Episode 72 : Easter - The Hidden Feminine Fragments

Easter is rarely questioned.

It’s presented as a fixed story, something that happened once, something to either believe in or dismiss, but when you begin to look at how it is timed, how it sits within the cycles of the sun and the moon, and how closely it mirrors the rhythms of the natural world, it becomes clear that there is something much deeper moving underneath it.

In this episode, Becky explores Easter as a layered, living pattern rather than a singular religious event, bringing together the Spring Equinox, lunar cycles, ancient fertility symbolism, and the ways in which older traditions were absorbed and reframed over time.

This conversation moves through Passover and the symbolism of the lamb, the threshold marked by blood, and what it means to stand at a point where something is ending and something else is beginning, without softening the parts of the story that feel uncomfortable or confronting.

It also revisits the story of Eve, as a symbol of life entering the body and consciousness choosing experience, alongside a more grounded perspective on Lilith that moves beyond surface-level reclamation.

The episode then explores the crucifixion through the lens of the body, including the wound at Christ’s side and the imagery of blood and water, and how this connects to deeper themes of creation, birth, and rebirth.

At the centre of it all is Mary Magdalene, not as a peripheral figure, but as the one who witnesses, recognises, and carries the moment of resurrection, and what it means that her role has been minimised, and is now being remembered.

This is an episode about thresholds.

About endings that are not final.

And about how these patterns are not separate from your life, but something you are moving through constantly, especially within the initiating energy of Aries season.

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Becky:

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www.therosealmanac.com

Laura:

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www.lauraclaytonwellness.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:02

