Descend to Rise: The Journey of Mary Magdalene
I don’t know where to start. Mary Magdalene is one of those stories that is so big that every time you think you understand it, another door opens.
I never studied her much, but I always felt a strong connection to her story and her energy. I grew up in a very Catholic environment. Jesus and Mary have always been present in my life, and they always will be. Magdalene came later, because hers is such a big story about feminine power, one the Church never wanted to unveil.
So this is not a history lesson, and it’s not a travel guide. It’s about her journey, and why I believe it is also ours.
From apostle to prostitute (and back)
Let’s start with the facts, because they matter.
In the Gospels, Magdalene follows Jesus and supports him. When he is on the cross and almost everyone has run away, she stays. She goes to the tomb and she is the first one to see him risen, and the first one he sends to tell the others. The first messenger of the resurrection was a woman.
Then in 591 Pope Gregory the Great, in one sermon, mixed her up with other women from the Gospels, including an unnamed sinner. From that moment she became the repentant prostitute, for almost 1,400 years.
The Church separated these women again only in 1969. In 2016 her day, July 22, finally became a feast, and she got back the title she had from the beginning: Apostle of the Apostles.
1,400 years carrying a story that wasn’t hers. I think many women know exactly how that feels.
The journey to France
Tradition says that after the crucifixion Magdalene left the Holy Land by boat with a few companions (some legends even say with a child) and arrived on the coast of Provence, where today there is Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. She preached in the south of France, and then she went up into the mountains of La Sainte-Baume, where she lived in a cave for thirty years.
The legend says that seven times a day the angels lifted her up to hear the music of heaven, and that was the only food she needed.
Honestly, I don’t read this as a woman running away from the world. She had just lost the man she loved and everything she knew, and instead of going around the pain, she went down into the earth, into the dark, into herself. Sounds familiar?
The sanctuary and the Grotte aux Oeufs
The path through the forest of La Sainte-Baume.
Today her cave is a sanctuary, kept by Dominican friars for centuries. You walk up through one of the oldest forests in Europe, you climb the stone steps in the cliff, and inside the rock there is a church, with altars, candles and her relics. It’s a place of prayer and silence, and it’s beautiful.
Inside the sanctuary: Magdalene lifted by the angels.
But not far from there, off the main path, the mountain hides another cave: the Grotte aux Oeufs, the Cave of the Eggs. No church, no candles, only the rock. Local tradition says that for centuries women came here to pray for fertility and I can tell you is not an easy path to find or to hike.
The entrance of the Grotte aux Oeufs.
You literally descend into the darkness, almost on your knees. It’s an indescribable emotion: like entering the vulva, into the mother’s womb.
If the sanctuary is where Magdalene is honored, the Grotte aux Oeufs is where you feel her. And getting there was also a descent into the dark: the true symbolism of Samhain, in real life.
Seven gates, seven demons
I didn’t find this connection in a book, even if it might exist somewhere. This is coming from my feelings and my visions.
In the weeks before going to La Sainte-Baume, a lot of synchronicities started to happen, and visions came to me early in the morning, in that space between REM sleep and waking. Dreams have always been my most powerful channel.
First it was Isis, showing me a four-step process… and later I understood why we went there as a group of four.
A few weeks later came a vision where the Via Crucis and the seven gates of Inanna were the same path. And a few days before leaving, the cross, Isis and the womb, all together.
I didn’t understand it all at once. But little by little it became clear: the story of Magdalene and the story of Inanna are the same story of descent. I just had to go there and walk it.
Long before Magdalene, women were already telling a story of descent. Inanna, the Sumerian Queen of Heaven, decides to go down to the underworld, to her sister Ereshkigal. There are seven gates, and at each one she has to leave something behind: her crown, her jewels, her gifts, her clothes. She arrives naked, she is killed and hung on a hook for three days. Then she comes back to life. Sounds familiar?
When the vision showed me the Via Crucis and the gates of Inanna as one path, at first I didn’t get it. Then I started to see it and to connect the dots.
The Via Crucis is the path of Jesus to the cross, station after station. At one of the stations he is stripped of his clothes, just like Inanna at the gates. He dies hanging on the cross, she dies hanging on a hook. Both stay three days in the dark and both come back to life.
And then something happened that still gives me goosebumps. On the way up I saw a small stone chapel with the crucifixion carved inside, and Magdalene at the foot of the cross. Only later I found out there were seven of these oratories on the old pilgrims’ path, each one with a moment of her life. And the first one? Magdalene freed from her seven demons.
Seven again, Like the gates of Inanna.
One of the oratories on the Chemin des Roys: the crucifixion, with Magdalene at the foot of the cross.
Two stories, thousands of years apart, with exactly the same structure: a path you walk step by step, being stripped of everything, death, three days in the dark, rebirth.
And who walks the Via Crucis with Jesus until the very end? Magdalene. She doesn’t look away. She sees every station, she stays under the cross, she waits at the tomb. She walks the descent with him first, and then she lives her own, in the cave.
