he sacred feminine is that other face of God that has not been honored over the two millennia of Christianity--at least not as a fully equal partner. -- Margaret Starbird As readers of the The Da Vinci Code will recall, almost on arrival in the middle of the night at Leigh Teabing’s Château Villette, Sophie Neveu finds herself immersed in explanations and theoretical pyrotechnics from Teabing and Langdon about the Holy Grail, Mary Magdalene, and the sacred feminine. Langdon tells Sophie: The Holy Grail represents the sacred feminine and the goddess…The power of the female and her ability to produce life was once very sacred, but it posed a threat to the rise of the predominantly male Church, and so the sacred feminine was demonized and called unclean. ... When Christianity came along, the old pagan religions did not die easily. Legends of chivalric quests for the lost Grail were in fact stories of forbidden quests to find the lost sacred feminine. Knights who claimed to be searching for the chalice were speaking in code as a way to protect themselves from a church that had subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned nonbelievers, and forbidden the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine. The Case for the Sacred Feminine The case for the sacred feminine/suppressed goddess/Mary Magdalene analysis that Langdon and Teabing lay out for Sophie in the book raises some of the most intellectually fascinating questions. To be sure, it is implausible in many respects, especially the way this set of mysteries has been wrapped into the enigmas of the plot. But it is profoundly interesting. In making his late-night case, the fictional Langdon draws heavily on Margaret Starbird, Elaine Pagels, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, Riane Eisler, and others. These experts put forward their own arguments about the role of the sacred feminine in the development of Western culture, thought, politics, philosophy, and religion. They recall the goddess-worshipping cults in Egypt, Greece, Crete, and Rome, and gender roles in the context of the Judeo-Christian biblical era. They sift through the Christian experience of the early and medieval church. And they examine spirituality, myths, legends, and traditions that associate special sacred significance with women in general, and with Mary Magdalene in particular. God Does Not Look Like a Man An Interview with Margaret Starbird Two of Margaret Starbird’s real-life books are specifically mentioned in The Da Vinci Code when they attract Sophie Neveu’s interest on Leigh Teabing’s library shelves in Château Villette: The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail and The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine. In the interview below for this book, Starbird briefly explains her view of the sacred feminine. She also declares that characterizing Mary Magdalene as an apostle, equal to Peter, or perhaps even more important than Peter, does not go nearly far enough. Our interview presents an introduction to Starbird’s thinking. How does the concept of the sacred feminine differ from the way most religions seem to assume the primacy of male deities? More and more, we are becoming aware that the Divine we call God does not really look like the patriarch on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. For two millennia Christians have been attributing exclusively masculine images to God, using masculine pronouns when speaking of the Creator. But intellectually, we realize that God is not male. God is beyond gender, the weaver beyond the veil and beyond our ability to conceive God. So we limit God by ascribing attributes to Him. God is neither male nor female, which is why the Jews were always told never to make images of God. But Christians dropped this idea, and ascribed to God and Jesus the epithets Father and Son. When the Greek words for Holy Spirit were translated into Latin, they became masculine: Spiritus Sanctus. The entire trinity was characterized as masculine from the fifth century onward in Western Europe. The sacred feminine is that other face of God that has not been honored over the two millennia of Christianity--at least, not as a fully equal partner. The Virgin Mary certainly embodies one aspect of God as feminine: the Blessed Mother, our advocate at the throne of her Son. But in Christianity, the paradigm of partnership, the life-giving principle on planet earth, has not been celebrated or even acknowledged. I believe we need to reclaim the lost feminine at all levels: physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual. We have been gravely impoverished by the loss of the bride and the mandala of sacred partnership that was to have been the birthright of Christians. We have suffered the loss of Eros/relationship and deep connection with the feminine--the body, the emotions, the intuitive, the kinship of all the living, the blessings of the beautiful and bountiful planet. ____________________________________________________________________________ What do you think? Was Mary Magdalene really the wife of Jesus? How does this change current religious perspectives and beliefs? Share your opinions. ____________________________________________________________________________ Who is the lost bride of the Christian tradition? How does she tie in with the concept of the sacred feminine? IsisThere is only one model for life on planet earth--and that model is sacred union. In ancient cultures, this fundamental reality was honored in cults that celebrated the mutuality and symbiosis of the masculine and feminine as intimate partners. Examples are Tammuz/Ishtar, Baal/Astarte, Adonis/Venus, Osiris/Isis. In these cultures, the joy from their bridal chambers spread out into the crops and herds, and into the people of their realm. Similar rites were acknowledged in various liturgies throughout the Near East. The Song of Songs is a redaction of ancient liturgical poetry from the hieros gamos rites of Isis and Osiris. Invariably the king is executed and his bride seeks him, mourning his death, and is eventually reunited with him. In The Song of Songs, the fragrance of the bride is nard [spikenard, an eastern perfume or ointment] which wafts around the bridegroom at the banquet table. And in the Gospel, again it is nard