The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (14 page)

The Gospel of Mark states plainly: `When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene.'s' The Vatican still tries to wriggle out of this by explaining that Jesus had no female disciples: basically a spiritually inferior woman, Mary Magdalene didn't count. And as the argument about female bishops rolls on unedifyingly in the ranks of the Anglican Church, the old prejudices emerge with some degree of viciousness - of course women should not be bishops, or even priests, for it is a known fact that Jesus chose his disciples only from among the male population.

Yet even the male-oriented New Testament not only lists the women on the mission - always beginning with the Magdalene - but also describes them as `disciples', although unfortunately this telling term has traditionally been translated as 'disciples' of the men, but the more derogatory and inferior `followers' in a female context. In reality, it is the same word for the same role. In any case, according to Luke's Gospel, the women `were helping to support [Jesus and the men] of their own means'," or basically funding the men's mission. (The women must have been somewhat taken aback at Jesus' teaching `Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labour or spin,'S4 about not worrying about the future because God would provide. If he did, his bounty took the form of the purses of the daughters of Asherah.) The Magdalene and the other women essentially kept the men, and proved loyal to the end, while Peter got drunk, denied three times that he even knew Jesus and, like his brothers in the Gospel (apart from young John) was nowhere to be seen at the crucifixion. Surely the women had earned the right to be called disciples.

However, the Gnostic Gospels make explicit what was lurking implicitly in the New Testament about the status of the women, especially Mary Magdalene. These forbidden, anathematized books make it very clear that not only did Christ welcome women into his mission, but they were members of his inner circle of initiates rather than the slower-witted and unimaginative men, who time and time again `knew not what he meant', and even showed no sign of comprehending the significance of Christ's death. The impression is that Peter in particular had no idea what was going on: all he knew was that he loved Jesus and spent much of his time in a redhot passion of envy and anger at the - to him - incomprehensible status of the Magdalene. Of all the women, Magda-lene, the Great Lady and anointing priestess, even earned the title `Apostle of the Apostles'," which implies that Jesus acknowledged she stood head and shoulders above all other apostles.

In the Gospel of Mary, even Peter is forced to acknowledge her closeness to Jesus, saying `the Saviour loved you more than the rest of the women',56 but not before he had suggested that she had invented the story of meeting the resurrected Christ, thundering incredulously: `How is it possible that the Teacher talked in this manner with a woman about secrets of which we ourselves are ignorant? Did he really choose her, and prefer her to us?"' When Peter calls her vision a lie, naturally:

... Mary wept, and answered him: `My brother Peter, what can you be thinking? Do you believe that this is just my own imagination, that I invented this vision? Or do you believe that I would lie about our Teacher?' At this, Levi spoke up: `Peter, you have always been hot-tempered, and now we see you repudiating a woman, just as our adversaries do. Yet if the Teacher held her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely the Teacher knew her very well, for he loved her more than us ... Let us grow as he demanded of us, and walk forth to spread the gospel, without trying to lay down any rules and laws other than those he witnessed.'58

Unlike the canonical gospels, several of the Gnostic texts make Jesus' love for the Magdalene crystal clear. Despite the tendency of the Pistis Sophia to indulge in the usual excessively impenetrable Gnostic ramblings about complex realms of heaven and hell, the passages concerning the personal relationships among the disciples read with an unusual clarity and confidence that strongly suggests a single tradition - perhaps beginning with authentic memories of the individuals on the Jesus mission. Christ makes this unambiguous statement to the Magdalene, which must have made the irascible Peter seethe: `Mary, thou blessed one, whom I will perfect in all mysteries of those of the height [the highest mysteries], discourse in openness, thou, whose heart is raised to the kingdom of heaven more than all thy brethren' S9 Later in the same Gnostic text, Christ announces: `Where I shall be, there will also be my twelve ministers. But Mary Magdalene and John the Virgin, will tower over all my disciples and over all men who shall receive the mysteries ... And they will be on my right hand and on my left. And I am they, and they are I.'60

