Mary Magdalene Revealed

by Meggan Watterson

  The Tor in Glastonbury is supposedly where the Red and the White Spring originate. Avalon, the sacred isle, or the Isle of the Blest, is thought of as representing the symbolic world center, with the Tor as the axis mundi, the world axis, that joins the ordinary world with the regions above and below.

  The Red Spring represents the goddess, or the divine feminine, and the White Spring represents the godhead, or the divine masculine. The Red Spring emerges in a well that has been surrounded and protected by a garden since the 1950s. And the White Spring is in the care of the White Spring Trust, a group of devoted residents who tend to it and keep the candles lit around the caldron where the White Spring emerges.

  Celtic legends relate a sacred relationship between wells and cauldrons, and the alchemists produce red and white elixirs in alchemy in their attempts to produce the “alchemical wedding” or the coniunctio, the union of opposites. This, the alchemists believed, created the Philosopher’s stone, the holy grail, the waters of everlasting life.

  The goal of the alchemist was to take base metals and, through a process of purification, transform them into unalloyed gold. This, of course, is a perfect metaphor for taking the base emotions of the ego, like envy and rage, and transforming them into the singular awareness of the soul.

  Gold was the metaphor for discovering the true spiritual nobility of the soul while still embodied. The ultimate objective is to restore the bond between matter and spirit, between earth and heaven, between masculine and feminine, between all those “opposites” that create this illusion of separateness. The ultimate objective is union.

  Legends relate that Joseph of Arimathea, a relative of Christ, traveled to Glastonbury from Palestine, through Southern France, carrying with him two small cruets and the cup that Christ used at the Last Supper. Supposedly, these two cruets, depicted as red and white, carried the blood and the water that came from Christ’s wounds at his crucifixion. Joseph built the first church in Avalon and buried the cup and the two cruets somewhere between the Red Spring and the White Spring.

  So, although the springs are separate, Red and White, they rise from the same source, from the axis between the worlds, the Tor. There is a seven-tiered labyrinth that surrounds the Tor, to represent the sevenfold process of transformation. The last phase in alchemy, the rubedo, or reddening, refers to the union of opposites restored, the royal marriage achieved from within the heart. The lunar-goddess-queen and the solar-god-king remembered as one.

  We descended from the Tor, and Kyle took us into town to explore. As we walked along a narrow street, Kyle spotted a storefront that said, “Aura Photography” and immediately insisted that we all get one done. Christiane’s was so surreal. We marveled at the otherworldly colors, hues of the most luminous periwinkle. Her photo looked like several gorgeous purple angels were sitting on her lap. Kyle’s was a full-on rainbow. He gave it one look and nodded his head, “Of course.” And my photo just showed layer after layer of the most crimson and scarlet reds I had ever seen.

  The aura man felt sorry for me and started explaining the baseness of the color red, how it represents anger and attachments to desire and worldly things.

  Kyle just snapped him silent. “Nope, this is a Mary Magdalene thing.”

  Before visiting the Red Spring, Kyle wanted to take us to a little chapel down a street called Magdalene Way. Built in 1070, Saint Margaret’s Chapel was originally a hospital and almshouse for the poor. It had a sweet little rose garden walled in on either side behind it. And it had these precious, small wooden doors arched at the top like a little hobbit house. We opened the doors and found the chapel empty.

  Christiane went so still and solemn as she entered, she was practically floating toward the altar. Kyle, which is why I love him so much, barreled in like a bull in a china shop. He is always, in all circumstances, equal parts pure angel and pure human. I entered last. I was getting that warm, honey feeling, when my heart suddenly feels like a beehive. When there’s electricity coursing through me. I knew something crazy was about to happen.

  Christiane and Kyle took seats close to each other on the side of the chapel. I followed my body’s lead and went to go down on my knees in front of the altar. I closed my eyes. I got still. My legs turned to lead. I felt statuesque. The heaviness, and the stillness, let me drop straight inward, like an anchor. I took a deep breath. And all of a sudden, I could see something I had never noticed before.

