In the beginning was love, and love was with God, and love was God. There was a woman sent by God. Her name was Mary Magdalene. She was not love, she did not incarnate love, but she was on earth to bear witness to love, to bring love closer to man, and to a god made flesh, a meeting of earth and the strength of love.

She had left the shores of Palestine in a skiff, accompanied by other women: the mother of Christ, Marie Jacob and Marie Salome. Three Maries, for the balance always comes from the number three. Never does a three-legged stool tremble or become wobbly. Thus went these holy women, on the waves as on the earth. Their boat was shipwrecked off Gaul, but carried by the wings of the angels on the crest of the waves and on the white foam of the bottomless and unlimited sea, they were deposited on the shore in a ray of bright light.

Mary Magdalene did not remain with them. She did not feel worthy to bear the pain of this mother who had lost the divine son. She did not feel worthy to expose her pain as a wife, a lover, a sister, the double, the feminine of the savior. She walked barefoot for forty days and forty nights. She walked to the point of transforming the soles of her feet into a stone of skin, she let her hair grow to the point of covering the nakedness of her body, she allowed her nails to break. Her eyes burnt. She knew that the mysteries of the world appear only to those who deny their human form, to those who leave this shell that carries life, to those who pass on the other side of this wall of images, to those who look at the bright light right in the eyes burning their souls and becoming blind… but illuminated. Mary Magdalene had made the choice of knowledge rather than beauty, because she abhorred ignorance. She chose the path of the love of knowledge.

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Nothing on earth has been done without the will or the approval of the heavenly power. It is thus that beasts and men are born, mountains and rivers, caves and cities. In this incessant struggle between good and evil (which the divinity tolerates as a temperance of the excess of good), there are the internal struggles.

Mary Magdalene often mortified her flesh and her soul. The wounds on his skin corresponded with the bruises of her entire inner being. Her incessant migraines were one of the most convincing signs, witnessing an internal storm, a violent struggle between two paths (parallel rather than opposite). For evil is not the opposite of good, it is a lesser good. It does not destroy the already established good, it slows its progress, it curbs progress, it facilitates disorder, it delays the accomplishment of human work – that is, the work of divinity. Nothing is black or white on this earth, but the man oscillates from a dark gray to a light gray according to his choices, his aspirations, his wills, his opportunities, his attractions, his weaknesses and his proofs of power.

Nothing is bad in man, everything is bad in man: we must build.

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At times, tired of struggling between two shades of life, she lay on the ground – her long black hair served as a soft strange mattress – wondering if she’d understood everything correctly, if something wasn’t amiss somewhere? That there was a God couldn’t be denied but to believe only in God’s goodness is to reject his wholeness. One couldn’t believe in God partly, and if one were to believe in his existence wholly, one had to accept his shadow side. That there was evil as well as good in the world was the proof that there was a self behind this mortal world of ours. Two shades, two sides can only emerge from someone’s psyche. In the Genesis, it isn’t written for no reason: “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him”.

God is the sum-total of all people.

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The pain was to have no end in her lifetime because the constant migraines were nothing but the constant questions of her mind. As she understood, little by little, what God actually meant, what good and evil was, there was still something that remained as opaque to her as it was when she was just born : Time, the strangest of all the things in the world, even more mysterious than beauty, sometimes even more complex than the divine. If someone were to constantly look at the moving water from the pier, it always seemed that it was the pier that was moving and not the water, and remembering those ephemeral moments, Marie often asked herself where and what was moving : were we all floating on Time? But how could this be, for we have been taught that it is Time that moves. In the scriptures she did not believe in, it is written that reality is the water that moves on the banks of time.

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Each migraine killed Jesus’ wife. Reduced her, as one burns a candle. Day after day, her light became more fragile. Darker. Was it the price to pay for her penance? This permanent headache was there to remind her that she was a woman, not a divine one, that is to say, mortal flesh, a passing soul on the path of nothingness, a fragile spark that the least breath of wind can switch off.
How could the son of a god – god himself, and yet man – have loved a woman when he should have devoted his entire existence to the love of mankind? Was this marriage authorized by god? How is that imaginable?

Because there was a god, one day, incarnated in man, in the form of a son. This son enlightened the world, and the world extinguished him, for it could not bear the light. This son had a wife whom he called “My wife,” and the world rejected this woman because it could not bear love.

But it did not matter, it just did not matter for Mary knew that the weight of even the most unbearable love only requires the strength of two people.

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M & Mrs Hyde are the two tantric and trashy sides of a forgotten soul, with frequent Jungian mood, tiny red spot obsession, Bombay Sapphire passion, frequent insomnia, recurrent headaches, taste for Darjeeling, and fascination for words. Always travelling from East to West, and inversely.