Essay 2 of 5 in the Magdalene Series
My relationship with Mary Magdalene (seemingly) began in 2018.
That year, I received an initiation into the wisdom teachings of the Ten Tantric Wisdom Goddesses. These fierce and compassionate forms of the Divine Feminine opened something in me that I didn't yet have language for. They were not the soft, sanitized feminine I had been taught to associate with spirituality. They were WILD. Fierce. They held creation and destruction, tenderness and ferocity, the beautiful and grotesque. They invited me into a relationship with the divine feminine that was much more whole than anything I had known before.
In the midst of that opening, Mary Magdalene began to appear.
No, there wasn’t a dramatic moment when she walked through a door and announced herself. She came through whispers at first: a conversation with a beloved friend, a book that somehow found its way into my hands, a name appearing again and again, a feeling I couldn't quite explain. A call to set out on a pilgrimage of remembrance.
The more I listened, the more I began to recognize her.
And then I realized something that still moves me when I think about it: she hadn't just arrived, She had been there all along. I simply wasn't ready to receive her before.
Looking back, I can see traces of Magdalene woven through my path long before I consciously knew her name. As a pilgrim and healer, through my devotion, the deep questioning of the religious structures I had inherited, my relationship with our natural world and its inhabitants, my longing to reconcile the human and the Divine - all of these threads were already present. Magdalene was simply becoming visible.
Yet, the beloved I was encountering in my own inner world didn't seem to resemble the woman traditional Christianity claimed she was. So, I started looking more closely. Who was this woman? What do the earliest texts - including those that did not become part of the Christian canon - actually tell us about her? And how did we get from the Mary Magdalene who witnessed Christ’s resurrection to the woman we eventually learned to associate with sin, sexuality, and repentance?
What I found opened a much bigger story.
The Christianity I grew up in made it seem as though the Bible had been written seamlessly by God, complete in its nature, with nothing missing and nothing left to question. I had never been taught that the earliest centuries of Christianity were filled with different communities, different teachings, different understandings of Jesus, and different ideas about the role of women. In fact, the church I grew up in focused much more heavily on the teachings of the Old Testament. I don't remember Mary Magdalene being spoken about very much at all. She certainly wasn't presented to me as a woman whose spiritual authority might have something to teach me.
What I came to understand was that the early Christian world was far more varied than I had been led to believe. There were competing streams of thought, and over time, some voices became dominant while others were declared heretical, silenced, or simply disappeared.
Among those early Christian traditions were what we now call the Gnostics, although even that word encompasses a wide range of communities and beliefs. Some of these texts offer a radically different picture of spiritual authority than the one I inherited. Women appear as disciples, teachers, visionaries and bearers of sacred knowledge. Mary Magdalene, in particular, emerges in some of these traditions as a woman who receives teachings directly from Yeshua, a woman later known as an apostle to the apostles, and one who possesses an understanding that even the male disciples struggle to comprehend.
This was more aligned with the Mary I was growing to know.
The more I learned, the more I began to see how threatening this kind of woman could be to a religious system organized around hierarchy and male authority. A woman who doesn't need a man to mediate her relationship with the Divine is difficult to control. A woman who receives revelation directly, teaches others, and trusts her own spiritual knowing challenges the very structure through which religious authority is maintained.
Please understand: I am not a historian and the history is more complicated than simply saying the Church erased women. Christianity developed through centuries of political, cultural, theological and social change, and the people involved were not all operating from the same motivations. But the outcome is undeniable: as orthodox Christianity consolidated its authority, certain texts and teachings were elevated while others were rejected, and the place of women within Christian leadership narrowed dramatically.
The feminine was not erased from Christianity entirely. She was given a very particular place:
She could be the mother.
She could be the virgin.
She could be the saint.
She could be the prostitute and repentant sinner.
But a woman who was simultaneously spiritually authoritative, embodied, sexually awake, intellectually capable, and directly connected to the Divine was much harder to accommodate.
And so Magdalene's story became a story about what happens when a culture doesn't know what to do with a woman who refuses to fit neatly into the categories available to her. When a woman's power challenges the structures around her, one way to contain that power is to diminish it, distort it, erase it, or even create fear around it. This is where I began to understand that the story of Mary Magdalene isn't only about what happened to one woman two thousand years ago. It is also a window into what happened to the feminine within the religious imagination of the West.
We didn't simply lose Magdalene. We lost an entire possibility of what a woman could be.
And perhaps that is why her return feels so significant now.
