"The Feast of Mary Magdalene" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Dancing with Goddesses: An Archetypal Journey Through the Menstrual Cycle"
ON THJIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
July 22
The Feast of Mary Magdalene
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For most of Western history, if you’d
asked someone on the street who Mary Magdalene was, you’d have gotten the same
answer: a reformed prostitute, the sinful woman Jesus forgave, a symbol of
repentance and second chances. Almost none of that comes from the Bible. It
comes from a single homily delivered by a pope in Rome in the year 591; one man’s opinion, stated once,
that somehow calcified into thirteen centuries of Western Christian identity.
Today, July 22, the Catholic Church
celebrates the Feast of Mary Magdalene, and the story of how she got her actual
name back is a genuinely remarkable piece of religious history, running in
parallel with a much stranger, much older story about what a handful of ancient
Gnostic Christians believed she really was…
The Pope Who Invented a Prostitute
In 591 CE, Pope Gregory I delivered a homily that did
something the Gospels themselves never do; he merged three separate women: Mary
Magdalene, Mary of Bethany
(the sister of Martha and Lazarus), and the unnamed “sinful woman” of Luke 7 who washes Jesus’s
feet with her tears (and some of us had to actually sit through a re-enactment
of this in Catholic school!) into a single composite figure. Gregory’s
Magdalene became a former prostitute whose dramatic repentance made her a model
penitent for the entire Western Church. It’s a compelling image, and it
produced centuries of extraordinary art, from Titian to Caravaggio. But…it’s
also simply not what the biblical text says. The three women appear in entirely
separate passages, with nothing in the Greek connecting them, and Eastern
Orthodox Christianity never adopted Gregory’s conflation at all, honoring Mary
Magdalene the whole time as a myrrhbearer and witness to the
resurrection, no repentance narrative required.
Strip away Gregory’s invention and the actual Gospel material is arguably more remarkable than the myth. Luke 8 identifies Mary Magdalene as a woman Jesus healed of seven demons, who then became one of several women who financially supported his ministry “out of their own means.” She’s named specifically at the crucifixion in all four canonical Gospels, present when most of the male disciples had reportedly fled. And she’s the first witness to the resurrection in three of the four Gospels, the person Jesus specifically instructs to go tell the others what she’s seen. (This is is precisely why Thomas Aquinas, writing in the thirteenth century, gave her the title that’s stuck ever since: apostola apostolorum, “apostle to the apostles.” None of that required Gregory’s penitent-sinner narrative. It was sitting in the text the entire time.)
The unraveling of Gregory’s error
happened in two stages, decades apart, and almost nobody noticed the first one.
When the Roman Missal was revised following the Second Vatican Council in 1969,
the Vatican quietly separated the three women again, stating plainly that the
July 22 memorial “concerns only Saint Mary Magdalene” and has nothing to do
with either Mary of Bethany or the unnamed sinner of Luke 7. It barely
registered outside liturgical circles. The louder correction came in 2016, when
Pope Francis elevated the July 22 observance from a memorial to a full
feast—the same liturgical rank held by the Twelve Apostles, a distinction no
other woman besides the Virgin Mary holds on the General Roman Calendar. The
Vatican’s own decree was titled, fittingly, Apostolorum Apostola.
Archbishop Arthur Roche, explaining the
decision for the Vatican newspaper, wrote that it was meant to underscore Mary
Magdalene’s role as “a true and authentic evangelizer” and to prompt deeper
reflection on the dignity of women within the Church. Thirteen
hundred years after Gregory’s homily, and forty-seven years after the Church
quietly walked it back, Rome finally said the correction out loud.
The Gospel That Never Made the Cut
Running entirely outside this
Catholic timeline is a different, older, and considerably stranger Mary
Magdalene, preserved in a text the institutional Church never had any intention
of correcting into orthodoxy, because it was never part of the canon to begin
with. The Gospel of Mary,
a fragmentary Coptic text discovered in a Cairo bookstall in 1896 and dated by
scholars to roughly the second century, portrays Mary Magdalene not as a
witness who needs rehabilitating but as the disciple who understood Jesus best.
In the surviving pages, she comforts the other disciples after the crucifixion
and then describes a private vision Jesus gave her: a soul’s ascent through
hostile cosmic powers on its way back to its true origin. When she finishes,
Peter and Andrew turn on her; Andrew doubts the vision came from Jesus at all,
and Peter asks pointedly whether the Savior really would have “spoken privately
with a woman, in preference to us, and not openly.” It’s one of the earliest
surviving records of an argument about whether a woman’s spiritual authority
counts, and Mary Magdalene is standing directly in the middle of it, in a text
nobody in Rome was ever going to canonize. (Modern theories also suggest that Mary
was the daughter of a wealthy fisherman, and acted as the chief financial
patron of Jesus and the Apostles’ travels.)
It’s worth being precise here, because this is where popular imagination and actual doctrine, ancient or modern, tend to blur together. The idea of Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s “sacred partner” draws mainly from a single, much-discussed line in the Gospel of Philip, another Nag Hammadi text, which calls her Jesus’s koinonos (usually translated “companion”) and describes him kissing her, in a passage with damaged, illegible gaps exactly where the details would be. Scholars remain genuinely divided on whether this describes a romantic relationship, a specific Gnostic ritual of spiritual union, or a claim about her unique closeness to his teaching. However, what’s not divided is this: nothing in either the Gospel of Philip or the Gospel of Mary uses the term “co-Redemptrix.” That language belongs to a real but distinct and much later theological argument about the Virgin Mary, adopted only recently, and by only a small number of independent modern Gnostic churches, to describe Mary Magdalene instead.
OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... In honor of every woman whose story got told for her before
she got to tell it herself...
Dancing with Goddesses: An Archetypal Journey Through the Menstrual Cycle
By
Agnieszka Drabek-Prime | Aeon Spirit
This is a deliberate departure from
our usual pairings, and it's worth explaining why. Rather than reach for
another Gnostic-text sourcebook, this column wanted to spotlight a smaller
press doing genuinely good work in the same spirit that animates Mary Magdalene's
whole rehabilitation story: reclaiming something feminine that institutional
history spent centuries treating as shameful. Drabek-Prime, a Womb Medicine
Woman and Sacred Weaver working out of Cambridge, draws on goddess archetypes
to reframe the menstrual cycle, another subject with its own long history of
being shrouded in embarrassment and silence, as a source of wisdom and power
rather than something to hide. It's not a book about Mary Magdalene
specifically, and this column won't pretend otherwise, but the underlying
instinct, that the feminine sacred deserves to be spoken about plainly rather
than euphemistically, runs through both stories in exactly the same way. Our
thanks to Aeon Spirit for this powerful, timely, and important work!
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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