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ASHLEY ON
Health & Wellness, Spirituality, and all things New.
ASHLEY ON
Ashley On - The Search for the Holy Grail with Margaret Starbird
On this epsiode of Ashley On we are joined by a woman whose research and writing have helped reshape modern understanding of the Christian tradition — particularly when it comes to the often-misunderstood figure of Mary Magdalene. Margaret Starbird is the author of several groundbreaking books, including The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, The Goddess in the Gospels, and Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile. Through her scholarship, Margaret invites us to re-examine the sacred feminine, decode hidden symbolism, and explore the possibility that the Christian story we’ve inherited may be missing one of its most powerful truths. In Dan Brown's famous book, The DaVinci Code, three books are cited as reference material; Margaret Starbird wrote two of them. Enjoy the show!
Hello and welcome
SPEAKER_02:to the show. Today's episode is one I've been looking forward to for a long time. We're joined by a woman whose research and writing reshaped modern understanding of the Christian tradition, particularly when it comes to the often misunderstood figure of Mary Magdalene. Margaret Starbird is the author of several groundbreaking books, including The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, The Goddess and the Gospels, and Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile. Through her scholarship, she invites us to reexamine the sacred feminine, decode hidden symbolism, and explore the possibility that the Christian story we've inherited may be missing one of its most powerful truths. Whether you're a seeker, a skeptic, or a spiritual explorer, I think you'll find her insights illuminating and deeply human. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy the show. Hello, this episode is brought to you by Morrison Alley. Morrison Alley provides consulting focused around strategy, leadership, and team development. as well as AI implementations to streamline effectiveness or marketing solutions or app development, and then leadership development from our Fire and Rain leadership development team focused on executive leadership experiences and experiential learning. Check it out, morrisonalley.com. Thanks. Margaret Starbird, thank you so much. Welcome to the show today.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. I'm happy to be able to join you.
SPEAKER_02:Well, it's awesome to see you and to meet you. As I mentioned, we'd like to just kind of dive right in on this show and get right into it. So I'd like to start with your groundbreaking book, The Woman in the Alabaster Jar, really challenged a lot of the traditional Christian narratives. Interested in just understanding, how did you first become interested in the search for the Holy Grail and Mary Magdalene being the bride of Jesus and reclaiming the sacred feminine? Give us a little bit of understanding of how you became interested in these topics.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I started off Catholic, of course, as a child. And in my teen years, I was able to go to Omer Amargal for the amazing passion play that they have every 10 years there. I don't know if you're aware of it. But every 10th year, they produce this huge panorama, really, of the crucifixion and death of Christ. And it starts in the early part of that week with the anointing by the woman with the alabaster jar. And then it takes it through the whole passion narrative and then the resurrection in the garden. And I hadn't realized as a youngster how important Mary Magdalene was to that narrative until I saw that show. And because I didn't understand a lot of German at the time, the German part went over my head, but the visuals were what I was noticing. And she was really important in that rendition of the passion play and she was everywhere and she was crying she was she was just really emotional about it until Easter morning of course then she's overjoyed to meet her beloved in the garden but it was the visuals that got to me I think even at that early age I think I was 17 when I saw it so then later when I had my you know I went through my life I got married had kids all that and my husband was teaching at West Point and I joined a little prayer group there a little camp group of Catholic women whose husbands were also involved with the faculty there. And so we had some really deep meditations and things. And over one period, we were shown that something was missing from early Christianity. We weren't sure what it was or how it would fit in. It had something to do with the feminine, but we didn't know what. And in those days, in the 70s, people weren't really talking about the feminine yet. It was sort of on the fringes of things. And so I didn't think much of it at the time. We all prayed about it, and then we went on our merry way. Did
SPEAKER_02:everyone experience this?
SPEAKER_01:We've experienced it at a group and shared it with each other and thought and prayed over it for a while, and we weren't sure what was meant by this lost piece or this lost something from the foundations of Christianity that was missing. Okay. That was always lingering in the back of my mind. And then a friend asked me to please read Holy Blood, Holy Grail. So I went to the library. This is about 1982 or three. I went to the library and found the, you know, that was back in the days of card catalogs. We didn't even have computers telling us where the books were. So I went to the stacks and there was the book. I picked it up. I looked at the front cover. It said, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. And on the back, it said that Jesus Christ was probably married. And I almost dropped the book. It was like a hot potato. I couldn't get rid of it fast enough. I wanted to leave. I fled from the library. And I didn't read it for another year, I guess. And when I finally did, it was so upsetting to think that the church could... At first, I thought it was blasphemy. And I sat down to think, oh, okay, this can't be true. And I told my friend about it, my best prayer group friend from my years at West Point, and she didn't believe it either. We were both apoplectic and said, this can't be true. The church would have told us, right? So we didn't believe it. And... Let's see, what was the sequence? I don't know if you want to hear the whole story, but a bunch of things. No,
SPEAKER_02:absolutely
SPEAKER_01:we do. Okay, the synchronicities were really powerful. So I said to myself one day, my friend hated this idea of this book. I'm going to pray about it. So I sat down with my Bible and my Holy Blood, Holy Grail in my lap, and I said, okay, Lord, I'm going to burn this book. Not the Bible, but the Holy Blood, Holy Grail book. But first I need to know what you want me to know about this book. Now, our prayer group had had a practice for years of just opening scripture with a question and then looking down and see if the answer to the question might be on the page that we were looking at. So I opened my Bible, and I opened, coincidentally, if you will, to the page between the Old Testament and the New Testament. And it said, New Testament, revised edition. And I thought... Oh, that's really intriguing. Maybe I better ask another question. So I said, Lord, if something in the New Testament needs to be revised, could you show me what it is that needs to be revised? And I opened my scripture again, and this time, my Bible, and this time I was in the book of, I think it was 3 Kings or something. I can't remember all the details anymore. I'm so old. But it said, Restore my wife whom I espouse to me. And I... decided that was my marching orders. So other things happened that day, but I went to the phone and I called my friend that had just come back from Tel Aviv. They'd lived in Tel Aviv for three years and came back. And she, I told her what had happened and that I'd gotten these readings from the scripture and she was horrified. And she said, it just doesn't sound right. They can't have not told us all this. So she said, she would pray about it. And she called me the third day, three days later. She said, I hope you're sitting down. My husband finally authorized me to call the plumber because our new house has a leak in the toilet in the master bedroom bathroom. The bridal chamber bathroom toilet is leaking. She said, I called the plumber and he crawled around and finally he called me in and showed me a crack around the base of the commode, and so whenever it's flushed, the clean water is pouring out onto the floor in trickles, you know, just this trickle on the floor. She said he took the thing, the commode out, and he replaced it with another one, the same make and model, and he installed it, and she said, I went in after lunch, and I flushed the toilet again, and it's still leaking. It's leaking again. She said, this time I crawled all around the commode, And the crack in the commode is in the exact same place. She said, it's a design flaw. She said, I finally understand. And I finally believe everything you said about the design flaw. There is one word written on my toilet. The word is church. So apparently this showed her, this crazy synchronicity showed her that I was onto something maybe. And we, so then we decided to pray about it. We told the whole prayer group to get on it and they, About that time, my husband, military, of course, got orders to Nashville, Tennessee. He was to be the district engineer in Nashville, Tennessee. So, well, the last place you want to be a heretic is Nashville, Tennessee.
