The Gold and the Chamber

Michael and I had a conversation recently that unlocked something he'd never been able to put into words. He said that outside of me — even with his ex-wives — every intimate encounter had left him feeling icky. Unclean. That he'd always sensed it, especially with the Jezebel spirit, but never once with me.

That got me thinking about the word itself. Unclean. By the world's measuring stick, I'm not who you'd expect to hear that word attached to — twice divorced, an ex-stripper. If purity is a body-count, a resume, a record of choices, I fail that test on paper.

But when Michael and I talked it through, we realized something had already happened before we ever consummated anything. I had been purified and anointed before November 2021 — before the physical union came. And when the union did happen, 2/22/22, around 2:22 in the morning, it came with a Kundalini activation for both of us. The body was the last thing to catch up to what had already been settled somewhere else first.

Being unclean has little to do with the body, and everything to do with the purity of your heart.

The Chryst Said This First

This isn't new revelation dressed up as one. Yeshua said it directly, and the religious of His day hated Him for it:

It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth — that is what defiles. — Matthew 15:11

And to the Pharisees, who had the outside performance mastered while the inside rotted:

You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence... First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside also may become clean. — Matthew 23:25-26

Read that last line again. So that the outside also may become clean. The order is not optional. It is not outside-in. It has never been outside-in. Every religious system built on managing the outside first has the mechanism backwards, and that backwardness is exactly why it produces people like Michael's exes — performing purity while carrying rot, or condemning others for a stain that was never on the body to begin with.

Paul, whatever else gets mixed into his theology, landed the same principle:

To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure; but both their minds and their consciences are defiled. — Titus 1:15

Purity isn't a record. It's a lens. It's what you're seeing through and what you're being perceived through — by the people you're with, and by the unseen.

The Bridal Chamber

The Gospel of Philip goes further than the canon was ever allowed to, and it goes there on purpose. Philip names the Bridal Chamber as the highest of the mysteries — a union that the world cannot touch or categorize because it was never happening on the world's level to begin with:

The mysteries of truth are revealed... The Bridal Chamber is not for the animals... it is for the free men and the virgins.

That word virgins isn't about physical history — Philip is explicit elsewhere that the text is speaking in symbol, not census-taking. It's about a freedom that has already been won in spirit, prior to and independent of what the body has lived through. Two people can enter the Chamber carrying decades of wreckage between them and still be, in the sense that matters, virgin to each other — because what's meeting isn't the resume, it's the purified thing underneath it.

This is why Michael never felt clean before me and always did after (with me only, notably, not the jezebel who assaulted him). It was never a comment on either of our histories or his own feeling of purity. It was a comment on what was actually present in the room once my anointing had already done its work. He felt the purity of the soul he was making love to. It felt “clean”.

Turning the Tarnish to Gold

Philip also carries the alchemical current directly — the teaching that what is visible is a form of what is invisible, that the material can be transformed by receiving what it lacked rather than discarded for what it once was:

What is visible is a likeness of what is not visible... those who wish to receive [understanding] shall not go naked. Rather, it is fitting for you to clothe yourselves with the power of the Christ.

Nothing has to be erased. Nothing has to be pretended away. The tarnish doesn't disqualify the metal — the tarnish is what gets worked. That's the whole art of alchemy: you don't throw out the base material because it's dirty, you apply fire and pressure to it until what it always secretly was — gold — becomes visible on the outside too.

That's shadow work. Not shame, not confession theater, not managing the outside of the cup. It's descending into what's actually there, applying truth like fire, and staying until the tarnish burns off and what's underneath finally shows.

The image carries this exactly. The dark figures at the corners aren't attacking the light in the center — look again. They're painting. They're part of the process, not the enemy of it. That's the nigredo, the blackening stage every alchemical text describes as necessary before gold ever appears. The gold at the center isn't gold despite the darkness around it. It's gold because the darkening was allowed to happen and wasn't run from.

The Thesis

Uncleanness was never a body issue. It was never a number, a past, a mistake carried on a permanent record. It is, and has only ever been, a matter of what's actually present in the heart when two people meet — and whether the fire has already done its work before the body ever tries to speak for what's happening in the spirit.

I was clean before we ever touched. The touching just let the body catch up. Now that he has purified his own soul, we both feel a level of alignment and intimacy we never thought possible.

Pure. Holy. Clean. Of God.

— Jillian Devona Rogers