Mary Magdalene Revealed

by Meggan Watterson

  Layne Redmond, in When the Women Were Drummers, explains, “All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries when she’s a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb.”

  In Robert Lentz’s icon, Mary Magdalene is pointing with one hand at an egg held in her other hand. She’s staring straight at the viewer with a gaze to me that translates as something like “Everything comes from within.” And there’s an insistence, or maybe an exasperation, almost “How can you not see this?”

  It struck me the first time I saw her icon, that the egg is the most feminine object or symbol of creation. In modern cosmology, it is believed that 13 billion years ago the entire mass of the universe was compressed into a gravitational singularity, the so-called cosmic egg. And from that singularity, the universe has expanded ever since to its current state, and continues at the moment you’re reading this to expand further still.

  The look on Mary’s face in Lentz’s iconography suggests she understood a secret we’re still trying to work out. She’s trying to point us to it, literally. To help us realize and remember it. That all life comes from within. Or as Jung realizes, in The Red Book, “I am the egg that surrounds and nurtures the seed of the God in me.”

  I’ve had this icon of Mary Magdalene pointing at an egg with me for almost two decades now. It’s the first object I find a nook for every time I move. It’s the same icon Dr. Karen King put on the cover of her translation of Mary’s gospel.

  According to the Eastern Orthodox Church, Mary Magdalene is associated with Easter because Christ resurrected to her first. I’ll return to this again later, this Easter moment and why love is what brings us back to life. But after hearing this in seminary about Mary, that she really is the whole reason Easter happens, I found it so curious that we associate an Easter egg with a rabbit rather than Mary.

  The Germanic tradition of the Easter Bunny dates back only to the 18th century with German Anglican immigrants and a myth about an Osterhase who gave gifts of candy and colored eggs to good children, sort of like a tiny, hairy Santa Claus. The Orthodox Church used to have a tradition of fasting from eggs during Lent, so the colored hard-boiled eggs were used as a way to celebrate breaking the fast on Easter morning.

  There’s a more ancient legend, though, that associates the egg with Easter. The Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that after the resurrection, Mary Magdalene traveled to Rome, where she was admitted to the court of Tiberius Caesar because of her high social standing. She told the court the story of her love for Christ, and how poorly justice was served under Pontius Pilate during Christ’s trial. She told Caesar that Christ had risen. And to help explain his resurrection, supposedly, she took an egg from off of the feast laid out before them.

  If I could magically pick to be present at any moment in history, this would be it. I would be sitting there held rapt with attention to every word Mary gave during her first sermon. I’ve imagined what she might have said so many times. I’ve imagined how it would correct for us this ancient misunderstanding we have about the body, and about the soul.

  It varies because sometimes there’s this loud thread of exasperation. As if she has been pointing at the egg after all these years, after millennia, and we still have zero clue.

  But it goes something like this . . .

  An egg, like a seed, contains the end at the beginning. The seed already has the bloom held within it. The egg holds safely inside whatever new life its precariously fragile shell is meant to protect. And if that new life is going to emerge, it has to come from within. You can’t break a shell and still expect a little beak to one day peck its way out and into the world. You have to let that tiny creature with wings within the shell arrive at the day of its own birth. You have to remain in this trusting, quiet unknown, as every mother or artist knows, and let that life declare its existence not when your ego says it’s time, but when that new life is ready.

  A body, like an egg, contains a soul.

  In the beginning there’s the dark, there’s the womb, and the only light is the soul, this new life that waits to emerge from within. The soul is the beginning, and also the end. Birth is meant to happen before we die. Ideally, many times. But we have to die to the ego to let it. The more the soul rises, resurrects in this life, the more love is present here inside us. Meaning, the soul is all we are when we come into this life and it’s all that we’ll be when we leave it. If you can stand there at the beginning, then you’ll know the end, which is a love that only ever expands.

  Then according to legend, Caesar was like, “Hah, yeah, right. A person can no more resurrect than that egg in your hand turn red.”

  (The egg immediately turns red.)

  The Body Never Lies

  What you say, you say in a body; you can say nothing outside this body. You must awaken while in this body, for everything exists in it: Resurrect in this life.

  — THE GOSPEL OF PHILIP

  There came a point when words were no longer useful. I sank into this clear-cut knowing of what needed to be done. Every move I made was intentional, unequivocal. And that certainty, that blazing truth spoke for itself. I began to experience how much less I can do, for the rest of my life, if I choose. The body never lies. Letting go of the need to explain myself with words, of saying why I needed to do something, or when, was the most powerful I have ever been.

  So, for example, when the midwives wheeled over a huge-ass floor-length mirror, the kind you’d check your outfit in before going out, and started positioning it so I could see my son’s head emerging, all I needed to do was allow it to not exist. I didn’t need to get angry, to tell them to get that thing out of my face, or my fanny, rather. I just continued doing what I had been doing, which was everything I already knew I needed to do in order to get my son safely into the world. My inside was my outside. I was nothing more or less than who I am.

