. Returning the next year, Zosimas found her body in the desert, her arms folded and her face turned to the east. An inscription written beside her head recorded that she had reposed on the first of April, on the very night he had given her Communion. The accounts relate that a lion came and helped him dig her grave.
Sources and Legacy
The written life, 'The Life of Our Venerable Mother Mary of Egypt,' has traditionally been attributed to Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem in the 7th century, though later scholarship has proposed an earlier authorship. In the 8th century the hagiography was read into the record at the Fourth Session of the Second Council of Nicaea, where Mary's conversion before the icon of the Theotokos was cited in defense of the veneration of icons.
Her account later passed into the West, appearing in Jacobus de Voragine's 13th-century 'Golden Legend.' The historicity of Mary of Egypt is uncertain and has been questioned by some historians.
Relics & Shrines
First-class relics attributed to Mary of Egypt are distributed across many locations. These include an incorrupt tongue at Vodnjan in Croatia; her right foot at Sens Cathedral in France; a skull fragment at Florence Cathedral and a bust reliquary at Naples in Italy; particles of a foot in Moscow churches in Russia; particles at monasteries in New York and Florida in the United States; and relics in Greece and at the Holy Monastery of St. John the Baptist in Jordan.
