Chapter 13

The Suppression of the "Feminine Divine": Truth or Feminist Fiction?

In This Chapter

● Scoping out the female side of God and finding it was there all along

● Refereeing the debate over Jesus and his “wife”

● Meeting some really divine fems

Feminine Divine. It sounds like a drag queen, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s the hottest thing to hit the university circuit since Women’s Studies. The feminine divine is the hip new concept sweeping the nation, a term that was coined when some warmed-over scholarly theories about Neolithic goddess worship collided with modern feminist sensibilities to create a whole new angle on comparative religion.

But the feminine divine (or the divine feminine or sacred feminine) really hit its stride with the publication of a speculative history called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, which served up — along with a long menu of theories on everything from treasures to Templars — the notion that Jesus Christ may have been married. This idea wasn’t a new one; actually, it had been hanging around for some time. But when combined with a little feminism and a great deal of speculation, it rushed onward to the peak of the craze, with the publication of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, and its plotline about the descendants of Christ that turned it into the mega-blockbuster of all time.

The earth cooled, the mountains rose from the sea, mankind crawled out of the slime to build a civilization, God saw this and pronounced it good. And then Dan Brown wrote a novel, and everything changed.

That’s really about the size of it. Like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense or Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Da Vinci Code was more than a book; it was a cultural earthquake. We now live in a post-Da Vinci Code age, a time when the mania for the book has finally died down, but a time in which most of the assertions of the book are accepted by the general public as holy writ.

Chapters 11 and 12 focus on the book as history, discussing the many and various aspects of The Da Vinci Code as they tie in to the Templars and other related subjects. This chapter focuses on an assertion that permeates the novel from beginning to end — the notion of the lost and abused feminine divine, and the theory that Judeo-Christian civilization, and the people who live in it, have been deeply wounded by this loss.

Defining Divine Femininity

So, what is the sacred feminine or the feminine divine, anyway? It’s actually a pretty simple concept, particularly in The Da Vinci Code. Scholars and anthropologists discussing this subject can pile it on pretty high and deep. But remember, these guys have to prove to their fathers that the money they spent sending them to an Ivy League college wasn’t wasted.

Dan Brown goes in the opposite direction, making his theme of the sacred feminine in The Da Vinci Code as simple, and supposedly as obvious, as A, B, C. He presents it as a war between two forces:

● The Old Way, the suppressed way of goddess worship and the “sacred feminine”

● The New Way, the Catholic Church, dominated by men, poisoned by celibacy, and determined to stamp out any power or prestige for women in order to keep men in charge

The pivot point of the novel is the theme of a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, a truth that the powers-that-be have spent 2,000 years hiding. This marriage, the bloodline stemming from it, and the Church’s determination to destroy the evidence of it at any cost, becomes the central metaphor of Dan Brown’s endlessly restated argument, that the Church has subjugated and tyrannized, not to mention demonized, women throughout history.

Dan Brown claims that over the course of three centuries, the Catholic Church burned over 5 million women at the stake. Nobody on this bus is defending the Inquisition or the “Witch’s Hammer,” the 15th-century do-it-yourself guide to exposing witches. But to portray the Inquisition as a genocidal attack on women is absurd. Both men and women went to the stake — Inquisitors were equal opportunity burners. As for the numbers, no one can say for certain, but it was far closer to 50,000, a tragic number to be sure, but a far cry from 5 million. The Inquisition was hardly a genocidal plot against women. It was a genocidal plot against everybody.

Dan Brown mentions three books prominently in the text of The Da Vinci Code, and states openly and honestly that they are the principal sources for the themes we outline here:

● The speculative history Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Lee, and Henry Lincoln

● The Templar Revelation, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, which covers much of the same territory as Holy Blood, Holy Grail

● The Woman With the Alabaster Jar, by Margaret Starbird

These books are his main escape hatches, really, because Brown makes it crystal clear to the reader, through the mouths of his characters Robert Langdon and Sir Leigh Teabing, that he pulled 90 percent of the material from them. An honest rogue. All three books tie in to the Templars, the Grail, and the rest of the subjects in this section. We discuss the first two in greater depth in Chapter 12. We lay bare Margaret Starbird’s book here.

The "lost bride"

To tell the truth, Margaret Starbird’s groundbreaking book The Woman with the Alabaster Jar is not really that earth-shattering a set of ideas. We admit that it’s the first time we’ve seen them gathered together in one easily accessible place. Starbird seems to know her stuff, and seeing all her knowledge of the Bible, of general history, and of myth, carefully laid out in a gigantic pointer toward one fact (that Jesus was married and that Mary Magdalene was his wife) makes for a very compelling argument. For Starbird, the denial of the Feminine Divine in the culture of the West has blinded people to the fact that Jesus obviously had a wife. She also believes that most of the violence, hatred and injustice of society is caused by the fact that our culture is skewed to the masculine while having lost the feminine, like a 2,000-year-old carburetor badly in need of an adjustment.

In the opening pages of her book, Starbird speaks eloquently of her spiritual crisis on reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail. She had been a devout Catholic, and the idea of Christ being married shook her up so badly that she became obsessed with it, determined to find out if there were any possibility of its being true. Afterward, she spends the rest of the book searching for the “lost bride,” the bride of Christ, Mary Magdalene, in the firm belief that if this “lost bride” can be restored to her rightful place, society will be the better for it.

The thing is, this idea of Jesus having a wife isn’t exactly new. People have been talking about it for years — one of us (Chris) heard about it when he was a kid, 30 years ago; the other (Alice), hadn’t heard about it until reading Holy Blood, Holy Grail. (In the interest of full disclosure, we’re both Catholic, but Alice’s dad was a Presbyterian — a mixed marriage in those days. We’re both open to the idea, if the evidence is there.)

The theory goes back even farther than Chris’s childhood, and not much that’s still alive and kicking can do that. For example, in 1946, Robert Graves of I, Claudius fame wrote a book called King Jesus, a novel that trotted out many of these same theories. But this earth-shattering and consciousness-altering contention remained mostly in the land of academia for many years. Before the astonishing find at Nag Hammadi in 1945 (see the nearby sidebar, “Christian Gnostics”) there were only a very few Gnostic texts available to researchers, as well as some fragments of larger works, tantalizing glimpses into a different kind of Christianity with a different belief system. Graves, as a professional scholar, would have had access to these, and he used his fertile imagination to fill in the rest.

Christian Gnostics

The Gnostic Gospels get mentioned a lot in The Da Vinci Code in relation to whether Jesus was married. The following is a criminally brief description, but both Chapters 7 and 14 discuss Gnostic beliefs in more detail.

For the most part, the Gnostic Gospels that Dan Brown is talking about were part of an incredible archeological find in Egypt in 1945. It was an entire Gnostic library that had been buried in a clay jar, probably to protect it from Byzantine church authorities who were hounding "heretics" back in the fourth century. These were gospels, stories of Christ by his followers, that were left out of the biblical canon, mostly because they reflected the Gnostic Christian viewpoint. Gnostics weren't just Christians — just about every religion on the planet has had a sect with a Gnostic point of view at one time or another. Gnostics believed, basically, in a duality in the universe, with good and evil in constant opposition.

What got the Christian Gnostics in trouble with the Church was some of the ideas that came out of this belief - for example, that Christ as well as all the material world had come out of the "evil" side of creation, or that God was evil as well as good. You've probably heard the terms for many of these famous heresies — Manichaeism, Arianism, Catharism, and Zoroastrianism. Lots of them are mentioned in this book, especially concerning the accusations of heresy against the Templars, who were accused of being Gnostics. In its first ten centuries of existence, the chief conflict in the Catholic Church was its attempt to stamp out these various heresies, despite many of them being very popular.

Robert Graves’s imagination wasn’t taken too seriously. That’s because, even though these famous Gnostic Gospels of Nag Hammadi were discovered in 1945, they floated around the Near East for years, sold in pieces by the Egyptian family who found them and had no idea of their worth. These leather-bound volumes called codices (a codex is an early form of book made by binding old-fashioned scrolls into an easier to read and carry format, the precursor to books as we know them) suffered heartbreaking damage during this period. The mother of the Arabic family who found them even burned some of them to light the family stove, thinking them worthless. Her sons sold them in pieces, while some came into the hands of a Coptic priest who was a family friend, and they finally ended up scattered here and there, to this university or that rare-book dealer. It took the scholarly world time to put it all together, time to translate it and correlate it all, to really understand the enormity of the find. You couldn’t just walk into a bookstore in 1962 and buy a copy of the Gnostic Gospels the way you can today.

