Dying and Rising: Reclaiming the Mystical Christianity of Mary Magdalene

Cynthia Bourgeault’s Chapter 5 unveils a forgotten lineage of inner resurrection and sacred seeing

Continuing the Journey

As we journey further into The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, Chapter 5 reveals what may be the most spiritually subversive and theologically potent material yet.

In our last reflection, we explored how the Gospel of Mary didn’t just preserve Mary’s memory—it preserved an entire lineage of early Christianity that was centered on inner transformation and visionary experience.

Now, with Dying and Rising, Bourgeault brings us to the mystical core of that lineage. Here, resurrection is not a historical trophy to be defended, but an interior path walked daily. Mary’s vision doesn't just illuminate Jesus—it reflects our own soul’s potential to rise by dying to what is false.

But this isn’t the end—it’s a turning point.

As the Gospel of Mary continues, the resistance begins. The clash between Mary and Peter reemerges with new intensity. In the next chapter, we will see what happens when wisdom threatens power, and what it costs to carry the deeper truths in a world that isn’t ready for them.

The question won’t just be what Mary saw. It will be whether the Church—and we—are willing to see it too.

Introduction: A Descent into the Depths, A Rising to Revelation

Chapter 5 of Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Meaning of Mary Magdalene takes us directly into the mystical heart of the Gospel of Mary—a gospel both fragmentary and transgressive in its implications. Entitled Dying and Rising, this chapter traces a stunning inner journey that defies ecclesiastical hierarchy, bypasses dogmatic gatekeeping, and offers a radically interiorized view of resurrection—not as a historical anomaly, but as a profound spiritual process accessible through deep vision and inner work.

What Bourgeault excavates here is more than just theological symbolism. It is a map of human transformation. Through Mary Magdalene’s vision—received not post-resurrection, but potentially during Jesus’ descent into death—we are invited to reconsider not only what resurrection means, but who is qualified to carry that meaning forward.

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The Setup: A Teacher’s Seat at the Threshold

We begin with an unexpected gesture: Peter, the emotional barometer of the disciples, momentarily sets aside his usual bluster and invites Mary to speak:

“Sister, we know that the Savior greatly loved you… tell us what you remember of his words that we ourselves do not know or perhaps have never heard.”

In this deceptively generous moment, Peter concedes Mary’s closeness to Jesus—but frames it through a predictable male lens: she was the “beloved,” and therefore privy to pillow-talk theology. Mary brushes past this assumption and steps into the teacher’s seat—not as lover or disciple, but as apostle of the heart. What follows is a visionary account whose spiritual and metaphysical stakes are so high, it's hard to believe they’ve been buried in obscurity for centuries.

Tragically, the text then suffers a four-page manuscript gap. But Bourgeault believes that the thread of the narrative, once grasped through the spiritual logic already presented, can be intuitively extended.

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The Vision Begins: “I Saw the Master…”

Mary says,

“I saw the Master in a vision and I said to him, ‘Lord, I see you now in a vision.’”

Jesus responds:

“You are blessed, Mary, since the sight of me does not disturb you. For where the heart is, there is the treasure.”

This initial exchange reveals the primary condition for true visionary seeing: emotional and psychic stillness. The blessedness Jesus speaks of is not sentimentality; it is stability of inner presence. The capacity to behold divinity without being disturbed—by fear, excitement, egoic craving, or self-doubt—is the doorway to the imaginal realm.

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The Nous: Eye of the Heart, Bridge Between Worlds

Bourgeault explains that the word “heart” in this passage refers not to mere emotion, but to the nous—a subtle organ of spiritual perception preserved in Eastern Christian mysticism and ancient wisdom traditions. The nous is the “eye of the heart,” a liminal faculty that mediates between realms, perceives through presence, and functions beyond discursive thought.

Thomas Merton’s description of this inner point of stillness—a “pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven”—grounds this concept experientially. It is through the nous, not through rational mind or emotional sway, that Mary encounters the real Jesus—not as memory, ghost, or symbol, but as an ontologically present being in the imaginal world.

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The Imaginal Realm: Neither Dream nor Hallucination

Here, Bourgeault emphasizes a crucial point. The vision Mary receives is not imaginary, but imaginal—a term drawn from Islamic mysticism and championed by Henry Corbin. The imaginal realm is an ontologically real domain, more subtle than the material, yet no less real. It is the realm of archetypes, true images, and sacred encounters.

Jesus, in this vision, is not merely “alive in her heart.” He is present in a realm accessible through purified perception—a realm of meeting where the divine and the human can commune directly.

