Interview with Margaret Starbird
Made by MysteryPlanet: 09/26/2005

	Date: 09/26/2005 .·. BACK TO MAIN
	Name: Margaret Starbird. Country: USA. Profession and/or Occupation: Teacher/author. Published Books/Researches: The Woman with the Alabaster Jar (1993); The Goddess in the Gospels (1998); The Tarot Trumps and the Holy Grail (2000); Magdalene’s Lost Legacy (2003); The Feminine Face of Christianity (2003); Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile (2005). Web Site: www.margaretstarbird.net Topics covered in the interview: Mary Magdalene, Jesus, Holy Grail, Jesus’ bloodline, templars, Church.

******* START OF THE INTERVIEW *******

Question: Is the story we know about Jesus a true and accurate story according to the facts, and therefore a theatrical representation from an eventual initiation ritual which was lived by this god-man, or, on the other hand, is it just a myth that was created for preserving and transmitting some type of secret esoteric teachings?

Answer: I personally believe that Jesus was an actual, historical person and that the Gospels reflect his teachings but that mythological elements have been woven into them to enhance the story. In my view, Mary Magdalene and Jesus actually embodied or “incarnated” the archetypal Bride and Bridegroom of the ancient mythologies of the “Sacrificed God/King”.

Question: What happened in the Jesus’ life during the years he systematically disappeared from the written history? Where did he go? What did he do? Why did he disappear?

Answer: I have no idea! There are numerous extravagant claims ranging from the British Isles through Egypt to India. I have not spent any effort examining these speculations. There are no FACTS.

Question: Who was Mary Magdalene and why did Church distort or manipulate the part of the story that tells about her relationship with Jesus?

Answer: All four of the canonical Gospels mention Mary Magdalene with her title. Of the eight lists that mention several women followers of Jesus together, Mary Magdalene is mentioned first on seven. Apparently the authors of the Gospels recognized her as “first lady”. Luke’s Gospel says that she was healed of “possessed by seven demons”. All four Gospels mention her presence at Golgatha and at the sepulcher of Jesus, when all the apostles had fled, and John’s Gospel names her as the primary witness to the Risen Christ in the garden on Easter morning.

Beyond this Scriptural witness, Church tradition has always mingled her story with that of Mary, the sister of Lazarus and Martha of Bethany. In Western Christianity, artistic images show her anointing the feet of Jesus a the banquet at Bethany (John 12:3) and liturgies for her feast day mention the raising of her brother Lazarus. Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene were celebrated as the same beloved disciple of Jesus until 1969 when the Roman Catholic Church revised the calendar of saints’ feast days and separated the “composite” into two “Mary’s”.

In the story I wrote at the beginning of “The Woman with the Alabaster Jar”, I suggest that Mary Magdalene was “lost” immediately after the Resurrection. She does not appear at all in the Book of Acts of the Apostles or in any of Paul’s epistles. On Easter morning, the Romans thought they had executed an insurrectionist pretender and heir to the title “Son of David”. Faced with rampant rumors of the Resurrection of Jesus –just like Tammuz, the resurrected fertility god of ancient pagan mythology– they must have been working furiously to squelch the stories. The friends of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus and Lazarus would have been franticly busy trying to protect the wife of Jesus, and doubly so if she were a mother or expecting his child. I think they took Mary into a place of safety and kept her in exile and that the “Church” then went on without her. Her obscurity kept her safe, but eventually her importance was dropped from the official or orthodox version of the story. Several of the Gnostic Gospels indicate that sects of Christians believed that she was the “favored” disciple and one, the Gospel of Philip, calls her the “intimate companion” or “spouse” of the Savior, so the belief in her “pre-eminence” continued until those sects were destroyed and their documents burned in the late 4th century. After that time, Mary Magdalene was gradually styled a “repentant prostitute” based on her identification with the “sinner” who anointed Jesus at the banquet in Luke 7.

I think the Church lost Mary Magdalene because her friends were so careful to hide her for her safety. Later generations of “Fathers” gradually abandoned the egalitarian principles of the earliest strata of Christians, relegating women to silence: “I do not allow a woman to teach or to exercise authority over men” (1 Tim 2:13). These Fathers effectively stole the “Voice of the Bride”, and certain Christian clergy today are reluctant to revise that 2nd-3rd century orthodoxy.

Question: Could you please tell us briefly what are the evidence from your research which made you think that Jesus was actually married with Mary Magdalene?