Of course, this isn’t to say that the theory of a married Jesus wasn’t causing the occasional flap long before Dan Brown. Slowly but surely, the Gnostic Gospels, with their indication of a Mary Magdalene of vital importance to early Christians, were making their way into the larger culture. For example, in 1970, the publication of a book with the straightforward title Was Jesus Married?: The Distortion of Sexuality in the Christian Tradition, by William E. Phipps, set off quite a firestorm in England, when a bishop of the Anglican Church read it, left the Church, and got married. But we’re sorry to say that Mr. Phipps didn’t have a whole lot to hang his hat on, factually speaking.

So what did the Vatican have to say about all this? They didn’t try to suppress the theory, and they didn’t secretly hire albino hit men to go out and kill anyone. They just smiled serenely and rode out the entire little flap. It’s what Holy Mother Church has always done best.

The mysterious Magdalene

Before heading into the subject of the speculation concerning Mary Magdalene, it’s important to start off with what we know for certain about her. It isn’t much. For centuries, Biblical scholars haven’t even been able to decide how many biblical passages are about Mary Magdalene, or how many references to a woman named Mary, as in Mary of Bethany, may really be talking about the Magdalene.

Too many Marys

The New Testament can be very confusing, insofar as who this or that person is, and the gospels as they exist aren’t always careful about explaining. The authors weren’t historians, and they probably didn’t think it was that important.

Myths and legends got told and retold, with an overarching feel to them of a Borsch-belt comedian (“You see, there was this guy . . .”). For the authors of the gospels, the story being told, and its spiritual point, was the important thing.

It doesn’t help that there was already a great deal of confusion about names, which is also nothing new. In Tudor England, for example, it’s estimated that roughly 70 percent of the women were named Mary, Catharine, or Elizabeth. Just like the first generation of the second millennium A.D. will doubtless be overrun with Britneys, Anna Nicoles, and J. Los. It was the same in biblical days. Certain popular names, Mary or Sarah, John or Joseph, were used again and again. There were six separate Marys in the New Testament. Often, in the struggle for a little clarity, these people were referred to by the added name of where they lived — Mary of Bethany, for example, or Joseph of Arimathea, or even something odder, like Simon the leper. The confusion comes in trying to figure out whether Simon the leper was also Simon the fisherman as well as Simon the moneylender.

Are you a hooker, or am I just doing great with you?

Somehow along the way, mostly in the folklore and oral tradition, Mary Magdalene became Mary the prostitute, redeemed by her love and faith. Back in the sixth century, Pope Gregory I preached an influential sermon in which he stated that the Mary Magdalene, who had seven demons cast out of her by Jesus, was the same unnamed woman “sinner” that Jesus forgives in the story just before it. Of course, in the sixth century, people also believed that the sun revolved around the Earth. We don’t believe that anymore. For centuries biblical scholars have known that there’s no evidence to support this popular legend whatsoever. So why won’t the image of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute finally be laid to rest?

The sun still revolves around the Earth in the world of cinema. In 1977, famed Italian director Franco Zeffirelli made a popular miniseries called Jesus of Nazareth (a film that sticks pretty close to the gospels in general), and, in 1988, director Martin Scorsese made the film The Last Temptation of Christ (a film that’s a bit of a mess). In both movies, the Magdalene is a prostitute.

Both directors are Catholic, both intelligent and well-read, yet neither would let this particular myth go. As for the Protestants, as far back as 1909, the Scofield Reference Bible, arguably the most detailed and referenced study Bible every produced, with its modern system of translation notes and crossreferences, went to great lengths to point out that the Magdalene was not a prostitute or a sinner. Yet, so many years later, Zeffirelli and Scorsese still have her streetwalking for a living.

There is one certain thing, one image of Mary Magdalene that emerges from all four gospels: her very special place among Jesus’s followers. When the so-called Gnostic Gospel of Phillip an apocryphal gospel that had not been included in the canon of the New Testament, was discovered at Nag Hammadi, much was made of the fact that a particular passage says that Jesus had kissed Mary “upon the [blank].” Yes, it’s that cruel a joke. The one little word upon which the work of so many speculative historians hinges appears where there is now a hole in the battered text. However, we don’t see where it matters that much, despite all the brouhaha over it. Based on the context of the sentence, the word was doubtless either face or mouth, and either way it doesn’t make much difference. No one who has read the New Testament in its accepted form needed this additional information to find out about the very special status of Mary in the entourage of Jesus; it has been a subject of speculation for centuries. But from papal bulls to the Encyclopedia Britannica, she is called not “St. Mary,” but rather “the female disciple,” perhaps a term of even more respect. In early Catholic tradition, she was sometimes called the Apostola Apostolorum, the “Apostle of Apostles,” certainly implying her importance, not just to Jesus, but to the early preaching of the gospel. She was conceded a very high place within the Church if only for the fact that she was, without doubt, the first person to see Jesus after his resurrection, surely a sign of divine preference. All four gospels place her at the foot of the cross with Christ’s family during the crucifixion.

As they would in spreading the new faith, women played a very important part in Jesus’ ministry, and many women, of high and low rank, followed him. But chief among them was the Magdalene. That’s the reason some people tend to get very huffy about the fact that Mary Magdalene was often cast as a prostitute. But it was merely confusion, not character assassination.

The Q Document

Often, when you're reading material about the Magdalene, a big deal will be made out of the fact that something appears in all four gospels. You may also hear the term synoptic gospels. The synoptic gospels are the first three: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They're called that because they tell pretty much the same stories in the same order, often using similar phrases, while John is different.

Dan Brown makes hay in The Da Vinci Code out of something with the ominous, 007-esque moniker "The Q Document," which he says even the Vatican "admits" probably exists. But it's not the mysterious key to hidden gospels that he makes it out to be. The so-called "Q Document" is a gospel that scholars believe may have been written before the other three, and that's why the synoptic gospels are similar, because they raided things from the same source. It's only a theory — there is no actual document of this kind — but because some of the gospels were written as early as a.d. 70, it's very exciting for Bible scholars to think there may be something out there even older, perhaps written in Christ's lifetime.

But that's why it's so important if something appears in all four gospels. This fact alone definitely adds weight to the truth and or importance of the story.

In studying the four gospels of the New Testament, we believe it’s pretty easy to figure out how the urban legends about Mary Magdalene got started. In the Book of Luke, Chapter 7, there is a story of an unnamed woman that could be one key to the mix-up. In this chapter, Jesus is invited to dinner in the home of a prominent local Pharisee, the Pharisees being the more conservative of the two main Jewish sects of the period. (The others were the Sadducees.)

The apostles aren’t thrilled that Jesus has accepted this invitation; they know very well that the man is Jesus’s enemy.

During the dinner, an unnamed woman enters, carrying an alabaster box of ointment. Ointments and perfumes of all sorts were very prized in Judea in this period, and were often more valuable than silver or gold. The woman is referred to only as “a sinner.” She kneels weeping at Jesus’s feet, “washing them with her tears” according to the Bible, then drying them with her hair. She then anoints his head with the ointment. This anointing of the feet and head was a common act of courtesy extended to an honored guest, but, of course, scholars have spent volumes on it insofar as its obvious metaphorical message of anointing a sacred man. This is the unnamed “sinner,” the woman with the alabaster box. Jesus forgives this woman her sins, sins that are never named or cataloged, and she leaves. Almost immediately afterwards, in the opening of the next chapter, Jesus meets the Magdalene for the first time. According to Luke he healed her, “casting out seven demons from her,” a common ancient explanation for all sorts of illnesses. These lines about the Magdalene occur only a few lines after the story of the unnamed “sinner.”

Now, remember two things:

● Those little separation notes in italics that break up Biblical chapters are modern conventions added much later. Early Bibles were done like one long, run on sentence. Within separate biblical books, chapters were not used to divide material until the 1200s, and verses didn’t arrive until the 1500s.

● Being “possessed by demons,” a state spoken of often in the gospels, was interpreted in many and various ways in the Middle Ages. Being in the grip of sin, as a prostitute or a violent murderer was, could be the same as being “possessed by demons” to the medieval mind, just as it could have meant something like being subject to epileptic seizures. They didn’t make the fine distinctions we do today.

