 Dear Friends,
I am writing to you from Sacramento, California to introduce myself to you, and to share with you some thoughts about my novel, Mary Magdalene, Beloved Disciple, which has just been published in the UK by Cygnus.
Until I retired in 1990, I was a college professor in Humanities and Philosophy, with a deep interest in the study of comparative religions.
Throughout much of my time as a teacher, feminist scholarship was turning every staid concept on its ear. People were beginning to question the wisdom of associating the female with the body and death (evil), and the male with spirit and life (good) – associations traditionally made by all the five 'great religions'. We are trained from birth to identify our self with our body. In humility and shame, we seek the indwelling spirit and worship it from afar, seeing as unattainable that which is our truest Self.
Yet, without this fragile clump of spinning electrons, Spirit cannot grow. That is why it seems truer, to me, to say that incarnate Spirit cherishes the ever-changing house it creates in its own image, just as Body adores the living force that rises and falls with its every breath. As He is her saviour, so She is his, initiating him into the sacred mysteries of death and rebirth, so they will never be separated from one another.
With these ideas of unity, wholeness and balance buzzing in my mind, the idea began to grow of passing on the insights I was able to give my students, in a love story that housewives, secretaries, and retail clerks would read and give to their friends to read. I knew that writing philosophy papers was ruining my prose for most readers, but the more I looked, the more I knew I could do it. My best friends were English and Creative Writing teachers. Another lucky coincidence! One day I was thrilled in a book store to see the category 'Women's Historical Fiction' because I recognized that that is what I would write.
Mary Magdalene, Beloved Disciple supposes that the ancient fertility cult of the Mother Goddess and the Dying and Rising God-King lingered on in Palestine until the lifetime of Jesus Christ and coexisted uneasily with the Judaism of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The story's chief character is Mary, who has been reared within the tradition of the ancient cult and has been trained to become a Priestess. At the age of sixteen Mary is given for seven years in marriage to the youngest remaining son of Herod the Great as a hostage, to secure 'protection' for the convent and Priestesses in Jerusalem.
So begins Mary's story. In this book, I wanted to challenge the most basic and untouchable of all Western myths. By this, I mean not only the Christian mythos, but the whole Judeao-Christian mythology that begins with the first chapter of Genesis. Scholars had already done the work for me, by giving me the tools and research. I only needed to rewrite it as fiction in order to direct it toward the wider audience that is reached by Art.
Real social transformation can never be a surface phenomenon. It happens from the inside, out. We cannot have an impact unless we challenge the very root assumptions, those ideas we have enshrined under the mantle of the sacred. Just so there is no doubt about what ideas I mean, let me once again state the obvious. They are:
a) God as an all-powerful male, the sole creator of everything;
b) God's apparent need and demand for worship, and absolute obedience;
c) God's separateness and otherness from everything He has created;
d) our necessity to do penance to Him for our inferiority to Him;
e) the idea that all who do not agree to this idea of God are evil and as God's enemies must be destroyed;
f) that God intends the world and its blessings for the use and exploitation of believers in him;
g) that God's justice demands the sacrifice of an innocent victim to atone for our imperfection, i.e. His son.
Goddess myths give the lie to all these ideas by presenting a deity who does not create the world, but one who brings it forth from Herself, and paradoxically takes it back again into Herself, so that she represents the eternal, cyclic, renewal of life from life. She does not command or demand anything of us, but she challenges us to seek meaning and purpose through the spiritual path that leads to identification with her, that is, the total process, rather than our own solitary, individual self.
It's hard enough to become an ego, a self, an autonomous being. It's so hard that our culture has fixated on it as if it were the final goal. We have forgotten that it is only half the heroic journey, that if we do succeed in 'finding ourselves,' attaining selfhood, we are only halfway there. Attaining selfhood is just a necessary prerequisite for true liberation, which comes about through transcending, overcoming, going beyond the self we have worked so hard to discover and develop.
Marion Zimmer Bradley turned the stories she chose as her themes on their heads, by seeing them through the eyes of the 'Dark Lady'. In The Mists of Avalon she used the viewpoint of Morgana, Arthur's outcast, incest spawned sister, and in Firebrand, of Cassandra, the captive seeress of the Trojans.
In Mary Magdalene, Beloved Disciple, I wanted to do what Marion Zimmer Bradley did with the male-dominant stories of King Arthur, and those of the Trojan War. I wanted to show the direct descent of Christian myth from Goddess mythology, to show that the holistic, non-violent teachings of Jesus were, in fact, a return to an earlier ethic of unity with the Divine, each other, and the earth. After the crucifixion, Mary and Judas (Jesus?) flee to France. There is no way to guess which twin, or perhaps both, survived. Mythology wants it all ways. It holds that Mary and Jesus' child lived to give birth to a dynasty, thus believed to be descended from Jesus Himself. In Mary's story, as in Bradley's, women are the movers and shakers; they act out of their own deepest knowledge and beliefs, and accept full responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
The story combines legends claiming that Yeshua's 'hidden years', were spent studying in India and Tibet, along with the controversial view that Mary became his wife and mother of his children. Tradition has presented Christ as all-knowing from birth, hence in need of no training, much less from 'outside', and as celibate, because the flesh is 'evil'. Still, recently translated Gnostic Gospels such as the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, support Mary's place in the inner circle of disciples, and her favoured status as the beloved of the Master.
Metaphysically, in this book, Love, not Strife, is seen as the primal cosmic reality. Nor does love struggle against any 'darkness', or 'evil'. Love drinks up good and evil alike, transforming them into itself. It is here with us, sustaining us through everything.
Our struggle, like Mary's, is towards Truth, Enlightenment. Through her visions and her suffering, she learns to recognize the Goddess in Almah, Yeshua's mother, in Grandmother Lili, and in Miriam, the Midwife. Mary's all too human inability to see the goddess in herself prolongs her pain. Yet Mary powerfully incarnates the Goddess within herself. She is Isis, Inanna, and Erishkigal, Queen of the Netherworld. In like manner, Yeshua is Osiris, related somehow to his twin or opposite, Seth.
For me, the most profound and healing truth of Mary's story is that the goddess brings us forth in Love, and takes us back to herself, in Love. Eros and Thanatos are both her messengers. We can neither live nor die beyond the circle of her embrace. The unflagging Love of the Goddess, (Isis, Mary Magdalene) for both matter (Seth-Judas) and spirit (Yeshua-Osiris), reveals the cosmic war between Light and Darkness to be an illusion, and restores the unity of the One. Love reaches beyond death to rebirth.
I hope that, through reading my book, you will gain a renewed sense of this Love, and of your own inner wholeness.
In Love,
Clysta Kinstler
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