THE RED PRINCESS
“Are you a princess?” I asked. She said, “I’m much more than a princess, but you don’t have a name for it yet on earth.”
StoryPeople
What you’re about to read is the most unorthodox Redvelation I’ve shared thus far.
Trust me, this chapter requires the use of Red rose–colored glasses.
Remember, we live in a Universe that uses any medium possible to communicate with us, to validate our heart’s knowing, to reflect our forgotten truths, and sometimes even to share dirty little secrets.
Alrighty then, let’s slip on those Red rose–colored glasses …
A FLUTTERING OF RED WINKS
First, I need to describe a few things that happened before I let go of Red, starting with the fact that getting the Red rose tattoo didn’t hurt. As the needle pierced the back of my neck, instead of feeling pain, I experienced fiery ecstasy, as if a horny Seraphim (an order of Red-winged angels in Christianity known as the “burning ones”) was giving me a hickey.
I wasn’t expecting that erotic sensation at all, but what I really wasn’t expecting were the inner experiences that pulled my consciousness away from the tattoo parlor and into what looked and felt like a rowdy Red party in the other realms. There was hootin’ and hollerin’, dancing and singing, and millions of Red balloons swirlin’ in my honor — as if I’d just returned from a faraway land and this was my welcome-home party, like even though I’d been conscious of Red for decades, I had just officially joined the Red Club, and like getting this tattoo was some sort of multidimensional initiation rite.
But then, this animated inner party scene changed, and oddly enough, I found myself in what I just knew was the Garden of Gethsemane, the garden where Jesus is said to have prayed the night before his crucifixion. My heart banged against my chest in shock.
“Huh …?”
Sure enough, J.C. appeared on my internal screen dressed in white, arms outstretched, and, uh, thanking me for sharing the Red Feminine! In that utterly candid moment, it appeared as though Red was something close to Jesus’s heart. Very, very close …
A few weeks after I received those visceral visions while getting my Red rose tattoo, a reader of my first book sent me an excited email informing me that Kathleen McGowan’s novel The Book of Love, is about the hunt for Il Libro Rosso (Italian for “The Red Book”), which shares secret teachings of Jesus and Magdalene, including a mystical path of spiritual partnership and sacred sexuality, as well as visionary and prophetic writings by Jesus and Magdalene’s daughter, Sarah. One of the main symbols of Il Libro Rosso is a rose.
One morning around this same period, I shot out of bed and began frantically searching for my lost ruby ring. It took about a full minute before I realized: I don’t own a ruby ring. But, in a between state, I saw and felt it so clearly: a large oval ruby surrounded by a gold disc that I wear on the ring finger of my right hand. “Well, that’s odd, even for me!” I said to my annoyed dog, who’d been woken up by my surreal search party.
Later that afternoon, my father sent me an email with the subject line “interesting name” and a link to an article about Saint Sarah-la-Kali. I clicked on the link and started reading. There are various legends about St. Sarah-la-Kali, but the most popular tells us that she was on the boat with Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome, and Mary Jacobe when they arrived at a tiny beach town in southern France, now aptly named Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (the Marys of the sea). Some say Saint Sarah was the Egyptian servant of Magdalene. Some say she was a gypsy queen already living in southern France, who welcomed and supported Magdalene and her crew who were escaping persecution. In fact, Saint Sarah-la-Kali is often referred to as “The Queen of the Outsiders” and is the patron saint of the gypsies, who have long felt like outsiders in Europe. In the town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, icons of the three Marys are kept above ground in a light-filled church, while Sarah’s icon is kept underground, in a dark shrine, partly because Sarah has never been canonized by the Vatican; she is unrecognized by the Catholic Church.
The gypsies originated in India, homeland of the goddess Kali. Some people believe that this connection accounts for Sarah’s name. If she was of Indian or Egyptian descent, it would also account for her dark skin. However, her skin color means different things to different people. As Margaret Starbird, author of Mary Magdalene: Bride in Exile, explained, “The standard interpretation is that Sarah was black because she was Egyptian, but the dark countenance of the child could as easily point to her status as a refugee in exile — lost to history and to consciousness.”1
According to more heretical legends and rumors circulating throughout France way before The Da Vinci Code was published, Sarah-la-Kali is the secret child of Jesus and Magdalene, often referred to as the lost little princess (Sarah means “God’s princess” in Hebrew), as Starbird claims: “There is no birth certificate for Sarah, no genealogies that irrefutably confirm her origins, nothing that constitutes proof of her existence or identity in the left-brained world of academics. However, legends often contain kernels of truth too dangerous to be asserted as fact but nonetheless significant.”2
After reading the article my father sent me, I Googled “Sarah-la-Kali.” Besides pictures of her icon in southern France, a colorful album cover of a gypsy band named De LaLap showed up, depicting a modern drawing of a woman with long, dark hair and bright-blue eyes wearing a thin gold crown or headpiece — she looked a bit like Wonder Woman, though “Sara-La-Kali” is written clearly across the picture. On the bottom left of the image is a Red rose (a symbol for Magdalene), and on the bottom right, the flaming Red heart of Jesus. Sarah-la-Kali’s right hand is held in front of her throat, between the Red rose and the Red heart, making the gesture like she’s about to tell us a secret.
And circling her right ring finger is my “lost” ruby ring.
