2002 Update. 

To become educated about how our times are changing, right now, for a group of religiously and horrifically oppressed women, check out the RAWA site. You can also find out how to help our sisters in Afghanistan survive aftermath of the recent earthquakes decimation of what little was left after 30 years of war by visiting the site of the Afghan Women's Mission

The longest journey begins with one click.

EARLY Christianity has always held a fascination for me.  Codification and charisma have long been at war.  Before that war broke out, before the chasm between gnosticism and patriarchial Christianity opened  and hardened into a nearly untraversable gulf, there was a cultish judaic movement focused on love, acceptance and equality between the classes and the sexes, between the living and the dead.  To attract so many women, so many slaves, it must have spoken clearly and to the heart without threats of damnation.  Underclasses, women, the inferm, and slaves are used to being threatened, I do not believe they would be motivated by threats.  I am fascinated by what the early church was really like, how it inspired, and how it was subverted.  I believe it must have been inspiring and quite different from what we know -- today's churches, overall, seem to be medieval constructs.  I personally feel we need to draw from all we know of what shaped and inspired our foremothers and fathers so that we can add to amend the wisdom of the ages... we need to draw upon all the wisdom we can.  So this page was created to house my musings.
 
 

I whole heartedly encourage you to check out: The Role of Woman in the Church by Frank Daniels for a discussion of the role of women through time in the Christian Church.
 
 

http://www.umilta.net/vangelo.html  Excellent discussion of women in the Gospels.  But even this site makes the assumption that the conversion of the Sinning Woman speaks of Mary Magdalen.  Yet no where is this stated.  I would love to hear more about sources for this assumption if you know of them.

And of course there is the Gospel of Mary.   And mid-20th Century archaeological discoveries give a very different picture of the early church than Acts would suggest.
 

Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the (Father's) domain]."  From the gospel of Thomas.

The gnosticism of the early church should not be confused with contemporary Gnosticism.  The Gnostic Church of today has undergone 2000 years of change just as has papist derived Christianity.

The linkage of women and ritual in paleolithic european belief systems is possibly best known through the presumed fertility fetish images known as "venus figures."

These figurines are widely distributed throughout Eurasia and suggest a widely held shared value.  What that value was is open to interpretation.
 
 

A bit "out there" but a still quite interesting piece written by a woman who "channels" Jesus.   Most of the information the author references in this work appears to be distilled from relatively well established information (primarily archaeological) about the early first millennium Christian churches.
 

Hadewijch. The Complete Works. Trans. Columbia Hart, Preface Paul Mommaers. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.

Harding, Wendy. 'Body into Text: The Book of Margery Kempe'. InFeminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature. Ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Pp. 168-187.