Essay 2 of 5
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. They were FIERCE. They held creation and destruction, tenderness and ferocity, beauty and untamed. They invited me into a relationship with the feminine that was much more whole than anything I had known before.
And somewhere 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. At first, she came through whispers: a conversation with a beloved friend, a book that somehow found its way into my hands, her name appearing again and again, a presence 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. Everywhere I went, there she was. 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, in my devotion, my 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. Here. Magdalene was simply becoming visible. And once I began to see her, I experienced her everywhere.
The more I tried to learn about Mary Magdalene, the stranger it became.
The woman 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 actually tell us about her? How did we get from Mary Magdalene as the first apostle 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 with felt like a single, unbroken tradition, handed down intact from Jesus to the apostles, through the Church and eventually to me. 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, my church was focused much more on the teachings of the Old Testament, and I don't remember Mary Magdalene being given much attention at all.
There was no single version of Christianity in those early centuries. 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 and 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.
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, the saint.
She could be the whore, the sinner.
But a woman who was simultaneously spiritually authoritative, embodied, sexually complex, 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. A woman whose power and self-authority frightens and threatens those in power and a patriarchal structure of society.
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.
Maybe that’s why her return feels so significant now. Not because we need another woman to worship. Not because we need to create a new saint to replace the old ones. And certainly not because I believe we need to take every story that has been written about Magdalene and accept it as historical truth.
There are really two Magdalene stories unfolding alongside one another. There is the historical Mary Magdalene, the woman whose life we can attempt to reconstruct through the fragments that remain. And then there is Magdalene as archetype, as symbol, as a living spiritual presence who continues to speak to people across time and tradition. I don't think we need to collapse these two into one. In fact, doing so creates another kind of distortion.
The historical Magdalene deserves our scholarship, our humility, and our willingness to say we don't know when we don't know. The archetypal Magdalene 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 to encounter the qualities she represents in our own lives.
Both are worthy of our attention.
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. What it does give us is evidence that the early Christian world contained traditions in which Mary Magdalene was understood very differently from the repentant prostitute of Western 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. 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.
I find this so relatable. How many times has someone questioned YOUR own authority or experience?
How many women's direct knowing has been questioned, dismissed, reframed, or attributed to emotion? 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 is.
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 who was reduced to her sexuality was actually 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 actually a bearer of spiritual wisdom, then perhaps our definitions of sin and holiness need to be examined. If the woman who was associated with the body becomes a guide toward the Divine, then perhaps the body was never the obstacle we were taught it was. Maybe its the vessel.
Maybe the path was never about becoming less human. Maybe it was always about becoming fully alive.
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: 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, his mother Mary, 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.
Because so much of what was recorded has been destroyed, lost, or rewritten, we cannot know for certain from an intellectual standpoint who Mary Magdalene was or what life she led. And this is where something becomes even more relevant to me.
What if we don't have to know her only through what has been written about her?
This is something I have come to understand deeply through my own spiritual practice and through the work I do with others. What I know of Mary Magdalene, the most precious aspects of her, the most intimate and sacred, have come from my direct relationship with her - not from anything I’ve read in a book be it written by scholar or mystic. This is why I spend much of my time supporting my students to remember that they have the authority of a direct connection to the Divine. I teach practices and offer tools that support them in turning inward, awakening deep knowing, and developing the capacity to open the channels of communication with the Divine within their own sacred heart. I support them in remembering.
Because a book can tell you about the Divine. A teacher can point you toward Her. A tradition can give you a map. But none of those things are the experience itself.
The intimate experience of the Divine within your own sacred heart is something no one can give you, and no one can take away from you.
This is why the experience of knowing Magdalene directly feels so important to me. I don't mean creating another voice in our head and deciding that everything we experience must therefore be Magdalene. That would simply replace one form of projection with another. I mean developing the capacity to become quiet enough, present enough, and discerning enough to recognize what arises within us.
To experience her first hand.
To know her not only from a book, or from a teacher, or from something someone else tells us she is, but through our own direct relationship with the Divine. This is the ancient wisdom of gnosis: a knowing that comes through direct experience rather than intellectual understanding alone.
And this is where the historical and archetypal Magdalene can meet.
We can study the fragments that remain. We can listen to historians and theologians. We can read the ancient texts and examine the traditions that developed around her. We can listen to mystics and contemporary teachers. We can hold all of this with an open mind and a discerning heart.
And then we can turn inward.
We can practice.
We can listen.
We can meet her for ourselves.
Because ultimately, I don't want to tell you who Mary Magdalene is.
I want to help you develop the capacity to know her for yourself.
This feels increasingly important in the world we are living in now. We have more access to information than any generation before us, and yet access to information does not automatically make us wise. The internet has given everyone a platform. AI is now giving us the ability to generate convincing words, images and stories at a speed we have never experienced before. Anyone can say anything about anyone, and increasingly, it can be difficult to know what is true.
The Magdalene path, for me, is not a path of blind belief.
It is a path of embodied wisdom, of deep listening, of inner discovery accompanied by discernment.
I can listen to the historian and listen 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 develop the capacity to meet Her within my own heart. Outside of all information and experience, to know Her for myself - gnosis - wisdom obtained through direct experience.
This is another reason Magdalene feels so timely. Her story itself asks us to become better at separating wheat from chaff. To look beneath the stories we have inherited. To notice where history ends and interpretation begins. To distinguish what we know from what we believe, what we have experienced from what someone else has told us.
The more I learn about Magdalene, the more I realize that reclaiming her isn't about replacing one fixed story with another. It is about becoming willing to see. It is about developing the capacity to see. To see the woman beyond the mythology. To see the feminine beneath the identities we created for her. To see what was lost, what was preserved, what was distorted and what continues to live.
And maybe, in doing so, we begin to see something about ourselves.
Because the question that began as Who was Mary Magdalene? has slowly become another question entirely: Who were we taught a woman was allowed to be? And what becomes possible when we are willing to remember something more?
Who was she before we decided who she was?
That is where I want to go next.