SPEAKER_02:I'm from about an hour and a half north of Nashville, Tennessee, so I know.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, you know all about it. Well, we spent a lot of time at Fort Campbell, so you must know where Fort Campbell is. My
SPEAKER_02:dad did, too.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, really?
SPEAKER_02:Clarksville.
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so anyway... When I got there, one of the things I ended up doing was going down to Vanderbilt Divinity School. I got permission to sign in. They had a program for lay people to study with their candidates for ministry. And I took some classes. The first thing I did was go to the library. And they had books there that were helpful. And I just... started researching and I kept in touch with my friends back in Virginia and the other prayer group people had gone to other places somewhere in New York and there were only seven of us so it was pretty easy to keep close contact. We just mailed letters to each other in those days. We didn't even have email. We had no quick communications but I shared with them and they kept praying for me and I finally became convinced myself that this thing that we thought was blasphemy was actually more than likely And I hadn't found the proof yet, but I had found enough circumstantial evidence that I decided it might be time to sit down and start writing. Even if I never published anything, I could at least write the book. So I sat down and wrote the book. 1990, I wrote the book.
SPEAKER_02:So many years later.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 84 or somewhere in there. So it wasn't huge, huge many years later. But, you know, we'd all been told that there was something about the foundations that had, you know, a design flaw in the foundation that had something missing. And then when we discovered that it was something as important as the bride, that kind of. made it important that we not at least keep it all to ourselves. We should try to share it as best we could. And I was the one that had the master's degree in literature or whatever. So I was, I guess, the designated person to do the actual writing and producing.
SPEAKER_02:So in your research then, when you began researching the book, how did you begin to connect Mary Magdalene to the concept of the Holy Grail?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so that's in the Holy Blood Holy Grail in the book. They actually tell you that the misunderstanding of the word sangral, S-A-N-G-R-A-A-L, everyone drops it or breaks it up after the N, so it's holy and grail, but no one ever heard of a grail, right? That was a mistake they made. They called it a holy grail. If you take the same word in Old French and divide it after the G, it means blood royal, right? the song real. And that's a whole different thing. You don't carry the blood royal around in a jar, right? The blood royal flows in the veins of a child. And in that case, the vessel of the grail, the vessel of the holy bloodline is the mother of the child. And that would of course be Mary Magdalene in this case. So it's a long, complicated story. At Vanderbilt, when I went to take classes there, one of the courses that I signed up for was interpreting the gospels. And so I decided to pray about which gospel to choose. Instead of just choosing it myself, I would open scripture and just ask for the proper gospel. And I knew the gospels were in the back of the book, of course. So I opened toward the back of the book and I was in Mark 14. It said, a woman with an alabaster jar came to Jesus while he was at a banquet at Bethany. And she broke the jar and poured the contents on his head. And the apostles were angry at the wasted value of the perfume. But Jesus said, she has done me a favor. And wherever this story is told, it will be told in memory of her. So I started there. That was the research topic that I was studying. gonna use I decided based on what I just opened and I didn't realize at the time that that was the whole connection to the bride but but that was let's see that was 1988 I guess 88 yeah fall of 88 so I went to the library and looked up anointing and I found all this stuff from the ancient goddess lore about the anointing of the bridegroom king and and how he is later sacrificed, mutilated, executed, laid in the tomb. And it's in several of the ancient fertility cults in the Middle East. And that was the clue. It's actually the prerogative of the bride to anoint her bridegroom. And then that's a prefiguring of the anointing that happens in the bridal chamber where they have coitus. And then when they return, the people all celebrate and the bridegroom Joy from the bridal chamber spreads out into the crops and herds and into the people of the land and everybody lives happily ever after. Just like all our fairy tales when we were young. All the little fairy tales where the bride and bridegroom are finally reunited and everyone lives happily ever after. So that was a really intriguing journey going through this research for this paper. And knowing that the anointing had everything to do with the bride. And then of course, if you're Catholic, All your life, you've been told that Mary Magdalene was the person who anointed Jesus at the banquet and also at the tomb on Sunday morning. So she becomes then the bride of the Easter mysteries, doesn't she? She's the one who carries the ointment, anoints her king, and then a few days later when he's sacrificed, she goes to the tomb to anoint him again after the After the Sabbath, she has to wait until the Sabbath is over, and then she goes again on Sunday morning and finds him resurrected in the garden. And that's a reenactment of the ancient pagan myths of the bridegroom king and his beloved. So that's what we're celebrating here at Easter. Just next week, actually, the 14th of April, is the celebration of the anointing by the woman. And that is the beginning of the Passion narrative, starts with the anointing at the banquet, because she's proclaiming him as the Messiah King of Israel. So there she is.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So it's perfect timing for us to be having this conversation. And I was going to ask you, you read my mind for my next question, was why did you call Mary the bride of the Easter Sunday? Oh,
SPEAKER_01:the Easter Mysteries. It's a 10-day period from the anointing on a Monday. Well, it's almost two weeks, I guess. The church celebrates the anointing on the Monday before Easter. So it's almost a whole week.
