What is it to be a Magdalene Priestess?
how this dirt worshipping heathen came to claim such a thing
Are you fucking kidding me? A Magdalene Priestess? Oi.
Don’t get me wrong. I am woo af. But, I am also a decently grounded human having a lived experience in the 3D. I believe in science right along with my engagement with herbs and energy. Spiritual growth and a belief in Animism are a driving force, but recognition of the laws of the Universe, the mechanistic constraints within which we live, and the value of the scientific method are not apart from that. So claiming some airy fairy title is not completely off-brand.
However, my grudge against Abrahamic Monotheism is a chasm miles wide. Bridging that gap to embrace anything even closely related to the cannon is qutie the leap.
That does seem to be some of the medicine received upon coming home from this recent pilgrimage—that two things can be true, that two perspectives can exist harmoniously, and that I have been denying myself certain aspects of abundance because of my judgement.
I LOVE mythology. I love people’s stories, historical stories, and cultural stories from all over the world. It’s ok to also enjoy these stories, too.
Access the Voice Note Here:
This article was originally published on Substack. You can read the original here.
Audio Transcription:
Hmm, a Magdalen Priestess. What the hell does that even mean? I mean, admittedly, on one hand it sounds very much like I'm playing dress up and make believe, but on the other hand it's actually quite serious, apparently. I just got back from a pilgrimage to France. First up to Paris, there's a church dedicated to Mary Magdalen up in Paris, and then down to the south of France, where the stories say she and her crew found themselves after being cast adrift in a boat with no sails.
Now, what a thing it is to be a lifelong pagan and agnostic, and, you know, I think Dante had me existing in the third ring of hell, quite literally, for the things that I believe in. But to be so drawn to this material, anyone who knows me knows I've got a huge chip on my shoulder when it comes to Christianity. And so when the woman who runs this particular operation approached me and asked if I wanted to be part of this first cohort of hers, I just kind of, I was like, oh, well that's very nice, but I don't know, I don't know that that's for me. And it was, as it turns out it was, I had to sit with the invitation for a few months, and then I realized, oh, this is actually really burning in my heart that I need to be a part of this.
For me, I was introduced to Mary Magdalen and her gospel at about 16, I think. My grandfather introduced me to the Gnostic Bible. He gifted me a Gnostic Bible. He could see that I was, I was literally reading Dante and Haimeos's Storms, The Seven Arrows, and Benjamin Lee Warf's essays on language and things like that. And so he's like, hey, here, here is an alternative form of the Bible. And perhaps he did that also because his wife, my grandmother, was going through her born-again phase and, you know, insisting I go to Sunday school when I was younger, and we would read sections of, I guess it's the King James Bible these days before bed.
And for me, one of my best friends was a Catholic, and so I grew up going to Latin Catholic Mass with her, and I'd go to Sunday school with her. And even though I wasn't formally part of the classes, and I was there when she received First Communion, and in fact, her parents encouraged me to go up and take Communion. And I have to admit, that was a terrifying moment, terrifying to be a young child. God, I must have been maybe seven, maybe older, but not much. And Latin Catholic ceremonies are long, and they're this, you know, this big orchestrated thing. There's lots of sitting and standing and sitting and standing and shaking hands and saying all the right words, and whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm up. And, you know, you go up, it's this formidable church, and there's this guy dressed in his robes. It's all just terrifying.
And I took the wafer, and you're supposed to say something of which I don't know any longer. I probably never knew. And he's expecting me to say that thing. And I didn't. I'm just like staring at him wide eyed. He gave me a look. I felt like he knew. I knew I was not supposed to be there. I didn't belong. But it was impressionable. So, I mean, that's my, that's my, some of my familiarity with the church. So, you know, it could have been my grandfather's way of counteracting the work that my grandmother was trying to do.
