The Womb of the Magdalene
My unedited story of rediscovering this ancient lineage of feminine magic
Dear readers, this is a long read - and is an unedited extract from Magdalene Mysteries that includes many sections that were cut out during the writing process and have never seen the light of day since.
Be gentle with them. I wrote this extended chapter in 2018 as my mother was dying, and I was trying to make sense of my life, right down to is spiritual bones, and to add together all the strange parts, that were telling me a tale I needed to hear. Since then, after motherhood and menopause (ongoing), my mystical maiden has been marched into The Tower, where her chops have been slapped round quite a bit, and I feel like the serpent looking up at the calloused soles of Virgin Mary, as she stands on the earth to channel her true power.
Am I looking for Mary Magdalene, or is she searching for me?
My soul senses that it is the latter. For how could I search for this icon, this ‘Saint’, this presence, this magical doorway, when I do not truly know who or what she is?
Yet there is the uncanny feeling that she knows exactly who I am. And more than that – who I am meant to become. This MM essence knows the parts of me that are lost, and need to be rediscovered, that I unknowingly, have so veiled, that I do not even know to search for them. So together we embark on this quest, this inner journey to reassemble the parts of my feminine soul, like a cosmic jigsaw of redemption. Is this the Apocalypse? The great unveiling of the lost feminine.
For me, Mary Magdalene is an instinctive force as well as spiritual essence. The more I read about her with my ‘mind’ the less tangible she becomes. Yet, as twilight falls, a sudden sweep of thick, red velvet cape appears to the left of my eye, moving quickly out of sight, around a corner, and I must follow and find her there in the darkness.
In this magic world of MM, her true Gospel is written on soft skin and in the stars. Her parables are shared by lover’s eyes, and in the in-between spaces of silence. Her true gospel breaths down the back of my neck, hot, subtle, mysterious, and laughing.
I cannot find her within scrolls and scholar’s arguments, remote and historical, or in dualistic theologies of bodily hatred, held in the inquisitorial records of her legacy. She does not sing to me of crucifixions, or of catholic, gnostic or cathar priesthoods.
Instead, I find her sat by the fire in the desert, laughing, her body warm against that of her lover, as they melt into the mystery of the Two flesh becoming One. Or I meet her in a wild old woodland, at the foot of the Pyrenees, with the Cathar priestesses of the Holy Spirit, preparing herbs, as red moon blood seeps into wild green moss.
In moments, I see her like a rare crystal jewel, shining light across all dimensions, sat on a golden throne at the very heart of the Earth, illuminating the soul of matter. As Sophia with her twin syzygy by her side, I bow to the primordial world parents, and glimpse beyond the doorway of life, into the great mystery of the Womb of God.
Yet I must also be in this body, in this life, in this world.
She comes to meet me here.
I must also find her in the small details of my own childhood, my own struggles, my own heartbreaks.
When I am weeping, I discover her weeping right by my side.
When I am shining, celebrating, loving, ecstatic, she is born again within me.
Her life, like my life, is full of contradictions and it is important to include it all.
So I search for her, as she is searching for me.
Birthing a New Way
Although I was baptized into the Christian church, my birth articulated a deep theological ‘drop-stitch’ in the fabric of religion, which I would need to reweave.
When my mother labored, surrounded by ‘sisters of mercy’, who had never acted as a womb doorway between the worlds, in her agony, with no pain medication – without her own mother by her side - the nuns told her that her pain was God-mandated, and that women were destined to toil in pain and misery to create life.
As she was being rent in half, body and soul, as my heartbeat stopped at those cursed words, and I was torn from my mother’s body by surgical forceps – my mother made a decision, to not make a sound, to not satisfy the religious need for her wounded howl.
So my birth was both an emergency and also a new emergence.
My mother was a quietly stubborn rebel, and she subtly and determinedly set about de-authorizing the religion she inherited from her father, and living by the feminine folk lore of her mother, and her mother’s mother, that celebrated Life’s holy power.
She sprinkled my childhood with the magic of the dreamtime, educating me with percolations, questions and spiritual explorations such as ‘where is the edge of the universe’ – and what then lives beyond this infinity? She asked me to imagine our world as a dream within a dream, and our universe as a living, breathing, dreaming being (a ‘dreaming-womb’) who holds and births other infinite dreaming universes.
Often, we would have to stop our visioning and make a cup of tea, in order to reassemble our atoms, which were in danger of floating away into that vast, unknowable, dark ocean of infinity; a witch’s cauldron of wild quantum soup.
So, I did not grow up in a religious household, and I rarely got to read much Christian scripture, or hear the stories of this mysterious ‘sinner’ and saint, Mary Magdalene. Yet her feminine Christ path, full of deep mystery, called me like a siren.
I was lost until you found me
As a young child my church was nature, the back garden bursting with flowers, and Buck Wood, the remnant of an ancient boreal forest, still tucked away in suburbia. My theology was bumblebees over-laden with pollen resting on the hot pavement, butterflies who refused to be caught, stinging wasps, noisy frogs searching for ponds. In this cathedral of summer, in the back garden, I first encountered MM.