SPEAKER_02:Got it. I'm not Catholic, so I'm not aware of that.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's a liturgy every spring of the same reenactment of this ancient myth of the renewal of everything. It's about the renewal of the life force in the spring. And it happens worldwide at springtime. Of course, on the southern hemisphere, it's opposite of ours, but I don't know what they do about the liturgies of the Christian faith in the southern hemisphere because it's all backwards.
SPEAKER_02:It's all different.
SPEAKER_01:I've often wondered about that because Christmas is when it's warm and, I don't know, the springtime is fall.
SPEAKER_02:What does your research say? I'm
SPEAKER_01:not getting... What does your research
SPEAKER_02:tell us about the life of Mary Magdalene and Jesus after the crucifixion? And after the resurrection?
SPEAKER_01:After the resurrection. Can
SPEAKER_02:you hear me okay now?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Mary Magdalene left and ran and told the other apostles that she'd seen Jesus. In all the Gospels, her story... This is the other interesting thing. Her story shows up in all four Gospels. The anointing at Bethany actually... Luke moves it to another town, but all four gospels have anointing by a woman. And only in John's gospel is she named, and we're told that she's a sister of Lazarus, Mary, the sister of Lazarus. And we already know who she is because she's the one who cried when Lazarus was dead in his tomb, and Jesus came and was moved by her tears to raise Lazarus, her brother, from the dead. And then in the next chapter, It's Mary, the same Mary who anoints Jesus and wipes her tears from his feet with her hair. So she is very prominent in John's gospel, especially. But the other gospels all mention her. And John is there to correct the record. And Jesus, in John's gospel, he says, let her keep it for the day of my burial. Because the apostles are complaining about the wasted value of her perfume. And he says, let her keep it for the day of my burial. And so then in the Gospels, again, it's Mary Magdalene who goes to the tomb. And in some of them, she's accompanied by other people, but in John's Gospel, she's alone at the tomb. And she recognizes Jesus, and he tells her, don't keep clinging to me. I have to go. And he says he's going back to his father, and she runs and tells the other apostles that he's alive. Okay, so what happens to them next? I wrote in the beginning of Alabaster Jar, my woman with the alabaster jar, I included a little short story that I had written called Mary in the Garden. And it starts off with Mary sitting there just desolate after the crucifixion, probably Sunday night, you know, after the crucifixion. And Joseph of Arimathea comes to her and he says, Mary, I have to get you out of town. In the book, I just say Joseph came to her, and he said, Mary, I have to get you out of town. It's dangerous, and you can't stay here. And she says, I don't care. I just want to not go anywhere. And he said, but I promised him I'd keep you safe. And so Joseph leads her away. She finally gets up and goes with him, and he takes her to Egypt. And then it's there that she discovers she's pregnant and has a baby. Anyway, she has her baby in Egypt. And then at some point, they decide that it's safe to go back to Israel, but it's really not because Paul has finally decided he's going to persecute Christians there. So they get in a little boat, and she and her brother and sister and others, Maximus and Sedonis, they call him, a couple other people, are in the boat. Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mary... Mary Salome, who could be a sister of Jesus. We're not really sure. But in any case, there are several women, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, and two men in this boat, and a little girl who is supposed to be the servant of her relatives. And they all travel in a boat that loses its oars somehow or never had them or something. Anyway, they wash ashore on the shores of Gaul in France, the Roman colony there. And the peasants take them in, and they treat them like refugees, which they are. So they become political refugees. And so they're hidden all this time. And the point is that it's too dangerous for them in the Roman Empire and even in Israel. Nobody wanted Jesus to be king of Israel either. The Romans were occupying Israel at the time. And you can imagine on Easter Sunday, try to imagine this. Easter Sunday, the rumor starts passing around. All these people who've showed up for Passover, thousands and thousands of I don't want to call them tourists, but pilgrims anyway, pilgrims to Passover. And suddenly the news is traveling all around that this carpenter, who was such a wonderful charismatic preacher, has been risen from the dead, just like Tammuz, their old god of fertility from this region. And they're all ecstatic over it. And the Romans and the Jewish leaders are all ecstatic. Horrified because this is the last thing they ever needed was rumors like this of this person's resurrection so for that reason the family would have been in grave danger and That's why in my story That's why Joseph of Arimathea came to take her away as fast as he could to some other location where they wouldn't be looking for her Anyway, they ended up on the shores of France and that's where all the legends survived then through the Middle Ages and into the into the modern era times. The legends of Mary Magdalene are on the shores, you know, early in southern France, Provence and that whole region. Very powerful legends and endless numbers of dark Madonnas. It's all, you know, actually... Tell us
SPEAKER_02:a little bit more about the legends.
