Mary Magdalene, the Greatest Story Never Told
guest article by Margaret Starbird

In the wake of Dan Brown’s record-breaking bestseller The Da Vinci Code, some insisted its plot was only fiction, while others were asking, “What remains when the fiction is stripped away from The Da Vinci Code?”

What remains, I believe, is the firm conviction of the earliest Christians that Jesus embodied the archetypal Sacred Bridegroom from the ancient mythologies of the Near East and that Mary Magdalene was his spouse. This belief appears at the core of the Gospels and was later embellished by authors of the Gnostic texts discovered in Egypt which unabashedly proclaim Mary Magdalene as beloved disciple and intimate companion, even “consort,” of Jesus.

Close examination of the New Testament confirms that Jesus honored, embraced, and elevated the status of the Feminine during his short ministry. The Gospels delight us with stories about women: one widow gives alms in spite of her own poverty, another sweeps her house searching for a lost coin. An adulteress is rescued from stoning, a woman declared “unclean” is healed of the flux, and the daughter of Jairus is raised from the dead. Mary, the sister of Lazarus, sitting at the feet of Jesus has “chosen the better part,” while Martha is worried about preparations for dinner. Courageous women stand near the cross mourning the crucified Lord, while his male apostles apparently cower in hiding. And faithful women approach the tomb in the dawn of Easter morning.

These narratives are remarkable for their time, a period when wives were treated like chattel and divorced with awesome ease, when women were denied the right to bear witness in court. In fact, the earliest Christian community, relying on radical teachings of Jesus, was essentially egalitarian and honored women in ways unprecedented in their time. In his epistles, Paul mentions various Christian women leaders and mentions that the brothers of Jesus and the other apostles travel around with their “sister-wives” (1 Cor 9:5). From this inadvertent statement we glean that the earliest Christians traveled as missionary couples, not as pairs of men as we have been inclined to believe.

There is no statement anywhere in the New Testament that Jesus was celibate, and in Judaism, the norm was marriage. They had no word for bachelor. I believe that one important aspect of the ministry of Jesus was the intent to re-establish the partnership paradigm based on the ancient model of “Sacred Marriage.” My personal conviction that Jesus was married and that he and his wife modeled the hieros gamos as the “archetypal divine couple” rests on the Passion narrative in the canonical Gospels, beginning with the anointing of Jesus by a woman, an event followed by his torture, death, and resurrection. This powerful sequence of events closely parallels that of numerous ancient mythologies and liturgies of pagan “bridegroom gods” similarly sacrificed and resurrected.

As Jesus was reclining at the banquet table in the town of Bethany, a woman carrying an alabaster jar of precious ointment approached him. She broke the jar open and anointed Jesus with its contents, precious unguent of nard. Then, as her tears fell on his feet, she dried them with her hair. This passionate story was so poignant that it survived for a generation in oral tradition and is one of only four stories included in all four of the Gospels eventually declared canonical.

What was it about the story of this anointing by a woman that was so powerful, so unforgettable? Jesus himself proclaimed that wherever this story was told, it would be told “in memory of her.” And yet, many people do not even remember her name!

Over the years, the unnamed woman became identified with Mary Magdalene and later was branded a prostitute, a slander which may have derived from the association of the anointing with pagan rites in which the anointing of the sacred King, once the prerogative of his royal bride, was later performed by a hierodule or “sacred prostitute.” In Neolithic times, the anointing was associates with nuptial rites in cults celebrating the “Sacrificed Bridegroom.” In the liturgical sequence, the Bride and Bridegroom were typically united in marriage amid widespread rejoicing and revelry. Later the Bridegroom was tortured, mutilated, executed, and entombed. Then, usually after a liturgical pause of three days, the Bride returned to the tomb and found her Beloved resurrected in the garden, a rite celebrated throughout the Near East in the cults of Tammuz/Ishtar, Osiris/Isis, Baal/Astarte, and Adonis/Venus.

