Mary Magdalene Revealed

by Meggan Watterson

  Then, suddenly, I felt this rush of air, the way the breeze catches you off guard when someone at a crowded restaurant opens the door. I turned in the direction that it seemed to come from and this is when he walked in.

  And this is when words start to fail me. But I know that if I’m going to tell this story completely, I’ll have to try to keep writing, even past where words end, past the point where words seem to lose their meaning.

  He walked in and we immediately knew each other. This is the part that’s dream-like, though, because, like a dream, it doesn’t really make sense. I write “he walked in” and yet I couldn’t describe what he looked like physically at all. Because the recognition seemed to take place with a faculty more accurate than eyesight. And “he” didn’t seem separate from me.

  Then, we wrestled, but not really. (See, dream-like.) All we were doing was looking at each other. But it felt like we were rolling around like deranged ferrets laughing and exploding with light. We kissed but it wasn’t like kissing I had ever experienced (in real life). It was like melding together, it was like each kiss was a return to what’s true, to the truest thing of all.

  It was a joy that had always existed in me. It was the experience of feeling loved. Loved from the inside out. It was a taste, however brief, of what it feels like when I am no longer absent, when no part of me is missing.

  As I gave gratitude and began to climb up the roots of the world tree, I knew this experience or vision I just had was the deepest medicine I would ever receive.

  I walked through the field and back into the room, back into my seated position in front of the shaman. Before I opened my eyes, she asked me to see if I had brought anything back with me from that vision. With my imagination, or the eye of the heart, I could see that we were both wearing a red thread tied around our wrists.

  Emotions flooded me when I saw this. It felt like I was seeing what had always been there, what we had placed on each other’s wrist too long ago for the mind to grasp.

  We both took a deep breath. I knew the vision was complete. I opened my eyes to see the shaman’s gorgeous brown saucer eyes spilling over with light. She stared at me. It felt like my eyeballs were on fire from all the love streaming through them. Then, the shaman burst into tears. And asked, genuinely shocked and upset, “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”

  I looked at her perplexed, and waited for her to say more. But she didn’t. “Tell you what?” I asked her.

  “The red thread,” she said as she reached across the space between us and took me into her arms. I inhaled.

  I forget so much, so many details about the people I love that have come in and out of my life. My memory seems to be purely olfactory. I knew in that moment that if I inhaled deeply enough, I would never forget her. Her long dreadlocks smelled like frankincense and geranium. I can’t smell either now without thinking of her. Without seeing those dark brown saucer eyes light up with a presence that isn’t entirely of this world.

  I knew not to ask her why the red thread meant so much to her. I pretended to understand, even though I didn’t entirely. I knew I would have to live into the reason why the red thread signaled something to her about who I am. About who we are.

  “I remember you,” she said with more love in her voice than I could even bear. “I remember you.”

  THE THIRD POWER: IGNORANCE

  What Happens in the Wilderness

  This is what I learn as a little girl; I am only safe when I am divided.

  I learn that there are forces, illusions, deep-seated misunderstandings, ego-driven needs that can overpower me. They come one night in the form of a teenaged boy mistaking me for an object.

  And I learn that I have the ability to leave, in any moment, in any situation. I can choose to exist somewhere else so entirely that nothing at all is even felt. I just witness. I see her hands (my hands) frozen in shock. I just watch with eyes now that are as old as the soul that once inhabited my body.

  In Aramaic, the language that Christ spoke, the word death means “existing elsewhere.”

  I learn that once that pathway out of myself, and out of the present moment, is created, it’s very hard not to choose it again whenever I feel anxious, afraid, or just out of control. I learn to exist elsewhere.

  As a teenager, I didn’t have the words—I had never even heard the words—to describe what actually happened for me in assault. That the trauma (of being separated or divided from the soul) can’t be seen.

  Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkolas Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves became my bible. These stories spoke a language that I inherently understood, a language of myth and metaphor. I felt this sense of a tribe for the first time in my life. Or a lineage. I felt like my story was the continuation of a story that has been told for thousands of years. I felt I was accompanied always by legions of us, generation after generation of women, healing this ancient misunderstanding that the female body signifies the lesser sex, a being to be owned, dominated, and not trusted.

  The tale of the Handless Maiden was my book of Revelation. It was originally collected by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, but existed for an unknown amount of time before that. It starts with a devil, a “demon,” a force that seeks to divide the maiden first from her body, then her father’s home, and finally from her love, the king.

  The devil tricks the maiden’s father into giving her to him in exchange for great wealth. In three years, he warns, he will return and claim her. She lives in prayer for those three years and on the day when the devil comes to take her, she draws a white circle around her with chalk. He cannot touch her; her heart is too pure. The devil tells her father to keep water away from her so she cannot wash. He will claim her the next morning when her hands are dirty. The maiden’s tears keep her hands clean. And again, the devil cannot claim her.

  He orders the maiden’s father to chop off her hands. Her father hesitates, but the devil says he will take him instead if he doesn’t do it. Her father begs for her forgiveness, and in his fear and ignorance, he does it; he cuts off her hands. The maiden cries all night. And in the morning, for a third time the devil cannot take her, because her tears have purified her soul.