Answer: The Gospel narratives, beginning with the anointing at Bethany in Mark, Matthew and John, and ending with the return of Mary Magdalene to the tomb of Jesus on Easter morning, are parallel to ancient liturgies of the “Sacred Bridegroom/King” sacrificed for his people in yearly rites. In those ancient mythologies, the Bride anointed the king in a nuptial rite and was united with him in the Bridal Chamber. Then, later in the liturgical season, the king was arrested, tortured, mutilated and executed, laid in a tomb. On the third day, the Bride and her women come to the tomb of the king to mourn his death and find him resurrected. The Bride and Bridegroom celebrate the “Sacred Reunion”. The exact same scenario is repeated in the Gospels. Every pagan convert to Christianity immediately recognized the mythology of the “Sacrificed King”. By virtue of the anointing and the embrace in the garden, they must also have recognized Mary Magdalene as the Bride.

Question: What is your opinion about the foot cleaning rite where Jesus got his foot clean from a woman called Mary from Bethany? Was Mary from Bethany also Mary Magdalene? Since the foot cleaning ritual had an Egyptian origin, was Jesus an Isis Cult worshipper, according what is written in the New Testament?

Answer: The Roman Catholic Church has a long tradition of combining Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene a position derived from the similarities of the anointing of Jesus by a woman, a story that occurs in all four Gospels and from ancient rites that identify the Bride as the woman who anoints the King and is later reunited with him in the garden after his torture, death and resurrection.

There is a significant difference between cleaning feet and “anointing”. In the Gospel narratives of the anointing, the earliest two Gospels, Mark 14 and Matthew 26, say that the woman with the Alabaster Jar broke her jar and poured her ointment on the HEAD of Jesus. Luke takes the story of the anointing by a woman, moves it from Bethany, placing it far away in Galilee, and calls the woman a sinner; he describes her anointing the FEET of Jesus and kissing them, wiping them with her hair (Luke 7:38). But John takes up the story and says in two places (John ll:2 and 12:3) that the woman who anointed the Lord and wiped his feet dry with her hair was Mary, the sister of Lazarus, a resident of Bethany on the Mount of Olives, a point that agrees with the Gospels accounts of Mark and Matthew. In anointing Jesus, this woman was proclaiming him as the Messiah/Bridegroom of Israel. We have to remember that “messiah” means “the anointed one”. We have no evidence of Jesus being anointed by a Temple priest; his only external anointing is that done by the woman. The story of the anointing at Bethany is not about a foot-washing ritual from a pagan cult.

I believe Jesus and Mary were coming from a Jewish tradition, supported by monarchist zealots. Mary of Bethany represented the land and the people of her native land, and her anointing of Jesus was not only an out-pouring of her personal devotion to him, but was a ritual anointing similar to that of ancient marriage rites of the ancient Near East. For millennia before priests usurped the prerogative of anointing kings, it was the right of a royal bride to anoint her consort. I do not think Mary Magdalene was a pagan priestess, or that Jesus was a worshipper of Isis. Instead, I think they embodied the ancient archetypes of the Sacred King and his Bride, the royal heiress of the domain. The Mount of Olives is a prophetic mountain “of oils” where God will stand on the “Day of the Lord” and has HUGE significance for the Jewish people. It lies in the region assigned to the tribe of Benjamin, so it is plausible that Mary was of royal lineage, perhaps a descendant of King Saul, the first anointed King of Israel. The anointing by the woman at Bethany appears to me to have constituted a dynastic marriage between the royal “daughter of Benjamin” and the Davidic Messiah. I believe Jesus and Mary were coming from a strictly Jewish tradition, supported by purists and monarchist zealots and that Mary was a royal Bride –the “royal complement” of the Sacred King. Jesus and Mary came from wells of Jewish ritual and practice, not pagan. But the nuptial rites survived and were recognized throughout the hellenized Roman world. Those who heard the Christian Gospel recognized the Sacrificed King; they could not fail to recognize the Bride.

Question: Do you think Mary Magdalene played an even far more important role than Jesus mother?

Answer: In the canonical Gospels there are eight lists that mention several women followers of Jesus. On seven of those eight lists, Mary Magdalene is mentioned first. If you had to pick “first lady” from studying these lists, you would probably pick the Mary called the Magdalene. She is the only person who is mentioned at the cross and at the tomb of Jesus. Clearly she was the most faithful of his dear ones.

Question: In your paper “Mary Magdalene, The Beloved”, you say:

“(…) The numbers coded by gematria in her name indicate that Mary Magdalene was the ‘Goddess’ among early Christians. They understood the ‘numbers theology’ of the Hellenistic world, numbers coded in the New Testament that were based on the ancient canon of sacred geometry derived by the Pythagoreans centuries before. ”

Could you explain us what you mean by “theology of the numbers”? Which ones are the numbers that Mary Magdalene carries?

