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The Magdalen and Gnostic Gospels

Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, Artemisia Gentileschi. 1617.

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Molly Hankins April 24, 2025

The Gnostic Gospels, discovered in Egypt in 1945, includes 52 texts allegedly omitted from the Bible that were authored in the first or second century A.D. Information in these texts suggests that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen and had a family with her, which corroborates the information channeled by Tom Kenyon and his wife Judi Sion in The Magdalen Manuscript. In this book,Mary Magdalen herself tells the story of her life with Jesus, then known as Yeshua, his true purpose for incarnating on Earth and her role as both his divine counterpart and a practicing priestess of the Temple of Isis.

Contrary to what’s included in the Bible, the Gnostic Gospels tell us that Magdalen was not a prostitute - she was an Initiate and priestess of the Temple of Isis, as was Yeshua’s mother Mary. Initiates were practitioners of tantric alchemy trained to use the subtle energies of sexual energy to activate the human light body. This work, described in detail in a previous article, is a means of achieving magical,healing abilities and, ultimately, immortality. According a portion of the Gospel of Thomas, a roughly 1500 year old manuscript housed in the British Library, not only was Magdalen married to Yeshua and the mother of his child, they were both practitioners of alchemical tantric magic and she was the founder of the Judeo-Christian church. 

Study of these gospels has proven controversial and difficult to verify historically - much of it is written in code and parts of the manuscripts have clearly been censored. However, channeled material supported by historical and archaeological record has proved to be a unique way of tracing human history. The most famous example is Dorothy Eady, a mid-20th century British historian who worked for the Egyptian Department of Antiquities. Following a head injury as a young girl, she recalled a past life as a fellow Isis Initiate in a  relationship with Pharaoh Seti at the Temple of Abydos. As an adult working in Abydos, she was able to accurately remember details from her past life and provide information to the Department of Antiquities to determine where onsite archaeological digs should take place.

In the same way Eady’s insights were supported by excavation and written historical record, much of what is shared in The Magdalen Manuscript is found  in parts of the Gnostic Gospels. After the crucifixion, Yeshua’s followers split into several groups and authored their own records of their time with him, which became known as the gospels. At that time Christianity was being heavily persecuted by the Roman empire  but under Emperor Constantine in the 4th century A.D. a specific form of Christianity was adopted by Rome, the version taught by the apostle Paul. All other gospels were systematically destroyed or hidden, losing nearly all records of Yeshua’s life as a young man and his relationship with Magdalen.

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“The material world is an illusion, a game for our souls to explore and evolve in, and achieving ecstatic states of bliss is how we transcend it.”

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It was during the early years of their relationship, according to Magdalen, that Yeshua also became an Initiate and was able to strengthen his Ka, or light body. In another book of channeled material, The Law of One from the Egyptian sun god Ra, much reference is made to souls getting lost in the third density of Earth. This is why more advanced, inter-dimensional beings are working to help the human collective achieve karmic escape velocity. Christ’s crucifixion can be interpreted as serving the same purpose, and some Biblical scholars interpret Yeshua and Ra to be different expressions of the same being.

The Magdalen Manuscript states that the purpose of Yeshua’s resurrection was to, “cut a passage through death itself,” allowing others understand the true nature of life and death and thereby “follow his trail of light” so as not to get lost in third density. His teachings were the means of escaping the wheel of karma, and his resurrection was the ultimate miracle proving that any of us could follow these teachings and achieve the same state of being. Indeed, every miracle he performed was intended to be a demonstration that his level of Christ consciousness is available to all of us, but this idea was omitted by the Roman-adopted version of Christianity. Instead of the story of Yeshua’s life and death serving as an example for all mankind, the narrative was revised to deify him and suggest that perfection and power were impossible to achieve.

Magdalen, through Kenyon’s channeling, clarified that those who witnessed Yeshua’s resurrection were seeing his light-body, which he had strengthened enough through personal and tantric spiritual practice to appear even though his physical body had died. After his resurrection, she and Yeshua’s mother and their young child were not safe under Roman rule, so they fled to France. They eventually made their way to what is now England to seek the protection of The Druids, who had connections to the Isis priesthood. The early Judeo-Christian church, founded by Magdalen, was a hybrid of Judaism, Paganism and Christianity. There is some surviving evidence, including a mosaic floor at a fifth century synagogue called Beit Alpha near Galilee in Israel, where Yeshua was from and where he taught. 