Luke writes that seven demons went out of Magdalene, nothing more. But I can’t stop seeing the connection: seven gates, seven things to let go, seven layers to take off before you arrive at what is true.
And this is exactly what a big transition feels like from the inside. Burnout, grief, a career that doesn’t fit anymore, a body that doesn’t do what you planned, an identity that falls apart. At every gate something is taken from you: the title, the role, the image, the control, the version of you that everybody applauded.
You can fight every gate, and most of us do, or you can just surrender. Nobody goes down to the underworld with the crown on. But remember: after death, there is resurrection.
When the cross becomes a womb
If you grew up Catholic like me, the cross was always there: suffering, sacrifice, death and a lot of guilt.
Magdalene shows us another way to look at it. She stood at the cross, she went to the tomb, she lived in a cave. Three places of darkness and death, and all three are also places where something transforms.
The womb is the same place. It’s dark and closed. It’s where life is created and where, every month, something dies and is released. In the womb, death and birth are not opposites, they are the same movement.
When you see this, the cross is not only a symbol of suffering anymore, because it becomes a womb: a place that holds what has died, until it’s ready to be born again.
Coming back to the yoni
Ancient people knew that caves are the womb of the earth. When you go inside one, you are literally inside the body of the Mother.
This is the connection with the yoni that so many of us have lost. And I’m not talking only about sexuality. I mean the yoni as the source of creation, of intuition, of that knowing that doesn’t come from the head.
So many high-functioning women live from the neck up. We manage, we plan, we perform, and we forget we even have a womb. Until it starts talking to us through pain, exhaustion, a cycle that stops, or a longing we can’t explain.
Magdalene’s cave is an invitation to come back down. Into the pelvis, into the dark, into the place where we were born and where we can give birth to ourselves again and again.
It is in the void, in the dark, that we can truly find ourselves, plant our seeds and find our true creative power. This is why the Celts celebrated the new year in the dark, at Samhain. And there are many dark goddesses who speak of this same connection:
Sheela na Gig. Medieval stone carvings, found mostly in Ireland and Britain, often on the walls of churches: a woman, sometimes old and almost skeletal, opening her vulva with her hands. She is the door we all come through when we are born, and the one we go back to when we die.
The Morrígan. The Irish goddess of fate, death and sovereignty, who often appears as a crow. In the old stories she is the washer at the ford, washing the clothes of those who are about to die. She is not evil: she simply sees what has to end.
The Cailleach. The old woman, the divine hag of Ireland and Scotland. Tradition says she shaped the mountains and brings the winter, ruling the dark half of the year from Samhain to Beltane. Without her winter, the land can’t rest and be reborn.
Freeing the voice: the connection between the yoni and the throat
The first words of the resurrection were given to a woman. Then her voice was taken away, and her story was told by others for fourteen centuries. It’s not a coincidence that so many of us have a tight throat, a truth we swallowed, the fear of being too much, too loud, too visible.
In womb work we say that the throat and the womb mirror each other. When one closes, the other closes too. When one opens, the other starts to breathe. This is why sound is such a powerful medicine for the womb: humming, toning, chanting, singing.
Inside a cave, the sound is different. It goes into the rock and comes back to you, and you hear your voice as if it was the first time. Sometimes you start with a song you know, and then a new one comes, one you didn’t know you were carrying. At least, this was my experience inside the cave: I could feel it was the voice of my womb.
Inside the cave, while the song came.
The power of sisterhood
This is the heart of everything, and maybe the hardest part to write.
I never went to La Sainte-Baume before because I knew I didn’t want to do it alone. And Magdalene didn’t arrive in France alone either: tradition says she came with other women, Martha, Mary Jacobe and Mary Salome.
What happened for me and the women who were with me is something that is hard to describe, and some of it has to remain untold and kept within our circle.
The way I met these women and connected with them at such a deep level is not something rational. Neither is the way this trip came together: we booked everything in one day.
And what was activated there goes beyond each one of us. It was for our personal healing journey, but also for the healing of the collective, and for the awakening of the feminine power that each one of us holds.
What are you ready to let die?
The descent is not something you plan. Usually it arrives by itself, as a crisis, a loss, a turning point. But you can choose how you walk through it.
Magdalene’s journey asks one simple question, and it’s the same question of Samhain: what are you ready to let die?
This year I’m letting die my attachment to being judged by how well I perform. To what I can’t control, and to approval that was never mine to hold.
Stay in the circle
If something in this story touched you, subscribe to my Substack so you don’t miss the next one. Here I write about cycles, ancestral healing, the sacred feminine and the places that call us. You can also follow me on Instagram at @lorella_dvina.
If you feel the call to go deeper, come to my next moon circle in Paris on November 24, or write to me for a 1:1 session.
And one more thing: I’m dreaming of bringing women to sacred places like La Sainte-Baume. If you want to be the first to know, sign up here and you will also get a free menstrual guide.
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