[Author’s Note: This essay in four parts is my webinar talk given to the Ubiquity University online Chartres Community Meeting ‘Madonna Rising’ August 14th, 2020]
Mary Magdalene or Mary of Bethany Part 3
I would like to say, as a preamble to this article, that this time we are living in is a time of metamorphosis, a time of tremendous and profound change, when what was hidden is coming to light, what was lost two thousand and more years ago is being recovered and restored. We can hear the voices, silenced so long ago, returning to life. There are now many books on Mary Magdalene, published over the last 20 years or so, which show that the feminine archetype is using this channel to activate and spread its influence in the world.[1] The Christian persecutions of the past have ended, so what was lost can be restored without fear. The despicable calumny placed on Mary Magdalene has been removed and we can now understand that she was the beloved consort of Jesus and co-teacher with him in Palestine, later taking the Essene Wisdom Tradition to France. She was, in the words of Tau Malachi, the Holy Bride.[2] She may also have been, as Tricia McCannon writes in her book, Return of the Divine Sophia, “the most important single teacher, aside from Jesus, in the entire Christian movement.”[3] She was the embodiment of the Divine Feminine, the feminine counterpart to the Divine Masculine as held by Jesus. She is also the expression of the Divine Feminine within us and her growing importance reflects the activation of that archetype within our soul and within our culture.
To understand the historical and religious context for the joint sacred mission of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, we need to go back to the First Temple in Jerusalem that was built by Solomon around 1000 BC. Drawing on the researches of the Biblical scholar Margaret Barker, Betty Kovacs has revealed in her book Merchants of Light, the enormous change in Hebrew cosmology that took place in 621 BC.[4] Originally, Israel and this great Temple had an ancient, shamanic, visionary tradition where the high-priest communed with the Queen of Heaven, the Holy Spirit. But in 621 BC under a king called Josiah, a powerful group of priests called Deuteronomists took control of the Temple. They banished the ancient shamanic rituals of the High Priest and instituted their own rule. They removed everything to do with the Queen of Heaven, The Holy Spirit and Divine Wisdom. In this First Temple, the Goddess Asherah was worshipped as the consort of Yahweh and was, with Him, the co-creator of the world. The statue of the Goddess and the great Serpent representing her power to regenerate life, were removed from the Temple and destroyed. Her Sacred Groves were cut down. All images of her were smashed. The ancient shamanic rituals of the High Priest which had honoured and communed with the Queen of Heaven as Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit were banished and replaced by new rituals based on obedience to Yahweh’s Law. The making of images was forbidden. The Deuteronomists also demoted the Goddess whose title was ‘Mother of All Living’, into the human figure of Eve and created the Myth of the Fall with its message of sin, guilt, punishment, suffering, and the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden to life on earth.
The Old Testament scholar Margaret Barker writes that “The tradition of the Temple was rich and complex, but it is essential to keep in mind the massive destruction and cultural revolution at the end of the seventh century BCE and to recognize that no complete reconstruction is possible.”[5] The result was that Yahweh was left as the sole Creator God: the feminine aspect of God was exiled from God and excised from Judaism. The Divine Feminine aspect of the god-head was not only lost to Judaism, but also to Christianity which took its image of God from the Old Testament. However, it fortunately survived, first in the Essene Communities and later, in Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Alchemy.
The ancient Wisdom Tradition of the First Temple was lost to the Jews in Palestine but miraculously survived in the large Jewish community in Alexandria where many Jews fled in three waves: at the time of the Deuteronomic takeover of the First Temple in 621 BCE; secondly, in 586 BCE at the time of the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple and a final time, after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.
It is astonishing that a myth created by a powerful priesthood who eradicated the Divine Feminine from their image of God has endured for over two and a half thousand years and had a profoundly negative influence on two religions – Judaism and Christianity – as well as two civilizations. This is the unhealed wound that lies at the heart of these civilizations. It is an extraordinary and also a tragic story, whose scattered fragments are gradually being pieced together. I believe, with Betty Kovacs, that the Mission of Jesus and Mary Magdalene was to restore the lost Love-Wisdom teachings and practices of the First Temple.[6]
Garden. ‘Noli me tangere’ by Fra Angelico .