  The maiden’s father wants to take care of her now that he is wealthy and she is maimed. But she realizes that she has to leave. She can’t stay in her father’s house. She is no longer safe, or at home. She begins to wander. And eventually, she finds her way into a garden. She rests near a pear tree and meets a king. He’s a good king, a kind man. And he loves her, stumps and all.

  Out of his love for her, he makes her silver hands. She loves him. They get married. And soon, she is pregnant. But then the king is called away to war. And in his absence the Handless Maiden gives birth to their son. He is beautiful and she adores him. A message is sent to the king to tell him the good news.

  But the devil is back again, and intercepts the message and distorts it so that it says that the baby was born misshapen and ill, a changeling. The king is heartbroken to hear about his suffering child but loves him all the greater. And when he sends a response telling the Handless Maiden that his love will never waver, again the devil interferes with the truth, and changes the king’s message to read that he wants the queen and the changeling killed.

  The king’s mother cannot follow through with these orders. So, she straps the baby boy onto the Handless Maiden’s back and tells her to run for it. The Handless Maiden begins wandering again. She makes her way eventually to a forest. And there she meets with an angel who guides her to a cabin with a sign on the door that reads, “Here anyone can live free.”

  The Handless Maiden raises her beautiful boy there in the wilderness for seven years. And in one version of the story, her hands simply grow back through the grace of her love for god. In another, her hands grow back when her son falls from her back into a stream and is drowning. When she reaches her stumps into the river to save him, her hands immediately appear. Either way, her silver hands are no longer needed. Love has regrown
her reason for being here. Love has healed her body. And it’s not a love that came from her father, or her husband, not even her son. It’s a love that came from within her, a love that had protected her and guided her all along.

  Then the king returns from war to find that his message of love had been tampered with and that the Handless Maiden, his queen, and his son had to leave the castle for their own safety. He vows to wander the earth until he finds them. An angel leads him to their cabin in the forest. And at first the king doesn’t recognize the queen, because she’s no longer handless. Then she shows him the silver hands he had made her long ago when they first met. And his face lights up with recognition. They return to the castle, restored to each other, and never to be parted again.

  The seven years spent in the wilderness, in a cabin: this is when she becomes whole again. Because as sweet as the silver hands were, they were never going to cut it. Being held in love by the king, being taken care of, was the beginning of something new for her. The birth of her son asked her to leave home again. To go deeper. To not just cover up that horrific trauma with silver, with making do, but to heal all the way through. To no longer carry the scars, the proof of the trauma, around with her wherever she went. To heal to such an extent that her own hands grew back. To reach a love within her that’s divine, that upgrades her silver to what’s golden and everlasting. To become whole again is to remember that she’s undivided.

  We often think of the end, the happily ever after, as the external union or outward marriage. To be held in love by another is just the start.

  It’s not the end. The culmination is when that trauma or wound has left the body altogether, so we no longer have to.

  This was the ending I wanted. The end when I have found the cabin deep inside my body with a sign on its door that reads, “Here anyone can live free.”

  The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

  Then Mary stood up and greeted them; she tenderly kissed them all and said, “Brothers and sisters, do not weep, do not be distressed nor be in doubt. For his grace will be with you sheltering you. Rather we should praise his greatness, for he has united us and made us true Human beings.”

  — MARY 5:4–8

  I read scholar and priest Jean-Yves Leloup’s translation of Mary’s gospel before Dr. Karen King’s translation, the summer before entering seminary. I remember seeing it from across the bookstore. I sort of hurtled toward it as if no longer in control of my legs, as if the Gospel of Mary was magnetized and there was no resisting its attraction. I probably looked possessed.

  The moment I had it in my hands, I stared at the image on its cover of Giotto di Bondone’s painting with Mary Magdalene being lifted by four angels, and then I just sank down and sat on the ground right there and started reading it. I didn’t move until I had read the entire book.

  I started crying just a couple pages in, when Peter calls Mary his sister. He says that he knows Christ loved her more than all other women. He asks her to tell them, the other disciples, what Christ told her that he didn’t reveal to them. And then Mary responds by saying, “I will teach you about what is hidden from you.”

  Her gospel, her vision of Christ, has been buried for so long. And yet, in that moment, the reason I cried was because her voice felt like a validation. As if somehow my entire life already included this scripture as its rule, as the truth I compared all else to. But now I was holding it in my hands, not just in my imagination, and in my heart as an ideal. Her gospel was scriptural evidence of what I already believed in.

  As we move our way through each passage in Mary’s gospel in this book, I also want you to have an overview, a Cliffs Notes version, of her entire gospel.

  God is not referred to as the Father (or the Mother) in the Gospel of Mary, but simply as The Good.

  Sin is not inherent to being human; we are not born sinful. Christ says in Mary 3:3, “There is no such thing as sin.” Sin is not some state of being that must be redeemed. Sin is something we produce within ourselves when we misunderstand the truth of who we are; when we forget that we are not just human, we are not just this ego assailed with constant needs and desires. We are not just this body, but also the soul that inhabits it while we’re alive. Sin comes from forgetting, and is remedied by simply remembering that messy truth that we are both a soul and an ego.