I am less interested in creating another figure to worship, or in proving exactly who Mary Magdalene was two thousand years ago. I am even less interested in conjuring up stories that create more illusion or further distort who she was/is. I am interested in what she represents, in the wisdom carried through her story, and in what she continues to reveal as a guide and ascended master. What does Mary Magdalene have to teach us now? And why are so many of us feeling drawn toward her at this particular moment?
I believe there is still value in understanding what we can know about the historical Mary Magdalene. Listening to theologians and historians and exploring the ancient texts in an attempt to understand what may have been lost, distorted, imagined, or preserved through centuries of interpretation is important. The woman who remained when others fled, who stood at the crucifixion, who encountered the risen Yeshua, and who was entrusted with carrying that news to the others offers us important clues.
But I am not searching for a definitive biography.
I am listening for the wisdom beneath the story.
What does it mean that this woman was entrusted with such a profound spiritual experience? What might her story reveal about direct knowing, embodiment, devotion, courage, spiritual authority, and our capacity to experience the Divine for ourselves? And what might those teachings have to offer us in the world we are living in now?
This is the Magdalene I am interested in knowing.
The more I sat with these questions, the more I began to understand the importance of discerning between the different ways we come to know Magdalene. There is the historical Mary Magdalene, the woman whose life we can attempt to reconstruct through the fragments that remain and what we know about life in that time. There is the Magdalene who has been interpreted, imagined, mythologized, and projected upon for nearly two thousand years. And then there is Magdalene as a living spiritual presence - an ascended master and guide whom many continue to experience across time and tradition.
I don't believe these ways of knowing her have to compete with one another, but I do believe we need to understand the difference between them. When we collapse mystical experience, theological interpretation, historical evidence, and our own projections into a single story, we risk creating the very distortions we are attempting to see through.
The historical Magdalene deserves our scholarship, our humility, and our willingness to say we don't know when we don't know (and the truth is, there is so much we simply cannot know for sure). Magdalene as a living spiritual presence invites something different from us. She asks us to listen with the deeper faculties of the heart, to notice what is being stirred within us, and ultimately, to develop our own capacity for direct experience.
Both academic study and direct experience are important as they offer us different wisdom. Between them lie centuries of interpretation, mythology, projection, and belief that require our discernment.
And this is where the work of scholars like Karen King became important for me. King's scholarship on early Christianity and particularly the Gospel of Mary helped me understand just how much more complicated the early Christian landscape was than the version I had been taught. Her work doesn't give us a definitive biography of Magdalene. Instead, it gives us another fragment of the story and allows us to glimpse a Mary Magdalene very different from the woman who would later occupy the Western Christian imagination.
The Gospel of Mary is one of those remarkable surviving fragments. It isn't part of the New Testament, and we don't know who wrote it. The manuscript itself is incomplete, with significant portions missing. Interestingly, the same pages are missing in all three of copies that have been discovered. Yet what remains presents Mary as a woman who has received teachings from the Savior and is willing to share what she has received with the other disciples.
When Peter questions whether the Savior really spoke privately with Mary, another disciple, Levi, comes to her defense. There is something about this exchange that gets me every time. Here is Mary, speaking from her own direct experience of the Divine, while another disciple questions whether her experience could possibly be legitimate.
How many times has this happened to you, ladies?
How many women have had their direct experience questioned, dismissed, reframed, or attributed to an overly-emotional state? How many women have been told that what they experienced wasn't real because the person - or institution - receiving the revelation wasn't willing to recognize them as a legitimate vessel for it?
I think this is one of the reasons the Magdalene story feels so alive to me now. She doesn't need us to make her powerful. She already was.
And this is where her story becomes deeply personal for me.
At the heart of my own work is a desire to support people in remembering that they, too, have direct access to the Divine. I can teach a practice. I can share what I have learned. I can offer tools that help someone become quieter, more present, more receptive. But ultimately, I don't encourage anyone to believe something simply because I believe it or say its my experience. I want them to experience the Divine for themselves.
Perhaps this is what moves me so deeply about Mary in the Gospel of Mary. Her authority does not come from an institution declaring her worthy of receiving. It comes from her direct experience.
And maybe this is part of what we are being asked to reclaim - not someone else's version of the Divine, but our own capacity to enter into relationship with Her.
The work of Meggan Watterson has also deeply influenced the way I understand Magdalene. Through her study of the Gospel of Mary, Watterson explores a teaching that feels remarkably relevant to this moment: the possibility that awakening isn't about escaping our humanity, but about knowing the Divine through the fullness of our human experience.