  I got this tingling sensation, as if a sudden effervescence flooded me, like my blood was now carbonated. Something was happening, for real. Something was releasing through my pores. A belief. A misunderstanding. An ancient fear. That I am safer if I silence myself. That my soul-voice is dangerous. That I am safer if I just hold it here bound within me.

  “I have been bound, but I have not bound anything.”

  The soul in Mary 9:14 is telling us what happens to us from a metaphysical perspective. The soul is bound by the “egoic operating system,” by the powers that make us human; fear in all of its manifold forms. The soul, in turn, binds nothing. There’s no constriction when it comes to the soul, or, if soul is a stretch for you, then let’s say when it comes to love. Only fear binds. And the way that love responds, or the way we can know love is from a sense of expansion, a sense of release.

  There’s a secret here in this passage that the soul reveals to us. The soul says that it isn’t recognized by the powers of the ego. (This is the ego’s ignorance, and the binding of our forgetfulness.) But the soul recognizes the seven powers of the ego. And here’s the way through: the dissolution of both heaven and earth.

  What in the world is the soul talking about here?

  We must dissolve our ideas of heaven and our ideas of earth. We must dissolve the ideas that keep them separate. So that heaven is already here on earth. So that the earth is a heaven we defend and protect. So that we no longer wait, projecting an idea of what’s to come, elsewhere, in death, when what is to come is already here. We just haven’t recognized it yet.

  As we entered the Chalice Well in Glastonbury, where the Red Spring is protected in a walled garden, we walked over a mosaic of the Vesica Pisces made from beautiful white polished stones. This ancient symbol of sacred geometry represents the third that’s created from integrating two opposing forces, two seemingly irreconcilable opposites.

  There are two circles of equal size and identical shape. And where they overlap creates the most ancient symbol of the divine feminine, the Vesica Pisces. It’s an oval, or an egg shape. It’s the shape that surrounds Christ in most images and icons of him.

  The Vesica Pisces is also on the lid to the well itself. We circled it together and took a soul-family photo like the pilgrims we were. It’s one of my favorite photos, ever. We’re all lit up like lighthouses. I look at this photo of us and I remember it all. The light that’s beaming from our faces tells the story of what love does, how it disarms us, and unbinds us from the chains we placed there ourselves.

  Like a Same-Sex Divine Feminine Noah’s Ark

  I am what anyone can hear but no one can say.

  — THE THUNDER, PERFECT MIND 4:23

  She reached out both of her arms across our small table in a dimly lit restaurant in Brooklyn. I took Inanna in my hands first. Inanna, the ancient goddess of heaven and earth. She spans the length of Kate’s entire forearm. I told her to tell me the story again, of how she felt initiated when she was having the tattoo done. She felt this warmth, a natural numbing sensation every time the tattoo artist touched her forearm to slowly dye her skin with the image of Inanna.

  There was a tiny candle on our table, so I turned her arm toward the light to catch more of the glint of gold in the goddess’s eyes. Then I reached for her other forearm and held it with both hands. I took in the beauty of this tattoo, which also spanned the length of her forearm. She told me the name of the woman or priestess who adorned this arm, but it didn’t sink in. I mean, I heard her say the name, but it seemed to slide through my mind like oil and water.
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  We had met to talk about an event we were putting together with Eve Ensler, founder of VDAY, titled Just Love, which was a day to heal, gather, and rise together as survivors of sexual assault. So, the name of Kate’s second arm tattoo was lost to me as we dove right into the details.

  Years later, I was writing the entry for Inanna in the guidebook of The Divine Feminine Oracle when I suddenly saw a flash of the tattoo Kate has on her arm opposite to Inanna. I texted her,

  “Who’s the other lady, not Inanna, on your forearm?”

  Within minutes my cell phone dinged: “Enheduanna.”

  I stared at it. I had to squint to try to figure out how to pronounce it. And then I Googled Enheduanna and nearly fell out of my chair.

  She’s the human embodiment of the goddess Inanna. The first high priestess. And the first known author in all human history!