So, welcome back to the podcast today. It's just me, Becky. I'm going to be talking about Easter and springtime and some storytelling around that. So, I want to first talk about Easter and how it is not a random date in the calendar. If you think about Easter, maybe when you're planning your holidays through the year, you kind of have to look it up in your diary and say, when is Easter? Is it early? Is it late? When is it? And that is because it is timed through the solar calendar and the lunar calendar. So it always makes me laugh that kind of astrology gets so distanced from religion and sort of frowned upon. Um and yeah, of course, the in the reasons why that might be are very interesting to explore in and of themselves. But the fact is, Easter is timed through the movements of the sun and the moon. And this tying together, therefore, of masculine and feminine energy, which if we unpick the different threads of Easter, I'm going to show you how that is just so woven through everything. You know, we're so conditioned with religion to think about Easter purely as being, you know, the story of Christ and the crucifixion and the resurrection, which is of course a big part of it. But I promise you the women are there. I promise you the feminine energy is coded through the story of Christ. If you have the eyes to see and um the mind, really, to look beyond the surface of things, which, if you know the podcast and you know me, that's just my thing that I love to do. So yeah, really hope to take you on a beautiful journey with all of that today. But coming back to this timing of Easter, that always happens on the Sunday following the first full moon, which follows the spring equinox. So the equinox is the day of the year, it happens twice a year in the spring and in autumn when day and night are equal. So spring equinox, equal day and night, but then as we know, as we move into summer, the days start getting longer. And that would, of course, been something to celebrate um millennia ago because celebrating the end of the coldness and the barrenness of winter and the food and warmth that would follow with spring and summer. So Equinox this year happened on the 20th of March. We then have the full moon in Libra happening. I'm recording this at the end of March, so it happens on uh Thursday this week on the 2nd of April, and then Easter Sunday is the 5th of April. But like I say, it changes every year, and that's because the moon cycles, there are 13 in a year, so this is why Easter shifts from being early or late, depending on how the moon cycles are working. And yeah, we have this interlinking of the masculine and the feminine energy here with the sun and our 24-hour day and the moon cycle with these 13 moon cycles and 29-day cycles for each moon cycle linking to the feminine menstrual cycle. So, this fact that both the solar and the lunar calendars are referenced with the timing of Easter, unlike Christmas, which is just the shortest day of the year, the 21st of December is the kind of the closest date to Christmas, tells you that Easter itself is an important portal that we move through. And yeah, it's so interesting that Easter is timed at this time because we have to understand what happened when Christianity spread via the Roman Empire. Like it doesn't arrive into empty land that already doesn't have culture, it arrives into cultures that already have rhythms, festivals, their own ways of marking time and meaning in the world. And rather than trying to erase all of that, which would have been impossible for the church to do, it layers itself on top, so makes it sort of feel natural. It keeps the timing but reframes the story. It takes what people already knew and felt to be true and gives it a new narrative. So this is like literally how empires work, right? Because empire needs cohesion that already exists, shared systems and calendars and beliefs that sort of allow these vast numbers of people to buy into it. So that's an interesting thing in and of itself. Something else that I think is interesting about the name of Easter is I don't know if you have heard of Ostara, which is the pagan name for spring equinox. And think of the similarity there to the word Easter. Um it's said that Ostara was the goddess that represent the return of the light on this threshold day between darkness and light. And we also have many symbols associated with this time of year, like eggs, um, which hold potential of life, the flowers that are these new shoots perfectly rising through the soil when the land was perhaps so barren only a few weeks before, and then hares and rabbits, which have long been associated with fertility due to their uh rapid reproduction and the instinct that they have to multiply and create, all of it really connecting to this same idea of life returning again, life insisting on returning again, no matter what. It can give us this sort of connection to death and rebirth that no matter what, when we think everything is dead in winter, life chooses itself over and over again. And of course, that is so linked to this story that Christianity has overlaid over the top with the idea of crucifixion and resurrection that follows on. Something else that I think is really fascinating about this time of year is how we have April Fool's Day on the 1st of April, and we've got to think like, why is that? And I think it's to do with the calendar shift itself. So when the Gregorian calendar came into play and the 1st of January became the first day of the year, the start of the year, it's like through having the first of April, when kind of spring is really kicked in by them, April Fool's Day emerges. It's like the undertone of ridicule towards the people that stayed connected to the earth and the original cycles to ridicule them. And then instead, April Fools, instead of spring and like connecting with the feminine nature of the earth, kind of Easter is imposed as this story about a man who died for everyone and then is reborn, which of course there's truth to that, but it's very much trying to paper over the connection to the land and replace it with religion, and that you were a fool if you still, I don't know, did the sort of pagan festivals that would have been more prevalent at the time. And I think the the fool is interesting as a word itself, because often the fool is the one who steps outside of convention and follows something that's more instinctive to them rather than something that has been imposed, and even the fool card, which is the first card in the tarot deck here, is this energy that will take a chance on something and might look foolish as a result of it, and yeah, it's kind of showing what religion perhaps didn't want people to do was think for themselves. Like religion brings all of the rules and the dogma so that you don't need to think for yourself, and so to be foolish was to step outside of that