The Expected One (54 page)

T
here is a stillness that exists within the heart of the Irish countryside, a hush that sweeps across the land as the sun sets. It is as if the night demands silence, devouring any enemy to tranquillity, without bias.

For Maureen, this peace was a necessary respite from the chaos of the previous months. Here she was safe in her seclusion — a solitude that included her own heart and mind. She had not allowed herself to process recent events from a personal perspective; that would come later. Or perhaps it would not come at all. It was too overwhelming, too far-reaching…and too absurd. She had fulfilled her role as The Expected One, for whatever bizarre quirk of fate or destiny or even divine providence she had been chosen.

Her job was finished. The Expected One was a spectral creature, tied to time and space in the wilds of the Languedoc — and left happily behind in France. But Maureen Paschal was a flesh-and-blood woman, and an exhausted one at that. Breathing in the sweet still air of her childhood home, Maureen retired to her bedroom for a long-awaited rest.

Her sleep would not be dreamless.

She had witnessed a similar scene before — a figure in shadow huddled over an ancient table, a stylus scratching as words flowed from an author’s pen. As Maureen watched over the writer’s shoulder, an azure glow seemed to emanate from the pages. Fixated on the illumination shining from the writing, Maureen didn’t see the writer move at first. As the figure turned and stepped forward into the lamplight, Maureen caught her breath.

She had been given glimpses of this face in previous dreams, fleeting moments of recognition that were over in an instant. He now fixed the full force of his attention on Maureen. Frozen in the dream state, she stared at the man ahead of her. The most beautiful man she had ever seen.

Easa.

He smiled at her then, an expression of such divinity and warmth that Maureen was suffused with it, as if the sun itself radiated from that simple expression. She remained motionless, unable to do anything but stare at his beauty and grace.

“You are my daughter, in whom I am well pleased.”

His voice was a melody, a song of unity and love that resonated in the air around her. She floated on that music for an eternal moment, before crashing down to the sound of his next words.

“But your work is not yet finished.”

With another smile, Easa the Nazarene, the Son of Man, turned back to the table where his writing rested. Light from the pages grew brighter, letters shimmering with indigo light, blue and violet patterns on the heavy, linenlike paper.

Maureen tried to speak, but the words would not come. She could not function in any human manner. She could only watch the divine being before her as he gestured to the pages. Easa returned his focus to Maureen and held her gaze for an eternal moment.

Gliding effortlessly across the space that separated them, Easa came to stand directly in front of Maureen. He said nothing more. Instead, he leaned forward and placed a single, paternal kiss on the top of her head.

Maureen awoke, drenched in sweat. Her scalp burned as though branded, and she felt dizzy and disoriented.

Glancing at the bedside clock, she shook her head to clear it. The first light of morning crept threw the heavy draperies, but it was still too early to call France. She would allow Berry a few more hours of sleep.

Then, she would call him — and demand to hear every detail regarding the last known resting place of the Book of Love, the one true gospel of Jesus Christ.

What is Truth?
P
ONTIUS
P
ILATE,
J
OHN
18:38

My journey along the Magdalene Line in search of the answer to Pontius Pilate’s question began with Marie Antoinette, Lucrezia Borgia, and a first-century Celtic warrior queen. Known to history as Boudicca, the latter’s impassioned battle cry “Y gwir erbyn y byd” translates from Welsh to mean “The truth against the world.” I have carried these words as my personal mantra on a quest that has spanned my adult life and led me down a tortuous path through 2,000 years of history.

I have long been driven to unearth the great untold stories, layers of human experience that are buried silently and often deliberately beneath academic accounts. As my protagonist, Maureen, reminds us, “History is not what happened. History is what was written down.” More often than not, what we know and accept as history was created by an author with a committed political agenda. This understanding turned me into a folklorist at an early age. I derive immense satisfaction from exploring cultures firsthand, seeking out the local historian or storyteller to uncover the real human chronicles that are unavailable in libraries or textbooks. My Irish heritage gives me an enormous appreciation for the power of oral records and living traditions.

My Irish blood also drove me to become a writer and activist, and as such I was immersed in the tumultuous politics in Northern Ireland throughout the 1980s. It was during this period that I developed an increasingly skeptical perspective on recorded, and therefore accepted, history. As an eyewitness to historic events, I realized that the reported version rarely resembled what I had watched occur before me. In many cases, the recounting of these occurrences in newspapers and television broadcasts, and later in “history” books, was nearly unrecognizable to me. All of these documented versions were written through layers of political, social, and personal bias. The truth was lost forever — except, perhaps, to those who had observed the events firsthand. Overall, these witnesses were working-class people who wanted only to get on with their lives; they would not write letter after unprinted letter to the national newspapers or seek out a publisher to record their version for posterity. They would bury their dead, pray for peace, and do their best to keep going. But they would also preserve their experience as witnesses to history in a personal way, through the retelling to family and community.

