This month we are given permission to celebrate a woman who was shamed and judged for thousands of years.
Last year Pope Francis of the Catholic Church made, July 22nd, Mary Magdalene’s Feast Day. Should we feast and be merry and celebrate the feminine empowerment on the planet by putting on our red dresses, lighting some candles, with an altar of roses and sit in a circle and om all night… right? Simply forgetting that this woman was consciously mislabeled as a whore, amongst other things, and not honored in her rightful place as healer, teacher, soul midwife, lover of the Divine and beloved daughter of Gaia.
One of the main tenants of a teacher of mine, Joanna Macy, says in order to get to the liberation, to see the world with new eyes, and go forth in a positive direction with gratitude, first we must honor our pain for the world. In my own life, I have come to know the value of using our shadow to forge a new path, rather than numbing it away or bypassing it to get to the good stuff.
Women today are inundated with marketing and promises of empowerment and equality, and awakening their sleeping feminine essence. Yes, this is needed, it is happening, this is where we’re all headed. And after 2000+ years of being quieted, burned, made small, and less than… we need to come together and create safe spaces for our gifts and our outrage to be expressed and used as fuel to awaken ourselves and all of humanity. The unveiling of the feminine on the planet is not meant to swing the pendulum to the opposing polarity, but support us in finding a balanced center that can hold it all.
We are full-spectrum beings, the feminine includes the beauty of death, the void, the empty rich fertile beginnings that have come to be through burning fires of destruction. We have these flames burning within us asking to be stoked. When we acknowledge and honor the beauty and value of our collective feelings we increase our capacity to welcome more of ourselves and others. We increase our capacity to hold more… more love, light, empathy, and remembrance. That’s what our pelvic bowl is for, to hold it ALL with love, transmutation and birthing anew.
To be fully present in this state of humanity, to be with the despair and the rising energy on our planet… is a righteously empowering act. Our collective awakening includes honoring the aspects of ourselves that need to die so that we may transform again, and surrender is a necessary embodiment in our phoenix process. The beauty of this time, as we remember the Conscious Feminine, allows us to embrace her presence within ourselves and begin to hold ourselves and each other with compassion in the process, healing and coming into whole remembrance together. So on your way to the beautifully needed women’s circle to celebrate the Sacred Feminine I invite you to stop and touch the grief stone and honor the collective experience we are all learning to honor. The welcoming of it all is what the awakening of the Feminine Divine looks like.
Luna Love
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This 22nd of July marked a community celebration of The Magdalene Movement and a heralding of our cultural raising, reclaiming and restoring of the Feminine Divine. Internationally respected Gnostic scholar of Directive Mythology, John Lamb Lash, refers this transformative passage in our evolution as the “Gaia Sophia Correction.” His research as an author allowed him to uncover the Egyptian Nag Hammadi Library (found Winter 1945) and he brought to light the ancient Creation Story about the Divine Wisdom Sophia. In the Coptic scroll’s She is considered the Earth Goddess, and John unveiled from those leather bound papyrus codices the Sophianic Vision. The revelations contained within that buried jar asserts that the archetypal Queen of Heaven is in fact embodied in our Earth - She is as a living sentient being. He teaches, “the beautiful thing about the correction that humanity is about to achieve is that it is a cooperative correction made with the earth goddess Herself… Mary Magdalena represents the innate wisdom that wells up from indwelling divinity, and the loving recognition that embraces it. In the sense of indigenous wisdom, she too is a reflection of the Earth Goddess.”
Now woman all over the world are reflecting this emerging Sophia Principle and embodied cellular presence. We are honoring the yogic principle of pranic Shakti within the vibrant vital energy of our awakening human body. For there are countless examples of mystics who honor the wild female life force of our planet in many different spiritual traditions. It’s Her revered serpent power of raw Earth-Kundalini… also know as the pulsing, surging, and undulating Shakitpat of Gaia’s primal waves of electro-magnetic resonance. This rising courses through all our geomantic ley lines, and it’s akin to the acupuncture meridians of our own anatomy. In other words, the circuitry of our own bio-pathways (Vedic nadi channels) truly mirrors that of our own planet’s organic power grids and geometric infrastructure.
