30/04/2021
A few eye opening highlights from an interview about Mary Magdalene. I am thankful for this interview, as I said to who sent me the article, I feel like I “levelled up” https://fruity.substack.com/p/the-surprisingly-feminist-history
“There’s a word that Christ uses in Mary's gospel, and it’s this Greek word, nous. I became obsessed with this word when I was in seminary, and if you follow it through the different centuries, that word meant “the highest aspect of the soul.”
“The reason this is so powerful is that it articulates a direct connection to a kind of vision that lies within all of us—it’s something we are all capable of. This is decentralizing spiritual authority, because it's saying that you can have a direct connection to spirit from within yourself, you can purify the heart, and you can see from within you. This has nothing to do with a priest who is going to absolve you, or something you have to get from an institution outside of the self. This is inner work. It's a transformation that happens from within.”
“Initially, there was a different message going on, and one of the threads of that message was: We are all equal, we are all radically just as much human and soul. What Mary keeps saying in her gospel is that Christ referred to himself as anthropos, and that we are anthropos, too. That word in Greek means “fully human and fully divine.”
“It was radical at the time, but Christ was saying that a woman—who had almost no rights—was worthy of receiving his vision, his transmission, his teachings. He showed up first to a woman—someone who would be considered, in terms of the apostles, the least among them based solely on her gender. So Christ is literally making the last, his first. He was putting into practice this radical idea that, rather than human existence being ranked on a vertical line hierarchically, we’re all horizontal. We are all equally soul and ego.”
Mary Magdalene Leaving the House Feasting
By Dante Gabriel Rossetti
1857