Goodness in the Garden
Illuminating the role of women in early Christianity has the power to restore spiritual sovereignty for us all
“We must learn to read the silences and hear the echoes of the silenced voices.”
- Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza
Ancient humans honored the woman and the goddess as the source of creation.
All evidence demonstrates that, at least in the heritage of the Western world, the ineffable divine was embodied in the feminine form first.
From the Venus of Laussel, carved into a stone of a cave in France at least 25,000 years ago, to the feminine figurines of the same name found across Paleolithic Eurasia, the archeological record brings to life the mythic one. Truth held in stories, was passed down through spoken word and symbols for tens of thousands of years before writing, in any form, was invented.
The image of the mother-goddess permeated spiritual and religious thought from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, Old Europe to the Near East, until everything shifted towards the dawn of the Iron Age. This is when, as Joseph Campbell puts it, “the old cosmology and mythologies of the goddess mother were radically transformed, reinterpreted, and suppressed.”
This shift in consciousness is how we came to have the story of the goddess we now possess, embodied in Eve. She is pervasive within the collective consciousness of Western culture as the woman who sinned, owning her role in the deception instigated by the serpent. This is a choice that led to the death of a god who was sacrificed in the ultimate act of forgiveness.
It was not always this way: the motif of the sacred garden and tree, with a guardian serpent, and a goddess form, was not original to Genesis, and it wasn’t negative. Rising above and choosing to see the higher view of ancient history demonstrates how the goddess lost her goodness and sinfulness became tied to the feminine–setting the stage for the characterization of Mary Magdalene in the greatest story ever told.
The Edge of Mystery
There is no simple way to trace the story back or blame to neatly place on a single authority for how the goddess fell from grace, but her demonization was integral to the rise of the patristic monotheism that has dominated the last two millennia.
The underlying psychology behind the goddess, and her rise and fall, is very simple, and even relatable for the modern mind to comprehend: life is a mystery, and it begins in the womb of a woman.
Goddess and god, feminine and masculine, woman and man–these are expressions of the duality inherent in this universe, with each polarity embodying aspects of the whole. The feminine is the unseen, ineffable, and emotional side of that coin. From the process of conception and birth to the enigma of intuition and emotion, the feminine carries, expresses, and epitomizes the mystery of creation.
Mystery lives at the edge of fear and devotion–it is this razor’s edge that both elevated the goddess to the highest levels of reverence and the fear of her power that brought her to be demoted.
The human mind is a meaning-making machine. Worship is a pathway through which we seek to commune with and even control what we cannot fully know–and so is suppression.
As Campbell wrote, “the fear of woman and the mystery of her motherhood have been for the male no less impressive imprinting forces than the fears and mysteries of the world of nature itself.”
Fear of the mystery is an essential part of how the goddess, the feminine, and the woman came to be viewed as negative, a projection onto the divine feminine that followed her throughout the growth and evolution of religion.
Descent of the Goddess
As civilization was born, with agrarian societies birthing new cities, ways of being, and eventually the written word, the divine feminine shifted forms–going from boundless unity of the mother-earth archetype to a variety of goddess beings with unique traits and stories.
Geography may have played a role in the descent of the goddess. The development of civilizations around the great rivers of the Near East and Egypt necessitated a new level of organization to track and harness the fertile powers of their cyclical flooding. Alongside science, mathematics, and writing, urbanization catalyzed a more complex social structure that was reflected in the growing and multifaceted divine pantheons of gods.
Just as the goddess went hand-in-hand with nature, the rise of the male gods went hand-in-hand with the rise of technology. The geographies of the goddess dominance were abundant with resources–flowing spring waters, rich land, and an easeful transition into agrarian culture, while the male gods took dominance in desert tribes, living in harsh conditions for cultivation. This naturally led to a more nomadic, herding-based lifestyle correlated with tribal clashes, and ultimately, war.
Male gods rose to prominence as the goddess was diminished, and the way this manifested across cultures was complex and unique:
In Babylon, the goddess goes from blessing the first warrior king Sargon I in 2350 BC, to being demonized in the form of Tiamat, whose mythological death at the hands of sky-god Marduk comes into play by the time of Hammurabi in 1750 BC. In pre-Olympic Greece, the goddess was revered, for even Medusa was a benevolent queen and granddaughter of Gaia.
We all know how her story unfolded–as Zeus marries, sires, and rapes his way through the local goddesses as the empire spreads and rises. What was a way to integrate new land through mythological synchronization became a patriarchal religious paradigm that shaped the evolution of Western thought and culture.