The mosaic depicts the zodiac with Pagan symbols, and Yeshua appearing in the center as the sun god Helios, the Greek equivalent to the Egyptian god Ra. There are also several traditional Jewish symbols depicted, including a temple and shofar which  Magdalen Manuscript’s claim that early Judeo-Christianity was established first in the Jewish region of Galilee and later amongst the Pagan-practicing Druids. This early expression of Christianity united multiple religious systems and revered the holy physical union of Magdalen and Yeshua. The separation from Jewish and Pagan influence and glorification of celibacy came with the later, distorted version adopted under Constantine. 

Following the account of her life and relationship with Yeshua, the second half of The Magdalen Manuscript provides a detailed analysis of world religions, alchemy practices and the commonalities between them and the original Judeo-Christian tenets. Many of these themes, largely erased from post-Constantine Christianity, are closer to a Vedic, Buddhist or Kabbalist worldview. The core message is that the material world is an illusion, a game for our souls to explore and evolve in, and achieving ecstatic states of bliss is how we transcend it. We all have the power to recognize life as a dream, awaken from it, and thereby enjoy it more.

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

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M. Night Shyamalan

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Parting (Museum of Suspense II)

Giovanni Lanfranco, Mary Magdalene Raised by Angels, c. 1616, oil on canvas, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples.

Ale Nodarse April 22, 2025

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A woman is borne aloft. She is called Mary Magdalen, and she floats. She rises naked, appearing, for a moment, like an air bubble brought to the surface of a stream. She does not move, but the artist clarifies her upward trajectory. One of three angels pulls at the cloth Mary sits upon  to raise her up, up and away. 

This seventeenth-century Magdalen (c. 1616) by the Italian painter Giovanni Lanfranco might count as one portrait of Mary Magdalen among many within the Museum of Suspense. Lanfranco himself was an eclectic observer of earlier painting. Merging disparate styles, his composition here draws readily upon medieval precedents. The image of the floating figure had stemmed from a thirteenth-century collection of saint’s lives, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), which included details of Mary Magdalene’s life after the death of her beloved Christ. This Mary chose to live in solitude and, as the Legend describes, forsake all food and drink; and yet, “every day she was lifted up in the air of angels” and given incorporeal sustenance. This continued until her death when her soul, as opposed to her body, parted indefinitely. In the 1616 canvas, Lanfranco leaves us to wonder if Mary ascends for a first or final time. His picture prompts us, in other words, to ask when. 

The picture is, of course, a material thing. Made of wood, canvas, and oil, it remains on the side of the ground. Likewise, the artist’s vision is a mortal one. Yet, just as  suspension challenges the division between ground and sky, so too does Mary’s body — liable, as it now appears, to drift. The artist’s vision entails a similar movement. To paint the miraculous, one wonders, did Lanfranco think of more “quotidian” blues. Did he once open his eyes under water? Did he look at the sun through the lens of the sea? Did he catch the billow of cloth in a wave? 

On the lower right of Lanfranco’s canvas, two small figures look up.

Our own mortal vision is set within the work. We are consigned to a lower realm. We are like them: those figures who, to the right of the dark outcropping, peer up. As one figure points and as the other raises a hand to forehead (as if to guard his vision from excessive light), we may recall when we have looked similarly to the sky above. The distance of cosmic events unfolding there, above — whether eclipse or ascension — may remind us of our proximity here, below. For a moment, the painting’s suspense might remind us of our shared conditions: of gravity, of departures, and of the periodic longing to overcome them both. 

In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene carries news of Christ’s ascension. “Do not cling to me,” Christ tells her, “for I have not yet ascended […].” Christ continues with an instruction to go to the apostles, “to go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”¹ As the chosen messenger, Mary becomes another apostle. The painting of her departure may be said to recollect this moment, as her temporary ascension mirrors that of the man she once knew and sought to grasp. Apart from one’s own beliefs, the image finds poignancy in this lingering of leavings. Mary’s stance remains open. Her eyes turn skyward, and her arms outstretch — less certainty and more question. That question may be a familiar one: Who do we look up to when we look up and away?

