Magdalene Metamorphosis:

Course Description

Once miscast as sinner-“prostitute” and later reborn as saint, goddess, lover, and cosmic witness, Mary Magdalene may be the most restless and shape-shifting figure in Western spiritual history.

This course charts the many afterlives of Mary Magdalene as she metamorphosizes through scripture, legend, art, heresy, and modern spiritual imagination, treating her as an archetypal force unto herself. Though honored as a central figure in the canonical Gospels, she was later misidentified and diminished by Church authority, a distortion that paradoxically opened the door for centuries of mythmaking. Her unusual intimacy with Jesus, the emergence of non-canonical texts such as The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, and the mid-twentieth-century discoveries of the Nag Hammadi Library all contributed to alternative visions of the Magdalene: visionary, teacher, priestess, initiatrix, and sacred counterpart.

We will trace how Magdalene lore flowed into medieval Europe, shaping troubadour poetry, Crusader myth, and rumors surrounding the Knights Templar, and how these stories intersected with the violent suppression of the Cathars in southern France. Was Mary Magdalene a cipher for forbidden spiritual knowledge, a vessel for suppressed feminine authority, or a figure through whom older, esoteric Egyptian traditions resurfaced under Christian guise? These questions reverberate into the present, where the Magdalene reappears in psychology, feminist theology, contemporary ritual, and popular culture—reborn again and again as healer, death-guide, queen, and threshold figure.

Structured as an overlapping quartet, these four weeks will explore the following archetypes: Mary the Sinner, Mary the Mother, Mary the Healer, and Mary the Mystic

Rather than seeking to recover a single “true” Magdalene, this course invites participants to dwell in her many incarnations—and to consider why this figure, endlessly dying and rising again, continues to act as a portal for spiritual imagination, renewal, and return."

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Classes will blend short illustrated lectures, guided discussion, and close-looking and interpretive exercises using artworks, sacred texts, folklore, and modern media. Together, we will examine how different historical moments reshaped Mary Magdalene to mirror their deepest anxieties and longings—and what those projections reveal about the cultures that produced them.

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Magdalene Metamorphosis:
Mary of Magdala as Shapeshifting
Archetype Across Time

with Teddy hamstra, ph.d.

Live-Video Jungian Psychology Seminar Series

Mondays - July 6-27

4-6pm Pacific / 7-9pm Eastern
Live via Zoom
+ Video Recording will be available

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Early bird sale pricing ends May 6

Teddy Hamstra, Ph.D.

Dr. Teddy Hamstra is an author and educator based in Austin, Texas. An English Literature & Visual Studies PhD recipient of the University of Southern California, his dissertation was entitled "Enchantment as a Form of Care: Joseph Campbell and the Power of Mysticism." He has published numerous online articles ranging from the fiction of Patricia Lockwood to the cinema of David Lynch to the music of the Mississippi Delta Blues, and is a frequent collaborator with the Back from the Borderline podcast. He works with the Joseph Campbell Foundation, and has taught online courses on mystical and mythological topics from the Eranos Conferences to Mary Magdalene.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the course, students will come away with:

• A clear understanding of Mary Magdalene’s historical, mythic, and symbolic transformations

• Tools for reading religious figures as cultural archetypes rather than fixed identities

• Insight into how suppressed or marginal figures carry enduring psycho-spiritual power

• A richer framework for thinking about resurrection, transformation, and the sacred feminine

• Finally, students will be invited to produce a creative final project based upon this archetypal, and metamorphic, approach to Mary Magdalene and their own spiritual histories and journeys.

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