In case you haven’t noticed, the Red Ones are certainly a motley crew, many of whom have been rejected or silenced or misconstrued by the Church. So I guess I shouldn’t have been that surprised that the alleged love child of J.C. and M.M., also known as “The Queen of the Outsiders,” was ringing my inner doorbell. But the thing was, I didn’t know what the hell to do with her. So, alas, Sarah faded from my awareness as I sank deeper and deeper into my writer’s block and let go of Red.
GO TEAM RED!
Six Redless months later and a few weeks after my cabin fever, I was still unable to write this book. So I took a much-needed weekend trip to Seattle to relieve some of the pressure and hang out with a few soul sisters — Emily, the intuitive soul whisperer, and Mercedes, the gifted body worker. We had a marvelous weekend together, chock full of magic and mayhem and high-school slut stories; we even created an “angel language” (it sounds like a cross between a drunk elephant and a cat in heat) that we would emit whenever we felt we had something “utterly profound” to say. Our last day together, I walked out of Emily’s bedroom, and my eyes locked upon two books stacked right on top of each other among many on a teetering bookshelf. I smiled with surprise. The two books were my childhood favorites — The Children’s Bible and The Little Princess; the latter is about an orphaned girl named Sarah who is eventually reunited with her family.
A few hours later while walking through a local park, Emily, who is always curious about how others receive intuitive information, asked how Red “showed up” for me. I was about to inform her that I had let go of Red, but before I could open my mouth to share this fact, a girls’ high-school track team running through the park suddenly stopped a few feet to our left and started jumping up and down, screaming at the top of their lungs, “GO TEAM RED!!! GO TEAM RED!!! GO TEAM RED!!!!!” Emily and Mercedes looked at me, eyes wide, mouths open. “Yeah,” I grinned. “Red shows up for me often just like that.”
Perhaps because I needed two soul sisters to witness Red’s audaciousness, perhaps because my heart simply can’t deny how delightful it is to be wooed like this, perhaps that old adage “if you truly love something, let it go, and if it returns, it’s meant for you” applies here, because no matter how many times I’ve let go of Red in my life, for some incomprehensible reason, Red will not let go of me. So instead of fighting or controlling or denying this enigmatic phenomenon, after six Redless months, I surrendered and reopened to Red’s mystery.
That night we were eating outside at a Mexican restaurant under the full moon, which according to the almanac just so happened to be called “the Red moon” that particular month. So there we were, yucking it up over enchiladas, when Emily got that glazed-yet-focused look she gets when something’s just grabbed her intuitive attention. After a few moments of silence, Emily asked, “Who’s Sarah?” Oddly, I instinctually knew who Emily was asking about, so I told her the traditional non-incendiary Sarah-la-Kali spiel you could read off any brochure. Emily, who had never heard of Sarah before and is generally unimpressed with cold research, interrupted my intellectual prattle with, “Yeah, well, whatever, she’s like here, right now, and she’s got stuff to share with you.” Meaning me.
Mercedes and I froze, salsa dripping down our chins, and I swear that the Red full moon started shining on our table like a spiritual spotlight none of us could avoid. Emily cocked her head as if she were listening to an invisible waitress hanging over her right shoulder and started to translate. The prescience of the moment and the intensity of the message was not unlike the Andrew Harvey/Kali experience, except the fire roaring through Emily was Sarah-la-Kali:
“Do you know how hard it was for her to be the daughter of Jesus and Magdalene?!” Emily suddenly exhaled.
“How fucking isolating and painfully lonely it was? She had to be protected from those who wanted to harm her and her lineage. There was so much persecution going on after Jesus’s crucifixion, so she was hidden, sometimes even in underground rooms, for long periods of time. She lived in fear. As a child she felt totally abandoned by her parents. Sure, her parents were spiritual big shots, but they often sucked at being human parents. J.C. visited her from the other realms, but she wanted to be like, like, you know, Jenny down the block and have him at her softball games! She wanted to please her daddy and was totally annoyed by her mom. Her lineage practiced sacred sexuality, which was how she was conceived, but she rebelled as a teenager and acted out sexually and eventually rejected her role to step in and carry on the feminine lineage after her mother. It feels like a high-priestess role, although it doesn’t feel hierarchical. Anyway, there was so much pressure to be like her parents and yet paradoxically, pressure to tone it down so she wouldn’t be killed like her father. While she shared some gifts with her parents, she was also different from them. But she didn’t trust her differences. She didn’t fully understand herself or feel like she fit in or was worthy enough to follow in her parent’s footsteps, so she bailed as a young woman. She killed herself or was killed — hard to tell ’cause they feel really similar in this case. Anyway, she feels that she failed her mission and her lineage. She believes that she is the reason the feminine ‘lost’ and the patriarchal Church ‘won’ — because the lineage never received what she was supposed to contribute. Her entire existence was covered up. She died feeling unknown and unwanted by this world.”
The words were startling for sure, but it was the energy coursing through this translation (which continued for another fifteen minutes or so) that pierced the Heart of Us All — the sadness, the ache, the longing felt so utterly feminine and eerily familiar. By this time, the restaurant had thankfully cleared out, because the three of us were crying so hard I think the Puget Sound was in risk of flooding. While my mind made out with disbelief, my body was twitching and turning with trauma and shaking uncontrollably with emotional release. What Sarah was sharing touched the core of my core of my core. I felt things deep inside me — dark and hidden and cramped things — finally beginning to release and come into the light.