This is where Magdalene begins to lead us somewhere I hadn't expected. Because if the woman later reduced in the Western imagination to her sexuality was also remembered in early Christian texts as a spiritual teacher, then perhaps sexuality was never the problem. Perhaps the problem was our inability to hold sexuality and spirituality in the same sacred space.
If the woman who was called a sinner was also a bearer of spiritual wisdom, then perhaps our definitions of sin and holiness need to be examined. If the woman so often associated with the body becomes a guide toward the Divine, then perhaps the body was never the obstacle we were taught it was.
Maybe the path was never about becoming less human. Maybe it was always about becoming fully embodied.
This is one of the places where I feel the wisdom of Magdalene meeting the wisdom of our moment. We have inherited spiritual traditions that have often taught us to transcend, to rise above, to overcome the messy business of being human. We have become very good at reaching for the light while leaving the shadow, the body, desire, grief, sexuality and the uncomfortable places of our humanity behind.
Magdalene doesn't ask me to do that.
She invites me into something more integrated: holding both light and dark, desire and knowing, body and spirit, human and Divine.
And yet, as I continued to explore her story, I encountered another layer that required an entirely different kind of discernment. Not everything written about Mary Magdalene comes from historical scholarship or ancient texts. There are contemporary spiritual teachers who have encountered her through meditation, dreams, visions, prayer, channeling and other forms of mystical experience. Claire Heartsong's Anna, Grandmother of Jesus is one example of this genre, offering a channeled account of the life and lineage surrounding Yeshua, Mary (his mother) and Mary Magdalene. Her work has touched many people and contributed to a growing body of contemporary Magdalene spirituality.
I don't believe we need to dismiss these experiences simply because they cannot be historically verified. But I also don't believe we need to make them historical fact in order to receive something meaningful from them.
How we know what we know matters.
Both academic study and direct experience are important, as they offer us different kinds of wisdom. Between them lie centuries of interpretation, mythology, projection, and belief that require our discernment.
Because so much of what was recorded has been destroyed, or rewritten, we cannot know for certain from an intellectual standpoint who Mary Magdalene was and what life she led.
But as I mentioned earlier, intellectual certainty is not the only kind of knowing available to us.
There is an ancient word for this kind of knowing: gnosis. It is different from collecting more information about the Divine. Gnosis is knowing born through experience. You can read about the sweetness of honey. You can study where it comes from, learn its chemical composition, listen to someone describe its taste. But until you place the honey on your own tongue, there is something you simply cannot know.
We live in a world overflowing with information. There is always another book to read, another teacher to listen to, another podcast, another interpretation, another person telling us what something means. And now we have machines capable of gathering and generating more information than any human being could consume in a lifetime.
But information is not the same thing as knowing.
We can spend our entire lives learning about the Divine without ever allowing ourselves to experience Her. At some point, we have to walk the path ourselves.
The Magdalene path, for me, is not a path of blind belief.
It is a path of deep listening, of inner discovery accompanied by discernment.
I can listen to the historian and to the mystic. I can allow a teaching to move my heart while still asking questions about its origins. I can hold mystery without turning it into certainty. I can remain open without surrendering my capacity to think critically.
And above all, I can become quiet enough to meet Her within my own sacred heart. To listen. To practice. To experience what cannot be given to me secondhand.
The more I learn about Magdalene, the more comfortable I become with not knowing.
Not because I don't care about history. Quite the opposite. I care enough about her story to want to distinguish what we actually know from what has been imagined, projected, rewritten, and passed down as fact. I want to honor the woman enough to leave room for mystery.
And perhaps leaving room for mystery is part of what allows another kind of knowing to emerge.
We can encounter the qualities Magdalene represents within our own lives. We can listen for what awakens when we sit quietly with her. We can meet the Divine within our own sacred hearts. We can allow the stories to become doorways rather than destinations.
I don't need to know everything about Magdalene to know Her.
This is the paradox that continues to unfold for me: the more I understand the limits of what we can know about the historical woman, the more curious I become about the beloved who continues to reveal herself through direct experience.
But if we are going to speak about Magdalene as a living spiritual presence, I also believe we have a responsibility to look honestly at the stories history handed us about her.
Because somewhere along the way, something happened.
A woman who stood beside the man she loved as he was crucified became a sinner.
A woman who witnessed the resurrection became a prostitute.
A woman whose voice carried spiritual authority became a cautionary tale.
So how did this occur? What did we do to her?