Okay, now look at Chapter 7 in Luke again. The two stories are very, very close to one another. It wouldn’t have been hard to pick up the mistaken impression that the woman who is later cured of seven demons by Jesus, Mary Magdalene, was the prostitute of the story that has just been told, even though that woman wasn’t specifically named as a prostitute; again, she has no name at all.

When someone thought of a woman as a “sinner” in those days, a prostitute tended to come to mind, or an adulteress. Maybe it’s sloppy, but it wasn’t deliberately spiteful. Some of the more paranoid feminist types writing about this have said that Mary Magdalene was quite purposely labeled a prostitute in order to demean her, because the early Church fathers were frightened and unnerved by a woman in a position of such prominence and grace. Nonsense. The Magdalene was cast as a prostitute because it made for such a great story. Despite Margaret Starbird’s contention in The Woman with the Alabaster Jar that the temple prostitutes of pagan faiths were respected women (and we’d love to debate that one), the fact is that in all cultures, there was no one looked down on more than a prostitute. What a great tool to use to reach out to sinful people and show them God’s love. It made a better story that way. If it didn’t, Zeffirelli and Scorsese, storytellers both, wouldn’t have been so determined to keep her the proverbial “hooker with a heart of gold.” The cult of the Magdalene was a very popular one in the Church, from the beginning. The story of a prostitute who loved God really hit a nerve with everyday people.

This is how the entirety of the gospels is structured — stories about Jesus, and stories told by Jesus, to illuminate timeless lessons of brotherhood, tolerance, and faith. When Jesus tells the parable of the Prodigal Son, the subject of the story doesn’t have a name and address; he’s an archetype, a foolish young man eager for the good things in life that everyone can identify with. And when the Roman soldier comes to Christ and asks that his servant be healed, and then says that Jesus needn’t bother actually coming with him, thereby showing his absolute faith, no book of the New Testament refers to him as anything apart from “the centurion.” He had no name, and he didn’t need one. It was a great story.

So, when one lone little monk, armed with nothing but a Bible, headed out for the pagan wilds of Ireland or Germany, he had one thing more — those great stories. Sitting around the fire at night with the locals, who ran the gamut from suspicious to hostile, he could pull up a log, take a deep breath, and then say, “You see, there was this guy. . . .”

Where people don’t know, they tend to fill in for themselves. That’s what folklore is all about. The very special place of Mary Magdalene in the gospels, combined with how little is actually known about her, has always made her a figure absolutely ripe for myth, too many of them to count. Now, with her new importance in the Gnostic Gospels and her “wedding” in The Da Vinci Code, the legends and myths of the Magdalene will be more numerous than ever before.

The woman with the alabaster box

So, it would seem that that little confusion over Mary has been tucked up nicely and put to bed. Unfortunately, there’s more. There is another Mary in the New Testament, Mary of Bethany, who is also a “woman with the alabaster box.” She is the younger sister of Martha and of Lazarus, the man Jesus raised from the dead. Bethany is near Jerusalem, and they are depicted as family friends in the Bible, who play host to Jesus whenever he travels there. In three biblical books, Matthew 26, Mark 14, and John 12, Mary of Bethany comes into the room where Jesus and the apostles are dining, carrying an alabaster box, and anoints him with oil, fragrant amber spikenard oil, which was very expensive. When Judas says it’s a waste, and that the oil could have been sold and the money given to the poor, Jesus gives the ominous reply that the poor will be with them always, while he will not. He then blesses Mary for this act, and says she will be remembered for it.

Margaret Starbird makes much of this Mary of Bethany thing. She seems to think that if she can prove Mary of Bethany and the Magdalene are one in the same, it will prove Mary and Jesus were married. Maybe we’re dim, but we just don’t see it. In all three biblical chapters, Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus soon before his arrest and execution, and Christ even makes reference to this as a ceremony symbolic of his burial. (In Judea at that time, dead bodies were anointed in the same way.) It seems obvious from the story that the young Mary of Bethany has picked up on Jesus’ references to his impending death, while his own disciples have not. But to say that this sort of closeness is something that would be felt by a wife is pretty much of a stretch, and not much in the way of proof.

The Starbird contention

Okay, here’s the scoop on the facts laid out in Starbird’s controversial book, The Woman with the Alabaster Jar. It begins with Starbird’s perfectly logical contention that within a culture’s myths and legends are to be found “fossils,” the archeological remnants of the events that gave the stories birth. Many of the fossils she digs up are quite intriguing; others seem like a real stretch. But she uses them to structure this alternative account of Christ’s life.

Jesus Christ was married, and his wife was Mary Magdalene. Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene were one and the same. The confusion over names is simple enough to explain: Mary of Bethany would have been of the place called Bethany, which sat at the foot of the Mount of Olives, just to the east of Jerusalem. Remember in the story of the Templars, for example, that sometimes the same man was referred to as Raymond de Saint-Gilles, Raymond of Toulouse, or the Count of Toulouse. They were all the same man. Starbird claims that the additional name of “Magdalene” was more of a title, “Magdala,” meaning “tower,” as in Micah the prophet’s reference to the Daughter of Zion as a “tower over the flock.” In effect, it could be like calling her “Mary the Great.”

This business about “Magdalene” being a courtesy title is important to Starbird’s theory. Mary Magdalene was probably at least a minor heiress of lands surrounding Jerusalem (as the lands of Bethany do), and that she may well have come out of the tribe of Benjamin. No proof, however is offered for this — it is mere speculation. There were 12 tribes of Israel, each with its own subtle shadings of character and special history. Benjamin was the tribe of Israel’s first anointed king, Saul, and had Mary come out of Benjamin, with Jesus claiming descent from the line of David, it would definitely have been a dynastic marriage and would have been seen that way by people at the time.

Redeeming women

Margaret Starbird's book, The Woman with the Alabaster Jar puts forward two ideas:

● That rituals grow out of myths, and those myths can give us undiscovered truths

● That many of our culture's rituals and myths tell us that divinity was once feminine rather than masculine

Most historians would agree with the first part, at least. But she doesn't cite many examples to back this up, and we think she missed some whoppers on her own side of the debate. Here's one of them.

In Ancient Israel, a custom dating back to the mists of prehistory dictated that, at roughly 30 days after the birth of a child (which gave a woman time to complete her period of withdrawal after a birth, so that she would be considered ritually purified), Jewish parents took their newborn to the Temple or the local holy sanctuary to be "redeemed," quite literally; they paid the priest five shekels of silver.

Pagan Semitic peoples often believed that the firstborn, not just of women but of all creatures, should be sacrificed, in order to assure continuing fertility. Every mother knows that the first birth is always rough going. These Neolithic peoples believed that this first difficult delivery opened up the birth canal, making it — and there's just no delicate way to put this — a well-oiled machine that could now easily deliver up many more offspring.

But the desert God of the Hebrews was just and merciful, and abhorred more than anything else the sacrifice of children, as witnessed by the hatred of the Jews for Ruth, the Moabite, because she came of a people that practiced ritual child sacrifice. And so, it's probable that this idea of sacrificing the firstborn evolved over time into the ritual of a paid redemption, literally buying the child back from the hands of God. What's key here to the discussion is the sex of the child. Initially, all children were "redeemed" from God, but eventually, somewhere in the post-Exodus era, that changed, and only sons were redeemed. The implication being, of course, that only sons were worth redeeming. Quite a change of attitude.

Jesus’s controversial life and violent death, along with the continuing danger from the authorities for his followers, would have put a wife in a very perilous situation. Jesus may have turned to the richest and most powerful of his followers, Joseph of Arimathea, to protect his wife and to spirit her out of the country. The south of France would have been ideal — there was civilization, with a small Jewish community and a half-hearted Roman presence, but it was off the beaten track, and filled with foreigners among whom she could disappear. Many of the legends of the Magdalene in the south of France tie her to the figure of Joseph. They may first have gone to Alexandria in Egypt, where there was a large Jewish population, so that Mary could deliver her child there before continuing on her journey. This would explain the “Cult of the Black Madonnas” so popular in the south of France. The Gauls in the south of France perceived Mary and her child Sarah in their myths as having come out of Egypt, and so gave statues and paintings of them dark skin.

After the Magdalene was spirited away, Christ’s marriage became a dangerous secret of his inner circle, and in order to protect the woman they considered to be their rightful queen, not to mention the royal child she carried, they would have gotten her as far from Israel as possible. And it was there, the book contends, that she was lost to history. This aspect of the theory has a very respectable ring of logic — far more logic than a massive effort on the part of the Church to confiscate or burn anything that mentioned the marriage.