Answer: Gnostic Christians were castigated by Church fathers Irenaeus, Tertullian and others for practicing “numbers theology” in analyzing the texts of Scripture. Those who are familiar with Kabala are aware that the Hebrew Bible has many instances of gematria, number values encoded in phrases that reflect cosmic principles. But most people are not aware that the same practice was used by authors of the New Testament Gospels, some epistles and the Apocalypse (Revelation).

Since each letter in both Hebrew and Greek alphabets has a numerical value, phrases were deliberately coined using letter combinations whose sums had symbolic meaning. My study of these numbers is published in “Magdalene’s Lost Legacy”. The Greek epithet given to Mary Magdalene is extremely significant by virtue of its sum, “153”. The number is one of the few that occurs in the Gospels. In John 21, the “153” fishes in the net are a metaphor for the ekklesia, the Church/Bride of Jesus. In the early Church, Mary Magdalene represented the community –the people of the Sion–, but also the Christian community as “Bride” of the Archetypal Bridegroom. Other experts on gematria (John Michell and David Fideler) have commented on the “fishes” in this chapter of John and their importance. They have also stated that “153” was a hugely important number in sacred geometry, understood by the classical mathematicians to represent the “vesica piscis” (() –the “vessel of the fish”) with all its feminine connotations: the womb, the doorway to life, the “bridal chamber”, the “holy of holies” and the “mother/matrix” of all shapes, and the “cauldron of creativity”. The () shape is also associated with the ancient Goddesses of love and fertility, and almonds were sacred to Venus/Aphrodite for that same reason. The epithet “the Magdalene” –the Magnificent/Tower– was deliberately “coined” to reflect the unique status of Mary Magdalene as the “Archetypal Bride” of Christ.

Question: What is the Holy Grail?

Answer: Legends of the Holy Grail say that it was the “vessel that once contained the blood of Christ”. The legends stem from an oral tradition in Western Europe and weren’t found in writing until about the 11th century. One legend claims that Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea brought the Holy Grail to Gaul. The word used in some of the written legends is Sangraal –Old French for “blood royal”.

Question: If legends about the royal blood (“sang raal”) are true, we must ask if there’s any evidence about a child. What child, product of Mary Magdalene and Jesus union, could have survived in western Europe to eventually become a French monarch (Merovingians)? Where is a child mentioned in Mary Magdalene’s legends?

Answer: There is an adolescent child on the boat in some of the legends of medieval Europe. She is called “Sarah” and she is said to be the servant of the two other Maries who traveled with Mary Magdalene, her brother Lazarus and sister Martha and their friends who fled from persecution in Palestine and landed on the shores of Gaul in 42.A.D. The name “Sarah” means “princess” in Hebrew, and the “dark” child is called “Egyptian”. I think it possible that this “fossil” survived in folk memory, though the real story was too dangerous to be spoken or written: “Out of Egypt I called my child” (Hosea 11:1).

Question: If Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a daughter and their lineage survived, where are their descendants right now?

Answer: After all these centuries, the bloodline would have been so widely disseminated that it would be virtually irrelevant. The royal families of Europe claim degrees of kinship with the Merovingians who were the alleged heirs of the “sang raal”. I am personally not convinced that available genealogies can establish a legitimate Davidic bloodline through Jesus, but that is the tenet of the heresy, based on the claims of the New Testament that Jesus was of the lineage of David.

Question: If we asume that Sarah was Jesus’ daughter, the fact that she had a dark skin also means that Jesus was dark skinned?

Answer: Jesus was allegedly Jewish/Semitic. I believe that the dark skin of Sarah in her effigy is a symbolic darkness –like that of the Bride in the Song of Solomon, who is also “black, but beautiful”. Sarah’s statue in the crypt of the Basilica of Our Lady of the Sea at Les Stes. –Maries de la Mer– is very black. I think this blackness is derived from a passage in the Hebrew Bible book of Lamentations 4:7-8: “The princes of Judah, whose faces were once ‘white as milk’ are now ‘black as soot’. They are not recognized in the streets. Their blackness represents their loss of power, prestige and domain. They now live in obscurity in foreign exile, incognito homeless refugees”.

Question: What do you think about Dan Brown’s Novel “The Da Vinci Code”, since it takes two of your books among its references?

Answer: I am grateful that Dan Brown’s book has put the idea of the marriage of Jesus and the “Sacred Marriage” in Christianity onto the bedside tables of people in every country on the globe!

Question: You had an interview for a recently released documentary from National Geographic called “Unlocking the Da Vinci Code”. We saw it and we believe that many relevant things were left behind during the documentary, in fact, there were some questions where it seemed pretty much like you did not have the chance to reply. Among the things they said about your answers, they commented that the City called Migdal did truly exist during Mary Magdalene times, and they also commented that you were not qualified enough for stating some things.

