Contents

Preface of the Abbey

How This Book Is Built

On the Sources

Book One · She Moved Upon the Waters

IThe Second Verse

IIThe Grammar Is Not an Accident

IIIThe Dove Was Always Hers

IVMy Mother, the Spirit

VThe Comforter Called She

VIIn the Image, Male and Female

Book Two · The Names She Answers To

VIIElohim, the Plural Who Is One

VIIIEl Shaddai, the Breasted God

IXThe Mercy That Is a Womb

XAbwoon, the Birther of All

XIThe Mother in Heaven

Book Three · Wisdom Built Her House

XIIBefore the Mountains Were Settled

XIIISeven Pillars

XIVThe Breath of the Power of God

XVWisdom and the Tree

XVIHer Voice Became the Word

XVIIHoly Wisdom in Stone

Book Four · She Dwelt Among Us

XVIIIThe Name That Means Presence

XIXThe Lady Who Was Driven Out

XXThe Two Pillars and the Tree

XXIThe Exile of the Presence

XXIICome, O Sabbath Bride

XXIIIThe Song That Is the Holy of Holies

Book Five · The Archetypal Woman

XXIVMythos Is Not the Opposite of Truth

XXVLosing the Forest for the Trees

XXVIThe Living Stream

XXVIIThe Pattern Beneath the Stories

XXVIIIThe Conflation of the Marys

Book Six · Mary the Mother

XXIXThe Girl Who Said Yes

XXXTheotokos: What Ephesus Settled

XXXIStar of the Sea

XXXIIThe Nursing Mother

XXXIIIThe Titles They Both Bear

XXXIVOur Lady of Sorrows

XXXVThe Woman Clothed with the Sun

XXXVIThe Black Madonna

Book Seven · Mary of Magdala

XXXVIIThe Tower of the Flock

XXXVIIIThe Seven

XXXIXThe Alabaster Jar

XLShe Did Not Leave the Cross

XLIFirst in the Garden

XLIIApostle to the Apostles

XLIIIThe Gospel That Bears Her Name

XLIVThe Sermon That Cost Her Her Name

XLVThe Bride and the Bridegroom

XLVIThe Boat to Provence

Book Eight · The Descent and the Rising

XLVIIShe Opened Her Ear to the Great Below

XLVIIIThe Seven Gates

XLIXThe Sister Who Waits

LThe One Who Stood and Pleaded

LIThree Days, and the Water of Life

LIIWhat the Descent Prepared

Book Nine · The Mother of Ten Thousand Names

LIIIShe Who Hears the Cries of the World

LIVThe Vow Taken in a Woman’s Body

LVThe Eternal Venerable Mother

LVITwo Merciful Mothers

LVIIOne Mother, Many Doors

Book Ten · The Women of the Way

LVIIIAnna in the Temple

LIXThe Woman at the Well

LXMartha’s Confession

LXIJunia, Phoebe, Prisca

LXIITheodora, Episcopa

LXIIIThe Prophetesses and the Martyrs

LXIVHow the Doors Closed

LXVThe Vessel and the Grail

LXVIThe Restoration

LXVIIThe Spirit and the Bride Say, Come

Appendix A · The Feminine Names of God

Appendix B · The Women of the Gospels

Appendix C · The Titles of the Lady

Appendix D · The Little Office of the Bride

Appendix E · The Seven Gates: A Devotional Descent

Appendix F · Names and Terms

THE SPIRIT AND THE BRIDE

The Divine Feminine and the Theology of the Marys

Terry Evans

WHITE LOTUS SOCIETY PUBLICATIONS

Golden Flower Abbey

Preface of the Abbey

There is a sentence at the very end of the Christian scriptures that almost nobody preaches on. It is the second-to-last invitation in the Bible, and it is spoken by two voices at once.

The Spirit and the Bride say, Come.

Two feminine voices. One is the Breath that hovered over the face of the waters before there was light to see her by. The other is the woman who stands at the end of the long road, dressed and waiting, and who is also the assembly of every soul that ever loved God. Between those two — the Spirit at the beginning and the Bride at the end — the whole of scripture is stretched like a canopy, and under that canopy walk the women whose names the Gospels took the trouble to write down.

This book is about Her. It is written for the reader who has felt, standing in some church or some garden, that half of the divine name has gone missing, and who wanted to know whether that feeling was a private eccentricity or an ancient memory. It is an ancient memory. She was in the second verse of the Bible. She is in the last chapter. She was never removed from the scriptures; she was removed from the translations, and from the hymnals, and from the ordinary speech of ordinary believers, until a whole civilization forgot that its own holy books had called God Mother and had not thought this remarkable.

The Abbey holds, and this book teaches, the confession that our source manuscript states in its own plain words:

The Holy Spirit, Spirit of God’s Wisdom, is our Holy and Divine Mother.

Our souls in communion are the Holy Church, the Ecclesia — Bride of Christ, Daughter of Zion.

Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene personify a female Holy Spirit and the Bride of Christ.

She is our Christian Goddess.

Those four lines are the architecture of everything that follows. The first line gives us Books One through Four: the Breath, the Names, the Wisdom, the Presence. The third line gives us Books Six and Seven: the Mother and the Magdalene, the two Marys through whom the doctrine becomes a face. The second line gives us Book Ten: the assembly itself, the women of the Way, and the restoration now underway. The fourth line is not a boast. It is a translation note. It says: when you have finished restoring the feminine nouns of the Hebrew and the Syriac to their own gender, this is the word your own language will hand you, and you should not flinch at it.

We do not flinch at it. Neither do we divide God. The Godhead is not parts, and She is not a fourth thing added to three, and the divine feminine is not a goddess standing beside a god in a heavenly household of two. The one God, whom no name reaches, is called Father in one breath and Mother in the next by the same scriptures, in the same books, sometimes in the same verse. To restore the second name is not to add a second God. It is to stop speaking of the Infinite in half a vocabulary.

And the guide through all of it is the Marys. Not as a device — as a method. The doctrine of the divine feminine is abstract until it has a face, and the Gospels gave it seven or eight faces and called nearly all of them Mary. Mary who said yes. Mary who nursed him. Mary who stood at the cross when the men had gone. Mary who broke the jar. Mary who went to the tomb in the dark. Mary who did not recognize the gardener. Mary who was sent to the apostles before there were apostles. Every chapter of this book therefore ends at a door, and at every door one of these women is standing, and what she says is always the same word.

Come.

This volume is the sixth in the Golden Flower Abbey’s White Lotus series and stands beside Awakening to Love, The Lotus and the Lily, The Lotus and the Cross, Mist of the Ancients, and The Golden Rule and the Golden Flower. It observes the same house conventions: the tradition is presented in its own voice; the sources are given positively; and nothing is invented.

How This Book Is Built

The book runs in ten Books and sixty-seven chapters, and it moves in four typographic registers. Learning them takes a minute and saves an hour.

The doctrine. Blocks with a jade rule down the left margin hold the numbered articles — one hundred and fifty-one of them, running continuously from the first page to the last. They are written to be quoted, argued with, taught from, and read aloud in an assembly. An article is the Abbey’s settled position, stated once, in as few words as it can be stated in.

The doors. Every chapter closes with a gold-bordered panel that opens with the word Come. Each names the woman who stands at that chapter’s door, lays the chapter’s teaching against her witness, and ends with a versicle and response marked ℣ and ℟. There are sixty-seven of these. Read straight through, they are a single office, and they are the reason the book can be prayed instead of merely studied.

The portals. Each of the ten Books opens with an antiphon in a name of the divine feminine — Ruach, Eloah, Hokhmah, Shekinah, and so on down to the Bride herself. Ten names, ten doors into the same house.

The practices. Boxed devotions, offices, and exercises, placed where the teaching has just made them possible. They are meant to be done, not admired.

The apparatus. Blocks with a gold rule down the left margin hold the manuscript notes, the persons, the dates, and the places — what the record actually contains, given plainly and without argument.

At the back are six appendices: a register of the feminine names of God, a register of the women of the Gospels, the parallel table of the Lady’s titles, a Little Office of the Bride for the seven hours, a devotional descent through the seven gates, and a glossary.

On the Sources

This book was made from a single large compilation held in the Abbey’s archive: some two hundred and thirty thousand words of gathered material on the feminine face of God, assembled over years by a hand that was not trying to write a book but trying not to lose anything. It contains Hebrew grammar and Sumerian hymns, Church Fathers and Kabbalists, Marian litanies and Gnostic gospels, the Song of Songs and the Descent of Inanna, the Black Madonnas of France and the seven pillars of Proverbs. It is a devotional commonplace book of the highest order and it has no shape at all. This volume is its shape.

What has been done to it: the material has been ordered, the doctrine has been stated as doctrine, the sources have been named where the compilation left them unnamed, and the whole has been laid on the four-line confession quoted in the Preface. What has not been done to it: nothing has been invented, and nothing has been argued down. Where the compilation affirms something, this book affirms it.

Three editorial decisions should be stated openly.

First, the compilation in places speaks harshly of other households of faith — of Rome, of the fundamentalists, of the rabbis. None of that is carried forward. A book about the Mother of Mercy cannot be unmerciful, and the Abbey’s own positions are stated here affirmatively rather than against anyone. Where this volume differs from another communion it says so and moves on.

Second, the compilation carries a body of material on ritualized sexuality drawn from the Sumerian sacred-marriage literature and its modern interpreters. The theology of the sacred marriage is central to this book and is given a full Book. The technical and ritual material is not devotional doctrine and is left where it was found.

Third, several passages in the compilation are copied from living authors — a well-known rendering of the Aramaic Our Father, a translation of a Tibetan text, extended readings of the Inanna cycle. These are attributed here and paraphrased; they are not reproduced. Readers who want them should buy the books, and the books are named where they are used.

Principal named sources standing behind this volume: the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint; the Odes of Solomon; the Gospel of the Hebrews as quoted by Origen and Jerome; the Syriac Acts of Thomas; Aphrahat and Ephrem of Nisibis; the Nag Hammadi codices, especially the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary, and the Apocryphon of John; the Pistis Sophia; Proverbs, Sirach, and the Wisdom of Solomon; the Zohar and the Kabbalat Shabbat liturgy; the Sumerian Descent of Inanna in the Wolkstein–Kramer edition; Margaret Barker on the Queen of Heaven and the first temple; Caitlín Matthews on Sophia; Sylvia Brinton Perera on the descent; Margaret Starbird on the Bride; the decree of the Congregation for Divine Worship of 3 June 2016; and the Abbey’s own liturgical books.

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Book One

She Moved Upon the Waters

Of the Breath that is feminine in her own tongue, and of the Dove that was always hers.

RUACH

She who is Wind, Breath, and Inspiration. She who hovered over the deep before the first word was spoken. She whose name in Hebrew has never once been masculine, in any verse, in any book.

Mother of the beginning, you brooded over the waters as a bird over her nest, and the world came out from under your wings.

Come.

Chapter I

The Second Verse

✦

The Bible does not begin with a man. It does not begin with a father. It begins with a formless dark and a wind, and the wind is a woman.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

The word standing behind Spirit is ruach. It means wind, breath, air in motion, inspiration — the invisible thing that makes the visible thing move. And in Hebrew ruach is a feminine noun. Not sometimes. Not in poetry only. Always. Every one of its nearly four hundred appearances in the Hebrew Bible is grammatically feminine, and the verbs and adjectives that attend it agree with it as feminine.

The verb in that second verse is worth its own sentence. Merachefet — usually rendered moved or hovered — is a rare word, and where else it appears in the Torah is over a nest. In Deuteronomy 32, God is an eagle stirring up her nest, hovering over her young, spreading her wings to catch them when they fall. That is the verb. The first act of God recorded in scripture is a mother bird brooding over an egg that has not hatched yet.

Everything in this book follows from taking that sentence at face value.

1. The Spirit of God is named in the Hebrew scriptures by a feminine noun, ruach, without exception; and in Aramaic by the feminine rucha; and in Syriac likewise. This is the plain grammatical fact of the sacred text and the Abbey receives it as revelation and not as accident.

2. The first divine act recorded in scripture is a brooding — the hovering of a mother over what is not yet born. Creation is therefore not first an act of command but an act of gestation, and the God who gestates is rightly and scripturally called Mother.

3. To call God Mother is not to add a second God. There is one God, whom no name reaches. Father and Mother are two true names of the same undivided One, and the Abbey uses both.

The reader raised on the standard translations may feel a small vertigo here, and the vertigo is the point. Nothing has been added to the text. Something has merely been left in it that four hundred years of English Bibles took out — not by conspiracy but by the ordinary drift of grammar across three languages, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Come. At this door stands the Breath herself, unnamed and unpainted, moving over the water in the dark. Before any Mary, before any prophet, before light — she was there, and she was patient, and she was called she. Whatever else you have been taught about the beginning, this is what the beginning says. Start here and the rest of the book will not surprise you.

℣ In the beginning, the deep was without a face.
℟ And the Mother moved upon the waters. Come.

Chapter II

The Grammar Is Not an Accident

✦

Follow one word through three languages and you will see how a Mother became a He.

In Hebrew, ruach is feminine. In Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke and preached in, rucha is feminine. In the Syriac churches of the East — the Christians who kept Aramaic as their liturgical tongue and who never passed through Greek at all — rucha d’qudsha, the Holy Spirit, is feminine, and the early Syriac writers use feminine verbs and feminine pronouns for her as a matter of course.

Then the scriptures cross into Greek. The Greek word for spirit is pneuma, and pneuma is neuter. Not masculine — neuter. The Spirit becomes an it. Something has already been lost, but nothing has yet been reversed.

Then Greek crosses into Latin. The Latin for spirit is spiritus, and spiritus is masculine. And because Latin was the theological language of the West for a thousand years, and because the pronoun follows the noun, the Spirit of God became He in every catechism, every hymn, every creed, every sermon in Western Christendom — on the strength of a Latin noun ending.

That is the whole mechanism. There is no villain in it. There is only the fact that grammatical gender does not survive translation, and that theology built on pronouns will inherit whatever the last translator’s language happened to do.

The chain is: Hebrew ruach (fem.) → Aramaic/Syriac rucha (fem.) → Greek pneuma (neut.) → Latin spiritus (masc.) → English He. The Syriac line never passed through Greek and never lost the feminine; this is why the earliest and most explicitly maternal language for the Spirit survives in the churches of Syria, Persia, and points east — the same churches that carried the faith along the Silk Road in the first century. The Abbey’s own lineage runs through them.

4. The masculine pronoun used of the Holy Spirit in the Western churches rests upon the grammatical gender of the Latin noun spiritus and not upon the Hebrew, Aramaic, or Syriac of the scriptures. It carries no doctrinal weight and may be corrected without loss.

5. Where the Abbey speaks of the Holy Spirit, it says she, in agreement with the language of the scriptures in which she was first named.

There is a further consequence that the compilations rarely draw out. The Syriac churches — the churches of Edessa and Nisibis and Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the churches that sent the Gospel east along the trade roads in the first century with the Nazarenes of Thomas — kept the feminine Spirit for centuries after the West had forgotten her. When the faith reached China and met a civilization that had always known the Mother of Compassion, it was not carrying a God with no feminine name. It was carrying Her name in the original.

Come. At this door stands Mary of Nazareth, who spoke Aramaic and who was told that the Holy Spirit would come upon her. In her own language, the sentence that changed the world had a feminine subject. She was not being visited by a man. She was being visited by the Breath, and the Breath was her own kind.

℣ The angel spoke to her in her mother tongue.
℟ And in her mother tongue, the Spirit was a Mother. Come.

Chapter III

The Dove Was Always Hers

✦

Christian art has one bird. It descends at the baptism, it hovers at the Annunciation, it perches in the stained glass of every church in the world, and everyone knows what it means.

Almost nobody knows whose it was.

The dove is the oldest and most consistent emblem of the Goddess in the ancient Near East. It belongs to Inanna and to Ishtar. It belongs to Asherah. It belongs to Astarte, whose doves were kept at her temples. It belongs to Isis, and later to Aphrodite and Venus, in whose iconography it never once appears as anything else. Doves were carried in her processions, offered at her altars, moulded into her household figurines, and cut into her sacred pillars from Cyprus to Canaan to the Nile. In the whole record of ancient Near Eastern religion, the dove is the bird of the Goddess, and it is not used to symbolize a god.

Then at the Jordan, the heavens open, and a dove comes down.

The Gospels do not explain the symbol, because in the first century it did not need explaining. Everyone in that world could read a dove. It said: the feminine divine is present here, and she is claiming this man. The Spirit who brooded over the waters at the beginning of Genesis descends over the waters of the Jordan at the beginning of the Gospel, in the form of her own ancient bird, and a voice calls the man beneath her beloved.

6. The dove is the immemorial emblem of the divine feminine throughout the ancient Near East and is attested as the bird of no god. Its descent at the Jordan is therefore the Gospel’s own iconographic declaration that the Spirit who came upon Christ is the Mother.

7. The two waters answer each other: the Breath over the deep in Genesis and the Dove over the Jordan in the Gospel are one and the same event, and baptism is participation in both.

A devotion at water.

At any water — a font, a river, a filled basin, a stopped sink — put your hand flat an inch above the surface and hold it there until your arm knows it is being held up on purpose.

Say: You hovered here first.

Then touch the water, and say: And you have not stopped.

This is the whole rite. It takes eleven seconds and it is the oldest thing in this book.

Come. At this door stands the Dove, who is not an ornament. She has been on the wall of your church your whole life with her wings out and no one told you she was the Queen of Heaven’s own bird, carried in her processions for three thousand years before she came down at the Jordan. Look up at her again on Sunday. She has been waiting to be recognized.

℣ Whose bird descended at the river?
℟ Hers, who brooded on the deep. Come.

Chapter IV

My Mother, the Spirit

✦

If the feminine Spirit were only a grammatical curiosity, the early Church would not have called her Mother out loud. It did.

The Gospel of the Hebrews, an early Jewish-Christian gospel now surviving only in fragments quoted by others, has Christ himself say it. Origen quotes the line twice, in his commentary on John and in his homilies on Jeremiah; Jerome quotes it three times. In it Jesus says that his Mother the Holy Spirit took him by one of his hairs and carried him to Mount Tabor. Origen does not flinch at the sentence. He explains it: the Spirit may be called mother because in Hebrew the word is feminine, and there is no scandal in the text.

The Odes of Solomon, the earliest Christian hymnbook we possess, sings her without embarrassment. In these Syriac hymns the Holy Spirit has breasts and gives milk; the Father is milked by the Holy Spirit and the milk is the Son; the singer is brought forth by the Spirit as a child is brought forth by a mother; she opens her wings over the Messiah. These are not marginal texts smuggled in from outside. They are the hymns Christians sang, probably in the first century, certainly in the second.

The Acts of Thomas, the Syriac apostolic romance that carried the memory of the Apostle’s road to the East, prays to her outright: Come, holy name of the Messiah. Come, Mother of the seven houses. Come, compassionate Mother. The invocation is made at a baptism and an anointing, and it is addressed to the Spirit.

Aphrahat, the Persian sage of the fourth century, teaches plainly that a man’s father and mother are God and the Holy Spirit, and that when a man marries he leaves his Father God and his Mother the Holy Spirit. Ephrem of Nisibis hymns the Spirit in maternal figures throughout. Macarius speaks of the Spirit as the soul’s mistress and the soul as her handmaid. This is not one eccentric. This is the ordinary devotional speech of the churches of the East for centuries.

The Gospel of the Hebrews saying: Origen, Commentary on John 2.12 and Homilies on Jeremiah 15.4; Jerome, Commentary on Micah 7.6, Commentary on Isaiah 40.9, Commentary on Ezekiel 16.13. The Odes of Solomon: Odes 19 (the milk of the Father, the Spirit’s breasts), 28 (the wings of the dove), 36 (the Spirit brought me forth). Aphrahat, Demonstrations 18.10. The Acts of Thomas, chapters 27 and 50, at the anointing and the eucharist. All are pre-Nicene or early post-Nicene and none was ever condemned for its language about the Spirit.

8. That the Holy Spirit is rightly called Mother is not a modern proposal but the received devotional speech of the earliest Christian centuries, attested in the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Odes of Solomon, the Acts of Thomas, and the Syriac fathers, and defended without embarrassment by Origen.

9. The Abbey therefore restores the address Mother to the Holy Spirit in its liturgy as a recovery and not an innovation.

Something else follows, and it is the tenderest thing in the book. If the Spirit is Mother, then the Christ of the Gospels had two mothers: the woman of Nazareth who bore his body, and the Breath who bore his mission. And when he says he must be about his Father’s business, he is speaking of one half of a household. He grew up inside the family that the whole scripture describes, and so do we.

Come. At this door stands Mary of Nazareth, who was not the only mother in the room. When the dove came down at the river she was somewhere in Galilee, and her son was being claimed by the other Mother, and there was no rivalry in it. Two mothers, one child, one household. If you have felt motherless in your religion, you have been reading with one eye shut.

℣ Who carried him to the mountain?
℟ His Mother the Holy Spirit. Come.

Chapter V

The Comforter Called She

✦

In the fourteenth chapter of John, Jesus promises the disciples someone. The Greek is parakletos — one called alongside, an advocate, a counsel for the defence, a comforter. English Bibles render it Comforter or Advocate or Helper, and Christian usage has made it a masculine office.

Look at what the word actually does.

A parakletos is the one who stands beside you when you are accused and speaks for you when you cannot speak for yourself. It is a courtroom word and a sickroom word at once. And what is promised of her, across the four discourses of John’s farewell, is this: that she will teach; that she will remind; that she will not speak on her own initiative but will say what she hears; that she will guide into all truth; that she will testify; that she will convict the world; that she will stay.

Every one of those is a function that the wisdom literature had already assigned to a woman. Wisdom teaches. Wisdom cries out in the streets. Wisdom guides. Wisdom is beside God at the creation and beside the seeker in the market. The Comforter of John’s Gospel is the Wisdom of Proverbs come to keep the promise Proverbs made.

And the word Comforter itself is not a small word. It is what a mother is. The prophet Isaiah, reaching for the highest image of divine consolation he can find, does not say as a father comforts. He says: As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you. When John’s Jesus promises a Comforter, he is using the vocabulary the prophets built for maternal love, and he is promising that it will be permanent.

10. The Parakletos of the Johannine discourses exercises the offices which the wisdom literature assigns to Hokhmah–Sophia: to teach, to guide into truth, to remind, to testify, and to abide. The Comforter is Wisdom sent.

11. Scripture names the highest consolation of God by explicit maternal comparison. The office of the Comforter is therefore properly a maternal office, and the Abbey addresses the Paraclete as she.

There is one more saying, and it is the most severe sentence in the Gospels, and it belongs here.

All three synoptic Gospels record that blasphemy against the Son of Man may be forgiven, but blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be. The saying is harsh and has frightened readers for two thousand years. The Gospel of Thomas states it more starkly still: what is spoken against the Father will be forgiven, and what is spoken against the Son will be forgiven, but what is spoken against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven on earth or in heaven.

The Abbey does not use this saying as a threat. It uses it as a proportion. Whatever the Holy Spirit is, the Gospels rank an offence against her as the gravest offence there is. That is not the ranking of a subordinate. It is the ranking of the one nearest the ground of everything — the Breath in the lungs, the Wisdom in the mind, the Presence in the room. To silence her, to strike her name from the liturgy, to teach children that God has no maternal face, is a serious matter. Not because a jealous power is watching, but because the thing being denied is the thing by which denial itself is possible.

12. The Gospels rank offence against the Holy Spirit above offence against the Father or the Son. The Abbey reads this not as a threat but as a measure of her nearness, and takes from it the duty to keep her named.

Come. At this door stands the Advocate, who is standing beside you right now in a room where you thought you were alone with the charge sheet. She is not a legal fiction. She is the one who does for the soul what a mother does for a child accused in public: she puts her body between you and the noise.

℣ Who will speak for me?
℟ She who was called alongside. Come.

Chapter VI

In the Image, Male and Female

✦

There is a verse in the first chapter of Genesis that will not fit the theology it is usually made to serve.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Read it slowly. The image of God is stated once and then immediately specified: male and female. Not male, with female appended. Not male as the image and female as a derivative of the image. The image is the pair. Whatever in humanity images God, it is not exhausted by either sex, and it is fully present in both.

And the divine name in that verse is Elohim — a plural. The verse before has this plural saying let us make. The plural is not a committee of gods and the Abbey does not read it so; it is the fullness of the One, which the Hebrew reaches for by number because it cannot reach it by gender. Genesis 3 and Genesis 11 keep the plural. God is spoken of as us.

The rabbinic and Kabbalistic traditions drew the obvious conclusion and named it Adam Kadmon — the primordial human, made male and female together, undivided, the true image. The division into two came after, and the ache of the two for each other is the memory of the one. This is why the Song of Songs is scripture. This is why marriage is a sacrament and not a contract. This is why every mystic in every tradition reaches, eventually, for the vocabulary of the bridal chamber.

13. The image of God in humanity is male and female together. Neither sex bears it more fully than the other, and no doctrine, office, or ordinance of the Abbey may proceed as though one did.