  The gospel stresses the importance of integration. It’s not sin but ignorance of our true nature that creates suffering. We have a template, an image that arises or exists beyond this realm and yet seeks its full expression here. Our work is to reunite with that template, with our own angel.

  This is Mary’s emphasis in Mary 5:8, “. . . for he has united us and made us true human beings.”

  In Jean-Yves Leloup’s translation of her gospel, he mentions Talking with Angels, the amazing account of a group of friends in World War II Hungary who each receive messages from their own angel. The only one among them to survive the war is Gitta. Leloup relates the passage when one of the angels reminds Gitta and her friends, “You yourself are the bridge.”13

  We are incomplete without remembering this other half of what it means to be human. To be a “true human being” is to unite the ego, or self, with the nous, or the soul. Anthropos, a true human, Leloup explains, comes into being when we complete the connection that exists between the created world (matter, plants, animals) and the creating world (angel, archangel, light itself). The human is in the middle. So, being human is a privilege and a purpose itself. To be the bridge between the created world and the creating world. To be the voice of love for the voiceless.

  Mary Magdalene stresses in her gospel that Christ has united us and made us “true human beings.” This is why we should praise his greatness, because he has “united us” by showing us the way, by becoming unified himself.

  We are capable of integrating the self and the soul, the image and the analogue, the human aspect of us with the eternal self that never changes, what Jung referred to as personality 1 and personality 2. We can become ihidaya, Aramaic for “undivided.” And this is the ultimate goal. Not a distant salvation, given to us through repentance, or guilt and shame. Or Hail Marys.

  We realize this aspect of who we are, our divinity, our angelic form, the nous, or the highest aspect of the soul, by allowing the soul to ascend. This ascension, however, is not about going up and over; it’s not about transcendence. This ascension is about going inward, more fully into our own emotions, our own embodiment, to purify the heart.

  There are seven powers, as I mentioned at the start of this book, or seven “climates,” as Episcopal priest and scholar Cynthia Bourgeault describes them. We need to go through these seven powers and no longer be bound by them in order to attain the vision that’s possible, that’s actually our inheritance in being human from within the heart. These powers or climates are: darkness, craving, ignorance, longing for death, enslavement to the physical body, the false peace of the flesh, and the compulsion of rage.

  The soul ascends because it does not seek to judge, nor does it attempt to dominate anything or anyone. And the soul cannot actually be harmed because it does not belong to the world of the flesh. We are here to attain the freedom the soul remembers. We do this by using the spiritual technique that Christ used called kenosis, the path of self-emptying love. It’s a spiritual practice that allows us to upgrade from the ego, or the “egoic operating system,” as Bourgeault refers to it, of viewing others as separate from us, to the unitive consciousness of the soul.

  Christ led Mary through this process of transformation, this spiritual path of integration, this goal of becoming undivided, and this is why she is able to receive a vision of Christ from within her heart. Her self and soul are one; she has become a “true human being.” And she can now teach what the other disciples never learned; she can be the apostle to the apostles as Christ’s most beloved companion who mastered the vision Christ attained. Mary is able to step into Christ’s ministry as the one who acquired his same peace. The one who is connec
ted from within her heart to the same love that Christ made incarnate.

  At the end of Mary’s gospel, the disciples are upset with this revelation, with the teachings that Christ gave to Mary and not to them. They argue, and express both contempt and disbelief that Christ could reveal such powerful teachings to Mary, a woman, and not to them. Peter is especially peeved. But one among them, Levi, comes to Mary’s defense, and suggests that if Christ considered her worthy, then who are they to disregard her? Because, he adds, Christ knew her completely and loved her steadfastly.

  Mary’s gospel tells the story of a very different criterion for spiritual authority.

  Souls are not sexed. So, the sexuality, sex, and gender ascribed to the body are ultimately illusory. These differences are part of the material world, not the eternal world.

  We are all souls that cannot be defined by our physical form. Spiritual authority cannot be determined by a person’s sex, gender, or sexuality but rather by the depth of their spiritual transformation and subsequent wholeness. Meaning, a person attains the spiritual authority to speak about Christ, or to proclaim the “good” news, not because of what they look like externally but because of how arduously they have worked internally at uniting the self with the soul.

  The imperative in Mary’s gospel is to become “the child of true humanity,” which means fully human and fully divine. It means becoming fully conscious of the eternal, unbounded soul while here in this tethered, limited human form. And this translates to me as trying (and faltering) and trying again to cultivate this love inside us. It means doing all we can to be the presence of love.

  Jean-Yves Leloup describes the emergence of these repressed, apocryphal (meaning hidden or secret) texts, like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and the Gospels of Thomas and Philip, as an effort of integration, of making the subconscious conscious. We have been very aware of the masculine, linear, more rational story of Christ, but what we haven’t heard, what has been hidden from us, and what we haven’t been ready to integrate is the equally significant story of Mary Magdalene, of the feminine, of the cyclical, the non-rational, of what waits for us within.