I doubt the poet Mary Oliver sought to paraphrase Christ’s words within John, but a shared concern resides within her own instruction. “To live in this world,” she writes: 

you must be able 
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, 
to let it go.²

In the moment of the Magdalene’s parting, there is something of all three. The time that comes — the time to “let it go” — has not yet arrived. It remains instead the painting’s question: a when which is also our own.

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¹John 20:17, English Standard Version. 
²Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods,” American Primitive (Back Bay Books, 1983)

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Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.

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Larry Levan Playlist

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Larry Levan was an influential American DJ who defined what modern dance clubs are today. He is most widely renowned for his long-time residency at Paradise Garage, also known as “Gay-Rage”, a former nightclub at 84 King Street in Manhattan, NY.

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Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

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The Eight of Swords (Tarot Triptych)

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Name:  Interference, the Eight of Swords
Number: 8
Astrology: Jupiter in Gemini
Qabalah: Hod of Yod

Chris Gabriel April 19, 2025

Interference is the perfect name for this card. If the Ace of Swords is pure Signal, the Eight is pure Noise. The message is lost, the image is blurred, the static drowns out the song.

In Rider, we see a woman in bondage. She is blindfolded and white ropes tie up her red dress. She is standing in mud and surrounded by eight swords. A castle sits on a mountain in the distance.

In Thoth, there are two sabers atop a medley of 6 swords. The background is the deep purple of Jupiter, and the erupting fragmented spikes are the orange of Gemini. This is Jupiter in its detriment.

In Marseille,  a small flower sits at the center of eight crosshatched swords. For Jodorwosky, this was the achievement of an empty and receptive mind: overstimulation leading to trance. To Eliphas Levi, this is the Intelligence of the Prince.

The best path to grasping the nature of Interference is to take its name literally. Let us consider the two sabers in Thoth as AM and FM. These are pure and directed signals but when we listen to radio, we are often assaulted with static, which are the six interfering swords. The same applies to  VHF and UHF, AC and DC, etc. Two streams of energy disrupted by background interference.

This is the nature of the fallen Jupiter in Gemini: when domiciled in Sagittarius, Jupiter launches arrows of belief into the distant unknown. When in Gemini it gets lost in immediate multiplicity,missing the tree for the forest. The grand spiritual faculty no longer focuses on the Heavens, but on what surrounds the body.

Rider shows us a grim image of confusion, a very occult view of the situation. Without divine clarity we are blinded, bonded, and beset on all sides. This is the same trouble Hamlet is afflicted by. The Prince who has guided us through the suit of Swords has shown time and time again to lose his contact with the signal, to the point where the Ghost of his father has to return and remind him of his duty after he gets thrown off track.

We can look at this dynamic more positively with another technology, stereo sound. The Eight of Swords is like a record needle, moved wildly by left and right waves of the vinyl but still producing a singular, coherent, Sagittarian sound.

In our lives we experience this very often. When you go into a room but forget what you were going to do, this is background interference overtaking clarity. When you intend to use your phone for a given purpose, but notifications and bright visuals distract you, this is interference. It can happen at greater and greater scales to the point where you have wasted your whole life on distractions, and like the figure in Rider, you are left tied up, blinded, and alone.

When pulling this card, clear your mind, beware of external distractions, and maintain your direction.

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Chris Gabriel is a twenty four year old wizard and poet who runs the YouTube channel MemeAnalysis.

CHANNEL, SOCIAL, READINGS

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Palmer Luckey

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How Should One Read a Book? (Pt. 1)

Guiseppe Antonio Petrini, c.1735.

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First given as a Speech at Hayes Court Common school in Kent at the start of 1926, and then adapted and published in the Yale Review the same year, Woolf’s impassioned ode to reading remains a seminal text. She reminds us that reading is not a passive activity, and that if each book only comes alive through active choices by its reader, it is worth considering how we as a consumer can elevate and enliven the literature we choose to read. The writer and reader are connected, and it is our duty to approach each new book as a different beast, to use our qualities of imagination, insight, and judgement, not rest on laurels of past works but follow our instincts to find the heart, truth, and beauty of each text anew.