Already on a decline, goddess culture collapsed with the volcanic eruption of Thera, now known as Santorini, in 1480 BC. This was the center of Aegean goddess culture, and it was destroyed in the explosion, along with a succession of tidal waves that devastated Crete, Egypt and Palestine, a geological event that played a major factor in the collapse of an age, taking the goddess down with it.
Eve’s Folly
It was in the wake of these dark ages, as the Bronze Age collapsed and the Iron Age arose, that the ancient Hebrew people coalesced their tribe, clarified their religious beliefs, and the Kingdom of Judea emerged. This was a tribe that embodied the archetype of the desert herding tribes, with an inherently patriarchal view to the culture and mythology that led to a single male god figure: Yahweh.
Archeological evidence demonstrates that the ancient Hebrew people did not always, solely, worship Yahweh, but that this deity–and the concept of monotheism–evolved slowly over time. The Hebrews would have originally been part of the Canaanite tribes, worshiping a fuller pantheon of gods, including El, of whom there are traces of in the Hebrew word “Eloheim” found in the Old Testament.
The goddess Asherah is an archetypal mother-goddess descendant of Inanna/Ishtar of Sumeria/Babylon. Multiple archeological artifacts, from an Eighth Century BC inscription in a Hebron cemetery to a Fifth Century BC temple just south of Jerusalem with two altars, indicate that Asherah was widely venerated in Ancient Israel.
The powerful presence of Asherah is essential, as it helps explain why the pendulum swung against her, all goddesses, and other deities in the following centuries as the religion now known as Judaism evolved and progressed. Genesis, an oral tradition before it was written down around the Fifth Century BC, is the example that rings most clearly for modern day Judeo-Christian culture of where the goddess in the garden went from being good, to being the prime example of feminine folly.
Eve, meaning “life,” transforms the perfection of God’s created garden into the original sin by following the the instructions of a malevolent serpent, leading to a curse on humankind, especially women.
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.”
- Genesis 3:6
Given the harshness of these words, it is surprising that the only known Jewish text to present a negative theological judgment of Eve is the Sirach, circa the Second Century BC: “In woman was sin’s beginning, and because of her we all die.” Apart from this text, the common view was that sin began not in Genesis 3, but in Genesis 6, with the cohabitation of “fallen” angels with human women.
It seems that in Hebrew culture and doctrine, the goddess became an “abomination” (2 Kings) less so due to the actions of Eve, and more so based on the intention to coalesce the tribe around a sole belief in the god named Yahweh. What the Torah taught was more nuanced than “Eve led Adam to sin.” The concept of blaming Eve directly for the “fall of humanity” doesn’t appear till early Christianity, as documented in Epistle of Barnabas in 130 AD.
The Devil’s Gateway
Just as the ancient Hebraic doctrine against goddess worship was a polemic–a contrasting position taken in order to coalesce thought, culture, and power around a single god, the “Church fathers” doubled down on Eve and the feminine as the source of sin in an effort to discredit the rising power of women in leadership positions in early Christianity.
Irenaeus of Lyon, a Second Century bishop based in Gaul (ancient France), claimed lineage directly to the Apostle John through his teacher, a bishop named Polycarp. In Against Heresies, Irenaeus makes the link from Jesus and Adam to Mary and Eve–both women are virgins, visited by angels, and each are given a choice. According to Irenaeus, Mother Mary is “found obedient,” her choice of submission to God’s will brings “salvation” into the world. But Eve is disobedient, and her choices in the garden create “the cause of death both to herself and to the entire human race,” otherwise known as original sin.
Tertullian, writing less than half a century after Irenaeus, builds upon his argument and applies the story of Eve to all women.
“Do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealed of the forbidden tree: you are the deserter of divine law.”
- Tertullian
For him, Eve was the direct cause of Jesus' death, her folly so great that she caused God himself to die. However, Tertullian gives away the source of his rage against women in another writing where he rails against female priests, who were teaching, and baptizing, saying, “the very women of these heretics, how wanton they are!”
Augustine of Hippo, writing almost 200 years after Tertullian, does his best to make all pleasure and goodness involved in human sexuality to be negative. He pines for sex to be mechanical in nature, instructing that sex is only sinless with the intention of procreation, and places the blame squarely on the “horrible wickedness of the woman who changed the natural use into that which is against nature.” Translation: Eve and women are the source of “lust”, the desire that he believes is unnatural to humans and the truest source of sin itself.
Even before her choice to eat the fruit, Eve had the “lust to investigate things unknown and irrelevant to our eternal wellbeing.” Again, we meet the divine feminine’s connection to the unknown, and the inevitable fear it perpetuates. Augustine writes, “besides, there is a great mystery here: that just as death comes to us through a woman, life is born to us through a woman.”
