The Divine Guide of Mary Magdalene

 In Episode 43, we'll explore the power of the divine feminine, not in how she steps into the openings within the dominant culture, but rather what happens when these openings close. Listen for the ways Alison talks about how these dialogs mirrors our own personal work. At first, openings, and then the closings as our ego structures and our instinctual ways of being rise up and try to re-establish the homeostasis of cultural norms.

Transcript

 Hines MM 12.3.24 Part 2 Mixdown 4.compressed.mp3

Susan Clark: [00:00:00] Welcome back, Alison, as we explore the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and your new book, A Journey of Inquiry Through the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.

Alison Hine: [00:00:09] Well, it's a pleasure to be with you.

Susan Clark: [00:00:11] And thanks to all the listeners who are continuing on from our first session where we talked about the first two sections of the gospel. Alison, can you now set up what happens next in the gospel?

Alison Hine: [00:00:26] So we were just at the point of the break in the text, when at the end of dialog two, which is very distressing because of course, it would be wonderful to know what transpired between Mary Madgalene and Yeshua during that break. But we don’t know, in my book I speculate a little bit about that, but we don’t really know what the exchange was. So where we emerge is almost mid-sentence and Mary Madgalene is being attacked by what are called the powers or the archons, which are these demonic forces or forms in the imaginal realm and in the old metaphysics that would have been called the lunar realm. And that's a realm where spirits, dangerous Spirits arise. It's a domain of human consciousness that we can visit, but also we enter into after we die and people get trapped there. And there's a kind of journeying through to what's called Paradise or heaven. Well, she's in that realm. She is encountering incredibly demonic forces. Let me read you the first one. The force of desire, so this is the first force, the first power that comes in. Spoke: I   did not witness your descent. So he didn't know her before she came down. But now I see you are ascending. Stop. Why lie to yourself? You are mine. So you can see the possessiveness of this desire, the force of karmic desire, if you like. Collective karmic desire that wants to possess her. Stop! Don't go where you're going. Right. And she encounters two more powers. And then they all constellate into one massive force against her. And she says it is I who saw you first, but you never truly knew me. You took the garments that I wore to be me. But you never recognized my true self. So again, what do we see here? She's encountering the force of desire. And I don't know if you've encountered the force of desire. But when I encounter it, I can tell myself all I want. But I find myself in front of the refrigerator. Right. And that's tiny. And in a way, to think about this is the collective karma of human desire that is living in this intermediate realm between this realm of earth and heaven. Again, what do you see?

Susan Clark: [00:02:57] Well, to me, it was showing her strength again to be in the face of this. And as they're beginning to demand this possession. Right. That I control you. She is able to look at them. So instead of being totally thrown into fear and to feel that desire and to feel all of those emotions which are not about our spiritual awakening, but about our very earthy manifestations, our connection to that which is very base; to see her rise. Yes, to me it was very powerful.

Alison Hine: [00:03:31] It was a really interesting phrase in here. You took the garments that I wore to be me, but you never recognized my true self. So again, this is I mean, this is a real commentary on our time because we are a culture that is obsessed with image, with the surface, presentation, with how we look, what stuff we buy. It's all about the surface image and the true self is completely lost, disconnected. And she's saying you only see the surface. You actually don't know me.

Susan Clark: [00:04:08] The power of that oscillation of feeling into that space and saying, uh uh, I'm not afraid of you. You don't own me. You don't know me. Yeah.

Alison Hine: [00:04:18] So then she comes under the influence of the third power, which is known as ignorance, which again scrutinized her closely. So they're looking at her, trying to figure out what's going on. Where do you think you are going? You are the slave of wickedness, dominated by it and lacked discrimination. So again, you know, there's the patriarchy saying, you know, you're a woman, you're wicked, you're promiscuous. You know, all that history which may have been the early, earliest precursor to the whore story. So he's attacking her for being a woman and being promiscuous, and then he's attacking her for the lack of discrimination, which is interesting, right? Because she's showing her capacity for discrimination step after step after step. I mean, this is not somebody who doesn't have that spiritual intellect, if you like, the capacity to pierce through the veils, through the distortions and see the truth.