As we know you had no chance to answer during that documentary, would you like to answer to those claims here, or perhaps to add something more you could not say there before at that time?

Answer: Thanks for asking. My interview was three hours long, and my comments on the documentary were cut to three minutes. I am not a Scripture Scholar but I am a Comparative Literature scholar with a passion for setting the record straight about Mary Magdalene.

A town that is now called Migdol situated on the western shore of Galilee existed in Biblical times, but it was called “Taricheae” in virtually all written records of the period between 43 BC and AD 70. Even Flavius Josephus, a Jew writing in Aramaic in the early 70’s, calls the town Taricheae (further details about the town called Taricheae and the epithet “the Magdalene” are recently published in “Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile”). The Jewish Talmud (written in the 4th c. from oral tradition) calls the town “Magdala Nunayah” and says that it was destroyed for “prostitution” (their term for idolatry). Since there is no written record that substantiates the name “Magdala” for the town, and since the written records call the thoroughly Hellenized city by its Greek name Taricheae, one might decide that the name “Magdala” was NOT used during the Biblical period but was used when the town was rebuilt after its destruction in A.D. 67.

I believe the title “the Magdalene” was derived from a prophetic passage in Micah 4, the “Daughter of Sion” crying over her deceased king and then going into exile, defiled by many nations. She is called “Magdal-eder”, the “Watchtower of the Flock”. The title had nothing whatever to do with a town in Galilee destroyed like Sodom and Gomorrah for its sinful life-style.

The “myth” of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute may have stemmed from the false assumption that she was from “Magdala” –but it was a late attribution.

Question: The Knights Templars were the guardians of the “Grail Family”. Were they protecting Jesus’ family? From who or what where they protecting them?

Answer: This is certainly part of the medieval lore attached to the Templars, mentioned in the 13th c. poem Parzifal by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Apparently the Templars were custodians of the “secret” of the marriage and bloodline and the importance of Mary Magdalene as the “Bride in exile”. It is possible that the “Grail” treasure went into the custody of the Templars after the fall of the Cathar strongholds during the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1250). Then, in 1307, the Templars themselves were liquidated and thrown into dungeons, tortured and executed. The story is told in the trumps of the Tarot which provide a flash-card catechism for the Heresy of the Grail and its connections with the Templars.

Question: The knights templars were exterminated because of the economic power they achieved, or just for hiding a powerful secret that endangered the Church? Why?

Answer: The French king needed money and the Pope was nervous about their alleged heresies. Voilà!

Question: When Matthew (Mt 16, 18) writes the following well known sentence, once spoken from Jesus: “And you are Peter, and on this rock I shall build my Church”, uses a Semitic word, “ekklesia”, that means as much there as throughout all the Old Testament, the assembly of the Jewish town before God, and not “religious hierarchic organization”, like that endorsed by Constantine.

Also it is in Gospels (Hebrew 5, 9-10 and 7, 21-25), where it is well clear that Jesus came to abolish the levitic priesthood, dedicated to the service of the temple. It brings with himself an egalitarian message that assures that priest is any member of the town of Israel. But that was ignored by the “parents of the Church”.

What is your opinion about that matter? Within that egalitarian message do you think that women had a fundamental role that was suppressed by the Church?

Answer: Paul’s epistles make it very clear that women were allowed to preach, teach and enjoy positions of leadership in the early church. He also states that “the brothers of Jesus” and Cephus and the other apostles are traveling around with their “sister-wives”. In other words, they are traveling as “missionary couples”. I think the early Christian community was modeled on the Song of Songs and the union of the archetypal Bride and Bridegroom in their midst!

Question: Knowing that in the Epistles of Saint Paul we read that the first bishops were married men, like the priests described in the Old Testament, and considering that clerical celibacy was not well seen among the Hebrews where Jesus was born, and also considering the fact that Jesus had as much sympathy for women like he had for his male disciples (Mc 15, 40-41), being a woman (Mary Magdalene) his favorite disciple with who he possibly had descendants; does clerical celibacy lack of evangelical foundation?

Answer: Eastern orthodox priests are still allowed to marry, and Roman Catholic priests were not forced to take mandatory vows of celibacy until 1139. There is no Scriptural foundation for clerical celibacy.

Question: Thanks a lot for this interview Mrs. Starbird. Would you like to leave us a last thought or message about this topic?

Answer: I believe that the Sacred Union of the Christ and his beloved Magdalene was at the heart of the Christian story and was to have been our collective heritage! It is the “model” for a partnership society, a partnership world! The Union of the Beloveds allows us to envision the Divine as loving partners, a sacred symbiosis of Masculine and Feminine.

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© Copyright 2005 Margaret Starbird. All rights reserved.

[ VERSION EN ESPAÑOL ]

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