One day, at about eight years old, as I was playing in the garden - a mysterious ball seemed to drop right out of thin air, landing just next to where I was playing. There were no children in either of the houses next to us, and the garden of the house overlooked the back lane, a tangled tree-lined dust path that led to the woods. It was quiet, and I could not hear the noise of anyone walking by or playing or shouting.
But there it was. This mysterious ball had landed right next to me.
It felt like it had been thrown at me from a rift in the fabric of the universe; that if I looked fast enough, I would see a mysterious force, disappear behind a cosmic door. The stillness of the afternoon took on that uncanny shimmer of promise and silence.
It felt like the ball had a message for me; in fact it literally had a message for me.
I picked the ball up to examine it, holding the soft leather in my hands and twisting and turning it round and around.
It was not your usual children’s ball. It was made of soft leather hexagonal pieces, stitched together, and stuffed, to form a ball.
On it was a picture of a sheep, and the words: “I was lost and then you found me”.
The name “Jesus” was written on it, so I knew it had come from religious folk. I didn’t know what it meant, but it touched upon something so deep inside me, that I kept hold of that magical ball for another 30 years, waiting for it to reveal itself.
Ancient Church of the Goddess
My parents read Charles Dickens to me as a little girl, and quoted Shakespeare as way of moral instruction – my mother had a little book where she handwrote her favorite poetry and Shakespeare quotations, and we often looked over it together to percolate the meanings. Her favorite was “love alters not, when it alteration finds,” whilst my father’s most oft quoted was “man, proud man, with his brief authority.”
So through the scriptures of poetry I learned of an undying love beyond the world of outer appearances, and also a worldly pride that decked itself out in false authority.
In the northern England of my childhood, over the wild moors of Yorkshire and the craggy contours of Derbyshire and the penine way, ruined castles, darkened caves, fallen abbeys, and old churches, all flowed within the same river of time. I loved visiting churches, just like I loved visiting castles; in fact, I liked churches more. Often set upon old pagan sites, with old mossy stones, rugged graveyards and fantastical beasts carved as guardians, inside it was like entering a mysterium.
Stained glass windows cast lightbeams of vivid jewel colors, the silence throbbed with peace, and old wood groaned under its memories, sometimes carved with mermaids or other relics of a forgotten faith. The altar was adorned by rich red velvet drapes, crisp white satin cloth, scented flowers from local meadows, tall candles in thick brass holdings, and in the center, a dramatic, sturdy gold cross.
The wild moors and peaks of Yorkshire wore their conversion to Christianity lightly, carrying on its ancient pagan Goddess worshipping rituals and ceremonies as usual, right up to the modern day, where iphones capture the May Queen in all her glory.
The new religion was neatly tucked, like a suckling babe, into the old religious traditions dating back at least 3,000 years, with sermons etched in the stones.
Born Again in Christ
In this world, fairytale castles and mystical abbeys were commonplace.
What seemed truly exotic and just out of reach was the truth about Jesus’ religion. I could never get to the bottom of what it really meant, and how it was explained made no sense. He was born to a virgin woman; he died to redeem our sins; he was a sacrificial lamb. It felt like a secret code lost within strange and unusual gibberish.
But it fascinated me nonetheless. After all, somehow it had ‘found me’.
In those days, hotels still had Bibles in them – though no one read them. For me, they were forbidden treasures, often housed in red leather, with golden trim. As a child, I would infuse the poetical words of Jesus that were highlighted in red. I felt a magical vibration in his words, as if a light were dancing just behind the surface. I did not know the dogma of the religion, but I read along as if it were Shakespeare.
Through his words of love, I could enter secret doorways that took me to the heart of Jesus, where he became a light-filled, moon man – he was totally unlike the men I was surrounded by; gruff northern men, misogynistic, rough, hardened up. He was a poet and a visionary. He had soft hands that were kind enough to comfort lepers. He did not belong to the world of tired old priests, with their arguments and their laws.
Then one day, at the age of 13, something amazing and peculiar happened. A series of events would lead to a rapturous vision with an unknown woman, whose name had never been spoken to me, and who I knew nothing about: Mary Magdalene.
A close school friend of mine announced that her cousin was coming to live with them – all the way from America. This in itself was exciting news. But the exoticness of these American émigrés intrigued me. The cousin wore tight jeans and Metallica T-shirts and talked with a funny accent. She was strangely glamorous to me.
Her mother was a born-again Christian from the charismatic, Baptist traditions of the South. We sat hushed, as she told us the dramatic story of her conversion. How she and the family had been escaping from an abusive marriage, when a ‘strange force’ had pulled her car over and walked her into a building. Stumbling down the stairs she found a gathering of born-again Christians, listening rapt to a preacher. Like a heyoka shaman of old, the preacher hit her with a lightning bolt of Holy Spirit – and suddenly, she was on the floor, repenting her old life and born again in Christ.
This was what I was waiting for – her story felt infused with myth and wild magic.