Welcome to The Magdalene Thread.
The Magdalene Thread began with a question: what if the story we inherited about Mary Magdalene was only a fragment of the woman she had been?
Inquiry led to curiosity, and curiosity to adventure. We followed Mary through scripture and history, art and architecture, forgotten texts and sacred symbols. What we discovered was that the full possibility of who she may have been has never been spoken aloud.
Her memory remains suspended in intrigue, rarely grounded in the evidence of how Mary, as a first-century woman, may have lived. Mary was everywhere in the imagination, and yet still not fully revealed.
Our first insights emerged here, on Substack, through essays and conversations. But we quickly understood that we needed to go deeper to bring forth the true identity of Mary Magdalene. So, we moved inward, into the research and the writing, and emerged almost two years later with our book, Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat.
Why Mary Magdalene?
Mary Magdalene meets you where you are, but doesn’t leave you where she found you.*
She illuminates pathways of possibility for remembrance and positive transformation.
She invites us to move beyond the boundaries that we, and our culture, have set for ourselves.
She embodies the archetype of all that’s missing or misunderstood–personally and collectively.
She calls us to hold a more compassionate and holistic lens on a belief system deeply in need of revolution.
Because her place within the Christian story opens onto something larger: a lineage in which the feminine was not peripheral to the divine, but central to it. In the earliest centuries of Christianity, before authority hardened into hierarchy and the church became an institution of empire, other expressions of faith still flourished. Within them, women held spiritual authority, and the sacred feminine remained holy, creative, and alive.
Mary Magdalene’s story is inseparable from the gradual diminishment not only of women, but of the feminine within the sacred. To follow her is to follow that loss, and to begin imagining what may be restored.
About Alicia & Kelly
As two cradle Christians, we have spent years as spiritual seekers and creatives contemplating the spiritual nature of holistic wellbeing and we share a love of learning about life’s mysteries and what it means to thrive.
Alicia Assad is a mother of five and writer on faith and flourishing - you can read her work at The Artistry of Faith.
Kelly Ingraham is a mother of four and a writer drawn to ancient history, symbolism, and the sacred.
Together, we are the authors of Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat and the founders of La Suvera Press, the independent imprint through which the book was published.
The Magdalene Thread was born of a thousand stories exchanged within our daily routines and the rhythms of nurture, in friendship and the messiness of motherhood. There is no precise way to convey the series of synchronicities that led us here to share this work with you, but it is certain that it is beyond us.
Follow the Thread
Subscribe for essays and conversations on Mary Magdalene, Christianity, the sacred feminine, and the making of Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat.
*Inspired by the great Anne Lamott, “I do not understand the mystery of grace—only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.”
