The Sacred Feminine in Gnosis

In 1945 an Egyptian farmer unearthed a sealed jar. Inside it was the half of the Gospel's voice that had gone missing.

In the beginning, according to the book of Proverbs, there was a woman laughing beside God. Her name was Wisdom, and she declares that she was there before the mountains, before the sea, before the first day. In Hebrew the word for Spirit is feminine - and the earliest Syriac-speaking Christians sang hymns calling the Holy Spirit she.

Then three languages carried that name across, and it changed gender on the way.

This book follows what was lost in that crossing. Eighteen chapters move through Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon, the Apocryphon of John, the Hypostasis of the Archons, the Gospel of Philip, Trimorphic Protennoia and the Gospel of Mary - the small mutilated text in which Mary Magdalene consoles terrified apostles, is challenged by Peter, and is defended with a sentence that has hung in the air for seventeen centuries: if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you to reject her?

You will find out why the penitent Magdalene of the museums appears in none of the four Gospels, and which homily of the year 591 invented her. Why Junia, called an apostle by Paul, was printed as a man for seven hundred years. And why the most mistranslated line in the New Testament does not say "touch me not".

What this book does not do

• It accuses no church and invents no conspiracy.
• It uses no document of doubtful provenance, even where one would help the argument.
• It does not fill the gaps in the papyri: where the manuscript is broken, it shows you the hole.
• It does not half-face the difficult texts - including the ones that give offence.

Every chapter separates historical fact from scholarly hypothesis and from symbolic reading. Every chapter ends with a meditation, a prayer, and a question.

And in the end the discovery is not about anyone being superior. It is about Unity - the moment when the masculine and the feminine stop competing and go back to reflecting the same image together.

It was still dark when she went out.