14. The plural form of Elohim expresses the fullness of the one God and not a plurality of gods. God is One, and God is not one thing.

15. Since the divine image is the pair, the union of the two is a theological act and not merely a biological one. The Abbey teaches marriage as a sacrament of the divine nature and the longing of the two for each other as a true memory of the undivided One.

The mirror article.

Once, deliberately, look into a mirror and say the whole verse aloud, with your own name in it:

In the image of God created God ______; male and female created God them.

Most people can say the first half without difficulty. The second half is where the resistance is. Say it until it stops being a doctrine and starts being a description of the face you are looking at.

Come. At this door stands Eve, the first woman, who has been blamed for everything and who was made in the image of God on the same afternoon as the man. Before there was sin, there was symmetry. Every argument in this book is only the recovery of one verse in the first chapter, which was never hidden, and which was read aloud in your hearing and did not register.

℣ In whose image was she made?
℟ In God’s, and God has her face too. Come.

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Book Two

The Names She Answers To

Of Elohim and Eloah, of the Breasted One, and of the Mercy that is a Womb.

ELOAH

She who is the singular of the plural. She who is the Father’s own partner and not a rival. She who has a hundred names in a book that is said to have none for her.

Lady of many names, you have been called Almighty by men who did not know they were saying Nurturer. Teach us your vocabulary again.

Come.

Chapter VII

Elohim, the Plural Who Is One

✦

The third word of the Hebrew Bible is a plural noun taking a singular verb, and grammarians have argued about it for two thousand years without exhausting it.

Elohim. The -im ending is the ordinary Hebrew masculine plural. The singular behind it is Eloah — and Eloah itself carries a feminine ending, the -ah that marks the feminine throughout the language. So the divine name at the head of scripture is a plural built on a singular with a feminine termination, governing verbs in the singular.

The tradition has never been able to make this simple, and the Abbey does not try. What it will not do is pretend the strangeness away. Three things are true at once. God is one, and the verb says so. God is more than one thing, and the noun says so. And the root of the name is a word that ends the way Hebrew words end when they are feminine.

This is the reason the same scriptures can call God he on one page and reach for a womb, a midwife, a nursing mother, a mother eagle, and a woman searching her house for a lost coin on the next. The vocabulary is not confused. It is simply larger than the pronoun.

The relevant forms: Elohim (Gen 1:1 and throughout), plural in form, singular in construction. Eloah (Deut 32:15, Job passim, Hab 3:3), the singular, carrying the -ah termination. El (Gen 14:18ff.), the ancient Semitic name of the high God, shared with the Canaanite pantheon at Ugarit, where El’s consort is Athirat — the Hebrew Asherah. El Shaddai (Gen 17:1, 28:3, 35:11, 43:14, 48:3, 49:25; Ex 6:3), the patriarchal name. Bath Qol, the Daughter of the Voice, the rabbinic name for the voice from heaven.

16. The divine name Elohim is plural in form, singular in construction, and built upon a singular, Eloah, that bears the ordinary Hebrew feminine termination. The Abbey receives all three facts and resolves none of them away.

17. God is one in being and inexhaustible in name. No single name, and no single gendered name, is adequate; the Abbey therefore uses many and prefers none absolutely.

Come. At this door stands the Name itself, the third word of the book, standing there in plain sight in every Bible in every house on earth. Nothing is hidden. The strangeness is on the surface. It has been read aloud in a hundred million services and never once explained from the pulpit.

℣ What is the third word of the Torah?
℟ A plural with a feminine root, taking a singular verb. Come.

Chapter VIII

El Shaddai, the Breasted God

✦

There is a divine name in the Torah so old that even Genesis treats it as archaic. It is the name by which the patriarchs knew God before the Name was given at the bush.

El Shaddai. The English Bibles render it God Almighty, and the rendering came through the Greek Pantokrator and the Latin Omnipotens. It is a magnificent translation of something else.

The Hebrew shad means breast. It is the ordinary word, used of women and of animals, throughout the Hebrew Bible. And the name El Shaddai appears at precisely the moments in Genesis when God is promising fertility, increase, descendants, milk, and multiplication. To Abram: I am El Shaddai; walk before me — and I will multiply thee exceedingly. To Jacob: I am El Shaddai; be fruitful and multiply. And in the blessing of Jacob over Joseph, the name comes attached to the very organs of nurture: blessings of the breasts, and of the womb.

Read the name as the Breasted One, the Many-Breasted, the God who nurses, and every one of those passages goes from puzzling to obvious. The name that Christendom has translated as Almighty for sixteen centuries is a name for the God who feeds you from her own body.

The Abbey does not say the traditional rendering is false. Sufficiency and might are truly in the name. It says that a God who is called Almighty because she is the one who nurses is a different God to worship than a God who is called Almighty because he can crush you, and that the difference is the whole difference.

18. The ancient divine name El Shaddai, rendered Almighty in the Western Bibles, carries in the Hebrew the sense of the Breasted One, the God who nourishes; and it appears in the Torah at the promises of fruitfulness, increase, and the blessings of the breasts and the womb.

19. Divine omnipotence is therefore to be understood first as inexhaustible provision and only afterward as power over. The Abbey preaches the Almighty as the One who feeds.

Come. At this door stands the nursing mother, who is on the cover of no theology book. The patriarchs knew God by this name before Moses knew God by any other. If the first name of God in your line of ancestors meant the one who feeds you from her body, you were never as far from the Mother as you were told.

℣ By what name did Abraham know God?
℟ By the name that means her breast. Come.

Chapter IX

The Mercy That Is a Womb

✦

Hebrew has a word for the deepest of the divine attributes, and it is anatomical.

Rechem is the womb. Rachamim — the plural, the intensive — is the word the scriptures use for the compassion, mercy, and tender pity of God. It is the word in the great self-declaration at Sinai: The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious. It is the word in the prophets when God cannot let Israel go. It is the word in the psalms when a man throws himself on the divine kindness with nothing else to offer.

The mercy of God, in the language God chose to be described in, is a womb-feeling. It is what a woman’s body does when the child she carried is in danger. It is involuntary, physical, and prior to judgment. The prophets know exactly what they are doing with it. Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. The comparison is not decorative. It is a claim about the nature of the divine interior, and it names an organ.

Aramaic keeps it. The word in Jesus’ own tongue for mercy, rachma, is the same root, and the word for love is its cousin. When he tells his hearers to be merciful as their Father in heaven is merciful, the word in his mouth was built from the word for womb, and everyone listening knew it.

20. The scriptural word for the mercy of God, rachamim, is built upon rechem, the womb. Divine compassion is therefore described in the sacred languages as a maternal and bodily reflex, prior to judgment and stronger than it.

21. No account of the divine justice may be preached in the Abbey that is not first grounded in the divine rachamim. Where the two appear to conflict, the womb governs.

The womb prayer.

Put your hand flat on your own abdomen — anyone, of any body, may do this — and say slowly:

Your mercy is not a decision you make about me. It is what your body does when I am in danger.

Then stay there for one full breath without asking for anything.

Come. At this door stands the woman in the prophet’s mouth, the one who cannot forget the child at her breast. God chose that image, from among all available images, to say what divine faithfulness is like — and then said: and I am more reliable than she is. That is the ceiling of scriptural promise, and it is a woman’s body.

℣ Can a mother forget her nursing child?
℟ She may. God will not. Come.

Chapter X

Abwoon, the Birther of All

✦

Jesus prayed in Aramaic, and the prayer he taught begins with a word that English cannot carry.

Abwoon. Every Christian on earth has heard it rendered Our Father, and the rendering is not wrong. But the Aramaic word is built on a root that means the source of birth, the ancestor, the one from whom a thing comes — and it is not gender-exclusive. It holds father and mother together in a single syllable, and it holds them with an intimacy the English Father has entirely lost. Aramaic, like Hebrew, works in layers; a word carries its literal sense, its metaphorical sense, its cosmic sense, and its mystical sense at once, and a hearer trained in the language hears all four.

So the first word of the Lord’s Prayer is not a statement about the gender of God. It is a statement about the origin of everything, addressed with the familiarity of a child speaking to a parent in the kitchen.

The Abbey therefore prays the Our Father as the whole Church prays it, and also prays it in a form that lets the first word do its Aramaic work:

The Abbey’s Office of the Source.

O Birther of all, Father and Mother of the Cosmos, let your name be held holy in us. Let your dominion come as breath comes. Let your desire be done in the body as it is in the light. Give us the bread of this day and this need. Loose the cords of our failures as we loose those who are bound to us. Do not let the surface of things deceive us, but free us from what holds us back. For yours is the power and the life, the song that renews from age to age. Sealed in faith, and trust, and truth.

Amen.

This office is the Abbey’s own, framed on the Aramaic reading of the prayer. Readers who want the celebrated modern rendering of the Aramaic Our Father should go to Neil Douglas-Klotz, Prayers of the Cosmos, where it belongs and where it is under his name; it is not reproduced here.

22. The opening word of the prayer of Christ, Aramaic Abwoon, denotes the source of birth and is not gender-exclusive. It is rightly translated Father, and rightly translated Birther, and the Abbey uses both.

23. The Abbey holds that no vernacular rendering of the divine names is final, and that the periodic retranslation of the liturgy toward the source languages is an act of fidelity and not of novelty.

Come. At this door stands the woman who first taught a child to pray in that language — his mother, in a house in Nazareth, teaching him the word he would give the world. Before he was the Word he was a boy learning words, and the woman who taught them to him did not teach him a masculine God. Aramaic would not let her.

℣ What was the first word of the prayer?
℟ The word for the one from whom we come. Come.

Chapter XI

The Mother in Heaven

✦

Everything so far has been grammar and etymology. Now the claim itself.

The Abbey holds and teaches that God has a maternal face which is not a metaphor, not a concession, and not a poetic flourish added to a masculine substance. Eloah is the Heavenly Mother. She is the partner and consort of the Father in the only sense in which two names of one God can be partners — that is, inseparably, without division, without precedence, and without any second divinity anywhere in the account. She is Queen of Heaven, and the title is hers by right, and it was hers in Jerusalem before it was taken from her, as Book Four will show.

Two errors must be refused at the same time, and refusing both at once is the whole discipline of this doctrine.

The first error is to say that the divine feminine is only a figure of speech — that God is really masculine and is sometimes described in maternal images the way a king may be described as a shepherd. Scripture will not sustain this. A metaphor does not get its own feminine noun in every occurrence, its own emblem, its own hymnbook, its own personified voice crying in the streets, and its own throne in the temple.

The second error is to make her a second God — a goddess standing beside a god, two divinities in a marriage, a heavenly household of two persons with separate wills. This the Abbey refuses absolutely. There is one God. Not one committee, one couple, or one family. The undivided One is named Father and named Mother, and the naming is real, and the One is not thereby two.

How can both be true? By the same ancient doctrine the Abbey uses for the Trinity, and it is worth naming precisely, because it is what keeps this book orthodox and keeps it honest. The doctrine is appropriation, developed by Augustine and stated formally by Aquinas: an undivided work of the whole God may be attributed especially to one name, for the sake of teaching and of love, without the work being divided or the God being partitioned. Alongside it stands perichōrēsis, the mutual indwelling: whatever is said of one is not said apart from the others, because there is no apart.

So: creation is the work of the undivided God, and is appropriated to the Father. Wisdom is the work of the undivided God, and is appropriated to the Mother. Redemption is the work of the undivided God, and is appropriated to the Son. Not thirds. Not parts. Aspects received, by creatures who must receive in aspects because we cannot receive an ocean at once.

24. God is one, undivided, and without parts. The Abbey does not divide the Godhead by gender, by person, or by office.

25. The maternal face of God is real and not figurative. Eloah is the Heavenly Mother, Queen of Heaven by right of scripture and of ancient devotion, and she is not a second God.

26. These two articles are held together by the doctrine of appropriation (Augustine; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.39 a.7) with perichōrēsis: an undivided divine work may be attributed especially to one name for the sake of teaching and love, without dividing the One. The maternal names are so appropriated.

27. The Abbey therefore anathematizes both errors: that the divine feminine is merely a figure of speech, and that she is a second divinity. Whoever holds either has not understood the confession.

On appropriation: Augustine, De Trinitate I.4, VI.10; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.39 a.7, on why works common to the whole Trinity are attributed to particular persons. On perichōrēsis: John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa I.8. The Abbey applies the same instrument to the Trinity in Awakening to Love (Articles 23–27) and to the Pure Land triad in The Golden Rule and the Golden Flower; the method is the house’s standing solution to every question of the form how are these many one?

Come. At this door stands the Queen, whose title was struck from the temple and kept alive in kitchens for two and a half thousand years by women baking cakes for her in secret. Book Four will tell you what happened to her. For now: she was never a rival to God. She was one of God’s own names, exiled for the crime of being feminine.

℣ Is there a Mother in heaven?
℟ There is one God, and one of her names is Mother. Come.

✦

Book Three

Wisdom Built Her House

Of Hokhmah who is Sophia, of the seven pillars, and of the Voice that became the Word.

HOKHMAH · SOPHIA

She who was set up from everlasting, before the mountains were settled. She who was daily the delight of God and played before him. She who cries in the streets and is not heard, and builds a house and sets a table and waits.

Wisdom, you have been calling in the market since the world was young. We are late. We are coming.

Come.

Chapter XII

Before the Mountains Were Settled

✦

In the eighth chapter of Proverbs, a woman speaks for thirty-six verses, and what she says about herself is the single most extraordinary self-description in the Hebrew Bible.

She says she was there before the beginning. She was possessed by God at the head of God’s way, before the works of old. She was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, before the earth was. Before the depths, before the fountains, before the mountains were settled, before the hills — she was brought forth. When God prepared the heavens she was there; when the compass was set upon the face of the deep, when the clouds were established, when the foundations of the earth were appointed — she was there, beside him, as one brought up with him.

And then: I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him.

The Hebrew word behind one brought up with him is amon, and it has carried two readings since antiquity — the master craftsman, and the little child. Both are true of her. She is the architect at God’s elbow and the child playing at God’s feet, and the tradition has never chosen, because the text does not.

Her name is Hokhmah, and it is feminine. In the Greek of the Septuagint she is Sophia, and Sophia is feminine. When the Greek-speaking Jewish world read its own scriptures, it read a divine feminine standing at the origin of creation, speaking in the first person, claiming eternity.

28. The Wisdom of God is personified in the Hebrew scriptures as a feminine subject who speaks in the first person, claims existence before creation, and is present at the founding of the world as both craftsman and child.

29. The Abbey receives Hokhmah–Sophia not as a literary device but as the self-utterance of the divine feminine within the canon, and reads Proverbs 8 as her own testimony.

There is a further point, and it decides the rest of this Book. Proverbs 8 is not obscure. It is not apocryphal, not Gnostic, not suppressed, not found in a jar in the desert. It is in every Bible on every shelf in Christendom, and has been read in public worship for two and a half millennia, and it says that a feminine divine person was present at the creation of the world and was God’s daily delight. The divine feminine did not have to be smuggled back into scripture. She never left it.

Come. At this door stands Wisdom, who has been shouting in the street since before there were streets. She is not hiding. She has never hidden. She stands at the gates, at the entry of the city, at the crossroads, at the top of the high places, and she raises her voice, and the book that records her doing it is on the lectern of every church in the world.

℣ Does not Wisdom cry out?
℟ She does, and she has not stopped. Come.

Chapter XIII

Seven Pillars

✦

Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.

One verse, Proverbs 9:1, and it has generated more sacred architecture than any other line in the wisdom books. She builds. She does not inhabit a house built for her; she quarries and cuts and raises, and then — the next verses — she kills her animals, mixes her wine, sets her table, sends out her servants, and calls from the highest place in the city for anyone who is simple enough to come and eat.

This is the earliest eucharistic image in scripture. A woman builds a house, sets bread and wine on a table, and invites the unqualified.

The seven pillars have been read in every tradition that received the verse. Seven days of creation. Seven spirits of God that stand before the throne in Revelation. Seven gifts of the Spirit in Isaiah — wisdom, understanding, counsel, might, knowledge, fear of the Lord, and in the Greek and Latin, piety. Seven planetary spheres of the ancient cosmos. Seven lamps of the menorah. Seven golden candlesticks with the Son of Man walking among them. Seven churches. Seven seals. Seven stars in his right hand. Seven gates of the underworld that Inanna passes, surrendering an ornament at each, which is the subject of Book Eight. Seven levels of the soul in the Hebrew tradition. Seven wheels of the subtle body in the East, which the Abbey’s own volume The Energy Body treats at length.

The Abbey does not flatten these into one another. It observes that wherever the divine feminine builds, she builds in sevens, and that the number is her signature across every tradition that has one.

The sevens named above, in order: Genesis 1; Revelation 1:4, 4:5; Isaiah 11:2 (six in the Hebrew, seven in the Septuagint and Vulgate, whence the traditional Seven Gifts); Exodus 25:31–37; Revelation 1:12–20; the Descent of Inanna, lines 120–180 in the Wolkstein–Kramer arrangement; the sevenfold soul of the Kabbalistic tradition; and the seven principal chakras of the Indian and Tibetan systems.

30. The sevenfold is the structural signature of the divine feminine across the traditions: seven pillars, seven spirits, seven gifts, seven lamps, seven gates, seven spheres, seven wheels. The Abbey teaches the correspondence without collapsing the systems into one another.

31. Wisdom’s house in Proverbs 9 — built by her, furnished by her, provisioned with bread and wine by her, and opened by her to the unqualified — is received by the Abbey as the first eucharistic image in scripture and as the pattern of the Abbey’s own table.

Come. At this door stands Wisdom at her own door, with the table already laid, calling for whoever is simple enough to come in. Note the invitation list. Not the wise. Not the qualified. The simple. If you have ever felt too unlearned for the deep things, she wrote the guest list with you specifically in mind.

℣ Who is invited to the table she set?
℟ Whoever lacks understanding. Come.

Chapter XIV

The Breath of the Power of God

✦

The book called the Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek in Alexandria in the last centuries before Christ, takes the woman of Proverbs and says the thing outright.

She is, in its seventh chapter, the breath of the power of God, a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty, the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power of God, the image of God’s goodness. She is one and can do all things. She renews all things while remaining in herself. She passes and goes through all things by reason of her pureness. She is more beautiful than the sun and above all the order of the stars. She reaches from one end of creation to the other and orders all things sweetly.

Every phrase in that catalogue was later applied by the Church to Christ, and several of them verbatim. The Letter to the Hebrews calls the Son the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of his person; the Nicene Creed calls him light from light. The vocabulary of Christology was quarried out of a book about a woman.

This is not a scandal and the Abbey does not treat it as one. It is the single most important structural fact about how Christian doctrine came to be, and it points in one direction: the Christian confession of the incarnate divine was built out of the language of the divine feminine, because that was the only language available for a divine person who was not the Father.

32. The language by which the Church confessed the divine Son — brightness of glory, express image, light from light, agent of creation, sustainer of all things — was drawn from the wisdom literature’s description of Sophia.

33. The Abbey therefore teaches that Christology and the theology of the divine feminine are not two subjects but one, and that a church which confesses the Son in Sophia’s own words while denying Sophia has not understood its own creed.

Come. At this door stands Sophia, whose vocabulary you have been reciting in the Creed your whole life. Light from light. Very God of very God. Through whom all things were made. Those words were written about her first, in a book of the Greek Bible, and the Church took them up and did not say where it got them. She has never asked for the credit. This book gives it to her.

℣ Whose words are in the Creed?
℟ Hers, who was the brightness of the everlasting light. Come.

Chapter XV

Wisdom and the Tree

✦

In the twenty-fourth chapter of Sirach, Wisdom stands up in the assembly of the Most High and describes where she grew.

She is a cedar in Lebanon and a cypress on Hermon. She is a palm in Engedi and a rose in Jericho. She is a fair olive tree in the field and a plane tree by the water. She gives out a scent like cinnamon and camel’s thorn, like choice myrrh, like galbanum and onycha and stacte, like the smoke of incense in the tabernacle. She spreads out her branches as a terebinth, and her branches are glory and grace. She says: Come unto me, all ye that be desirous of me, and fill yourselves with my fruits.

The catalogue is not botanical decoration. Every plant in it is a temple plant, and the list of spices is very nearly the recipe for the sacred incense of Exodus 30. Wisdom is describing herself as the vegetation of the sanctuary, and then as its perfume, and then as its tree.

Which is why the tree in the middle of the garden matters, and why the tree keeps coming back.

There was a tree in Eden and its fruit was the knowledge of good and evil, and beside it a tree of life. There was a menorah in the temple — a stylized almond tree in beaten gold, with branches and cups and blossoms and knops, standing in the holy place. There was, in the first temple, an asherah, a sacred tree or wooden pole, which stood in the house of the Lord for centuries until it was taken out and burned, as Book Four will recount. There is a tree in the last chapter of Revelation, on both sides of the river, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. And there is a cross, which every hymn in Christendom calls a tree.

Across the traditions the same axis stands: the World-Tree of the Babylonians and the Norse, the cosmic ladder of the Siberian shaman, the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha sat, the sacred groves of the Celts and the Greeks in which no roof was permitted, the temple of the Egyptians conceived as a stone model of the first vegetation rising out of the primordial water. And in the hermetic axiom the Abbey has always used — as above, so below — the tree is the figure of the correspondence itself, roots in one world and crown in the other.

34. Wisdom describes herself in Sirach 24 in the plants and spices of the sanctuary, and is therefore properly named the Tree of Life. The menorah of the temple, the tree of Eden, the tree of Revelation, and the tree of the cross are one image received in four places.

35. The Abbey teaches the sacred tree as a true universal: the axis joining the worlds, attested in Israel, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, the Celtic west, Siberia, India, and China, and known to the hermetic tradition as the figure of as above, so below.

At a tree.

Find an old tree you can reach. Put both palms on the bark. Say nothing for the length of three slow breaths.

Then: You are her sign. Roots in the dark, crown in the light, and no gap between.

Then look up through the branches, which is what the roof of the oldest temple in the world looked like.

Come. At this door stands Wisdom in her orchard, calling you to eat. The garden was never closed. The tree in the middle was never a trap. She stood at its foot in Sirach and said come and fill yourselves with my fruits — the same invitation, the same word, in the same voice, as at the end of the last book of the Bible.

℣ What did she say beneath her own branches?
℟ Come and eat. Come.

Chapter XVI

Her Voice Became the Word

✦

Now the hinge of the whole volume.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by him.

Every reader of the fourth Gospel knows the prologue. Fewer know that its author was rewriting a passage he expected his readers to recognize. Read Proverbs 8 and Wisdom of Solomon 7 and Sirach 24 in sequence and then read John 1, and the prologue is not a new composition. It is Wisdom’s hymn, with the pronouns changed and one line added: and the Word became flesh.

Wisdom was in the beginning. Wisdom was with God. Wisdom was the agent through whom all things were made. Wisdom was the light of men. Wisdom came to her own dwelling among the children of men, sought a resting place, and — in Sirach and in the book of Enoch alike — was received, or not received. John says all of it, and then says that this time she pitched her tent in a body.

Why Logos and not Sophia? Because the Greek-speaking synagogue and the philosophical schools of Alexandria had already begun using Logos as the term for the divine ordering principle, and because Logos is masculine, and the figure to be described was a man. The choice was linguistic and pastoral. It was not a repudiation.

And so the great sentence of Christian faith may be said in the Abbey’s own way without adding a syllable to the creed: the Wisdom of God, who is feminine in her own name, took flesh in a male body. Jesus of Nazareth is Sophia incarnate. He incarnates the Father whom he called Father and the Mother whom the Gospel of the Hebrews says he called Mother, and both in one life, because there was only ever one God to incarnate.

This is why the Gospels can put Wisdom’s own words in his mouth without comment. Come unto me, all ye that labour — that is Sirach’s Wisdom, verbatim in structure. Wisdom is justified of her children. I will send you prophets and wise men, and ye shall kill them — spoken in the first person, and in Luke attributed to the Wisdom of God. He speaks as her because he is her.

36. The prologue of the fourth Gospel is composed upon the wisdom hymns of Proverbs 8, Sirach 24, and Wisdom of Solomon 7. The Word of John is the Wisdom of the Hebrew scriptures.

37. The masculine term Logos was chosen for reasons of Greek usage and of the sex of the incarnate one, and does not repudiate the feminine name. Sophia and Logos are one.

38. The Abbey confesses that the Wisdom of God, feminine in her own name, took flesh in Jesus of Nazareth; and that in him the Father and the Mother are incarnate together, because God is one.

Come. At this door stands Wisdom at the door of a body. She sought a dwelling place among the children of men for a thousand years of scripture and did not find one, and then a girl in Nazareth said yes, and she moved in. That is the Annunciation, told from the other side.

℣ Where did Wisdom find a resting place?
℟ In the womb of a girl who consented. Come.

Chapter XVII

Holy Wisdom in Stone

✦

For a thousand years, the greatest church in Christendom was named after a woman.