Admittedly, for myself, I never resonated with the Bible. It was, I could tell from a very early age, it was just stories about men and boys. And women got mentioned if they happened to give birth to male children. And other than that, or if they were harlots or something, you know, we needed to be made an example of. Other than that, it just didn't didn't really take for me. But the the Gnostic Bible was something entirely different. It's a book of poetry in many ways. And Mary Magdalene's Gospel is incomplete. There's like three pages missing, I believe. But that what is there is it seems, I don't know, when I read it, it seemed logical. That of course, of course, God is inside of us. Of course, we don't need some establishment to go pray and give our money to and, you know, of course, there's the the only dogma that that that is truly present is that which is in our own heart. And and that is cause for introspection to paraphrase.
So for me, a devout he then there was never any question that that Mary and Jesus were a couple, that she was the apostle of the apostles. And then it wasn't I learned later that she was likely a Jewish priestess of the Eocene order, and trained in certain ways that that the Christianity as a whole finds abhorrent. And that it was no at that point, like my Celtic history, it was imperative for any leader in the society to be wed to the high priestess, because it's a marriage of God and the land. And it's a reflection of our of that union and prosperity and all kinds of things. So yeah, okay.
And, you know, I don't know, the church calling Mary a horror was like, Oh, God, you guys are just so jealous. 12 boys fighting about who's the prettiest. And they've got to shame the one who is actually the closest and the prettiest and cast her out. But what a testament, I would say to her strength and resolve that here, it's 2000 years later. And she cannot be suppressed, her wisdom, her love, her alchemical marriage remains. And in fact, it's it's making a resurgence. I don't know if you have been paying much attention. But certainly, since before I was ever called into this particular container, this particular Mary Magdalene mystery school, I had started to see others, other teachers, other classes, other works of Mary Magdalene starting to pop back up and for myself even.
She she's been present with me for a very, very long time. I had self identified as a sister of the Rose, I think since at least I was a teenager. And in 2016, when I got married, and my daughter was conceived, I was working with somebody to sell some Bath and Beauty products and had created a product that was a Magdalene Rose body scrub. And I had asked another friend of mine, I was just freshly been trained as a Reiki master just a couple years earlier. And so I was really engaged with the symbols. And what I had seen in the Shoku Ray symbol was a rose. And so I had asked a very talented artist friend of mine, Rebecca Wurz, if she could take the symbol of the Shoku Ray and turn it into a rose. And she did a beautiful, beautiful rose symbol. And so here we are, you know, 12 years, not quite 12 years, what year are we in 2026. So 10 years later, getting out of myself, enrolled in this Mary Magdalene priestess training.
Now, because of my judgments, my internal judgments of Christianity, and, you know, that whole pantheon, I noticed that I had engaged with the material very loosely. I haven't read all the books. I'm dyslexic. I'm an incredibly slow reader. High retention, slow reading, and certainly being a mom has dampened my voracious appetite for books. I'm just too tired. There's too many other things to be done. And books on tape don't quite cut it for me, just in case, you know, sometimes the narrator's just great. And the misophonia that comes up with those horrible narrators, I don't mean to shit on them. Everyone's got to make a living. And, you know, some voices are better for some of us than others. So I haven't read all the books. I haven't necessarily been super engaged in all the material. I'm not, like I said, I am not a Christian.
And so I noticed in the year that we, this group and I had spent together in the lead up, it's an online course for most of the work that we do that I had been holding at, you know, at arm's length in a way. And so a couple months before we were about to embark on our journey, I started noticing this behavior in myself. And I thought, wow, isn't that curious? So I cracked the spine on the Megan Waterson book, Mary Magdalene Revealed. And I still haven't gotten through that entire book. It's not a long read at all. But for me, the material in there is so deeply, deeply personal and moving and profound. So Megan Waterson talks at one point about a healer who she finds who teaches her how to do what I call shamanic journeying. And in fact, I teach a course on that, on that skill that is a part of human's birthright in my ever humble opinion.
And then there's all these other things. The author being so drawn to this work and yet considering herself, I think an atheist or at least not a Christian.
And her fear of traveling and going on her own pilgrimage, that's where I was at when I went on my pilgrimage. I'm not afraid of flying. But especially as I get older, it is, it just stresses me out to know and and it's physically very painful. I have arthritis in my hips and my knees and up and down my spine. And it's just part of aging. I was, I chose a career in, in kitchens and that is wonderful in some aspects and not so good in others. And, you know, there's consequences to that work. There's consequences, frankly, to everything.
