The Passion of Mary Magdalen by Elizabeth Cunningham

I will also tell of mornings when I didn't want to wake and noons full of harsh light and judgment. Passionate and unrepentant, fierce and tender, Maeve leaps off the page, a luminous, embodied archetype for our time. In this central novel of The Maeve Chronicles, acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Cunningham brings us a Mary Magdalen who defies all stereotypes - old and new. Throughout the terrain of the Gospels - its healings, exorcisms, miracles, feasting, riots, and terrifying prophecy - the lovers fight and make love, comfort and confront each other, infusing this unique passion narrative with passion in all its meanings. What is a girl to do but settle down in the good-time town of Magdala and open her own holy whore house, welcome each stranger as if he were a god - until, at last, he is.Įqually strong-willed and charismatic, Maeve and Jesus form a union that is as stormy as it is ecstatic. Neither one knows where Jesus is he has vanished again. When Maeve lands in mortal trouble, priestesses, whores, matrons, and even Rome's chief Vestal Virgin must unite to bring about her rescue.įree at last, Maeve goes straight to Palestine where she meets Mary of Bethany, a prickly would-be rabbinical scholar, and Ma (yes, his mother), a fey but autocratic matriarch. Here in the house of her enemy, Maeve learns the healing mysteries that become the basis of her life - and his. A failed attempt at escape results in even more bitter slavery when Maeve is sold to a spoiled young matron with a terrible secret.

Snapped up by an aristocratic madam, Maeve becomes not only an accomplished whore but also has a startling encounter with the goddess Isis, whose story of loss and longing affects Maeve deeply. Only an imperial power could slow this woman down.

She has survived a shipwreck, trekked through the mountains of Celtic Iberia. Born to warrior witches on an island in the Celtic Otherworld, raised to be a hero, Maeve is determined to find her lost beloved, a young man known to the Celts as Esus, whose life she once saved at enormous cost to herself. And like her beloved Jesus, Maeve incarnates the divine mystery of love - in the flesh.įlesh we first encounter stripped naked and displayed on a slave block in Rome. No one's disciple, she is lover, bard, priestess, healer.

Make way for Maeve, the feisty, outspoken Celtic Magdalen, telling her own story, on her own terms. The most provocative woman in the Gospels, Mary Magdalen makes only a few, dramatic appearances.

The Passion of Mary Magdalen by Elizabeth Cunningham