Jesus and Magdalene Chapter
This is the chapter that appears in the softcover version of Ramakrishna and Jesus Christ, The Supermystics.
The following Chapter is Copyrighted. Copyright © 2025. Vedantic Shores Press. All rights reserved.
_____________________________
Jesus and Magdalene
Jesus’ haunting relationship with Mary of Magdala, the prostitute he converted into penitent saintliness, has never found a satisfactory explanation, at least none of record, and doubtless, in the absence of certain knowledge, and fuller documentation, none is actually possible. An attempt will be made nevertheless.
All the gospel narratives place her at the center of the women at Calvary and during the dramatic hours following the crucifixion. Her continuing gratitude and devotion to the extraordinary man who had rescued her from sensuality and from much else would account for this. But how can we explain the fact that after his death he first appeared to her alone, as Mark and John specifically state? For such a unique honor, why was Peter, the delegated leader, not chosen, or John, who understood him best, or Mary of Bethany, she who had sat at his feet, enraptured by his presence? Why the Magdalene?
Let us for a moment recast the gospel story as an oriental epic in which the hero, possessed of occult power and mysterious antecedents, is put to death by enemies but because of his thaumaturgic gifts is able, as he had prophesied, to rise from the tomb—and to appear first to a woman, one not long before caught in the snares of fleshly lust, greeting her by name in a soft voice at dawn in the garden of his resurrection. We would conclude that he loved her in a special way, that they had either been lovers in that life or in some other. We would assume this.
We should make the same assumption about Mary and the Galilean.
The only other time we find them together is the scene in Simon the Pharisee’s house (Luke 7: 36-50), coming shortly after her conversion from the “seven devils” that had plagued her. Uninvited, she makes her way into a gathering where Jesus and his disciples are seated and where her long-standing promiscuous reputation is well known. Acting not as a devotee nor as a woman understandably grateful for her liberation from misery but as someone possessed by a trance-like compulsion, she cannot remain apart from Christ but falls at his feet, washing them over and over with her tears and then with the expensive ointment she has brought. In her love and adoration and, seemingly, in the grip of some other, more obscure emotion, she cannot do otherwise—her craving to be near him, to touch him, to wash his feet, to weep over him, completely overmastering her. This impassioned, compulsive behavior is—there cannot be any doubt—that of a woman at the feet of her lover. Whatever else it might be, it is that first of all. If asked to interpret the actions of any other woman in such a situation, that would be our response; it should not be different because the woman was Mary Magdalene and the man Jesus.
Thus, in the only two scenes where they appear together, something most extraordinary happens, and in both cases, we are led, though by very different evidence, to an identical conclusion about them. Both incidents exude a strange kind of intimacy and both reinforce the same insight, which, had it not been for the habitual state of reverential numbness in which we gloss over our scripture-reading, would have been self-evident.
Since the fragmentary records in the text regarding this relationship (and so much in Jesus’ life) are unsatisfactory and—perhaps deliberately—incomplete, we are forced to speculate, guided by intuition and by the light of normal human experience. This is where we might be led:
To render her so sublime an honor as their secret appearance together that morn, he must be acknowledging some personal tie, some private debt that for long has been left unpaid. She must have served him well—somehow, somewhere—but not in a merely personal sense. The service would have been, necessarily, to his higher self—more likely, to his evolving higher self as it was at the time of their association (a perfected self obviously needing no such service). Further, if she had been able, and permitted, to serve someone who in time was to become the Christ of the Western world, and so significantly that in recompense he chose her to whom to appear at one of the portentous hours of his life, the association had to have been not only deep and intimate, but of long duration.
Many lives they must have known each other, becoming ever more closely linked—like Gautama and Yasodhara—probing the depths of the other’s soul through every possible psychological mode. They would have been parents to one another, children, siblings, friends, husband and wife, lovers, teacher and student. At some point, he would have begun to move steadily in a purely spiritual direction, with each lifetime mounting rapidly toward ultimate illumination, which finally came in Palestine, on a cross. That would have been reached several, perhaps a dozen or more, lives prior to the Jesus of Nazareth embodiment. It would have come during or immediately after the last time they had been emotionally united: as lovers, as husband and wife. That would have been the time when their love, in power and depth, had been at its apogee.