The entire Hellenized Roman Empire was conversant with this liturgical sequence so obviously repeated in the Gospel stories. The word Christos means, literally, “the anointed one.” John’s Gospel states in two places (11:2 and 12:3) that the woman who anointed Jesus was the sister of Lazarus, and it is this same Mary who was conflated with the woman called “the Magdalene” in the early Church. Clearly it was THIS Mary—“the Magdalene”—who performed the final stage of the ancient ritual, returning with her women companions to the tomb to mourn the death of the “Sacrificed Bridegroom” and rejoicing to find him resurrected in the garden, where she embraces and clings to him (John 20). The Gospels deliberately frame her as “Bride” in rites already familiar to the citizens of the empire.

Later legends tell that Mary Magdalene brings the Holy Grail to the shores of Gaul, arriving in about 42 A.D. with her friends and family in a boat with no oars, fleeing persecution in Judea. With them is a pre-adolescent child, between the ages of nine and twelve whose name Sarah means “Princess” in Hebrew, yet legend declares that she is a servant. Was she perhaps, like Cinderella, really a princess from a faraway land? This legend lies at the core of the bloodline heresy that cannot be proven with facts, but echoes poignantly throughout medieval European folklore and art—the myth that a royal child descended from Jesus and Mary Magdalene survived the Crucifixion. Like Isis, who bore a child to Osiris after his death, Magdalene may have carried the royal seed. The “lost princess” belongs in the realm of legend, a story too dangerous to be told as fact, but one that contrives to confirm the marriage of the “Christ-couple” at the heart of the Christian mythology.

Stained glass window from the Kilmore (1906), Church of Saint Mary at Dervaig, on the Isle of Mull (off the coast of Scotland) shows Jesus and Mary of Bethany: “Mary has chosen the better part and it shall not be taken from her.” Throughout Church history, Mary has been the symbol for the “Bride”—the church community and the people of God, faithful to Christ and his beloved.

More from Margaret Starbird:

,©2007-2009 rlcresearch.com, all rights reserved, Article copyright Margaret Starbird, reproduced here with kind permission

Gabriel Knight is a computer game hero created by Jane Jensen, whose third and last adventure takes place in and around Rennes-le-Château. It is a classic 3D point-and-click adventure. The game was launched in 1999 and looks a little dated now. Still, it is quite a treat to be able to walk around in 3D in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, the Tour Magdala and the Villa Bethania. Although the village in the game isn’t an exact replica of the real thing, it’s clear the makers did their best to capture some of the feel.

Unfortunately the game is no longer for sale but it can be downloaded here.

Screenshots from the Game

[View with PicLens]

12►

Links

Gabriel Knight 4 Campaign
Gabriel Knight III on Wikipedia

Video Trailer of the Game

,©2007-2009 rlcresearch.com, all rights reserved

Was the body of Christ laid to rest in Southern France?

Image on a Reliquary kept in la Sainte-Baume (South of France). The boat carrying Mary Magdelene into Southern France is also carrying a mummified body facing Mary mother of Jesus

It is the the central question of the recent book La Tombe Perdue (The Lost Tomb) by French author and researcher Christian Doumergue.

Three days after its interment, the body of Jesus disappeared from the Tomb in which it had been laid to rest. While the church claims Jesus was raised from the dead, already during the first centuries, this was subject to heavy debate amongst many Christians and Gnostics who disputed the idea. Serious historians could never reconcile with the idea in the first place.

So what really happened then?

In the Gospel of John, Mary Magdalene suggests that the body of Jesus is moved. She talks to man, she believes to be a gardener and asks him where he moved the body. Later in the Gospel, John tells us that this gardener is none other than Jesus himself. Today it is known for fact that sections of the Gospels were ‘tuned’ to be in line with the dogma of the physical resurrection. There are several indications that he passage about the gardener is one of those.

Now who was this gardener and why would Mary Magdalene ask him where he moved the body of Jesus? Perhaps coincidentally, some Jewish traditions do speak of a gardener who would have stolen the body of the Christ. They have in fact been in existence since the first centuries of Christianity. Reconciling these traditions with the original Gospel of John, all of a sudden it appears to become an actual possibility that Mary Magdalene spoke to the man who took the actual body of the actual Christ out of its tomb. She even appears to have found it back.

