sacred dolls.
Most of all, beauty and truth fans, picture a hidden sacred city of the imagination—temples, dream sanctuaries, gymnasiums, theaters, healing spas, love chambers—kept so secret that it’s invisible to all but a very few in every generation. Call this place a thousand names. Call it the College-Whose-Name-Keeps Changing-and-Whose-Location-Keeps-Expanding, or call it the Sanctuary-Where-the-Thirteen-Perfect-Secrets-from-Before-the-Beginning-of-Time-Are-Kept. Its official name as of today is “Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail,” and it has headquarters on all seven continents. Five thousand years ago, it was housed solely on two continents as “Inanna Nannaru,” derived from Akkadian words, translated roughly as “Inanna’s Nuptial Couch in Heaven.” Six thousand years ago: “Tu-ia Gurus,” from the Sumerian, loosely meaning “Creation-Juice, Bringer of Good Tidings to the Womb.”
Two thousand years ago—so this story goes—our mystery school that is always both outside of time and yet entering time at every moment was called Pistis Sophia—in English “Faithful Wisdom.” Its most famous member—its
only
famous member—was Mary Magdalen, visionary consort of Jesus Christ. Not a penitent prostitute, as the Christian church later distorted her in an attempt to undermine the radical implications of their divine marriage. Not an obeisant groupie who mindlessly surrendered her will to the man-god.
On the contrary, beauty and truth fans. Magdalen was Christ’s partner,his equal. More than that, she was his joker, his wild card: his secret weapon. They worshiped the divine in each other. So say the ancient texts of our mystery school.
But you need not believe the secret texts to guess the truth. Even the manual of the Christian church itself, as scoured of the truth as it is, strongly hints at Magdalen’s majesty. While all the male disciples disappeared during the crucifixion, she was there with Christ. While the twelve male disciples were cowering in defeated chaos, she was the first to find the empty tomb. Jesus appeared to her first after his resurrection; she was the first to be called by him to the mission of apostle.
The Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi, discovered in 1947, reveal even more of their relationship, which violated all the social norms of their time. She was a confidante, a lover, an Apostle above all the other Apostles. Jesus called her the “Woman Who Knew the All,” and said she would rule in the coming Kingdom of Light. Even an early Christian father, Origen, helped propagate these truths, calling her immortal, and maintaining that she had lived since the beginning of time.
The traditions of our ancient order say all this and more: that Mary Magdalen’s performance on history’s stage was an experiment—Pistis Sophia’s gamble that the phallocracy was ripe for mutation.
That the risk failed is testimony not to Magdalen’s inadequacies, but to the virulence of out-of-control masculinity. Magdalen, alas, was too far ahead of her time to succeed in being seen for who she really was. Her archetype was not permitted to imprint itself deeply enough on the collective unconscious. Sadly, the divine feminine barely managed to survive in the dreams of the race through the defanged, depotentized image of the Virgin Mary—Christ’s harmless mommy, not his savvy consort.
From her cave in Provence, twenty years after the death of Christ, Magdalen foresaw that the future Church would suppress her role in the joint revelation. She predicted the Council of Nicaea, which in the year 325 excised from the Bible all texts that told of her complete role. She even prophesied that the spiritual descendants of Peter, the Apostle who had hated and feared her most, would trump up the absurd story of her whoredom, conflating her with Mary of Bethany and three other unnamed women described as sinners and adulterers in various books of the freshly canonical New Testament.
In the last