Emily continued:
“Sarah is indicating that she is one of your soul fragments. She’s saying the Red work was her work, and it includes a hidden yet integral piece of Magdalene’s and Jesus’s work, a piece that was deliberately suppressed, often quite violently, by those who did not agree with it. But her work is also different from their work. To put it another way, it feels like Magdalene and Jesus carried Red, and Magdalene outwardly displayed it more than Jesus. But Sarah was Red. Anyways, point is, you are helping Sarah live her previously unlived life through your current life.”
Emily jumped up and ran to the bathroom; her period had suddenly started. Red was rushing out of her in a few different ways that night. Mercedes and I stayed silent, hardly looking at one another, cheeks wet with tears. When Emily returned, I saw that her human ego had finally caught up with what had just fired through her. She looked directly at me, shrugged her shoulders, and vulnerably voiced,
“Look, I know nothing about Sarah or this stuff she is saying. This is brand-new information to me, but Sarah feels vital for you, and she really wants you to understand your connection to her and to know that you have a spiritual lineage. You have a spiritual family, Sera.”
Another sob wrenched out of me. A country song about Jesus started playing over the restaurant speakers. We three looked at each other, snotty and speechless.
THE LINEAGE LOWDOWN
A few years before this night, when I was interviewing spiritual teacher Sofia Diaz for my Redvolution film, she had talked emphatically about the importance of being part of a spiritual lineage — a specific line of teachers, traditions, and transmissions. Although I don’t happen to believe anyone needs a spiritual lineage in order to experience the Good Stuff, Sofia’s passion for her lineage touched my heart.
After I published The Red Book, I’d peacefully come to accept my spiritual homelessness. However, whenever I received Red winks and Redvelations, I couldn’t deny the feeling that they felt linked, and part of something much larger and specific. But when I dutifully searched for corresponding external references, more often than not, I came up empty-handed. After years of this, it just makes one wonder …
At the end of the interview, I leaned toward Sofia and whispered, “But Sofia … what do you do when your spiritual lineage has been offed?” I thought Sofia would laugh or shake her head or think I was being dramatic, but she took my strange question strangely seriously.
For example, the Inquisition (the Catholic Church’s “War on Heresy”) lasted six centuries, and millions of people whose spiritual practices and beliefs contradicted and/or rivaled the Church’s were methodically sought out and brutally eradicated. While yes, at some point or another in history, almost every religion or spiritual group has been persecuted and deemed heretical, there have been “winners” — those who succeeded in saving their lineage or propagating their belief systems. In other words, I’m obviously not the only recycled “heretic,” and I’m not the only one intimately connected to an “offed” lineage.
You Know Who You Are.
THE HOT AND HOLY INNER TEACHINGS
Since so much spiritual material has been lost or misinterpreted or manipulated by those in control, we can only make semi-educated guesses regarding this possible lineage. With that said, many academics and theologians acknowledge the “inner teachings” of Jesus — not necessarily the exoteric teachings you hear in a church or read in the Bible, but the esoteric teachings, which were not given to men alone, hence The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
Some of these teachings, to my ears, sound radically Red. Jacob Needleman wrote about these inner teachings: “As a path of inner awakening, as a path of deep self-knowledge (that is to say, gnosis), it invites and supports the inner struggle to attend, to ‘hear and obey’ one’s own Self, God in oneself.”3 And this path of self-knowledge is infused and often created by eros. In The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, Cynthia Bourgeault points out that, “Christian mysticism seems to contain a ‘tantric gene’ — a tendency to express itself in the language of transfigured eroticism.”4 However, the Church has sucked the Sexy right outta the Sacred, and this has become our cultural “condition.”
Interesting fact: Many ancient cultures practiced variations of hieros gamos, a sacred marriage enacted sexually between a man and a woman. The hieros gamos symbolized the uniting of masculine and feminine, God and Goddess, and the spirit in body to ensure the bounty of crops and sometimes to produce a physical or symbolic “holy child.” Since we don’t have this balanced symbol in the Christian religion but crave it on a deep unconscious level, many Jungians say we project this necessary desire for wholeness onto J.C. and M.M. Getting It On.