SPEAKER_01:The legends. Well, there's not a lot to them. They just crop up there and everybody believes them. They have a church where they have a... Let's see, they call it St. Mary's by the Sea in a town called St. Mary's by the Sea. There's a church called Our Lady of the Sea that has in the crypt, it has this statue of St. Sarah. And the gypsies think that because she came out of Egypt, she's a gypsy like them because that's the root word of gypsy is Egypt. So they're considered kin to her and she's dark. She's black, in fact, pretty black. I've been there twice and three times. I don't know, so many. Anyway, she's very dark. And the gypsies, the gypsy women in these different clans sew this beautiful series of gowns. She has seven gowns or eight, I don't know, some number from the different clans of the gypsies. And on the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th of May every year, they have a celebration in this town where the gypsies, in full regalia of all their clothes, all their important costumes, take the statue of little St. Sarah and take her on a white horse and carry her out to the sea. Oh, the men are on white horses. I guess some of them are walking, carrying her. But anyway, they're carrying her on some kind of platform and they carry her out to the sea to remind everyone that she came from far across the sea to bring the gospel to France. And she and her friends and family, and they were all... They're also honored in this town. Two other women, Mary Jacobi and Mary Salami, are the other two women on the boat. And they're, besides Mary Magdalene, her sister. Anyway, they're all, the legends permeate the southern part of France and everybody celebrates this thing every year. It's a big pageant. People come from all over the world to visit St. Sarah and the Feast of St. Sarah. It's a celebration on the 23rd, 24th of May. Very exciting. And the Gypsies all bring their fiddles, and they celebrate with music and dancing and joy and laughter. It's wonderful.
SPEAKER_02:So it sounds like it. But you'd be unable to attend this, you said,
SPEAKER_01:right? I've been there twice for the celebration of that. So
SPEAKER_02:how did this knowledge and this memory of the sacred union then manage to survive? In Western Europe, if everybody was kind of, I mean, it has survived. How has it survived?
SPEAKER_01:Well, the Inquisition was formed in part, I think, to liquidate it or obliterate it. And in fact, there's this horrible story from the town of Béziers, which is also in southern France. The people fled to the Church of Mary Magdalene to get away from persecutions by the armies that were sent against them. They were besieging the town. And when the armies, it was actually Simon de Montfort who besieged Béziers, I think the date was 1209, they got into the town and they burned the church down over these people's heads. And the chronicler later said that it was just retribution because of their scandalous blasphemy that Christ and Mary Magdalene were partners. So, I mean, that's kind of a nasty little trick, but the Inquisition was well aware of the heresies of this region and they tried to get rid of them. So they went underground and they went into art, paintings, special symbols that they used to signal the bride, unicorn tapestries, tarot cards, watermarks in their bibles they the same crowd the cathars printed their by their scriptures on paper that they manufactured themselves and they printed some of their symbols in watermarks in the paper and Uncannily, I was onto that early on and found a book that was full of pictures of these things, and some of them are so obviously connected to the Grail heresy. It was almost impossible not to pick up on it, and I put some of that in my alabaster jar book as well, little drawings of some of these amazing watermarks that tied up the Grail heresy with this catharsis. crowd who were heretics, according to the church. And I keep thinking, what if the first heresy was the denial of the bride? In which case, the people who are called the heretics are really the people who are sticking to the tradition of the sacred marriage that was at the heart of the Christian community when they walked with their sister wives around Israel and did their preaching. When Jesus sent them out two by two, he didn't send them out in pairs of men. He sent them out as couples. Paul even says the brothers of Jesus are all traveling around with their sister wives. And the word sister wife is even indicative because it comes straight out of the Song of Songs where the bridegroom calls his bride, my sister, my wife, my sister, my spouse. So it's all linked to the ancient mythologies from the ancient Near East of the holy marriage, the sacred union. of bride and bridegroom. But you know, it's more than that because in our country, in our culture now, we're just trying to get away from this thing that has been totally masculine-oriented for so many generations and centuries even in the Western world. because our church taught us that we had a celibate male God and no other gods before him. And so what you worship, you become, right? So we became a society that was warped in that way that we weren't balanced. And we can watch it playing out today, looking around the globe and what's happening. We know exactly what the source of all this was, was a preference for everything male. And the denigration of everything female for so long.
SPEAKER_02:Is that a form of control, do you think? I mean, I understand at the beginning, right? It
SPEAKER_01:might have been an accident. You know, in my book, in my Alabaster Jar book, I suggested that Joseph of Arimathea took her away because it was so dangerous for her to stay. And so the story of her, Paul never met Jesus. and his friends never told Paul that he was married. And so Paul just went on with the risen Christ and taught the church all doctrines of the Paulanity, sometimes they call it. It's not the teachings of Jesus necessarily, it's what Paul made of it, but he never knew about Mary Magdalene. And meanwhile, she's an exile or refugee in incognito in Southern France, and no one knows where she is even. And one of the reasons they lost her was because her child was a daughter. and not a son. I myself thought she was going to have a son. I was writing the book, or the short story. I was typing away, and I got to the point where she went into labor, and I burst into tears when I realized suddenly that the reason that they lost her and couldn't find her anymore was because the child was not a son. If it had been a son, they would have tried to keep track of her because he could have led their armies back into battle against the Romans. But that was what all the zealots wanted them to do. But that's not what happened because the child was a daughter. So then I, yeah. So I cried and then I continued the story and her child was a daughter.
SPEAKER_02:So many questions for you. Yeah. You know, why do people today This doesn't take anything away from me, from my view of Jesus and from his message and what he stood for. If anything, it makes it more real and makes him even a greater cultural figure and historical
SPEAKER_01:figure. Because he had every experience under the globe instead of just, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Right. But so many people... that are probably listening to this, even, and friends of mine. I've had conversations with some close friends that I was going to talk to you, and some are very interested and said, this sounds great, and others are like, oh my gosh, this is blasphemy. I just don't, why would people, I don't know what to say to people like that. I feel like this doesn't take anything away from Jesus. What do you think?