However, texts outside of the canon that were considered part of the gnostic school of thought had alternative beliefs about Eve. Elaine Pagels, writer of The Gnostic Gospels, notes the “The Hypostais of the Archons described Eve as a spiritual principle in humanity who raised Adam from his merely material condition” and The Testimony of Truth tells the Garden of Eden story from the serpent’s (benevolent) point of view.
Scholar Birgen Pearson points out a gnostic author commenting on Genesis using an “Aramaic pun” to equate the serpent with an “instructor.” So while the emerging mainstream Christian orthodoxy we have today had one concept of Eve, there were other perspectives present on her, and likely very popular in their own day, that were squashed and eliminated.
This was a time when the goddess was still being worshiped, her devotion not formally outlawed in the Roman empire till 500 AD–the same century in which Mary Magdalene formally became a “whore.”
License to Evangelize
With innumerable pieces of art and text destroyed over thousands of years for both pernicious and practical reasons, there is so much that has been lost that would tell us exactly how and when women were diminished and erased from positions of power in Christianity.
It was not until the Fourth Century that male priests were formally forbidden from marrying, having sex, and producing children. The first official Church manuscript describing ordination of men priests dates to the Ninth Century, leaving hundreds of years to be imagined. The art and literature we do have demonstrates that women were exceptionally involved in Jesus’ ministry and the early spread of his movement, as outlined by Ally Kateuz in her book Mary and Early Christian Women.
Biblical and extra-biblical literature, from Paul to Pliny the Younger, describe numerous women as leaders–ministering, baptizing, teaching, and spreading the “good news.” Little thought of is that Mother Mary herself was one of the earliest leaders most prolifically described and depicted in early art and literature, but evidence abounds about female evangelists teaching the ways of Jesus Christ, from Rome to Iberia.
Hidden in plain sight, the signs of leadership in ancient art may be subtle to our modern eye, but patterns of body language can indicate shifts in social structures. In early sculptures and paintings, women are shown with their hands raised, holding censers, and other objects indicating their active engagement in liturgical roles. Over time, women are shown with hands and eyes cast down, if they are present at all.
Thecla, an early Christian saint and martyr whose story is chronicled in texts called The Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Life of Thecla, is an example not only of power, but of faith and courage. Tertullian rallied against her directly, writing that Thecla’s example was a “license,” in Kateuz words, for women to teach and baptize. Subsequently, all traces of Thecla were destroyed, and her story exemplifies the influence and renown of female leaders in the early Jesus movement. The art and literature created in her name, pervasive in its own time, was destroyed, including the eyes and hands of her depiction on the walls of the Grotto of Saint Paul, hands raised in a gesture of authority, being burned off the walls.
Speaking of Paul, one of the most infamous and damning sections of the New Testament in regards to women lies in one of his letters: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent" (1 Timothy 2:12). Yet, this passage, used for centuries by Church leaders to marginalize women is now widely acknowledged to be a forgery. In fact, there is no manuscript of Paul’s letters that exists before the Third Century, making it possible that Church leadership “standardized” the text to align with emerging doctrine.
The Apostle OF the Apostles
Holding these ancient texts and artifacts side-by-side with the commentary of the Church fathers’ on women, a more nuanced story begins to unfold. By “reading the silences,” as Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza writes, we can glean that the diminishment of women was being perpetrated, not in spite of, but due to, the power of women in nascent Christianity.
Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene are among the most powerful women in the Bible itself and extra-Biblical storytelling, from oral traditions, to art and literature. Scholars agree that Mary Magdalene’s prominence was such that early Christians understood her to be in competition with Simon Peter, the founder of the Church.
But “the Mary’s” were not portrayed as “apostles” or “disciples,” with words used to indicate members of Jesus’ inner circle given the task of spreading the good news in the texts that came to form the New Testament.
An apostle is “one sent on a mission,” and the criteria for what it meant to be an apostle of Jesus Christ clearly laid out in the Acts of the Apostles (the fifth book of the New Testament that scholars now believe was not written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke). One, an apostle must have followed Jesus during his entire earthly ministry, from the baptism by John to his ascension into heaven; two, an apostle must have seen Jesus after his resurrection; and three, an apostle must have been appointed by Jesus himself.
Mary Magdalene, according to Luke 8, followed Jesus throughout his ministry. Mary Magdalene, according to Matthew 28:1, Mark 16:1, Luke 24:10, and John 20:1, witnessed the resurrection. Notably, none of the male apostles were specifically named to be at the crucifixion. Who was at the crucifixion? Mary Magdalene, noted by name in Matthew 27:56, Mark 16:40, and John 19:25.