which, twining around the same log,
draw close and, kissing,
form a single flame.5
— Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
However, this projection doesn’t mean they didn’t play a few rounds of the horizontal hanky-panky. Bourgeault tells us that in the Gnostic Gospel of Phillip, J.C. and M.M. had a relationship that was mutual and explicitly erotic: “‘Jesus loves Mary Magdalene more than the others and many times would kiss her on the mouth.’”6 Another provocative point is made in Jean-Yves Leloup’s commentary of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene: “‘That which is not lived is not redeemed.’ If Yeshua, considered as The Messiah and the Christ, did not live his sexuality, then sexuality would be unredeemed. In that case, he could not be a Savior in the full sense of the word.”7
What’s more important than hiding the sacred sausage, which any two humans can do (well, in some form or another), is the exciting possibility that J.C. and M.M. are examples of authentic spiritual partnership. In October 2012, the New York Times reported the discovery of a legit ancient fragment of papyrus, dated to the fourth century, in which Jesus mentions his wife. (A winking side note: the article mentions that this controversial piece of papyrus was carried to New York in a “red handbag.”8)
A path of sacred partnership helps two committed people unleash their gifts and be of greater service on this planet together than either of them could be alone. According to Bourgeault, it’s a path in which partners help each other know their own Divinity through the trials (fights and farts) and glories (laughter and love) of intimate relationship; and thus, “physical lovemaking can never be separated from the rest of the path itself. It is the daily experience of ‘this is my body given for you,’ lived out in the myriad opportunities for self-surrender and forgiveness, that gradually fashions a sacrament out of human sexual passion.”9 Our world, our hearts, desperately need this Way of Relating in Service Together as Love. Peter Grey rightly declared in The Red Goddess, “The apocalypse is Now. It is impelling us into action to enthrone the Goddess that is woman, and meet her as the God that is man … conjoined.”10
Look, it’s way beyond the scope of this book to do this hot topic justice, but scholarship does allow the possibility that Jesus and Magdalene were intimate partners, which means they could have had children. As the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas cryptically states, “Whoever is acquainted with the Father and the Mother will be called the offspring of a prostitute.”11
Hello.
BLOODLINES AND BLING AND DUALITY SINGS
Before we return to the night of Redvelation at the Mexican restaurant, I need to burn up a few fallacies:
First: I’m not subscribing to a secret bloodline conspiracy theory or pop-culture fantasy. I’m also not implying that I’m somehow genetically related to the holy family — screw bloodlines, this is a Love Line. I like the way Claire Nahmad and Margaret Bailey described the bloodline in The Secret Teachings of Mary Magdalene:
We believe that there is a divine bloodline which descended through Jesus and Mary, the sacred “red thread,” which has such mystical significance, but that its history is not as it has been portrayed so far…. We would stress the importance of recognizing the fact that we are all divine as well as human. The bloodline is most definitely not about exclusivity or genetic superiority — in fact, these concepts are the very opposite of the essence and purpose of the bloodline, which exists to unite us all, to show us that we are all of one blood — sons and daughters of the king and queen.12
And I would add that this “Red thread” inspires us all to grow the hell up so we can become kings and queens alongside them.
Second: Ruby rings aside, the “royal” claims twinkling throughout most material about this supposed lineage are not snobby spiritual bling. As Nahmad and Bailey posit, “Their teachings on royalty did not conceive of it as we understand it today. It did not breed privilege or a class system, but was instead a practice designed for those … to be of ultimate service to their communities …”13 In my opinion, true princesses are a lot like true priestesses. They Serve the Greater Good. In other words, there’s a throne for every single one of us.
Third: This spiritual Love Story isn’t a high-five to heterosexuality or a kudos to Christianity. It represents the spiritual relationship between the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine that struggles to flourish and integrate within every single one of us, no matter what religion or sex or gender or sexual orientation we are. Through a Red lens, Jesus and Magdalene symbolize the dynamic fundamentals of life, the stimulating and sacrosanct duality of this Universe. They are mindful metaphors, sly symbols, and, thankfully, flesh-and-blood reminders of our own physical, energetic, and spiritual makeup.
THE WHOLE TRUTH (AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, SO HELP ME GOD/DESS)
In a dream-vision I had a few weeks after the night at the Mexican restaurant, I was looking at the crucifixion through a telephoto lens of a camera, but the lens kept sliding down, away from Jesus hanging on the cross, instead zooming in on Magdalene and her barely bulging belly. I woke myself up fervently shouting, “We’ve missed half the point of the crucifixion! We’ve completely. Freakin’. Missed It!” The teaching was not just about a Godman who gave up his life for us; it was also about a Goddesswoman who did something equally hard and hurting and profound: She dared to continue living!
SHE
STAYED
HERE,
FEET
HEART
TEARING
OPEN,
LIVING
FOR
LOVE
Magdalene carried the Red love they created together in her body. She continued their mission on Earth. She planted Divinity into the ground of life as a female in a time when it was perilous for females to do so, all the while knowing she was going to be slandered, scorned, and stripped bare even more than he. As Nahmad and Bailey exclaim, “Although Mary Magdalene was not crucified on the cross, she was indeed crucified by the imposition of a mentality, a soul dysfunction that stretched across centuries and made of her an outcast and an embodiment of human weakness and degradation. She, whom we should have most honored and revered …!”14
In other words, we gave him all the credit, and we gave her all the crap.
To me, M.M. is undeniably a holy heroine and just as spiritually adept as her partner J.C. As Tau Malachi wrote in St. Mary Magdalene: The Gnostic Tradition of the Holy Bride, “Many can accept she was a close disciple, some can accept she was the wife and consort of the Lord, but few are they who accept her as the female embodiment of the Christos.”15 Through a Red lens, it is only with Magdalene that Jesus’s mission, message, and life are complete.
It is only Together that Love’s Whole Truth emerges.