So there was just a lot of resonance in, in the read and I found myself being so incredibly moved every paragraph that I was reading that material that it's just taken me quite a long time. So here we are. We went on this pilgrimage and I don't know exactly what I was thinking it was going to be. Actually, if I was to examine my thoughts about it, it was just, I was looking forward to a girl's trip. I had never been to France. Here I'm, I was 20 years in kitchens and, and classically trained French kitchens is where I cut my teeth. Excuse me. And yet I had never been to the homeland of hot cuisine. And so definitely that was something inside of me that, you know, I was curious about it was bringing up a lot of nerves.
My time spent in professional kitchens was not free from abuse. Excuse me. I started in the early mid 90s and completed many, many years later. And usually until the very end of my career, I was often the only woman behind the line at any given time until I was running the show. And then I created an all female line as it should be our rightful place in the kitchen. Oh, oh, a side note. Isn't that just the funniest thing that a woman's place is in the kitchen unless it's a professional kitchen. And then she is relegated to Garmage or pastry at best. I mean, maybe things are changing, but I don't see, I don't see much change, honestly, in that realm, at least not yet.
Oh, but here we are. We're in France. We're going to France. I was noticing that I was feeling a lot of emotions and the lead up to it. And on top of that, I had a pretty intense health emergency scare. It ended up being not well, we ended up being something we still don't know what it is. So I'll get back to you if I ever find out. But it wasn't the horror show that we thought it might be. So that's all for the best. And I had called, I call him my witch doctor. He's my energy healer and mentor and confidant. And so we were able to work through some of that process. But he said, okay, well, let me know how it goes after you walk that rose line. I'm feeling like there's big things coming up for you. And I laughed with him about it. And yeah, haha. Isn't that fun? Oh my gosh, excuse me. I think I do have my daughter's cold coming on.
Anyway, I honestly wasn't expecting very much. I was expecting to go see some cool places and learn some new history and, you know, see some relics. But I certainly also carry judgment about saints and relics and, you know, what the church props up as. I mean, I grew up in the 80s. I think there was some woman in Australia whose walls were crying and, you know, she saw Jesus in her toast or something like that. Okay, okay, whatever. And in fact, there's a book called Out of Egypt that was introduced to me at a very early age. And basically saying, well, there's literally no evidence that this guy named Jesus who did all these things actually ever existed. And believe me, we've looked. So my verdict is still out on whether or not that guy even ever existed. Of course, with some of the evidence of Mary Magdalene, it lends a little bit more credibility to this guy, Jesus, Yeshua, whatever the hell he was called. You'll either play, you hopefully you'll forgive my heretical nature. I'm not very reverent.
But there were two times on our trip that impacted me in ways that I can't quite explain, especially given how I feel. My thoughts and feelings on this whole Christianity thing. In fact, it really extends to all of Abrahamic monotheism. I think it's a toxic plague released upon the world and that we need to do things to rectify the harm that has been done for us. But the first one you've already heard about, if you've listened to my, I think, what 40 minutes of voice note about my experience at St. Maurice de la Mer and the water being next to that water, that spring that the Black Madonna, Sarah, and the Mary's prayed for. It was incredibly moving for me and continues to move through me.
And then, I think it was, and then we went to Mary Magdalene's cave up in the mountains in St. Baum. And again, oh, I mean, the hike itself is totally gorgeous. It's completely just stunning to see this building carved into the side of the mountain and to go into the cave and to see the clear water and to be with that. But excuse me, you go visit the relic. I think it's a piece of her femur bone, supposedly, that is encased in gold and glass behind the pulpit. And you ascend the steps and there it is glowing and it's in its cage. And it is mind altering. It's literally mind altering.
