Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail The author draws heavily on Holy Blood, Holy Grail for her factual data in addition to her own research, but she makes her point more clearly and The Woman With The Alabaster Jar is much more readable. Holy Blood, Holy Grail contains more dense verbiage, and the authors develop their facts and surmises slowly and their themes very carefully, item by item. It gets tedious at times. Not so with Margaret Starbird. She comes right out with it. The thrust of both books is that Yeshua bar Yosef (better known by his Greek name, Jesus) was married to Miriam of Bethany (better known as Mary Magdalene) and sired a daughter by her. After his crucifizion, Mary moved to Egypt where her child, Sarah, was born, and then to Provence on the Mediterranean coast of France. The Catholic church tried to stamp out and eradicate the idea that Mary and Jesus were married and had a child because it threatened their orthodox views, murdering 15,000 people in the Provence area who believed the fact that Mary and Jesus had started a bloodline which survives yet. In the Inquisition, many thousands more were killed for the same reason: their "heresy," in the eyes of the church. The theory is that the organizations known as the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion protected the secret genealogy of the holy bloodline, and the proofs of the sang raal (holy blood, which became known as the Holy Grail). Starbird and the three authors of Holy Blood, Holy Gail make a plausible case, even a convincing one. These hypotheses were the background for The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown, who also drew heavily on Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The research is very thorough, although there is clearly much persuasive speculation involved. This book may not be the book to recommend to orthodox Christians who are convinced that the Bible, as they know it, is the inspired word of God and not to be questioned. This is a book better suited to people with a background in religious history, who are familiar with the Council of Nicaea and its activities, and the part played by Constantine and Theodocius in suppressing the so-called "heretical" gospels and other writings that were denied entry in the canon of scripture, and the editing, deletions and additions made to those that were included. It is not clear that the truth of the matter is portrayed in these books, but it is quite clear that there is much evidence to support their plausibility. On balance, this is a more likely story than the virgin birth or resurrection of the dead, as portrayed in the orthodox version of the Bible. |
Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine Margaret Starbird's courageous exploration of the scorned feminine in Western religious tradition created a personal crisis for this Catholic scholar. In The Goddess in the Gospels the author tells how she was guided by an incredible series of synchronicities that reveal the Sacred Marriage of male an female - the hieros gamous - leading to her own personal redemption. |
Symbolic Numbers and the Sacred Union in Christianity Margaret Starbird continues her exploration of the message of Mary the companion of Yeshua (Jesus) by examining the gematria of the canonical gospels and other books of the Bible's New Testament. As every statistician knows, the Greek alphabet consists of symbols like "delta" and "pi" that also work as numbers. Starbird suggests that using Greek alphanumerics to encode relevant passages, early "heretical" Christians hid verboten material in otherwise inoffensive text. Irenaeus, a church father of the 4th century who ordered the destruction of Gnostic material (such as the books found at Nag Hammadi) knew of this practice and forbade it. However, the "heretics" did not listen to him, and they hid material about the Magdalene in the New Testament - in the synoptic gospels and the mysterious Book of Revelation. Starbird says modern computers have provided scholars the means to decode these arcane messages. She provides a Greek key you can use to interpret passages in Greek, included in the book. Hidden numbers aside, Starbird poses a question asked by other scholars - why do specific numbers appear in the books of the Bible and do they matter. For example, The Book of Revelations suggests the 'beast' is 666. In gemetric code, 666 = the solar principle. Starbird suggests the solar principle without a lunar principle leads to a desert. Day without night or Sol alone = "raw abusive, power, the power of the tyrant" or the male element run amuck. When the male element is combined with the female (lunar or night =1080) they form 1746 the symbolic equivalent of "the grain of mustard seed" or "the kingdom of God within." The marriage of sol and luna or masculine and feminine (1746=union of opposites) is also the gematria for "Jerusalem the city of God." This wonderful book continues Starbird's exploration of messages about the Magdalene hidden in plain sight for two millennium. |
Great Secrets of the Middle Ages This book presents an unusually coherent and cohesive theory about the origins of the Tarot Trumps and their relationship to the "Grail" heresy: the belief in medieval Europe that Jesus was married and that his bloodline survived in the Merovingians and related families in Europe. The trumps are here explained purely as an historical artifact without any reference whatever to divination. The images provide a "flash-card catechism" for the Grail story, including connections with the Knights Templar, the alleged "guradians of the Grail." In my view, other theories of the origin of Tarot trumps do not provide as plausible an explanation for their images in a purely historical context as does this little book. |
Margaret Starbird examines the many faces of Mary Magdalene, from the historical woman, to the mythic and symbolic Magdalene, archetype of the Sacred Feminine. Starbird offers historical evidence that Mary was Jesus’ forgotten bride, and establishes her true role as embodying the soul’s own journey in its eternal quest for reunion with the Divine. |
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