At this point the new narrative of Jesus’s life picks up the Holy Blood, Holy Grail doctrine (discussed in Chapters 11 and 12) and runs with it. Mary and Jesus’s daughter Sarah’s descendants married into the Merovingian line of French kings (a.d. 476-A.d. 750), eventually setting off a struggle between the Merovingians and the forces of orthodoxy that lasts through their descendants into the present day.

Mary's Marriage: Pros and Cons

In his novel, Dan Brown makes much of Napoleon’s quip, “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” Napoleon was the master of such quips, cranking out about 20 a day. But is Brown’s contention really true, that history is “written by the winners”? If it is, then why do we know so much about the Nazis, or Stalin, or the Plantagenets, for that matter? Historians struggle to learn more every day about even the ancient losers, like the Etruscans who were wiped out by the Romans.

As with so much in the novel, there’s truth in the statement, a surface truth anyway, but a surface that’s far too slick to really build such an important historical argument upon. The true historian never blinds himself with preconceived notions about a subject, but does his best to free his mind of the shackles of convention and look only at the evidence at hand. This we’ll do, with the evidence of a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

The following sections lay out the intriguing pieces of evidence we possess that point to a marriage, or at least a sexual relationship, between Mary Magdalene and Jesus, and the equally intriguing arguments of the people who say this is a lot of baloney. Historians of the future will probably be armed with more information than this, from exciting discoveries of documents and archeological evidence that have yet to be made. In the meantime, look over the facts we have, and make a judgment call for yourself.

Pros

In the following sections we cover the major, and most respectable, arguments for a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. We may be prejudiced, but we just don’t think that having a medieval Bible printer use a unicorn (a popular myth at the time) as his watermark symbol means he was trying to tell us that the horn symbolized the sexual potency of Jesus. We don’t think much of looking for M’s in tarot cards as proof, either. Some of the facts in the following sections, however, strike us as compelling evidence.

A painting is just a painting

There’s one annoying little foible that the Brownites share: their obsession with looking for hidden messages in medieval and Renaissance artwork. They don’t seem to realize that this is all strictly interpretive; you see in it what you want to see in it. Stare at a dishtowel long enough and you’ll see the Holy Grail. This obsession often blinds them to more powerful evidence for their own argument that’s right under their noses. For example, only one of Dan Brown’s admitted research books, The Templar Revelation, points out a compelling piece of pro-marriage evidence — the fact of just how far back this belief goes in the south of France. Documentary evidence of Cistercian monks going back to the 12th century discusses the “disgusting heresy” of the locals that Mary Magdalene was the concubine of Jesus.

Any historian will tell you that the older a piece of evidence is, meaning the closer it is to the event itself, the more likely it is to be at least partially true.

It is a deeply-held belief in the south of France that the Magdalene preached the gospel there — many sites, all along the Mediterranean coast of France, are considered holy because she ministered and converted there. Myths, particularly of this age, don’t appear out of thin air. The image of Mary Magdalene in France is different from any other place on Earth. It doesn’t require an enormous leap away from logic to suppose that this difference grows out of the fact that they walked with her, knew her, and received a great deal of their Christian faith from her. And if they knew her, they knew what her relationship to Jesus was.

No unescorted ladies in the bar, please

Many passages in the New Testament seem strange to a historian who knows anything about the conservative nature of first-century Judea. In a time and place where women were not free to roam about following a desert prophet, Mary Magdalene did so. Combine this with the fact that several passages make it clear that she supported the new faith, passages implying financial support; they state that she “ministered to him” of her “substance” (Mark 15:40, Luke 8:3). Therefore, she was obviously a woman of at least some rank and wealth, hardly the poor prostitute of legend. Had she been a prostitute, nothing would have been said. But in those days, a single woman of rank and wealth traveling in the entourage of a single man, constantly in his company, would have caused more than raised eyebrows. This was a time when adulteresses were stoned (and by this they included “fallen women”). Yet, there’s nothing in any of the gospels to imply that a single word was ever spoken against her, or that a single ugly incident occurred. Of course, nothing would have been said, if she had been Jesus’s wife.

New gospels, new perspectives

The Gnostic Gospels present an entirely different Mary Magdalene, one at the very center of the young Christian movement. She is the first person to see Jesus after his resurrection, and she is, again, constantly by his side, although this time, unlike in the New Testament canon, she’s actually allowed to talk.

In several of the Gnostic Gospels, Jesus states that he has symbolically raised her to the position of a man, when the apostles question why a mere woman has been given such power. We don’t believe this was intended as an insult, but as a reference to the union of sexes, because there is no sex in paradise, as Paul later states.

The Gnostics had a general tendency to treat women with equality. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, the apostle Simon Peter, who is always presented as a thorn in Mary’s side, says that she should leave the room for the conversation, for “women are not worthy of life.” Jesus chides Simon Peter that he will then “make her male.” In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, when Thomas asks Jesus what must be done to enter the kingdom of heaven, part of his reply is that “When you make the two one . . . and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same,” then you will enter heaven. The Gnostic Gospel of Phillip speaks openly of the close personal and touchy-feely relationship between Mary and Jesus. And in the Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic Gospel discovered much earlier than Nag Hammadi, when Mary Magdalene asks to speak, Jesus replies, “Mary, thou blessed one, whom I will perfect in all mysteries of those of the height, discourse in openness, thou whose heart is raised to the kingdom of heaven more than all they brethren.” Taken together, these new gospels really do suggest something far more for Mary than her simple New Testament status as a “follower.”

Are you married? Then you're a bum!

When Dan Brown alleges that all Jewish men were married during the time of Jesus, there is an element of truth in what he’s saying. We just wish he’d found a more tasteful way to say it. It leaves you with a Neil Simonesque image of the Jewish father in Come Blow Your Horn shouting at his bachelor son, “Are you married? Then you’re a bum!” It’s true that if Jesus was a rabbi, in particular, then he naturally would have married — it would simply have been expected of him. Yet, there were celibate Jews, sects of monastic, and often apocalyptic Jews like the Essenes, who believed that the Romans were one more sign that doom was just around the corner.

But all this is sort of dancing around the point. The real point is that if Jesus came with a message of celibacy, and a belief that all holy men should remain celibate, then why isn’t it mentioned in the New Testament? His silence on this subject, and that of his followers, is deafening.

Cons

There is, of course, plenty of evidence for the other side, equally compelling.

New gospels aren't always better ones

Although the Gnostic Gospels paint a very different portrait of Mary Magdalene, an image of a woman with much more power and influence in the movement, the fact remains that none of them comes right out and says anything about a marriage or even a sexual relationship. These Gnostic Gospels were heretical, and they wouldn’t have shrunk from pointing out a marriage if the writers (most of whom are very early, just after the turn of the first century A.D.) had known of such a marriage. The closest any comes is in the oft-quoted Gospel of Phillip, which probably said that Jesus kissed Mary Magdalene often on the mouth, which made the other apostles very jealous of her special status. (There’s actually a hole in the document under the word mouth that Dan Brown fills in so freely. But any open-minded reading of the text will show that it had to be either face or mouth because of the structure of the sentence.) The problem is, that’s all it takes to be married, a kiss on the mouth?

If so, Britney Spears and Madonna need to go register for a china pattern. To the opposition, this isn’t much of a proof.

What's in a name?

As far as most scholars are concerned, Mary Magdalene was called “Magdalene” because she was from the fishing village of Magdala on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, not because it was any sort of title. Incidentally, the rabbi we consulted couldn’t come up with a Hebrew word similar to “Magdal” that meant “tower,” which is Starbird’s contention (that Magdalene could be a sloppy translation of “tower over the flock”).

Humanity Versus divinity

Unfortunately for Dan Brown, despite his contention that the Gnostic Gospels present a far more human Christ, if you sit down and read them, you’ll find just the opposite to be true. In fact, many Gnostics were burned at the stake simply for believing that Christ was God, and if he was, then he couldn’t really have been in a human body, because human bodies and all matter on Earth was evil, while all good was invisible and spiritual. Some thought that what the apostles saw wasn’t a person, but just a projection, like a hologram, just something for them to see because they wouldn’t have understood Jesus otherwise. Therefore, the Gnostic Gospels, taken as a whole, don’t present a more “human” Christ that it’s easier to believe would have had a wife.

