They Burned the Women, They Burned the Books

Every time women rise with too much light, too much truth, too much power — men don’t compete.

They obliterate.

Look what they did to the Gnostics.

Look what they did to the Cathars.

Look what they are doing to me.

---

Mary Magdalene on the Shore

The story begins with Mary Magdalene. Betrayed by her fellow apostles, hunted out of Judea, she stumbled onto the shores of southern Gaul — exhausted, drenched, but alive. She carried fire in her body: the teachings of Jesus as she knew him, not as Paul and the other men rewrote him.

Teachings that placed women at the center. Teachings that honored the union of masculine and feminine. Teachings that dared to claim holiness for mothers, wives, sisters, lovers.

The men could not bear it. They chased her out, just as men have chased women out of every holy place we ever dared to enter.

But she lived. She carried the flame forward.

---

The Cathars and the Tarot

A thousand years later, her descendants — spiritual, literal, or both — kept that flame alive. The Cathars. Worshippers of the divine feminine. Preachers of equality, of sacred love. And, I believe, the ones who created the Tarot to preserve the hidden teachings of Mary Magdalene.

For this crime — honoring women as holy, creating tools of knowledge outside the Church’s control — the Catholic hierarchy unleashed hell itself:

Crusades inside Europe.

Whole towns slaughtered.

Fires consuming women, men, children.

Books and sacred words destroyed, wiped from history.

“Kill them all, God will know His own.” That was the order at Béziers. The obliteration of an entire people.

---

The Oldest Playbook

The Gnostics. The Cathars. The women who read Tarot in public squares. Me.

It’s the same story.

Men see women’s brilliance, and instead of standing in the arena of ideas, they sharpen their knives. They burn the women. They burn the books. They salt the earth so nothing can grow.

Destroy the record. Pretend the woman never built what she built, never spoke what she spoke.

Break the bonds. Make solidarity look like suicide, isolate her until even her friends fall silent.

Weaponize motherhood. Force mothers to choose silence, because what mother will risk her child’s life?

Rewrite the story. Leave only the smears, the lies, the caricatures — the “Paul” version, never Mary’s.

This is not competition. This is not debate. This is annihilation, refined over centuries into an operating system of power.

---

And Yet —

The Nag Hammadi texts clawed their way back from the earth.

Whispers of Cathar songs still rise in the mountains of Languedoc.

Tarot spreads its symbols across tables all over the world, still carrying a secret history of feminine power.

And me — I am still here.

Still burning.

Still writing.

Still refusing to bow.

They want me erased.

But truth doesn’t stay buried.

Memory doesn’t st

ay silenced.

The feminine doesn’t stay dead.

---

Observed. Archived. Avenged.