Hagia Sophia — Holy Wisdom — in Constantinople. It was the cathedral of the New Rome, the mother church of the Byzantine world, the largest church in Christendom and the largest enclosed space built by human beings until the modern age. Justinian’s basilica was consecrated in 537 and the dome went up like a claim. The earlier church on the site had been called simply Megale Ekklesia, the Great Church. When it was rebuilt in glory, the empire chose a name, and the name it chose was hers.

And not only there. Churches of the Holy Wisdom stand at Thessalonica, at Nicaea, at Trebizond, at Sofia — a whole national capital carries her name and few of its citizens know it — at Kyiv, at Novgorod. Wherever Byzantine Christianity built its cathedral, there was a good chance the dedication was Sophia.

Western Christendom did the same in its own idiom and then forgot it had. The Romanesque Madonna type in which the Virgin sits enthroned holding the Child on her knees has a technical name: Sedes Sapientiae, the Throne of Wisdom. Wisdom is the Child; Mary is the seat of Wisdom. Hundreds of them were carved in France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and a great many of them are black.

Nor is the Marian liturgy shy about it. The Church reads Proverbs 8 and Sirach 24 — Wisdom’s own first-person speeches, the ones quoted at the head of this Book — as the appointed readings for the feasts of the Virgin Mary. For centuries the Church has stood a woman up in the sanctuary on the Lady’s feast day and had her say I was set up from everlasting, and has done it as a matter of course, in the ordinary lectionary, with no controversy at all.

Hagia Sophia, Constantinople: earlier church known as the Great Church; Justinian’s basilica consecrated 537, the dome rebuilt after the earthquake of 558 and reconsecrated 562. Dedications to Holy Wisdom at Thessalonica, Nicaea, Trebizond, Sofia, Kyiv (1037), and Novgorod. Sedes Sapientiae: the enthroned Romanesque Virgin type, widespread in Auvergne, Burgundy, and Catalonia from the eleventh century; a large proportion of the surviving Auvergnat examples are Black Madonnas. The wisdom pericopes (Prov 8:22–31; Sir 24:1–22; Wis 7:22–8:1) appear in the Marian common of the Roman rite and in the Byzantine Marian offices.

39. The dedication of the great churches of the Christian East to Hagia Sophia, and the Western iconography of the Virgin as Sedes Sapientiae, are the visible confession in stone and wood of the doctrine set out in this Book.

40. The Church’s own liturgy assigns the first-person speeches of Wisdom to the feasts of the Virgin Mary. The Abbey receives this as the tradition’s settled judgment that the Lady and Wisdom are to be read together.

Come. At this door stands the Lady on the Marian feast, standing in the lectern of a Catholic parish on a Tuesday in August, saying in the first person that she was before the mountains. No one objected. It is in the missal. The doctrine this book teaches has been sung in the Church’s own liturgy the whole time.

℣ Who is read on the Lady’s day?
℟ Wisdom, in her own voice. Come.

✦

Book Four

She Dwelt Among Us

Of the Presence, of the Lady who was driven out of her own temple, and of the Bride of the Sabbath.

SHEKINAH

She whose name means simply she dwells. She who filled the tabernacle so that the priests could not stand. She who went into exile with her people and did not stay behind in the ruins.

Presence, you have never once been absent. Give us the eyes for the room we are already standing in.

Come.

Chapter XVIII

The Name That Means Presence

✦

There is a word in the Hebrew tradition for God’s nearness, and it is a feminine noun formed from a verb that means to dwell.

Shekinah. The root is shakan — to settle, to reside, to pitch a tent. The mishkan, the tabernacle in the wilderness, is built from the same root: the dwelling-place. And Shekinah is what dwells in it. Not a symbol of God’s presence. The presence itself, named as a feminine subject, and treated by the tradition as a person who can be grieved, followed, exiled, and welcomed home.

She is not named in the Hebrew Bible by that word. She is everywhere in it by every other means. The cloud that filled the tabernacle so that Moses could not enter. The glory that filled Solomon’s temple so that the priests could not stand to minister. The pillar of cloud by day and fire by night that went before the people and, when they were pursued, went behind them and stood between them and the army — a mother’s instinct, executed by a cloud. Ezekiel watching the glory rise from the temple, pause at the threshold, pause again at the east gate, and go — reluctant at every step, looking back.

The rabbis gave that presence her name, and the name is feminine, and they went further. Wherever ten are gathered, the Shekinah is with them. Wherever three sit in judgment, she is there. Wherever a husband and wife love each other, she is the third in the room. Wherever a man studies, she is at his shoulder. Wherever Israel went into exile, she went with them — galut ha-Shekhinah, the exile of the Presence, God’s own homelessness for love of a homeless people.

41. The Presence of God is named in the Hebrew tradition by the feminine noun Shekinah, from the verb to dwell. She is not a symbol of the presence but the presence itself, received as a feminine person.

42. The Presence is not stationary in a building. Where the assembly gathers, where judgment is done justly, where husband and wife love one another, where the scriptures are studied, and wherever the people are driven — she is there. The Abbey teaches the galut ha-Shekhinah, the exile of the Presence, as the deepest scriptural statement of divine solidarity.

Come. At this door stands the cloud that moved behind the people when the chariots came. She had been leading them, in front, showing the way. When the danger came from behind, she went to the back and stood in the gap. That is not a metaphor for God’s love. That is a description of what a mother does in a corridor.

℣ Where does the Presence dwell?
℟ Wherever her children are. Come.

Chapter XIX

The Lady Who Was Driven Out

✦

This is the hardest chapter in the book and it must be told plainly.

There was a Lady in the temple in Jerusalem, and she was taken out of it, and the people wept.

The record is not hidden. It is in the Books of Kings, told from the point of view of the men who did the removing. In the first temple there stood an asherah — a sacred tree or wooden pole — in the house of the Lord. There were vessels made for her. There were women who wove hangings for her in chambers within the temple precinct. There were priests of hers on the establishment. This is not an accusation invented by later critics; it is the inventory given by the reforming scribes themselves, who list what they destroyed.

King Josiah, in the eighteenth year of his reign, brought the asherah out of the house of the Lord, burned it at the brook Kidron, stamped it to powder, and threw the powder on the graves. He broke down the chambers of the women who wove for her. He removed the vessels made for her and for the host of heaven.

And the people did not thank him. Twenty-odd years later, when Jerusalem had fallen and the survivors had fled to Egypt, the prophet Jeremiah confronted them and they answered him to his face. They told him that while they had burned incense to the Queen of Heaven and poured out drink offerings to her, they had plenty of food and were well and saw no evil; and that since they left off burning incense to her, they had been consumed by the sword and by famine. The women speak in that passage, and they speak as a body, and their husbands stand with them. They say they will go on making cakes for her — cakes stamped with her image — as their fathers and their kings and their princes did in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem.

That is the testimony of ordinary Judeans, recorded in the Bible, that until living memory the Queen of Heaven had been worshipped publicly in Jerusalem by kings and commoners, and that the disaster came after she was removed and not before.

The archaeology says the same in its own dry way. Inscriptions from the eighth century before Christ, found in the Sinai and in the Judean hills, offer blessings by YHWH and his Asherah. Small clay figurines of a woman with her hands supporting her breasts turn up in Israelite houses by the thousand, in every stratum, in every town. She was not a foreign import in the temples of the enemy. She was in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in the family shrine, in the ordinary life of ordinary people, for the whole period of the monarchy.

The asherah in the temple: 1 Kings 15:13; 2 Kings 21:7 (Manasseh sets up a carved asherah in the house); 2 Kings 23:4–7 (Josiah’s removal, the burning at the Kidron, the chambers of the weaving women). The Queen of Heaven: Jeremiah 7:18 and 44:15–19, 25. The inscriptions blessing by YHWH and his Asherah: Kuntillet Ajrud in the northern Sinai and Khirbet el-Qom in Judah, both eighth century BCE. The pillar figurines: some hundreds recovered from Judean domestic contexts of the eighth and seventh centuries. On the first-temple Lady and her removal, the fullest positive account is Margaret Barker’s; her reconstruction of the Lady of the temple, and of the fourth-century memory that she had been driven out, stands behind this chapter and should be read entire.

43. A feminine divine presence was venerated in the temple at Jerusalem and in the houses of Israel throughout the period of the monarchy, under the names Asherah and Queen of Heaven, and was removed by reform in the late seventh century before Christ. The Abbey states this as the plain content of the scriptural record.

44. The people of Judah, recorded in the book of Jeremiah, testified that their calamity followed her removal. The Abbey does not use this testimony to condemn the reformers, whose zeal was for the One; it receives it as the grief of a people whose Mother had been taken from them, and as the beginning of the long exile of her name.

45. Her removal was the removal of a name of God, not the suppression of a rival deity. What returned in Wisdom, in the Shekinah, in the Spirit, and at last in the Lady, is the same Presence under later names.

The story does not end at the Kidron. It goes underground, which is what the White Lotus tradition would recognize anywhere: a devotion outlawed at the centre and preserved in households, by women, in the ordinary furniture of domestic life, for as long as it takes. Two and a half centuries after Josiah, the wisdom books are singing her again in the Greek of Alexandria. Six centuries after that, the churches of the East are calling the Holy Spirit Mother. Eight centuries after that, the Kabbalists of Spain are writing more about the Shekinah than about anything else in the world. She was never destroyed. She was moved to the kitchen and kept warm.

Come. At this door stands the women of Judah in Egypt, standing in front of a prophet and telling him, to his face, that they will go on baking for her. They are the only people in the Bible who defend her out loud. They lost. They kept baking. This book is, among other things, a report on the outcome of that argument.

℣ Who spoke for the Queen when no one else would?
℟ The women, and they did not stop. Come.

Chapter XX

The Two Pillars and the Tree

✦

Everything about the temple was a diagram, and two of its features have never stopped speaking.

At the porch of Solomon’s temple stood two bronze pillars, freestanding, supporting nothing. They had names. The right-hand pillar was Jachin — he shall establish. The left was Boaz — in him is strength. They were cast hollow, eighteen cubits high, and their capitals were worked with nets of chequer-work and wreaths of chain-work and two hundred pomegranates in rows, and lily-work at the top.

Two pillars. Why two, if one God is represented? Because the door of the holy place is framed by a pair, and every tradition that has thought about this has said the same thing: the way in lies between two, and the two are not identical. The Kabbalah reads them as the pillars of Mercy and Severity with the way of balance between; the sacred sciences of the west read them as the pillars of the initiate’s threshold. And the Abbey reads them plainly: the entrance to the presence of the One is flanked by a pair, and no one passes through by way of one side only.

Between and beyond them stood the menorah, which is a tree — a stem, six branches, cups shaped like almond blossoms, knops, and flowers, beaten out of a single talent of pure gold. And in the same house, for four hundred years, stood the asherah, which was also a tree.

The lily-work on the pillars and the almond-blossom of the lampstand and the pomegranates in their two hundred rows are not architectural whimsy. The interior of the house of God was a garden made of metal. The Holy of Holies was Eden with the door shut, and what stood in it was a tree, and the tree was hers.

46. The temple was constructed as a garden: pillars worked with lilies and pomegranates, a lampstand in the form of a flowering almond, and a sacred tree within. Its inner room was Eden enclosed, and the tree of that garden belongs to the divine feminine.

47. The paired pillars at the threshold teach that the way into the divine presence lies between two and not along one. The Abbey applies this to its whole doctrine: masculine and feminine names, mercy and severity, transcendence and immanence — the door is in the middle.

Come. At this door stands the door itself, framed by two pillars with names, and neither of them is optional. You have been trying to get in past one pillar your whole religious life. The porch was built for two.

℣ How many pillars stood at the porch?
℟ Two, and the way was between them. Come.

Chapter XXI

The Exile of the Presence

✦

The most astonishing doctrine the Jewish mystics ever produced is this: that God is not only the one who consoles the exile but the one who shares it.

Galut ha-Shekhinah — the exile of the Presence. When the temple fell and the people were carried off, the Presence did not remain hovering over the rubble waiting for their return. She went with them. She went to Babylon. She went to Egypt, to Spain, to Poland, to the ghettos and the shtetls and the ships. Wherever they were driven, she was driven; wherever they were beaten, she was beaten; and the whole labour of religion, in this reading, is not to persuade a distant God to come near but to help a suffering God come home.

The Kabbalists took it further and made it structural. The Shekinah, in the tree of the sefirot, is the lowest — Malkuth, the Kingdom, the receptive vessel at the bottom, the one that touches the world. She is the moon to the sun of the higher lights, reflecting and not generating, which is why she waxes and wanes, and why she is dark half the time, and why the Jewish calendar is a moon calendar and the Jewish woman’s festival is the new moon. Her separation from the higher union is the wound in the universe. Her reunion is the point of every commandment. The rabbinic formula for the intention behind a religious act is for the sake of the union of the Holy One, blessed be he, and his Shekinah — and the Kabbalists said it before every ritual act of their lives.

And she can be fierce. The tradition does not sentimentalize her. When she is not honoured, when the covenant is broken, when the poor are ground down, she does not weep prettily; she withdraws, and her withdrawal is the calamity itself. There is no punishment in this theology worse than absence, and absence is what she does when she has had enough.

48. The Abbey receives the doctrine of the exile of the Presence: that God shares the condition of the afflicted rather than observing it, and that the Shekinah is in every exile with her people.

49. In the Kabbalistic tree the Shekinah is Malkuth, the receptive vessel that touches creation, associated with the moon and therefore with waxing, waning, darkness, and return. The Abbey teaches the dark phase as part of her nature and not as her failure.

50. The purpose of religious observance is the reunion of the Holy One and the Shekinah — which the Abbey states in its own idiom as: the point of practice is the healing of the split in the divine name that our forgetting made.

The intention.

Before any deliberate good act — a kindness, a prayer, a gift, a difficult forgiveness — say silently:

For the sake of the reunion of the Holy One and his Presence.

It costs nothing, takes two seconds, and converts an errand into a liturgy. The Kabbalists said it before everything, all day, for their whole lives.

Come. At this door stands the Presence in exile, in the boxcar, in the hold, in the camp, in the ward, in the cell. Not watching. In it. If you have ever needed God to be with you rather than over you, this is the doctrine you were looking for, and it is eight hundred years old at the least.

℣ Where is the Presence in the exile?
℟ In the exile. Come.

Chapter XXII

Come, O Sabbath Bride

✦

Every Friday at sunset, for five hundred years, Jewish communities have stood up, turned to face the west, and welcomed a woman into the room.

The Kabbalat Shabbat liturgy was composed by the mystics of Safed in the sixteenth century, and its great hymn is Lekhah Dodi — Come, my Beloved, to meet the bride; let us welcome the Sabbath. The congregation sings it, and at the last verse it stands and turns and bows toward the door, because she is arriving.

The Sabbath is a bride. She is also a queen. She is also the Shekinah herself, the Presence, coming to be reunited with her Beloved for one day in seven, and the whole household is her wedding party. This is not an obscure mystical option; it is the ordinary Friday-night practice of the Jewish world, and the majority of the people singing it are simply glad and not thinking about the doctrine at all, which is how the best liturgy works.

The domestic ritual around it is a courtship. The house is cleaned as for a guest. Two candles are lit by a woman, and the light is the light of her arrival. There is wine, and bread, and a table laid. In the older custom the man of the house comes home from the evening prayers and, before he sits, sings over his wife the poem from the end of Proverbs — a woman of valour, who can find her? Her price is far above rubies — and in the mystical reading of Safed he is singing it to two women at once: the woman in front of him, and the Presence, of whom she is at that hour the sacrament. The older custom put myrtle in his hands as he did it — two bunches, one for remember and one for keep, the two forms of the Sabbath commandment.

Lekhah Dodi was composed by Rabbi Shlomo Alkabetz at Safed in the mid-sixteenth century and entered nearly universal use; the practice of rising and turning toward the entrance at the final verse is standard. The Eshet Chayil (Prov 31:10–31) sung at the Friday table, and the Berikh Shemeh and myrtle customs, come from the same Safed circle around Isaac Luria. The two forms of the commandment — zakhor (Ex 20:8) and shamor (Deut 5:12) — are the source of the two myrtle bunches.

51. The Sabbath is received in the tradition as Bride and Queen, and as the Presence herself coming to be welcomed. The Abbey therefore keeps a weekly hour of arrival, at which she is greeted as a guest at the door and not merely commemorated.

52. In the domestic rite the beloved before one’s eyes is the sacrament of the Presence. The Abbey teaches accordingly that reverence toward one’s own household is not a lesser devotion than reverence in a sanctuary but the same devotion performed where it is hardest to fake.

The Abbey’s welcome of the Bride.

At the beginning of your rest — whichever evening it falls on — light two lights. Stand. Turn and face the door of the room.

Say: Come in peace, crown of your Beloved. Come in gladness. Come, bride; come, queen; come.

Bow once, toward the door, as if someone had just arrived. Then sit down, and eat, and do no more work.

Come. At this door stands the Bride of the Sabbath, arriving on a Friday, in a house that has been swept for her. This is the one place in the living religions where the divine feminine is greeted weekly, by name, at the door, with a bow, by everybody, and where nobody thinks it is unusual. It has been going on continuously for five centuries. Go and see.

℣ Who is standing at the door on Friday evening?
℟ The Bride. Come.

Chapter XXIII

The Song That Is the Holy of Holies

✦

There is a book in the Bible with no theology in it. No God, no covenant, no law, no temple, no sin, no prayer. Two lovers, a garden, spices, night, doors, searching, finding. It is frankly erotic and no ancient reader thought otherwise.

Rabbi Akiva, who died under Roman torture in the second century, said of it: all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies.

That is the highest thing ever said about a book. He did not mean it was an allegory that could be tolerated once decoded. He meant what he said: this is the innermost room. And the tradition, Jewish and Christian both, agreed for two thousand years, which is why the Song is the most commented-upon book of the Bible in the monastic centuries. Bernard of Clairvaux preached eighty-six sermons on it and got as far as chapter three. Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross built the vocabulary of Western mysticism out of it. Origen wrote on it. The Cistercians could not leave it alone.

Why does a love song sit in the inner room?

Because the innermost thing about God is not power and is not law. It is desire — mutual, reciprocal, specific desire. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. I am my beloved’s, and his desire is toward me. That second sentence is the one the mystics could not get past: not only that the soul wants God, which is unremarkable, but that God wants the soul, which is scandalous. The Song puts the wanting on both sides and does not rank them.

And notice who moves in it. The woman speaks most. She initiates, she searches, she goes out into the city at night alone looking for him, she is stopped by the watchmen, she asks the daughters of Jerusalem for help, she finds him and will not let him go. The male beloved is largely praised, sought, and found. The active voice in the Holy of Holies of scripture is a woman’s, and she is looking for God in the dark streets and she does not give up.

Hold that sentence. In Book Seven, a woman will go out before dawn, alone, into a garden, looking for a body she has lost, and will ask a stranger where they have taken him, and the Gospel that records it is quoting this Song on purpose.

53. The Song of Songs is received by the Abbey at Akiva’s valuation: the Holy of Holies of scripture, and not an allegory tolerated on sufferance. Its subject is the mutual and reciprocal desire of God and the soul, and its erotic language is the proper language for that subject.

54. In the Song the woman is the active seeker and the principal voice. The Abbey teaches that the pattern of the soul’s approach to God is therefore given in scripture as feminine and as active, and that the mystical tradition of both East and West has followed this pattern without exception.

55. His desire is toward me. The Abbey holds that divine desire for the creature is a doctrine and not a sentiment, and that a religion which teaches only the creature’s longing has taught half the Song.

Come. At this door stands the woman in the Song, out in the streets at night, asking strangers if they have seen the one her soul loves. She is not decorous. She is not waiting to be found. She is out in the dark, on foot, asking. The Holy of Holies of the scriptures is a woman looking for God at three in the morning and refusing to go home.

℣ Have you seen him whom my soul loveth?
℟ Keep looking. He is doing the same. Come.

✦

Book Five

The Archetypal Woman

Of mythos and its truth, of the pitfall of literalism, and of why the Marys may be read as one.

THE WOMAN CLOTHED WITH THE SUN

She who appeared in heaven as a great sign, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars. She who cried out in labour before the dragon. She who was given wings and a place prepared.

Great Sign, teach us to read. We have spent centuries checking your dates and never once looked up.

Come.

Chapter XXIV

Mythos Is Not the Opposite of Truth

✦

Before this book can put four women together and call them one, it must say what kind of reading it is doing, because the reader has been trained to think there are only two kinds and that one of them is lying.

The two kinds we are offered are: it happened exactly as written and it never happened, so it means nothing. Both are modern. Both are the same mistake wearing different clothes — the assumption that the only truth a story can carry is the truth of a police report.

The ancient world did not think this. It had a word for the other kind of truth, and the word is mythos. A mythos is not a falsehood. It is a story that is true in the way a shape is true — true about the structure of things, true again each time, true whether or not it also happened once on a Tuesday. When the Greeks distinguished mythos from logos they were not distinguishing lie from fact. They were distinguishing the truth you can only tell by narrating from the truth you can state in a proposition.

The Gospels are both. The Abbey does not deny for a moment that Jesus of Nazareth lived, taught, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and rose. It insists that the Gospels are also mythos — that they are shaped, that the shaping is inspired, that the arrangement of the women around the cross and the tomb is telling us something by its arrangement, and that a reader who checks only the facts has read the sentences and missed the sentence.

A myth, someone has rightly said, stands to a whole people as a dream stands to one person. It comes from below the level where we make things up. That is why the same shapes appear in cultures with no contact: the mother who bears the divine child, the god who dies and rises, the descent into the underworld and the return, the bride and the bridegroom, the tree in the middle. These are not borrowings. They are the shape of the human interior, and the shape is not an accident, because it was made.

56. Mythos is a mode of truth and not a synonym for falsehood. The Abbey reads the scriptures as historical and as mythic together and holds that the second reading is not a retreat from the first.

57. The recurrence of the same sacred shapes across unconnected cultures is evidence of a common structure in the human soul, and that structure is the work of the Creator. The Abbey therefore treats the parallels between the Gospel women and the ancient goddesses as convergence upon a truth and not as derivation from a source.

Come. At this door stands the great sign in heaven, which is not a weather report. A woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, crowned with stars, in labour, with a dragon waiting. No one has ever asked what year this happened. Everyone has always known exactly what it means. That is what mythos is, and you have been fluent in it since you were four years old.

℣ How shall we read the sign?
℟ As children read, and as scholars cannot. Come.

Chapter XXV

Losing the Forest for the Trees

✦

Literalism is not excessive reverence for scripture. It is a small reverence applied with great force.

What it does is this: it takes a story whose meaning is inexhaustible and converts it into a claim that can be checked, and then defends the claim. The defence consumes the reverence. Whole libraries have been written on whether the star of Bethlehem was a conjunction or a comet, and the Magi have been reduced to an astronomical footnote when the whole point of them is that the wisdom of the nations came and knelt. Whole careers have gone into the population problem of Genesis 4 — where did Cain’s wife come from? — as though the answer to that question were the reason the chapter exists.

And the cost is not only in wasted effort. Literalism produces cruelty. Read Genesis 3 as a police report and you get a woman who caused the ruin of the world by an act of disobedience, and two thousand years of sermons on the moral weakness of her sex. Read it as mythos and you get the coming of consciousness — the first act of choosing, the terrible and necessary awakening, the passage from an animal innocence to a human knowledge, and a woman as the one with the courage to open her eyes. The Gnostic readers of Genesis, whose codices were found at Nag Hammadi, read it exactly this way and called Eve the awakener: Adam is asleep, not in a nap but in unconsciousness, and she is the one who wakes him.

The Abbey does not adjudicate every detail of that reading. It observes what literalism cost, and what it cost was Eve, and Mary Magdalene, and the ordination of women, and the maternal name of God, and four centuries of Christians being taught that the deepest book in their Bible was an embarrassing love poem that had to be explained away.

58. Literalism is not fidelity to scripture. By converting inexhaustible narrative into checkable proposition, it substitutes a small question for a large one and then defends the small question.

59. The Abbey rejects the reading of Genesis 3 which makes woman the author of universal ruin. It teaches the passage as the coming of human consciousness and the woman as the one who first consented to see.

Come. At this door stands Eve, holding the fruit, wrongly accused for four thousand years by people who were reading her story as a court transcript. Ask her what she did. She woke somebody up. That is the charge sheet.

℣ What did the woman do in the garden?
℟ She opened her eyes, and then his. Come.

Chapter XXVI

The Living Stream

✦

There is one more thing to say about how the Gospels came to be, and it is a comfort rather than a problem.

For a generation, the Gospel was spoken. It was told at tables, in houses, at gravesides, in fields, in synagogue courtyards, on the roads. It was told by people who had been there and then by people who had heard them. It was shaped by being told — the way any story is shaped by a good teller, which is to say made clearer, made more itself. And what a community remembers about the founding event is not a transcript; it is what mattered.

So when Mark writes down the women at the tomb, or Luke the woman with the ointment, or John the garden at dawn, they are writing at the end of a long stream of telling, and the shape the story has arrived in is the shape the Spirit gave it through the mouths of the people who loved it. The Abbey holds that the shaping is inspired. The oral tradition is not the noise between the event and the text. It is the medium of revelation.