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Virginia Woolf, April 15, 2025

At this late hour of the world’s history, books are to be found in almost every room of the house—in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. But in some houses they have become such a company that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own—a reading room, a library, a study. Let us imagine that we are now in such a room; that it is a sunny room, with windows opening on a garden, so that we can hear the trees rustling, the gardener talking, the donkey braying, the old women gossiping at the pump—and all the ordinary processes of life pursuing the casual irregular way which they have pursued these many hundreds of years. As casually, as persistently, books have been coming together on the shelves. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, dictionaries, maps, directories; black letter books and brand new books; books in French and Greek and Latin; of all shapes and sizes and values, bought for purposes of research, bought to amuse a railway journey, bought by miscellaneous beings, of one temperament and another, serious and frivolous, men of action and men of letters. 

Now, one may well ask oneself, strolling into such a room as this, how am I to read these books? What is the right way to set about it? They are so many and so various. My appetite is so fitful and so capricious. What am I to do to get the utmost possible pleasure out of them? And is it pleasure, or profit, or what is it that I should seek? I will lay before you some of the thoughts that have come to me on such an occasion as this. But you will notice the note of interrogation at the end of my title. One may think about reading as much as one chooses, but no one is going to lay down laws about it. Here in this room, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom. Here simple and learned, man and woman are alike. For though reading seems so simple—a mere matter of knowing the alphabet—it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it. Paris is the capital of France; King John signed the Magna Charta; those are facts; those can be taught; but how are we to teach people so to read “Paradise Lost” as to see that it is a great poem, or “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” so as to see that it is a good novel? How are we to learn the art of reading for ourselves? Without attempting to lay down laws upon a subject that has not been legalized, I will make a few suggestions, which may serve to show you how not to read, or to stimulate you to think out better methods of your own. 

And directly we begin to ask how should one read a book we are faced by the fact that books differ; there are poems, novels, biographies on the book shelf there; each differs from the other as a tiger differs from a tortoise, a tortoise from an elephant. Our attitude must always be changing, it is clear. From different books we must ask different qualities. Simple as this sounds, people are always behaving as if all books were of the same species—as if there were only tortoises or nothing but tigers. It makes them furious to find a novelist bringing Queen Victoria to the throne six months before her time; they will praise a poet enthusiastically for teaching them that a violet has four petals and a daisy almost invariably ten. You will save a great deal of time and temper better kept for worthier objects if you will try to make out before you begin to read what qualities you expect of a novelist, what of a poet, what of a biographer. The tortoise is bald and shiny; the tiger has a thick coat of yellow fur. So books too differ: one has its fur, the other has its baldness.

Yes; but for all that the problem is not so simple in a library as at the Zoölogical Gardens.Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves. It is difficult to know how to approach them, to which species each belongs. But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.

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“We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.”

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To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them. For this certainly is true—one cannot write the most ordinary little story, attempt to describe the simplest event—meeting a beggar, shall we say, in the street, without coming up against difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face. In order that we may realize, however briefly and crudely, the main divisions into which novelists group themselves, let us imagine how differently Defoe, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy would describe the same incident—this meeting a beggar in the street. Defoe is a master of narrative. His prime effort will be to reduce the beggar’s story to perfect order and simplicity. This happened first, that next, the other thing third. He will put in nothing, however attractive, that will tire the reader unnecessarily, or divert his attention from what he wishes him to know. He will also make us believe, since he is a master, not of romance or of comedy, but of narrative, that everything that happened is true. He will be extremely precise therefore. This happened, as he tells us on the first pages of” Robinson Crusoe,” on the first of September. More subtly and artfully, he will hypnotize us into a state of belief by dropping out casually some little unnecessary fact—for instance, “my father called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by the gout.” His father’s gout is not necessary to the story, but it is necessary tothe truth of the story, for it is thus that anybody who is speaking the truth adds some small irrelevant detail without thinking. Further, he will choose a type of sentence which is flowing but not too full, exact but not epigrammatic. His aim will be to present the thing itself without distortion from his own angle of vision. He will meet the subject face to face, four-square, without turning aside for a moment to point out that this was tragic, or that beautiful; and his aim is perfectly achieved.

