Who was Mary Magdalene and why has her voice been silenced? She beckons to us through the shrouds of history, a woman of such spiritual stature that she became the first to open our consciousness to the risen Christ. She brings a vision of a Christianity in which masculine and feminine meet as intimate and equal partners. A vision never more needed than today. Irina Kuzminsky's thought-provoking introduction to this remarkable woman precedes a verse narrative, interposed with biblical and gnostic quotations, retelling the Christian story from Mary's spiritual perspective. All is crafted to bring us closer to this woman seen by her contemporaries as an embodiment of Sophia - the archetype of feminine wisdom - and as Jesus' true companion and partner in his work.
Irina Kuzminsky (Irinushka) is widely published as a poet and scholar; she is also a classically trained dancer, pianist, and singer and passionately believes in the arts as a bridge into spiritual consciousness. A Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford, Irina wrote her doctorate on 'Écriture féminine or the Language of Women' and was elected Junior Research Fellow in Humanities at Wolfson College. Though she was raised as an Orthodox Christian, her search for women's voices from the past and for the feminine faces of God has taken her across diverse sacred traditions from Tantric Buddhism and the Shakta current of Hinduism, to the Mother of Ten Thousand Things of the Tao, and to the Sufi path, and on to studies of antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages. This led to her composition of long poetic narratives on the Tao, the meeting of Ibn 'Arabi and the Lady Nizam, the Neolithic, Heloise and Abelard, the faces of the Shakti, and Mary Magdalene.