Helen Martineau's Blog

I came across a website by women fed up with the patriarchal church and its centuries-long subjugation of the feminine. I liked their section exploring the importance of women in early Christianity and thought they might like to know about my novel  Marriages of the Magdalene.  S o I made contact. A message came back. ‘Sorry to be blunt when you have been so complimentary, but we couldn’t possibly have anything in common or continue to communicate. It appears to us that you are a Gnostic!’ (they had looked over my website). There was no explanation. Mystified I was motivated to find possible reasons for the rebuff. After all, Gnosticism didn’t  reject the feminine spirit or her human counterpart. Wisdom,  Sophia  in Greek was very much part of it, and Mary Magdalene was often cast as a guide to wisdom. A look at Gnostic origins Gnostic comes from  gnosis,  the  Greek word for knowledge, the kind of knowledge that enables insight into spiri...

Melbourne, my home, is not the only city that has a month-long Comedy Festival. Comedy has always been popular.  It  can be cruel and crass, but good comedy  tweaks reality and tickles the mind and emotions. When we laugh, momentarily we become free as a child, released from what life has thrown at us, from the crises that create personal havoc to the mess the world is in. . Especially through the irony of self-reflective parody and satire we open up and can see the world from a new angle. This doesn’t happen when we choose to enter a comfortable bubble and associate only with those who are like us. Or when we protest until we boil over into anger that only makes everything worse. Or we sink into existential gloom. Better then to throw up our hands and turn despair into comedy – that is, if we can. I have just re-read George Orwell’s famous and bitterly satirical novel 1984, and was shocked agai...