My experiences in Ireland reinforced my belief in the importance of oral and cultural traditions, and why they are often our richest source for understanding the human experience. These localized events on the Belfast streets became my microcosm. If they were deemed important enough to be reconstituted and altered by major newspapers and broadcast accounts, what did this mean when that concept was applied to the macrocosm of world history? Wouldn’t the tendency to manipulate the truth become greater and more absolute as we looked farther back to the past, to a time when only the very wealthy, highly educated, and politically victorious were able to record events?

I began to feel an overwhelming obligation to question history. As a woman, I wanted to take this idea one step further. Since the dawn of written records, the vast majority of materials that scholars consider academically acceptable have been created by men of a certain social and political strata. We believe, usually without question, in the veracity of documents simply because they can be “authenticated” to a specific time period. Rarely do we take into account that they were written during darker days when women held a status lower than livestock and were believed to have no souls! How many magnificent stories have been lost to us because the women who starred in them weren’t deemed important enough, even human enough, to merit mention? How many women have been removed completely from history? And wouldn’t this apply most certainly to the women of the first century?

Then there are those women who were so powerful and instrumental in world governments that they could not be ignored. Many who did find their place in the history books were remembered as notorious villains — adulteresses, schemers, deceivers, even murderers. Were those characterizations fair, or were they political propaganda used to discredit women who dared to assert their intelligence and power? Armed with these questions and my escalating sense of mistrust for what has been academically accepted as historical evidence, I set out to research and write a book about infamous women who had been maligned and misunderstood through time. I started researching the aforementioned notorious ladies — Marie Antoinette, Lucrezia Borgia, and Boudicca.

Mary Magdalene was initially just one of multiple subjects in my research. I set out to gain a greater awareness of this New Testament enigma in terms of her importance as a follower of Christ. I knew that the idea of the Magdalene as a prostitute was prevalent in Christian society and that the Vatican had made some effort to correct that injustice. This was my starting point. It was my intention to incorporate Mary Magdalene’s story as one of many within the context of an entire body of literature that spanned twenty centuries.

But Mary Magdalene had a different plan for me.

I began to experience a series of haunting, recurring dreams that centered on the events and characters of the Passion. Unexplainable occurrences, like those that Maureen experiences, led me to investigate research leads surrounding the legends of Mary Magdalene from locations as disparate as McLean, Virginia, and the Sahara Desert. I traveled from the mountain of Masada to the medieval streets of Assisi, from the Gothic cathedrals of France to the rolling hills of southern England and across the rocky Scottish islands.

I fought hard to balance the increasingly surreal elements of my life, walking a Dali-esque line between suburban Little League mom and Indiana Jones. I would come to understand that most of my life had been lived in preparation for this specific journey of discovery. Seemingly random personal and professional experiences began to fall into an elaborate pattern, leading me to uncover a series of family secrets that would have been unimaginable to me previously. I even dealt with the shock that much of what I was raised to believe about certain members of my family turned out to be completely untrue. Nearly two decades after their passing, I discovered that my conservative and highly traditional paternal grandparents — my sweet southern belle grandmother and her devoted Southern Baptist husband — had been deeply involved in Freemasonry and secret society activity. I learned that my grandmother was related in blood to some of the oldest families of France, a fact that would change the course of not only my research, but my life. The ultimate shock came with the revelation that my own birth date was the subject of a prophecy related to Mary Magdalene and her descendants — the Orval Prophecy as spoken by Bérenger Sinclair. These personal “coincidences” became the skeleton key to unlock doors that had been barred to researchers who preceded me.

My interest in Mary’s folklore turned to obsession as I experienced fascinating ancient cultural traditions that have been preserved with love and a fervent passion throughout western Europe. I was invited into the inner sanctum of secret societies and met with guardians of information so sacred that it astonishes me to this day that they, and the information they protect, exist — and have done so for 2,000 years.

I most certainly did not set out to explore issues that called into question the belief system of a billion people. It was never my intention to write a book that tackled a subject as weighty as the nature of Jesus Christ or his relationship with those closest in his life. Yet, like my protagonist, I discovered that sometimes our path is chosen for us. Once I discovered the Greatest Story Ever Told from Mary Magdalene’s perspective, I knew there would be no turning back. It possessed me then as it does to this day. I am certain that it always will.

Two millennia of controversy have made Mary Magdalene the most elusive character of the New Testament. In my quest to find the real woman behind the legend, I realized that I had no desire to rehash all of the traditional sources as interpreted by the usual suspects. I wrapped myself in the warm cloak of the folklorist and went in search of a deeper mystery. I discovered that the extensive folklore and mythology surrounding Mary Magdalene in western Europe is as rich as it is ancient.
The Expected One
and the subsequent books in this series explore theories about the identity and impact of this controversial Mary as inspired by subcultures in the south of France and elsewhere in Europe.