The Mary Magdalene of the hidden Wisdom tradition reveals an entirely different story from the one told in the Gospels. Having researched this subject for many years, there is no doubt in my mind that Mary Magdalene was the beloved consort of Jesus or Yeshua as he was called in Aramaic, and the Apostle to the Apostles, described in a gnostic text discovered at Nag Hammadi called the Dialogue of the Savior as ‘The woman who knew the All’ and ‘the woman whom Jesus loved’.
In all four gospels, Mary is described as present at the crucifixion of Jesus, standing with his mother and sister at the foot of the cross. However, the famous scene of the meeting of Mary and Jesus in the sepulchre garden after his resurrection is only recorded in the Gospel of John (20:1). John is also the only gospel to describe the wedding at Cana — which celebrated the wedding of Mary Magdalene and Jesus — and the raising of Lazarus, Mary’s brother. In the Jewish customs of that time, Mary Magdalene would not have been allowed access to the sepulchre, with or without other women accompanying her unless, as his wife, she had come to anoint his body for burial, as was the burial custom at that time—a custom to which Mark (16:1) testifies. This is so blindingly obvious that I am amazed the Christian religions have not recognized it, although to do so would radically undermine the given facts of Jesus’ life.
The Gospel of John gives the only description of the meeting in the sepulchre garden, saying that Mary came there alone, when it was not yet light, on the first day of the week and saw the stone taken away from the sepulchre. She ran to get the disciples and they returned with her, Peter at first not believing what she had told him and then seeing for himself that the tomb was empty. Then the disciples left Mary on her own in front of the sepulchre. She stood there weeping, then looked into the sepulchre and saw there two angels. One of them said to her, ‘Woman, why weepest thou?’ She answered, ‘Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him.’ Then she turned away and saw a man standing nearby who said to her. ‘Woman, why weepest thou?’ She, supposing him to be the gardener, said to him, ‘Sir, if thou have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary’. She turned around and, astonished, said to him, ‘Rabboni’.
Jesus said to her, ‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father, but go to my brethren, and say unto them I ascend unto my Father and your Father; and to my God and your God.’ Then Mary went back to the disciples and told them what had taken place. Later that day, when the disciples were gathered together indoors, Jesus appeared to them. We know that the disciples met a week later in Mary’s House in Bethany and that she told them, in answer to their question, the words that Yeshua had spoken to her. What she told them was rejected by Peter, always jealous of her closeness to Jesus and uncomprehending of what he taught the disciples.[7]
(To be continued)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Anne Baring
[1] The first of these books was Holy Blood, Holy Grail 1983 by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Then came Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code 2005. Both these books sold millions and brought Mary Magdalene into the awareness of the general public. There was also Bloodline of the Holy Grail 1996, The Magdalene Legacy 2005 and The Grail Enigma 2008 by Laurence Gardner. As well as these books for an interested public, there were several books about her by Margaret Starbird and the highly acclaimed The Meaning of Mary Magdalene by Cythia Bourgeault 2010. There was also the classic The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Jean-Yves Leloup 2002..
[2] Tau Malachi, St. Mary Magdalene, The Gnostic tradition of the Holy Bride, Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, Minnesota, 2006. Tau Malachi is the founder of Sophia Fellowship and the author of several books in the Gnostic tradition.
[3] McCannon, Tricia, Return of the Divine Sophia: Healing the Earth through the Lost Wisdom Teachings of Jesus, Isis, and Mary Magdalene, Bear & Co, Vermont 2015
[4] Kovacs, Betty C. Merchants of Light, The Kamlak Center, Claremont CA 2019
[5] Barker, Margaret, former President of the Society of Old Testament Studies, The Hidden Tradition of the Kingdom of God, SPCK 2007, p. 27 see also her website http://www.margaretbarker.com/
[6] Kovacs, Betty C., Merchants of Light, The Kamlak Center, Claremont CA 2019
[7] Described in both The Gospel of Mary and The Gospel of the Beloved Companion (Jehanne de Quillan)