Mary and young John are Jesus' closest apostles who will sit on his right and left throughout eternity - and John the Beloved/Divine/Evangelist will have a special part to play in this investigation. But Mary is more obviously Jesus' favourite, being dubbed `The All' or `The Woman Who Knows All' by him. A clue as to the depth of their relationship is found in this explicit passage from the Gnostic Gospel of Philip:

... And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene . But Christ loved her more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended ... They said to him, `Why do you love her more than all of us?' The Saviour answered and said to them, `Why do I not love you as I love her?'61

It has been suggested by Christian traditionalists that Jesus was merely kissing Mary in the spirit of agape, or spiritual love - indeed, the Gnostics celebrated their religion at `love-feasts', which were more or less chaste depending on the group. (Of course the Carpocratians' love-feasts were somewhat more colourful.) But if he only meant to give her an affectionate spiritual peck, why did Jesus choose to kiss her on the lips, and why would it have `offended' the others so blatantly? Actually, no one knows where Jesus kissed her because, frustratingly, the ancient gospel is missing that particular bit of papyrus. `On the mouth' is merely a scholarly speculation, but of course it is extremely interesting that even scholars thought fit to suggest the mouth and not the hand or cheek. Of course the original may have said something quite different, such as `on the Sabbath' or `on the Sea of Galilee'! Another passage from the Gospel of Philip is even more intriguing:

Three women always used to walk with the lord - Mary his mother, his sister, and the Magdalene, who is called his companion. For `Mary' is the name of his sister and his mother, and it is the name of his partner [My emphases] 61

The word for `companion' is the Aramaic koinonos, a Greek loan word meaning `partner'. Previously63 when I claimed that this means `sexual partner' there were howls of outrage from certain quarters. I remain unrepentant. I maintain that koinonos means `partner' in exactly the sense of our modem word, which depends almost entirely on context for its nearest definition. If someone is introduced as `partner' in an office setting, it will be assumed this means business associate. If at a party, `lover' is more likely to fit the bill 6' Here we have the Magdalene, who elsewhere in the Nag Hammadi texts is described as being repeatedly kissed, presumably on the mouth, by Jesus. She may have controlled the purse strings, but somehow she hardly sounds like a business partner - nor would the modem British `good mate' match the context. (In which case she would probably have been described as `disciple' or `follower'.) Koinonos, in this context, can only mean lover.

The phrase `who is called his companion' is also slightly stilted, perhaps as if some kind of euphemism, as in `who they say is his companion', and Mary is specifically called his partner.

Despite the belief fostered worldwide by Dan Brown's blockbusting thriller The Da Vinci Code that Jesus and the Magdalene were man and wife - a concept that first reached the Anglo-Saxon public in 1982 in Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln's The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail - there is little to support this view, either in the Bible or, more tellingly, even in the Gnostic writings. The miracle of the turning of the water into wine at a marriage at Cana, said to be the wedding of Jesus and Mary, originally - as we have seen - came from the myths of the dyingand-rising wine god Dionysus 65 And the single most important piece of evidence for their not being married is one of glaring omission: simply, there is no mention of a `Miriam, wife of the Saviour' or `Mary, Christ's spouse' in either the New Testament or any of the known Gnostic writings. Although there was a conspiracy to marginalize her in the Gospels of Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it seems that it did not extend to air-brushing out her marital status. Indeed, the obvious distaste the male disciples feel for her may partly arise from the fact that her relationship with Jesus was not sanctioned by Jewish Law.

In any case, Jesus' disciples were forbidden to marry - although John the Baptist's followers were not - and there are other possible considerations that would prevent Christ `making an honest woman' of her. Unacceptable and unthinkable though such considerations may be, either or both of them could already have been married, or they may have been close blood relatives - too close to make their love legal. Or one or both of them could have been dedicated to chastity, most likely as priest or priestess of a foreign cult. (Even temple `prostitutes' or servants were expected to remain unmarried and observe the sexual rites only within the temple walls.) The thirteenth-century citizens of Beziers in the south of France - all 20,000 of them - willingly died martyrs' deaths rather than recant a belief that Mary was Jesus' 'concubine', which they probably gleaned from Gnostic gospels that were circulating in the area at that time, but which have since been lost 66

The Magdalene's closeness to Jesus, her relationship with `John the Beloved', and Peter's hatred, are all significant factors in her emergence as `Mary Lucifer' - for better or worse in the minds of future generations. And in order to piece together her true significance, we need to fast-forward to the late fifteenth century, where one of the world's most famous figures was concocting works of the most outrageous blasphemy.