SPEAKER_01:Okay, so here's, well, I wouldn't have published the book if I hadn't felt I was being shown to do just that because somebody needs to tell us that we've been out of balance all this time. But I took it to my priest because I was this nice Catholic girl and I didn't want to be the one to spill the beans without permission. So I took it to the pastor at Fort Lewis, Washington, where my husband was stationed, and I handed it to him and I said, I need you to read this for me. And when he called me back, to come and get it. He said, this could heal the church. He said, but you have to know. He said, I was reading it starting at the beginning and I read three or four pages before I realized you weren't talking about the same Mary and the same Joseph we always talk about on the flight into Egypt. He said, you were talking about Mary Magdalene and Joseph of Arimathea going to Egypt and not the other Mary and the other Joseph from the early gospels. And I said, yes, so what did you do, Father? And he said, well, I had to go back and read the whole story again. And I said, well, Father, that's what I want you to do. I want everyone to have to do that. I want everyone to go back and read the story again. Because the circumstantial evidence that I have found is powerful in many, many ways. And it'd be very hard to go back and put Pandora's box back together again. Once you've let it out, too many people have seen the evidence now, and it's so obvious all around us that the original thought of the Christ community was to unite the masculine and feminine energies and have them work with each other as partners and not this celibate stuff anymore. And even if you go back into ancient Israel, they allow that God had a partner as well, Yahweh and his Asherah. So anyway, it's all an interesting story, but I don't know what else to tell them except that the evidence, the most important evidence I found was actually in the sacred numbers. And I don't know if you want me to go into that at all, but the gematria.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, please do.
SPEAKER_01:Do you want me to do that? Okay, it's complicated. Okay, so where to start? Back when I first became a born-again, if you want to say, a born-again Catholic, which is kind of awkward to say, I went to the library and I got out a book called The City of Revelation, and it was so interesting. It was by a man named John Mischel, and he said that the important phrases in the New Testament, but also in the Old Testament, are number-coded because the alphabets in both Hebrew and Greek, the Old Testament in Hebrew, the New Testament in Greek, had... a value for every alphabet letter. So alpha is A and beta is B is two, alpha is one, beta is two, and gamma is three. And in Hebrew, it goes the same way, one, two, and three. And then there's a series. So it's on three tiers, if you will. And so it goes through up until, in Greek, it goes up to 800 and omega is 800. And so you can read in my Magdalene's Lost Legacy, actually is the book where I elucidate all this, detail but but the point is that these phrases have number values and when you add up with the phrase you find that the value is very important so years later I met John Michelle after I'd read his book I met him and I asked him if he'd ever looked up the number for Mary Magdalene and he said no maybe that's your job so I went home and told my little my son who was a computer geek at the time. He was about 12. I told him to please fix this Greek alphabet with the right letters and then let me know so I could type the Magdalene into a little program and come up with the right numbers. So he programmed the thing for me and I wrote it out and typed it in and the Magdalene, the way it's spelled in Greek, adds up to 153. Well, that's really interesting because John Mischel talks at length about how valuable and important the 153 is. 153 is the number for the sacred feminine in the ancient world. It's the denominator of a fraction that exposes the square root of three. And so it's tied up with the Vesica Pisces symbol, what they call the Yoni symbol. in India, but it's the womb. It's the doorway to life. It has everything to do with the feminine orifice. And 153 is the number that denotes that. Among the ancient Greek philosophers, they call it the 153. And what they're talking about is the Vesica Pisces symbol, which is the matrix, the mother of all forms. And then it has this mathematical importance. And they also have euphemisms for it, the doorway to life. and the bridal chamber. I mean, they call it all these things that have to do with the bride and the feminine. So it's the number that's associated with the goddesses of love and fertility in the ancient world. And it's Mary Magdalene's number. The title they gave her adds up to that number. Now, the interesting thing is that all the Maria's add up to 152, Maria itself, the word Maria. adds up to 152. But the one that nails it is the Magdalene, 153. And so that's how I know from having, from John and Michelle telling me it was my job to figure it out. I know that they were trying to say this is the woman who was the bride. She is the goddess of love and fertility from the Gospels.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, that's fantastic.
SPEAKER_01:It is, it is. That's all in my Magdalene's Lost Legacy book. It's the one I published in... 2001 or so. So
SPEAKER_02:what does...
SPEAKER_01:Alabaster jar.
SPEAKER_02:What does Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper have to do with Mary Magdalene and The Lost Bride?
SPEAKER_01:That's a fun story. Okay, so the beautiful painting The Last Supper, if you notice old copies of it, you can see it's really dark and kind of gloomy looking. But in the middle 70s, the Pope... assigned a woman the job of cleaning it up. And so they did all the most modern things they could do to clean up this painting that had gotten smoke and damage over centuries sitting in the cafeteria of a monastery. And when she got through cleaning, she found that in the top corner on the left side, there's this very funny thing in the wall that When you stand away from it, it's kind of an optical illusion, but when you stand away from it, it looks like a chalice. And it's standing above the head of the apostle that's on the far left. And that apostle has been identified as Bartholomew. So Bartholomew has this chalice above his head. But then if you draw a line from the chalice diagonally all the way across the painting to the bottom corner on the far right side, you're going to, I guess this goes this way, you're going left to right, you're going to find the knot, a knot in the tablecloth. And if you've studied... enough art history or something, you'll come across a little line somewhere in somebody's writing, and I'm not sure who anymore, but I was told this by Javier Serguera, who wrote a book about the Last Supper. He said a gratuitous knot anywhere in the painting in the Middle Ages tells you that it's coming from the secret tradition, the underground traditions, the secret. It's like code, a gratuitous knot. in the um interesting anywhere in the painting so in this case it's in the tablecloth you don't have a corner of a tablecloth with a knot in it so if i drew a line across from the cup of the chalice down to that line and it passed right through where peter has his hand across mary magdalene's neck trying to shut her chakra off so she can't she's lost her voice in other words and the apostle peter sitting next to this person that looks very feminine in the last in the last yeah very and everyone says oh that's john but he shouldn't have been that feminine looking so in any case uh we all know that the beloved was mary magdalene this he's shutting off her voice and then if you go With the line still further, it goes through Jesus' left hand, which is a symbol for the feminine, the left hand rather than the right. And then it goes down to the knot in the tablecloth. It goes the whole distance. If you go to my website, margaretstarbird.net, and look up the Da Vinci painting, Last Supper, I think it's got a little thing on the menu up there. And you can look at the painting itself and follow my discussion there a little better. But the line goes from the chalice, through Mary's throat chakra down through Jesus' left hand and into the knot in the tablecloth. And the ratio of the chalice to the neck and then to Jesus' hand is one to one. And then the next ratio is two, which is the Fibonacci sequence, which is a symbol for life. So it's like Leonardo was trying to say something really specific. And the funniest part of all of this was one night, Stone Phillips was sitting talking to an art critic on his show which was I've forgotten what his show was called now but anyway they had this show and they were talking about the Last Supper painting it was after the Da Vinci Code came out and of course Dan Brown thought that the V shape between Jesus and Mary Magdalene was the sacred grail but he didn't know anything about this cup over here on the corner but if you go look on my website you'll see that cleaned up picture with this thing on this side. Anyway, so they were laughing that anybody who could think that Leonardo might have been a heretic or had known anything heretic, you know, been trying to signal anything heretical. And I thought, you people have just never scratched the surface. You don't always know everything. Well, he spent a
SPEAKER_02:lot of time in those areas of France, right? I mean, that's where he...