The folklore and traditions of Europe also provided new insight into some of Mary’s mysteries, those that have never been explained in any way that I could find palatable through traditional scholarship. An excerpt in Mark’s gospel (16:9) has been used against Mary for centuries:
“Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.”
This single line has led to extreme claims about Mary’s mental state, including books dedicated to the idea that she was either possessed by demons or mentally ill. It was not until I became familiar with the Arques perspective as presented here — that Jesus healed Mary after she had been poisoned by a lethal concoction known as the poison of seven devils — that Mark’s line made real sense for me.

In a time when women were defined by their relationships, Mary Magdalene is not identified as anyone’s wife in the New Testament, much less the spouse of Jesus. This fact alone has led scholars to assert definitively that the idea of Mary and Jesus as married is an impossibility. But this creates another conundrum as she is also the only woman in the four Gospels to be identified entirely as her own person. She is a stand-alone character, indicating that her name would have been easily recognized by the people of her time and immediately after. I believe that Mary’s complicated relationships — her status as a noblewoman who becomes both widow and bride — were problematic. It would have been awkward and even politically incorrect to attempt to identify Mary in terms of her relationships with men. As a result, she became known by her name and title: Mary Magdalene.

Further, Magdalene’s iconography has always puzzled me. Despite the enigmatic nature of her legend, she evolved into one of the most popular subjects for the great artists of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Hundreds of portraits exist of Mary Magdalene, from Italian masters like Caravaggio and Botticelli to those of modern Europeans like Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau. One common thread runs through the vastly different portrayals of Magdalene; she is depicted over and over again with the same props: a skull, said to represent penance, a book, believed to symbolize the Gospels, and the alabaster jar she used to anoint Jesus. Always, she wears red — a tradition that reaches back into history and is generally believed to relate to the idea of her as a harlot.

But I believe now that the iconography is linked to this secret version of her story as it has been preserved throughout the European underground. The skull is, for me, clearly a representation of John, for whom she will always do penance. The book is either a reference to her own gospel or to Easa’s work, the Book of Love. And the red robes and veils are representative of her queenly stature in the Nazarene tradition. I believe wholeheartedly that many of the great artists and authors of Europe were immersed in the “heresy” of Mary Magdalene — and the rich heritage that she left on the Continent.

Along this road the untold stories of other New Testament heroes and anti-heroes unveiled themselves in stunning detail. The reader finds a very different — and I hope a very human — interpretation of the role of the infamous Salome in these pages. John the Baptist is a different man when seen through the eyes of Mary Magdalene, and of those who have revered her for 2,000 years. It is my fervent hope that the reader will not feel that I was harsh in this portrayal of John. Both Mary and Easa reiterate that John the Baptist was a great prophet. I also believe that he was a man of his time and his place, a man committed to his law in an uncompromising way, a man who was unbending in his opposition to reforms. While I am certainly not the first writer to suggest a rivalry between the followers of John and Jesus — and I won’t be the last — I am aware that this idea of John as Mary’s first husband is shocking to many. It literally took years for me to process that revelation before I was prepared to write about it. John’s legacy, through his son with Mary Magdalene, will continue to reveal itself in my future books.

I fell in love with the apostles Philip and Bartholomew during this process. As seen through Mary’s eyes, they were extraordinary heroes. Peter came to life for me in a way that was far beyond “the man who denied Jesus,” just as I developed a new perspective on Judas and his tragic, eternal role in the passion.

I was perhaps most excited by the information that came to light regarding Pontius Pilate and his heroic, heartbreaking wife, a Roman princess known as Claudia Procula. Catalogued documents in the Vatican archives and a fascinating French royal tradition exist to support the extraordinary story of Jesus’ involvement with the Pilate family, an account that authenticates his miracles and explains Pilate’s more enigmatic actions in John’s gospel. I believe that the Pilate material is critical to a new understanding of the events surrounding the passion, and I was fascinated to discover that Claudia is a saint within Orthodox traditions, as is Pontius Pilate within the Abyssinian/Ethiopian churches.

I worked to corroborate the new Magdalene material from many different angles, using the first-century correspondence of Claudia Procula as published by the Issana Press, multiple versions of New Testament apocrypha, early writings by Church fathers, a number of invaluable Gnostic sources, and even the Dead Sea Scrolls. I understand that this version of events may be surprising to the point of stunning, and it is my sincere hope that readers will be inspired individually to explore their own understanding of these mysteries. A treasure trove of information exists, most written from the second to the fourth centuries, that is not included in the traditional Church canon. There are thousands of pages of material to discover — alternate gospels, additional Acts of the Apostles, and other writings that reveal details and insights into the life and times of Jesus that will be completely new to readers who have never before looked beyond the four evangelists. I believe that exploring all of this material with an open mind and heart can build a bridge of light and understanding between the many divisions of Christianity, and beyond.