This is what the Greek civilizations called Geomancy, and for those who traveled from all over the world to learn from the renowned Oracle of Delphi (near mount Parnassus) this knowledge was accepted, appreciated and embraced as a valuable technology for one’s health and well-being. Furthermore, numerous highly revered historical Goddesses such as Auset (Isis from Egypt’s pantheon) are known to physically represent this remarkable capacity to run a tremendous amount of frequency through our physical vessel as well as Mother Nature; the two bodies are inexorably connected. Even Mary Magdalene herself (with the Essenes in Israel) spoke about the “textures of light within our bodies,” and she described this vibrational fabric as the web of life within all our Earth’s Eco-Systems. We’re genuine morphogenetic SYMBIOSIS!
With this deep Earth-Centered realization available to us again we – the women of wisdom – of the womb – of creation – can generate the much needed anti-dote to heal and remedy what Grandfather Ilarion Merculieff (Alaskan Native) calls the great masculine imbalance. It’s our medicine elixir of self-love that we can extend to our own sacred regeneration – especially during heightened days of ceremony and feasting – paying our respects to the Universal Feminine Spirit of All That Is. This precious gift is dissolving our old multi-generational pain-body by the global family choosing to become inner trail blazers, and thankfully this fire is igniting in us all. Many pioneering hearts (BOTH men and women) are now returning home to the natural and instinctive power of our primordial Terra Nova (New Earth.)
Rev Samavesha Gayatri Devi
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Let’s reframe our understanding of the archetype of ‘Mary Magdalene’. As we know her today through the writings of many authors, she is an example for modern women of how to integrate great strength with enormous grace and kindness. This is empowering for us.
We are learning as we go how to be a full sovereign HER. Once I left the ‘mens’s world’ of work and competition, I delved deeply into what pleasure, what sensuality, tears of sadness and ecstatic joy felt like. I found a new type of dynamic force in me and it felt like openness, softness and Grace. And it was terrifying. Our culture tends to call this softness ‘passive’, ‘weak’ or when it gets wild – ‘crazy’. Remember that the church shut down all the Celtic temples and celebrations when they came to Britain in the first century AD. It became ‘heresy’ to use the old ways of connection to nature, pleasure and unbridled experiences of mysterious joy. There was a cultural message indoctrinated to women (and men) to be passive – unless at war, sexless – unless procreating, and only trust priests to mediate experiences of the Divine. This rigid control dynamic is diluted but still very present today.
Women all over the world chat about this on social media, read books by a variety of authors, go to ‘Red Tent’ workshops and nod in recognition. For me, this is where Magdalene comes in. Mary, according to my understanding, was Jesus’ Tantric Partner. Yes that’s right – they had sex. And they reached God/Goddess through making love. They were initiated by Isis into the the mysteries of immortality in the Egyptian Temples. She was his equal. She was with him as he passed into death, and was the only one with him in the cave where he ‘resurrected’. Why her? Some say they were engaging in their yogic tantric practices during this time. I can’t prove their validity to you ‘scientifically’ but I can tell you I feel it in my bones, my tears, my joy and my life.
What is the deepest re-frame here is that there is even more beauty underneath the mystery of their relationship. The truth is that her relationship with Yeshua was that of utmost devotion. It’s said that she was ‘barren’ and on the night of ‘the Last Supper’, Yeshua gave her a blue rose symbolizing his devotional love for her. That night she conceived. Perhaps the depth of love and trust she felt created a shift in her body. Could pure love actually manifest physical change on Earth…?
I sense that this energy of reverence is what we deeply yearn for today. This is why Magdalene’s story touches so many. She was radical, committed, gifted, and she stepped outside her ‘tribe’ for a greater purpose – she was lover and partner to arguably one of the most important men of our time. Now Mary is to be respected for her loving commitment! Her story is real for us, as it’s our journey. We are all needing the core values that her life embodied, and they are those of consideration, care, intuitive understanding, and cherishing all that is mysterious and unknown.
Magdalene’s story is like a breath of fresh air, and her message gives us permission to trust one another and to give of ourselves fully – to be totally filled with passion and generosity and feel powerfully held there. When needed in the face of inequity, we can still be full of intense emotion, and then held in peace and presence as we re-balance to center. From this place of shared understanding of our complete humanity, huge change is totally possible.
