Queen of Swords

I really, really try to be respectful of other peoples' beliefs and perspectives, but sometimes I have a gut-level, knee-jerk reaction of O RLY??

As I think I mentioned recently, I've been exploring some aspects of Magdalene spirituality -- and I really should expect to have a different perspective than many on that path. In addition to her associations with the Holy Grail ("holy blood" aspect optional) and a representative of the Divine Feminine within the Gospel story, I've come to see her as an underworld priestess: one intimately connected to the forces of sex, death and transformation which are central to this work (at least as I do it).

I just picked up a book called Invoking Mary Magdalene: Accessing the Wisdom of the Divine Feminine. I opened it at random and first sentence I read was: As mentioned previously, Mary Magdalene is usually shown with specific accountrements, several of which symbolize her role as wise woman and healer. The skull, one of her ubiquitous emblems, is a potent image for healing. . .

WTF?

In my study of Mary Magdalene, the skull is almost always seen as representing her knowledge of death, sometimes as a rather literal representation of "Golgotha" -- the Hill of the Skull -- where Jesus was crucified. Those who see her as a repentent prostitute sometimes see it as reflecting her awareness of the futility of a carnal life rather than a spiritual one. To quote Hamlet "To this end she must come."

I read a sentence like this one and I wonder about the author's (apparent) absolute rejection of the place of death and suffering in Mary's story. I paged through the book to try and find an acknowledgement of death and suffering elsewhere, but even when the author talks about the "Dark Goddess" aspect of Magdalene, she does so in terms of being the rejected Divine Feminine in Christianity and emphasizing her sexuality rather than going fully into the more terrible aspects of a goddess who is associated with death, or of transformation through ordeal.

Focusing on the bright aspects of Magdalene is not in itself a bad thing. They are there and powerful. It upsets me, however, when I see what I perceive as a twisting of a symbol which is uncomfortable to the author to deny the darker aspects of the story. Which is particularly ironic given the author's acknowledgement of the "shadow" aspect Magdalene carries for Christianity. She herself takes the darkness of Mary's story and pushes it into the shadow of rejection and denial.