Susan Clark: [00:05:22] And I also found that to be so fascinating, because as you get into this metaphysical space, as you call it, as you begin to live in this, it does appear to those who are still primarily focused on the surface that there is no discrimination. There isn't the kind of discrimination that happens at the surface when you're in this metaphysical place.

Alison Hine: [00:05:46] Absolutely. You get the sense of a spiritual being, a spiritual consciousness that is rising. That is incredibly integrated with what we might call human capacities.

Susan Clark: [00:06:02] Say more. What do you mean by human capacities?

Alison Hine: [00:06:05] Well, we have the capacity to think. We have the capacity to think rationally, linearly, like that. Discursively. And that's one way that we can know things. And that's basically how the world we live in today operates. And that's how we were taught to think go from A to B to C. It's sort of the scientific method if you like. But there is a knowingness, a discrimination that is outside of that mental way of analyzing and working out what is going on. And she's living in that domain. She is outside of the way we think about things. But I think she's also outside of the mythic Way that she might have thought about things which had to do with this swinging between seasons, between the opposites. She is just piercing through. And to go back to what you said is a freshness of knowing that, yeah, that Jesus had, Yeshua had, but she also has.

Susan Clark: [00:07:15] And it also feels like this enlivening of the part, right? It's the intensification of the felt sense, that deep felt sense that comes from the heart and at the same time have the deeper intellectual discrimination that oscillates with that, that allows you to create that awareness. You know, Gebser calls it version, that understanding in between these different parts and using the interplay between these entities, these very chaotic entities, right, to illustrate that intensity, that vibration between those two factors.

Alison Hine: [00:07:54] What comes next is all the Seven Powers conglomerate into this massive assault on her, and they ask the question, so all of a sudden they don't know who she is anymore. They think they know who she is, but all of a sudden she's not fitting into their paradigm. So where do you originate? Manslayer? Where do you think you're going? Space conqueror? Well, when I landed on that in my early readings, I thought, what is it that they're perceiving that doesn't fit in their metaphysical view, in their distorted view of how things are? And this is where I felt, and that came more recently, was another way to see Mary Magdalene, which is that she was a spiritual warrior. So the phrase man slayer, right. Harkens back a bit to that, that she was a spiritual warrior in the sense, and she was also a Tai chi master in the sense that she never attacked them directly. She didn't throw it back. She just challenged them in ways that allowed her to move on.

Susan Clark: [00:09:09] Well, and it was a question, right? She came at them to raise more questions than she did to define anything, because she worked on a completely different position on the metaphysical plane.

Alison Hine: [00:09:20] And so you can see how to see Mary Magdalene as a spiritual warrior and a Tai chi master. All woven together is a very different image than perhaps what we think about Mary Magdalene, you know, from The Da Vinci Code or, you know, some of those kind of memes that are going around right now. This woman is formidable, and she's not entangled in the matrix of this domain, which in a sense is a reflection of patriarchy and the domination system. The lunar realm is the above of the below, which is also incredibly violent and cruel to most people, actually. I mean, if you were fortunate to be in the aristocracy, you had a reasonably good life, but for most people they didn't and they were threatened and so on. So again, she just grew in stature for me. Who is this woman? How did she develop this capacity to navigate this realm, which most people find terrifying and want all kinds of protection and so on? I mean, more and more, I just began to feel the power of her presence, you know?

Susan Clark: [00:10:36] And let me clarify, I understand you actually know the person who translated the version that you're working with.

Alison Hine: [00:10:43] Yes, yes I do.

Susan Clark: [00:10:44] And as you shared this with him, what was his response?

Alison Hine: [00:10:49] Well, I showed him a section. Actually, I showed him this section when he was visiting maybe a year ago or so, and he disappeared into his room and I'm going, eek! You know, he knows this text. And he came upstairs and he said, Alison, you have to keep writing, keep writing, keep writing.