Discovering the code

In the early 1990s Clive Prince and myself were busily researching the secrets of the great Florentine Maestro Leonardo da Vinci, for what became our first joint book, Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994), its subtitle becoming the more self-explanatory How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History for the 2000 paperback. Our discovery of a mass of circumstantial evidence that suggested strongly he had created the allegedly miraculously imaged Holy Shroud of Turin using a primitive photographic technique will be discussed later, when analysing Leonardo's Luciferan credentials. For now, suffice it to say that as we became convinced of Leonardo's intimate link to the `Shroud', our homes rapidly disappeared beneath a mass of Leonardo reproductions, which we habitually scrutinized minutely for any clues as to what he really stood for. Concentrate as we might, however, our eventual discoveries seemed always to operate on an unconscious level - apparently spontaneously - as if a coiled spring was released explosively in our minds as a reaction to hours of intense staring. We `suddenly' saw the most astonishing things in what are, after all, the most famous works of art, and therefore the most familiar images, in the world. However, these were not simply the equivalent of imagining faces in the fire or animal shapes in cloud formations: gradually the features we had noted and our discoveries about Leonardo's own particular brand of heresy came together as an utterly consistent, coherent whole.

That he intended posterity to notice his hidden clues is certain, and reflects his attitude, as revealed in his contempt for the typical poet because `he has not the power of saying several things at one and the same time' 67 One of the first of the `hidden' symbols we discerned in The Last Supper proved astonishingly blatant, yet like everyone else for 500 years we had succumbed to the blanket of assumption that veiled our eyes. In 1994 we wrote:

Look at the figure of Jesus with his red robe and blue cloak and look to the right where there is what appears at first glance to be a young man leaning away. This is generally taken to be John the Beloved - but in that case, should he not be leaning against Jesus' `bosom' as in the Bible? Look yet more closely. This character is wearing the mirror image of Jesus' clothing: in this case a blue robe and red cloak, but otherwise the garments are identical ... [and] ... as much as Jesus is large and very male, this character is elfin and distinctly female. The hands are tiny, there is a gold necklace on show ... This is no John the Beloved: this is Mary Magdalene. And a hand cuts across her throat, in that chilling Freemasonic gesture indicating a dire warning 68

Yet if we thought we could safely leave The Last Supper behind us, we were sadly mistaken. Its symbolism proved central to our next co-authored work, The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (1997) and was of enormous significance for my own Mary Magdalene: Christianity's Hidden Goddess (2003): with each book we had something new, exciting and disturbing - like all Leonardo's secrets - to present. This trend continues here, with a major new revelation. But first, the essential background:

In the Last Supper the young `St John' leaning as far as possible away from Jesus to make a giant `M' shape with him, indicating the real identity of the character, appeared in our second book, and has also reached a huge international audience through The Da Vinci Code, which used our work as the inspiration for the whole concept of Leonardo's codes and secrets. Yes, clearly this is Mary Magdalene, her mirror-image clothes revealing her to be Christ's `other half', taking what many heretics would have believed to be her rightful place at his side as he initiates the great Christian sacrament in which the wine represents his sacrificial blood and the bread his body. And, as I noted in Mary Magdalene, the hand that makes the vicious slicing motion across the woman's neck belongs to Saint Peter, whom the Gnostic gospels make clear actually had threatened her ... But how was a 15th-century Italian painter to know about the fraught relationship of those two long-dead disciples? Did he have access to the forbidden books that were circulating in the south of France a few centuries before his birth? (Certainly he understood the value of secrets, writing about `truth and the power of knowledge'.) And why did Leonardo believe she ought to be sitting at Jesus' right hand during the Last Supper?