SPEAKER_01:Well, you don't need to go to France to see this picture. It's all over the internet. All you have to do is type in The Last Supper.
SPEAKER_02:No, I mean, but he would have heard these... These legends
SPEAKER_01:have been aware of that. Yeah, you would have thought, but no, he didn't know anything about it. He was laughing that Leonardo might have been somebody who was in on the secret. But all the artists, I mean, they kept this story alive. You asked me early on, how did this story manage to survive? The story of the sacred union at the heart of the Christian story survived in art and artifacts throughout Western Europe. over the centuries for years and years. It just went underground and nobody talked about it because of the Inquisition. But they put the symbols in their art and artifacts. The unicorn tapestries, I can't even start, but they're in the alabaster jar as well. I told people
SPEAKER_03:about that.
SPEAKER_01:And the watermarks and what else? The tarot cards, all of it. It's all there. That was the fun part about writing that book was revealing all these secrets.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I bet. Did Dan Brown consult with you at all on the Da Vinci Code?
SPEAKER_01:No, but he read my book, and then he went back and read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and I guess he looked up Lynn Picknick's book as well, and some others. The interesting thing is in Dan Brown's, what does he call that, the Da Vinci Code, his characters are in a library, and they talk about three books. And two of them I wrote, and the third one quotes me. So it's like, oh, I'm the grandmother of this whole story.
SPEAKER_02:That's great.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it was interesting. And then people started reading my books because they went to the Internet. I just happened to be born on the cusp of the Internet. All these years we've been waiting for a breakthrough like this, and now everything can be communicated so quickly. And I just happened to be writing my books on the cusp of installing the Internet so that everybody could pass it all around as fast as possible. Lightning is like spontaneous.
SPEAKER_02:Another good timing, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's awesome.
SPEAKER_02:That's synchronicity. It sure is. It sure is. So why is it so important that we reclaim the story of the sacred union, like between the masculine and feminine in Christianity?
SPEAKER_01:Well, okay, so we've had this model where we had a celibate lord who stripped of his feminine partner, whether by accident or by design. And I believe it was an accident. I think they lost her and then they went on with Paul's teachings. And since she never showed up and there was never an alternative until they'd already gone on with their celibate priesthood and their power invested in bishops and all those things. So they didn't have any room for her to come back. So they just left her out altogether and just kind of, they called her prostitute, remember? All those years she... And she was a penitent, and she turned to Christ in time to be saved, but she was definitely, you know, whatever. In other words, they marginalized her from the start. And in marginalizing her, they marginalized women. And then they had this beautiful Virgin Mary, who is a wonderful mother and And special in every way and answered prayers throughout the centuries for Catholics who prayed rosaries. And she's been a wonderful mentor for everybody. But they left out the bride altogether. And really, a mother-son combination is dangerous because the mother spoils the son but not the daughter. In the families, it perpetuates. And then they hang around after the son is married. And so they can destroy marriages. It's just not the proper pattern for human marriage. happiness and joy and all the things that you wish to come out of the marriage chamber. You end up with a distorted, you have a distorted reality. And we've been living with it for 2,000 years. So it's, I mean, we got all these fairy tales about poor Snow White. She's current right now and her stepmother was the evil person that wanted to get rid of her, right? Because she was not welcome in this paradigm. But The prince needed her, so he went and found her again, thank God. Okay, so all our fairy tales, how many fairy tales do we have where the princess is lost, stolen, hidden, kidnapped, locked in a tower? All kinds of horrible things, and it takes forever to get the bride and bridegroom reunited, because that is the model for life on our planet. No matter what else we want to do and say about everyone, we still only have one pattern that gives life, and that's... the old fairy tale one. So anyway, why do we need it? Why do we need it to return? We need balance. And right now the masculine energies are going rampant, as you've probably seen in the news and everywhere. We need people to be balanced so that they can hear the cries of the poor and the underprivileged and the marginalized and help them become balanced. part of the picture and into the wholeness and not have everything be based on. When things are run by a totally masculine principle, the solar principle we call it, masculine energy, you end up with hedonism, violence, and what was the third one? I had a third one. Violence, hedonism. Anyway, that's enough to tell you that it's, and greed. It's just not healthy, right? And so what we need is for everything to find a partner and be balanced and safe and whole again. Harmony, all of those things that come from reuniting or integrating, as Carl Jung calls it, integrating the opposite energies, the masculine and the feminine energy. And the study of numbers, I just reviewed that book recently. The study of the numbers is really important. Jesus' number is 888. jesus if you spell jesus 888 and that he's the dawn of the new day if you spell the the name jesus the way the greeks did in the gospels right the greek authors of the gospels the greek speaking greek spelling of jesus i h s o u s it's 888 and it's it's the epitome of of eight and the Early church fathers called him the Ogdawad, Ogdawad, I guess, which means the fullness of eights. So he's 888 and Magdalene's number is 153. So if you take eight times 153, it comes out to a really interesting number, 1224, which is the number for the fishes. And it turns out that they are lord and lady of the age of the fishes. And it's all encoded in these numbers I was telling you about earlier in the Gospels themselves. The fishes is 1224, 8 times 153. So it's Jesus and Magdalene, Lord and Lady, integrated energy. It's not just about a man and a woman. It's about the energies of masculine and feminine, the solar and the lunar energies working together and bringing about wholeness. So that's why it's important, Ashley. Did you get that?