So what became of the body of Jesus then? Several traditions claim Mary Magdalene left Jerusalem. Many of them tell us she travelled to the South of France. Some lesser known ones claim that she went to Rome first to ask the Emperor Tiberius to make amends for the death of Jesus. This suggestion is less outrageous than it might seem. Mary Magdalene would have had access to the Emperor through Claudia Procula, Pontius Pilate’s wife whom she knew and who was a relative of Tiberius. The name Claudia indicates membership of the important Claudii family, the family of the Emperor himself.

According to a IVth century apocryphical text, Mary Magdalene told Tibere she wanted to speak to him about the inequitable death of Jesus. The response of the Emperor maybe in an ancient manuscript, kept in the French National Library in Paris. The text is called ‘The Avenging of the Saviour’ and has been dated back to the Carolingian period, some time between 700 and 720 AD.

In the manuscript, a woman by name of Veronica shows up to meet the Emperor Tiberius. A further study of the text uncovers that Veronica is another name for Mary Magdalene. In ‘The Avenging of the Saviour’, Veronica / Mary Magdalene converts the Emperor Tiberius to become a Christian. The text continues to claim that, after his meeting with the Magdalene, he has an underground sanctuary constructed in the South of France “on behalf of” Christ.

Was this underground sanctuary intended to become Jesus’ grave as an atonement for his death as Mary Magdalene requested? You would get the impression from how it is described in the manuscript. Moreover, some of the traditions about Mary Magdalene coming to France have her travelling in the company of mummified body

What is most extraordinary about ‘The Avenging of the Saviour’ is the precision by which it gives the location of the underground chamber. It tells us Tiberius’ construction was built beneath the crossing of two streams: the Hérault and the Tincta (today the Thongue). The streams cross close to the village of St. Thibery, an obvious reminder to the Emperor’s name Tiberius (Tibere in French). No doubt the village was named after the relics of a certain St. Tibere. The locals will tell you St. Tiber was a Roman saint. As happens often, perhaps this figure served as the memory placeholder for an event in which the Roman Emperor bestowed a great favour on the Christians in this area.

In Roman times, the village of St. Thibery was called Cessero. A Roman inscription found near the village commemorates works by Tiberius.

Another ancient document kept in the French National Library states that a there was an underground chamber in St. Thibery which is blocked today. Documents in the Departmental Archive of the Hérault region tell us when it was blocked and how.

Today, the entrance lies beneath several metres of rubble. Further investigations will no doubt shed light on what really took place in St. Thibery almost 2.000 years ago. There seems a distinct possibility it once hosted the first Tomb of Jesus in the South of France. The first indeed, as an apocryphical text by Claudia Procula suggest that the body was again moved.

Christian Doumergue

Christian Doumergue was born in 1976. He has a Masters degree in Archeology and a post-graduate diploma in Comparative Literature. He is the author of several books on Rennes-le-Château, Mary Magdelene and Gnosticism.

This is a summary of the first part of Christian Doumergue’s book La Tombe Perdue published by Pardes in 2008. There is no English translation available at this the moment. ISBN 978-286714-414-1

,©2007-2009 rlcresearch.com, all rights reserved. The excerpt is displayed here with kind authorization of the author

The Grail. Between 1190 and 1240, it formed the central theme of a series of literary works that spoke of, and appealed to, a new social class, that of the knights and warriors and the adventures they encountered on their travels. In recent decades, it unleashed Indiana Jones on one of his death-defying treasure hunts and was the central ingredient of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, one of the biggest bestselling novels ever.

