Hierophant Self Discovery: The Sacred Feminine and The Church. The Annihilation of Female Priesthood and Female Spiritual and Intellectual Leadership. The Rough Guide to The Da Vinci Code. Michael and Veronica Haag

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Hierophant Self Discovery: The Sacred Feminine and The Church. The Annihilation of Female Priesthood and Female Spiritual and Intellectual Leadership. The Rough Guide to The Da Vinci Code. Michael and Veronica Haag 

The Sacred Feminine 

The Rough Guide To The Da Vinci Code 

Michael Haag and Veronica Haag 

In Search of The Lost Goddess 

“The ancients envisioned their world in two halves – masculine and feminine. Their gods and goddesses worked to keep a balance of power. Yin and yang. When male and female were balanced there was harmony in the world. When they were imbalanced, there was chaos. This pentacle is representative of the female half of all things – a concept religious historians call the “sacred feminine”. 

The Da Vinci Code. Chapter 6. Dan Brown 

Arguably the most important and interesting discussions in The Da Vinci Code concern the ‘sacred feminine’. As the novel’s characters point out, seeing God in solely masculine terms misrepresents and limits the divine – which is precisely what happens in Christianity with its vocabulary of Jesus the Son of God the Father. That is the starting point of those who argue for recognition of the Sacred Feminine and what they see as the restoration of spiritual balance to the world. True, the Virgin Mary as Mother of God brings something of the feminine to the Christian godhead, but it is not a full partnership and entirely lacks that element of Eros in which the feminine and the masculine most intimately meet. 

The argument for recovering the sacred feminine finds a tradition of sacred union in ancient cultures in which the feminine and masculine were celebrated as intimate and equal partners; examples include Isis and Osiris, Astarte and Tammu, Cybele and Attis and Aphrodite and Adonis. In these sacred pairings there is the theme of death and new life, with the female playing an active and restoring role, raising her dead lover or bringing forth new life by bearing his child. 

Yet this role of the sacred feminine is missing from Christianity, and there are those who in searching for Christianity’s ‘Lost Bride’ find her in the figure of Mary Magdalene, and who say the time has come to listen to her story. 

The Greek Gods

The Ancient Greeks worshipped their gods, including innumerable local deities, at sanctuaries great and small,  in market places and by roadsides, in cities and on islands, on mountaintops and headlands – everywhere, in fact, because the gods themselves were everywhere. But the Great Gods known to all were the twelve who lived on Mount Olympus. Ten (four of them women) were already recognised by Homer in the eighth century B.C.; Zeus, the lord of the heavens and supreme power on Olympus; Hera his wife and sister, and goddess of fertility; Athena the goddess of wisdom, patron of crafts and fearless warrior; Apollo the god of music, of prophecy and the arts; his sister Artemis the virgin huntress and goddess of childbirth; Poseidon the god of the sea and the forces of nature; the beautiful Aphrodite, goddess of love and desire; Hermes the messenger who leads the souls of the dead to the underworld, but also the protector of the home and of the market; Hephaestus, the lame god of craftsmen and for a while the husband of Aphrodite; and Ares, the god of war who in cuckolding Hephaestus was subdued by the goddess of love. In the fifth century B.C., these were joined by two deities who embodied the mystical quality of rebirth; Demeter, the goddess of crops and female fertility; and Dionysus, the god of wine and intoxication. They answered a growing need among the ancient Greeks for a doctrine of the soul otherwise lacking in the Olympian religion. 

The Eleusinian Mysteries 

Every September a great torchlit procession made its way from Athens to Eleusis on the Saronic Gulf in the west of Attica, the scene of the Greater Eleusinia held at the temple of Demeter, literally Earth Mother, goddess of agriculture in the Olympian scheme. A statue of Dionysus was carried at the head of the procession; then came the priests with the sacred objects of the cult hidden from sight in baskets; and finally there was the huge crowd of Mystai or initiates. No other festival in Greece was of more consequence or surrounded with greater secrecy. We can only guess at the nature of the Eleusinian Mysteries, as throughout their entire history no one ever revealed what transpired. 

But it was here according to the myth, that Demeter came, searching by torchlight for her daughter Persephone, who had been abducted to the Underworld by Hades. Threatening perpetual winter, so that crops would no longer grow and mankind would be extinguished. Demeter forced Zeus to order Persephone’s release for nine months of the year, when the world once more enjoyed the fruits of spring, summer and autumn. And so the mysteries in some way celebrated  death and rebirth, and certainly the response could be profound. The poet Pindar wrote that ‘he who has seen the holy things and goes in death beneath the earth is happy for he knows life’s end and he knows too the new divine beginning, while the Roman statesman Cicero, who came four hundred years later, said “the greatest gift of Athens to mankind and the holiest is the Eleusinian Mysteries”. 

