In the 1330’s a tract was published called Schwester Katrei (Sister Catherine), which states “God is the Universal Mother”. It contains ideas of Mary Magdalene that are only otherwise found in the Nag Hammadi Gospels, and there’s no coincidence that it shows the Cathars and Troubadour influence of the Languedoc. It also links the Magdalene with the Minne – the Lady-love of the minnesingers, who, along with the troubadours, had devotion and reverence for the Feminine Principle and their poems were a mixture of spirituality and carnality thinly veiling allusions to sacred sexuality.

Sacred sexuality was the highest sacrament and bestowed access to the divine. Alchemical texts were full of sexual imagery because the secret most alchemists pursued was an erotic one, and the texts were confusing and elaborate to throw off the uninitiated. At its deepest level, alchemy was concerned with personal, spiritual and sexual transformation, with the secrets and techniques for achieving the ‘Great Work’. Alchemy was the conquest of love, an “alloy” of the erotic and spiritual.

-- Picknett, Lynn and Clive Prince, The Templar Revelation, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1998. Pages 94-95, 151-153, 156.