Susan Clark: [00:11:10] So did he give you?

Alison Hine: [00:11:11] No. I mean, he didn't give me any guidance at all about whether what I was doing made sense or not. He just said, keep writing. And then when I sent him the draft of the whole text, I guess it was a year ago. Yes, in the fall. And I was still not sure about the title. He said, Alison, this is an inquiry. This is not a commentary in the usual sense of the word. It's an inquiry. And you're going through an inquiry with a text in a living way. And so it's a completely different way of offering Mary Magdalene to the reader.

Susan Clark: [00:11:53] Well, and that is what I loved about it, is that it drew me into an inquiry. It didn't feel passive. It drew me in. It engaged me into my own intensification awakening, because I would go back and read them again and again. They were so intriguing to read the translation after I'd done the historical context or the musings and looking at the context. Yeah.

Alison Hine: [00:12:19] And my sense is you can read that translation and it's sort of interesting, but if you don't penetrate, you're going to miss the power of it. You're going to miss the aliveness that we're both feeling right now, that when you get through the sort of surface way that the mind can read things, you know, you could read it. So I'm really interested in Mary Magdalene. So I'll read this text and you read this sort of interesting thing and you go, wow, that's amazing. But how is it amazing? That's what I became clearer and clearer to me. And so Mary Magdalene's response to this constellation of these demonic forces, to use that language or this collective karma that's living in this lunar realm, she sings and she proclaims her enlightenment, and she basically sings the vision of her awakening into the full bodied transcendence and then goes silent because at that point there aren't any words. It's just the silence of mystery or the absolute. And it's so poignant at that moment that it's silence. And I just keep having this sense that, as she told the story to her friends, that they too were carried in a way through this narrative and were transported for a while into the silence of the transcendent.

Alison Hine: [00:13:49] And then, of course, it goes wrong. In dialog four, all of a sudden, the door that opened early in dialog two, where Peter asks her to tell them what she had learned, closes. And right away you have two of the disciples accusing her of lying, that she's made all this up. And how could a woman say all this? So the door of patriarchy comes slamming in, and then the story in the last dialog, which is short, is she weeps and says, why do you think I would lie to you? And then one of the disciples stands up and defends her and says, Peter, you have a temper, basically, and you're quick to get angry. And he reminds them again of the blessing and the mission that Yeshua gave to them at the end of the first dialog, and then they disappear and she disappears. And we don't hear from her again except through legends.

Susan Clark: [00:14:54] And yet to have that be the ending to this gospel is setting the reality, the framework in which she's placed, as no matter how much you've created this new vision of femininity, of the sacred feminine, of the warrior feminine, it still lives within a patriarchy that can only stay open for so long.

Alison Hine: [00:15:18] So it's interesting, one of the things and it happens in two places. So the question at the end of this exchange she has with Yeshua in the visionary encounter with him, where he brings her to the eye of the heart. The next thing that you're in is this assault by the powers and the Archons. And so the question is, why does that happen? And then again, in the disciples, let's assume that they were transported a little bit and they were kind of at peace and quiet. Why does the door shut like that? That happens all the way along the spiritual path that you have an opening, and then the ego structure or the instinctual structures come back to reestablish the homeostasis. So you could say that Mary Magdalene had this incredible opening and then had to deal with the shadowland of the lunar realm, as the revelation was showing her more about what reality is like. And then she had to navigate through that. Here we see the disciples not being able to tolerate this transcendent space, particularly coming through a woman, and they reestablish the homeostasis of patriarchy and their certainty.

Susan Clark: [00:16:39] So and I love that because it takes it to the work that you're doing that is part of the book writing, but is what you're more involved in on a daily basis, which you call the Rewilding of Christianity, which I find just in itself a delightful term. Would you like to describe a little bit of that rewilding as a way in which we can play with this? We call it the patriarchy, but it's really a well-honed operational system that humans have evolved into. And what is Rewilding Christianity do with that? How does it play with that?