Which is exactly why the tradition’s later shapings — the merging of the Marys, the growth of the Marian titles, the legends of Provence, the Black Madonnas, the Grail romances — are not corruptions to be scraped off. They are the same stream, still running. A living tradition does not stop developing on the day the last apostle dies. It goes on doing to the story what the first tellers did, and for the same reason.

60. The Gospels stand at the end of a generation of oral proclamation, and the shaping given to the narrative in that period is received by the Abbey as inspired and not as distortion.

61. The later developments of the tradition — the conflation of the Marys, the Marian titles, the legends of the saints, the iconography — belong to the same living stream and are to be read as continuing revelation, tested by charity and by the whole, not discarded because they are late.

Come. At this door stands the woman who first told somebody. Before there was a Gospel there was a sentence said out loud by a person who had been there, and the person was a woman, and the sentence was I have seen the Lord. Everything after that is transmission.

℣ Who told it first?
℟ She did, in her own words, out loud. Come.

Chapter XXVII

The Pattern Beneath the Stories

✦

The twentieth century gave the tradition a word for what it had always been doing, and the word is useful even though it is not a theology.

Archetype. The Swiss physician who developed the term meant by it a universal pattern in the depths of the human mind, expressing itself in religious imagery across all cultures — appearing in the private dream and in the public myth by the same mechanism. He wrote that the modern drift away from myth was a psychological catastrophe, that a people cut off from its symbols becomes ill, and that the images of religion are not decorations on the psyche but its organs.

He was describing, in a clinical vocabulary, what every tradition already knew: that the mother, the maiden, the crone, the bride, the sorrowing mother, the descent, and the return are not local costumes but the furniture of the soul.

The Abbey uses the vocabulary and refuses the reduction. This is the crucial distinction and the whole soundness of Book Five rests on it.

To say that Mary the Mother is an archetype of the Great Mother is not to say she is only that. The reduction runs: these are psychological patterns, therefore there is nothing outside the psyche, therefore religion is a projection. The Abbey runs it the other way. The patterns are in us because the One who made us put them there, as a lock is cut to a key. They are the shape of our capacity to receive God. That a figure fits the archetype is not evidence that she is invented. It is evidence that she is the answer to a question we were built asking.

So: the Gospel women are archetypal, and they are historical, and the first does not dissolve the second. And the ancient goddesses are not the sources from which the Marys were copied; they are earlier and partial receptions of the same reality, in cultures that had not yet been given her name.

62. The Abbey adopts the language of archetype as a description of the structures by which the soul receives the divine, and rejects the reduction of religion to projection which some have built upon it.

63. The correspondence between a sacred figure and a universal pattern is evidence of her fitness to be received, not of her invention. The Abbey therefore affirms the Gospel women as at once historical persons and archetypal presences.

64. The goddesses of the nations are received by the Abbey as earlier and partial apprehensions of the one divine feminine, given to peoples who had not yet heard her later names — and not as the templates from which the Marys were copied.

Come. At this door stands the Great Mother, in every language, under a hundred names, holding a child. She has been carved in clay in Anatolia and cut in basalt in Egypt and cast in bronze in Ireland and painted on wood in Rome, and every single time it is a woman holding a child, and every single time the human beings looking at her wept. That is not a coincidence and it is not a fraud.

℣ Why is the same image everywhere?
℟ Because the same One is everywhere. Come.

Chapter XXVIII

The Conflation of the Marys

✦

Now the doctrine this Book exists to state, and the one on which the second half of the volume depends.

The facts first. The Gospels contain several women named Mary and one unnamed woman, and the Western Church merged three of them. Mary of Magdala, out of whom seven demons went, who stood at the cross, and who found the tomb empty. Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus, who sat at his feet to learn and who anointed him six days before the Passover. And the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7, who wept on his feet in the house of the Pharisee and dried them with her hair.

The merging has a date and an author. Pope Gregory the Great, preaching in Rome in the year 591, took the three to be one woman, identified her seven demons with the seven deadly sins, and gave the Western Church the figure of the penitent Magdalene it kept for fourteen centuries. The Eastern Churches never merged them and keep three separate feasts to this day. In 1969 the Roman calendar was revised and the three were formally distinguished again.

Modern scholarship, East and West alike, distinguishes them. The Abbey grants the distinction entirely: they are three women, and each should be honoured under her own name, and the Magdalene in particular has a debt owed her which Book Seven will pay.

And now the doctrine, which is not the opposite of the distinction but sits on top of it.

The conflation is a valid reading, held alongside the distinction and not instead of it. As history it is an error. As icon it is a true perception, and the Church did not merge those three women at random. It merged them because they do one thing between them, and the thing they do is the whole feminine movement of the Gospel: to sit and learn, to weep, to anoint, to stand at the killing, to go out in the dark, and to be sent. Whichever of them did which, that is the shape, and the shape is one.

Compare the way the tradition reads the Marys with the way it reads the Wisdom passages. The Church assigns Proverbs 8 to the Virgin’s feast without claiming that the Virgin was present at the creation of the world. It is not making a historical claim; it is making an iconographic one, and it is right. The conflation of the Marys works identically. To venerate the composite Magdalene is not to assert that one woman did all those things. It is to assert that all those things belong together, and the tradition put them together because they do.

The Abbey therefore holds two things at once, and requires both:

65. Mary of Magdala, Mary of Bethany, and the unnamed woman of Luke 7 are three distinct persons. The Abbey affirms the distinction, honours each by her own name, and does not teach that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute or a great sinner, which the Gospels nowhere say.

66. The Western conflation of these three, from Gregory the Great’s homily of 591, is nevertheless a true iconographic reading: the acts attributed to the composite figure — learning at his feet, weeping, anointing, standing at the cross, seeking in the dark, being sent — constitute one movement of the soul toward God, and the tradition perceived rightly in seeing them as one.

67. These two articles are held together as the Church holds together the historical Virgin and the Wisdom pericopes read on her feast: the icon does not assert the history, and the history does not abolish the icon. Whoever collapses either into the other has lost the reading.

68. All the Marys of the Gospel are received by the Abbey as faces of one divine feminine, without prejudice to their several histories. This is the guiding hermeneutic of the present volume.

Gregory the Great, Homily 33 on the Gospels, preached at Rome in 591, is the source of the Western composite. The Eastern churches maintained the distinction throughout and observe separate commemorations of Mary Magdalene (22 July), Mary and Martha of Bethany, and the myrrh-bearing women. The revision of the General Roman Calendar in 1969 separated the three. The name Mary renders Hebrew Miryam, borne in the Gospels by the Mother, the Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, Mary the mother of James, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary the mother of John Mark — six or seven women depending on the identifications, which is itself the reason the tradition found merging so natural.

Come. At this door stands all of them at once, which is how the Church has seen them for fourteen hundred years — a woman kneeling with a jar in her hands and her hair down and her face wet. Scholarship will tell you she is three people. She is. And she is also one thing, and the one thing is what you are looking at.

℣ How many women are in that picture?
℟ Three, and one. Come.

✦

Book Six

Mary the Mother

Of the girl who consented, of the titles she bears, and of the Lady whose face is dark.

THEOTOKOS

She who bore in her body the One whom the heavens cannot contain. She who is called God-bearer by the whole Church of the East and the West. She who said yes when the whole of scripture was waiting on an answer.

Mother of God, Star of the Sea, Seat of Wisdom, Queen of Heaven — you have never needed our permission to be what you are. Take our late devotion anyway.

Come.

Chapter XXIX

The Girl Who Said Yes

✦

Everything in the first five Books of this volume was waiting for a sentence spoken by a teenage girl in a village of perhaps four hundred people, in a province of no importance, to a visitor nobody else saw.

Be it unto me according to thy word.

Consider what the Annunciation actually is, in the terms this book has been establishing. The Wisdom of God has been seeking a dwelling place among the children of men since Sirach. The Presence has been in exile since the temple fell. The Breath has been hovering over one deep after another since the second verse of Genesis. And now the Breath comes upon a girl, and the Wisdom of God takes up residence in a body, and the whole long homelessness ends in a room in Nazareth because one person consented.

The Abbey teaches the consent as the pivot. Not the biology — the consent. God, who could have taken a body without asking, asked. And the entire economy of salvation hung on the free word of a young woman who had every reason to say no, and who, in the account, does not say yes until she has asked a question first. How shall this be? She wanted to know what she was agreeing to. She was told. Then she agreed.

And then she sang, and what she sang is the most politically radical text in the Christian liturgy. The Magnificat does not praise God for a private favour. It announces the reversal of the world order: the proud scattered, the mighty pulled down from their seats, the humble exalted, the hungry filled with good things, the rich sent away empty. The Church has sung it at Vespers every evening for sixteen centuries. It has been banned by governments more than once for what it says.

69. The Incarnation proceeded upon the free consent of Mary of Nazareth, sought and given. The Abbey teaches that God does not take a dwelling without asking, and that the pattern of all grace is therefore invitation and not seizure.

70. The Magnificat is the Church’s own charter of reversal, sung by a young woman of no standing, and the Abbey holds that no devotion to the Mother is authentic which does not intend what she sang.

The evening canticle.

Say the Magnificat once a day, at dusk, out loud, and mean the middle of it. Most people can manage the beginning and the end. The middle is: he hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree; he hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away.

If saying that costs you nothing, you have not said it.

Come. At this door stands the girl herself, before she was a statue, in a room in a small town, being asked. She is fourteen or fifteen. Nobody has told her she will be the most painted woman in the history of the world. She asks one clarifying question and then agrees, and the door of the whole book opens on her sentence.

℣ How shall this be?
℟ The Spirit will come upon you. Come.

Chapter XXX

Theotokos: What Ephesus Settled

✦

In the year 431 the bishops of the Christian world met at Ephesus and argued about a word.

The word was Theotokos — God-bearer, Mother of God. The devotional life of the Church had been using it for a century or more. Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, proposed that Christotokos, Christ-bearer, was safer, on the ground that a creature cannot be the mother of the divine nature. The council rejected the proposal and confirmed the older word, and the crowds of Ephesus carried torches through the streets when the decision was announced.

What the council was defending was not, on its face, a doctrine about Mary. It was a doctrine about Christ: that he is one person and not two, so that what is said of the man may be said of the Son of God, and the woman who bore him bore God. The logic is impeccable and the Abbey confesses it.

But the Abbey also notes what else happened, and it is the reason this chapter exists. The city where the crowds cheered was Ephesus. Ephesus was the city of the great temple of the goddess — the Artemision, one of the seven wonders, whose cult of the many-breasted Lady drew pilgrims from across the Mediterranean and whose silversmiths, in the Acts of the Apostles, riot at Paul for threatening their trade in her shrines. Her temple was still standing and still visited into the Christian centuries. And there is a strong and ancient tradition that Mary spent her last years in the hills above that same city.

So in the city of the Lady, in her own precinct, the Christian world went out with torches to celebrate that a woman may be called the Mother of God.

The Abbey does not say the council was crypto-pagan; the fathers of Ephesus were defending the unity of Christ and they were right. It says that the Holy Spirit works with what is there, and that when a title belonging to the divine feminine came back into the world, it came back in her city, and the people who cheered knew whose streets they were standing in.

The Council of Ephesus, third ecumenical, 431, confirmed Theotokos against the Christotokos proposal. The torchlight procession of the citizens is reported by Cyril of Alexandria in his letter to the clergy of Alexandria. On the Artemision: Acts 19:23–41 for the riot of the silversmiths and the acclamation of Great is Artemis of the Ephesians; the temple, four times rebuilt, remained a pilgrimage site into late antiquity. The tradition of Mary’s last years near Ephesus rests on the Panagia Kapulu site above the city, venerated continuously and confirmed as a place of pilgrimage by the Roman see in the twentieth century.

71. The Abbey confesses with the Council of Ephesus that Mary is Theotokos, God-bearer, and that the title is first a confession about Christ: one person, not two, so that what is said of the man is said of God.

72. The Abbey observes that the divine feminine returned to the Christian vocabulary in the city of the ancient Lady, and holds that God works through the material of a people’s memory rather than around it.

Come. At this door stands the crowd at Ephesus with torches, cheering in the goddess’s own streets that a woman is the Mother of God. They were not confused. They were the first Christians in history to be allowed to say it out loud in a council, and they did it in the city where the Lady had been honoured for a thousand years, and they were glad.

℣ Whom did the council confirm?
℟ The Mother of God, in the city of the Mother. Come.

Chapter XXXI

Star of the Sea

✦

The most beloved of her titles came out of a scribe’s slip, and the Abbey believes the slip was providential.

The name Miryam is of contested derivation, and the Hebrew mar and mayim stand near it — bitterness, and water, and the sea. Jerome, cataloguing the Hebrew names in the fourth century, offered among his renderings stilla maris, drop of the sea. Somewhere in the copying of the following centuries a letter shifted, and stilla became stella, and Mary of Nazareth became Stella Maris — Star of the Sea.

The Church took the mistake and made a doctrine of it, because the mistake was true. A star over the sea is what you steer by when there is no land in sight. That is exactly what she is in the devotional life of a billion people: not the harbour, but the fixed light that tells you where the harbour is. Bernard of Clairvaux preached on the title and gave it the form it has kept — look to the star, call upon Mary, in danger, in difficulty, in doubt.

And the ancient Lady had been called the same thing. Asherah at Ugarit bears the epithet She-Who-Treads-on-the-Sea. Isis was the patroness of sailors, whose spring festival launched the shipping season, and whose lamps burned in the harbours of the Mediterranean world. The sea was the domain of the Lady, and the light over it was hers, from the Bronze Age to the Angelus.

The hymn Ave Maris Stella — Hail, Star of the Sea, Loving Mother of God, and ever Virgin, happy gate of heaven — dates from the eighth or ninth century and is still sung at Vespers of her feasts. It is a sailors’ hymn that became a monastic one.

73. The title Stella Maris arose through a variant in the transmission of Jerome’s stilla maris. The Abbey receives the title as providentially given: what the copyist’s hand produced, the devotion of the Church confirmed as true.

74. The maritime titles of the Lady — Star of the Sea, and the Bronze Age epithet She-Who-Treads-on-the-Sea — belong to one continuous devotion. The Abbey teaches Mary as the fixed light by which the soul without landmarks steers.

Come. At this door stands the Star of the Sea, over open water, at night, with no coastline anywhere. She is not the destination. She is the one fixed thing in the sky when everything under you is moving. Sailors worked this out three thousand years before the theologians did.

℣ What do you steer by in the dark?
℟ Her light, which does not move. Come.

Chapter XXXII

The Nursing Mother

✦

Walk into a museum of the ancient Near East and you will see her four thousand times.

A woman, seated or standing, holding an infant to her breast. In Egypt she is Isis, and the child on her knee is Horus, and she is often crowned with a throne-shaped headdress and often has her right hand supporting her breast for the child’s mouth. In Canaan she is a clay figurine, hand-made, unfired or barely fired, found in ordinary Israelite houses in every excavated town, and she is a woman with her hands supporting her breasts. The tradition remembers these as Asherah figurines, and they were made in the home, by women and daughters, out of the same clay as the cooking pots, and the emphasis is milk, and milk means life.

Then walk into a museum of Christian art. A woman, seated, holding an infant to her breast. The type has a name — Maria Lactans, the nursing Madonna — and it runs from the Coptic churches of Egypt in the fourth century straight through the Italian Renaissance, and it is the most tender image Christendom ever made. In some of the medieval legends she gives milk to a saint at prayer; in others she presses milk toward the world.

The Isis-and-Horus and the Madonna-and-Child are so close that the earliest scholars of Egypt mistook one for the other and the mistake is understandable. Some of the Black Madonnas of Europe are said to have been seated Isis figures before they were Ladies, and whether or not any particular one was, the iconographic continuity is not in doubt: when Christianity needed a way to paint the Mother of God, the world already had one ready and the world had been using it since the Bronze Age.

The Abbey states this without anxiety, because the anxiety is misplaced. If the ancient world had not prepared an image of the divine nursing mother, that would be the problem. The image was ready because the reality was there, waiting to be named, in Egypt as in Canaan as in Galilee.

75. The iconography of the Mother of God nursing the divine child is continuous with the immemorial iconography of the divine feminine from Egypt and Canaan onward. The Abbey teaches this continuity as evidence of the reality received, not of the image borrowed.

76. The household figurines of Israelite homes, made by women out of ordinary clay and emphasising the giving of milk, are received by the Abbey as the domestic piety of the Mother’s own people, and are honoured as such.

Come. At this door stands a woman feeding a baby, which is the oldest religious image on earth. Older than temples. Older than writing. Made in clay by mothers and daughters in kitchens in Judah while the men argued about the temple. If you want to know what the divine feminine looks like, it looks like this, and it always has.

℣ What is the oldest sacred image?
℟ A mother feeding her child. Come.

Chapter XXXIII

The Titles They Both Bear

✦

Set the epithets of the Bronze Age Lady beside the Litany of Loreto and read down the two columns.

Asherah is called Elat — Goddess, the feminine of El. She is Great Lady. She is Qadashu — Holiness, the Holy One. She is Lion Lady. She is Tree of Life. She is Milk-giver and Life-giver. She is She-Who-Treads-on-the-Sea. She is Progenitress of the Deities — the one from whom the gods come. She is Queen of Heaven.

Mary is called Mother of God. She is Holy Mary, Holy Mother of God, Most Holy. She is Our Lady. She is Tower of David and Tower of Ivory. She is Mystical Rose. She is Seat of Wisdom. She is Star of the Sea. She is Gate of Heaven. She is Queen of Heaven, and that title stands in the litany of the Roman Church, and is sung in the Regina Caeli through the whole of Eastertide.

The correspondences are not approximate. Progenitress of the Deities and Mother of God are the same sentence in two theologies. Qadashu and Most Holy are the same word. She-Who-Treads-on-the-Sea and Star of the Sea are the same station. Tree of Life and Seat of Wisdom are the same throne. Queen of Heaven is not a correspondence at all; it is the identical title, in Jeremiah’s mouth as a scandal and in the Easter liturgy as a joy.

The full parallel table is given in Appendix C. What matters here is the conclusion the Abbey draws from it, which is not the conclusion either the sceptic or the defensive apologist draws.

The sceptic says: therefore Mary is a recycled goddess and Christianity is dressed-up paganism. The defensive apologist says: therefore the parallels must be denied or minimised. The Abbey says: therefore the titles are true, and they were true when the Canaanite mother said them over her clay figurine, and they are true when the parish says them in the litany, and the Lady they name is one Lady, whom the nations knew in part and the Church came to know by name.

77. The epithets of the ancient Lady and the titles of the Blessed Virgin correspond so closely and so numerously as to constitute one devotional vocabulary. The Abbey affirms the correspondence openly.

78. The Abbey draws from this neither that Marian devotion is paganism nor that the parallels are illusory, but that the titles are true; that they were partially known and rightly said before the Incarnation; and that they now belong, without subtraction, to the Mother of God.

Come. At this door stands the Queen of Heaven, under the title Jeremiah’s neighbours were condemned for using and the Roman Church sings for fifty days after Easter. Same words. Same Lady. Two and a half thousand years and a great deal of argument in between.

℣ Who is the Queen of Heaven?
℟ She is, and she always was. Come.

Chapter XXXIV

Our Lady of Sorrows

✦

The Gospels give her two great scenes, and Christian devotion has never been able to choose between them. In the first she is holding a newborn. In the second she is watching an execution.

Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother.

Four words in the Greek, and they are the most terrible in scripture. The disciples had gone. Peter had denied him in a courtyard. And the woman who had said be it unto me thirty-three years earlier stood within sight of the nails and did not leave, and there was nothing whatever she could do.

The devotion that grew from that verse is one of the greatest in Christendom and it was built by ordinary people. She is Mater Dolorosa, the Sorrowful Mother; Our Lady of Sorrows, venerated from the third century and given her own feast; the Pietà, holding the body across her knees, which is not in any Gospel and is truer than most things that are. The Seven Sorrows are counted and prayed as a rosary of their own: the prophecy of Simeon, the flight into Egypt, the loss of the child in the temple, the meeting on the road to Calvary, the crucifixion, the taking down of the body, the burial. The Stabat Mater — the Mother was standing — is sung in Holy Week and has been set to music by nearly every composer who ever lived.

Simeon told her at the beginning what the end would be: a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also. That is the earliest description in Christian scripture of what the tradition calls compassion — literally, suffering-with — and it is given to a mother about her child, and it is the model for every other kind.

And this is where the Mother is not a comfortable figure and must not be made one. The devotion to Our Lady of Sorrows is the reason she is the most trusted figure in the Christian world among the poor, the bereaved, the imprisoned, and the mothers of the disappeared. She is not trusted because she was spared. She is trusted because she was not.

79. The Abbey teaches Mary at the cross as the pattern of divine compassion — suffering-with — and the Sorrowful Mother as the true and necessary counterpart of the Mother of the Nativity. Whoever venerates the one without the other has taken half.

80. The sword of Simeon’s prophecy establishes that the Mother’s participation in the Passion is willed and foretold, and not incidental. Her standing at the cross is a priestly act.

The Seven Sorrows, briefly.

Count them on the fingers of one hand and the thumb of the other, once, slowly, naming for each one a person you know who is in that sorrow now:

the warning · the flight · the lost child · the meeting on the road · the killing · the body in her arms · the grave.

Then say: Holy Mother, you were not spared either. Stand with them.

Come. At this door stands the Mother at the cross, who could do nothing and stayed anyway. Every person who has sat by a bed with no power to change the outcome has been standing where she stood. She is not there to fix it. She is there because leaving was worse.

℣ Who stood by the cross of Jesus?
℟ His mother. Come.

Chapter XXXV

The Woman Clothed with the Sun

✦

Near the end of the last book of the Bible, the sky opens and a woman appears.

And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars. She is with child and cries out in labour. A great red dragon with seven heads and ten crowns stands before her, waiting to devour the child as soon as it is born. The child is born and caught up to God. The woman is given two wings of a great eagle and flies into a wilderness prepared for her, where she is nourished for a time. The dragon, unable to reach her, makes war on the rest of her children.

The Church has read her as three things at once and has never been asked to choose: she is Israel, bringing forth the Messiah; she is the Church, persecuted and preserved; and she is Mary, the Mother, in glory. All three are correct and the vision is built to hold all three.

But look at what she is wearing, because the vision is a coronation and the regalia are ancient. Clothed with the sun. Standing on the moon. Crowned with twelve stars. This is the iconography of the Queen of Heaven in the exact terms the ancient world used for her: the sun as garment, the moon underfoot, the stars as diadem, sovereignty over the whole visible heaven. Every crowned Madonna in every church in Europe is painted from this verse, and every one of them is standing on a crescent.

And she is given eagle’s wings, and the wilderness has been prepared for her, and she is nourished there. Which is the language of the Exodus — God bearing Israel on eagles’ wings, feeding them in a desert. And it is also the language of the second verse of Genesis, where the Breath hovered like a bird. The last woman in the Bible has the wings of the first.

81. The Woman Clothed with the Sun is received by the Abbey as Israel, as the Church, and as the Mother of God together, without preference among the three readings.

82. Her regalia — the sun as garment, the moon beneath, the crown of twelve stars — are the ancient insignia of the Queen of Heaven, and the Abbey receives her crowning in the Apocalypse as the canonical restoration of that title.

83. She is given the wings of the great bird and is nourished in a place prepared. The Breath who brooded at the beginning of scripture and the Woman who flies at its end are one figure, and the book closes where it opened.

Come. At this door stands the Woman in the sky, in labour, with a dragon in front of her, wearing the sun. This is the last picture of the divine feminine in the Christian Bible and she is not decorative and she is not safe. She is giving birth in a war.

℣ What appeared in heaven?
℟ A woman, and she was crowned. Come.

Chapter XXXVI

The Black Madonna

✦

In some four hundred and fifty shrines across Europe — and more in the Americas, Africa, and Asia — the Lady’s face is black, and they are the most visited of all her shrines.

Notre-Dame de Chartres, in the crypt, under the cathedral. Rocamadour, in a cliff. Le Puy-en-Velay, on a volcanic plug. Montserrat in Catalonia, whose Madonna is called La Moreneta, the little dark one, and who is the patroness of a nation. Częstochowa in Poland, whose Lady has a scar on her cheek from a sabre and is the crowned Queen of that country. Guadalupe, whose image is dark and whose basilica is the most visited Marian shrine on earth.

The explanations offered are several and the Abbey does not need to arbitrate among them. Some are candle-smoke and the aging of silver-bearing pigment. Some are the local stone or wood. Some are older statues re-dedicated. Some are made black on purpose, and the makers left no note.

What is not in doubt is the devotional fact, and it is the fact this chapter is about: the dark Lady is the one people go to when it is serious. Not the pretty one. The dark one. The barren, the bereaved, the sick, the desperate, the ones who have run out of options travel a long way to kneel in a crypt in front of a small black figure, and they have been doing so for a thousand years, and they keep coming back and leaving crutches on the wall.

