Archetype of Love

by Rhys Jones.

As we enter the spring holy season, I would like to bear witness to a profound love displayed during the Passion of Jesus by Meriam Magdalena. The Lady Magdalene goes these days by various names, and she has enjoyed a revival and rehabilitation during the past four or five decades. Often described as a disciple of Jesus, the Apostle John considered her to be the founder of Christianity, Mary Magdalene was the first of the disciples to have seen the resurrected Christ. She also seemed to have had some special relationship with Jesus—the complaints of Peter are often raised in this area. And then, authors Henry Lincoln and others extrapolated that relationship into a marriage (leading to a best-selling novel and a major motion picture …).

At the heart of that relationship lay a profound, transcendent, and transformative love, that is not sinful or shameful, and that our true purpose is to become fully human and embrace all of our faults, and then to love them, transform them, transcend them. From the Magdalene literature, we find a woman at the heart of these stories who provided care and companionship. Here is a story of woman who cared for her man as he went off on crazy project that really put him in extremis. But we don't find complaints or judgement. We find a deep understanding and acceptance of what it means to inhabit a human body and we find a devotion to this spiritual journey that leads her on her own flight from persecution, probably with her child, that ultimately landed her in France. Jean Markale develops some of the history of what may have been The Church of Mary Magdalene in his 1989 book.

Among the "gnostic" gospels, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene has been available since the late nineteenth century but has since been reinforced by the Gospels of Thomas, Philip, Peter, and Bartholomew, all of which are non-canonical. A leading authority here is Jean-Yves LeLoup whose translation of the Gospel of Mary reveals a renewal of the sacred feminine that was at the heart of Christianity.

Probably one of the leading thinkers around Magdalena studies these days is Cynthia Bourgeault. Her The Meaning of Mary Magdalene explores the transcendent Christianity that she and Jesus shared. Often termed the "Bridal Chamber," this love is considered as a shared physical bond that goes beyond the physical, a conscious love that Bourgeault (and others here) argues was at the core of Christianity. One of the most readable and least connected to a documentary history of Mary Magdalene is Tau Malachi's St. Mary Magdalene which focuses more on the idea of the "bridal chamber" as a gnostic tradition than a close reading of any text.

This literature and scholarship around Mary Magdalene has helped to propel her even beyond Christianity.  For the story we get through this scholarship is often one that seems different from, if not at odds with, the Christianity of Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas.  First we have Meggan Waterson's Mary Magdalene Revealed, tells us gives us a more historically and theologically accurate depiction of Mary.  Watterson's vision shows us how Mary invites us to see past our small egos and lives to the real, lasting, and infinite that lies within our hearts.  And the last of the Magdalene works that we have found inspiring is Seren and Azra Bertrand's The Magdalene Mysteries which places the ministry of Magdalene in a broader context of feminine priestessing that extends thousands of years before and after her.  The Magdalene Mysteries emphasize Christian mysticism and the left-hand path of sacred feminine Christianity.

These texts underscore how Mary Magdalene embodied the archetype of love at the foundation of Christianity, a foundation that had been shunned and is now rediscovered.

The art is small cropping from Annibale Carracci (1560–1609), Mary Magdalene in a Landscape (1599), oil on copper, The Fitzwilliam Museum.