  I didn’t need to explain to them that seeing his image outside of me was a distraction. It took me away from the awareness I already had from within. The image the mirror provided was awareness once removed. I already had direct awareness. I could see him but with a sense the heart’s capable of, a far broader and more precise sight than the eyes will ever provide for us.

  I could sense that something was wrong, that his position was making it difficult for him to descend. I knew in a way I couldn’t translate that he was healthy and strong and that he would make it through this, that I would birth him and not need the C-section they had alerted the surgeon I was headed toward. I never said a word, though. I never said anything except the passionate repetition of one name, and this is the part of my birth story it has taken years (and this book) to reconcile. Because the body never lies.

  Forty-eight hours earlier, I’d been warned that I was going to need to be induced the next morning. So, my husband and I walked the full length of Manhattan. We ate an amazing meal, had some red wine, and some impressive sex. (Impressive because of my size.) Then that night, I stood up from the couch in my little black maternity dress and my water broke. It wasn’t biblical, but it felt like a triumph. I started to strut around the apartment, “They can’t induce me now!” With the tiny flood, came breath-clenching contractions. When I arrived at the hospital, I was already at three and a half centimeters dilated. I come from a long line of natural-child-birthing women. I siphoned my confidence from this fact. And trusted I would be counted among them.

  I went into the hospital shower and stood with my hands braced against the wall to support me as each new and more painful contraction wracked my body. The hot water pounded against the center of my back and slid over my sacrum, soothing me when the painful contractions receded. I use the word pain, but this isn’t accurate. At all. Pain doesn’t begin to describe what would happen in intervals to my entire being. Here, I have it now. It felt as if slowly, and with greater success, I was being de-boned. It felt as if my
pelvis was being pushed in increments down through my body from the pressure of each contraction. I labored that way for most of the night.

  Before dawn, I moved back to the bed for the midwife to check on me. I knew from the look on her face as her gloved hand gently investigated that she wasn’t finding what she had hoped. I could read her as if her thoughts were written on cue cards out in front of her. It was not good news. She said that I had actually gone down a centimeter. I was now only at two and a half centimeters dilated. Up until this point, I had been managing the “de-boning” with breath work, and the hot water, and sheer, undiluted resolve. And it all felt worth it, because it was productive. But exhaustion and dread began to set in after I realized I had labored for all that time and had actually managed to close myself back up again. I had managed to labor in the wrong direction.

  As I remember it now, I went straight into the unimaginable pain. It was worse than being de-boned. It felt as if all along, without me realizing it or any doctor seeing it on an X-ray or sonogram machine, my pelvis was actually made of a thick, translucent glass. And my son’s small but hard bowling ball of a head had gotten itself wedged into this miraculous glass-pelvis in a way where instead of managing through it, of finding a way to shift and turn so that he could fit, his skull had actually shattered it. My pelvis shattered into infinitesimal shards of glass and with each next contraction the countless shards pierced me from the inside out.

  I can’t really say that I said his name. The first time I heard myself say it, I didn’t even realize it was me calling out for him. This was the point where words no longer served a purpose. This was the point where I crossed a threshold I knew I could never come back from.

  With each next wave of the shards of glass embedding themselves deeper into my body, I now only said his name, again and again. Jesus Christ. And I didn’t know until pain had embodied me so fully that this existed; that he was a truth that lived within me beyond words and reason. The only truth real enough to match the intensity of that pain. As if the pain was a flamethrower, and with each next contraction, it consumed everything within me that wasn’t real, until all that remained was this stowaway love that had always been there. A love that I had fought against, a love that I had denied, a love that I built an iron wall around my heart to keep me safe from, a love I never needed to find, a love that has been with me my entire life from the inside out.

  I never needed to ask for an epidural. It was communicated so clearly through the state I had entered. I remember the nod I gave my husband. It was a nod so telling, he just immediately set out to find the doctor. She was a vision as she entered the room. She was at least six months pregnant, maybe seven. This felt like a blessing. Her headscarf was as white as her white medical coat.

  I was still calling his name as if it was the only panacea or elixir for managing the pain. So, she followed suit, and began repeating, “Allah” with each next contraction until I could hold still for long enough for her to insert that horrifically long needle into my spine. We locked eyes as the medication began to reach my shattered glass-pelvis and coat it with numbness, which felt like warm honey. We locked eyes and said nothing, and said everything we could ever need to communicate. Because everything in that moment was human, and everything was holy.

  Mary Magdalene Was Not a Prostitute

  I said to him, “So, now, Lord, does a person who sees a vision see it with the soul or with the spirit?” The Savior answered, “A person does not see with the soul or with the spirit. Rather the mind, which exists between these two, sees the vision and that is what . . .”

  — MARY 7:5–7

  I remember how WTF I felt when I first saw that this passage from chapter seven in Mary’s gospel gets cut off right at the clincher. All three copies of Mary’s gospel have this same answer torn from it. We can only imagine what Christ was about to tell Mary.

  The gospel won’t start up again until four pages later. And it also resumes mid-sentence, as if we passed out just before Christ was going to tell us how we perceive a vision from within, and then we wake up again while Mary’s telling us about the powers that keep the soul bound.