The intention of apostolic succession was, presumably, to keep the teachings of Jesus Christ as pure as possible, linking the Church leaders directly to the original group who followed him. By definition, it means that “bishops represent a direct, uninterrupted line of continuity,” and in practice, it has meant the consolidation of power within the Catholic Church.
Even in the gnostic text, The Sophia of Jesus Christ, published in the Nag Hammadi Codex III, the translation reads that after Jesus rose from the dead “his twelve disciples and seven women continued to be his followers,” when the Coptic actually refers to “twelve male disciples and seven female disciples.” This difference in wording may seem slight, but if we gather this subtle evidence about Mary Magdalene, and arguably, Mother Mary–women who clearly meet the criteria of “apostle”–then the figurative “keys to the Church” fall into question.
Reclaiming Spiritual Sovereignty
As spiritual power was removed from the individual and allocated solely to the voice of the Church, authority was wrested from not only from Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary, but all women and humans.
Jesus may have said, “ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” in Matthew 7:7. But for Tertullian, those who exerted free will in the expression of their spirituality was inherently a heretic: choice, itself, was the culprit, and common people had no right to think or act freely.
Meanwhile, free will has been espoused as an essential reason why the divine intelligence we call God chose to create humans their own “image.”
The divine woman, also called a goddess and known as Eve, we are told, ate the fruit of knowledge, at the behest of the wise serpent, rather than eating from the Tree of Life solely. Yet, this itself is a confusion of the laws of nature–an allegorical reading of cutting-edge science tells us the Trees of Life and Knowledge are not separate, but one in the same.
Life itself evolves and grows through the gathering of information, synthesized into meaning, that directs the choices we make–a process propelled forward by the differentiated lenses of our unique and individual embodiments of consciousness.
As God’s image pertains to our human intelligence, the agency of choice is its clearest actualization, and as the image applies to our human bodies, the woman’s facilitation of life’s creation is its most concrete manifestation.
The woman and choice, to Tertullian’s dismay, are together inextricable from life’s divine creation. Meaning, we have had the power all along, just as the divine made us–as above, so below, male and female. But to fully claim our divine ability to choose and create, it’s necessary to reframe original sin—and remember the goodness not only in the goddess, but in our own nature.
Follow The Magdalene Thread
As you can see, the source of Mary Magdalene’s feminine power is as inextricable from the divinity of the goddess as it is from the humanity of Eve. From Mary’s legend to the rumors that have followed her, the Church fathers may have tried their best to extinguish the light of the feminine, but the truth always rises, and our natural inclination is to find balance and wholeness.
We are here to explore the inherent goodness, spiritual sovereignty, and extraordinary faith Mary Magdalene models for us as a reflection of our own potential. You may listen to our latest podcast episode titled Women, Sex and Sin for a continued deep dive into the context that molded both Mary Magdalene and all women in early Christianity.
Women, Sex & Sin
Women, sexuality, and sin have been connected from the beginning of Christianity, forming a foundation of beliefs that has been highly influential on human history, shaping our modern reality.
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Source List
You can read our full resource list, updated weekly, here at Living Resources of the Magdalene Thread.
Augustine’s Literal Adam, by Peter Sanlon, The Gospel Coalition (2011)
Archeology of the Hebrew Bible, featuring the work of William Dever, PBS (2008)
The Curse of Eve: A Jewish Perspective on Women in Society, by Tova Bernbaum, Chabad.Org
Early Christianity’s Concept of Sexuality, CBE International
Eve: Apocrypha, by Alice Ogden Bellis, Jewish Women’s Archive
Eve: Midrash and Aggadah, by Tamar Kadari, Jewish Women’s Archive
Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine by Joseph Campbell
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
A History of Religious Ideas, Anthology including Vol. 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, Vol. 2: From Gautama Buddha to the Triumph of Christianity, Vol. 3: From Muhammad to the Age of Reforms by Mircea Eliade
In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
The Invention of God by Thomas Römer, translated by Raymond Geuss
Mary and Early Christian Women: Hidden Leadership by Ally Kateusz
A New New Testament: A Bible for the Twenty-first Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts, compiled and edited by Hal Taussig
Patterns in Comparative Religion by Mircea Eliade
Why the Early Church Thought Mary Was the New Eve, by Joe Heschmeyer, Catholic.Org (2024)
Brava!! What a well-researched, cohesive piece 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 Thank you for writing it.
By chance have you read “Mary Magdalene” by Lynn Picknett? It’s fascinating stuff — full of gems. Just wanted to suggest it for your podcast! ♥️
Brilliant summary of such a complex subject that spans many oceans of time to the primordial days of mankind!