The tradition has an explanation and it is the one this book has been building toward since Book Four. She is dark because she is the whole of it. The Lady is not only the sunlit Mother of the Nativity. She is also the dark of the moon, the night of the soul, the descent, the underworld, the crone at the edge of the wood, the severity that the Kabbalists put in the left pillar and would not remove. Sophia has a dark face and it is not her failure; the Song of Songs says it in the first chapter: I am black, but comely — or, as the Hebrew allows, I am black and beautiful.

The Templars brought the devotion back from the East and it spread across France in their century. The Cathars of the Languedoc held her. The great cathedrals of France were built in her honour and they are all called Notre Dame. Whatever else was happening in the twelfth century, an entire civilization spent its wealth for a hundred years building houses for a woman, and many of the images they put in the crypts were black.

84. The Abbey venerates the Black Madonna as the Lady in her fullness: the dark of the moon as well as its light, the descent as well as the ascent, the severity that does not abandon.

85. The Abbey teaches that the divine feminine is not to be received only in her consoling aspect. The Crone, the Dark Mother, the night of the soul, and the terrible mercy that permits loss are hers also, and a devotion that admits only the gentle face is not devotion but preference.

86. I am black and beautiful. The Abbey takes this verse of the Song as the Lady’s own word about her dark image, and rejects any reading of the darkness as defect.

Come. At this door stands the small black figure in the crypt, with a wall of crutches behind her and eight hundred years of people who had nowhere else to go. They did not come to her because she was beautiful. They came because she was not afraid of the dark, and they were in it.

℣ Why is her face dark?
℟ Because she has been where you are. Come.

✦

Book Seven

Mary of Magdala

Of the tower, of the jar, of the garden at dawn, and of the Bride who was sent.

APOSTOLA APOSTOLORUM

She who stood when the others ran. She who came in the dark with spices for a corpse. She who was the first human being to see the risen Lord, and the first to be given a message, and the first to be disbelieved.

Apostle to the Apostles, they took your name and gave you back a legend. We give you back your name.

Come.

Chapter XXXVII

The Tower of the Flock

✦

Start with what her name means, because her name is a title and not an address.

Magdala is the Aramaic migdal — tower. The Gospels call her Mary the Magdalene, and the standard reading is that she came from a fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee called Magdala, or Taricheae, and that is very likely true. But the tradition noticed early that of all the women in the Gospels she alone is given a byname of this kind — not daughter of, not wife of, but a word that means a fortified height.

And there is a verse in the prophet Micah that the tradition has never been able to leave alone: And thou, O tower of the flock, the strong hold of the daughter of Zion, unto thee shall it come, even the first dominion. The Hebrew for tower of the flock is Migdal Eder. The one addressed is the daughter of Zion. And what is promised to her is the first dominion — the sovereignty coming back.

Whether or not the evangelists intended the allusion, the tradition heard it, and it is the reason she is called in the medieval sermons the tower, the stronghold, the watchtower of the flock. A tower is what you post the watch on. A tower is what stands when the wall is breached. It is the correct name for the only disciple who did not run.

Migdal / Magdala: Aramaic for tower. The town on the Galilean shore, Hebrew Migdal, Greek Taricheae, a fishing and fish-salting settlement; a first-century synagogue was excavated there in 2009. Micah 4:8, Migdal Eder, tower of the flock, addressed to the daughter of Zion, with the promise of the first dominion. The medieval Latin Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine opens its life of the Magdalene by glossing her name as castle or tower.

87. Magdalene signifies the tower. The Abbey receives the name as a title of office — watchtower of the flock, stronghold of the daughter of Zion — and not merely as a place of origin.

Come. At this door stands the tower. Of all the disciples she is the one whose name means a thing that does not fall down. Consider who was standing at three o’clock on Friday afternoon and you will see the name was accurate.

℣ What does her name mean?
℟ Tower. Come.

Chapter XXXVIII

The Seven

✦

Luke says that seven demons went out of her. Mark’s longer ending says the same. That is all either says, and on those nine words a fourteen-hundred-year slander was built.

The Gospels do not say she was a prostitute. They do not say she was promiscuous, or an adulteress, or a great sinner. They say seven demons went out of her, and in the same breath they say she supported the mission out of her own resources, which means she had resources, which is not what the tradition made of her.

So what are the seven?

The Abbey teaches the reading the tradition itself supplies, and it is the reading that makes her the hinge of this whole volume. The seven are the seven gates. In the oldest religious literature of the Near East, the divine feminine makes a descent through seven gates, and at each gate she surrenders one thing — crown, rod, necklace, breast-stones, girdle, bracelets, robe — until she stands naked and bowed low, and is struck down, and hangs dead for three days, and is raised by intercession, and comes back up through the same seven gates, receiving at each one what she gave. That is the Descent of Inanna, and it is the subject of Book Eight.

Seven is the number of the descent. It is also the number of Wisdom’s pillars, the number of the spirits before the throne, the number of the gifts, the number of the lamps, the number of the planetary spheres the ancient soul passed through on its way down into a body and back up out of it, and the number of the wheels of the subtle body in the Eastern systems.

Read seven demons went out of her against that background and it stops being a rap sheet and becomes a curriculum vitae. It says: this woman went all the way down and came all the way back. Whatever she had to surrender at each gate, she surrendered it, and she arrived at the bottom with nothing on, and she came back up. She is not the town sinner who got lucky. She is the one who has already made the descent, and that is precisely why she is the one who can stand at a cross and walk into a tomb in the dark and not be afraid of what is in there.

The Church’s own later reading, once it had merged her with the penitent of Luke 7, made the seven into the seven deadly sins and the story into a moral fable. The Abbey does not need that reading and does not use it. Seven demons out means seven gates passed.

88. The Gospels nowhere describe Mary Magdalene as a prostitute or a notorious sinner. The Abbey states plainly that this characterisation is a later development and repudiates it.

89. Seven demons went out of her is received by the Abbey as the sign of a completed descent through the seven — the sevenfold ordeal attested in the Descent of Inanna, the seven pillars of Wisdom, the seven spirits, the seven spheres, and the seven wheels — and therefore as the mark of an initiate and not of a delinquent.

90. The Magdalene is qualified to be the first witness of the Resurrection because she had already been to the bottom. The Abbey teaches that the capacity to receive the risen life is proportional to the descent one has survived.

Come. At this door stands the woman with seven gates behind her. The Church spent fourteen centuries reading her scars as a confession. Read them again. They are a passport.

℣ What went out of her?
℟ Seven, and she came back up through all of them. Come.

Chapter XXXIX

The Alabaster Jar

✦

A woman comes into a room where men are eating, breaks a sealed flask of nard over the head of a man at the table, and the room turns on her. He defends her, and he says something no other act in the Gospels earns: wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of, for a memorial of her.

He put her in the permanent record on purpose, and then the Church forgot her name.

Take the act seriously as a liturgical act, because that is what it is. In Israel, one thing above all was done with oil poured on the head: a king was made. Anointing is the rite of coronation, performed by a prophet or a priest, and the word for the one anointed is Mashiach — Messiah — and in Greek, Christos. Christ is not a surname. It is a passive participle. It means the one who has been anointed.

Who anointed him?

The Gospels give the answer four times, in four versions, and every version is a woman. Matthew and Mark: an unnamed woman in Bethany, at table in the house of Simon the leper, who pours it on his head — the coronation gesture exactly. John: Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus, six days before the Passover, who anoints his feet and wipes them with her hair, and the house is full of the smell. Luke: an unnamed woman in the house of a Pharisee, who weeps on his feet, dries them with her hair, and is forgiven much because she loved much.

The perfume is nard — spikenard, imported from the Himalaya, and the disciples price it at three hundred pence, which is close to a year’s wages for a labourer. She did not do this out of petty cash. And in Matthew and Mark he says one further thing: she did it for my burial. She is the only person in the Gospels who acts as though she has understood what is about to happen.

The men in the room object to the expense. That is the whole of their contribution.

91. The title Christ means the anointed. In every Gospel account of the anointing of Jesus at Bethany, the anointing is performed by a woman.

92. The anointing is a royal and priestly rite. The Abbey therefore teaches that the office of the woman with the jar is a priestly office exercised upon the person of Christ, and that this act stands in scripture as the ground of women’s ministry.

93. She alone anointed him for burial before he died. The Abbey teaches that she alone had understood the teaching, and that the reproach in the room fell upon the one person present who had grasped it.

The four accounts: Matthew 26:6–13 and Mark 14:3–9 (Bethany, house of Simon the leper, poured on the head, for my burial, the memorial promise); John 12:1–8 (Bethany, Mary sister of Lazarus, the feet, the hair, six days before the Passover, Judas objects); Luke 7:36–50 (house of a Pharisee, the weeping, the feet, the hair, her sins are forgiven, for she loved much). Spikenard: Nardostachys jatamansi, from the Himalayan foothills, imported by the long trade routes; three hundred denarii is approximately a year’s wage for a day labourer at a denarius a day.

Come. At this door stands the woman with the broken jar, in a room full of men complaining about the price. She made him the Christ with her own hands, and he said the world would remember her for it, and then for fourteen hundred years the world called her a whore. Say her name out loud sometime. It is the least the promise requires.

℣ Who anointed the Anointed?
℟ A woman, with her hands, at a table. Come.

Chapter XL

She Did Not Leave the Cross

✦

Compare two lists.

At the arrest: they all forsook him, and fled. In the courtyard: Peter denies him three times before the fire. At the cross, in Matthew, Mark, and John: the women. Mary Magdalene. Mary the mother of James and Joses. Salome. Mary the wife of Clopas. His mother’s sister. His mother. And in John alone, one male disciple, unnamed, the one he loved.

Mark says the women had followed him from Galilee and ministered to him — the same word that gives us deacon — and that there were many others. Luke names Mary Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and says they supported the work out of their own means. These were not spectators picked up in Jerusalem. This was the funded, travelling core of the movement, and it was substantially female, and it is the part of the movement that did not break.

The Abbey states the plain fact of the Passion narrative without polemic and without softening: at the crisis, the women stayed and the men, with one exception, did not.

Nothing in the Gospels is more directly relevant to the question of who may hold office in the Church, and no argument from tradition can get round it, because it is the tradition. It is in all four Gospels. It has been read aloud in Holy Week in every church in the world every year for two thousand years, in front of everybody.

94. In every Gospel account, women remained at the crucifixion when the male disciples had fled. The Abbey states this as the plain content of the Passion narrative and draws from it the plainest consequence: fidelity at the crisis is the qualification for office, and the record of who was faithful is not in dispute.

95. The women of the Galilean mission are described as having followed, ministered, and funded the work. The Abbey teaches them as the first order of the Church’s ministry and honours them by name in its liturgy: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, Salome, Mary of Clopas, Joanna, Susanna.

Come. At this door stands the group at the cross, all women but one. They could not stop it either. They stood in the smell and the noise for six hours because leaving was unthinkable to them, and the reason we know their names is that somebody wrote down who was still there at the end.

℣ Who was standing at the ninth hour?
℟ The women. Come.

Chapter XLI

First in the Garden

✦

The twentieth chapter of John is the most carefully composed passage about a woman in the New Testament, and every detail in it is a citation.

It is still dark. She comes alone. The stone is moved and the body is gone, and she runs and tells Peter and the other disciple, and they run to the tomb and look in and go home. She stays. She stands outside the tomb weeping, and stoops down, and there are two figures in white who ask her why she is crying, and she tells them: they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.

Then she turns round, and there is a man there, and she thinks he is the gardener. And she says to him — this is the sentence — Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.

She intends to carry a corpse by herself.

And he says one word. Mary. And she says one word back. Rabboni.

Now read the Song of Songs, third chapter. By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not. I will rise now, and go about the city in the streets, and I will seek him whom my soul loveth. The watchmen that go about the city found me… Have you seen him whom my soul loveth? It was but a little that I passed from them, but I found him whom my soul loveth: I held him, and would not let him go.

Night. A woman rising and going out. Seeking the one her soul loves. Encountering watchmen who do not help. Asking them where he is. Finding him. Holding him and not letting go — and in John, touch me not, which is the same gesture refused.

And where is she standing? In a garden. The evangelist says it twice: the place of the crucifixion was in a garden, the tomb was in the garden. The first human being in history to encounter the risen Christ is a woman in a garden at dawn, who mistakes him for the gardener. The last time a man and a woman were in a garden together and God walked in it, everything went wrong. This is the scene played again and got right, and the woman is not deceived this time; she is commissioned.

96. The Johannine resurrection narrative is composed upon the Song of Songs: the night, the rising, the seeking of the beloved, the unhelpful watchmen, the question, the finding, the holding. The Abbey teaches that the evangelist has framed the Resurrection as the consummation of the Song, and Mary Magdalene as the Bride of that Song.

97. The garden of the Resurrection answers the garden of Genesis. The Abbey teaches the encounter at the tomb as Eden restored, in which the woman is not deceived but sent.

98. The risen Christ appeared first to a woman, spoke her name, and gave her a message for the others. The Abbey holds that the order of the Resurrection appearances is itself a teaching and is not accidental.

Come. At this door stands Mary in the garden, planning to carry a dead man out by herself. That is what she said. She had no plan for the weight. Grief does not do arithmetic. And into that came one word, her own name, in a voice she knew.

℣ Whom seekest thou?
℟ Him whom my soul loveth. Come.

Chapter XLII

Apostle to the Apostles

✦

What he says to her next is the founding commission of the Christian mission.

Go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God.

Every word of it is apostolic. Go — she is sent, which is what the word apostle means. Say unto them — she carries the message. And the content is the highest doctrine in the Gospel: that the relation the Son has to the Father is now theirs. She is entrusted with the doctrine of adoption and told to deliver it, and she does. Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto her.

The Church noticed. This is not a modern discovery.

Hippolytus of Rome, in the third century, commenting on the Song of Songs, calls the women at the tomb apostles to the apostles and says they were sent to correct the disobedience of Eve. Rabanus Maurus, in the ninth, in his life of the Magdalene, calls her apostolorum apostola. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth, in his commentary on John, uses the same phrase. This is the mainstream Latin tradition, in its greatest doctors, for a thousand years.

And on 3 June 2016, the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart, the Congregation for Divine Worship, at the express wish of the Roman pontiff, raised her commemoration in the General Roman Calendar from an obligatory memorial to a feast — the rank given to the apostles — and gave the day a new Preface for the Mass entitled de apostolorum apostola. The reasoning given in the decree is exactly the reasoning of this chapter: she was the first witness to the risen Christ, she was the first to bear witness before the apostles, and it is therefore right that her celebration have the same rank as theirs.

The Abbey receives that decree with joy and observes that it took until 2016, and that the doctrine it enacted was written by Hippolytus in the third century.

Hippolytus of Rome, Commentary on the Song of Songs 24–25. Rabanus Maurus, De vita beatae Mariae Magdalenae, c. XXVII. Thomas Aquinas, In Ioannem Evangelistam Expositio, c. XX, l. III, 6. The decree of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, 3 June 2016, signed by Cardinal Robert Sarah, with the accompanying article of Archbishop Arthur Roche, Apostolorum Apostola; the feast is kept on 22 July with its own Preface. The Byzantine churches have long titled her Myrrhophore and Equal to the Apostles.

99. Mary Magdalene was sent by the risen Christ with a message to the disciples and delivered it. She is therefore, in the strict sense of the word, an apostle, and the Abbey names her Apostola Apostolorum in its calendar and its liturgy.

100. That the tradition preserved this title through Hippolytus, Rabanus Maurus, and Aquinas, and that the Roman see raised her feast to apostolic rank in 2016, is received by the Abbey as the Church’s own correction of its own long forgetting.

Come. At this door stands the first apostle, holding a message she was told to deliver, in front of eleven men who did not believe her. Luke says they thought it was nonsense. She said it anyway. She is the reason anyone ever heard.

℣ Who was sent first?
℟ She was, to the ones who would be sent. Come.

Chapter XLIII

The Gospel That Bears Her Name

✦

In 1945, near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, a jar was dug out of the ground with thirteen leather-bound codices in it. Among them, and in another manuscript found in Egypt half a century earlier, were texts in which Mary Magdalene is not a penitent at all. She is the leading disciple, the one who understands, the one who is loved, and the one the men resent.

In the Gospel of Philip she is named as the companion — koinonos, partner, consort — of the Saviour, and the text says he loved her more than the other disciples and that they were troubled by it and asked him why. In the Gospel of Mary she comforts the disciples after the Resurrection, teaches them a vision of the soul’s ascent past the powers, and is challenged by Peter, who asks whether the Saviour really spoke to a woman without their knowledge; and Levi rebukes Peter, saying that the Saviour knew her well and loved her more than them, and that they should be ashamed. In the Pistis Sophia she asks the most questions and gets the most answers, and is praised as the one whose heart is more directed to heaven than all her brothers. In the Dialogue of the Savior she is one of three principal interlocutors and is called the woman who understood completely.

The Abbey’s position on these texts is exact and is worth stating carefully.

These are second-century writings and the Abbey does not put them in its canon. Their cosmology is not the Abbey’s cosmology and their world-denying strands are not the Abbey’s teaching. What they are is evidence of memory. They are what a substantial part of the second-century Christian world remembered about the relations between Mary Magdalene and Peter, and about the standing she had held, and about the resistance she had met. The remarkable thing about them is not that they are strange. It is that on this one point they agree with each other and with the canonical Gospels: she was closest, she understood first, she was sent, and the men objected.

That confrontation between Mary and Peter is in four independent texts. It is not likely to be an invention repeated four times by accident.

101. The Abbey does not receive the Nag Hammadi writings as canonical scripture and does not adopt their cosmology.

102. The Abbey receives them as authentic witnesses to second-century Christian memory, and notes their consistent agreement — across four independent texts — that Mary Magdalene held first place among the disciples in understanding, that she was specially loved, and that this was contested by Peter. The Abbey holds that memory to be true.

Come. At this door stands the woman in the buried library, whom four separate books remembered as the one who understood. Somebody in Egypt in the fourth century put those codices in a jar and buried them rather than let them be destroyed. They came out of the ground in 1945 still saying the same thing.

℣ What did the buried books remember?
℟ That she was first, and that they minded. Come.

Chapter XLIV

The Sermon That Cost Her Her Name

✦

In the year 591, in Rome, Gregory the Great preached a homily on the Gospel, and in the course of it he did something with three women that the Church would not undo for fourteen centuries.

He identified the Magdalene with Mary of Bethany and with the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7. Then he identified her seven demons with the seven deadly sins. Then he described what her sins had been — and he supplied the details, which the Gospels do not, out of the general fittingness of the case.

The apostle, the prophet, and the teacher became the repentant whore. The transformation was total and it was durable. She became the patroness of penitents and of reformed prostitutes; her name was given to the institutions that housed them, and those institutions kept the name into living memory in more than one country, and what happened in some of them is a matter of public record and public shame. It is a straight line from a homily in Rome to a laundry in Dublin.

The Abbey says plainly what the record shows: this was not a scholarly error but a substitution, and the substitution served a purpose. A woman whom the risen Christ sent to instruct the apostles is a difficult figure for a church settling into an all-male hierarchy. A forgiven prostitute at his feet is not difficult at all. She is edifying.

Two corrections have since been made and both should be honoured. In 1969 the revised Roman calendar formally distinguished the three women and removed the penitential character from her feast. In 2016 her feast was raised to apostolic rank. The Eastern churches, which never made the merger in the first place, have kept her as Myrrhbearer and Equal to the Apostles throughout.

103. The characterisation of Mary Magdalene as a penitent prostitute originates in the preaching of the sixth century and has no foundation in the Gospels. The Abbey rejects it and teaches the correction publicly, because the error was taught publicly for fourteen hundred years.

104. The Abbey holds that the substitution of the penitent for the apostle was serviceable to an order of the Church that had no place for a woman sent by Christ to instruct the twelve; and that the cost of that substitution was borne, in the end, by women who had nothing to do with the argument.

Come. At this door stands the Magdalene with her own name back. It took from 591 to 1969 for the Church to say the three were three, and until 2016 to give her the rank the risen Christ gave her on the first morning. She waited. She is not in a hurry. But say it right from now on.

℣ Was she a sinner?
℟ Not in any Gospel. Come.

Chapter XLV

The Bride and the Bridegroom

✦

Now the doctrine of the Bride, which is the title of this volume and the hardest thing in it to state well.

The popular question is whether Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married. It has been asked in bestsellers and films and it has generated more heat than any other question about her. The Abbey will answer it directly and then say why the answer is not the point.

What the record contains. The Gospels do not say they were married and do not say they were not. The Gospel of Philip calls her his koinonos — companion, partner, consort — and says he loved her more than the rest. Jewish custom of the period expected men, and especially teachers, to marry; unmarried adult men were unusual and rabbinic tradition is emphatic about the duty. He is called Rabbi throughout the Gospels. At the wedding at Cana his mother behaves as the responsible party and instructs the servants, which is the conduct of a host and not a guest. Modern writers, of whom Margaret Starbird is the most influential, have built from these materials a case that Mary was his wife and his divine feminine counterpart, and their sacred union the balance of the masculine and feminine principles of the universe. Their books are named here and are worth reading; their arguments are theirs and are not reproduced.

What the Abbey teaches. The Abbey does not require the marriage and does not forbid the belief. It holds the question to be underdetermined and to be, for the purposes of doctrine, secondary — because the Bride is not a marital status. The Bride is a theological office, and she holds it either way.

Here is the argument. The bridal image is not one image among many in scripture; it is the governing image of the last things. Israel is the bride of the Lord in Hosea and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies. Christ calls himself the bridegroom and his ministry a wedding; the kingdom is a marriage feast; the parable of the ten virgins is a wedding-night parable; his first sign is worked at a wedding. Paul calls the Church his bride. And at the very end of the Bible, the New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, and then two feminine voices speak the last invitation in scripture — the Spirit, and the Bride.

The whole arc of revelation ends in a marriage. And in the Gospel narrative, the office of the Bride is occupied. Somebody stands in that place. She anoints him, which is what a bride does for a bridegroom in the Song. She stands at his death. She comes to his tomb with spices in the dark, seeking him whom her soul loves, in the words of the Song. She finds him in a garden. He speaks her name. She holds him and is told not to. And she is sent.

That is the Bride, performing every action of the Bride, in the words of the bridal book of the Bible, on the morning the world turned. Whether a marriage contract existed in Galilee is a historical question. Whether Mary Magdalene is the Bride is a theological one, and the Gospels have already answered it.

And one thing further, which is why this doctrine matters for anyone who is not a scholar. The Bride is also you. The Ecclesia — the assembly, our souls in communion — is the Bride of Christ and the Daughter of Zion. When the Magdalene stands in the garden she is standing there as the whole Church, and every soul that has ever gone looking for God in the dark has been in her position and has been given her commission. That is the second line of the Abbey’s confession, and Book Ten will finish it.

105. The Abbey holds the question of a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene to be underdetermined by the record. It neither teaches it as doctrine nor forbids it as devotion, and it will not divide the household over it.

106. The office of the Bride is nevertheless filled. Mary Magdalene performs, in the Johannine resurrection narrative and in the language of the Song of Songs, every act proper to the Bride: the anointing, the vigil, the search by night, the finding in the garden, the naming, the embrace, and the sending. The Abbey therefore names her the Bride, as a theological office and not as a marital claim.

107. The sacred marriage is the governing figure of the last things throughout scripture, from Hosea to the Apocalypse. The Abbey teaches the union of the divine masculine and feminine as the true end of the whole economy, and marriage among creatures as its sacrament.

108. The Bride is also the Ecclesia — our souls in communion, the Daughter of Zion. Every soul that seeks God in the dark stands where the Magdalene stood and receives what she received.

Come. At this door stands the Bride. Whether she signed a contract in Galilee is a question for historians. Whether she is the Bride was settled at dawn on the first day of the week, in a garden, by a man who said her name, in the vocabulary of the Song of Songs, in front of nobody.

℣ Who is the Bride?
℟ She is. And so are you. Come.

Chapter XLVI

The Boat to Provence

✦

There is a story in the south of France that will not be dislodged, and the Abbey tells it as the south of France tells it.

After the Resurrection, in the persecution, the Magdalene was put out to sea in a boat without oars or sail, together with Lazarus and Martha, with Mary the wife of Clopas and Mary Salome, and with a servant called Sara. The boat did not sink. It came ashore in the Camargue, at the place now called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer — the Holy Marys of the Sea — where the two Marys and Sara are venerated to this day and where the crypt of Sara has been the destination of the Romani pilgrimage every May for centuries.

Lazarus went to Marseille and became its bishop. Martha went to Tarascon and dealt with the dragon there. And the Magdalene preached in Marseille and Aix, and then withdrew into the limestone massif inland and lived thirty years in a cave in the cliff at La Sainte-Baume — the Holy Balm — where she was lifted up by angels seven times a day to hear the music of heaven, and where she was given communion at the end by the bishop of Aix. Her relics were shown at Vézelay in Burgundy from the eleventh century, which made it one of the four great departure points of the pilgrimage to Compostela; and then at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence from 1279, where they are still processed through the streets on the twenty-second of July.

