A 19th century French researcher, Édouard Schuré, in his work The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions, first published in 1889, writes: "Women have a special place among Jesus' followers….Christ is the restorer and liberator of women, whatever Saint Paul and the Church Fathers may have said….Christ elevates her by restoring her mission of love and divination.

 The woman initiate represents the soul in mankind….that is, the power of Intuition, the loving and seeing faculty.

The turbulent Mary Magdalene….became his most ardent disciple. It was she, according to Saint John, who first saw the divine teacher, the spiritual Christ, risen from his tomb. Legend has insisted in seeing in this ardent and believing woman Jesus' greatest worshipper, the initiate of the heart, and legend is not mistaken, for her story represents the entire regeneration of woman as desired by the Christ."

The spiritual role of women was also recognised in the pre-Christian Druid tradition. According to the Welsh bard, Edward Jones:

"Beside the Druids, the Britons had Druidesses, who assisted in the offices of religion, and shared in the honours and emoluments of the priesthood. The Druidesses of Gaul and Britain are said to have been divided into three ranks, or classes."

(The Bardic Museum of Primitive British Literature, 1802). The Rev. Richard Smiddy also writes:

 "It appears that females were, at one time, admitted to the order or fraternity of the Druids, and that they were appointed to fill certain offices in connexion with the oracles or suil-bheil. Hence, the name of sibyl or sibylla, of the Latins. A female of this class was called a bean-draoi, that is, 'a woman Druid'; and by the name was meant a priestess, prophetess, or enchantress….We have already seen that the suil-beal, that is, the sibyl, or oracle, was an institution of the Druids….It is stated that some of these oracles, or sibyls, uttered matters in connexion with the life of the future Redeemer."

(An Essay on the Druids, the Ancient Churches and the Round Towers of Ireland, 1871).

 Interestingly, Dr. John A. Goodchild notes:

 "I have been working hard….at various old puzzles relating to the Mother-Church at Glaston….I am pretty clear of this, that from the establishment of that Church before the middle of the 1st century, a woman, always a Princess of the Royal Blood, was its Supreme Head and Nursing Mother, until she laid down her authority about the middle of the 6th century at an Irish Church Congress held under the presidency of Comgal of Bangor."

(Ref. The Avalonians by Patrick Benham, 1993)

The canonical gospels of the New Testament record the presence of a number of women disciples around Jesus, especially Mary Magdalene.

Could there have been a female apostolic succession which ostensibly has gone unrecorded in the official history books?  

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