  So, let me start again.

  Long before the spiritual concept of monotheism arrived on the scene, there were many deities, especially female deities, that were celebrated and honored. The goddess Inanna, from the Akkadian Empire, roughly 4500 B.C.E., was worshiped by re-creating the Hieros gamos, or the sacred marriage between the divine feminine and the divine masculine.

  Inanna’s priestesses would choose a consort to reenact the sacred marriage between Inanna and Dumuzi, her male counterpart. The priestesses would ritually make love to their consorts, merging heaven and earth in their bodies, consciously, ritualistically joining the opposites within them as an act of embodying their wholeness.

  Enheduanna is an actual historical human woman who lived in roughly 4,200 B.C.E. This was considered in ancient Mesopotamia the pinnacle of Inanna’s worship; temples dedicated to Inanna and the priestesses who honored her with their rituals flourished at this time. Enheduanna was the daughter of King Akkad. And she was both spiritually and politically very powerful. She was considered to have reached a semi-divine status in her lifetime.

  She is most remembered for her Temple Hymns to Inanna. Hymns that influenced the cadence and poetry of the Psalms in the Old Testament, and the Homeric Epics. Enheduanna is the first known author in all of human history. Her work The Exaltation of Inanna has more copies, or inscriptions, than the inscriptions of Kings (which is basically the ancient Mesopotamian version of hitting The New York Times bestseller list).

  What’s significant here to realize is that in some fundamental way, Enheduanna was able to embody the essence of Inanna, which is a force of uniting the light and the dark. The human and the divine. Merging with the shadow, deep beneath the surface of everyday life. Inanna descended to the underworld, or the unconscious, to merge with her “sister” or her twin-shadow-self chained there in the depths to the wall. At each gate, an article of clothing was demanded as her entrance, until at the seventh gate, she was stripped bare. Entirely exposed. And vulnerable.

  This is when she meets with her “sister,” frees her from the underworld, and rises with her, more powerful than she has ever been before.

  Two things hit me like a ton of bricks. First, we are responsible for our own education. History is deeply subjective. There is no master version of history that tells for all of us all the stories we need to hear. The second thing that hit me was a vision that had been sitting on the periphery of my awareness for years. Just waving at me. Wanting me to see it but I just wasn’t ready.

  So, here’s what happened. Because it was very visual and very visceral.

  Like a same-sex divine feminine Noah’s Ark, I started seeing these divine beings pair up, hand in hand, with these actual human women who lived and breathed and tried their messy best to be their divine counterpart, embodied, while alive.

  Here’s what I mean. Suddenly, I saw Inanna, naked as all get-out, take the hand of the first writer ever in human history, Enheduanna, Inanna’s embodiment. They came together first, I guess, because they felt like the oldest. The first recorded divine-human duo.

  Then I saw the Egyptian goddess Isis and Mary Magdalene meet together like Mr. & Ms. Pac-Man before the game begins. First they were face-to-face, and then, facing the same direction, they clasped hands and walked off into the sunset.

  Next, I saw the Buddhist goddess Quan Yin and the Chinese princess Miao Shan bow to each other and then walk off together, pinkies linked.

  I saw the Tibetan Bodhisattva Vajrayogini loop arms with her reincarnation, Yeshe Tsogyal.

  I saw the Celtic goddess of the dawn, Brigid, whistle at and side-eye the Catholic saint Brigid. And on and on . . .

  The divine hooking up with the human. What hit me was the clarity I could see that humanity is meant to move the divine story forward.

  Let’s go back to Isis as an example. The Egyptian goddess Isis dates back to 2,500 B.C.E. and was known for her healing, even resurrecting powers. It’s a long story and it has to do with a snake and the sun god Ra, but in brief, Isis secures the power to regenerate life. She’s associated with the sexual energy, the life-force that exists within us all and that can be cultivated through meditation and breath-work to promote healing and abundance in our lives.