Rome's lecherous gods and goddesses

The overwhelming majority of religions surrounding these new Christians were Hellenized religions, and no one would have thought twice about a god with a wife and child. All gods had wives and children — and lots of them. If we accept Brown’s claim that all Jewish men were married, that means the Jews would also have had no problem with a married Messiah. And everyone else was a Gentile, all of them Hellenized, who would have accepted the deity-as-parent notion without a second thought. In fact, it was the very concept of Christ as a celibate that struck potential converts as being so strange, and so had to be overcome by the early evangelists to the Gentiles, like Paul.

But my wife is my best friend

Probably the worst place where Dan Brown dropped the ball is in his contention that, when Mary is referred to in the Gospel of Phillip as Christ’s “companion,” everyone knew that, in ancient Aramaic, companion meant “spouse.” Brown assures his readers that “any Aramaic scholar” will tell you this. Well, we consulted several Aramaic scholars, and they confirmed nothing of the kind. Not one agreed that this statement was in any way correct.

Aramaic is an offshoot of Hebrew mixed with other Near Eastern dialects, such as Phoenician. It was the everyday language of Jerusalem in the time of the gospels, while Hebrew was the holy language of the Temple. A few of the gospels were originally written in Aramaic. In that language, as in many Romance languages, wife and woman are the same word, and neither is in any way related to the term companion or friend.

Rabbi Arnold Bienstock of Congregation Shaarey Tefilla, fluent in both Hebrew and Aramaic, conceded the merest shred of possibility that in Ancient Aramaic, the term companion may have been used in certain instances in the same way that the French use the term petite amie (my little friend), which is old-fashioned slang for a girlfriend or mistress. We have no way of knowing.

That’s about as far as anyone would go in Aramaic.

But the really funny moment came when we dug a little deeper. According to biblical scholar and translator Bart Ehrman, the entire Gospel of Phillip was written in Coptic, not Aramaic. Coptic was another Semitic language altogether, spoken mostly in Egypt, where this version of the gospel was found, at Nag Hammadi. Moreover, the word as it appears in the original gospel was a word Coptic had borrowed from the Greek, so we now have two languages that aren’t Aramaic. The word used for companion was koinonos, and even in Greek there is no confusion as to its meaning. It means either companion or friend, with no lingering wisp of lover or spouse. Therefore, this word game on which Dan Brown has hung so much of his argument is wrong in three languages.

This gospel is out, end discussion

The Brownites contend that the Church did its best to suppress gospels that were not “canonical.” There is some truth in this, although many of these gospels were read through the centuries, right up until the Renaissance, while others fell into oral tradition. But they also contend that the monks doing the copying were diddling with the text, cutting out what didn’t conform to the orthodox. Did they diddle with the text? Yes, all the time, for a variety of reasons. Did they cut out the little fact that Christ was married? It seems unlikely. This is because archeological finds of ancient documents don’t just poke holes in the Church — sometimes they back it up. Codices of gospels in the New Testament canon that have been found from the very early second century, long before the Council of Nicaea, have proven remarkable in their own way. Yes, they’re different from the ones in your local bookstore, but not that different. In many respects, considering the number of times they’ve been copied and the number of monks doing the copying, the similarities are powerful evidence in favor of the argument that the post-Nicaea Church did not run around rewriting gospels, or burning gospels they didn’t like.

Why bother with celibate followers?

If the Brownites are right, and the Templars were the guardians of the Grail, and that Grail was the secret of the holy bloodline, then why were they celibate? And they weren’t just celibate; they were celibate. Other orders of monks had had their sexual scandals, but not the Templars. Their image was squeaky clean insofar as sexual shenanigans are concerned. If the secret they guarded was that Christ was married, being obsessively celibate doesn’t seem like the way they would honor their savior.

The Gospel of Mary, the only gospel written by a woman

We find it strange that Margaret Starbird doesn't hit on the Gnostic Gospel of Mary in her book more often. For our money, it's the most powerful clue we have that Jesus might — we say might— have been married to the Magdalene. It's the only gospel we have that is the words of a woman — the words, in fact, of Mary Magdalene to the disciples, after Jesus's death. Huge chunks of it are missing — only 52 lines of it have survived — and we can only hope that someday archeologists find it in its entirety. But what we have is incredibly compelling.

In the Gnostic Gospel of Mary, Mary tells the disciples of a vision in which Christ appeared to her, explaining the mysteries of the nature of the soul. The vision ends with a warning not to create too many laws or rules beyond the word of God, because they might be constraining, which sounds very much like Jesus's criticism of the tangle of laws governing the lives of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. When the apostle Peter, always hot tempered, challenges her version of the nature of the soul, saying that he never heard Christ say any such thing, Levi (the apostle Matthew's name before Jesus rechristened him) steps in and says that no one was more beloved of Jesus than Mary, and what she says goes. Peter and the rest of the apostles agree, and the gospel comes to a close. A powerful argument for Mary's high place among them.

If you'd like to read the Gospel of Mary for yourself, you can find it for free on various Web sites, including http://www.gnosis. org/library/marygosp.htm. If, as we hope, you decide you want to know more, we recommend two books:

● The Gospel of Mary of Magdala, by Karen L. King: There is an extremely intelligent examination of this gospel in this book.

● Lost Scriptures, by Bart D. Ehrman: If you want to read the other fascinating Gnostic Gospels, we recommend this book. Many other books on this topic exist, but for an introduction, Ehrman's is the easiest to understand.

Sacred sex

This business about hieros gamos really doesn’t play well for the Brown team. The term hieros gamos comes from the Greek, and it translates to “holy wedding” or, if you will, “holy sexual union.” It’s a later term for the Neolithic and pagan practice of ritualized sex in reverence to the gods of fertility. It was often acted out in temples of the Near East as part of goddess worship, where the high priestess (standing in for the goddess) and the selected god/king (standing in for the god) have sex in the temple, either to rouse the gods to similar fertility, or to pay homage to them. In many pagan cults, “sacred prostitutes” were installed in the temples, so that, for a few shekels, any guy could take part in the fun, turning houses of worship into brothels, a thing often mentioned none too kindly by early Hebrew prophets.

In the famous “parable of the mustard seed” that’s related in several gospels, Jesus, in the version in Mark 4, makes the relatively innocuous statement that he speaks in parables (stories) for the masses, but that, alone with his disciples, he will “expound all things.” The Brownites claim this as a sign that the disciples were receiving secret teachings from Jesus that were too shocking for the masses. Through some similarly convoluted proofs, they try to assert that Jesus preached the hieros gamos as part of his doctrine of peace and love.

We have to say that this contention is not only criminally stupid, it’s insulting. In roughly 168 B.C., the Hellenized Syrian emperor Antiochus IV, overlord of Palestine, attempted to install “sacred prostitution” on the Temple Mount. It set off the bloody revolt of the Maccabees that would eventually throw Antiochus out and establish the Hasmonean line of Jewish kings, a guerrilla war still celebrated in the holiday of Hanukkah. The victorious Maccabees went to great lengths to ritually cleanse the Temple afterward. These are not the actions of men who have any belief whatsoever in the “sacred” act of hieros gamos. It seems unlikely that Jesus, raised a devout Jew, would have had an attitude that was any different.

Goddess Worship and the Sacred Feminine: Do We Realty Want It Back Again?

Dan Brown bought hook, line, and sinker into one of the more annoying foibles of Margaret Starbird and her imitators. They speak wistfully of that long ago Neolithic period of goddess worship, a time in which women were the respected equals of men, sex was not shameful but was openly performed in temples as part of religious ritual, and all God’s children were happy and free, living in deep and joyful union with Mother Earth. If the French philosopher Voltaire was right, and Christianity is nothing but a myth, then this stuff amounts to a fairy tale.

The women who worshipped goddesses

Just because the High Priestess of a particular Neolithic cult was a woman doesn’t mean the women of that time and place were more respected. The power players, the rulers and the generals of the armies, were almost invariably men. Sexual roles, as far as we can tell in a society without the written word, were about the same in Neolithic times as they were right up until the 20th century, and the same was true in the Far East.

The Neolithic period

Most of these assumptions about goddess or mother-earth goddess worship come to us from anthropologists, who often disagree on all sorts of things about this age. That's because the Neolithic period is two maddening things:

● The 15,000 years or so before the dawn of civilization in the Nile and Mesopotamia

● A period without the written word

Consequently, everything we know about it is based on anthropological field work, archeological digging, and scholarly surmise. Surmise is the word scholars use when they don't want to say "guessing."