SPEAKER_02:Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you very much. Yeah, I do.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So what advice would you give those who are trying to reclaim this kind of wisdom in their own lives? Or if they're engaging with your work, what do you hope them to take away?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I guess just the idea that this was our birthright. as Christians and as people of our planet, in all of our communities, our birthright was to have known about the sacred balance of the energies of masculine and feminine in our partnership of Christ and Magdalene in the Christian gospels. Even if they're not Christian, I think Muslims actually honor Mary Magdalene and the mother of Jesus and other people as human, fully human. In fact, there's a wonderful song out there by Ilana Lewandowski. I don't know if you know who she is, but she's a wonderful Canadian singer. And her song is called Human One. I think I have a link to it on my website, but if not, you can just go ask for Ilana Lewandowski. Lewandowski's Human One, and listen to that song. It's about the humanness of Jesus, and that's one of the things that was lost, because they put Jesus up in heaven on a golden throne, and at the right hand of the Father, and then they neglected any mention of humanity. And so they created him, and they He's supposed to be fully human and fully divine, but instead they cut out the human part and emphasized the divine. And so that gave us an unbalanced view of who Jesus really was in his human form, you know, as an incarnation. I think of him as the incarnation of Yahweh on the human plane. He represents God the Father as bridegroom of Israel. That was God's role as bridegroom of Israel. And Jesus represents that idea or ideology, if you will, or I don't even know. I'm losing my words in my old age. But anyway, Jesus represents Yahweh as bridegroom of Israel. And Magdalene represents the people of Israel as bride. And if you go back into the Old Testament scriptures, you find out that the bride was not always faithful, and God kept calling her back whenever there was a problem, trying to get her back into some kind of relationship with him, just as he does with every human soul. God is always trying to get people to come to some understanding of who God is. And we don't even have to call him God. It doesn't have to be a him. It can be the divine, just the divine. It's energy. It's not... It's light, it's energy, it's not in a human form, but it manifests in creation. And so it's creation that has been out of balance for so long because of our characterizing God as only male instead of this integrated male and female energies.
UNKNOWN:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:I don't know if that helped. But anyway, what I tell people to do is pray about it. I told this to a wonderful Protestant preacher who was, I guess he was a Baptist. And he said, you know, I love the story you tell, but I don't know what to believe about it. And I said, well, pray about it. And the next day, he came to me. We worked in the same building in the chapel at Fort Lewis. He came to me. He was jumping up and down. He said, guess what? He said, I prayed about it last night. I pray God to show me what it is you're trying to do. to show me whether it was right or what the story is. He said, I opened my Bible the way you do, and I opened to the anointing of Jesus at the banquet at Bethany. And I said, well, that's where I started too. It's the beginning of the whole story. You have to know that the anointing prefigures the anointing by the female of the male during coitus. It's a liturgical... anointing is just the preview of the marriage anointing. It's a marriage rite. So anyway, so that's where I'm coming from.
SPEAKER_02:So from all the, you've, you know, you've put out a lot of, you know, an amazing body of work, and you've heard, you know, lots of responses to it, both, you know, supporters and skeptics over the years. What do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of Mary Magdalene?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think the reason people resist this is because they were told for 2,000 years that she was a prostitute. But even the Catholic Church doesn't teach that anymore. They've actually reclaimed her back in the 1960s. They decided that there was no evidence that she was a prostitute. The word that Luke uses when he says a sinner from the town anointed Jesus is He uses a word for someone who evades their taxes or shortchanges you somehow on a business deal, but not someone who is not a sexual sin and certainly not a prostitute. But I think what happened was the early church recognized this anointing scene as something that came out of pagan rites. And for that reason, they called her a prostitute because of the sacred prostitutes in the pagan temples that used to perform similar rites. during their celebrations in the spring of these sacrificed bridegroom king figures. I mean, we have, I guess, five or six of them. It goes all the way back to Isis and Osiris and Ishtar and Tammuz, Dumuzi and Inanna. I mean, there's numerous god-goddess couples from the ancient Near East that have similar stories. And so all of these models, if you will, for sacred union, just in a progression, they all had different names, but they had similar stories. And Mary Magdalene fits into that, but in the temples when they celebrated it, they used a sacred prostitute. So that kind of clung to her as if she were a common prostitute, which she was not. And finally the Catholic Church has come around and said, well, she really wasn't a prostitute, but they didn't say it very loud. And so most people growing up, if they have Christian teachings, they're usually told that she was a prostitute, and that's why they resist this story so much. But my own priest told me it could heal the church, so I was happy to hear that. Why
SPEAKER_02:do you think there's such similarities in these different stories?