convention, and I think there's also an inherent mocking of the feminine with this, because of course, Mother Earth cycles are feminine with her seasons and her connection to the moon and even to the sun, you know. Um, it was another way of distancing and dismissing feminine energy. Another festival that happens in the Jewish culture at this time is Passover, which is quite a tough story to kind of look at. It's a story of people who were on the edge of leaving the land and having to walk across the Red Sea to avoid a series of plagues which were escalating, intensifying. And whether you read this literally or symbolically, it really is a sense of the world reaching its limit and cannot continue in the way that it has been. Um and maybe that's why I've been drawn to talk about Passover today on this podcast, because there is a sense that the world itself is at its own Passover right now. Uh, we can see the where things are crumbling, where we have like this war machine that just keeps going, and why is that? Uh we can pretend it's for liberation, and I'm not saying certain people haven't been liberated through the wars that happen, but and to me, and this is my personal opinion, and you can take it or leave it, it feels very much like a money-making machine, and in a way, a form of ritual sacrifice. So interesting. We're you know, deep in war, as I record this, with all the terrible things that are happening in Iran, no matter what side of the fence you sit on. Death is never uh on a big scale like this something that you can look at and smile with. But anyway, going back to Passover, what happened on Passover was a lamb was taken and sacrificed and its blood placed above the threshold of the doorway of the home, so that death would pass over that space, so that they thought there was kind of this um angel of death or this force of death that was taking people through plague, that someone had already died with the lamb being sacrificed, and so no one else would need to die as a result of that. Uh, and the lamb itself represents innocence because a lot of children were dying. The lamb, this innocent life that has just been born and its blood, its life force energy offered up at the threshold of the home in this way. And the threshold itself is an important um kind of symbol in that it is the start of one place and the beginning of another. We go from outside into inside. So it's this idea of protecting the home, but also the continuity of life, life carrying on when everything around it appears to be dying and breaking down. And that's interesting, isn't it? That the lamb definitely remains part of Easter. Sort of the lambs are always born in February, and then they're sacrificed at this time of year for food. I don't know who's having lamb for their um Easter Sunday dinner, but this is where that um ritual comes from, and I think that's okay, you know. If you I'm not judging whether you eat lamb or you don't eat lamb, but I'm saying there is a connection here to Passover and to know consciously and feel into yourself if that feels like something you want to honour or not. Um so, yes, like this pattern of death and rebirth here again. Uh, and I feel it feels like I'm gonna go off on a tangent, but I'm not really because I'm gonna bring in the story of Eve here. If you've listened to the podcast the last few weeks, I've talked about Eve a little bit because she is prevalent in the book that I'm writing at the moment, and she is positioned as the one who called caused the fall, the one who brought suffering into the world. And I don't know if you're listening to this, maybe you've heard of Lilith, who was Adam's first wife before Eve, and she was the one who refused, who refused to be dominated, it said, although actually there's no reference of this in the in the Bible or in the myths that followed. It feels like Lilith has really been reclaimed as the rise of the feminine energy, uh, and her story kind of told to suit our own narrative there that yes, she she left the garden, she chose herself. Um, and what happened when she left the garden was yeah, she was banished there forever. And there is truth in feeling that reclamation as and connecting with Lilith's energy as like a sovereign no. But I think it's really worth going in there because there's to me, there's a deeper layer that sits underneath all of these stories of Adam and Eve and Lilith because it said Eve came after this kind of failed attempt by God to create Lilith, who came from the same earth as Adam, this idea that they would be complete equals and they couldn't work it out right, whatever the story is, she left, she banished herself from the garden. And what I really get from that story is the power actually of the feminine energy that can create and destroy. Um, because underneath all the myths and fables, Adam really is not a man. Adam comes from the word Adama, which means earth and means humanity. So it actually represents men and women, uh, the word Adam. And Eve is not really a woman. Eve is life, Eve is the animating force, the divine feminine presence that brings consciousness, this human flesh, into form, into human as we know it now. So it's like when she chooses the apple. Well, it's not really an apple, but I'm gonna say apple for the sake of this podcast, because you probably all understand that reference. It is not a mistake in the way that it's been framed. It is the moment that consciousness awakens, life becomes conscious of itself when the divine feminine presence enters. Uh, and the divine feminine presence is actually the Holy Spirit. And what's interesting is the divine feminine presence or Holy Spirit was actually always a feminine uh frequency, always a feminine word in Hebrew and in Aramaic, where it was originally written about. And then it was sort of denuted uh when the stories about the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit uh came into being in the Bible. The Holy Spirit was no longer referenced as feminine, but just as this sort of gender-neutral force. So is yet another attempt by the church to kind of make the feminine smaller here. But the original story is, yeah, the Holy Spirit was always a feminine, powerful, powerful presence. So, yes, this moment carries consequence, um, but it is an expansion. It is, if it weren't for this story, where whichever way you look at it, consciousness decided to become embodied in human form, we wouldn't exist. So there is this idea with Eve that she came from Adam's rib, and I think when I've seen kind of paintings and pictures of um Jesus on the crucifixion to kind of bring it back to Easter, and he is stabbed in his side, and the wound at the side is said to pour blood and water, and that is like the Yoni bleeding every month. So here is the feminine coding or part of the feminine coding in the story of the crucifixion, in the same way that Eve is said in the myth