Alison Hine: [00:17:17] Well, I think since Vatican Two there has been an opening, the monastic tradition basically moved from sort of medieval monastic life to something much more humane and relevant to this world, so that you weren't just cloistered forever with a very oppressive hierarchical structure that often was very abusive. And we have stories of people, Karen Armstrong being one of them, that tell the horrors of that. So there was an opening, right. And then you have people like Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating that brought in contemplative prayer to us. And up until now, if you went to church, you got, you know, the liturgy, but you didn't get a practice, you got blessed, you got the Eucharist, but you didn't actually get a practice. So in comes centering prayer and contemplative prayer within Christianity. And that's all within the Western stream of Christianity, which is the apostle Paul. And a lot of John were the stream that went into the West, and Christianity became the religion of the empire with Constantine, and it became very romanized. Romans were engineers, were warriors, you know, so it becomes a very doctrinal system of belief and loss that way for a long time. Of course, there were these mystics that would come along and flower, and then many of them got, you know, silenced or burned at the stake. So there has been this aliveness that's attempted to come through in Christianity in significant ways, but it always was pushed back to, okay, it's about believing. It's not about experiencing and knowing.

Susan Clark: [00:19:12] Because when you find that truth yourself, when you find that enlivenment yourself, you don't always follow dogma.

Alison Hine: [00:19:20] No, you don't, because it doesn't make sense anymore. You know, why do I have to believe in the virgin birth? I mean, that's the other thing, is that modernity has shown that the world wasn't invented in six days. So in order to believe that, you have to have a very literal interpretation and believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, which is a lot of what fundamentalism is about. So that's the sort of Western stream of Christianity that has become quite progressive. And in parts you have well-known writers like Cynthia Bourgeault and people like her who've been bringing in a new vision of a living Christianity. My colleague Lynn Bowman, who wrote the translation for this, ended up translating the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and the Gospel of Philip. And what's become clear is that those texts, and this one also Mary Magdalene, are not within the Roman tradition. They're in within the Jewish tradition. So you have to remember that Yeshua was a Jew. There was no such thing as Christianity at that point. They were called the followers of the way. That was about as much as it was defined. And so if you start seeing it as Jewish, Semitic. It has a very different root to it and history to it. It goes way back to the First Temple and how it was a host to Sophia, wisdom, Shekhinah, the light, the whole first temple was devoted to her. And then she gets kicked out around 500 BC. And there's a lot of history there, right? And so you have this tradition that then ends up being more and more doctrinal, more and more about piety, more and more about rules that Jesus reacts against. He's just blowing it apart, saying, no, that's not it. You know, you've destroyed my temple. This is not my father's temple. And so it's a different stream that considers that Jesus was a remarkable, perhaps unique human being that came forward in this incredible way, but was profoundly a wisdom teacher rather than He's the Son of God, and he sits on the right side. And so that whole mythology. Right. It's about wisdom.

Susan Clark: [00:21:59] And is it about wisdom? But it's experiential wisdom. It's wisdom that comes from practice.

Alison Hine: [00:22:06] It's all about being incarnated and living and having practices that allows you to open the portal, the eye of the heart, to be able to receive and listen to wisdom who's speaking all the time.

Susan Clark: [00:22:21] And in essence, rewilding what we think Christianity is today. Back to that experiential aspect.

Alison Hine: [00:22:29] Yeah. And so for me, Mary Magdalene was a revivifying, if you like, of the image of her, which had become sort of stereotypical or non-existent into a living presence that we can experience, and we can invoke her by asking for her to show up. And she does. You know, I mean, I don't know if you're feeling the intensity at the moment, but I certainly am. And it isn't neutral. It isn't boring, it isn't flat, it isn't fixed even.