Now, let’s widen the vision …
THE THIRD
Once upon a millennium, the Divine union of a heretical Godman and an outcast Goddesswoman created
The Third
A Divine Wild Child
A Daughter
A rebel with a ginormous cosmic cause weighing down her petite shoulders, not to mention a wee bit of family pressure to Bring It. The Secret Teachings of Mary Magdalene says this about Sarah: “She was to be the embodiment of the Great Invocation, combining the spiritual qualities of her mother Mary, the ‘Woman Who Knows All’ … and those of the man called the Christ, her father, the Light of the World.”16
Through a Red lens, it’s crucial to note that in this lineage at this time, the holy child created between the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine is female. This tells us something significant, if we have the ears to hear. As The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene warns:
There is no knowledge of the Father apart from the Mother, for it is the Mother Spirit who gives birth to the image of the Son in whom the Living Father is revealed. So also shall Mother Spirit give birth to the image of the Daughter, so that … the revelation of God Most High is made complete. Truly I say to you, there is a holier Gospel yet to be spoken.17
In other words, folks,
There’s a new Trinity in town.
Like her Mom — and like most powerful feminine energies during that time — Sarah was hidden underground because this world and human consciousness were not ready for her wild Red ways.
Well, some of us are ready for her now.
Or perhaps, she’s finally ready for herself.
But, we have to go underground, into the darkness, into our souls and bodies (and perhaps even into a Mexican restaurant) in order to welcome her into the light.
Send out the criers, go to the marketplace of souls,
“Hear, hear, all you in the colonnade of lovers, here it is:
“For several days now, the daughter of the vine has reported lost.
Call all your friends! Whoever’s near her is in danger.
“Her dress is ruby-colored: her hair is done in sea foam;
She takes away reason; be alert; Watch out for her!
“If you find this bitter one you can have my soul for dessert.
If she’s in the Underworld, then that’s the place to go.
“She’s a night-woman, shameless, disreputable, and red.
If you do find her, please bring her to Hafez’s house.”18
THE CLEOPATRA SYNDROME
Back at the Mexican restaurant, as the fires of Sarah faded, several minutes passed in which I Rested
In
This Total Knowing.
This Natural Acceptance.
This Divine “Duh!”
(Pause)
(Pause)
(Pause)
But, as I started to reflect less on Sarah’s collective meaning and more on her personal meaning … for me, I writhed with resistance, and my healthy ego wrestled this highly hazardous part of the Redvelation to the ground.
“I’m not catching the ‘Cleopatra syndrome!’” I practically shouted. Mercedes and Emily looked confused, so I charged on.
“It’s infected the entire New Age, where everyone is someone famous from a past life — heaven forbid, not an ‘ordinary human,’ like a farmer or a housewife or a Starbucks barista. Look, we’ve all got childhood wounds, messiah complexes, and unconscious needs to feel special. Not only am I a wounded soul, but I’m a middle child, so needing to feel special is par for my spiritual course and something I gotta watch like a Red hawk. Also, when someone is translating spiritual information from the other realms, no matter how impressive the original Source is, it still has to work itself through a human personality and ego, psychological and cultural screens, and the translator’s current level of consciousness.”
I eyed Emily, suspiciously.
She shook her head like I had entirely missed the sacred point:
“Look, Sera, I’m not trying to convince you that you were Sarah in a past life. I personally don’t give a crap about knowing who people were in their past lives unless it somehow helps their soul unfold in this one. Past, present, and future lives are all happening at once on one level, so everything we need to know can be found right now within our current lives. However, sometimes, if it’s important for the soul to get a wider perspective on her current situation — like, a cosmic backstory — she will usher forth a past-life incarnation to help. This especially holds true if it’s a wounded piece of the soul ‘stuck’ in a particularly traumatic lifetime. That fragment needs healing and reintegration because the wounds are directly affecting and re-manifesting in the current life.”
Emily took another deep breath:
“I think if our egos weren’t getting all tripped up over the [mimicking a Charlton Heston voice] ‘Sarah, daughter of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene’ or [now mimicking a Darth Vader voice from Star Wars] ‘Luke, I am your FATHER’ piece, it would be like any other past-life message I receive for a client. But, if it makes you more comfortable, perhaps see this as just a metaphor, a chip off the collective unconscious, or an archetype through which to heal your soul. Clearly, there’s an enormous energetic and emotional release going on with you in response to this Sarah piece, and that’s what matters.”
She made some good points.
Also, if Sarah had shown up all backlit and blissed out with stars shooting out of her armpits, spewing that generic “channeled” material you can read on almost any New Age-y website attributed to “ascended masters,” or if she had asked me to worship her or was pedantic or told me I was the golden child here to reveal this secret lineage and save the world and blah blah blah, well, I wouldn’t have trusted what was going on. At all. Because that’s not how Red communicates. The reality is, we all need to be enormously discerning around shiny spirits with big names. As it’s written in The Secret Gospel of St. Mary Magdalene:
Mary said to her disciples, “Do not receive every spirit that comes to you, but put every spirit to the test to see if it comes from God or the demiurge or Satan. There are many false lights, and they glitter and glow, and even a demon can appear in the image of the Risen One. Do not be deceived, but look always for the light of Love and Truth, for what is evil lacks Love and what is mixture lacks the perfection of Truth. In the Holy Spirit you will be empowered to discern, for she is discerning awareness.”19
Something significant I’ve witnessed over recent years: With any breakthrough of truth, such as the Revelation of this holy family, false light beings catch on faster than you can say “Hello Kitty” and want a piece of the cosmic action. One of their main ways of cutting in? Mimicking the Holy Family. Basically, it’s energetic identity theft. Currently, there are more “false” Mary Magdalenes and Jesuses (and now Sarahs) roaming the “higher” realms and the New Age scenes than Republicans in Texas. Even if they honestly believe they are the real beings, disincarnate impersonators often have underlying agendas that don’t take our soul’s best interest into account, but which we usually eagerly agree to carry out because we’re wowed by their claimed identity and by the strong blissful or “heavenly” feelings they create (and sometimes manipulate) in us, and because of all our honest human unconscious cravings to feel chosen, cared for by the Universe, and like we, well, matter.