Wild and Excitable Women 

The theme of rebirth is a very ancient one, and not surprisingly women played a central role. But when viewed as part of a cycle, rebirth is preceded by death, so that women played the role of killers as much as nurturing mothers. The Greeks who lived on the eastern shores of the Aegean in Asia Minor worshipped Artemis, their goddess of the hunt, at her temple in Ephesus, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. But this was not the chaste huntress, the sister of Apollo, who had asked Zeus her father for the gift of eternal virginity. Instead this was an oriental version of Artemis, a woman with a past, whose cult statue was adorned with bees and the testicles of bulls. 

From this peculiar fact it is possible to trace her ancestry back many hundreds of years to Cybele, an earth goddess of Asia Minor whose son and lover was Attis. There were stories of mountain-top affairs during which Cybele, like a queen bee, would tear out her lover’s organs. Cybele combined within her death and life, nature, man and the divine. Her temple rites were often ecstatic acts of self-sacrifice or self-abandonment: her priests castrated themselves in an ecstasy of identification with Attis, while the high-born women who were Cybele’s priestesses also served as temple prostitutes; known as MELISSAI, or bees, they offered up their bodies to the act of Hieros Gamos, sacred sexual union. 

The story has a strange sequel, for according to a strand of Christian tradition, for according to a strand of Christian tradition, Jesus confided his mother to the care of his apostle John, who brought Mary to Ephesus where she lied out her days. At a site said to be the remains of Mary’s house, local Christians long celebrated mass on August 15, the date set by the Church as her assumption into heaven – though the date has a far older resonance than that, for August 15 was also the annual feast day of Artemis at Ephesus. Nor is it likely to have been a coincidence that in the Christian Church the virginity of Mary is symbolised by a bee. 

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Montanism 

The ancient power of the goddess also found an outlet in the form of Montanism, a Christian heresy that arose in the second century A.D. in Phrygia, the region of Asia Minor that was once home to Cybele. The descent of the Holy Spirit was imminent, said Montanus its founder, declaring that as a sign it spoke from the mouths of prophets like himself and two prophetesses close to him, one of whom was said to have seen Jesus Christ dressed as a woman. 

Montanus was accused of having been one of Cybele’s eunuch priests; that he gave such a prominent role to women, those ‘gateways of the Devil’, was unforgivable; he even admired Eve as the source of knowledge, not of sin. But Montanus’s real office was to assert that men and women could achieve a direct apprehension of God, and that by being filled with the Holy Spirit prophets could be trusted as well as bishops. Instead the Montanists’ ecstatic prophesying was deemed demonic, and one modern Christian writer has pointed to the danger that “had Montanus triumphed, Christian doctrine would have been developed not under the superintendence of the Christian teachers most esteemed for wisdom, but of wild and excitable women.” 

Goddesses and their Lovers 

All over the ancient world you find versions of the goddess who is at the centre of the drama of life and death. For example in the mountains of Lebanon, which were the setting for the love affair between Adonis and Aphrodite as related by the Greeks. Adonis was a mortal born of an incestuous relationship between the king of Byblos and his daughter. Aphrodite hid the infant in a chest, which she placed in the care of Persephone, queen of the underworld. But when Persephone opened the chest and saw the child’s beauty, she wanted to keep him for her own. 

Zeus was called in to mediate in this dispute between death and love and decreed that Adonis must live part of the year in the dismal underworld but during the other part could return to the shining world above. There in the mountains above Byblos Adonis and Aphrodite became lovers, exchanging their first kisses and also their last at the spring of Afqa, for near the gorge Adonis was gored by a wild boar, and although Aphrodite tried to heal his wounds, Adonis bled to death, bright spring anemones growing where his blood touched the ground. 

It is an eternal story, the alternation of seasons expressed in the death and rebirth of men and gods, the theme resonating through the stories of Osiris, Attis and Jesus. Aphrodite is, of course, the Roman Venus, and in her earlier Semitic form she was Astarte, and in Babylonia Ishtar, the great mother goddess who was the embodiment of the reproductive energies of nature. Her lover was Tammuz, addressed by his devotees as Adon, that is ‘Lord’, his title mistakenly taken by the Greeks to be his name. Tammuz was a vegetation god who every year was believed to die, his divine mistress journeying into the underworld in quest of him. In her absence the passion of love ceased to operate in the upper world: men and animals forgot to procreate, and all life itself was threatened with extinction. 