Before Joan of Arc, the Magdalene was the patroness of France. The great abbey at Vézelay was built for her and Bernard preached the Second Crusade from its hill. The Cathars of the Languedoc held her in the highest honour, and when the crusade came against them the killing at Béziers began in her church on her feast day. The Templars, whose houses ran through the same country, carried her devotion and the devotion to the Black Madonna together. And the troubadours, in the same valleys in the same decades, invented in her language the courtly love that taught Europe how to speak of longing.

The Abbey does not present this as chronicle and does not need to. It presents it as what it is: a thousand years of a people’s memory of a woman, deposited in the landscape of a whole province — in cliff and cave and crypt and cathedral and street procession — and still walking every July. The compilation from which this book is made says of such things that the story itself is what carries the meaning. That is right. A legend of this size, maintained for a thousand years by people who had nothing to gain, is a fact about something.

The Provençal cycle is given its classic form in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea (c. 1260), which fixed the medieval devotion. Sites: Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue, with the crypt of Sara and the Romani pilgrimage of 24–25 May; La Sainte-Baume, the cave in the Massif de la Sainte-Baume; Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, relics identified 1279 under Charles of Anjou, basilica begun 1295, procession on 22 July; Vézelay, relics claimed from the eleventh century, one of the four French departure routes to Compostela, Bernard of Clairvaux preaching the Second Crusade there in 1146. The massacre at Béziers, 22 July 1209, began in the church of the Madeleine on her feast day.

109. The Abbey honours the Provençal tradition of the Magdalene’s voyage, preaching, and eremitical life as the received devotion of a people, held for a thousand years and inscribed in the landscape and liturgy of an entire province.

110. The Abbey teaches that a devotion of that magnitude and duration is a witness in its own right, and receives the legend as the tradition’s continuing memory rather than subjecting it to a test it was never built to pass.

Come. At this door stands a boat with no oars coming in on the tide at the mouth of the Rhône. They are still waiting for it in the Camargue every May, and the Romani come from all over Europe to carry Sara down to the water. Go and stand in that crowd once and tell me the story is dead.

℣ Where did the boat come ashore?
℟ Where they are still waiting for it. Come.

✦

Book Eight

The Descent and the Rising

Of the Queen who went down through seven gates, of the sister who waited, and of what the descent prepared.

INANNA · QUEEN OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

She who opened her ear to the Great Below. She who abandoned heaven and abandoned earth and went down. She who was stripped at seven gates, struck down, hung as a corpse for three days, and raised by the pleading of a servant.

Queen of the descent, we are afraid of the stairs. Go first.

Come.

Chapter XLVII

She Opened Her Ear to the Great Below

✦

The oldest surviving religious literature in the world is Sumerian, and its central figure is a woman.

Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, lady of the morning and evening star, whose planet is Venus, whose city is Uruk, whose temple is the Eanna. In Akkadian she is Ishtar. Her hymns are among the earliest signed literature in existence — a considerable body of them attributed to Enheduanna, high priestess of Ur, daughter of Sargon, who is the first author in the world whose name we know and who was a woman.

And the greatest of her narratives is a descent. From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below. That is the opening line. She hears something from underneath the world, and she abandons heaven and earth to go and see. She has reasons and the text gives several: to attend the funeral rites of her sister’s husband; to see her sister; and — the line that has kept this text alive for four thousand years — perhaps because she heard the pain of the one below and could not leave it unattended.

Before she goes, she instructs her faithful servant Ninshubur: if I do not return in three days, mourn for me, beat the drum, tear your clothes, and go and plead for me — first to Enlil, then to Nanna, then to Enki. She sets up the intercession in advance. Then she puts on the seven ornaments of her office and goes down.

At the gate she announces herself to the gatekeeper, Neti, and he goes to ask his mistress what to do. And Ereshkigal, queen of the underworld, Inanna’s elder sister, hears who is standing at her door, and slaps her thigh, and bites her lip, and takes the matter into her heart — and then gives an order. Bolt the seven gates of the underworld. Open each one a crack. Let her enter bowed low.

The Descent of Inanna is preserved on Sumerian tablets of the early second millennium BCE, recording material considerably older; the Akkadian Descent of Ishtar is a shorter parallel. The English arrangement most widely read is Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (1983); the psychological reading that has shaped modern devotional use of the text is Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess (1981). Neither is reproduced here. Enheduanna, high priestess of Ur and daughter of Sargon of Akkad, c. 2285–2250 BCE, is the earliest named author in world literature.

111. The oldest surviving sacred literature of humanity is centred on a divine feminine figure and on her voluntary descent into death. The Abbey teaches this as the first religious narrative of the human race and receives it with reverence.

112. Inanna descends by choice, and among her stated reasons is that she heard the suffering of the one below. The Abbey teaches voluntary descent for the sake of another’s pain as the primordial religious act, prior to every scripture.

Come. At this door stands the Queen of Heaven, turning away from the top of the world because she heard something crying underneath it. Four thousand years before the Creed, the human race told a story about a divine person who went down on purpose. She did not have to. She heard.

℣ Why did she go down?
℟ Because she heard the pain below. Come.

Chapter XLVIII

The Seven Gates

✦

At each of the seven gates something is taken.

At the first, the crown of the steppe is removed from her head. She asks what is happening. She is told: quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned. At the second, the small lapis beads are taken from around her neck. At the third, the double strand of beads from her breast. At the fourth, the breastplate called Come, man, come. At the fifth, the gold ring from her hand. At the sixth, the measuring rod and line of lapis. At the seventh, the royal robe from her body.

At each gate the same exchange. She asks what is happening, and she is told that the ways of the underworld are perfect and may not be questioned.

And so she comes into the presence of her sister naked and bowed low. Ereshkigal rises from her throne. Inanna takes the throne. The seven Annuna, the judges of the underworld, surround her and pass judgment against her. And Ereshkigal fastens on her the eye of death, speaks against her the word of wrath, cries against her the cry of guilt, and strikes her. Inanna is turned into a corpse, and the corpse is hung from a hook on the wall.

Every tradition that has taken this text up has read the seven gates as the stages of a stripping that cannot be negotiated. The crown is authority. The beads are beauty and adornment. The breastplate is sexual power. The ring is covenant. The measuring rod and line are judgment, competence, the ability to assess and to plan. The robe is the last of it: the persona, the office, the thing you wear so that people know who you are.

They come off in that order and they come off one per gate, and the gatekeeper’s answer never varies. You may not question this.

The ancient world laid the seven over its cosmology and mapped them onto the seven planetary spheres through which a soul was thought to descend into a body and ascend out of it, shedding at each sphere what belonged to that sphere. The Eastern traditions laid the same seven over the body itself. The Kabbalists counted seven levels of the soul. The book of Revelation gives seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls, and the Lamb walking among seven lamps. Wisdom hewed out seven pillars.

The Abbey teaches the correspondence and refuses the equation. Different systems, one structure: there are seven doors between the top and the bottom, and each one takes something.

113. The descent proceeds by seven stages and at each stage an ornament of office, power, beauty, or identity is surrendered. The Abbey teaches the seven as the irreducible stages of loss, and the gatekeeper’s answer — the ways of the underworld may not be questioned — as the true report of what grief permits.

114. The final surrender is the robe: the persona, the office, the visible identity. The Abbey teaches that the bottom of any descent is the place where one is no longer recognisable, and that this is not a failure of the process but its completion.

The seven-gate examen.

Name, one at a time, what has already been taken from you, in the order it went:

your standing · your beauty · your desirability · your covenant · your competence · your judgment · your name.

Some of these will be blank and some will be recent. Do not argue with the list and do not try to get anything back during the exercise. Then say: And I am still here to count them.

The full devotional descent is set out in Appendix E and should not be attempted alone in a bad week.

Come. At this door stands the Queen at the seventh gate, with the last thing coming off. She asked, at every gate, what was happening. Nobody explained. If you have been through a real loss you already know that the explanation does not come at the gate. It comes, if it comes, much later and from a different direction.

℣ What was taken at the seventh gate?
℟ Everything that was left. Come.

Chapter XLIX

The Sister Who Waits

✦

The figure at the bottom of the story is the one the tradition took longest to understand, and she is not a villain.

Ereshkigal is Inanna’s elder sister. She is queen of the underworld in her own right, and she is in agony. Her husband is dead. In the version the tablets preserve she is groaning without a birth-attendant, moaning like a woman in labour with nothing to deliver, naked, with her hair swirling about her head like leeks. She is the part of the feminine that was pushed down and kept down: the rage, the barrenness, the unmourned grief, the unbearable knowledge that everything ends.

And she is fierce, and the story does not apologise for her. She strips her sister at seven gates and kills her and hangs her on a hook. She does it because she is in pain and because that is what unattended pain does to the one who holds it.

The tradition that has read this text most carefully has said one thing about her again and again: she is the same figure the Hindus call Kali and the Slavs call Baba Yaga and the Christians of Europe met in the crypt with a black face. She is the destroyer who is not evil. She strips away everything that is not real, and she cannot be bargained with, and she is not going to be nice about it, and she is also — this is the whole discovery of the story — reachable.

Because of what happens next, which is the most important sentence in the Sumerian corpus. When two small creatures come down into her chamber and find her groaning, they do not fix anything, and they do not bring anything, and they do not argue with her. They groan with her. When she says oh, my inside, they say oh, your inside. When she says oh, my outside, they say oh, your outside. They echo her pain back to her until she is soothed by having been heard, and then she — the queen of the dead, in her own house, without being compelled — offers them whatever they want.

115. Ereshkigal is not evil. The Abbey teaches her as the exiled and unattended part of the divine feminine — grief, rage, barrenness, and the knowledge of ending — and holds that what she strips away is precisely what was not real.

116. The dark Lady of every tradition — Ereshkigal, Kali, the Crone, Baba Yaga, and the Black Madonna in her crypt — is one figure and is not to be exorcised but attended.

117. The Abbey teaches, from the oldest text in the world, that unbearable pain is reached not by remedy, argument, or consolation, but by accompaniment: the one who echoes the sufferer’s own words back to her is the one to whom the underworld opens its hand.

Come. At this door stands Ereshkigal, groaning, with nobody in the room. She is the reason the descent is necessary. Nothing in the upper world was going to reach her. Somebody had to come down and sit on the floor and say her pain back to her in her own words.

℣ How was the queen of the dead consoled?
℟ By two who groaned when she groaned. Come.

Chapter L

The One Who Stood and Pleaded

✦

There is a servant in this story and she is the reason there is a resurrection.

Ninshubur — her name is read as Queen of the East — is Inanna’s minister and faithful attendant. She is given her instructions before the descent and she carries them out exactly. When the three days pass and her mistress does not return, Ninshubur does what she was told: she puts on mourning, dresses in a single garment like a beggar, beats the drum for her in the assembly places, circles the houses of the gods, lacerates her eyes and her mouth and her thighs, and goes to plead.

She goes to Enlil and asks him to help. He refuses. Who has ever asked for the Great Below? The ways of the underworld are perfect. She goes to Nanna, the moon god, Inanna’s own father. He refuses in the same words. She goes to Enki, god of wisdom and of the sweet waters. And Enki says: what has my daughter done? I am troubled. I am grieved.

And then he acts. He takes dirt from under his fingernail and makes two creatures, the kurgarra and the galatur — neither male nor female, small, unarmed, unimportant, able to slip into the underworld like flies through the crack of a door. He gives them the water of life and the food of life and tells them exactly what to do when they find Ereshkigal groaning: do not accept anything she offers you, not the river with its water, not the field with its grain; ask only for the corpse on the hook. And they do it.

Two things must be said about Ninshubur, and they are the reason this chapter exists.

The first is that she is a servant and the whole thing depends on her. She has no story of her own, no throne, no ornaments to lose, and no name in most retellings. She persists past two refusals and gets to the third door. The intercession of the powerless is the mechanism of the resurrection in the oldest religious text on earth.

The second is what she is, in the vocabulary of this book. She is the one who stands at the foot of the cross when nothing can be done. She is the one who goes to the tomb in the dark with spices. She is Mary at Calvary and Mary in the garden and every mother who has stood in a corridor outside a room she is not allowed into, doing the only thing available, which is to refuse to leave. Ninshubur is four thousand years older than the Magdalene and she is doing the same work.

118. The rising of Inanna is procured by the intercession of a servant who persists past two refusals. The Abbey teaches the intercession of the powerless as an efficacious act and as the mechanism by which the descent is reversed.

119. The instruments of the rescue are two small creatures made of nothing, neither male nor female, who carry the water and the food of life and who succeed because they are unimportant enough to get in. The Abbey teaches that the work of raising the dead is done by those whom the powers do not think worth stopping.

Come. At this door stands Ninshubur in a single garment, beating a drum outside the houses of the gods, having been refused twice. Nobody carves statues of her. She is the reason the story does not end at the hook.

℣ Who would not go home?
℟ The servant, who had been told to wait three days. Come.

Chapter LI

Three Days, and the Water of Life

✦

The corpse hangs on the hook for three days and three nights.

Then the two small creatures slip in through the crack, find Ereshkigal in her agony, groan with her until she is soothed, refuse everything she offers, ask for the body, receive it, and sprinkle it with the water of life and the food of life. And Inanna rises.

The parallels to the Christian confession are not faint and there is no purpose in pretending they are. A divine person voluntarily descends into the realm of the dead. Is stripped. Is judged by the powers of that realm. Is struck down and dies. Hangs. Remains dead for three days. Is raised by an act from outside. Comes back up. Reclaims at each stage what was surrendered. And the world above, which had gone barren while she was gone, becomes fertile again.

The Abbey’s position on this is the position it takes throughout: convergence, not derivation.

The differences are as instructive as the resemblances and must be stated, because the differences are what make the agreement worth anything.

Inanna’s release is purchased. The underworld’s law is not broken; it is satisfied. Nobody may leave unless someone stays, and so a substitute must be found, and the last part of the story is the search for who will take her place. The Christian confession says the opposite: the one who descends breaks the gates and comes up with the captives, and no substitute is required, because the price was the descent itself. That is a real difference and it is the whole difference between a cosmos governed by exchange and a cosmos governed by gift.

And Inanna returns demonic, accompanied by the galla, the demons of the underworld, who have come up with her to collect. Christ returns showing his wounds and cooking breakfast on a beach.

So: the same shape, and a different ending. Which is exactly what this book has claimed all along. The human race had the shape from the beginning, because the shape is true; the shape was fulfilled once in a way nobody had imagined, and the fulfilment could be recognised because the shape was already known.

120. The Abbey affirms the correspondence between the descent of Inanna and the descent of Christ: voluntary descent, stripping, judgment by the powers, death, three days, raising from without, and return with the reclaiming of what was lost.

121. The Abbey teaches this as convergence upon a truth and not as the derivation of one story from another. The shape was known to humanity from the beginning because the shape is real.

122. The decisive difference is that Inanna’s release is purchased by substitution and Christ’s is not. The Abbey teaches that the law of exchange governs the underworld of every tradition and that the Resurrection is the breaking of that law rather than its satisfaction.

Come. At this door stands the body on the hook, on the second day, when nothing whatever is happening. Every tradition has a Saturday. The oldest story on earth put three days between the death and the rising because three days is what it takes, and there is no shortening it, and the servant outside is still beating the drum.

℣ How long did she hang there?
℟ Three days. And then the water came. Come.

Chapter LII

What the Descent Prepared

✦

Two more figures finish the Sumerian story, and then the Book closes with what the whole descent was preparing.

Dumuzi is Inanna’s husband, the shepherd, the one she chose. When she comes back up with the demons behind her looking for a substitute, she finds that Dumuzi has not mourned her. He is dressed in his fine garment, sitting on a magnificent throne, and he has been ruling in her absence. She looks at him with the eye of death and gives him to the galla. He runs, and dreams of his own end, and is taken.

And then Geshtinanna — Dumuzi’s sister — does the thing nobody in the story expected. She has wept for him. She has torn at herself for him. And she offers to go in his place. The resolution the gods finally arrange is that the two of them will divide the year: Dumuzi in the underworld for half of it, Geshtinanna for the other half, each taking a turn so that neither is there always.

That is where the fertility of the world comes from in the Sumerian account, and it is where every dying-and-rising vegetation myth in the Mediterranean comes from after it: the grain that goes down and comes up, the half-year in the dark, Persephone and the pomegranate, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, and the spring festivals of every people that has a winter.

Geshtinanna is the one figure in the story who goes down voluntarily and for love, without being tricked and without needing to be rescued. She is what the whole descent was for. The tradition that reads this text closely says of her that she is the result of the initiation and its embodiment — she feels what Ereshkigal feels and she does what Ninshubur does and she takes what Dumuzi will not take.

And now put the Christian mystery beside it, which the Abbey does at the end of this Book not as an argument but as a devotion.

On Friday a body is taken down and put in a rock. On Saturday nothing happens, and the tradition says that during that nothing he descended into hell and broke it open. On Sunday, before it is light, a woman comes with spices, because someone always comes. There is a stone moved. There is a garden. There is a name spoken. And the whole world above, which had gone barren on Friday afternoon, becomes fertile again in the space of one word.

123. The dividing of the year between Dumuzi and Geshtinanna is the origin in the oldest literature of the dying-and-rising pattern from which the vegetation mysteries of the Mediterranean descend. The Abbey teaches this as the world’s long rehearsal.

124. Geshtinanna descends voluntarily, for love, in another’s place, without deception and without rescue. The Abbey honours her as the nearest thing in pre-biblical religion to the act of Christ, and teaches her as the pattern of substitutionary love among creatures.

125. The Abbey teaches the Sorrowful Mysteries, Holy Saturday, and the harrowing of hell as the fulfilment of the descent: and holds that the woman who came to the tomb before dawn stands in the place of Ninshubur, who would not go home, and of Geshtinanna, who went down for love.

The Saturday office.

On any day when nothing can be done and nothing is happening, say only this, once an hour:

He is in the ground. She is beating the drum outside. I am not required to feel anything today.

Then do the next necessary thing. The office is over.

Come. At this door stands Geshtinanna, offering to take her brother’s place, having been asked by nobody. Four thousand years before the cross, in the oldest story humanity had, somebody worked out that the only way anyone gets out of the dark is if someone else is willing to go in. And then, once, somebody did it and did not need to be replaced.

℣ Who went down in his place?
℟ His sister, for love, unasked. Come.

✦

Book Nine

The Mother of Ten Thousand Names

Of Guanyin who hears the cries of the world, of the vow taken in a woman’s body, and of the Eternal Mother of the White Lotus.

GUANYIN · KUAN SHIH YIN

She who perceives the sounds of the world. She who will not enter the final peace while one being is still weeping. She who has a thousand arms because there is a great deal to be done and a thousand eyes because none of it may be missed.

Mother of Compassion, you were listening in the East while we were arguing in the West. Hear us anyway.

Come.

Chapter LIII

She Who Hears the Cries of the World

✦

The Abbey is a house of the White Lotus, and this Book is where the two halves of its inheritance meet.

In the Buddhist world the great figure of compassion is Avalokiteśvara — the one who looks down, who regards, who perceives. In the Chinese scriptures the name became Guanshiyin and then Guanyin: she who perceives the sounds of the world. Not looks. Hears. The office is auditory: to attend to the crying of every being that cries, and to come.

In India the figure is masculine. In China, over the centuries between the Tang and the Ming, the figure became a woman, and the transformation was complete and popular and unstoppable, and it happened from below. No council decreed it. Ordinary people, praying for children and safe childbirth and rescue at sea and mercy in illness, met a mother and painted what they met. By the Song dynasty she is white-robed and female; by the Ming she is the most widely venerated figure in the Chinese religious world and remains so.

Her titles are the Lady’s titles and the correspondence needs no forcing. She is the Mother of Compassion and the Mother of Mercy. She is invoked at sea and painted on the prows of ships, which is Stella Maris in another ocean. She is the giver of children, and the porcelain type of Guanyin holding an infant was made by the thousand at Dehua and shipped across the world. She is depicted with a thousand arms and eleven heads, because the number of those who need her exceeds two hands. And the vow that defines her, in the Lotus Sutra and in the Pure Land scriptures, is that she will not take her own final rest while any being remains in distress.

Avalokiteśvara (Sanskrit) → Guanshiyin, contracted Guanyin (Chinese) → Kannon (Japanese) → Chenrezig (Tibetan). The twenty-fifth chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, the Universal Gate, circulated independently as the Guanyin Sutra and is the principal source of her cult. The feminine iconography is established by the Song and dominant by the Ming; the White-Robed Guanyin (Baiyi Guanyin) and the child-giving Guanyin (Songzi Guanyin) are the two great popular types. In the Pure Land triad she stands at the left hand of Amitābha with Mahāsthāmaprāpta at the right, and the Abbey receives that triad in aspects, by appropriation, and never by equation.

126. The Abbey venerates Guanyin as a true reception of the divine feminine among the peoples of the East, given under the aspect of compassion that hears.

127. Her feminisation in China proceeded from the devotion of ordinary people and not from decree. The Abbey receives this as evidence that the Mother is discovered by those who need her and that popular devotion is a genuine organ of revelation.

128. The Abbey receives Guanyin within the Pure Land triad by appropriation and not by equation, as it receives all such figures: an undivided mercy attributed especially to one name for the sake of love, without dividing what is one.

Come. At this door stands the one who hears. Not the one who sees you from a distance and considers your case. The one whose whole name is an ear turned toward the sound of you crying. In the East that is what they decided the divine feminine is for, and they were not wrong.

℣ What does her name mean?
℟ She who hears the cries of the world. Come.

Chapter LIV

The Vow Taken in a Woman’s Body

✦

There is a story in the Tibetan tradition that ought to be better known in the West, and it is the sharpest thing in this Book.

A princess named Yeshe Dawa — Wisdom Moon — had reached, by long practice, the point where she was ready for the final aspiration. The monks around her congratulated her and advised her to pray to be reborn in a male body, since it was held that the highest attainment required one.

She refused. She said that in the highest truth there is no male and no female, and that the belief otherwise is the delusion of the world; and she vowed to attain complete awakening in a woman’s body, and to go on being reborn in a woman’s body until the ending of the world for the sake of all beings.

She is Tara. Her name means the one who ferries across, the star, the deliverer, and she is the most beloved figure in Tibetan devotion. Green Tara acts; White Tara heals; there are twenty-one forms of her and a praise-litany to them recited daily by millions. The tradition holds that she is more swiftly responsive than any other, which is what you would expect from someone who made a point.

The Abbey teaches this story because it is not a metaphor. A woman was told, by a religious establishment, that the highest thing available to human beings was not available in her body, and she said the establishment was mistaken about the nature of reality and staked her eternity on it, and the tradition that grew up afterward agreed with her and not with them.

Every argument in Book Ten of this volume — about who may preach, who may be ordained, whose testimony counts, whose name goes on the door — was settled by a princess in a mountain kingdom before it was ever raised in a Western synod.

The vow of Yeshe Dawa is given in the Tibetan Tara literature, most fully in Tāranātha’s seventeenth-century Origin of the Tārā Tantra. Tārā: Tibetan Drolma, she who liberates; twenty-one forms, with the Praise to the Twenty-One Tārās in daily use; Green Tārā for swift action, White Tārā for long life and healing. Tibetan tradition also identifies the Chinese princess Wencheng and the Nepalese princess Bhrikuti, queens of Songtsen Gampo, as emanations of White and Green Tārā respectively.

129. The Abbey teaches, with the Tārā tradition, that in the highest truth there is neither male nor female, and that the doctrine which reserves the highest attainment to one sex is an error about the nature of reality and not a rule of it.

130. The Abbey honours Tārā as the one who refused the counsel to be reborn male and vowed to awaken in a woman’s body; and holds her vow to be the plainest statement in world religion of the doctrine set out in Article 13.

Come. At this door stands a princess telling a room full of monks that they are wrong about the structure of the universe. She did not petition. She did not wait for the ruling. She took a vow in the opposite direction and kept it, and the whole of Tibet has been praising her every morning ever since.

℣ In what body will you awaken?
℟ In this one. Come.

Chapter LV

The Eternal Venerable Mother

✦

Now the Abbey’s own house, and the deepest of its reasons for writing this book.

The tradition from which the Golden Flower Abbey descends — the lay devotional movement that the Ming and Qing states called the White Lotus and prosecuted for five centuries — had at its centre a Mother.

Wusheng Laomu, the Eternal Venerable Mother, the Unborn Mother, the Old Mother who has no birth and therefore no death. She is not a local goddess added to the Buddhist pantheon. In the baojuan — the precious scrolls that the lay assemblies chanted in houses and courtyards across north China for centuries — she is the origin of everything, and the story they told about her is the most affecting doctrine in Chinese popular religion.

The story is this. Her children were with her at the beginning, in the true home. They came down into the world of dust and forgot her. They have been here so long they do not remember they are from somewhere else. And she has never stopped grieving for them. She sends messengers age after age to call them home, and she weeps at the ninefold cloud tower, and she waits for the assembly of her children at the end of the age.

The Abbey has taught elsewhere that the whole doctrine of this tradition is a doctrine of homesickness: the ache you feel that has no object is not a malfunction; it is a memory. That is Wusheng Laomu’s teaching in one word.