But a bit of reading on the subject of the rituals of these prehistoric goddess worshippers gives more than a little pause. Fertility was everything, and whatever you had to do to get it was okay. Very often this included killing something, or someone, as a ritual sacrifice, their blood soaking the earth a symbol of renewal of the soil. The Woman with the Alabaster Jar in particular speaks of this worship in vague generalities, as does Dan Brown. To be more specific could prove occasionally inconvenient — it’s hard to sound longingly melancholy about many of these cults, which practiced such delightful ceremonies as ritual sacrifice, particularly of virgins and children, but also sometimes of the god-king who “marries” the temple high priestess in the hieros gamos ceremony.

The “god-king” was not a real power but a paper king, merely a symbol, and as such, he could not be allowed to sicken or age. This god-king myth lived on for some time; it’s clearly reflected in the stories of King Arthur and the belief in his eventual return from the Isle of Avalon, because Arthur and the land were one, and if Arthur actually had “died” (in the myths he is merely carried off) then the land, too, would perish. These Neolithic stand-in “god-kings” were often killed before they could age, then buried (literally “planted,” in an obvious metaphor for enriching the soil).

But this was certainly not the only ritual sacrifice these believers in the “sacred feminine” practiced; archeologists cite the “conspicuous frequency” of skeletal remains of women and children in the burial places for the victims of these rituals. As for celibacy, the high priests of Greece and the Near East who served these goddesses often castrated themselves, thereby saving everyone the problem. On other holy days, such as the “Day of Blood” in the popular Neolithic Near Eastern “Cult of the Great Mother,” the high priests sliced themselves and then spun around in an orgiastic frenzy, splashing the blood onto the statue of the goddess.

This same fairy-tale “Brownite” approach gets impressed upon Celtic and Druidic culture, often by the same people. But the same annoying facts hold true for the Celts: The power players were men. There are a few exceptions, such as the Celtic warrior queen Boudicca, but even in Celtic society, warrior queens were a rarity outside of the popular characters they made for in 19th-century operas. In the Age of Romance (which reached its peak roughly from 1820 to 1840), the Druid High Priestess was a staple of many a dramatic tale, often the story of a Druid queen or priestess falling in love with a Roman soldier. It usually ended with lots of sword fights, suicides, and stage blood all over everything. But in reality, the high priests of the Druid faith were men, period. Druids also practiced human sacrifice, though generally on captured prisoners of war, and the occasional male victim of the tribe, rather than women and children. It seems to have been a complex religion, from what we know about it, with many layers of belief about the sacred forces of the earth, the afterlife, etc. But it was definitely polytheistic, worshipping both male and female gods.

Female status was a bit different for Celts than for the Neolithic women before them. Women were perceived as being very close to the divine forces of the earth, partially because of their mystical ability to bear children. Celts often drew their family trees in a matrilineal fashion, which means simply that they followed the line of their mother, particularly if they didn’t know who their father was. If the stories the stuffy Romans told of Celtic free love and wife-swapping are true, the reason for this is obvious - it was the only line you could be sure was yours. Also, it meant that women could inherit, and in many tribes, if the king had no son, his daughter could become queen, although it was common practice for the king to chose a son-in-law, adopt him, and marry him to the eldest daughter. Some powerful Druidic women were seers, and in this capacity advised important men. But the all-powerful priesthood was definitely a boy’s club. Besides, Celtic warriors were the most aggressive and feared on earth — even the great Julius Caesar dreaded taking them on. It was a very macho culture. Which means that, just because a Celtic warrior listened in awe that very night to a prophetess reading the tribe’s future in a copper bowl of water, that doesn’t mean he didn’t go home and beat his wife. Celtic warriors also were famous for collecting heads, but it didn’t make them any smarter.

As for the preliterate societies of the early Neolithic and late Paleolithic periods, the Neolithic goddess worship that Brownites speak of is strictly a matter of speculation, particularly the farther back in history you go. A lot of interest is centered on the discovery, all over Europe and the Near East, of these really oddball little talismans that scientists named Venuses, after the goddess of love. These little clay statues are bizarre. They are undoubtedly female; in fact, they’re a little too female. The breasts, hips and buttocks of these figures are grossly oversized, while there is usually no face and very often no head, as if to imply that it represents, not a single woman, but all the attributes of woman writ large. Very large.

The Venuses are remarkably similar, from France to the steppes of Russia, and they’ve always led anthropologists to believe these people were worshipping a mother-earth fertility goddess. On the other hand, the Venuses could have been the Playboy centerfolds of Neolithic Mesopotamia, and the guys who carved them just thought they looked cool. After all, in a society where it was constantly difficult to get enough to eat, women with a great deal of cellulite were probably looked upon as the absolute apex of feminine beauty.

This, then, is the essential problem with Starbird’s thesis where the marriage of Jesus is concerned. In The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, she states that because certain phrases and rituals (such as Mary of Bethany anointing Jesus) recall the high-priestess/sacred-bridegroom marriages of pagan goddess worship, we can sort of slide into the illogical conclusion that this proves that Jesus and the Magdalene were married, and that these references constitute hints and fossils in the text for the culturally aware.

But if you look at the society around you, you’ll see that hundreds of things we do are invested with all sorts of mythological baggage. Judges wear black robes and sit on high benches, and they have since time immemorial, while brides wear white gowns, virgin or not. But none of this changes who and what we are, what we think, and what we believe. We’re perfectly willing to concede that ancient goddess worship, and certain mythological motifs of death, sex, and sacrifice, ran throughout many of the words and actions in the New Testament, including the mysterious anointing of Jesus by Mary of Bethany. We’re also willing to concede that many of those unconscious motifs were in the minds of Christ and his disciples when the event occurred. Our question here is: So what? It doesn’t change anything and, what’s more, it doesn’t prove anything. Both of us are absolute Halloween fanatics, but that doesn’t make us Satan worshippers, despite the incessant “motifs” of devil worship that surround the holiday.

The women who worshipped the male God of Israel

So, it seems there may be a flaw in the Dan Brown’s logic. The worship of the “sacred feminine” in a culture’s temples didn’t necessarily mean the women who lived in those cultures had it so great. This could be a flaw in our own logic, of course, but it seems obvious to examine the other side of the coin. If women in pre-Christian cultures might not have had absolute equality, then maybe women in Christian culture haven’t been a bunch of cringing little milksops. Because the Brownite argument stems from the oppression imposed on women by the Christian religion, then the Bible seems the place to start. And because Christianity didn’t magically appear out a mystical mudhole, it also makes sense to start with the Old Testament that gave birth to the New.

Powerful women in the Old Testament

In the Old Testament, some of the powerful women who are still deeply revered in the Jewish faith might surprise you. Deborah, for example, was a great warrior/queen in the mold of David and Joshua. You will find her story in Judges. The men who ruled Israel in the period between the death of Joshua, who’d been the successor of Moses, and the arrival of King Saul, were called “judges,” and Deborah was one of them. There were 13 in all. Deborah, wife of Lapidoth, and a prophetess, was the fourth judge of Israel. Canaanite raids were making life very dangerous — this would be around the 11th century b.c. Deborah called a warrior named Barak out of Kedesh to be her general (he would later be the fifth judge), and the two of them, fighting side by side, utterly routed the Canaanites in a heated battle at Mount Tabor.

The strange thing is, you might at least expect some word in the biblical account about Deborah being a woman, but there isn’t one. Obviously, they didn’t think it was a big deal. She’d been chosen by God, and that was that. They must have had some concept of the sacred feminine. Incidentally, after the battle, the Canaanite general named Sisera was on the run, having lost just about his entire force. He stumbled to the tent of an old woman named Jael, who offered him a mantle for his shoulders, then food and drink, putting him at ease. And when he fell asleep, she picked up a tent nail and a hammer and drove the nail through his head. The Bible succinctly states, “So he died.” We would imagine so, and it was probably for the best. Once again, not a peep out of anyone over the fact that this savage act of war was committed by a woman. You just didn’t mess with these ladies of the Old Testament.

