Saint Mary of Egypt. Mary of Egypt is revered as the patron saint of penitents, most particularly in the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Churches, and Oriental Orthodox Churches. The primary source of information on Saint Mary of Egypt is the Vita written of her by St. Sophronius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Most of the information in this section is taken from this source. Saint Mary, also known as Maria Aegyptiaca, was born somewhere in the Province of Egypt, and at the age of twelve she ran away from her parents to the city of Alexandria. Here she lived an extremely dissolute life. In her Vita it states that she often refused the money offered for her sexual favors, as she was driven by an insatiable and an irrepressible passion, and that she mainly lived by begging, supplemented by spinning flax. After seventeen years of this lifestyle, she traveled to Jerusalem for the Great Feasts of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. She undertook the journey as a sort of anti-pilgrimage, stating that she hoped to find in the pilgrim crowds at Jerusalem even more partners in her lust. She paid for her passage by offering sexual favors to other pilgrims, and she continued her habitual lifestyle for a short time in Jerusalem. Her Vita relates that when she tried to enter the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for the celebration, she was barred from doing so by an unseen force. Realizing that this was because of her impurity, she was struck with remorse, and upon seeing an icon of the Theotokos outside the church, she prayed for forgiveness and promised to give up the world. Then she attempted again to enter the church, and this time was permitted in. After venerating the relic of the true cross, she returned to the icon to give thanks, and heard a voice telling her, If you cross the Jordan, you will find glorious rest. She immediately went to the monastery of Saint John the Baptist on the bank of the River Jordan, where she received absolution and afterwards Holy Communion. The next morning, she crossed the Jordan and retired to the desert to live the rest of her life as a hermit in penitence. She took with her only three loaves of bread, and once they were gone, lived only on what she could find in the wilderness. Approximately one year before her death, she recounted her life to Saint Zosimas of Palestine, who encountered her in the desert. When he unexpectedly met her in the desert, she was completely naked and almost unrecognizable as human. She asked Zosimas to toss her his mantle to cover herself with, and then she narrated her life's story to him. She asked him to meet her at the banks of the Jordan, on Holy Thursday of the following year, and bring her Holy Communion. When he fulfilled her wish, she crossed the river to get to him by walking on the surface of the water, and received Holy Communion, telling him to meet her again in the desert the following Lent. The next year, Zosimas travelled to the same spot where he first met her, some twenty days' journey from his monastery, and found her lying there dead. According to an inscription written in the sand next to her head, she had died on the very night he had given her Communion and had been somehow miraculously transported to the place he found her, and her body was preserved incorrupt. He buried her body with the assistance of a passing lion. On returning to the monastery he related her life story to the brethren, and it was preserved among them as oral tradition until it was written down by St. Sophronius. There is disagreement among various sources regarding the dates of Saint Mary's life. The dates given above correspond to those in the Catholic Encyclopedia. The Bollandists place her death in 421, others give the date of her death as 522 or 530. The only clue given in her Vita is the fact that the day of her repose was April 1, which is stated to be Holy Thursday, meaning that Easter fell on April 4 that year. If one consults a perpetual calendar that is keyed to the Julian Calendar, one finds that there are 24 years in the relevant centuries on which April 1 occurs on a Thursday. Of these, the years on which Easter would fall on April 4 according to the Julian Calendar are: 443, 454, 527, 538, and 549. It is notable that the Synaxarion states that Zosimas lived during the reign of the Emperor Theodosius the Younger, who reigned from 408 to 450. According to tradition, Zosimas lived almost a hundred years, dying in the sixth century, and the Vita states that he was fifty-three years old when he met Saint Mary. In iconography, Saint Mary of Egypt is depicted as a deeply tanned, emaciated old woman with unkempt gray hair, either naked or covered by the mantle she borrowed from Zosimas.