But the fact that Sarah showed up via Emily during an ordinary weekend of healthy, grounded girlfriend giddiness and pretty much just wanted to dish about her dysfunctional family life and share her pain, her regrets, her mistakes, her imperfect humanity — well, that was more trustworthy, not to mention that I felt everything she shared within my own soul body. Also, by the time of this dinner, Sarah had been a relentless repeat on my Red radar, and I’d like to think I have enough sentience to recognize when the Universe is trying to get my attention. Bottom line: Sarah did not make me feel “special” or like the next messiah. She simply made me feel my somewhat fucked-up, wary, and wounded self.
For the public record, I’m not claiming to be the reincarnated daughter of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene (if you want to go on that wild Google chase, you will find other women having experiences of Sarah and claiming to be her incarnation or her “channel,” which when not being maneuvered by the false light, represents a much-needed Divine energy that is coming through all of us, collectively). What I am claiming is that Sarah is integral to my personal healing. Our stories, though different on a surface level, match on a subterranean level. We are closely tied together. Knowing her helps embody Me. She is an essential part of my soul retrieval.
I didn’t sleep that night, under the Red full moon; this Redvelation ran like a live wire through my body. Although I wasn’t telling myself that what happened at the Mexican restaurant was “true,” when I was able to temper my mind’s critique and simply allow myself to “have” the experience, on levels way deeper than my psychological wounding, I felt
Found.
We now interrupt this program for a much needed …
DANCE BREAK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is a hefty chapter, so I highly suggest you put this book down, find some good tunes, get out of your head and into your body, and shake your ass. I’ll be dancing with you …
Over the next few weeks, “memories” of Sarah’s life came rapidly and experientially. One of the more potent experiences was being inside Magdalene’s womb as she faced Jesus dying on the cross. There are no words deep or wide enough, in any universe, to describe what it was like to feel Magdalene’s heart-splitting pain inside her body as “Sarah.”
(Pause.)
(Deep exhale.)
Besides feeling her mom’s devastation at losing her beloved, Sarah also felt people’s misunderstanding, fear, and even hatred of her parents — all of which is terrifying to feel from the womb and makes a baby’s consciousness (which is different from a baby’s brain) rethink her soul’s plans: “This is how divine love incarnate is treated on this planet? Uh, ‘Check please!’” This initial soul shock and recoil from the negativity present on Earth resides deep inside all of us.
In some “memories,” I experienced Sarah’s twelve wise very busy aunties, aka Magdalene’s “disciples,” though a more appropriate title for these women would be priestesses, since they were powerful teachers and healers in their own right. In The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene, Magdalene says, “Under the old covenant, only men were called as priests, but under the new covenant, women are also called as priestesses.”20
Looks like my childhood calling to be a priest was actually a calling to be a priestess. As James Hillman declared in The Soul’s Code: “A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It will make its claim. [It] does not go away.”21 It was making its claim, and I could not get away.
During my initial Sarah memories, it was hard not to get royally pissed and call “conspiracy” on the Church’s ass. So, of course, I got my fight on and asked the “Red team” if there was something specific I should do — like storm the Vatican, creating a Red Grrrl Church Revival? My team laughed and told me they’re not asking me to do anything for them, including trying to “prove” the lineage (via texts, theology, history, artifacts). They told me that living as proof is my best course of action.
(Our best course of action)
(Pause)
To ring clearer than Church bells: I’m not interested in using Sarah or this lineage for self-worth purposes or to validate my Red work (these peeps have been used enough). I’m revealing these Redvelatory experiences to you so that I’m in integrity. And I have to trust that I’m also being urged to share this publicly because there’s something in it for you … or there will be soon.
I will admit that when the memories started, I wondered if this was finally It — the answer to my lifelong question of who/what Red is — this mystical lineage, this “bloodline,” this funky, freaky princess priestess and her crazy, sexy cosmic crew. But apparently this was not my “Final Answer.” My homies whispered: “Red is bigger than a priestess practice or a person from the past and even this mystical lineage; Red is bigger than anything your mind could easily grasp at this time.”
However, because I do have a very specific soul commitment to this particular lineage (as do many who are alive now), my Red team warned me that there are “false” lineages running alongside the “true” lineage, and it’s critical that I know the difference. Through a Red lens, “false lineages” are those that have purposefully covered or manipulated the teachings that stemmed from the sacred relationship created between Jesus and Magdalene.
Beyond my labels, definitions, experiences, and memories, please feel what happens in your body and your heart as you explore the possibility of this lineage, and trust that over anything I say or anyone else says.
There are Spaces Our Truth can always Be Found
The Heart.
