Depictions of the Dormition of Mary are perplexing to a viewer ignorant of their meaning. Until recently, this ignorance was my condition. I only became aware of it while spending some mornings in an Italian church that has on its walls a 14th-century painting of the Dormition. During that same visit, a friend gave my family a wooden cabinet door from the 19th century. It was painted with icons and Russian inscriptions and included an image of the Dormition as the penultimate frame. 

The Dormition—the moment of Mary’s death—has not been a popular theme in Catholic art for several centuries. Like many Catholics, I knew only the pictures of Mary’s triumphant Assumption.

The usual Dormition scene looks like this: Jesus stands over the lifeless body of his mother, accompanied by some or all of the apostles. He is holding an infant, shining brightly and clothed in white. There are angels around. One of them has just cut the hands off a man attempting to reach at Mary from below. Apostles may or may not also be depicted flying on small clouds. Angels may be carrying Mary’s living body upward to heaven.

The small, shining figure is what first caught me. It seems a reversal of the more common images of mother and child, with the young Mary carrying the Christ Child, sometimes even feeding him at her breast. This time it is Jesus who is the vigorous young adult, holding a child over his motionless mother.

To those unfamiliar with the story—missing in the Bible and first written down in not-quite-harmonious accounts from around the 5th century—it is not obvious who is who here. My first interpretation was that Jesus is carrying himself as a child, and thereby reminding his mother of what we are taught is her crowning accomplishment in salvation history: giving birth to him.

It turns out, however, that this is the interpretation of a self-centered son who imagines that everything important about a mother can be summarized in what she did for him. The Jesus of the Dormition scene is not that.

The figure he is carrying is an even fuller reversal of the mother-and-child motif. It is Mary’s soul, embodied as a radiant baby. One early account adds that her soul is “both male and female.” By holding her soul in the guise of a child, no longer defined by her womb or her breasts, Jesus presents to the world an image of Mary we too often miss. God loves her as an end in herself, not simply for her mothering role, not simply for what her body was necessary to accomplish.

This story of the Dormition likely developed among early churches in Palestine, where Mary lived and died. It became more widely popular after the Council of Chalcedon in 451, perhaps as a salve for the divisions circling around the church at the time. As tradition tells it, after miraculously arriving on clouds from their various mission fields, the apostles unite around their spiritual mother. They uphold Peter as their rock, Paul as the great preacher and John as Mary’s caretaker. In times like ours today, we can see the value of a unifying story like this.

The exception to the theme of unity is the presence of unbelievers, who are conspiring to abduct Mary’s body and burn it in hopes of suppressing the growing Christian movement. One of them attempts to accomplish this, only to have his hands severed by the sword of an angel. Peter then guides him to repentance and conversion. Some versions include scenes worthy of an action movie. But what they have in common is the sense that Mary lived under threat until the end.

Giotto and Fra Angelico painted this scene, among countless others. The last major Catholic depiction of Mary’s death was by Caravaggio. It has no Christ, no child-soul, just confusion and mourning. Eastern churches continue to celebrate and depict the Dormition. But the West has turned its emphasis to the Assumption, a glorious dance in the clouds with no sign of wear or death on Mary’s body. Guided by popular devotion, Pope Pius XII proclaimed the Assumption as dogma in 1950.

As Pope John Paul II explained in a 1997 audience, however, the Assumption assumes that the Dormition occurred. It must have. As with Jesus, eternal life comes through the door of death, and the conquest of it as well. A sound belief in the Assumption has the old Dormition story built in. Many of the early Dormition narratives likewise include a bodily Assumption at the end. The soul and life of Mary would not be complete without her sleep.

Find a picture of the Dormition this Advent and contemplate it. When we honor Mary the mother, the life-giver, the moon who shines by the light of her son, we should also remember that her soul shone with its own light, too. Her son wanted us to see that. As much as she is the mother of all the world, she is even more.

Nathan Schneider is a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life and God in Proof: The Story of a Search From the Ancients to the Internet.