to be birthed from Adam's rib. There's like an overlap between those two stories, one being about death and one being about life. But either way, like the feminine Yoni is coded in there, albeit you know, not spoken about in church. Um, but yeah, this idea of the coding being there, and we've got to think the people that wrote the men that wrote the stories of Adam and Eve and the crucifixion were men writing about men for men, and then it's been men who have preserved these stories. It's only when we look at them with a lens of hermeneutical suspicion, which is like, why is that? Why are things written the way that they are that we can sort of see these gaps in the stories that are so so fascinating? You know, the blood and the water that pour from this wound on the side of Christ, the substances of birth, like the amniotic fluid, they are what's around life in the womb and accompany accompany us into the world, and it is this direct epo echo of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. Um, this mirroring that from one side life is taken, and yet from the other side, life is released, and we kind of have to take the gender in a way out of it, you know, such a pattern of linking death and birth in a way that can't easily be separated. And this would not have been, you know, not intentional with the old testament and the the new testament. It's just if we're looking at it through this like higher consciousness lens, um, it's just a really interesting sort of process to go through. And then I can't talk about Easter without talking about Mary Magdalene, who is not mentioned, um, or she is mentioned, but it's very kind of in passing in the Bible, and she is not peripheral to this whole story. Uh, it's said that when Jesus walked to Golgotha, where he was crucified, there were three women that stood at the bottom of the cross, his mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and a third Mary, Mary of Clopas. And none of the male disciples were there. They were too afraid to say that they supported uh Jesus and Yeshua at that point where he is being crucified for being this radical kind of man who goes around turning you know water into wine and uh enacting miracles and all of this stuff that the Jewish Church did not want. And so, yeah, these three women are at the foot of the crucifixion, and there are stories that exist that say it was through the magic that they did um with their womb energy, the womb being the place of um growing a baby, right? The place of new life itself, this cosmic force that, through the magic they did in their wombs while he was being crucified, that allowed him to. Be reborn, and I don't think when I feel into the story, I don't feel like they knew what was going to happen if he was literally going to come back to life, if he were they were going to be able to stop him breathing and he come back to life, or if it would just be his light body that resurrected afterwards. But you know, the name Mary is a really interesting name. They didn't have a word for priestess in those days. And if you were born a Mary, if you were named a Mary, it was because you were being born into a lineage where you were given the mystery school teachings. Uh and Mary Magdalene was a high priestess who was given this initiation and this training. And some say that she became Yeshua's Jesus' wife. Um, and in the Bible it does say that he rose when he resurrected to appear to Mary Magdalene. Uh, and why would he choose her to appear to, like if she wasn't someone important? But either way, what I think is fascinating is it is that these women, these women that are witnessing the crucifixion, remaining where the men can't stay, and it takes something really powerful to stay present in you know, witnessing the death of someone that you deeply, deeply love, and then they do their anointing rituals and wrap his body, and then it's when Mary Magdalene goes back to the cave where he has been entombed the night before that she knows something has happened and he appears to her. Um, without her being the witness of all of this, and if the womb magic part of it is true, but let's imagine it is, then like the whole thing couldn't have even happened without these women being there to witness it. And she is just completely her part is so downplayed in the whole story of it, and there's some amazing books that you can read about Mary Magdalene, and I think more and more people are waking up to and remembering who she was, and this isn't through like lots of books coming out, but perhaps through their own experience of their own stories in life being rewritten or um diminished, dismissed. And Mary Magdalene is literally standing at this threshold between death and life, holding the space for this man that she deeply loved, witnessing his transition and seeing something that can't be proven but is known to her, like her intuition that doesn't rely on somebody else seeing him. And maybe that's why she was min minimized in the way that she was, because yeah, and we all probably know as women uh what it feels like to have your intuition and what you know in your heart uh to be true, to be questioned. And despite of all of this, yeah, so many women remembering her. And Mary Magdalene was taught things by Yeshua that even his other 12 disciples were not taught. It's said that Yeshua had kind of three levels of teaching where he taught to the masses like the basics of his teaching. Then the next level of like initiation that he taught was to his 12 disciples. And then it's said that he shared wisdom with Mary Magdalene, like his most private and uh sort of high consciousness teachings that he only shared with her. And it's through Mary Magdalene um went on to teach his true teachings, it's said, uh, that she fled to Egypt after the resurrection because she was no longer safe uh where she was living, fled to Egypt, and then it's said that after that she travelled across to France, and there's a whole region of France, uh the Cathar region of France, that like really uh embodies these Mary Magdalene teachings. And it said that she she died in France, um, where she spent many years teaching. It's this is where her name uh because she became the apostle to the apostles, the teacher of the teachers uh through this region of France. Um, and it said she at the end of her life spent many years meditating in these very specific caves in France. And yeah, I often wonder what she was doing, like maybe with her energetic forces, sort of encoding the field or the Akashic field, or like the empty space that exists, so that 2,000 years later women would remember her story and feel compelled to talk about it. Because of course, what happened with Mary Magdalene was she was called the repentant sinner and a whore, and through Pope Gregory, very early on in Christianity, written to be a prostitute, so that she was distanced from