The Flowering Wand

It is not often that a book such as this comes along. Reading it one is forced to take a deep breath and sit back and utter a sign of relaxation and say out loud, “Thank God that somebody has finally written this book”. It is of course, the book we have all been thinking about. It is there in the collective Zeitgeist. It is there in the deep minds of all those men and women who feel that masculinity doesn’t need to be so toxic. It is there in all men and women of depth and learning who feel that the male archetype can and must be re-claimed for the forces of light and goodness in the struggles for narrative dominance that are going on all over this planet at present.

This book is like an encyclopaedic manual for the psychotherapeutic healing of the wounded male. Read it, give it to your boyfriend or husband or brother. Give it your father, or your son. I think it is one of the most important books in print at the moment. Why? Because there are a lot of wounded men out there who think that to reassert their masculinity as having value requires them to be aggressively anti-woke, aggressively heterosexual, misogynistic against feminism and the women’s movement, and supporters of Trump and Putin because “they get things done”. At the extremes of this toxicity, you have the Proud Boys and their equivalents in male bonding cults who feel that to be a true man involves being ready to sacrifice one’s life in violent struggle for “the cause.” If you know anyone like this, please give them this book. It explains that actually the true male heroes of mythology, theology and history give themselves in sacrifice to the goddess out of love and in the cause of peace, not to oppress women but to liberate them. Not to dominate women or terrorise them but to let them get free from the monsters that have captured them in a high castle or a hidden cave.

This is a courageous book because Sophie Strand has gone back to the depths of mythology to find the sacred masculine and lo and behold, she finds it in nature. She finds it in Osiris as the original Green Man. She finds it in Dionysus, the God of the vine and the wild vegetation. She finds it in Tristan who finally escapes the trauma of the hero’s journey. She finds it in wild David, the shepherd boy who became king and danced before the Lord. She finds it in Merlin the Druid seer who was so shocked by the wars caused by human stupidity that he lived alone in the woods for years learning from the trees, the plants and the animals. She finds it in Parsifal who finds the Grail through his own humility and dedication. She finds it in Orpheus whose song inspired the sacred Orphic traditions of antiquity and who was willing to face death itself in the name of love.

She also challenges us to have another look at the Devil archetype and says maybe it’s actually Dionysus in disguise and that instead of being an evil force, the Devil simply represents the inner wildness within our untamed souls. But the secret she gives away is that the untamed wildness is not evil at all. That was the terrified dream of urban city dwellers who were afraid of the dark woods and of themselves and their inner emptiness. For those who face their shadow, Sophie Strand reveals, Dionysus rewilds even the Devil as the best friend of God. Perhaps the most astonishing achievement of this book is that she situates Jesus’ work in this lineage of the outcast, the forsaken, the marginalised, the one who is not quite welcome in the city.

To Sophie Strand, The Gnostic Jesus is the true king who rewilds the wounded masculine and re-enacts the myth of the authentic resurrection that belongs to every man. I have some questions however: is this book poetry or is it prose? Is it a sacred text or is it a medical pharmacopoeia? Is it a piece of comparative religious studies? Perhaps it is all these and my question actually points to its strengths. Sophie is also interested in understanding how women can deal with or facilitate a rewilding of the healed masculine. Instead of aiding and abetting the toxicity of our modern cyber warlords and their Russist or Trumpist warriors, the enlightened feminine archetype is found for Sophie in the figure of Mary Magdalene who stands beside Jesus throughout his mission and until very recently was both ignored and trivialised.

She wants us correctly to look at Jesus and Mary Magdalene as a joint-peace mission. I have been fortunate to meet Sophie Strand online when she spoke at the Mary Magdalene Study Association’s conference annual conference in 2022 and 2024, which I chair from here in France. Sophie is definitely a brilliant young scholar who thinks like the guardian of a seed bank, and who in her various publications is planting in our minds many future insights and inspirations. This book will certainly appeal to many members of the Scientific and Medical Network, and readers of this Journal, for as I said in the beginning, it is precisely one of the books we have all been thinking about, and perhaps have collectively thought it into being. Now that’s a topic for another occasion – “Telepathy and the Art of Literary Creation.”