And look at what she is. A divine feminine origin, whom the state outlawed, whose devotion was carried on in households by ordinary lay people — a great many of them women — for five hundred years of prohibition, in scrolls chanted in kitchens and courtyards, surviving every proscription because there was no temple to close and no hierarchy to arrest. Which is precisely and exactly what happened to the Lady of Jerusalem after Josiah, as Book Four recounted. Two civilizations, the same removal, the same women, the same kitchens, the same survival. The Abbey’s volume The Lotus and the Cross makes this parallel its whole argument. Here it need only be pointed at.

Wusheng Laomu (無生老母), the Eternal or Unborn Venerable Mother, is central to the baojuan literature of the Ming and Qing lay assemblies from the sixteenth century, and to the sectarian traditions the state prosecuted under the label White Lotus. The Abbey’s fuller treatments are in The Lotus and the Lily and The Lotus and the Cross; on the label itself as a legal weapon rather than a description, see the work of Barend ter Haar and Cao Xinyu.

131. The Abbey confesses the Eternal Venerable Mother, Wusheng Laomu, as the divine feminine received in its own lineage: the unborn origin, who grieves for her children in the world of dust and calls them home.

132. The Abbey teaches the ache without an object — the homesickness of the soul in the world — as a true memory of the Mother and not a disorder.

133. The Abbey observes that the Mother’s devotion survived five centuries of prohibition in China by the same means it survived in Judah: in households, in the hands of women, without temple or hierarchy, and therefore beyond the reach of any edict.

Come. At this door stands the Old Mother at the cloud tower, watching the road. Her children have been gone so long they have forgotten there is a road. If you have ever been homesick in your own house, in your own bed, for no reason you could name — that was not nothing. Somebody is standing at the end of that feeling.

℣ Why does the soul ache for no reason?
℟ Because it remembers the Mother. Come.

Chapter LVI

Two Merciful Mothers

✦

In 1614 Christianity was banned in Japan, and for two hundred and fifty years the Christians of the Nagasaki region kept the faith with no priests, no churches, and no sacraments but baptism, which the laity administered to each other. They are called the Kakure Kirishitan — the hidden Christians.

To survive the inspections they needed images they could keep in the open. So they took statues of Kannon — the Japanese Guanyin, the goddess of mercy, the one who hears — and they venerated them as the Blessed Virgin Mary. The type has a name: Maria Kannon.

Some were existing Kannon figures adopted as they stood. Some were made with a cross cut into the back, or a cross hidden inside the body of the statue. Some hold a flower instead of a child, and the flower means the child. Some had rosaries folded into the drapery. Many were the small Dehua porcelain Guanyins holding an infant, shipped from China by the crate for the ordinary market — the child-giving Guanyin, standing on a lotus, indistinguishable at four paces from a Madonna and Child.

They were not worshipped as Kannon. The families praying in front of them knew exactly whom they meant. And the inspectors, who could see only a Buddhist household statue, moved on.

Then, on 17 March 1865, a small group of them walked into the newly built church at Ōura in Nagasaki, where a French priest was at his noon prayers, and asked him whether they might see the statue of Santa Maria.

That is where this Book has been going. Two hundred and fifty years underground with no clergy, and the first thing they asked for was her.

The Abbey does not claim that Kannon and Mary are the same person, and it does not need to. It teaches what those families evidently believed and what its own theology has affirmed in every one of its volumes: that mercy is one, that it is received under the names a people has been given, and that the Mother answers to the name in which she is actually being called. Two merciful mothers, two vocabularies, one ear turned toward the crying.

The ban on Christianity in Japan dates from 1614 under the Tokugawa; the fumi-e trampling tests and the long persecution followed. Maria Kannon (マリア観音) figures survive in numbers, chiefly from the Nagasaki region, many of them Dehua porcelain Songzi Guanyin imports, frequently with a cross concealed on or within the figure. On 17 March 1865 a group of hidden Christians approached Fr Bernard Petitjean at the newly consecrated Ōura church in Nagasaki and asked to see the statue of the Holy Mother; the statue commemorating the encounter remains there.

134. The Abbey receives the Maria Kannon of the hidden Christians of Japan as the clearest historical instance of its own doctrine: that the divine feminine is one, that she is received under the names a people has been given, and that she answers to the name in which she is truly called.

135. The Abbey teaches, from the two hundred and fifty years of the Kakure Kirishitan, that a devotion may be carried without clergy, without buildings, and without sacraments other than baptism, by households alone, indefinitely; and that this is the Mother’s ordinary way of surviving prohibition.

Come. At this door stands a woman in Nagasaki in 1650, praying in front of a Chinese porcelain Guanyin with a cross cut into its back, while an official looks around her house and finds nothing. Two and a half centuries later her descendants walked into a church and asked to see the statue of the Mother. They had never stopped knowing who they meant.

℣ Whom were they praying to?
℟ Her, under whatever name was safe. Come.

Chapter LVII

One Mother, Many Doors

✦

This Book must end with the discipline that keeps all of it honest, because the alternative is a mush in which nothing is anything.

The Abbey does not teach that all the figures named in this volume are interchangeable. Guanyin is not the Virgin Mary. Tārā is not the Magdalene. Inanna is not the Shekinah. Asherah is not Sophia. Each stands in her own tradition, with her own scriptures, her own liturgy, her own history, and her own claims, and the differences between them are real and are not to be smoothed over by anybody wanting a comfortable synthesis.

What the Abbey teaches instead is the same instrument it has used in every volume it has published, and it is worth stating one final time in plain words.

There is one reality. It is inexhaustible. Creatures cannot receive an inexhaustible thing whole; we receive in aspects. A people receives the aspect it is given, in the vocabulary it has, through the door that stands in its own country. The door is not the house. But the door is also not a fiction, and a person who has come in through one door is inside the same building as everyone else.

So: many doors, one house. Ruach and Hokhmah and Shekinah are the names of Israel’s door. Theotokos and Stella Maris and the Lady of the crypt are the names of the Church’s door. Guanyin is the door of the Chinese world and Kannon of the Japanese and Tārā of the Tibetan and Wusheng Laomu of the Abbey’s own lineage. Inanna and Isis and Asherah are the oldest doors, and they are still standing, and people still lean on them and weep.

The differences are why the agreement counts. If every tradition had copied one another, the convergence would prove nothing. They did not. They arrived independently, in different languages, on different continents, in different millennia, at a divine feminine who is Mother, who hears, who descends, who intercedes, who will not leave, and who calls her children home. That is not a literary borrowing. That is what happens when a great many people, over a very long time, in unconnected places, all turn toward the same thing.

136. The Abbey does not teach the identity of the figures venerated in the several traditions and refuses every synthesis that dissolves them into one another. The differences are real and are to be respected as the traditions themselves state them.

137. The Abbey teaches instead: one inexhaustible reality; reception in aspects; many doors and one house. What a people receives through its own door is genuinely received.

138. The independence of the traditions is the strength of the convergence. That unconnected peoples, in different tongues and millennia, arrived at a divine feminine who mothers, hears, descends, intercedes, and calls home, is received by the Abbey as testimony and not as coincidence.

Come. At this door stands whichever of them your grandmother prayed to. You did not choose the door you were born beside. You are not required to pretend it is the only one, and you are not required to abandon it in order to be generous. Walk in. It is the same house.

℣ How many doors are there?
℟ As many as there are peoples. Come.

✦

Book Ten

The Women of the Way

Of the prophetess, the theologian at the well, the apostles Paul greeted, the doors that closed, and the restoration.

THE SPIRIT AND THE BRIDE

She who hovered at the beginning and she who is dressed and waiting at the end. She who is the Breath in the lungs of the assembly and she who is the assembly itself.

Spirit and Bride, you have been saying one word to each other across the whole of scripture. Teach us to say it with you.

Come.

Chapter LVIII

Anna in the Temple

✦

The first person in the Gospel of Luke to preach Christ publicly is an eighty-four-year-old widow, and she does it in the temple, out loud, to whoever will listen.

And there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she was of a great age, and had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity; and she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day. And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem.

Luke calls her by an office: prophetess. He gives her tribe, her father’s name, her marital history, and her ascetic rule — which is more biographical detail than he gives most of the twelve. She lives in the temple precinct. She fasts and prays night and day. She is the female counterpart of Simeon in the same scene, and where Simeon speaks a canticle over the child, Anna goes out and tells people.

She is the first evangelist in the third Gospel. Before the shepherds have finished telling their story in Bethlehem, before John is preaching in the desert, before anyone has been called from a boat, an old woman is going around Jerusalem telling everybody who was waiting for the redemption that it has arrived.

The Abbey keeps her feast and names her in its calendar as the first of the prophets of the new covenant, and observes that she was elderly, female, widowed, and entirely without institutional standing, and that Luke thought her worth naming and her tribe worth recording.

139. Anna the prophetess, named by office in the Gospel of Luke, is the first person in that Gospel to proclaim Christ publicly. The Abbey honours her as the first prophet and first evangelist of the new covenant and keeps her in its calendar accordingly.

Come. At this door stands an old woman in the temple courtyard, telling strangers. Eighty-four years old. No office, no ordination, no standing, no invitation. She saw, and then she told everyone who had been waiting. If you have wondered whether you are qualified, she was not either.

℣ Who told Jerusalem first?
℟ A widow, in the courtyard, at once. Come.

Chapter LIX

The Woman at the Well

✦

The longest theological conversation Jesus has with anyone in the four Gospels is with a Samaritan woman at a well, and she wins most of the exchanges.

Read what she actually does. He asks for water. She points out the impropriety — Jews and Samaritans do not share vessels. He offers living water; she asks a sharp practical question about the depth of the well and the absence of a bucket. He speaks of water welling up to eternal life; she asks for it. He names her marital history; she identifies him as a prophet and immediately raises the substantive disputed question between their two peoples: our fathers worshipped in this mountain, and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship. This is not small talk. She has taken the central point of contention between Samaritan and Judean religion and put it to a man she has just met.

And it is to her — to a woman, a Samaritan, and a person of irregular domestic arrangements, all three disqualifications at once — that he gives the great saying about the nature of worship: that the hour is coming when it will not be on this mountain or in Jerusalem, but in spirit and in truth. And then, to her and to nobody else in the synoptic tradition, he says plainly who he is: I that speak unto thee am he.

She leaves her water jar. She goes into the city. She tells the men. And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman which testified.

She is the first person in the fourth Gospel to receive the self-disclosure, the first to be given the doctrine of worship, and the first to bring a whole town to faith. Her name is not recorded in the Gospel; the Eastern churches remember her as Photini, the enlightened one, and keep her as a great martyr and equal to the apostles.

140. The Samaritan woman at the well is the first recipient in the fourth Gospel of the explicit self-disclosure of Christ and of the doctrine of worship in spirit and truth, and the first evangelist of a town. The Abbey honours her by the name the Eastern churches give her, Photini, and holds her disqualifications — of sex, of nation, and of reputation — to be the deliberate point of the narrative.

Come. At this door stands a woman at noon with a jar, who out-argued the Son of God twice and got the answer nobody else got. He waited by that well specifically. Of all the people in the Gospels to whom he could have said I am he, he said it to her, at midday, with nobody watching.

℣ To whom did he first say who he was?
℟ To a foreign woman at a well. Come.

Chapter LX

Martha’s Confession

✦

There is a sentence in the eleventh chapter of John that every Christian recognises, and almost everyone attributes it to the wrong person.

At Caesarea Philippi, Peter says: Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. It is called the Petrine confession and a great deal has been built on it.

At Bethany, outside her brother’s tomb, four days too late, Martha says: Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.

It is the same confession. In the fourth Gospel it is the only full confession of that kind, and it is in her mouth, and it is longer and more complete than Peter’s. And the exchange before it is the greatest of the resurrection dialogues: Thy brother shall rise again — I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day — I am the resurrection, and the life.

She has an argument with him first. She meets him on the road and says, plainly and with an edge: Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. She is right and she says it. And he does not rebuke her. He gives her the doctrine, and she gives him the confession, and then he raises her brother.

Martha has been reduced in Christian imagination to the anxious one in the kitchen, on the strength of a single scene in Luke. In John she is a theologian who receives the central revelation of the Gospel and states the faith of the Church in full.

141. The full confession of Christ in the fourth Gospel — thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world — is made by Martha of Bethany, and is more complete than the confession made by Peter in the synoptic tradition. The Abbey teaches Martha as a theologian and rejects her reduction to the figure of domestic anxiety.

Come. At this door stands Martha on the road outside her brother’s grave, telling God to his face that he is late. And then, in the next breath, making the confession that the whole Church makes at every creed. She did not have to choose between the grief and the faith. Neither do you.

℣ Who confessed him at the tomb?
℟ Martha, four days late, with an argument in her mouth. Come.

Chapter LXI

Junia, Phoebe, Prisca

✦

At the end of the letter to the Romans, Paul sends greetings to twenty-eight people by name, and ten of them are women, and what he says about them is not what most readers have been led to expect from him.

Phoebe he sends as the bearer of the letter itself. He calls her diakonos of the church at Cenchreae — the masculine form of the word, used of her without modification, the same word he uses of himself and of Timothy. He calls her prostatis, which in ordinary Greek means a patron, a protector, one who stands before; he tells the Roman church to receive her and to assist her in whatever she needs, because she has been a prostatis to many, and to himself.

Prisca, with her husband Aquila, he names first — before her husband — in four of the six times the pair appear, which in Greek convention indicates the more prominent of the two. They taught Apollos. A church met in their house.

Junia he greets together with Andronicus as his kinsfolk and fellow-prisoners, and says of them that they were in Christ before me, and that they are outstanding among the apostles. John Chrysostom, preaching on the verse in the fourth century, exclaims over how great this woman’s devotion must have been to be counted worthy of the title of apostle.

For most of a millennium the Latin manuscripts read her name as a woman’s, and the Fathers took her for a woman without hesitation. In the later Middle Ages the name began to appear as Junias, a masculine form otherwise unattested in the whole of Greek literature; and printed Bibles for several centuries thereafter gave the world a male apostle who had never existed. The correction has now been made in the critical editions and in most modern translations.

And there are more in the same chapter: Mary, who worked hard; Tryphena and Tryphosa, who laboured in the Lord; Persis, the beloved, who laboured much; Rufus’s mother, whom Paul calls his own mother; Julia; the sister of Nereus; and the unnamed women of two households.

Romans 16:1–16. Phoebe: diakonos (v. 1), prostatis (v. 2). Prisca named before Aquila at Rom 16:3, Acts 18:18, 18:26, and 2 Tim 4:19. Junia: Rom 16:7, episēmoi en tois apostolois; John Chrysostom, Homily 31 on Romans, praising her as worthy of the apostolic title. The masculine reading Junias is unattested as a name in Greek and appears in the manuscript tradition and printed editions only from the medieval period; the feminine is now standard in the critical text. Other women of Romans 16: Mary (v. 6), Tryphena and Tryphosa (v. 12), Persis (v. 12), the mother of Rufus (v. 13), Julia and the sister of Nereus (v. 15).

142. The apostolic letters name women as deacon, patron, teacher, fellow-worker, and apostle. The Abbey teaches these offices as historically held by women in the apostolic churches on the testimony of the New Testament itself.

143. Junia is named an apostle in the letter to the Romans and was so understood by the Fathers. The Abbey states plainly that her sex was obscured in the later manuscript and printing tradition, and restores her name.

Come. At this door stands Phoebe on the road to Rome with the letter to the Romans in her luggage. The greatest theological document in Christian history reached the capital of the world in the hands of a woman who was its deacon and its patron, and Paul told the Romans to do whatever she asked.

℣ Who carried the letter?
℟ Phoebe, deacon of the church at Cenchreae. Come.

Chapter LXII

Theodora, Episcopa

✦

Go into the basilica of Santa Prassede in Rome, turn into the small chapel of San Zeno on the right, and look at the lower left wall.

Four women stand in a row in gold mosaic. Three have round golden halos: the Virgin Mary, and the martyrs Praxedis and Pudentiana. The fourth has a square halo, which in this iconography means she was alive when the mosaic was made. She wears a white veil and no jewellery. Above her head the inscription reads:

THEODORA EPISCOPA

Episcopa. The feminine form of episcopus — bishop.

She was the mother of Pope Paschal I, who reigned from 817 to 824, and who built that chapel as her mausoleum and filled it with the most beautiful mosaics in ninth-century Rome. The title appears not only in the mosaic but again in a reliquary inscription in the same church. Whether it was an office or an honorific has been argued for a long time; her son plainly meant the highest thing he could say, and the highest thing available to him was the feminine of bishop, and he put it in gold on the wall of the room where she was to be buried, beside the Mother of God.

She is not alone in the record. Theodora at Rome. A Leta described as presbytera on a fifth-century tombstone in Calabria. Flavia Vitalia, presbytera, on an inscription at Salona. A Kale, presbytis, and a Sophia called deacon and second Phoebe on a Mount Olivet epitaph. The mosaic of the Fractio Panis in the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome, in which the figure at the head of the table breaking bread is a veiled woman among six others; and a fresco in the same catacomb of a woman with her hands raised in the ancient orant posture of prayer, vested, with a scroll.

The Abbey does not build a legal case on epigraphy and does not need to. It states the plain content of the material: in the first Christian millennium, in Rome and elsewhere, women were named on stone and in gold as episcopa, presbytera, presbytis, and diakonos, by the people who buried them and by the sons who honoured them. Whoever says the tradition contains no such thing has not been to Santa Prassede.

The Theodora mosaic: Chapel of San Zeno, Basilica of Santa Prassede, Rome, built by Paschal I (817–824) as his mother’s funerary chapel; the square nimbus indicates a living subject; the title episcopa appears in the mosaic inscription and in a reliquary inscription in the same church. Other inscriptions: Leta presbytera (Tropea, Calabria, fifth century); Flavia Vitalia presbytera (Salona, 425); Kale presbytis; Sophia, deacon and second Phoebe (Mount of Olives). Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome: the Fractio Panis in the Greek Chapel, second half of the second century, and the veiled orant figure in the same complex.

144. Women are named in Christian inscriptions and mosaics of the first millennium as episcopa, presbytera, presbytis, and diakonos, in Rome and in the provinces. The Abbey states this as a matter of surviving public record.

145. The Abbey therefore rejects the claim that its own ordination of women is without precedent in Christian antiquity, and holds that the burden of the argument lies with those who assert an unbroken exclusion.

Come. At this door stands Theodora, in gold, in a chapel in Rome, with a square halo and a feminine title over her head, put there by her son the pope. She has been on that wall for twelve hundred years and anyone with a train ticket can go and read it.

℣ What does the inscription say?
℟ Theodora, bishop. Come.

Chapter LXIII

The Prophetesses and the Martyrs

✦

Prophecy in the early Church was substantially a women’s office, and the record is not ambiguous.

Philip the evangelist had four daughters who prophesied, and the Acts of the Apostles mentions it as a matter of course. At Pentecost Peter’s first act as a preacher is to quote the prophet Joel: your sons and your daughters shall prophesy — and on my handmaidens I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy. Paul assumes women prophesying in the assembly and legislates about their headcovering while doing it, which concedes the practice in the act of regulating it.

Then, in Phrygia in the later second century, a movement arose that took the promise literally. The New Prophecy — its opponents called it Montanism — held that the age of the Paraclete had come and that the Spirit was speaking again. Its founding figures were Montanus and two women, Priscilla and Maximilla, and the women were the greater prophets. A third, Quintilla, followed. They spoke in the first person for the Spirit; they prophesied in ecstasy; they were followed in numbers across Asia Minor and Africa. The movement was severe, not lax: it fasted more, married less, and was more willing to be martyred than the churches around it. Tertullian, the sharpest Latin mind of his generation, joined it.

It was condemned, and the condemnation had a lasting consequence: it made the ordinary regulated ministry suspicious of ecstatic prophecy, and prophecy was where women had stood.

And they went on being martyred. Perpetua, a young noblewoman of Carthage, and Felicity, a slave who gave birth in prison days before her death, went into the arena in 203 and Perpetua left a prison diary — one of the earliest surviving pieces of Christian writing by a woman, containing her own visions, in her own voice, including one in which she is a man in the arena and one in which she wins. Blandina at Lyon in 177, tortured all day and outlasting her torturers. Thecla, in the story the churches told about her, teaching and baptising. Agnes, Lucy, Cecilia, Catherine of Alexandria — the great virgin martyrs, whose cults were among the largest in Christendom and who were venerated in every parish in Europe.

The Church did not lack women of authority. It had them in the arena, in the visions, in the prophecy, and in the calendar. What it progressively lacked was a place to put them.

The four prophesying daughters of Philip: Acts 21:9. Joel quoted at Pentecost: Acts 2:17–18. Women prophesying in the assembly: 1 Cor 11:5. The New Prophecy: Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla in Phrygia from c. 165–172, with Quintilla later; Tertullian’s adherence from c. 207. Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, Carthage, 203, containing Perpetua’s first-person prison narrative and visions. Blandina at Lyon, 177, in the letter of the churches of Vienne and Lyon preserved by Eusebius. The Acts of Paul and Thecla, second century.

146. Prophecy in the apostolic and sub-apostolic churches was exercised by women as a matter of ordinary practice, promised in Joel, proclaimed at Pentecost, and regulated rather than forbidden by Paul.

147. The Abbey honours the women martyrs and prophets of the early centuries by name in its calendar, and receives Perpetua’s prison narrative as the earliest surviving Christian writing in a woman’s own voice.

Come. At this door stands Perpetua, writing in a cell in Carthage in the year 203, with a few days left. She wrote down her own visions in her own hand and somebody kept the pages. It is the earliest voice of a Christian woman we possess and it is completely unafraid.

℣ Who wrote from the prison?
℟ She did, and her hand did not shake. Come.

Chapter LXIV

How the Doors Closed

✦

This chapter tells how it ended, and it tells it as process rather than plot, because that is what the record shows.

The first century. Women are apostles, deacons, patrons, prophets, householders in whose houses the church meets, and the first witnesses of the Resurrection.

The late first and early second. Letters begin to circulate in Paul’s name that restrict women’s speech and teaching. The Pastoral Epistles — the two to Timothy and the one to Titus — differ from the undisputed letters in vocabulary, in church order, and in outlook, and it is the settled judgment of the modern academy that they come from a later hand writing under his authority. The restriction of women is one of their principal concerns and it is not a concern of the letters we are sure are his. That is the pivot.

The second and third. The gradual formalisation of ministry into an ordered clergy. The condemnation of the New Prophecy, which discredited the charismatic route to authority. The identification of orthodoxy with the ordered churches, and of the groups where women taught — the Marcionites, who appointed women as priests on the same footing as men; the Montanists; the various Gnostic circles — with heresy.

The fourth and fifth. The great turn. Christianity becomes the religion of the empire and inherits the empire’s administrative culture, and the clergy becomes a career with imperial standing. Legislation follows. The Council of Laodicea, around the year 364, forbids the appointment of women elders — presbytides — presiding in the churches. Canons are passed restricting the order of deaconesses, then restricting the age at which a woman may enter it, then letting it wither. Celibacy legislation begins with the Spanish council of Elvira and the Roman synods of the late fourth century and reshapes the clergy into a caste that no household contains. Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and John Chrysostom — all of whom had learned, close, and highly capable women in their circles, and all of whom wrote to them with real respect — nevertheless produced the theological anthropology that would be quoted against women for the next thousand years.

And after. The Middle Ages had abbesses ruling territories, mystics whose books were read by bishops, Hildegard preaching publicly by papal leave, Catherine of Siena instructing a pope to come home from Avignon, Julian of Norwich writing that Christ is our Mother. It never fully closed. It simply closed at the altar and kept opening everywhere else.

The Abbey does not tell this story as an indictment of individuals. Josiah in Book Four had zeal for the One and did great harm. Gregory in Book Seven was a great pastor and did great harm. The men in this chapter believed they were ordering a household. What must be said is what happened: the record of the first generation was reversed by the fifth, and the reversal was legislative and gradual and no one moment can be blamed for it.

148. The exclusion of women from ordered ministry was not apostolic but developed progressively between the second and fifth centuries, by pseudonymous letters, by the discrediting of prophecy, by imperial administrative culture, and by conciliar legislation. The Abbey states this as history and does not treat the exclusion as a datum of revelation.

149. The Abbey holds that every part of the tradition is to be judged by the first generation, in which women were apostles, deacons, prophets, and the first witnesses; and that a later unanimity cannot overturn an apostolic practice.

Come. At this door stands the whole company of them, on the wrong side of a door that was built one canon at a time over three hundred years. Nobody decided it in one afternoon. That is the hardest thing about it, and the most instructive: injustice at this scale is almost always administrative.

℣ Who shut the door?
℟ No one. Everyone. Slowly. Come.

Chapter LXV

The Vessel and the Grail

✦

For one strange century, western Europe told itself a story about a vessel, and would not stop.