Other Jewish heroines of the Old Testament, who were also revered by Christians, may not have been quite so militant (or so bloodthirsty), but they still used their courage and their brains to save their people. Esther, one of the greatest heroines of the Jewish people, gave herself in marriage to the king of the Persians, then later stood against his evil minister Haman when that man wanted to annihilate her people. The king was on Haman’s side, but Esther openly opposed him, risking not only her place as queen, but her life, and in the end saved her people. Haman was later hanged.

Then there’s Ruth, the Moabite, mother of the Davidic line of kings. Ruth was a beautiful young widow, and she brazenly went to lie in the fields one night with Boaz, a kinsman of her husband, to escape an unwanted marriage to another kinsman that attempted to claim her. Ruth and Boaz married and gave birth to a dynasty. Ruth, after being widowed, famously refused to leave her mother-in-law, Naomi, who was also a widow, despite the danger of hunger in a foreign land. Her words, “Whither thou goest, I will go, and whither thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God,” are some of the loveliest in the Old Testament. For many Christian societies, from the Templars to the Eastern Star, an appendent body of Freemasonry, Ruth was the symbol for faithfulness.

There was only one stand-alone queen in the short history of the Hasmonean dynasty, the last dynasty of Jewish kings. But she was really something. Salome Alexandra became Queen of Judea in 76 b.c. and, like Elizabeth I in England, she brought a period of peace and prosperity in a time of civil strife. She was a master of diplomacy, doing a graceful balancing act with the powerful empires around Judea, including Rome, that wanted to swallow up the Jewish nation. She stipulated that all children must be educated in public schools, and despite being a Hellenized queen, she made a union with the conservative Pharisees to bring this about. After her death, the land was plunged once more into civil war, and many would look back with nostalgic affection on the halcyon days of Queen Salome.

Women in the new faith

Women played an incredibly important role in launching Christianity. They took the faith as their own from the very beginning, and stood by it through three centuries of on-again/off-again Roman oppression. Paul was perhaps the most important apostle, for he was the apostle to the Gentiles, traveling the world to make converts, not caring whether they were Jews. He sought out and won over many women of the aristocracy to the cause; he knew that if he converted them, the rest was in the bag. His attitude about marriage and fidelity didn’t hurt his cause. Divorce had grown increasingly common in Ancient Rome, and many a matron found herself cast aside for a trophy wife. Christianity said one wife for life, period. The element of charity in the new faith also had great appeal to these ladies of Rome, as well as the other countries of the Mediterranean where Paul preached the word. The gospels all present a list of the “women who followed Jesus,” and Paul made the women of Rome aware of this, making them feel a part of the Church from the beginning.

When Paul preached against marriage, it was always in connection with the coming apocalypse. He believed that when Jesus said he would return, he meant now, maybe next week, maybe this very minute. Families, of course, should stick together. But taking on new obligations wasn’t such a hot idea. In I Corinthians 7:26 he comes right out and says that single people like him should stay single because of the impending crisis that will be brought about with the return of the Lord. Later biblical letters of Paul, many of which scholars believe were written by later theologians, softened this apocalyptic view. It had been a century by that time, Jesus had not returned, and it didn’t look like he was coming anytime soon. So, of course, their stance on celibacy softened; for everyone except the clergy, that is.

Paul was definitely no sexist. The real Paul, the one who had the women of Rome and Antioch eating out of his hand, comes shining through in passages such as the famous Galatians 3:28, in which he states that all are now baptized in Christ. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Along with his anti-divorce stand, Paul is reported to have said repeatedly that “In Christ, there is no male and female.” Of the 13 letters listed in the New Testament under Paul’s name, scholars doubt highly that he wrote even half of them. And the later ones, such as the epistles of Timothy and Titus, that speak of the natural submission of women in church, were of a certainty not written by Paul. If he’d been alive, he probably would have sued.

The remarkable fems of the West

An incessant theme of The Da Vinci Code is that the Catholic Church pretty much stomped women into the dust, grinding them under the Church's booted heel. It is stated so often, in such a variety of ways, that you really do begin to believe it.

The problem is, there's an awful lot of evidence to the contrary. No one is saying that women haven't been considered second-class citizens in many respects. This was an attitude that had greater currency in some cultures, less in others. An amazing number of even ancient philosophies and movements preached the equality of women, from the Greek Epicurean and Cynic philosophers, right on through to the feminist giants of the Age of Enlightenment. Yet, it was an idea that ran like a constant thread through the history of the West (and the East, as well), that Woman was Man's helpmate, the keeper of hearth and home, and by implication, someone whose pretty little head was not to be bothered with weighty matters.

But to hear Dan Brown tell it, men have called all the shots, and women were deliberately and maliciously persecuted by Christian patriarchy for 2,000 years. Yet, taking a long hard look at the history of that 2,000 years could easily lead to the label of its being a "proto-feminist period" — meaning a time when women were too busy handling things to stop and think that they were inferior. These dreary and oppressed little drudges of the Christian West have made a whole lot of noise in the last two millenniums.

As we discuss in this chapter, women had an enormous impact on the spread of Christianity. The Romans often referred to the "priestesses" of this new faith, emphasizing their feeling that women were running the show. A good later example of women as power players involves the period of the Crusades and the Templars. Women, particularly of the nobility, played a vital central role in the warfare of the Middle Ages. The feudal system in Europe gave each noble a "fief," and that property was his to control and to defend as a vital link in the feudal chain. The lady of the fief was incredibly important to its daily life, and she was equally important to its defense. For a feudal warlord, his most important officer was his "marshal." The marshal was second-in-command, the lord's right hand in battle and his chief military advisor. It was as common as dandelions for a feudal lord to make his wife his marshal, especially his marshal in charge of castle defenses, so that his marshal/knight could accompany him to a battle.

For example, one of the worst defeats suffered by the Knights Templar was the Battle of Hattin in 1187. Raymond of Tripoli, overlord of the feudal Crusader state the County of Tripoli, was in the city of Acre having a council of war when news reached him that Saladin's army was on the march, and that they had laid siege to the city of Tiberius, where his wife, the Countess Eschiva, was in residence. The countess took charge of the defense, rallying the few knights she had for a long and bitter siege. Raymond must have trusted her a great deal. When King Guy of Jerusalem began to push for an immediate response in order to relieve Tiberias, Raymond instead wisely counseled waiting until the troops were ready, an argument he eventually lost. We know that he loved his wife very much, so obviously this attitude didn't grow from an uncaring indifference. Clearly, Raymond felt comfortable that Eschiva had things under control.

We also know of an even more famous example, in Spain in 1100. With the death of El Cid, the great knight who was the hero of Christian Spain in its struggle against the Moors, it fell to his wife, the legendary beauty Princess Jimena, to hold the city of Valencia for the king. She reorganized the army, and held back the Moors for over three years before she even asked for any help, which is clearly more than most of the

knights of the period could manage, since the Moors had overrun three-quarters of Spain. El Cid had always sought her wisdom and counsel, and doubtless would not have been surprised by her skill as a warrior.

But apart from these famous stories, we know of hundreds of examples of wives acting as their husband's war marshals. In the documents that tell these stories, they are generally related in a very dry tone, as if nothing at all unusual is going on. So much for the Second Sex. As for the rest of the Church's position on the status of women in society, it's extremely telling that, when Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095, every version we have of what he said contains a particularly interesting admonition. As a fever swept the crowd, catching the pope off-guard, and the knights began to swell forward to take the Cross, he said that he would only accept this offer of service from single men. Married men were told to go home and talk this serious decision over with their wives. If their wives agreed that they should go, then they could return and take the Cross. And if their wives wanted to go too, then they should be allowed to do so, for the sake of their own souls. According to Dan Brown, the Church believed that women hadno souls. So, we ask the question: Does this sound like a Church that held women in contempt?

As for the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and even the Victorian Age, women were no slouchers, there, either. This Church that supposedly hated women sure crowned a lot of them queen. In the 16th century, Europe was dominated by three of the most powerful and cussedly stubborn women who ever lived: Queen Elizabeth I of England, Queen Mary Stuart of Scotland, and Catherine de Medici, the don't-mess-with-this-lady Queen of France. Russia had its greatest age of glory in the 18th century under three remarkable women: Catherine I, the widow of Peter the Great; Elizabeth I, her daughter; and the immortal Catherine the Great, Elizabeth's daughter-in-law, a German princess who became more Russian than her Cossack guards. The two Tsars who reigned for blessedly brief periods in this century, Peter II and Peter III, were complete screw-ups, the worst of them being Catherine the Great's husband Peter III, who was mad as the proverbial hatter. Incapable of watching Russia go down the tubes, Catherine staged a palace coup and overthrew her ineffectual husband, just as her mother-in-law had done, ruling alone from 1762 to 1796. After her death, it took a great deal of time and a couple of assassinations for the Russian people to find a man who could fill her dainty shoes.