For Richard Barber, in The Holy Grail: The History of a legend, “it is, in all its forms, a construct of the creative imagination”. However, for dozens of other authors, the Grail is not a literary invention, but a veritable treasure, out there, somewhere. Unfortunately, in general, studies trying to identify and trace the physical Grail have taken on flights of fancy. The Grail has been linked with countries from the Middle East to America, as well as with the persecuted Cathars and even extra-terrestrial beings. It has been labelled a code word for the Ark of the Covenant, after the Templars allegedly transported it from the Middle East to a new hiding place in France. Today, “what is the Grail?” is no longer asked and instead, we are repeatedly told – often by these authors seeking the Grail – that we should speak about “a Grail” – which they of course have found. The Grail, today, can be anything to anyone, and is no longer – if it ever was – a precise object, but a word that should be written in lower case – grail: a precious object, or an ambition that one tries to attain, often with great difficulty.

The first person to write on the Grail was Chrétien de Troyes, in le Conte du Graal (The Story of the Grail), between 1180 and 1191. Interestingly, Chrétien refers to his object not as “the Grail”, but as “un graal”, “a grail”, suggesting the word was used, in its earliest literary context, as a common noun – and that there were indeed more than one.

The basic Grail account opens with a young man, Perceval, encountering knights and realising he wants to be one. Despite his mother’s objections, the boy trains for the knighthood and begins a series of travels. On one such trip, he comes across the Fisher King, who invites him to stay at his castle. While there, he witnesses a strange procession in which young men and women carry magnificent objects from one chamber to another, passing before him at each course of the meal. First comes a young man carrying a bleeding lance, then two boys carrying candelabras. Finally, a beautiful young girl emerges bearing an elaborately decorated “grail”.

For whatever reason, Chrétien de Troyes left us with an incomplete poem, numbering 9000 lines of text; he never explained what “a grail” was. Though this non-definition might be seen as evidence that in his days, everyone knew what “a grail” was, in fact, that was not the case. The appeal of his work came, in part, from the unknown object that had obviously inspired this wandering knight, an object used in a setting that was unlike anything he had ever seen. In the following years, there were a series of “continuations”, written by four, sometimes anynomous, writers, which took the total length of the “Grail account” to ca. 40,000 lines of texts. Meanwhile, others wrote prequels to the story, such as the Elucidation Prologue, which focused on the family and descent of Perceval, emphasing that the relationship between the Grail and certain bloodlines is nothing new to The Da Vinci Code.

It was, in short, the start of a literary tradition, in which the Grail was to become the central theme. With a literary existence of more than 800 years, there has thus been ample time to write on the subject – and that time has not been wasted to define and redefine the nature of the Grail. The most defining work, however, was composed almost immediately after Chrétien had finished his work, was written between 1191 and 1202, and was the work of Robert de Boron, who made “a grail” into the “Holy Grail”. In his verse romance La grant estoire dou Graal, “The Great History of the Grail”, more popularly known as Joseph d’Arimathie, the biblical character of Joseph of Arimathea acquires the chalice of the Last Supper to collect Christ’s blood upon His removal from the cross. Joseph is later thrown in prison, where Christ visits him and explains the mysteries of the blessed cup. Upon his release, Joseph gathers his in-laws and other followers and travels to the west, and founds a dynasty of Grail keepers that eventually will include Perceval. De Boron’s version has become the standard Grail account, and it is the quest for this dynasty of Grail keepers, and the object they protected, that has become an enduring Quest for the Holy Grail, which allegedly even preoccupied the leaders of Nazi Germany, and Heinrich Himmler in particular.

Though the interest of the Nazis in magical talismans like the Holy Grail and the Ark of the Covenant has almost become as mythical as the objects they chased themselves, it is nevertheless well-documented that in the 1930s, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler personally oversaw a series of quests, including that by a young SS officer, Otto Rahn, who went in search of the Grail in Southern France, near the Cathar castle of Montségur. Rahn’s two books on the subjects, including Crusade against the Grail , were used by Himmler when he visited – inspected – the region in October 1940, when Himmler was in Barcelona while Hitler was holding a conference with the newly installed Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco. Hitler believed he could persuade Franco to join the war on Germany’s side, but whereas Hitler was talking politics, Himmler specifically took in the various castles and locations Rahn had mentioned.

