✨ Mary Magdalene: The Anointed and the Remembered
Mary Magdalene: The Anointed and the Remembered
Series: The Sacred and the Sensual
by Rosalind Green
“She touched what others only worshiped.”
The Misnamed
Mary Magdalene’s story has always been rewritten by others.
In the early centuries of the church, she was called apostola apostolorum — the apostle to the apostles — because she was the first to witness the resurrection.
Centuries later, she was renamed a prostitute, folded into other women’s stories, her authority cut down to repentance.
The erasure was deliberate. A woman who anointed the divine body with oil, who received knowledge through intimacy rather than hierarchy, threatened the structure that required distance between flesh and faith.
Her touch was her testimony.
The Anointing
The Gospels describe her pouring expensive perfume on Jesus’s feet, drying them with her hair. It was an act of tenderness so physical, so human, that it unsettled those watching. But in that moment, her gesture became theology — that the sacred could be felt, not just believed.
The oil she poured was called nard — an herb used in burial rites and in aphrodisiac blends. It was scent, memory, and offering combined. Her act united pleasure and grief, devotion and mortality.
She didn’t seek forgiveness; she offered recognition. She saw divinity in the body before it died.
The Suppressed Priestess
In Gnostic texts like The Gospel of Mary, she speaks with authority, teaching the male disciples what they failed to understand. Her voice is calm, assured, intimate with mystery. For that, she was dismissed.
But her wisdom endures as the echo of the High Priestess within Christianity — the one who holds secret knowledge of union, not separation. She is the keeper of embodied faith, the proof that spirit does not fear the flesh.
Mary’s story reminds us that patriarchy often disguises erasure as purity.
The Alchemy of Touch
Anointing was not metaphorical; it was alchemical. Oil carries scent and memory; it turns skin into prayer. In ancient traditions, to anoint was to open the body to the divine.
Mary’s hands bridge that tradition. Through her, the erotic becomes sacramental — not because of sex, but because of presence. She shows that the divine can enter through sensory experience — through scent, through warmth, through the tremor of care.
Her intimacy was not scandal; it was understanding.
The Modern Pulse
In modern art and mysticism, Mary Magdalene re-emerges as the archetype of the embodied mystic — the woman who knows God through the senses, who carries both faith and flesh without contradiction. Painters render her with red hair and bare shoulders, holding a jar of oil like memory itself.
She endures because her story is the reconciliation of what religion divided: sensuality and holiness, love and knowledge, body and spirit.
Mary Magdalene teaches that redemption was never about cleansing — it was about remembering.
Rose Meow™ by Rosalind Green
A study of art, cannabis, sex, and spirit — written without flinching.