The Blood
The Soul
The Fire
The Rose
The Between
The Belly Laugh
In The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, much of the teaching and guidance Magdalene receives from J.C. after he was crucified occurs through the nous (pronounced “noose” in Greek): “A dimension often forgotten … In the ancient world, the nous was seen as ‘the finest point of the soul … ’ It gives us access to the intermediate realm between the purely sensory and the purely spiritual, which Henry Corbin so eloquently names as the imaginal.”22
This does not mean the nous is “make believe.” Bourgeault quickly reminds us:
Imaginal does not mean imaginary — fictitious or subjective. It is a realm that objectively exists (one might think of it as an enveloping matrix of meaning around our own space-time dimension), and it is from this realm that our human sense of identity and direction ultimately derive. … However one names it, the point to keep uppermost in mind is that it designates a sphere that is not less real but more real than our so-called objective reality and whose generative energy can change the course of events in the world.23
While I do not presume that my experience of the nous is like Mary Magdalene’s or others, I can say that
I Know this Space in my own Way.
(As do you.)
This is the space I’ve visited since I was a child to “be with” God. This is the space I started calling “the between” after my grandfather’s death, the space where Kali licked me (between), the space where I first heard Her voice that I captured in my Red journal. This is the space I wrote specifically about and at times from in my Red Kali paper for graduate school and, now, in this book as well. This is the space I refound in my Red Tent. This is my soul’s space. In fact, it is through my soul that I enter this space. While Red has always erupted out of my physical life and shown up in comical and concrete signs, It seems to do so in order to validate that which I already know in here.
What I Receive In this Space doesn’t always make sense,
but It always Makes Love.
When I’m in this space, it’s less like a psychic “seeing” and more like a heart knowing. I do not go up and out to receive the goods; I go down and in. This is an important distinction. You see, years ago, when I was at my energy school, something peculiar kept happening during my meditations that contradicted the teachings of that particular school. The seven chakras (energy centers) in my body would merge into one, a blazing point between my head and my lower body, behind my heart, disclosing not my heart chakra but what I call the Heart of my heart. While I could use my upper chakras to receive psychic information via my pineal gland (a physical and energetic spot in the center of the head considered the G-spot for enlightenment, what philosopher Rene Descartes designated “the seat of the soul”), it felt unnatural, forced, and not like the seat of my soul. But because my experiences weren’t validated by my energy school, I doubted myself … until I attended a spiritual retreat outside the school where we practiced “telling” the Divine we were open and ready by repeatedly chanting the mantra, “Here I Am, Here I Am, Here I AM.” After a few minutes of chanting, my Lady cut in, forever changing the arrangement of the chant by fiercely beating against my chest:
“I Am Here.
I Am Here.
I Am Here.”
She most certainly is.
In The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, J.C. told M.M., “For where the heart is, there is the treasure.”24 In this case, the heart and the nous become synonymous. As Bourgeault writes,
When through the nous, the vibrational field of a particular human heart comes into spontaneous resonance with the divine heart itself, then finite and infinite become a single, continuous wavelength, and authentic communion becomes possible. Bridging the created and uncreated realms within a human being, it is both a realm in itself and the means by which this realm makes itself known.25
For me, the most powerful knowing undeniably comes from this holy heart space.
This Center of Me.
This Point of All Return.
Leloup says this between space, the nous, “is witness to an altogether different mode of understanding that the masculine mind typically overlooks: a domain of prophetic or visionary knowledge that, though certainly not exclusive to women, definitely partakes of the feminine principle.”26 Visionary knowledge is not “less than” book or oral knowledge. And, as Bourgeault reminds us, visions that derive from the nous are not necessarily “subjective” nor are they reflections of the person’s psyche. Some believe they are the most direct and unfettered way to receive “the real” wisdom.27
Because feminine wisdom has been virtually erased from traditional religions and nontraditional spiritualities’ derivatives, we modern women more often than not have to hang out on the shady corners of the unknown, relying upon alternative ways to uncover our spiritual truth. We are Vibrant Visionaries, Praising Prophetesses, Mystical Misfits, Stalwart Salvagers of Soul, Mighty Metaphorologists, Lost Lineage Luminaries, Heretics of the Heart, Radical Realm Rompers, Bringers and Bangers of the New. In other words, when it comes to the Feminine Divine, more often than not, we gotta pirate Her booty. We know that the external world only knows half the truth, so we depend on the inner worlds to show us the rest. Just ’cause you can’t find certain characters or lineages or teachings or Goddesses in his-story, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Her-story awaits to unfold from you.
This between space reveals the universe in my body. It’s where my flesh reveals its divinity. Leloup claimed that the nous is “where spirits become embodied and bodies become spiritualized.”28 Sometimes in the between, my Red team simply holds me, so my body starts to re-member.
They hold me
(In)
They love me
(In)
’Cause we all know embodiment ain’t my strong suit.
J.C. and M.M. inform me that what made them so “dangerous” in their day was that they dared to fully incarnate; they did the “work” to embody their souls. God and Goddess became flesh, and flesh became God and Goddess. It was through their bodies that they found salvation. They did not deny their humanity, but revered it. They were fully human and fully divine. They were anthropos, or what Bourgeault defines as “the completed human being,”29 who has not only fully integrated the masculine and feminine, the conscious and the unconscious, and is not only Whole in the Jungian psychological sense, but has also united their humanity with their divinity.