But let us not for a moment confuse it with Jane Austen’s aim. Had she met a beggar woman, no doubt she would have been interested in the beggar’s story. But she would have seen at once that for her purposes the whole incident must be transformed. Streets and the open air and adventures mean nothing to her, artistically. It is character that interests her. She would at once make the beggar into a comfortable elderly man of the upper middle classes, seated by his fireside at his ease. Then, instead of plunging into the story vigorously and veraciously, she will write a few paragraphs of accurate and artfully seasoned introduction, summing up the circumstances and sketching the character of the gentleman she wishes us to know. “Matrimony as the origin of change was always disagreeable” to Mr. Woodhouse, she says. Almost immediately, she thinks it well to let us see that her words are corroborated by Mr. Woodhouse himself. We hear him talking. “Poor Miss Taylor!—I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought of her.” And when Mr. Woodhouse has talked enough to reveal himself from the inside, she then thinks it time to let us see him through his daughter’s eyes. “You got Hannah that good place. Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her.” Thus she shows us Emma flattering him and humoring him. Finally then, we have Mr. Woodhouse’s character seen from three different points of view at once; as he sees himself; as his daughter sees him; and as he is seen by the marvellous eye of that invisible lady Jane Austen herself. All three meet in one, and thus we can pass round her characters free, apparently, from any guidance but our own.

Now let Thomas Hardy choose the same theme—a beggar met in the street—and at once two great changes will be visible. The street will be transformed into a vast and sombre heath; the man or woman will take on some of the size and indistinctness of a statue. Further, the relations of this human being will not be towards other people, but towards the heath, towards man as law-giver, towards those powers which are in control of man’s destiny. Once more our perspective will be completely changed. All the qualities which were admirable in “Robinson Crusoe,” admirable in “Emma,” will be neglected or absent. The direct literal statement of Defoe is gone. There is none of the clear, exact brilliance of Jane Austen. Indeed, if we come to Hardy from one of these great writers we shall exclaim at first that he is“melodramatic” or “unreal” compared with them. But we should bethink us that there are at least two sides to the human soul; the light side and the dark side. In company, the light side of the mind is exposed; in solitude, the dark. Both are equally real, equally important. But a novelist will always tend to expose one rather than the other; and Hardy, who is a novelist of the dark side, will contrive that no clear, steady light falls upon his people’s faces, that they are not closely observed in drawing rooms, that they come in contact with moors, sheep, the sky and the stars, and in their solitude are directly at the mercy of the gods. If Jane Austen’s characters are real in the drawing room, they would not exist at all upon the top of Stonehenge. Feeble and clumsy in drawing rooms, Hardy’s people are large-limbed and vigorous out of doors. To achieve his purpose Hardy is neither literal and four-square like Defoe, nor deft and pointed like Jane Austen. He is cumbrous, involved, metaphorical.Where Jane Austen describes manners, he describes nature. Where she is matter of fact, he is romantic and poetical. As both are great artists, each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and will not be found confusing us (as so many lesser writers do) by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book.

Yet it is very difficult not to wish them less scrupulous. Frequent are the complaints that Jane Austen is too prosaic, Thomas Hardy too melodramatic. And we have to remind ourselves that it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith, from Richardson to Kipling, is to be wrenched and distorted, thrown this way and then that. Besides, everyone is born with a natural bias of his own in one direction rather than in another. He instinctively accepts Hardy’s vision rather than Jane Austen’s, and, reading with the current and not against it, is carried on easily and swiftly by the impetus of his own bent to the heart of his author’s genius. But then Jane Austen is repulsive to him. He can scarcely stagger through the desert of her novels.

Sometimes this natural antagonism is too great to be overcome, but trial is always worth making. For these difficult and inaccessible books, with all their preliminary harshness, often yield the richest fruits in the end, and so curiously is the brain compounded that while tracts of literature repel at one season, they are appetizing and essential at another.

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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th century modernist authors. An important part of the contemporary literary scene, Woolf’s relevance has only grown in the near century since her passing, and her pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women's writing, and the politics of power have become touchstones for contemporary thought.

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