At Byblos, the principle centre of the Adonis cult, these were days of lamentation: “He is dead, Adonis the beautiful, he is dead!” Women would beat their breasts and shave their heads, or they could offer themselves for sacred prostitution. Then, on the eighth day, the sorrow turned to rejoicing: “He is risen, Adonis, he is risen!” And today still the old fertility rites are recalled, though not in carnal form. Christians are numerous in this part of Lebanon and in the days before Christmas and Easter the mountain villagers place ‘Adonis gardens’ on their window sills or by their doors, earthenware pots planted with quick-growing seeds that spring to life in commemoration of the birth and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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Anti Social Christian Virgins 

Artemis, Aphrodite, Astarte and Cybele: these were formidable women who took what they wanted from a man. And then there was no less formidable St Thecla of Iconium, now Turkish Kinya, who wanted no man at all. Supposedly she lived in the first century A.D. but she may never have existed at all, as elements in her tale suggest that an ancient pagan cult was perverted to Christian ends. The legend goes that she was converted to Christianity in her native city by the apostle Paul, whereupon she broke off an engagement to marry and devoted her maidenhood to God. She was young and beautiful and her loss to the world of men seems to have been too great to bear. Her fiancé had her flogged, but failing to win her in this way he obtained a sentence of death by fire, only to see Thecla saved by a thunderstorm and make her escape. Another frustrated admirer tried to prise her from chastity by the threat of wild beasts, but again she got away, finally withdrawing to a mountain cave. When her persecution was yet again renewed at the age of 90, this time by local medical men jealous of her healing powers, the rocks opened up and swallowed her. 

The story of St Thecla is reminiscent of other tales of mountain passion like those of Adonis and Aphrodite, Attis and Cybele – indeed the mountain outside Konya to which Thecla withdrew had once been named for Cybele. But the life of Thecla perverts the ancient dramas of fertility, death and resurrection, and their concern for the seasons of cultivation and of man. With its other-wordly fixation on the Second Coming, the story of Thecla’s life illustrates one of the most fundamental threats that early Christianity posed to human society. 

The ancient world was “grazed thin by death”, as St John Chrysostom put it. Average life expectancy was 25 years, and only four men (and fewer women) in every hundred lived beyond the age of 50. For the population of the Roman Empire not to decrease, every woman needed to bear five children. Paul preached resurrection, yet an excess of Theclas could mean the extinction of the human species. True resurrection, said Paul’s opponents, is “that which takes place through the nature of the human body itself, and which, through human means, is accomplished every day”. 

But for Christians awaiting the Second Coming, and meanwhile eager to avoid any worldly temptation and sin, the collapse of human society was irrelevant. Chastity was venerated for the sake of gaining access to the next world, while Thecla and Christians generally, perceived as anti-social in the most fundamental sense, were persecuted for the sake of the world of the living. 

Allah and Allat 

The rejection of the sacred feminine was not only an early Christian phenomenon. According to the pre-Muslim Arab belief, Allat (properly al-Lat, meaning goddess in Arabic) was a sun goddess and daughter of Allah. The centre of Allat’s worship was a rich temple at Taif in Arabia, but there were many others including the one erected in the first century B.C. at the great trading city of Palmyra which stood at the crossroads of the desert caravan routes making it a place where many influences met. An inscription to Allat at her temple in Palmyra described her as “Allat who is also Artemis”, tying her to the great cycle of stories about the sacred feminine found throughout the ancient world. 

But when Mohammed conquered Mecca in 630, Allat’s worship at Taif survived for only another year, her overthrow marking the final victory of Islam over paganism, the Koran stating (Sura 53:22) that the old pagan deities “are but names which you and your fathers have invented: Allah has invested no authority in them”. 

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Ancient Egypt’s Contribution to Christianity 

Christianity came early to Egypt and spread rapidly from the Greek and Jewish environment of the cities to the native Egyptian countryside, where it took strong root despite ferocious persecution – the worst anywhere in the Roman Empire. Egyptians were already familiar with the doctrine of the resurrection and personal immortality which had been central features of their Osiris cult for three thousand years, and indeed it is possible that Christianity borrowed these and other ideas from the ancient religion that lingered in Egypy well into the sixth century. What is more certain is that Christianity borrowed much of its symbolism and popular art from the Egyptians so that from Isis and Horus came the Virgin and Child, and from the ankh, the ancient Egyptian sign for life, came the paradox of the Cross as representing rebirth. 