What had begun to separate them would have been his growing commitment to the spiritual path per se, the path both of them had been treading for a long time: the undergirding principle in their relationship. For her to have been the feminine presence in the life of someone destined to become a world savior means that she, too, would have possessed, by that stage, or by the time they had met—many lives previously—a spirituality proportionately rich, at least potentially so. But along with it, growing simultaneously, was a nature capable of enormous ranges of creaturely emotion, which, because insufficiently purified and inadequately grounded in mystical insight, fell prey to some negativism by virtue of its very intensity, locked her into a dominantly human attachment—with accompaniments of anger and jealousy that universally appear at that stage—clouded her spirituality, and began seriously to block his own movement toward higher and higher perception of truth.
Thus, her love, by its very passion and the totality of her commitment to him as a man—which prevented her from making an equal commitment to him as a spiritual being, as an emerging saint—became, with tragic irony and fatal inexorability, an obstacle on his path: on the world’s path, too.
She would be falling into despair, or disease, or dissipation, possibly suicide at this point, though the agony (mutual agony) would have been protracted through hundreds of scenes over many lifetimes, the tie between them so powerful, the soul rapport so profound, the fabric of their shared karma so densely woven. Only slowly, resistingly, would she have drifted into the control of inauspicious emotions that would have sought escape in one addiction, passion, illness or another, each one like a devil—that is, each with the power, demon-like, to blot out the divine light that had been potent in her, the power to dominate her emotional life increasingly, and all of her life, for her heart had ruled her life, was her life, was her soul too. (By the time she is born in Palestine some lifetimes later, the “devils” having accumulated and left her deranged as well.)
Slowly he, the polestar of her existence, her other half, would have felt an urge, a divine implantation, to move away from her, but might indeed have resisted it, might have chosen instead to die with her than live without her, as the poet Emily Dickinson sang:
And were you lost, I would be—
Though my name
Rang loudest
On the heavenly fame.[1]
Or as Milton, in Book IX of his great allegory of human fate, shows us Adam speaking to his Eve after her fall:
Certain with thee my resolution is to die.
Unable to solve the knotted tangle of their psyches, unable—because of his own attachment to her—to guide her into freedom and a clear understanding of what was taking place, unable, in short, to help her, he might have chosen to follow to the end the long course they had by then traveled together.
Their separation, brought about at last, would have required divine intervention, taking one form or another, bringing her to death perhaps, while he was still in the midst of strength, coercing him to proceed without her— the Divine unwilling that a spiritual potential already so formidable should serve only creaturely drives, only human life—and in the next lifetime, apart from her, his mind absorbed in other themes, and for the lifetime following, is dedicated to work, to sacrifice, to austerity, to contemplation, to ego-conquest, heart-conquest, too; the light advancing in him rapidly, as five, ten, or more lifetimes pass, and she is forgotten as, following another course, she continues to slip away from the height she had known when they had been last together, slipping away … down, down.
But she has given him much, more than can be uttered. Only God could give him more, and we might say she had been an instrument of the Lord in giving him what she had over such a time span, so that he is in her debt forever. Indeed, appearing to her that momentous dawn outside the sepulcher could not match the magnitude of her gift, the treasure she had bestowed on him.
What was the treasure?
The total knowledge of Woman. Through their all-absorbing union, perfected over many incarnations, he had come to know, each time, a new phase of womanhood in her evolving love for him. She would have told him: You can experience all of Woman through me. With each facet of the feminine unveiled to him through the symbiosis of their love, he had discovered corresponding facets of himself. Between them the universe of manifestation had become known. Insofar as human relations can provide the incentive, he had come to know what could be known about himself, and about Her, his soul’s companion through the ages. For this gift, there was nothing to truly compensate. He did what was possible. When they met again in Galilee, he saved her from depravity, and on the morning of his appearance in the astral state, called the Resurrection by Christians, it was to her that he chose first to come, whispering her name, as only he could, and as only she could hear it: Mary. But she had borne many names, and he had. She had known him once, perhaps, as—Adam.
When all she could give him was received, and she could give no more, but only the Source of life, including womanhood, could instruct him, he had to turn, or be made to turn, to it instead—with what anguish we may imagine.
In Luke 8: 2 (immediately after the scene in Simon the Pharisee’s house) she is identified as formerly afflicted with “seven devils”—with the lust, fear, rage, addiction, and self-hate, which had replaced, with equivalent intensity, the love she had nurtured over so long. Jesus, who would have received her precognitive image in meditation before they met again, recognized her early in his public ministry—feeling a sorrow and heartache beyond our comprehension. Some unrecorded meetings would then have passed between them, during which he would have transferred to her, through his yoga power, the knowledge of who she was, who and what they were to each other, the knowledge of all their past. She would have been stricken, traumatized by wonder, delirious with relief, gratitude, incredulity, adoration beyond measure inundating her.