  There is so much we don’t know. There’s so much I don’t know. I’ve been studying Mary Magdalene for two decades as a scholar, as a theologian, and as a devout seeker compelled by a force I can’t name or entirely understand to know who she really was, and to interpret the significance of her gospel.

  And the effort has humbled me.

  There is so much that just remains a mystery. This is why I love humility. Whenever I let it sweep over me, it’s like changing into flats after realizing I had been in high heels for too long.

  There’s so much that we don’t have empirical truth to rest on when speaking about her and who she was. There is, however, one thing we know for certain: Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute.

  And this is not a commentary about prostitution. I often get a wave of defense when I’ve written or spoken about this before. But this is not about sex workers, and the sacredness of the body. Though I appreciate that Mary Magdalene has been the patroness of those who have felt shamed by our culture in relation to the body for centuries. And I think there’s beauty in the story, that she was a prostitute. There’s beauty in a story of a woman who loved much and was forgiven much. It’s a story of the sinner turned saint. And who can’t identify with that? It’s a good story. It’s just not Mary Magdalene’s story. And it’s simply not true.

  Meaning, there’s so much we can’t verify. So much of the evidence, the scripture that would attest to the truth of who she was, has been tampered with, burned, edited, or destroyed. (The most damaging of which is the capacity of our imagination to even conceive of the idea that she may have been the most significant figure in Christ’s life. Because of two millennia of homilies and sermons, and interpretations of her as a prostitute rather than as one of the first apostles in the earliest form of the church.) But her status as a prostitute is verifiable. And it’s not true.

  So, what happened?

  How did Mary Magdalene become the penitent prostitute?

  If Christian theologians in the Latin West were going to establish an exclusively male church, then the central figure to Christ’s story, Mary Magdalene, needed to be retold.

  Starting in the 4th century, with the formation of the traditional bible, all of the gospels that confirmed Mary’s spiritual authority and unique relationship with Christ were excluded from the canon and deemed “heretical,” like the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Thomas. And the scriptures that confirmed and validated women’s leadership in the earliest forms of Christianity, like The Acts of Paul and Thecla, were also excluded.

  Over the centuries, Christ became less and less human; he was depicted as chaste, monastic, purely divine, and Mary Magdalene underwent the inverse transformation. She became more and more human, more “sinful,” until the 6th century when Pope Gregory sealed the deal on her depiction in his interpretation of Christ healing Mary by freeing her of seven “demons.”

  Pope Gregory conflated Mary Magdalene as both the unnamed “sinner” in Luke 7 who anointed Christ’s feet, and the Mary of Luke 8 and Mark 16 who is freed of all her demons by Christ. And then he interpreted these passages as confirming that Mary’s sinfulness had to do with her sexuality. “Seven demons” translated to him as prostitute, no question.

  Or as Cynthia Bourgeault explains, “The shadow side of Christianity’s notoriously undealt-with issues around human sexuality and the feminine get projected directly onto her.”30

  Pope Gregory’s Homily 33 set the precedent that the faithful should hold Mary as the penitent whore.31 This interpretation of Mary had a very clear agenda: reinforce the view that women were to be seen primarily in terms of their sexuality and not their spiritual nature. Dr. Karen King explains that his fiction of Mary Magdalene as the whore created by the church solved two problems at once; it undermined both “the teachings associated with Mary
and women’s capacity to take on leadership roles.”32 With this interpretation of Mary, as the penitent prostitute, as King laments, “Her radical heritage had been tamed and erased.”33

  Finally, in 1969, which, if we do the math, is 1,378 years after Gregory’s fusion of Mary Magdalene and the unnamed sinner as proof of her prostitution, the church officially corrected his mistake, or, to be clear, his misogyny. (And this admission came 450 years after religious scholars had rejected it as fiction, as just flat-out historically inaccurate.) However, the image and interpretation of Mary Magdalene as the penitent prostitute continues to be preached; it has remained in place behind the pulpit and deep-set in the popular imagination.

  July 22 is Mary Magdalene’s feast day in the Catholic tradition. (I’m writing this chapter on July 22, 2018.) She was recently “rehabilitated” from the penitent prostitute to the apostle to the apostles by Pope Francis. (I knew good things would come from a Pope who knows how to tango.) Though, it’s important to make clear, she is still not considered an apostle herself. (Let alone the first.)

  So, we’ve established what religious historians, and now even the Pope, know she was not.

  Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute.

  What, then, do we know about her that isn’t fiction?

  Let’s start with this. The historical figure Mary of Magdala was a prominent Jewish woman, a benefactress of Jesus’s ministry, a visionary, and a leading apostle in the earliest Christian movement. Her status as the apostle to the apostles comes from this “secret” teaching, or transmission, that she receives from Christ, according to her gospel.

  Her epithet “Magdalene” comes from the fact that she was born in the town of Magdala (located in present-day Israel), on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee just north of the city of Tiberias. And although Mary Magdalene is often depicted as having red hair and culver white skin (as if from Ireland), it’s more historically accurate to depict her as if from ancient Israel.