Montserrat Rico Góngora in The Desecrated Abbey states that Himmler visited the famous Montserrat Abbey near Barcelona, where he thought he would find the Grail which Jesus Christ was said to have used to consecrate the Last Supper. According to Góngora, Himmler was also inspired by a folk song from Catalonia, the north-eastern region in which Montserrat lies, which has a cryptic reference to a “mystical font of life” situated in the area. Hitler’s right-hand man thought that if he could lay claim to the Holy Grail, it would help Germany win the war and give him supernatural powers. Of course, the relationship between the King of the Jews and the superiority of the Aryan race seem a cumbersome match, so it might not come as a surprise that Himmler shared the outlandish belief with other leading Nazis that Jesus Christ was actually descended from Aryan stock.
Himmler left Montserrat empty-handed.

Though often linked with the cup of the Last Supper, the precise nature of the Grail is in origin undefined. Even though Chrétien de Troyes spoke of “a grail”, there is no definitive answer as to what this grail was. This has meant that the undefined Grail can be used as a deus ex machina to try and give some credibility to an author’s otherwise poor line of reasoning when setting out his theory, whether fictional or not. Dare we suggest that this also happened in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, where the Grail was imaginatively redefined as the vulva, the “V shape”, an original, though not ingenious solution to the author’s plot. It has left us with a forest of grails, in which “the Grail” can no longer be distinguished. Like Himmler on his quest for the Holy Grail, no-one who has gone in search for the true origins of the Grail, has ever been successful; it has proven to be perhaps the most arduous of Grail quests.

Still, one man, in the decades following Chrétien de Troyes’ account, took it upon himself to answer what the Grail was. Wolfram von Eschenbach is now known as the author of Parzival, the work that inspired Richard Wagner’s famous opera Parsifal, which in literary circles is often described as “the first extant work in German to have as its subject the Holy Grail”, as well as taking up a unique niche within the Grail literature, as it doesn’t fit in any of the categories the scholars have created. The reason for its unique position is that Wolfram, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not elaborate on Chrétien’s story, but expressed disdain for it, labelling it erroneous in many of its details, and stated that he would rectify these errors in Parzival. In short, Wolfram claimed the Grail was real, and he knew more about it. He claimed he knew because he had been in contact with a source, “Kyot”, from Provence, who was able to furnish him with “the truth”. Wolfram claimed that he was able to identify the real characters of the Grail story, as well as identify the true nature of the Grail: a magical stone.

We can compare Wolfram’s situation very much with the modern example of The Da Vinci Code. Upon the publication, and especially the success, of Dan Brown’s book, dozens of other novels appeared that treaded the same themes, some with more success than others. Brown’s book also saw a series of “guides”, that enhanced upon the organisations, places and people worked into the book, and debated their historical veracity, or not. Amazingly, this would lead to official statements from the Vatican, as well as a high-profile court case in which two non-fiction authors, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, co-authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, sued Brown’s publisher for copyright infringement. A series of non-fictional works, specifically on the Grail and Mary Magdalene, also saw re-editions, often with new titles that included the keyword “code” in it, and some which even used the same font and cover design that had made The Da Vinci Code stand out in the bookstalls.

Imagine the task of Wolfram von Eschenbach, who amidst this frenzy is trying to argue that Chrétien got it wrong, but that he knows the truth. It is, of course, not an easy task and it does bear some resemblance to some claims made by authors today that they “knew” the truth about Dan Brown’s novel – one of whom then adopted the pen-name of Dan Green!

In retrospect, Wolfram failed miserably; he was unable to persuade Western Europe that he had definitively answered what the Grail was. Today, most scholars even doubt the veracity of his source Kyot, believing instead that Kyot was a literary device invented by Wolfram to explain his deviations from Chrétien’s storyline. Professor of history Joseph Goering, when discussing Wolfram, thus calls his work “the most elaborate and inventive retelling of Chrétien’s story”, to add later that the book illustrates “the fecundity of imagination” of Wolfram. Nobody, it seems, believed Wolfram when he was claiming to speak the truth. Instead, he was held to be “just” another writer. Only centuries later, would he be saved from this doom, by being labelled “an oddity”, if only because he did not embrace the Christian setting that had become the standard frame of reference into which one spoke about the Grail – the Holy Grail.

