The Gospel of Eros: Mary Magdalene, Madonna, and Erotica
How many of us have been starved of our own desires, too scared to name what keeps us hooked?
'I hate when they call me frigid' my cousin spits, and it cuts like glass because I know that sting too well. When ‘they’ called me frigid, I didn’t fight back. I folded. Quiet. Small. I let the word crawl under my skin and settle there, freezing me in place. My body went stiff, coldness creeping through me, and every primal longing blurred into static, like a dead TV channel.
Isn’t it wild how a single word can pull you back into tight dresses that suffocated our ribs, into the silence that choked our voices before we knew how to scream? The shame didn’t just disappear. It seeped in. Smeared all over our innocence. Grew roots. Twisted itself into how I move, how I love, how I rarely ever ask for what I need. We carry it. All of us. This slow, suffocating inheritance that locks us into prisons of our own making. And now, in my 30s, I’m here to carve out a whole new declaration. But first, I feel compelled to dust off the old VHS tapes and turn it all into paper dust. Every inch of my body I abandoned to please someone else. Every part of me that trembles at the brutal force of my own carnal ostracisation. My libido. My thirst. My lust.
Your fear is where your erotic revolution begins. Strip tease your way across the bridge.
Music has always been my high priestess, dragging me to the hour of confession. Our ancestors didn’t dance for show. They jived to survive the colonial subjugation, to summon spirit, to shake loose the chains of the mortal world. Fire. Drum. Sweat. That’s the truth some of us have forgotten. That’s a power we buried. Night life is spiritual atonement.
And me? I recently I strangely remembered it in the glow of a YouTube video. Madonna’s "Justify My Love" And it cracked me open. I couldn’t look away. It roared through me, shattering the dull noise of my daily bullshit. For the first time in too long, I felt alive. Electric. My womb pulsed like a war drum, like something ancient waking up. And as an energy healer, I could sense it.
‘Tell me your fears
Are you scared?
Tell me your stories
I'm not afraid of who you are’ - Madonna *Justify my love*
At first, I didn’t understand why it struck such a deep chord. I mean, it’s just a music video, right? But this wasn’t just me simply being seduced by a piece of visual art. It was a visceral sensation, an energy coursing through me like a lover unveiling the mysteries of sacred erotic initiation. It felt ancient. Primal. Sacred. In that moment it hit me. Madonna wasn’t just performing. She was channeling. It was vampy, with Eros at the helm, and maybe it was even Mary Magdalene herself. The biblical icon of the ‘whore’ resurrected.
Mary Magdalene. I’m a lover of theology and you may not know her name beyond the biblical smear campaigns, but she is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented figures in religious teachings. Often described in biblical texts as a "whore" (a label feminist historians and spiritual girlies now rightly challenge) she was a close companion of Jesus, and even spoken of as his lover and tantric consort. Her role as a spiritual leader and confidante was marginalised, twisted, and erased by patriarchal narratives over time. But beyond those ancient texts, she embodies a much larger truth: a woman of power, sexuality, and wisdom. With all her lore combined, she is the patron saint of the exiled, the erased, and the rebellious.
But here is where the connection *really* clicked for me. Like Mary Magdalene, Madonna’s ‘Erotica’ era mirrors this legacy of challenging societal norms, reclaiming the sacredness of the erotic, and creating space for women to own their bodies and inner dragon. "Justify My Love" wasn’t just a music video…it was a ritual. A spell. Born from the album Erotica in 1992, Madonna’s era of shadow and sweat, it was released during the AIDS crisis. When death was no longer an abstract nightmare but knocking on every door, stealing lovers and friends in silence. Grief was the air they breathed. And from that grief, 'Erotica' became the offering. An album pulsing with sex, life, death, and resurrection. This wasn’t cheap pop for the masses. It was a love letter to free all the girls and femmes with bruised knees, kneeling to virtuous and performative femininity. A middle finger to repression.
Erotica is the love child of death. Because that’s what Eros is. Not just sex, not just desire, but the feral part of us wild and immune to domestication - where our senses shit on all the lies our minds tell us. Eros reminds us that to live is to be constantly flirting with death. And death, in its ruthless way, wakes us the fuck up. When the ground crumbles beneath us and the ones we love are ripped away, we feel that primal instinct to fight, to somehow stay alive. To burn. To create. To fuck. To scream. Erotica is that edge, where passion and grief collide, sharpening us into something immortal.
But how do we reconcile Madonna’s role as both provocateur and flawed icon? She’s messy AF, there was one particular interview she did in the 90’s that just makes my skin itch with dust mites. Madonna’s work was not without sin, and her artistic integrity often blurred the line between homage and exploitation. And yet, she *still* detonated conservative America, forcing conversations about sexuality, power, and identity into mainstream viewing even as those same conversations revealed the complexities of her character.
Erotic dictatorship is spiritual ignorance.
My gosh, this world feels fractured like chariots and Trojan horses waiting to charge through our streets. We’re on the brink of something colossal, can you sense it too? And in that split, there’s also an erotic charge humming beneath everything, a pull towards a revelation. Like a lover you know will baptise you in your own filth, yet you’ve been craving it for centuries, too afraid to admit it.
That’s the energy of now. Mary Magdalene doesn’t ask you to rise above it. She drags you down into it. Into the dirt, into the sweat, into the truth of your body. She is the rhythm in your hips when you dance alone in the dark. She is the scream caught in your throat.
The body isn’t a cage. It’s a temple. A weapon. A prayer. She teaches us to stop rejecting it, so we can beg for it without that sick feeling about our own needs for pleasure and survival. Madonna didn’t just provoke to harvest attention. She reshaped the cultural boundaries, giving the sacred erotic a place in daily life. And with power shifting back toward ultra-conservative Christian ideals, our right to simply exist in public is once again being churned into patriarchal butter. We desperately need voices that refuse to perform to keep the gatekeepers smiling. She stood on the frontlines of judgment, letting her art burn away the bullshit.
As an activist for women’s and LGBTQIA+ rights, Madonna tore apart the male gaze and laid bare the truths society tried to shy away from. And in "Justify My Love" the body becomes holy. Every movement, every glance, every forbidden touch. It was worship. Those dancers didn’t just move, they prayed with their bodies. And I watched, starving for that kind of freedom. Desire in "Justify My Love" isn’t just sex it’s initiation. A gateway. A meeting of spirit and flesh.
So I ask: Who are the artists, activists, and spiritual leaders who carry this erotic fire within them? The poets, dancers, and dreamers building sanctuaries out of their art who refuse to be domesticated? They are revolutionary forces standing firm, letting Eros guide us with passion and instinct rather than the heavy, rigid grip of willpower.
The new manifesto is clear: tear down the walls that divide the sacred and the sensual. Scatter reminders everywhere. Through your work, your body, your life - that to be alive in this historic dawning hour is to embody a wildfire, a sanctuary, and a storm.