And that was a curious thing as well. I thought it was just me. I have had vestibular issues since pregnancy. I just don't, you know, descending stairs, I don't quite trust my feet. I'm kind of unsteady and I've been working with some practitioners on improving that. But I went up to the stairs and I saw the relic and I gave my offerings. And I noticed that I was off kilter and I thought, oh, well, that's okay. Well, I haven't experienced that this whole trip. But you know, I mean, it rears its ugly head more often than not. So whatever. And then as we were taking the hike down, many of the other women mentioned the same thing and mentioned observing others who were praying at the relic, who stood up on unsteady legs and had very similar experiences.
So that was quite interesting. And then, you know, coming home has been quite the experience. The integration process has been, has been a thing. It has been and, you know, jet lag is a thing. But the jet lag, I've traveled all over the world and I have never experienced it like this. It's been acute. And the integration on the way on this end of things has required quite a lot of sleep.
And I have always done dream work. I have been, you know, my grandfather was the one who noticed when I was 13, I would tell him that I was having these dreams. And then he shared ways that I could start to walk in those dreams, you know, through the works of Carlos Castaneda and whatnot. But nonetheless, they worked. And so lucid dreaming has been a part of my life since then. Just a few short years. Just a few short years.
And now I teach about dream work. So it is unsurprising to me that I'm coming home and I'm having all of these dreams, but the dreams are centered a lot around large bodies of rushing water and escaping the state, the militaristic aspects of the state. And I just find that so curious. I mean, I've always had a penchant for bad boys, men on the wrong side of the law, so to be dreaming of being, you know, a Jesus figures girlfriend and running from the law is, well, I can't say that I ever dated anyone who is Jesus like, I definitely dated someone who thought he was Jesus like. But I think there are, yeah, I think that that was some self-aggrandizement.
Anyway, the dreams have been incredible and moving. And so to come home and to claim Magdalene Priestess is something that has certainly shifted. I feel it deeply. And what is the deal with this particular Mary anyway? Because Mother Mary certainly, I have choice words, I think, for most of the figures that we get to see in Christianity, particularly when it comes to women. So, you know, what is it about this Mary that is either attractive or so abhorrent? What is it that's so dangerous? And frankly, I think that it's simply Mary being a woman, like a woman of the world, a woman who has lived in the world to her fullest extent.
She was a moneyed woman. She was more than likely an entrepreneur of sorts. So she knew how to run a business. She knew what made things sell, obviously. She funded the original Christian movement and look at how far that funding got the church. Her business acumen really helped to sell the gospel in whatever ways she did that. She was a woman who had sex, hence the church calling her a prostitute. If she was coupled, as she would have been with Jesus, that meant she had sex. And more than likely, she would have enjoyed it because those are part of the sacred sexual rights. Those are part of the sacred sexual practices, spiritual practices, by the way, of the Eocene sect of the Jews.
Also, if we believe that Jesus went and studied in what, India or wherever, he also would have been brought up in those tantric traditions on the fast track of spiritual growth. So Mary being a self-possessed woman who was capable of orgasms, who had sex, who partnered with Jesus, who had his baby, if the stories are to be believed as well, who likely, if she was having sex, would have had a child back then because contraception was not what it is today. Of course, America wants to take us back to those days. But back then, we did have herbal remedies before the church had gotten a hold of the wise women and killed them. So all of these things, I think, really contribute to the threat that Mary Magdalene is to the church at large these days.
But the biggest threat, of course, we know because of social media memes and all of the other women who love Mary Magdalene and who are coming out with her work. The fact that she talks about each of us having direct access to God, inherently possessed in ourselves, that is what makes her the most threatening. That's the primary threat to organized religion is the idea that one needs no interpretation for the Word of God because we all know it inherently in our own hearts. God speaks to each and every one of us in their own way. And that is very dangerous. Very dangerous for politics, for anyone who would want to rule over us, whether they be a Lord, a king, or a God.
And that, I think, is probably primarily where I find myself the most strongly connected to this idea of being a Magdalene priestess. In teaching about shamanic journeying, I am sharing with you the path of direct revelation. The path of direct revelation can be found through shamanic journey work. It's not the only way, it is one way. And by virtue of that alone, I take up that mantle of Magdalene priestess and I see myself reflected in her and in her story.