with which Mary anoints Jesus, and the fragrance filled the house (John 12:3). On seven of eight lists of women who accompanied Jesus, Mary Magdalene is mentioned first, and yet, her status as first lady was later denied. It suited the church fathers of the fourth century to officially elevate the mother of Jesus as Theotokos (God-bearer, Mother of God) but to ignore his bride/beloved. The result has been a distortion of the most basic model for life on our planet--the sacred union of devoted partners. You just referred to hieros gamos, which is mentioned in The Da Vinci Code and is understood to be a translation from the Greek of sacred marriage. But what does it really mean? And how is it connected to Jesus? I believe that Jesus embodied the archetype of the sacred bridegroom and that he and his bride together manifested the mythology of hieros gamos. Their union was, in my opinion, the cornerstone of the early Christian community, a radical new way of living a partnership. In 1 Corinthians 9:5, Paul mentions that the brothers of Jesus and the other apostles travel around with their sister-wives, a phrase that is often translated as Christian sisters. But it actually says sister-wives. What is a sister-wife? There is another place in Scripture where sister and wife occur together and that is in the Song of Songs. There, the bridegroom calls his beloved my sister, my bride. This phrase speaks of an intimate relationship that is beyond that of an arranged marriage. It is a relationship of mutual interest, affection, and special kinship. According to Paul, these apostles were traveling as missionary couples, not as pairs of men as we have been inclined to believe. I firmly believe the model for this relationship was Jesus traveling with his own beloved. It is this intimacy to which the Gospel of Philip alludes when it states: There were three Marys who walked with Jesus. His mother, his sister, and his consort were each a Mary, and goes on to say that Jesus used to kiss Mary Magdalene and the other disciples were jealous. What is the significance of the chalice--or grail--symbolism? ChaliceThe chalice or vessel is ubiquitous as a symbol for the feminine container. I have a picture of a pitcher with breasts from about 6000 b.c.e. It represents the feminine as nurturer. Marija Gimbutas [pioneering archaeologist and commentator on goddess symbols and goddess-worshipping cultures of pre-historic Europe and the Near East] noted examples of the letter V on cave walls dating from prehistoric times. The downward-pointing triangle is universally understood as the female pubic triangle, and the hexagram is a very ancient symbol for the cosmic dance of the chalice and the blade, the male and female triangles representing the deities Shiva and Shakti in India. What role did women play in the earliest days of the Christian church? Before the Gospels were ever written, women were apparently very much involved in the leadership of the early Christian communities. In his epistles, written in the 50s c.e., Paul mentions various women, including Phoebe, a deaconess, Prisca, and Junia, who exercised leadership in early Christian communities. In the epistle to the Romans (16:6,12), Paul commends several women--Mary, Persis, Tryphosa, and Tryphena--for their hard work. Wealthy women supported Jesus ministry from the beginning, and were faithful to him until the end, standing at the foot of the cross while the male apostles cowered in hiding. Women opened their homes as meeting places and communal living space in the early community, and some served as deaconesses and even priests in the early days of the church. Dr. Dorothy Irvin has discovered and published numerous murals and mosaics from early Christian communities depicting women in priestly robes and regalia. Following the guidelines found in the epistle 1 Timothy, the hierarchy later denied women the right to teach and prophecy in the assembly. How do you feel about efforts by modern feminist scholars to recast Mary Magdalene as the preeminent apostle? Although I’m very much in sympathy with research establishing Mary Magdalene as the most faithful of all those who accompanied Jesus during his ministry, I don’t think that styling her as an apostle, equal to Peter, or perhaps even more important than Peter, goes nearly far enough. There is no doubt that Mary Magdalene shows total devotion and faithfulness to Christ. But the Gospel also tells a different story. In the earliest Christian texts, Mary Magdalene is not merely equal in status to Peter. She is identified as the archetypal bride of the eternal bridegroom and provides the model for the quest and desire of the human soul (and the entire human community) for union with the Divine. She models the way of eros relatedness, the way of the heart, and together with her bridegroom, provides the paradigm for imaging the Divine as partners. Her role of apostle or emissary fades in comparison. Some people, taking this argument too literally, seem to feel that styling Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jesus somehow demeans her. The argument seems to be that it defines her in terms of her relationship with a man which somehow diminishes her own stature. I believe this is far too narrow a view. One needs to realize that the sacred marriage we are discussing here is not merely about a first-century Jewish rabbi and his wife. It is really about the archetypal pattern for wholeness, the harmony of the polarities and the syzygy of logos/sophia (reason/wisdom) representing the Divine as a union of opposites. * Throughout the Gospels Jesus is presented as bridegroom, but it is now widely claimed that he had no bride. In the ancient rites of hieros gamos, the royal bride proclaimed and even conferred kingship by her anointing of the bridegroom. Clearly the woman with the alabaster jar who anointed Jesus embodies that ancient archetype, immediately recognized in every corner of the Roman Empire. There was nothing subservient in the mythic act of recognition and endorsement Mary performed in anointing Jesus in the rite of hieros gamos. See also: * Codes and Symbols * Da Vinci Code: History * Glossary of Terms * Mary Magdalene and the Sacred Feminine * The Da Vinci Code Effect * The Dan Brown Revelations * The Da Vinci Code Tour of the Louvre