The Madonna Secret – a review, a tribute
a “rerooting, rewilding and retelling” of the story of Jesus, by the woman who loved him
"My story is made of soil and water and wind and pain. It lives in people's breath. It is held in the body. Someday it will not just be written down. It will be told, woman to woman. It will be sung."
This book, this story – it’s everything. The rose and the sun and the stars and the earth and the moon. And the river. And the leopards. And the light. It floored me, in the way that only the best stories do – hauntingly.
So here is my attempt at a book review, something I have never done before, because Miriam’s story demands it.
When Leukas, a Christian convert, ventures into the wilds of Gaul to receive the hidden teachings from Mary Magdalene before she dies, he discovers that hidden within the Gospels he thinks he knows is an epic love story—between an educated Jewish woman overwhelmed by her mysterious spiritual powers and a sensual magician devoted to the wisdom of the earth. The secrets she will reveal are both more shocking and more tragic than anything readers have encountered before.
Beginning with Miriam’s childhood as a wealthy Jew outside Bethany, we see her struggles as a young woman with spiritual curiosity and intellectual aspirations that drive her to combat the violence of Empire and the sexism of her own culture. Propelled by mystic visions, Miriam is finally drawn into the wilds of Galilee, where her destiny collides with a mischievous rabbi who will change her and the world forever.
With The Madonna Secret, author
delivers a potent “rerooting, rewilding and retelling” of the story of Jesus (Yeshua), told by the woman who loved him, Mary Magdalene (Miriam). In 600 pages of flowing, sensuous prose, The Madonna Secret changes THE story – the foundational myth that has ruled the world for thousands of years, the operating system for the modern world, the cultural template of our civilisation.“I am here for the trees. The women. The children. The birds. I am not here for the men who would hurt them all."
Imagine if the world was run by this story, instead of the broken old one. Just imagine…
Nearly two decades ago, I read The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown. Pulp fiction it may have been, but it shone an unforgiving light on the absence of women in the Church. So much so that I embarked on a fact-checking mission. Back then, in the early-ish days of the internet, I could barely find any reliable information. Still, it soon became clear that Mary Magdalene was in all likelihood Jesus’ wife and his equal. Far from being the repentant prostitute of Christian lore, she was vilified, her character assassinated and her influence erased by a nascent catholic Church intent on asserting its god-bestowed patriarchal authority, underwritten by the very Roman Empire that Jesus sought to resist. This is how the Mother was erased from the so-called holy trinity. I also learned that several gnostic gospels were written and subsequently disappeared, including the Gospel of Mary, on top of the four presented ever since as the only story.
Pulp fiction it may have been, but The Da Vinci Code opened my eyes to the violent erasure of women’s voices from the Church, in a way that forever altered my view of Christianity as a force for good.
Sophie Strand cites The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant, as a source of inspiration – a work of historical fiction that still haunts me, a decade or so after reading it. The Red Tent1 retells the Old Testament story of Dinah, only sister to Jacob’s infamous twelve sons, grand-daughter of Isaac and great grand-daughter of Abraham himself. But she is above all daughter of Leah and Rachel and of all the women who raised her – women who each month gathered in the red tent for their moontime.
"You may think you eat his body. You may try to partake in the blood mysteries when you drink wine. But your own wife is closer to them when she bleeds every month. (...) Ask her about her blood. Worship it.”
I started reading The Madonna Secret in October. But about halfway through I stalled, only to pick it up again in the new year. If truth be told, I dreaded the crucifixion chapters. I hate graphic scenes, whether in print or in film, and what is the crucifixion but a lengthy torture scene? And I am so grateful to Sophie Strand for deftly veering away from the gory detail of it all: we’ve heard and read it a thousand times before, this sanctification of suffering and death that is only meant to keep us in our place.
“We were walking over the dried blood empires had left behind.”
Blood, young and red, has been soaking the land of Miriam and Yeshua. I started reading The Madonna Secret just as a genocidal war broke out in Palestine. Empire is a word that’s been weighing heavily on my mind and heart, in all its blood-thirsty, virulent glory, since it all began again – empire taking what’s not freely given, yet again unleashing brutal violence on people and the world.
Rebecca Solnit says it so much better than I ever could –
Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist.
This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian.
Dig deeper, and you’ll eventually find that empire is entrenched in a concrete foundation of patriarchy – as are all inequalities: gender, race, sexuality, class. As the great unravelling proceeds at pace, our institutions’ response is to double down on the same old patriarchal policies of control and coercion – with always the ultimate goal of maintaining the status quo. It doesn’t work. The red tide of suffering won’t be stemmed by inflicting more suffering.
🕊️ CEASEFIRE NOW 🕊️
"Most of all, I pray to the women. All of us. For it is we who give birth to the world.”
The Madonna Secret moved me in ways I don’t quite have the words for. It transported me, nourished me, healed me. It reaffirmed my longing that it all could be so different, and rekindled it. It gave me hope too. Because I see Miriam in other women: Sophie Strand herself, of course, Laura Murphy, Elizabeth Gilbert, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Cheryl Strayed, the late Sinéad O’Connor, to name but a very few, as well as many women close to me. The mothers. All of us. Story healers.
Truly, another world is possible.
And this line, near the end, as if written just for me:
"Do you swim? Have you ever rested in the water, the breath in your lungs keeping you afloat, gazing up at the flat sky above you until you are not sure you have ever been human?
You are water. Water in water, looking at water. Cradled by a colour. A coolness outside of time."
The Madonna Secret quenched a thirst I didn’t know I had – for fiction, for passion, for stories that pulse with desire. For it is, most of all, an EPIC love story, glimmering with earthly magic, rippling with a love as eternal and wild as the sea. Maybe someday James Cameron will make a movie out of it.
About the author
is a poet and writer based in the Hudson Valley of New York who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. She is the author of The Madonna Secret (2023) and The Flowering Wand – Rewilding the Sacred Masculine (2022), both at Inner Traditions, and available online and in larger bookshops (Easons or Dubray Books in Ireland).Listen to Sophie’s conversation with on the Knotwork Storytelling podcast. You can also find her on Instagram at @cosmogyny and on Substack at .
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Disclosure: Buying any of the books recommended in this post may earn me a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookshops.
Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent (1997) is now seen as a feminist classic, so influential that it spawned a worldwide movement, created by ALisa Starkweather.
This incredibly generous review brought tears to my eyes. Thank you for holding Miriam’s story with me. 🌹❤️🔥🌹