MARY MAGDALENE

I boarded a plane to the South of France without my husband, without a plan, and without knowing how to speak the native language. 

For 80 days, I would surrender to silence. No texts. No calls. Just a trust in the unknown. What began as a solo journey quickly became a pilgrimage. One that led me deep into ancient land, into the arms of the sacred feminine priestess path.  Into the presence of the Rose.
 

I grew up with the Bible. Sunday school flannel boards, memorized scriptures, the handful of stories about women that quietly slipped into the background while the spotlight focused on the men. Mary Magdalene was one of them. The red-robed woman with a haunted past. Labeled a prostitute. Possessed by seven demons. Saved, but slightly suspect. The first to witness the resurrection, yes, but even that got buried under centuries of silence.
 

What I wasn’t taught (what none of us were) is that this Mary was never meant to be a side character. It wasn’t until I found myself on a quest for truth that her story began to call to me. Not the church version. The one whispered through ancient texts and recovered scrolls, hidden in desert caves and Cairo marketplaces, where her gospel was uncovered in 1896. Translated into English in 1955, and still somehow barely spoken of.

​

I remember reading Mary Magdalene Revealed by Meggan Watterson and feeling something crack open inside me. Like I wasn’t just reading a book, I was remembering something. Mary wasn't a fallen woman. She was a teacher. A mystic. A healer. The apostle to the apostles. A woman of deep wisdom and spiritual authority who walked beside Jesus, not behind him. She wasn’t saved by him. She walked with him.

​

Her gospel didn't offer doctrine. It offered transformation. It spoke of visions, of the soul’s journey, of purification through the seven powers of the ego.  It wasn't a checklist, it was a mirror. A potent invitation to look at what lives in us, to confront our shadows, and to come home to the heart of who we really are.

​

This is the Mary who calls to those of us searching for something deeper. Something real. The Mary who never needed to be saved, because she already knew the way. She didn’t just follow Christ, she walked beside him. Equal in spirit, equal in power. She baptized. She anointed. She led sacred rituals with the authority of one who knew.

Fueled by my desire to know Mary more intimately, I journeyed to the French countryside to join a small circle of women, each of us called there by something invisible yet undeniable. Our guide, Natalia, had followed her own miraculous call years earlier, from Canada to an 18th-century villa nestled in the heart of the Occitanie Region. It was there she created a sanctuary for women walking the Rose Path, a lineage woven through time by the feminine presence of Mary.
 

Each day, we gathered in ceremony, remembering the women who came before us. We walked barefoot where Mary Magdalene once walked. We swam in her sacred pools, entered hidden grottos, and touched the stones of crumbling chapels that still echoed her name. The presence of the Magdalene was everywhere. In the wind, in the trees, in the pulse of the land.

​

Something inside me began to stir. I danced. I cried. I listened. And then I remembered. Not with my mind, but with my body. In the stillness, I heard Mary’s voice. Not the saint from stained glass windows, but the woman. The teacher. The beloved.

​

After the retreat, I knew where I was being called next: the mountain region of Sainte-Baume, where Mary Magdalene is said to have spent the final three decades of her life. I searched for a way to get there. Emailing companies, asking in facebook groups, making enquiries, but nothing aligned. Until I was guided to a name: Anne-Marie Bataille.

She answered the phone in a thick French accent and welcomed me into her home for nine days. Her ancient stone house felt like it had grown out of the land itself. It smelled of roots and rain. Her eyes held stories, and her hands, strong and kind, carried the wisdom of many lifetimes. I had come to visit the sacred sites: the cave sanctuary, the forest shrine, the hidden chapels perched high on stone ridges. But one place pulsed in my soul like a drum: the Cave of Eggs. Hidden in the crux of the mountain, It called to those ready to enter.
 

For three days, I prepared. No food, no talking, no screens. Just prayer, meditation, spring water, and stillness in the forest. But on the fourth day, just hours before I ready to begin the hike, I picked up my backpack and my lower back seized. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t sit.  All I could do was lay in bed and cry.  The journey was paused.

​

In the seven days that followed, I laid in silence asking what now? What did this pain come to reveal? Slowly, the answer came. Mary’s gospel doesn’t tell you what to believe, it tells you what to let go of. Her teachings are about transformation, not theology. She names the seven powers of the ego: darkness, craving, ignorance, jealousy, enslavement, intoxicated wisdom, and guileful wisdom. They are the dragons we each must face. I had come to the mountain to remember her, but she had come to help me remember myself.

​

So I let the fire rise. I raged for the women who were silenced, stoned, forgotten. I screamed into the trees. I cried into the soil. Finally the pain began to shift. The forest heard me. The mountain held me. And Mary whispered, Now you’re ready.

​

One week later, on the morning of my granddaughter’s second birthday, I began the ascent. Anne-Marie led the way. We hiked a narrow path through forest and stone until we reached an opening hidden in the trees. Two great boulders stood like ancient sentinels, forming the unmistakable shape of a yoni. A threshold. A portal.

​

I stepped inside the Cave of Eggs. The walls were smooth and damp, glistening in the dim light. Egg-shaped stones clustered along the ceiling like a constellation. At the back, a simple altar waited. I placed a rose quartz and my scroll there, tied with ribbon and filled with names of women I love. And then I sat. No words. No movement. Just breath and presence.

​

The silence was holy. The air shimmered with something more ancient than language. I felt her. Not as a myth, not as a saint, but as a living current of love. I felt her in my chest, in my womb, in my tears. She was not separate from me. She had never been. She was the fire that had brought me here, and the mirror that showed me who I’ve always been.

I didn’t just walk in her footsteps, I awakened something ancient within my own. Each step through the moss-covered trails, each breath in the stillness of the cave, echoed with the memory of a truth I had always carried.
 

She didn’t ask me to follow her. She invited me to remember myself. To trust my own holy intuition. To bow to the altar of my own becoming.

​

I left the South of France changed. Not because I found Mary, but because I remembered she had been with me all along. In every ache, every longing, every act of love. 

​

This was never about a destination. It was a homecoming. And that, I now know, is the truest pilgrimage of all.

If you feel a stirring in your heart, it's because her presence is alive and rising, and perhaps, like me, you’re remembering something too.

​