“Nothing in Christianity is original”, asserts Sir Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code, as he and Robert Langdon launch into an impromptu lecture on Christianity’s pagan roots. (“Sophie was surprised”). The halos  hovering over the heads of saints were derived from ancient Egyptian sun discs, and images of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus in her lap come from yet more ancient images of Isis suckling her son Horus. 

But, the Teabing-Langdon lecture continues, although pagan rituals, festivals, symbols and themes were absorbed into the growing Christian tradition behind it was a deliberate plan to convert the world “from matriarchal paganism to patriarchal Christianity”, to demonise the sacred feminine and to assert the dominance of men. (“Sophie’s had was spinning”.) If that indeed was the intention, then Christianity found its most formidable opponent in the Egyptian goddess Isis. 

Isis: The Last Great Goddess 

The divine triad of Isis, Osiris and Horus goes back at least to 3000 B.C., by which time Horus was already identified with the reigning pharaoh. His father Osiris was a king who ruled and was greatly loved in distant times, Isis was his sister and wife, Seth his brother. When Seth killed Osiris and dismembered his body, Isis searched out the pieces and put them together again, wondrously restoring Osiris to life in the underworld, where he reigned as judge and king. Moreover, Isis was sufficiently able to arouse her dead husband to have intercourse with him (a scene illustrated on the walls of Egyptian tombs) and conceive their son Horus. Isis therefore played the vital role in transmitting the kingship from the dead Osiris-king to the living Horus-king, a role repeated endlessly throughout the generations of pharaonic rule in Egypt. 

Through her suffering over the death of Osiris and her joy at the birth of Horus, Isis offered an emotive identification so powerful and satisfying that she became identified too with all other goddesses of the Mediterranean, whom she finally absorbed. Isis was the Goddess of Ten Thousand Names, Shelter and Heaven to All Mankind, the House of Life, the Great Mother of All Gods and Nature, Victorious over Fate, the Promise of Immortality, Sexuality and Purity, and the Glory of Women who alone could save. She was passionately worshipped by men and women alike. 

Cleopatra deliberately identified herself with Isis, and called herself the New Isis, casting Anthony as Dionysus, the Greek equivalent of Osiris, so that on earth they re-enacted the already existing cosmological bond. 

Christianity, with its male-orientated antecedents in Judaism and to a lesser extent the Zeus-centred worship of the Greeks may never have given the prominence it did to the Virgin Mary had not a figure been needed to absorb in turn the great popularity and success of the rival Isis cult. It was a rivalry that continued well into the Christian era. 

A temple was founded in Isis’s honour in Rome by the emperor Domitian himself during the 80s A.D. And in spite of the edicts of the emperor Theordosius l, which succeeded in terminating the Olympic Games after a thousand years in the fourth century A.D., pagan Philae continued as a centre of Isis worship until the sixth century when the emperor Justinian closed the temple of Isis at Philae, imprisoned its priests and had its cult statues carried off to Constantinople. In 553 part of Isis’s temple at Philae was turned into a church, the occasion commemorated by a contemporary inscription in Greek: “This good work was done by the well-beloved of God, the Abbot-Bishop Theodore. The Cross has conquered and will ever conquer.”

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Mary Magdalene: From Apostle to Whore 

There are only twelve mentions of Mary Magdalene in the four gospels of the New Testament, and eleven of them relate directly to her presence at the crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection. The twelfth reference is in Luke (8:2-3) where we are told that Jesus freed several women from evil spirits and infirmities, among them Mary Magdalene, from whom he drove out seven devils, and that these women then provided for the itinerant Jesus and his twelve disciples out of their own resources. And that is all the Bible tells us about Mary Magdalene, though she does appear in some Gnostic Gospels, and we will look at those in the following chapter. 

Nevertheless, two striking things stand out from these New Testament accounts. First, Mary Magdalene seems to be an entirely independent woman. Magdalene is not her surname; it is the place she is from, a town on the Sea of Galilee. This makes her the only woman in the Gospels who is not defined in terms of a man; that is, she is not described as the wife or sister of daughter of a man. She has her own resources, enough to keep herself in the company of Jesus and his followers, and she also contributes to their mission in the field. Second, Mary Magdalene is present at the most important moments of the Jesus story, his death and resurrection. 

At the crucifixion of Jesus his disciples have gone into fearful hiding. However, Mary Magdalene is at both the cross and the tomb, and it is she who carries the news to the disbelieving disciples that Jesus has arisen. Her appearances in the Gospels may be brief but they are telling. It is as if she fulfils the role of those ancient goddesses whose lives embraced the deaths and rebirths of their men. 