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The Missing Pages: Jesus’s Descent?

When the manuscript resumes, the speaker is no longer identified, but referred to simply as “the soul.” Traditional interpretations take this to mean Mary is recounting her own visionary journey. But Bourgeault proposes an astonishing alternative: what if the speaker is Jesus himself?

The missing pages may have originally contained a record of Jesus’s journey through death—his harrowing of hell—as seen through the eyes of Mary Magdalene. If so, this would make her not merely a witness to the resurrection, but the receiver of his direct account from within death itself.

This possibility places Mary Magdalene at the center of the Paschal Mystery—not as an observer, but as a spiritual midwife of divine transformation.

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The Soul’s Descent and Ascent: Naming the Powers

In either reading—Mary’s psychological ascent or Jesus’s cosmic descent—the narrative moves through confrontation with dark powers:

• Craving: "Why lie to yourself? You are mine."

• Ignorance: "You are the slave of wickedness and lack discrimination."

• Wrath: A sevenfold deluge of distortions—death, bodily enslavement, false peace, and rage.

Each force attempts to block the soul’s ascent. But the soul responds with kenotic grace—not by arguing, but by disidentifying. “You took the garments I wore to be me.” The soul sheds identity like clothing.

This is not just mythic metaphor. It is a psycho-spiritual manual for inner purification. The “powers” are not demons in the sky—they are deeply embedded psychic patterns. Bourgeault aligns these with Thomas Keating’s “false self system”: craving, aversion, judgment, and the illusions of ego.

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Doing the Work: Apostleship Redefined

Perhaps the most revolutionary claim in the chapter is this:

Apostleship is not bestowed—it is earned through inner work.

Mary Magdalene, unlike Peter or James, is an apostle because she did the work. She purified the nous. She encountered Christ in the imaginal realm. She named the powers and disrobed the false self.

This redefinition of apostleship is both radical and ancient. It suggests that spiritual authority is not conferred by gender, proximity, or clerical title, but by one’s capacity to live from the heart’s deepest alignment with the divine.

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The Harrowing of Hell: Jesus as Speaker?

Bourgeault’s most daring move is theological and literary: proposing that the ascent narrative is Jesus’s own account of his journey through the underworld.

This interpretation gains strength from the text’s language: the soul is called “space-conqueror,” “man-slayer”—terms aligned with shamanic hero archetypes, not psychological interiority. If Jesus is the speaker, then this is the only recorded first-person account of his death experience: a journey not through physical resurrection alone, but through metaphysical reconciliation.

Guided by mystics like Ladislaus Boros and Jacob Boehme, Bourgeault reconstructs what might have been on the missing pages: Jesus’s final blessing to Mary, his descent, the moment of metaphysical “planting” in the heart of matter, and his soul’s ascent through the realms of distortion and fragmentation—on behalf of all creation.

This interpretation transforms the Gospel of Mary from an obscure Gnostic artifact into the most profound Christian mystical text we possess.

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The Final Hymn: Liberation in Silence

The vision ends not with doctrinal assertion but with poetic surrender:

“What has bound me has been slain… I go forward into the season of the Great Age… I will repose in silence.”

Whether this is Mary’s voice or Jesus’s, the trajectory is clear: the work is done, the soul is free, silence is the only fitting response. The nous has seen what the ego cannot grasp. Liberation is not achieved through conquest but through remembrance, stillness, and surrender.

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Conclusion: A New Center of the Christian Mystery

With this chapter, Bourgeault doesn’t just restore Mary Magdalene’s dignity. She re-centers her as the true apostolic transmitter of Christ’s deepest teachings. Whether as mystic, midwife of resurrection, or witness to Christ’s cosmic descent, Mary’s role is elevated far beyond what tradition has allowed.

This chapter invites the reader to see that resurrection is not a one-time miracle. It is the soul’s repeated journey through darkness, craving, and fragmentation—toward inner singleness, communion, and the imaginal light. To encounter Christ as Mary did is to become what he is. And through that heart-vision, each of us can begin the sacred work of dying and rising.

In this light, we uncover not just a chapter but a lost lineage of Christianity—what might be called Magdalene Christianity or Wisdom Christianity. Here, death and resurrection are not beliefs to cling to, but practices to embody. Each time we let go of the egoic self—its judgments, its cravings, its false garments—we participate in the Paschal Mystery. In practices like centering prayer, where we surrender to the presence and action of God within, we literally sacrifice the ego and allow the authentic self to rise. This is not metaphor. It is initiation.

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