Today, the Grail is largely seen as a literary invention, but this may be a serious mistake. For one, Wolfram on Eschenbach never wrote fiction; he was known for writing family histories – non-fiction. Noting that he stated that when addressing the Grail, he was correcting errors and was writing a factual account, there is an obvious blatant problem that is never addressed by any of the scholars: by all accounts, Wolfram was a non-fiction writer, who set out to write a non-fiction account about the Grail. Furthermore, Wolfram is very specific, not only identifying his source as Kyot, but stating that Kyot based the origin of the Grail on two documents. Despite such information, the experts state they have been unable to identify who Kyot was (which is, of course, their problem, not Wolfram’s), and hence they have treated Kyot as a literary invention by Wolfram, or is mentioned, without any further explanation.

In short, Wolfram’s Grail story was his rendition of Kyot’s historical detective work. One of the documents on which the Grail story is based is a family history, which was the history of Perceval, the leader of the family who came to possess the Grail. The other document is a pagan document, thought to be absent from Christian medieval Europe, containing a pagan doctrine that required an initiation… hence, a brotherhood. Hence, what the “Grail quest” set forth in this book has uncovered, is threefold. First, there is no reason to doubt that the Grail was indeed a magical stone. Second, that this stone was in the possession of the Aragon royal family that lived on the southern slopes of the Pyrenees – the general region where Rahn and Himmler explored. That this family had created a series of initiations and rites, linked with the worship of this object, and which we will refer to as the “Grail Brotherhood”. That the real Perceval, of French descent, was welcomed into this Brotherhood because of his family ties to the Aragon royal family. Third, that the Aragon royal family initiated a project, in which they hoped to transform Europe into a “Grail Kingdom”: unite it, and transform into a theocracy, in which the unifying power – object – would be the Grail itself. That their ambition failed (quite early on too), might have contributed to the problems Wolfram faced in convincing the people of Western Europe that he was nevertheless right. But right, it seems by all accounts, he was… and the Grail was – is – real.

Excerpted from the introduction of
Servants of the Grail
by Philip Coppens

published by O Books
2009
ISBN 978-1-84694-155-9

,©2007-2009 Philip Coppens, displayed here with kind permission, all rights reserved

The domain of Abbé Saunière and in fact the whole Mystery of Rennes-le-Château counts a , number of inversions and doubles. Here’s an attempt to sum them up in random order. I am open to suggestions.

• On the large Fresco on the west wall of the church it is WINTER on the left and SUMMER on the right.
• The Belvédere has two mirrored sets of 11 steps
• The facing statues of Joseph and Mary at the back of the Church both carry a baby Jesus
• The floorplan of the church is mirrorred in the Church garden, where the confessional mirrors Notre Dame de Lourdes (pénitence!), and the altar mirrors the Calvaire.
• The Tour Magdala (in stone) is mirrored by an Orangerie Tower (in glass) as opposites on a chess board
• The N on Saunière’s tomb’s cross is inverted
• The INRI on Jesus’s cross on the Bell from the Church tower is inverted
• The Stations of the Cross are displayed in reverse order
• The Visigothic Pillar carrying Notre Dame de Lourdes has been placed upside down
• The Knight’s Stone was found liying face down
• The painting of Christ and the Hare in Rennes-les-Bains is the inverse of the original (which is hanging in Anvers – pronounced Invers – the French word for inverse)
• In the far right corner of the Tour Magdala there’s an red dot in one of the floor tiles, the same dot used to be visible on the floor of the Orangerie on the other end of the Belvédère
• The Devil and Jesus are sitting opposite eachother in mirrored similar crouching positions in at the back of the Church of St. Mary Magdalene