Susan Clark: [00:23:04] And it's not. I'm not receiving a recitation with the hope of getting it. Yes, without the hope of getting it. I think that's so well said. And yet that also explains, I suspect, a lot of how people are moving away from the church, have been for a while, and are looking for something different, and that what I found so interesting in your book about Mary Magdalene is it's calling us to a new place, a rewilding, a place of experiential understanding.

Alison Hine: [00:23:38] One of the other things that I think, if you think about this in Gebserian terms, the mythology, the great myths died a long time ago, and they're just stories that you learn in elementary school, and they don't mean very much. This story could be seen as a great mythic story of the divine feminine on her own heroic journey. Right. And so we're bringing back the livingness of the mythic world, which was full of potency, full of energy, full of terrors and beauties and all kinds of things that they were living with in an immersive way. Mhm. I mean, my God, we have the mythology of this country, of the great exceptionalism. It doesn't hold the spiritual juice that these ancient stories did. And now they have to be brought in. Not like we're going to go back to that. But how do they inform us now as to what is being called upon us to step into?

Susan Clark: [00:24:47] And what I hear you saying is so powerful for me. It isn't that we go back to learning the old stories and absorbing them, it's that we need to live into. Use these as guides for experiential understanding of developing that felt sense, that heart that does not reside outside of our logical constructs. And as Gebser says, it's really the blending of these so that it comes back to our own experiences of it.

Alison Hine: [00:25:17] The sense of living mythology is actually relevant in our time. And if you dive into the myth of Persephone that I have been fascinated by, and it is a wondrous story, and it has meaning now. But if you take it very literally to our modern ears, that's not going to go very far.

Susan Clark: [00:25:41] But how do you find Persephone in your own life? Where is she manifesting? How are you living that out? That's a really interesting question to me.

Alison Hine: [00:25:53] Yeah, it brings us right into our recent election. And Persephone, as a mythology of the descent into the underworld, happened just before the election, and it continues to this day. There is something about her journey into the underworld and the circumstances under which she was taken down, which I think are relevant now. So the story is that she was in a lovely springtime field, and Hades, the god of the underworld, comes, rapes her, kidnaps her, and takes her down into Hades or hell. And you know, this is a horrifying story, except that if you look at it from a more Jungian perspective, it's actually the descent into the collective unconscious where in this mythological story, she becomes married to Hades and becomes the queen of the underworld. She's the depth of wisdom in the collective unconscious. And so when we go down into that world, we think that we're just being taken down into a realm of horror and difficulty. And you see that in the third dialog. But actually it's a descent into the deepest source of wisdom.

Susan Clark: [00:27:32] And, Alison, are you equating then what Mary Magdalene goes through in this third section, really to immersement of Persephone in the underworld.

Alison Hine: [00:27:43] Yes. And I think there's a real resonance here. And on the one hand, you could say that when we go down into the underworld, in our deep inner work, we're going down into our personal shadow, and we're having to confront all the aspects that we have buried in that descent. I think that what Mary Magdalene is doing is she's going down into the underworld, which we called earlier, the lunar realm at an archetypal level. And so she's encountering powers that are far greater than the powers that we might experience as we go down. My sense is that when she met Yeshua at the Jordan Valley at his baptism. The story goes that he exorcized the demons from her. The seven deadly demons. And my sense is that what he exorcized was her personal shadow land. So she had already done some really deep work. And here she is revisiting this in the imaginal or the lunar realm, and is charting a pathway through these archetypal forces. And so I think we are living in a time like that. We have all been traveling in an underworld that's been growing for, you know, at least eight years, but probably longer than that. And we've been struggling with what this means and how this exists, and it's now ratcheted up at a global level. And so we're seeing this descent, this disintegration of the structures of democracy and the flowering of, so to speak, of the forces of authoritarianism, of polarization, of hatred and so on. So there's something very resonant about our time, Persephone, as she's going down and becomes wisdom. Right. And Mary Magdalene. So the question is, what is the wisdom that Persephone, now the queen of Hades, sometimes known as the Queen of death, what is she to teach us? And one of the fascinating things is that while she's down there, she refuses to eat any of the food he offers her, but at the very end she's willing to take six pomegranate seeds and eat them.