COSMIC FAMILY THERAPY (PART 2)
Since the Mexican restaurant, Sarah’s life feels as real to me as my own. In fact, whenever something is up in my life, another layer of her life is revealed. Often what I experience with Sarah in the between is something along the lines of cosmic family therapy. It isn’t glorious; it’s raw and emotional and gritty soul work. Who Sarah was and what she “held” needed to be planted energetically in the dark, silent earth via a female body, but not bloom for two thousand years while the Church reigned in the light. From a wounded perspective, it has not exactly been a “fun” or “fair” mission. But, when Sarah sees from her soul’s perspective, she grows quiet with remembrance, with reverence, with the realization of just how noble, how brave, and how necessary her dramatic act of a short life was for the planet, for the people, for the Divine Feminine. In other words, she failed no one. She is slowly beginning to accept and integrate this truth. I can feel Sarah’s trauma loosening, like tight muscles that have kept her locked into a position that is out of alignment with her soul’s current expression; I feel her releasing the past so she can bloom in the present. It is time.
Not too long ago I had a powerful dream: Jesus and Magdalene were on either side of me, holding my hands. I was their child. We walked through a town together, wearing filthy clothes as the townspeople yelled obscenities at us, spat on us, and acted with hatred toward us. So we started running, giddily, out of the town and down to this wooden dock from which we jumped into the sea. Under the warm turquoise water, we unclasped hands and floated away from one another. After a while, these large, luminous stingrays rose underneath each of us and gently deposited us back onto the dock. Our previously dirty clothes were now sparkling clean. Once I made sure Magdalene was okay, I looked for Jesus, who was sitting a short distance away, catching his breath. I grabbed Magdalene’s hand, and we walked over and sat down with Jesus, forming a triad with our bodies.
I knew if the townspeople saw us together like this again, they would freak out, but I didn’t care.
I was so tired of being forced apart.
I leaned toward Jesus and Magdalene, and collapsed into their arms. I cried oceans. I cried like crying would cry if it could cry. I cried like I needed to. I woke up the next morning with a soggy pillow and a healed commitment: To Them. To this planet. To you.
(Pause.)
Undoubtedly, my experiences with Sarah have helped me recognize and release my own wounds — feeling that not all of me is wanted or safe here; feeling that I am abandoned by God/dess, spiritually exiled, and orphaned; feeling shame, self-doubt, and confusion about my mystico-erotic feminine nature; feeling my soul’s (not just my ego’s) immense pressure to carry out my mission; and feeling the equally immense fear to hide and stay safe. Some people are known to receive the wounds of Christ — these wounds manifest physically as the stigmata, but they can also manifest energetically, leaving no physical marks. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve received the wounds of Christ’s daughter. Sometimes, I know that every Western woman has.
In Soulcraft, Bill Plotkin says our wounds hold the keys to our destiny in this life. Fact is, we are all daughters of an ecstatically loving union between the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine, and it’s time to carry out our collective mission. Our divine femininity is this planet’s current savior. As a new generation of hopeful heretics, we’re here to make some serious love. As Bourgeault sums up, “If I am right, then, the true progeny of Mary Magdalene and Jesus is the path of … love itself. Their intertwined hearts bear fruit in a distinctive flavor of love that is visionary, transformative, inclusive, and ubiquitously creative.”30
(Pause.)
However you interpret all this is really none of my business. I’m not interested in convincing or converting. While I’m not attached to “past life” stories, I am attached to honoring the multivalent ways the Feminine Divine communicates, the multidimensional mysteries whispering through each and every one of us, the transformations that ensue by spending quality time inside ourselves, and the authentic power that arises from trusting our own knowing, and putting what we’ve experienced and learned into action.
My sessions in the between give me the courage and inner stamina to take solid steps in my ordinary life. They challenge me, stretch me, and awaken me. They unearth my self-imposed blocks. They help me face both my dark and light shadows. They grace me and they grill me as they grow me.
They Keep It Real.
And most importantly, these sessions in between bring me Red heart to Red heart with my Lady. That’s right: My Red team constantly reminds me of my soul’s desire — to love my Red Lady, out loud and on purpose. By doing so, I help my lineage, naturally. These sessions in between make me cry with relief and laugh at what previously felt like too heavy of a burden to carry. They help me become a better human.
Interestingly enough, after one month of cosmic family therapy (and after a year of writing through cement), my writer’s block finally broke. Some people need life coaches to help them take a huge personal step and start a new project; I need Jesus’s daughter.
IT’S TIME
Sarah asks us all to get a little wild, a little dangerous, and alotta free. She asks us to clean the mud off our faces, shake the dust off our memories, and open our hearts so wide that the planet falls in. She doesn’t care if you believe in her story, but she does give everything to help you believe in the fiercely loving Feminine Divine ripping and roaring through your story.
Sarah doesn’t allow herself to become rigidly defined or overly bloodlined. The past has given her no place, so the present offers her every place. Her mystery is more important than her history. Sarah gives us the freedom to project upon her what we need for our own personal and collective healing, and if we occasionally let go of what we need or believe, if we allow ourselves to venture into the nous and listen in the Ways of the Forgotten, we might also begin to hear what she has to say for herself:
Sisters,
It’s Time.
Come Find Me.
But Know This:
When We Meet
There
Will
Be
No
More
Hiding!