Mary Magdalene represents the fierce, unwavering love that we have access to within our own vulnerable hearts. It’s a love that renders all things sacred from the animals to the angels, from the poorest to the most powerful. It’s a love that sees the inherent worth of all things. And it’s a love that remains, even through the darkest of times, even through death; her love is the one that resurrects.
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene relates that Jesus came to unite us, to demonstrate to us a “true human being,” an anthropos, meaning a person who is both fully human and fully divine. This is what Mary became and it’s why she was so beloved to Jesus. She didn’t seek to follow him; she sought instead to become her true self.
Mary Magdalene reminds us that we have the power to receive vision from within. We are worthy of such proximity to the divine because that’s the other half of what it means to be truly human. She reminds us that there’s a bridge between heaven and earth, and that we are that bridge. And she wants us to remember that the truest church we can ever enter is in the heart. This is where our true power rests and where love never ends.
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Over 4,000 years ago, the high priestess Enheduanna wrote in The Exhaltation of Inanna, “Most precious lady, beloved by An, your holy heart is great.” And in The Sumerian Temple Hymms, “Whatever enters you is unequaled, whatever leaves endures.” She is the limitless love and the inexhaustible power that moves through us when we merge with the soul.
We each have a personal myth. We each have an ishta deva, a personal deity who inspires and compels us to bring heaven right here on earth by moving us with the fierce conviction that we’re divinely led. Enheduanna encourages us to integrate our light and our dark, to bring our conscious aspects of self into conscousness.
The high priestess is often described as the guardian of the unconscious. She is that aspect in all of us that holds the veil of awareness that separates us from our inner depths. Enheduanna is about merging the awareness of our soul, and all the love and power it gives us, with our individual personality or ego.
Enheduanna wants you to live and breathe your soul. She wants you to become so intimate with it that there is no longer any separation. And there are no more excuses, or apologies for how powerful you are. You are the high priestess. ” You are this eternal,” she whispers. “Your holy heart is this legendary.”
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Inanna goes into the depths of her own unconscious to merge with her twin-sister-self. She becomes more powerful because she is no longer using conscious, psychic energy to keep her shadow or negative attributes hidden deep underground. She courageously descends and faces the aspects of herself that are hard to get to when she’s “fully dressed” or cloaked heavily in the ego.
Inanna is an invitation to get naked. She wants us to drop our defenses. She wants us to see how holy and sacred it is to be vulnerable.
As above, so below: this is an alchemical adage that suggests heaven and earth are not so separate. It suggests that within us, deep down in the dark cages where we place parts of ourselves, the truths that exist there also exist right here on the surface of our everyday lives. So if we are exerting great amounts of energy to keep from seeing our shadow, it is actually playing a large role in our conscious life.
When we can face what we think is dark or negative about us – I mean really embrace it and see it for what it is (a beautiful broken place that’s a call for love) – then we can emerge more whole. We can marry the light and the dark aspects of our being. And in uniting with our twin sister from the depths, we can stop projecting her onto other women. We can see and own the hot mess we often are and not get sabotaged by it. The light must cast a shadow. And the high priestess is the one who gets called to love them both .