The Anointed

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.” 

After Mary Magdalene anoints Christ with the spikenard and washes his feet with her hair, before his crucifixion, Christ says in Matthew 26: “I tell you, wherever, in the whole world, this good news is proclaimed, what this woman has done will be told in memory of her.” 

When Judas is horrified that Mary wastes such an excessive amount of oil, Christ explains that it was intended that Mary save this oil to prepare for his burial. It was intended. This was what had been intended all along. 

Mary Magdalene was the one who was meant to assist Christ in his transition from this life to the next. 

If we see the resurrection narrative as also a metaphor, the anointing ritual becomes the passage from the death of the ego, the limited egoic-self, into the expansive realm of the soul. This is the transformation of consciousness at the heart of the Christian tradition. 

Anointing, then, in its original context, is the act of acknowledging that the body dies, but the soul within the body does not. And each time we can die to the ego, we then rise more aware of the soul of who we are now. 

And we do this in memory of her.

The Mary Magdalene Oracle is about a vision of radical love that formed long before Christianity became a formal religion in the 4th century, long before Mary’s gospel was excluded, destroyed, and buried. It’s a vision of humanity as a beloved community that risked their lives to recognize each other as equals – innately worthy of love, no matter their status within the Roman Empire. And it’s about a vision that Christ gave Mary to then give to us, then and now – to see less with the ego and more with the eye of the heart. 

The Mary Magdalene Oracle leads us card by card through the spiritual teachings of the Gospel of Mary as well as pivotal moments in the legend of Mary’s life. Each of the 44 cards reveals a key aspect of the transformation that her gospel seeks to inspire within us. Each card is meant to remind us of the truth that we are comprised of a massively human ego as well as a divinely merciful soul. So that we can do the life-altering inner-work of bringing love to where it has never been before.

​Click here to learn more and order.

With only more love,
​M.