Again we see her trailing into the Pharisee’s house after Jesus had entered, standing behind him, weeping, with her tears washing his feet, kissing them, wiping them with her hair, anointing them with the oil she had brought in the alabaster box, and had been doing so from the time he entered the house, for when Simon objected silently to his tolerating the presence of a known sinner, Jesus, perceiving his thought, remarked: “This woman, since the time I came in, hath not ceased to kiss my feet.” Then adding, perhaps addressing himself to an audience unknown: “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven: for she loved much.”
How much, and whom, he alone there knew—and she herself.
The protracted weeping, and washing, kissing, and anointing of his feet—among people who scorned her because of her reputation as a sinner and her known “possessed” character—is difficult to comprehend, but in terms of the background traced above, her conduct becomes perfectly understandable. In one stroke, she has been liberated from her diseases and lusts and simultaneously reunited with her soul’s love for so many ages! Her behavior seems wholly natural, innocent, touching, beautiful beyond words. Again, she is a being possessed—but by love now. A woman’s love—and the humble love of a penitent: both at the same time.
Is he penitent too? With his yogic vision he could recapture their past, and might have wondered if he could not have acted more wisely during that crucial lifetime when their paths had diverged for the first time, could not have managed her agony better, could not have known himself more accurately, could not have prevented the tragic disjunction from taking place—while still pursuing his path to glory. Could not the will that was driving him to immortality have been matched with sufficient wisdom to cope with the problems destroying their love, to find some alternative to abandoning her to a baleful destiny, which ten lives could not bring to an end?
We cannot but feel the intimacy of her gestures in Simon’s house, going beyond that of the penitent only. There seems a trace, at so long a remove, of the old passion mixed with the penitence in her prostrate weeping and caressing of his feet, mingling with her tears the sighs of a lover’s heart reborn. In John 12: 3, Mary of Bethany is seen also anointing his feet with oil but the manner of her doing so is purely devotional, worshipful of the messiah, not the man. The outward similarity of the two women’s ritual of adoration has led some to think of them as the same person but the difference in mood and attitude obviously springs out of two quite different feminine hearts. And when we see Mary with her sister Martha in the famous domestic interlude (Luke 10: 39- 42), her serene absorption in the Master’s words contrasts fundamentally with Magdalene’s devastated unbelief on finding herself free while clinging to the feet of her Adam.
Then there is the scene where Mary of Bethany informs Jesus of the death of her brother Lazarus (John 11: 32), in the manner of a devotee—not as the tragedy-laden Magdalene would have acted. The death of a loved brother, coming soon after the time of the sinner’s illumination, could not, in all candor, have been regarded as a momentous incident—as it manifestly seemed to Mary and Martha, for whom the spiritual path was not a recent revelation and for whom, therefore, their brother’s sudden death would have had the decisive impact it, in fact, did have.
An avatar’s actions always have a double meaning. Beyond the crucial personal aspect of the Resurrection, there is the powerful symbolic factor. Christ’s appearance to a woman is deeply appropriate on that ground alone, for woman symbolizes the soul, represents the soul in human life, and to her, man—the perfected man, especially he—must render homage. Even the adulteress, the harlot embodies the divinity of the Universal Woman, the eternal feminine, and so Christ in one stroke reaffirms woman’s divine nature, worthy of special reverence and tribute.
At the same time the masculine and feminine principles are fused into a living unity. Mary is the divine woman, the Christ without, the feminine half of pure being. Although Jesus, become the Christ, has achieved this union of opposite principles within himself, his appearance first to her outwardly symbolizes the fusion of the two eternal polarities.
Not least of all, it is an act of sheer gratitude. Three of the four accounts show him abandoned by everyone on Calvary—except for the few women who stayed to the end. At the center of whom, as the reports make clear, was the Magdalene, ministering with her heart’s tears to the world’s newest savior, but herself a savior also— his, so long ago, remembered by them both now, and by the gods who keep watch over mankind’s laborious ascent into the light from out of the prehensile darkness.
[1] From her poem “I Cannot Live With You.”
Copyright © 2025. Vedantic Shores Press. All rights reserved.