Christ. And I just think it's incredible, really, that everywhere you look in Christianity, the feminine is hidden or diminished. Yet the fact is, like priests literally wear dresses, it's why they wear dresses, is to embody the feminine energy because the Holy Spirit is feminine and they know the Holy Spirit is feminine, and then there's this sort of resistance by the church to admit that Jesus Yeshua would have been in a relationship with a woman when he didn't live an ascetic life, and an ascetic life is one that you know, where you deny yourself kind of sex and rich food and things like that. We know like he turned water into wine, like alcohol. Um, he did not live an ascetic life, uh, and that's one of the reasons, as well, that the sort of Jewish community didn't accept him, and that's why he was crucified in the first place. And so his in history, like his wife and his own relationships are not spoken about, and I think it's to sort of distance us from the sacredness of first of all, divine union and the masculine and the feminine energy within ourselves, but then you know, replicating that divine union with each other is like you know, less than because Christ didn't do it, so yeah, there's just so much there, isn't there, to sort of unpick. Um, but the point is, yeah, Mary Magdalene written as this repentant whore, and I think women who are really reading more about her, reading books about her, discovering her teachings, uh, because there is a gospel of Mary that was found uh in Nag Hammadi. Uh, and it's only been published recently. I think it was like in the 1970s, I want to say the 1970s, but I'm I haven't got my notes on that to confirm it. So fairly recently that the Gospel of Mary was published, and guess what? Pages of it are missing, but there's still some real key teachings in that Gospel of Mary that are not anywhere else. And I think it's amazing that her story survived um and was found with some other texts that in Nag Hammadi, in uh, I think it was in some ancient vase or something that cracked open, and there were all these scriptures in there, including the Gospel of Philip and um other documents that sort of tell the story differently. But I I really feel like that book was not published until sort of the collective consciousness, the group consciousness across the world was high enough to receive it. And I think it's now women really are seeing their stories in Mary Magdalene where you know they've been diminished or kind of classified as many women have had their psyche sort of split. That old tale of the Virgin and the Whore, which is kind of, you know, you've got Mary Magdalene who is depicted in this way, and then the other Mary, and the Virgin Mary is like such a pure soul that we can't see ourselves there either. So this kind of split of the feminine psyche kind of can't be underestimated, the impact of this on women today, and I think women are finally rising this rising of female energy, but more than that, the rising of feminine energy generally, which is rising the qualities such as compassion, love, nurturing, and putting this energy front and centre of our society, which God, it's what the world needs at the moment. So I think there's a reason that her energy is coming to light so much more at the moment because we're ready to reembody it. And it was said that Mary Magdalene would never be reincarnated, um, but that her energy would rise through all women at a point in time when uh we're ready to receive it and ready to do something with it. And some also say that this rising of the divine feminine energy and Mary Magdalene, who is said to be the kind of feminine Christ, the equal to Jesus when he was alive, and so some say the second coming of Christ is actually this rising of divine feminine energy, which allows Christ consciousness to be complete, to have both facets. When a lot of people believe in it, these days, this week that we call holy week is not just a religious historical marker, it's an energetic cycle that we move through each year, and so fascinating as well that it happens in Aries season, the first sign of the zodiac, where life is reborn, and we have the opportunity to manifest new beginnings. We all have Aries somewhere in our birth chart, and I really encourage you to go and look at your birth chart. Where does Aries fall in your chart? For me, it's my eighth house of death and rebirth. Um, but at this time of year, every year in Aries season, this is the part of your life that gives you the opportunity to have a new beginning through that lens of that house. Um, and understand that the things that are falling away and closing off are creating the space for the new beginnings that want to be born. And that is perhaps the real invitation of Easter time to let go of what is no longer relevant in your life, in your body, in your heart, and see what is rising, the new shoots that are coming through. And Aries energy so much about being brave, having the courage to let those things live, to let those things be born, and to see yourself as not separate from the earth, the solar cycles, the lunar cycles, from the festivals that take place, even if you don't necessarily believe or celebrate in them. But know that you too are at a threshold point. Perhaps there are certain things in your life, there always are, but things that feel uncertain, unresolved, but also this kind of freshness of new energy that's beginning beneath all of that, because that's what gets amplified in this season, and noticing what is moving and allowing yourself to kind of move with it. I also think this is a beautiful time of year to spend time outside connecting with the earth, realizing that you are part of the same system that is shifting all around you. Christianity has made resurrection a religious story and perhaps a bit of an abstract idea as well. Whether you believe in it or not, to me, it is the process of allowing something to fall away so that something new can be reborn, something else can emerge, and resurrection, not a comfortable process. But think of the wound on the side of Jesus' ribs, like this yoni, this birth canal, and what could be reborn from that point, that place. This is the same energy that is moving through Mother Earth right now, moving through the cosmos with all of the planets at the moment that are lining up in Aries, not just the sun. Uh, this year we have more planets in Aries than we usually have. So, this extra emphasis on this energy and setting your intentions, especially when we get to um the Aries new moon, which actually doesn't happen until the 17th of April. So it's kind of being in this portal of time. Perhaps you are feeling like the whisper of new desire at this time of year for something new. But know that life keeps choosing itself over and over and over again, and that you can do that too, and this is the perfect portal of time to do that in.