No, all the influential women of the Christian world were queens. Historians could, and have, filled library shelves with books about shrewd, powerful, and influential women, from Venetian poet Veronica Franco to chief presidential

advisor Abigail Adams, who didn't sit on purple cushions. And, although The Da Vinci Code contends that losing the feminine in the divinity of the Church caused our society to be more violent than it would otherwise have been, women are fairly well represented in the criminal classes as well. The Countess Elizabeth Bathory, "the Bloody Lady of Cachtice," in Hungary, tortured and murdered hundreds of young girls before her arrest in 1611. And in a footnote of history relevant to our own age, it was a woman named Sophia Perovskaya, who invented the suicide bomber. The product of a normal and pious middle-class upbringing, she nonetheless founded one of the most violent terrorist organizations in history, called the People's Will. They shot and bombed hundreds of innocent people, until at last they got their target, the most liberal tsar in Russia's history, Alexander II. Sophia was caught and hanged with the rest. She neither asked for nor received any mercy on account of her sex.

A historian could easily go on all night about the highborn, rich, and important women who aided Christianity, from Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, to Anna Comnena, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius who had called for the First Crusade; she was one of the greatest scholars of the age. Paul even had a female apostle, St. Thecla. But it was the everyday saints who propelled the faith forward. Julian the Apostate, the fourth-century emperor who tried to bring back the pagan faith, griped endlessly about his disgust with these hordes of Christian women, who gave their charity, not just to other Christians, but to pagans, as well, turning them to a faith that he despised in the process.

Flip open a roll call on the lives of the saints, and you’ll find it about evenly matched between men and women, not to mention representatives of every race, color, and creed on earth. Although some of these saints are invoked for some really dippy stuff, everything from mice infestations to eczema, you’ll also find that some of the most courageous saints of the early Church were women. From Genevieve to Joan of Arc, women fought and died for their faith, even to the present day: In 1980, four Maryknoll nuns were brutally assassinated in El Salvador during that nation’s bloody civil war.

The Catholic Church's Relationship with Women

Nowadays, Catholics must feel that they just can’t win for losing. In the wake of The Da Vinci Code, Catholics are accused of strangling the feminine side of divinity, choking it in a male-dominated tyranny. But for centuries, they’ve been taking it on the chin for something that’s about as opposite as you can get — the accusation that the Church was far too wrapped up in the feminine divine, obsessed with devotional figures from the Magdalene to St. Teresa, and most particularly Our Lady, the mother of Christ. In countless books, Protestant devotional tracts, and general histories, Catholic worship of the Virgin Mary has been compared to a pagan mother-earth cult. This negative attitude was worsened by the strange intricacies of the Catholic doctrine on the Immaculate Conception, something that confuses even some Catholics. They think it means the virgin birth of Christ through a miracle of God, and to some degree, it does. But it also means that Mary herself was free of any stain of sin, from the moment of her conception. This was a doctrine that smacked to Protestants of putting Mary on a par with Christ, and perhaps it does. So where’s the beef now with a supposed lack of respect for divinity in women?

There’s no question that the Church has stumbled in one regard — or at least, they had a hand in the debacle: This was the growing ideology that sexuality was lust, lust was a sin, and that sin had to be fought at any cost, up to and including self-castration. This idea took hold in the Middle Ages, long after the establishment of the faith, and it became part of the mindset of medieval times. Medieval or not, it’s difficult for a lot of modern women to forgive a Church that cooked up ideas like original sin (Eve ate the apple and disobeyed God, so all of us are forever suspect) and celibacy, which these same modern women, we believe, somewhat mistakenly, can be interpreted as a hatred of women.

Ideas of celibacy were hardly embraced by everyone in the Church; in fact, it took several centuries of struggle for the medieval Church to force priests, particularly in the countryside, to give up the wives they’d taken when they thought it was all right to do so. Paul speaks at length in Corinthians on the subject of the sanctity of marriage, and the importance of a just and fair relationship between husbands and wives. And as for original sin, many a Christian scholar spoke against it, on the doctrinal basis that Mary’s immaculate conception had wiped the slate clean, or that this sin was borne by Adam and Eve equally, since both disobeyed God.

Of course, anyone who thinks that celibacy was an invention of the Catholic Church would be sadly mistaken. In fact, most of the world’s major faiths,

either in the mainstream or in offshoot sects, have practiced religious celibacy. It seems to be something of a universal in logic: The most wonderful things in life are love, sex, family, wine, good food, and luxuries of all sorts, all of which are things of the senses, and should therefore be given up by anyone seeking a higher plane of contact with the spirit. Consequently, celibacy has been practiced by the clergy in various sects of just about every major faith except Islam. As a concept, it does not automatically imply a hatred of women. (We talk a lot more about the concept of celibacy and who stuck us with it in Chapter 14.)

The real burr in the saddle

We think that a lot of the anger of women that Dan Brown tapped into so effortlessly grew not out of the way women have been treated for the last 20 centuries, but the way they’ve been treated in the last two. A whole lot of the harshness toward Christianity that runs through feminist doctrine, which lists it as one of the chief oppressors, grew out of this two-century period far more than it did ancient Rome or 14th-century Italy.

During the Age of Enlightenment particularly between about 1750 and 1820, women were getting hot as a pistol in England and America. Painters like Marie-Louise Vigee-LeBrun, and Angelica Kauffman, founding member of the British Royal Academy of the Arts, writers like George Sand and Jane Austen, philosophers like Madame De Staёl, politicians like Madame Roland, even political assassins like Charlotte Corday, had their hands all over the cultural steering wheel. It was an eruption of liberty, not just political, but social and even sexual. Language, always a barometer of a culture’s openness, was free and easy, and remarkably vulgar, so much so that many a “father of our country” type returned to his journals in the 1830’s and 1840’s in order to clean up all that “coarse” language. Women moved more freely in society than they ever had before — they drank and they danced, they gambled and attended horse races, they played cards and flirted and read books on all subjects.

This wasn’t only happening in New York, but in parlors and parties in Richmond and Charleston, Baltimore and Providence, all over the brand-new 13 states. Always eager to imitate Europeans, Americans were holding their own intellectual salons to discuss the great issues of the day, and they were very often hosted by women. Most important of all, women were interacting with men, and with the world around them. Even the clothing of women at the turn of the 19th century reflected this new freedom; easy, flowing and sometimes shockingly revealing garments that were extremely naturalistic, incorporating motifs of the newly unearthed societies of ancient Greece and Egypt.

Victorianism

Then, somehow, though she could hardly be held completely to blame, Alexandrina Victoria Hanover came to the English throne at the age of 18 in 1837, and everything began to change. Chastened language became the order of the day, and one little “damn” could get you sent to bed without any supper. Young English girls increasingly became prisoners of the nursery, held from any knowledge of life or men, until they were unleashed on the world at the age of 17 or 18, utterly unprepared to be sacrificed on the altar of marriage. In America, the predominant religion, a comfortable Christmas-and-Easter sort of Anglicanism (with a large number of Congregationalists and Presbyterians), was being challenged by a massive wave of tent-revival style evangelism. Uneducated but fiery preachers were sweeping the countryside by the 1820s, winning souls in droves to the new religions, especially the Baptist and Methodist churches. Women had been the movers and shakers behind the family religion for centuries, and evangelists openly went after them in particular. In the journals of the early Victorian period, many of the most devout men, from senators and congressmen to millers and blacksmiths, make it perfectly clear that their wives had become converts to the new fundamentalism first, and that they had been drawn into it by their wives and mothers afterwards. It’s sad to think, because it’s like a slave fastening on her own shackles every morning after she brushes her teeth.

Facing the future

Of course, there were some good things about this new religious fervor. The Abolitionist movement to free slaves the world over was given an enormous boost by it, and as for sexual equality, Methodists in particular were known for the equal status they gave women, so long as it was expressed in preaching the Word. But overall, the toxic blend of religious fundamentalism and the new Victorianism turned into one of the heaviest weights of oppression women would ever bear. This is the oppression that modern feminists have battled for the last century, but it has little to do with the status of women 10 or 20 centuries ago, or of Neolithic women, for that matter.