SPEAKER_01:Well, first of all, they come out of nature. And what you're celebrating is the return of the life force in the spring. And how you do that is you celebrate a god and goddess together. In fact, in the ancient world, they built temples side by side, and the goddesses, priestesses were with her, and then there were priests with a masculine, and then they interacted, and it was common for them to do that, I guess. And numerous ancient gods and goddesses, I mean, we have hundreds, we could probably spend all day trying to name some of them, but they have... Almost every culture had some kind of celebration in the spring of this sacred marriage. And whether they copied... I mean, it's like a copycat thing. When they conquered somebody's country and they found that they had this beautiful celebration in the spring and everybody lived happily ever after, they decided to do it themselves. But they changed the names as they went along into different names of different goddesses or attached different attributes to the gods and goddesses they already had. But you have... not just Greeks and Romans, but you have Assyrians and Babylonians and Canaanites and I don't know how many. There were many, many, but they all had similar stories because that's the nature of things. In fact, Carl Jung says somewhere, he said, first of all, we know Jesus loved the church, but you can't have Jesus embracing a church. It looks a little odd. So what you need is for a woman to represent the church. A woman to represent the church so he can embrace the woman who represents the church. Well, the woman who represents the community, the 153, is Mary Magdalene, and she does that by way of John's Gospel in the last chapter, 21. 21? Yes. Okay, so the number 153, and this is a funny story. So, St. Peter is out in the boat with other disciples, and Jesus is on the beach. And Jesus calls out to them. This is after the resurrection. Jesus calls out to them, and he says, have you caught anything? And they say, no. And he says, well, throw your nets over the starboard side. So they throw their nets over what they call the lucky side, and they catch 153 fishes, and they bring them to shore. Now, who's counting? I don't know who would bother to count, but somebody did because the gospel says they caught a catch of 153 fishes. And the people who've studied this say that number represented this vesica pisces, the net, and it caught all of these fishes, which are the symbol of the early church. the Church of the Fishes, and it's the Church of the Age of the Fishes as well,
SPEAKER_03:okay?
SPEAKER_01:So it all ties in with the zodiac sign that was shifting just as Jesus came into his own as a charismatic preacher walking in Israel and preaching the gospel. But he becomes the avatar of the fishes by virtue of his resurrection, and Magdalene is there with him. Interestingly enough, there's a church... in Megiddo, which is in Israel. It's now a prison built over the top of it. But there is a mosaic floor they uncovered when they were building the prison, I guess. They uncovered this mosaic floor. And it was donated. OK, the floor belonged to a chapel that was built onto a Roman army barracks so that the troops would have a place to go to church, a chapel. And it was Christian. It was donated. The mosaic floor was donated by their officer, the centurion, in charge, apparently. And in the medallion on the floor of this church, among other things, along with inscriptions and things, is this big medallion of two fishes swimming in opposite directions. It's the zodiac symbol of Pisces. And the people who studied this after it was revealed, it came out about 10 years ago, I think, 10 or 12 years ago, this whole story and pictures of it and everything. And all the Christians were scratching their heads and said, oh, it's all about the loaves and fishes. Well, that's great, except there are no loaves. There's just fishes, and it's the symbol for the zodiac sign of Pisces, which is what they were celebrating because the Roman army had been worshiping Mithras and the rites of Mithras, and then they shifted to Christianity because the age shifted from the Aries, I guess, to Pisces. And so then by this time, they were celebrating Pisces, the fishes. And I told you, 153 times eight, Jesus and Mary Magdalene's sacred numbers to give you the fishes. It's amazing. The whole stories are... It all falls together. It's just amazing. I really wish everyone would. I mean, people talk about my alabaster jar book and everybody loves to read it. And that's fun because it has all these secrets in it. But the book that I reviewed just recently is Magdalene's Lost Legacy about the numbers. And that it just it still blows me away that these numbers are there for people to find. And I asked somebody once who was studying the. the importance of the Gospels and how all four Gospels had some stories that were very similar and others that weren't. And Gospel of Thomas thrown in and all these different things. I said, well, did you ever look at the Gematria? And he looked at me kind of funny and he said, you know, we looked at the Gematria and we decided we didn't know what to do with it, so we decided not to mention it. And I thought, oh my gosh. They had the tools there and they could have at least thought about mentioning it, but no, they decided it was too much trouble to mention it. They didn't want to confuse anyone, I guess. So I went and confused everyone by mentioning it. But it's really important work.
SPEAKER_02:Well, thank you for doing that. I know you've got to run. We're running up toward the end of your time. I said, after all these years and all the research you've done, how has your faith shifted? It
SPEAKER_01:became internal instead of external. and because my husband is so needy i really can't even go to church anymore because i can't leave him for very long because he's only happy if i'm there he doesn't like someone else to help him with some things that are personal so i just have to do everything by myself more or less that you know churching things but it's internal now and i don't know i don't know how to explain it but Mostly, I just try to practice the presence of God. That was always my way even before. I knew that even if I was peeling potatoes or whatever, there's this wonderful book about a monk back in the Middle Ages, Brother Lawrence. I don't know if you know it, but it's called Practicing the Presence of God. And the bishop came and asked him, you know, how is it that you are such a holy man? And the man said, I'm not holy. I just practice. know that God is always with me day and night, in all ways, always. And so I just am always in communication with the God within, right? And so in a way, that's been my journey as well. And for years and years, I went to church and did all the outward things, but I don't do those anymore as much because I'm, well, I'm in my 80s and my husband's even older than I, and he needs help a lot, so I have to stay close to home. But I used to pray about the way of the heart, and now I'm living the way of the heart.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that's fantastic, and thank you so much. That's a great place to wrap. I really appreciate you taking the time today. It was wonderful to meet you, and I
SPEAKER_01:wish you
SPEAKER_02:nothing but the best.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you, Ashley.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. God bless you. Be well.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. You too. Bye.
UNKNOWN:Bye.
SPEAKER_02:Hello, this episode is brought to you by Morrison Alley. Morrison Alley provides consulting focused around strategy, leadership, and team development, as well as AI implementations to streamline effectiveness or marketing solutions or app development, and then leadership development from our Fire& Rain leadership development team focused on executive leadership experiences and experiential learning. Check it out, morrisonalley.com. Thanks.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for listening to Ashley on Nothing But The Truth for a better you and me.