  Like Mary Magdalene, Isis has a partner or consort that is not altogether human: Osiris, the Egyptian god of the afterlife and the dead. And like Christ, Osiris is murdered and his body goes missing. Isis revives his body once it’s re-membered. She resurrects him. Just as Mary is the only person there at the tomb, maybe because she had more to do with his ability to come back to life than we’ve ever recognized.

  Maybe because Mary Magdalene is meant to move the story of what it means to be human forward. Or put another way, her story is meant to move a more ancient story of the power of the goddess forward into the modern world. A story of a human woman, a woman in love, who works miracles by bringing love itself back to life.

  What I felt like I was witnessing in this divine feminine Noah’s Ark was a pairing up of the self with the soul. That we can in a sense die to the individual self and merge with the soul, the love that remains after death. We can become both. So that Isis isn’t a goddess in the heavens, but an energy of love that works miracles here in a human heart.

  A Religion Every Body Belongs To

  When the soul had brought the third Power to naught, it went upward, and saw the fourth Power. It had seven forms.

  — MARY 9:16–17

  In France, in 1310, an author named Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake, along with a copy of her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls. She was condemned as a “relapsed heretic,” and as a free spirit—someone who believed that human beings could achieve union with the divine, without the mediation of the church. Free spirits believed that god is love, and that love (being god) alone could lead the soul to union from within them.

  The Mirror of Simple Souls lived on and continued to be translated into other languages and circulated throughout the world. In some ecclesiastical centers, it was considered to be a near-canonical piece of theology, though Marguerite’s name had been removed from it. It existed as an anonymous spiritual work until 1946, when Romana Guarnieri identified Latin manuscripts of The Mirror in the Vatican. Marguerite Porete’s name returned to her book in 1965, when it was published for the first time.

  We know very little about Marguerite, except that she was a beguine. Beguines were women who lived in spiritual communities together to live in alignment with Christ’s love. They weren’t nuns, they never took formal vows; they were always free to come and go. But they lived together with a shared intention to emulate the kind of self-emptying love that Christ mastered. Historians believe she wrote The Mirror in Old French sometime between 1296 and 1306. She was deemed a “relapsed heretic” because she was asked by church authorities several times to recant the words she wrote in The Mirror. But she refused. Her words were her truth.

  The book is structured as a discourse between love and all that is not love, aimed at reaching a state that’s indistinguishable from the love that is god. Marguerite leads the reader through the seven stages that her soul as
cended through in order to experience this state of union.

  And this is what made her work so dangerous. She didn’t need the direction of the church, or any external spiritual authority, but rather just the voice of love that existed within her. Marguerite writes in The Mirror, “I am God, says Love, for Love is God and God is Love, and this Soul is God by the condition of Love.”

  Marguerite refers to the liberated soul, the soul that has made it through the seven stages, as a phoenix. This is precisely what her words in The Mirror became: they rose from the ashes and took on an immortal life the church could never have anticipated.

  Roughly 200 years later, in Spain, Teresa of Avila at the age of 44 began to have a series of visions that convinced her that Christ appeared to her in physical, bodily form, and yet remained invisible to the eye. The sight she had acquired was spiritual.

  Teresa had devoted herself to the interior life from an early age. Her childhood was marked by frequent illnesses that confined her to her bed. She read everything she could about spiritual exploration and contemplative prayer. Since she couldn’t move or explore the world around her, she went inward. She began to become fluent in the language she heard within her heart, a language of the soul, which includes visions and states of being not ordinarily experienced.

  Her visions of Christ lasted for two years and would inform all of her subsequent books, especially her spiritual masterpiece, The Interior Castle. Similar to The Mirror, The Interior Castle charts the ascent of the soul as an inward journey through the seven mansions or states of being that exist within us. Teresa wanted to share with the other sisters in her Carmelite order the spiritual perception that can be acquired by entering into the seventh mansion where the divine dwells within the soul. She reveals that in the actual moment of union with the divine, the soul feels nothing, but that the divine “removes the scales from its eyes,” so that the soul can see at last a “dazzling cloud of light” within the heart.