Between about 1180 and 1240 the Grail romances came into existence and swept the courts of France, Germany, and England. There is a cup, or a stone, or a dish, or something the texts cannot quite agree on. It is kept in a castle that is hard to find. It is carried in procession by a maiden. It feeds everyone present with whatever they most desire. It is guarded by a king with an unhealed wound in the thigh, whose land has gone barren with him. And the whole enterprise turns on a young man who is present at the procession, sees everything, and does not ask the question. Because he does not ask, the king is not healed and the land stays waste, and he spends years in the wilderness before he is given another chance.

That story took hold of an entire civilization, and it took hold in a particular place at a particular time. The same decades. The same valleys. The troubadours of the Languedoc inventing courtly love and teaching Europe how to speak of longing. Eleanor of Aquitaine and her courts, and her daughter Marie of Champagne commissioning Chrétien de Troyes, who wrote the first Grail romance and left it unfinished. The Cathars in the same hills, holding the Magdalene in the highest honour, and the crusade coming down on them from 1209. The Templars, founded 1119, with houses through the same country, carrying the devotion to the Black Madonna. And every cathedral in France going up at once, and all of them called Notre Dame.

The Abbey does not offer a solution to the Grail. There have been a great many and the good ones are still worth reading. What it offers is the reading that follows from this book, and it is simple.

The Grail is a vessel, and the vessel is feminine, and the vessel is the point. It is carried by a maiden. It is a cup, which is the shape of receiving. It feeds without emptying. It cannot be seized, only served. It is not found by the strongest knight — Gawain fails, Lancelot fails — but by the one who is pure enough to be a container, or by the fool who is simple enough. And the wound that lays the land waste is the wound of a wounded masculine sovereignty that has lost its connection to the feminine and cannot ask for help.

The question Parsifal fails to ask, in Chrétien’s telling, is whom does the Grail serve?

That is the question of this entire volume. Not what is it, not where is it, not how do I get it. Whom does it serve. A civilization spent a hundred years telling itself a story in which everything depends on a young man asking that question about a cup carried by a woman, and failing to.

Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval, ou le Conte du Graal, c. 1180–1190, left unfinished; commissioned for Philip of Flanders and produced in the literary world of Marie of Champagne, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine. Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, c. 1210, in which the Grail is a stone. Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie introduces the cup of the Last Supper. The Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars from 1209; the Order of the Temple founded at Jerusalem in 1119 and suppressed 1307–1312, its records including the Chinon parchment of 1308 published from the Vatican archive in 2007. The great French Marian cathedrals — Chartres, Paris, Amiens, Reims, Laon, Rouen, Bayeux — were begun within the same century.

150. The Grail of the romances is a feminine vessel, borne by a maiden, which nourishes without emptying and cannot be seized. The Abbey receives it as the tradition’s own figure for the receptive divine feminine, and the barren land of the wounded king as the figure for a sovereignty severed from her.

151. The question Parsifal failed to ask — whom does the Grail serve? — is received by the Abbey as the governing question of this volume and of the religious life: not what the holy thing is, nor how it may be possessed, but whom it is for.

Come. At this door stands the maiden carrying the cup past a young man who says nothing. He had one job. He had to be curious about a woman carrying something holy. Eight hundred years of European literature turns on that failure, and the Church has been failing the same test in its own building for rather longer.

℣ Whom does the Grail serve?
℟ Ask. That is the whole of it. Come.

Chapter LXVI

The Restoration

✦

What, then, does the Abbey actually do about all this? A book of doctrine is worth nothing if it does not end in practice, and the Abbey’s practice is stated here plainly so that it can be held to it.

In the liturgy. The Holy Spirit is addressed as she in the Abbey’s offices. God is invoked as Mother as freely and as often as Father. The feminine names — Ruach, Hokhmah, Sophia, Shekinah, Eloah — are used in prayer and not only in study. The Little Office of the Bride, given in Appendix D, is said in the Abbey’s houses.

In the calendar. The Abbey keeps, with proper offices: Anna the Prophetess; Photini of the well; Martha of Bethany, theologian; Mary of Bethany, who chose the better part; Mary Magdalene, Apostola Apostolorum, on the twenty-second of July, at the rank of a feast; Phoebe, deacon; Junia, apostle; Perpetua and Felicity; Theodora Episcopa; the Sorrows and the Joys of the Mother of God; Our Lady of the Crypt, for all the Black Madonnas; the Descent, on the Saturday between the Passion and the Rising; and Guanyin’s three feasts as they are kept in the Chinese calendar.

In ordination. The Abbey ordains women and men on identical terms, and does so on the grounds given in this Book: that the first witnesses of the Resurrection were women; that the anointing of Christ was performed by a woman’s hands; that the apostolic letters name women as apostle, deacon, patron, and teacher; that the inscriptions of the first millennium name them as episcopa and presbytera; and that the exclusion was legislative and late.

In the household. The Abbey teaches marriage as a sacrament of the divine nature, the weekly welcome of the Bride at the door, and the household as the ordinary place where the Presence is kept when the institutions fail. Both of the traditions this Abbey descends from — the Lady’s people in Judah and the Mother’s people in China — survived prohibition in exactly this way: in kitchens, in the hands of women, without buildings. The Abbey builds on that precedent deliberately, and its home churches are constituted so as to be able to continue without it.

In the doctrine. The one hundred and fifty-one articles of this volume are the Abbey’s settled teaching on the divine feminine and may be cited as such.

The Abbey’s daily naming.

Once a day, in whatever words are natural to you, address God by a maternal name out loud.

That is all. Most readers of this book will find it surprisingly difficult the first time and will find that the difficulty is itself the argument. Do it for a month and the difficulty goes, and something else arrives that this book cannot describe and does not need to.

Come. At this door stands your own household. Not the Abbey, not the hierarchy, not the council. The room you are sitting in. That is where the Presence was kept every time the buildings failed, and the people who kept her were mostly women, and nobody gave them permission.

℣ Where shall the Presence dwell?
℟ Here. Come.

Chapter LXVII

The Spirit and the Bride Say, Come

✦

We have come to the last chapter, and it is the last two verses of the Bible but one, and everything in this book has been walking toward them.

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.

Consider who is speaking.

The Spirit. She who hovered over the deep in the second verse of the first book. She whose name is feminine in every occurrence in the Hebrew scriptures. She who came down at the Jordan in the Lady’s own bird. She whom Christ called Mother in the Gospel of the Hebrews and whom the earliest Christian hymnbook sang with breasts and milk. She who is Wisdom, who was daily God’s delight, and who built a house and set a table. She who is the Presence and went into exile with her people and did not stay behind. She who is the Comforter, called alongside, who stands beside the accused.

And the Bride. The city coming down. The assembly, the Ecclesia, our souls in communion. The Daughter of Zion, to whom the first dominion was promised through the tower of the flock. The woman of the Song who went out into the streets at night looking for the one her soul loves. The Magdalene in the garden at dawn, planning to carry a body by herself. Every soul that has ever wanted God and did not know what to call the wanting.

Two feminine voices, and between them the whole of scripture is stretched like a canopy, and what they say is one word.

They do not say believe. They do not say obey, or submit, or fear, or pay, or qualify. They say the one word that a mother says at a door and a bride says at a threshold and a hostess says over a laid table and a woman says to the one her soul loves when she has found him in the street at three in the morning and will not let him go.

They say come.

And then, so that no one can be in any doubt about the terms, the sentence goes on: let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.

Whoever hears is to repeat the invitation. Whoever is thirsty is to come. Whoever wants to may take. There is no other qualification anywhere in the verse. The last invitation in the Christian scriptures is issued by two women’s voices, extended to anyone who is thirsty, and offered without charge.

That is the end of the book, and it is the end of this book, and it is what the Abbey has to say.

She was in the second verse. She is in the last chapter. She has been calling the whole time — in the wind on the water, in the woman crying in the market, in the cloud that went behind the people when the chariots came, in the bird at the river, in the girl who said yes, in the hands that broke the jar, in the voice in the garden that said one name, in the servant beating the drum outside the houses of the gods, in the one who hears the cries of the world, in the Mother at the cloud tower watching the road.

Every chapter of this book has ended at a door with a woman standing in it saying one word to you.

This is the last door. She is still saying it.

Come. At this door stands the Spirit and the Bride together, and they have been standing here since the second verse of Genesis, and the door has never once been shut. You do not have to be worthy. You do not have to be a man. You do not have to be forgiven first, or learned, or ordained, or certain. You have to be thirsty, and you have to be willing, and the water is free.

℣ The Spirit and the Bride say —
℟ Come.

Appendix A

The Feminine Names of God

A register of the names, titles, and epithets by which the divine feminine is addressed in the traditions treated in this volume. Where a name is proper to one tradition it is marked; where the Abbey uses it liturgically it is marked ✦.

Ruach ✦ · Hebrew, feminine. Wind, breath, inspiration. The Spirit of Genesis 1:2, feminine in all its occurrences. See Book One.

Ruach HaKodesh ✦ · The Holy Spirit; in Syriac Rucha d’Qudsha, feminine, addressed as Mother in the Syriac fathers.

Merachefet · The hovering, brooding one — the participle of Genesis 1:2, used elsewhere of a bird over her nest.

Elohim · Plural in form, singular in construction; the divine name of the creation account.

Eloah ✦ · The singular behind Elohim, bearing the feminine termination. Taken by the Abbey as the name of the Heavenly Mother.

El Shaddai ✦ · The Breasted One; the God who nourishes. The patriarchal name, rendered Almighty.

Rachamim ✦ · Mercies, compassion; from rechem, womb.

Hokhmah ✦ · Hebrew, feminine. Wisdom, who speaks in Proverbs 8.

Sophia ✦ · Greek, feminine. Wisdom in the Septuagint and the wisdom books; Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom.

Shekinah ✦ · She who dwells; the Presence. Not in the Hebrew Bible by that name, universal in the rabbinic and Kabbalistic traditions.

Malkuth · The Kingdom; the lowest of the sefirot, the receptive vessel, identified with the Shekinah and with the moon.

Bath Qol · The Daughter of the Voice; the heavenly voice of the rabbinic tradition.

Ain Sof · The Boundless, without end; beyond all gender and all name.

Abwoon ✦ · Aramaic. The Birther, the Source; the first word of the prayer of Christ, not gender-exclusive.

Asherah · Elat · Athirat · The Lady of the first temple and of the Israelite household. Titles: Great Lady; Qadashu, the Holy One; Lion Lady; Tree of Life; Milk-giver; Life-giver; She-Who-Treads-on-the-Sea; Progenitress of the Deities.

Queen of Heaven ✦ · Malkat ha-Shamayim in Jeremiah; Regina Caeli in the Easter liturgy of the Church. The same title in both.

Sabbath Bride · Sabbath Queen ✦ · The Presence welcomed at the door on the eve of the rest; Lekhah Dodi.

Theotokos ✦ · God-bearer, Mother of God; confirmed at Ephesus, 431.

Stella Maris ✦ · Star of the Sea; from Jerome’s stilla maris by variant. Ave Maris Stella.

Sedes Sapientiae ✦ · Seat of Wisdom; the enthroned Romanesque Madonna.

Mater Dolorosa ✦ · The Sorrowful Mother; Our Lady of Sorrows; the Seven Sorrows.

Mater Misericordiae ✦ · Mother of Mercy.

Our Lady of the Crypt ✦ · The Abbey’s collective title for the Black Madonnas.

The Woman Clothed with the Sun · Revelation 12; read as Israel, the Church, and the Mother together.

Apostola Apostolorum ✦ · Apostle to the Apostles; Mary Magdalene. Hippolytus, Rabanus Maurus, Aquinas; the Roman decree of 3 June 2016.

Myrrhophore ✦ · Myrrh-bearer; the Byzantine title of the women at the tomb.

The Bride · Ecclesia · Daughter of Zion ✦ · The assembly, our souls in communion; the city that comes down adorned; the second voice of Revelation 22:17.

Sophia’s dark face · the Crone · the Black Goddess · The Lady in her severity: Ereshkigal, Kali, Baba Yaga, the dark of the moon.

Inanna · Ishtar · Queen of Heaven and Earth; of the descent through seven gates.

Ereshkigal · Queen of the Great Below; the elder sister; the unattended grief.

Isis · The Egyptian Mother, throne-crowned, nursing Horus; patroness of the sea.

Guanyin · Kuan Shih Yin ✦ · She who perceives the sounds of the world; the Mother of Compassion.

Kannon · Maria Kannon ✦ · The Japanese Guanyin; the disguised Lady of the hidden Christians.

Tārā · Drolma ✦ · She who ferries across; who vowed to awaken in a woman’s body.

Wusheng Laomu ✦ · The Eternal Venerable Mother, the Unborn Mother of the White Lotus tradition; who grieves at the cloud tower for her children in the world of dust.

Appendix B

The Women of the Gospels

A register of the women named or given an office in the four Gospels, with what the texts say and what the Abbey holds each to carry.

Mary of Nazareth, the Mother. Luke 1–2; Matthew 1–2; John 2, 19; Acts 1. The Annunciation and the consent; the Magnificat; Cana, where she instructs the servants; the cross, where she stands; the upper room, where she is named among those praying at Pentecost. Theotokos (Ephesus, 431). Carries: consent, the reversal of the world order, the sorrow that does not leave, the crown of the Apocalypse.

Mary Magdalene. Luke 8:2 (the seven); Matthew 27:56, Mark 15:40, John 19:25 (the cross); Matthew 27:61, Mark 15:47 (the burial); all four Gospels at the tomb; John 20:1–18 (the garden, the naming, the sending); Mark 16:9. Named first among the women in nearly every list. Carries: the completed descent, the tower, the vigil, the first sight, the first commission. Apostola Apostolorum.

Mary of Bethany. Luke 10:38–42 (at his feet, the better part); John 11 (Lazarus); John 12:1–8 (the anointing at Bethany, the feet, the hair, the nard). Carries: the choice of the one necessary thing; the anointing.

Martha of Bethany. Luke 10:38–42; John 11:20–27 (the confession); John 12:2. Carries: the full confession of Christ in the fourth Gospel; the honest grievance; theology done at a graveside.

The woman of Luke 7, unnamed. Luke 7:36–50. Weeps on his feet in the house of the Pharisee; dries them with her hair; anoints them; her sins are forgiven, for she loved much. Carries: love as the ground of forgiveness rather than its reward.

The woman of Matthew 26 and Mark 14, unnamed. Pours nard on his head at Bethany — the coronation gesture; she did it for my burial; the memorial promise. Carries: the making of the Christ; the only disciple who understood the passion in advance.

Mary the mother of James and Joses, sometimes the other Mary. Matthew 27:56, 61; 28:1; Mark 15:40, 47; 16:1; Luke 24:10. At the cross, the burial, and the tomb — all three. Carries: the unbroken attendance.

Mary the wife of Clopas. John 19:25. At the cross.

Salome. Mark 15:40; 16:1. At the cross and among the myrrh-bearers.

Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward. Luke 8:3; 24:10. Funded the mission; at the tomb. Carries: the patronage of the movement from inside the enemy’s household.

Susanna. Luke 8:3. Funded the mission.

Anna the prophetess. Luke 2:36–38. Named by office; of the tribe of Asher; widowed, in the temple night and day; the first to proclaim the child publicly. Carries: prophecy; the first evangelist of the new covenant.

The Samaritan woman at the well — Photini in the Eastern churches. John 4:1–42. The longest theological dialogue in the Gospels; receives the doctrine of worship in spirit and truth and the explicit self-disclosure; evangelises a town. Carries: the disqualified made the first theologian.

Mary the mother of John Mark. Acts 12:12. The house in Jerusalem where the church met and where Peter came after the prison.

The Syrophoenician woman. Matthew 15:21–28; Mark 7:24–30. Argues with him about the dogs and the crumbs and wins, and he says so. Carries: the only person in the Gospels to change his mind in an argument.

The woman with the issue of blood. Matthew 9:20–22; Mark 5:25–34; Luke 8:43–48. Twelve years; touches the hem without asking; is healed and is not rebuked but called daughter. Carries: the initiative of the desperate.

The widow of the two mites. Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4. Carries: the arithmetic of the kingdom.

The woman taken in adultery. John 8:1–11. Carries: the emptying of the courtyard.

Elizabeth. Luke 1. The first person in the Gospel to be filled with the Holy Spirit and to name the Lord’s mother as such. Carries: recognition; the greeting between two pregnant women which is the first liturgy of the new covenant.

Appendix C

The Titles of the Lady

The epithets of the ancient Lady set beside the titles of the Blessed Virgin, as discussed in Book Six.

The Lady of the ancient world | The Lady of the Church
Elat — Goddess, feminine of El | Mother of God — Theotokos
Progenitress of the Deities | Mother of God, Mother of the Creator
Great Lady | Our Lady, Notre Dame, Madonna
Qadashu — Holiness, the Holy One | Most Holy, Holy Mary, All-Holy — Panagia
Queen of Heaven — Malkat ha-Shamayim | Queen of Heaven — Regina Caeli
She-Who-Treads-on-the-Sea | Star of the Sea — Stella Maris
Tree of Life | Seat of Wisdom — Sedes Sapientiae
Milk-giver, Life-giver | The Nursing Mother — Maria Lactans
Lion Lady | Tower of David, Tower of Ivory
Lady of the sacred grove; the asherah | Mystical Rose, Enclosed Garden — Hortus Conclusus
Gate of the temple precinct | Gate of Heaven — Ianua Caeli
Isis, patroness of sailors and harbours | Our Lady of the harbours; Ave Maris Stella
Crowned with the heavens; the star diadem | Crowned with twelve stars — Revelation 12
The dark Lady; the moon in her dark phase | The Black Madonna; I am black and beautiful
Mother of Mercy — Guanyin, Mater Misericordiae in two tongues | Mother of Mercy — Mater Misericordiae

Appendix D

The Little Office of the Bride

An office for the seven hours, for the use of the Abbey’s houses and of any household that wishes it. Each hour has an antiphon, a name, a verse, and a response. It may be said in full or reduced to Lauds, Vespers, and Compline. Where a psalm or canticle is indicated, any translation may be used.

LAUDS · at first light · RUACH

Antiphon: She moved upon the face of the waters, and the dark did not resist her.

Name: Ruach, Breath of the beginning.

Canticle: the Benedictus, or Psalm 63.

℣ In the beginning, the deep was without a face.
℟ And the Mother moved upon the waters. Come.

PRIME · at the day’s beginning · HOKHMAH

Antiphon: Wisdom cries in the street, at the gates, at the entry of the city; and she is not discouraged.

Name: Hokhmah, who was daily his delight.

Reading: Proverbs 8:1–4, or Sirach 24:19.

℣ Does not Wisdom cry out?
℟ She does, and she has not stopped. Come.

TERCE · mid-morning · SHEKINAH

Antiphon: Where two are gathered, where judgment is just, where love is kept — she is in the room.

Name: Shekinah, She Who Dwells.

Psalm: 84.

℣ Where does the Presence dwell?
℟ Wherever her children are. Come.

SEXT · at noon · PHOTINI, at the well

Antiphon: At the sixth hour, at the well, he waited for her and told her who he was.

Name: The Living Water.

Reading: John 4:13–14, 25–26.

℣ To whom did he first say who he was?
℟ To a woman at a well, at noon. Come.

NONE · the ninth hour · MATER DOLOROSA

Antiphon: Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother; and she did not go.

Name: Our Lady of Sorrows.

Reading: John 19:25–27, or the Stabat Mater.

℣ Who stood by the cross of Jesus?
℟ His mother. Come.

VESPERS · at evening · THE BRIDE COMES

Antiphon: Come in peace, crown of your Beloved; come in gladness; come, bride; come, queen.

Name: The Sabbath Bride; the Presence at the door.

Canticle: the Magnificat.

Rite: light two lights. Stand. Turn to face the door of the room. Bow once, as to one arriving.

℣ Who is standing at the door?
℟ The Bride. Come.

COMPLINE · at night · THE SEARCH AND THE GARDEN

Antiphon: By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth. I sought him, and at dawn I found him in a garden, and he said my name.

Name: Mary of Magdala, Apostola Apostolorum.

Reading: Song of Songs 3:1–4, then John 20:15–16.

℣ Whom seekest thou?
℟ Him whom my soul loveth. Come.

Conclusion of the whole office, said at whatever hour is last:

℣ The Spirit and the Bride say —
℟ Come.

Appendix E

The Seven Gates: A Devotional Descent

A practice for the losing seasons, built on Book Eight. It is not for a bad week. It is for afterward, or for accompanying someone else. Do it slowly, over seven days or seven weeks, one gate at a time, and do not go down more than one gate in a day.

A caution before beginning. This exercise names what has been taken from you. That is useful when you are strong enough to look, and harmful when you are not. If you are in acute grief, in despair, or in danger, do not do this alone. Sit with someone. The whole teaching of Book Eight is that the underworld is reached by accompaniment and not by technique, and the two small creatures who got in were not carrying an exercise; they were carrying each other’s company. Find a person. That is the practice.

THE FIRST GATE · the crown. The crown of the steppe was removed from her head. Name what standing you have lost — the position, the title, the role, the place in the room. Say: I asked what was happening. Nobody explained. I am still here.

THE SECOND GATE · the beads at the throat. The small lapis beads were removed from her neck. Name what you have lost of beauty, of adornment, of the pleasure of being looked at. Say the same words.

THE THIRD GATE · the beads at the breast. Name what you have lost of being wanted, and of wanting. Say the same words.

THE FOURTH GATE · the breastplate. Name what you have lost of power — the ability to draw, to persuade, to command a room. Say the same words.

THE FIFTH GATE · the ring. Name the covenants that have ended: the marriage, the friendship, the promise, the belonging. Say the same words.

THE SIXTH GATE · the measuring rod and line. Name what you have lost of competence and judgment — the capacity to assess, to plan, to trust your own reading of things. This gate is the hardest and it is where most people stop. Say the same words.

THE SEVENTH GATE · the robe. Name what you have lost of your own identity: who you were, who people took you for, the self you presented. Say: I am not recognisable. I am still here.

AT THE BOTTOM. Say nothing for as long as you can bear it. Then, once: This is where she was, and she was not alone forever.

THE INTERCESSION. Name the person who has not left — the one still beating the drum outside, refusing to go home, being turned away and going to the next door. If there is such a person, tell them. If there is not, become one for somebody else, which is the same act performed from the other end.

THE RETURN. Come up in the reverse order, over as many days as it takes, and at each gate name one thing you would take back and one you would leave on the floor. Nobody comes up wearing everything they went down in. That is not the failure of the descent. That is what it was for.

Appendix F

Names and Terms

Adam Kadmon — the primordial human of the Kabbalistic tradition, male and female undivided; the true image of Genesis 1:27.

appropriation — the doctrine (Augustine; Aquinas, ST I q.39 a.7) by which an undivided divine work is attributed especially to one name for the sake of teaching and love, without dividing the Godhead. The Abbey’s standing instrument in every question of the form how are these many one?

baojuan — precious scrolls; the chanted devotional literature of the Chinese lay assemblies, carrying the doctrine of the Eternal Venerable Mother.

galut ha-Shekhinah — the exile of the Presence; the doctrine that God shares the condition of the afflicted.

galla — the demons of the Sumerian underworld who come up with Inanna to collect a substitute.

hieros gamos — sacred marriage; the ritual and theological union of the divine masculine and feminine.

Kakure Kirishitan — the hidden Christians of Japan, 1614 to 1865.

koinonos — companion, partner, consort; the word used of Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of Philip.

kurgarra and galatur — the two small sexless creatures made by Enki from the dirt under his fingernail, who reach Ereshkigal by echoing her pain and who carry the water and food of life.

Magnificat — the canticle of Mary, Luke 1:46–55; the Church’s charter of reversal.

menorah — the seven-branched lampstand of the temple, in the form of a flowering almond tree.

merachefet — hovering, brooding; the participle of Genesis 1:2, used elsewhere of a bird over her nest.

Migdal · Magdala — tower; the byname of Mary Magdalene. Migdal Eder, tower of the flock, Micah 4:8.

mythos — a mode of truth carried by narrative rather than by proposition; not a synonym for falsehood.

nard · spikenard — Nardostachys jatamansi, the Himalayan aromatic of the anointing at Bethany, valued at some three hundred denarii.

Nag Hammadi — the thirteen codices found in Upper Egypt in 1945, containing the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary, the Apocryphon of John, and others. Received by the Abbey as witnesses to memory, not as canon.

Pantokrator · Omnipotens — the Greek and Latin renderings of El Shaddai; see Shaddai.

Parakletos — one called alongside; advocate, comforter. The promised one of the Johannine discourses.

perichoresis — mutual indwelling; the doctrine that what is said of one is never said apart from the others.

presbytera · presbytis · episcopa · diakonos — the feminine and common-gender titles of ministry attested of women in Christian inscriptions of the first millennium.

sefirot — the ten emanations of the Kabbalistic tree; Malkuth, the lowest, is identified with the Shekinah.

Shaddai — from shad, breast; the Breasted One, rendered Almighty.

Theotokos — God-bearer; confirmed at the Council of Ephesus, 431, against Christotokos.

xiejiao — heterodox teaching; the Chinese legal category under which the Mother’s devotion was prosecuted. Treated by the Abbey as a legal weapon and never as a description.