“He said, ‘Thecla, my betrothed, why do you sit like this? What is the emotion that binds you in passion? Turn toward your Thamyris and be ashamed.’ And her mother also said the same things to her, ‘Child, why do you look down and sit like this, answering nothing but acting like a mad person?'” (The Acts of Paul and Thecla, Chapter 10)

In 1986, a year before his death, at a lecture in Amherst on the responsibility and role of the writer in society, James Baldwin said, “The reason that Plato wanted no poets in his republic is because a writer is, by definition, a disturber of the peace.”

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One of the most significant names used to identify Christ by the earliest group of people to document his teachings was the Greek word Christos, which means “someone anointed with oil,” or simply, “The Anointed.”

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The Mary Magdalene Oracle is about a vision of radical love that formed long before Christianity became a formal religion, long before Mary’s gospel was excluded, destroyed, and buried. Unearthing that vision changed everything for me.

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In her gospel, Mary Magdalene tells the other disciples about a vision she had of Christ. She says: “I saw the Lord in a vision, and I said to him, ‘Lord, I saw you today in a vision.’ He answered me, ‘How wonderful you are for not wavering at seeing me! For where the mind is, there is the treasure.’” (Mary 7:1–4)

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I can’t name or point to one particular event or moment when I sensed it, or remembered it. Remembering is the closest word to try to describe it. It’s like remembering a memory of something I once knew completely, experienced directly, and yet somehow also completely forgot about, completely forgot not just that I experienced it but that it ever existed.

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There’s a legacy of love, a red thread, that hasn’t been written about before now. Or it has, it’s just scattered, with pages missing and with parts buried. It isn’t codified in any one singular sacred text; it isn’t institutionalized within any one religion or sect. It isn’t handed to every little one born to this world as a secret personal bible, as a promise sealed already inside the heart, that love is where we have all come from, no matter who we are.

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The Divine Feminine Oracle contains 53 saints, mystics, poets, priestesses, gender rebels, cross-dressers, trailblazers, and holy troublemakers who represent both divine beings and the human beings who sought to embody them.

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Words are like sutures. They can close up ancient wounds. They’re magic, we know this. Words heal not just from the meaning they convey but also the energy they contain. Words can hold, as if tiny little vessels, the energy that transmits from the writer to the reader. Or from the speaker to the listener. Words have the power to transport us and transform us just from taking them in.

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I remember walking into my first tarot reading as if that moment remains in present tense. A close friend had booked the appointment because she had heard that this particular card reader was really powerful.

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Sometimes I set it aside, the magic. Not on purpose, not consciously. I set it aside out of pain, or doubt. I set it aside to drink in the mundane for a bit. Because, and few tell us this much less prepare us for it, magic is exhausting. Because magic is a direct reflection of our own power. And that’s always one part exhilarating and one part terrifying. So, I set it aside sometimes. I place it in a box in the garage, all taped up and labeled, “Magic,” with a red cautionary skull and crossbones so someone doesn’t open it unaware of the dangers it contains.

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The Gospel of Mary doesn’t refer to god as god at all. God of course is the masculine form of the creator, or ultimate divine being in the English language. The feminine form is goddess. The Gospel of Mary refers to god or goddess, or the ultimate creator, as simply, The Good.

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Christ’s parable of the vineyard workers describes a man who arrives in a vineyard late in the day, and yet he’s given the same amount of pay for his brief labor as those who have been hard at work since dawn. Christ explains that in the world to come (or in the world that already exists invisibly within this one), “those who are last shall be first, and the first last.” (Matthew 20:16) This doesn’t seem fair though, or just. And that’s precisely what the parable is meant to do; it’s meant to get us all caught up in our ego so that we can recognize it and release it.

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It’s hard to remember what we have never been taught. It takes trusting our own intuition, our own heart. It takes learning how to listen to what the soul whispers to us when we can get still enough, free enough from the distracting chaos of our everyday life.

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The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Christ. Coptic and Greek fragments were found in Nag Hammadi Egypt in 1945, along with the Gospel of Philip. Scholars date the Gospel of Thomas to 130 A.D., and it is believed to have been widely read in the first centuries because of the fact that both Greek and Coptic fragments of the gospel were recovered.

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“Only give me the seal of Christ, and no trial will touch me.” This is what a Turkish teenager named Thecla says to the apostle Paul in her miraculous story recorded in The Acts of Paul and Thecla. She wants Paul to baptize her so she can devote her life to Christ. This power though to transform, to devote herself to a life of the soul, is a power Thecla has to find within her.

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It’s not dramatic, or loud, or even impressive. And this is how it’s so easily missed.It’s so small, and so terribly quiet. It takes place in a place within that so many of us have never visited much less venerated. It’s a place within we’ve never been taught or told to reach for and find. It’s so crucial and essential, but we only know this once we’ve found it – once we’ve given up the search to find it in someone else.

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What I want to tell you is that you’ve always been worthy, but it’s more than that. Understanding the worth you have always existed within versus the worth you were weighed against outside of you, this has always been the fire-breathing dragon that lives inside of you.

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I’m a Scorpio, through and through. Astrologically, it’s pretty much all I have in my chart. All the planets and moon, rising and descending, it’s all Scorpio. We’ve entered Scorpio season, and my actual birth date, November 13th, is associated with the phases of the moon, the birth and death that the feminine knows so intimately.

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After Mary demonstrates that she can turn the hearts of the other disciples back to the Good, to god, Peter says in the gospel of Mary, “Sister, we know the Savior loved you more than all other women. Tell us the words of the Savior that you remember, the things which you know that we don’t because we haven’t heard them.”

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“All seven and we'll watch them fall
They stand in the way of love
And we will smoke them all” –Prince

The work of unifying this great big unsayable love inside us with the humanity we’re meant to embody while here in this world hinges on a spiritual practice that the early Christians called Kenosis, or self-emptying love.

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