Speaker3: [00:30:24] Mhm.

Alison Hine: [00:30:24] The story goes, is that that determined how long she had to stay below ground, and how long she could stay above ground in the surface of the world in the season of spring, summer and fall with her mother.

Speaker3: [00:30:39] Mhm.

Alison Hine: [00:30:40] So if you take that metaphor of the pomegranate seed a little further and wonder, what is it that those seeds represent for wisdom for us now that we are actually being asked to eat, to digest, to metabolize, so that we can ascend to the surface in a more and more dystopian world. It's a very powerful, mythic story that over time, of course, lost its potency as we studied it in elementary school. And it was sort of an interesting story.

Susan Clark: [00:31:18] So then in the third section, as everything kind of closes down the opening that was there within the patriarchy, within this organizational structure of our culture, as that shuts down and this idea of moving into the underworld really represents something that's really challenging for us. It's not an easy journey for us to take, and for us to step into this place and begin to explore what are those seeds of wisdom that allow us to emerge during this dystopian time, as you called it?

Speaker3: [00:31:49] Yes.

Susan Clark: [00:31:51] That's really the power of this part of Mary Magdalene's gospel for you. Is that right?

Alison Hine: [00:31:57] I would say yes. I mean, the potency that she navigates this really dangerous, difficult, spiritual, well, let's call it the lunar realm, is such a potent reminder of what we are called to do right now. And I'll just bring in one more thing here, which is there's a Wendell Berry poem that is an extraordinary poem that ends with the line, practice resurrection. So what if those seeds are actually an invitation from the depths that Mary Magdalene was traversing and that Persephone inhabited? Right? To discover what it means to practice standing up like she did. To practice resurrection in the now. Not as a one shot deal that Jesus went through, but in fact, something that we can do moment by moment if we're actually aligned with the ground of our being, the soul of our being and all that's beyond that. I mean, what an amazing challenge for now. And, you know, personally, I feel it may take a crisis like this for people to wake up to that.

Susan Clark: [00:33:16] It feels as if it's like keeping the flame burning.

Speaker3: [00:33:19] Exactly.

Susan Clark: [00:33:20] During these times.

Alison Hine: [00:33:21] We have to keep the flame burning. Because another way to think about the underworld, from a Jungian point of view, is that presence has been so repressed by modernity that actually it lives in the underworld. And so when you go through all that unconscious material, what do you find at the bottom of it? Or as you open more and more in a kind of surrendered way to it, you discover that all the things that you long for actually arise in the depths of the underworld, that you then bring up to the world of the surface that we live in. And that's the gift that we give during this time. And we go back and down, up and down in a kind of cycling process. And it takes great courage, but there's great gifts there.

Susan Clark: [00:34:16] And I can really see how Mary Magdalene really helped you with that. This gospel has really helped you.

Alison Hine: [00:34:22] This insight about Persephone and the resonance with Mary Magdalene didn't happen until around the election. So it was months after I wrote the book.

Susan Clark: [00:34:30] So it happened after the election. But I suspect that Mary Magdalene was influencing while you were writing the book as well.

Alison Hine: [00:34:38] There were times when I just said, I can't do this. It's just too much. I can't do it. And so I would put it aside for months, and then she would she would start bugging me. And so if you listen to the little bugging, you know, the little tapping on the window. So we have to listen, we have to listen. We have to feel into our embodiment. If we just stay on the surface, we're just locked up in the crazy world that we're living in. But in the depths she is there to teach us, and we're going to need to pay attention to her because she has much to say.

Susan Clark: [00:35:16] Oh, Alison, this has been so wonderful. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your time.

Speaker3: [00:35:22] Thank you.

Alison Hine: [00:35:22] It's been wonderful. It's fun to play with her in her presence.

Susan Clark: [00:35:26] Yes, absolutely.