“The stories of women are of our grandmothers and their grandmothers and their grandmothers - all of us - and are woven into the collective stories of all women stored within the vertebrae of the whales headed north, vibrating in the roots of foggy forests, wrapped up and held tight in the howling moments of grief among soul sisters. They find their way. They always do.”
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Last weekend I sat in my sunlit loft with my friend Corinne and told her what I had read about some people believing that whales carry the Akashic records, which are thought to be our collective human memory. She paused and said, “That’s so interesting even just scientifically because whales absorb the carbon in the ocean. They can store more of it than trees.” Her arms reached up over her head when she said it - as if she were making room for possibility. The idea of whales absorbing both carbon and memory became a metaphor that bloomed between us while we sat in the morning light, still in our PJs, and traveled with us all the way up the highway to a nearby coastal town.
Later that day we boarded a small boat and rode it out over dark, rough seas to witness the migration of gray whales. We steadied ourselves against the railing, planted our feet wide, and held our breath when they surfaced close by. I felt it - a trembling in my chest, a familiar resonance that hummed, “I know you.” Maybe whales, our Grandmother Giants, absorb and contain memory like carbon, only releasing small amounts when necessary. Maybe each surfacing of our past life memories is simply the watery sigh of a gray just off the nearest coast.
I like to think that whales know all of it, that held in their bodies are the stories we’ve preserved in art and in the books we couldn’t pull fast enough from the fires. I like to think that there is something on this planet that remembers everything and that they carry that memory in the holy grail of their massive lungs. Maybe the thrill we feel when an enormous whale surfaces near us, flukes glowing below the near-surface of the water, is more than being in the presence of a giant. Maybe we shiver to be so near a library of story. Maybe we can almost remember how old and how long the story is, how much has had to try to survive, and maybe that turns our bellies upside down. Or maybe I’m telling you something subversive and coded right now because I, like you, am an heir of metaphors, folklore, and secret watermarks.
If you were in my loft right now I’d invite you closer. “If you have the eyes for it,” I’d say, “I have something to show you…”
In 1209 CE the then pope and French king used a joint army to kill 20,000 people, many of them Cathars. What’s significant about the Cathars is that they specifically believed in what was called The Great Heresy: the marriage and the subsequent child of Mary Magdalene and Jesus of Nazareth. One particular massacre - part of The Inquisition - led to some of these people seeking refuge in a church. But instead of holy sanctuary, they found themselves at the center of a roaring, stinking pyre. The building was torched by the wicked alliance of church and state, leaving families, neighbors, and lovers dying while screaming and weeping together. A woman’s story - The Magdalene herself - was buried below the ash and bones of people who had loved her.
And yet.
“the research of the folklorist Kathleen McGowan, recently published in her book The Expected One, confirms that stories of Mary Magdalene and the bloodline of Jesus survived in an underground reservoir of folk memories, in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword wielded by the Inquisition in an attempt to wipe them out.”
-Margaret Starbird, Bride in Exile
The church and the crown may have believed that they had extinguished The Great Heresy during The Inquisition, that it had taken its last dangerous, feminine breath in the bodies of people murdered for revering it, but here we are still holding a preserved story up to the light. Unburnt. Unconquered. Unerased. And did you catch how The Great Heresy was saved?
It was art. Art has always been the ark of stories, of things we want to subversively protect. It is a form of real magic that refuses to be drowned or torched or colonized. And so it was because of artists that The Great Heresy did not die. In watermarks, in paintings, in tapestries, in fairytales, in folklore (which simply means ‘the belief of the people’), and in the earliest tarot decks, The Magdalene - her love, her daughter, and her life in exile - found a refuge. She was the Holy Grail - her body and her womb - and she did not stay buried.
As her story spread, it took on new names and shapes - evidence of its potency, not of its dilution. My friend
, a Hawaiian writer, artist, teacher, and anarchist, has taught me that the more a story is told, the more real it is. The more its details evolve, adapt, and expand, the more proof we have that this is a story worth telling.So the oral traditions in parts of France and Europe evolved to take on meaning and symbolism that we probably wouldn’t now immediately recognize as pointing back to The Magdalene. And that was the point. Unless we had learned how to speak in dialects of watermarks, metaphor, and connecting threads we would have certainly missed it. Art and storytelling had kept her hidden in plain sight, tucked into folklore where belief blooms in cadence with the land.
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