Nonetheless in the year 591 Pope Gregory l, the ‘Great’, pronounced Mary Magdalene a whore. Pope Gregory had been reading the Gospel of Luke 7:37-38, where a woman described as ‘a sinner’ came to Jesus and ‘brought an alabaster box of ointment, and stood at his feet behind him weeping, and began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment.’ The ointment, said the pope, must previously have been used by her ‘to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts’. 

This woman is nameless in the Gospel of Luke, but her anointing of Jesus occurs just a page before that scene whre he drives the devils out of Mary Magdalene. Though the connection between these two episodes is tenuous at best, the pope felt free to say, ‘We believe that this woman Mary Magdalene is Luke’s female sinner.’ Only fourteen centuries later, in 1969, did the Vatican admit that Gregory had made a mistake. 

Demonise or Liberate? 

According to Dan Brown, who wrongly gives the impression that it was Constantine and the Council of Nicea in 325 who were responsible for portraying  Mary Magdalene as a whore, this charge of harlotry marked the beginning of the Church’s campaign to demonise the sacred feminine. In reality Christianity was a largely liberating influence on women’s lives, for the everyday truth about women in pagan societies was that their worth was judged almost exclusively on their success as sexual and reproductive beings. This gave women importance and authority within the domestic sphere, but it was Christianity, especially once it had legitimised by Constantine, which opened up the horizons of new promise, and women were not behind in seeking out established roles. 

In this they were building on their already considerable contribution, for it was very much through the agency of women that Christianity had spread throughout the Roman Empire and into every level of society. The evidence in the New Testament from the Gospels, the letters of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles, shows that Jesus treated women equally with men, that women were conducting church services in their homes (Acts 12:12). In fact at the beginning women were probably more important than men in nurturing and spreading Christian belief. 

But an aspect of that belief was a tendency among both men and women to choose a life of celibacy. In men that was not considered problematic, but the independence of women, when it emulated the life of St Thecla, was perceived by the post-Constantine Church as a threat as much to itself as formerly it had seemed to society. For now the Church and society were one. 

Consequently there was an assertion of the old paternalistic attitudes of the pagan world (not the pre Atlantis true, pagan world. AZR). Men kept for themselves the more important and powerful roles in the Church, such as that of bishop, though they made somewhat slower headway in monopolising the priesthood, for there are records of women priests officiating at Mass right through the fifth century. Women were encouraged to be passive and submissive and to breed, and so it was that towards this end Mary Magdalene, that model of independence, that apostle to the apostles, was transformed into the very model of a humble and repentant sinner, the ideal for every woman seeking identification with the Church. 

Mary Magdalene in France 

After the crucifixion, Mary Magdalene had no choice but to flee the Holy Land, according to The Da Vinci Code, and so she travelled secretly to France, where she sought refuge with the Jewish community. The origin of this story, whether Dan Brown troubled to look into it himself or simply picked up a garbled version from a book like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, is found in a legend still alive today as the fishing village of Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer in the Camargue. Here, says the legend, Mary Magdalene along with Mary, the sister of the Virgin, and Mary, the mother of apostles James and John, landed in about 40 A.D., together with their servant Sarah, and Martha, Lazarus, Maximinus and Sidonius – all having fled from persecution in the Holy Land. The event if celebrated by a gipsy pilgrimage every year on May 24-25, as the gipsies identify with Sarah, who is said to have been an Ethiopian and dark-skinned like themselves. 

From there Mary Magdalene struck inland to the Ste-Baume massif where she lived as a hermit in a cave, only venturing down into the plain as she felt her approaching death in order to receive communion from Maximinus. There lie in the abbey church St Maximin-la-Ste-Baums, they say, lie the bones of Mary Magdalene. 

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The Bones of Vezelay

Yet the earliest trace of a legend placing Mary Magdalene in France says nothing about Provence at all; nor does it go back before the eleventh century. Rather it is a claim made I the 1050s by the great abbey church of Vezelay in Burgundy that it possessed her relics, an assertion supported by a papal document dated April 27, 1058. 

The Muslim Arabs, who had invaded and occupied the entire Middle East during the seventh century, had recently been making it difficult for Europeans to undertake piligrimages to the Holy Land, a factor which encouraged th development of pilgrimage sites within Europe itself. Various well-known New Testament figures were suddenly discovered to have travelled to the West and died there, their bones unearthed by enterprising churches. Glastonbury had already laid claim to Joseph of Arimathea in this way; in Paris was announced the discovery of the bones of St Denis, a convert and student of St Paul; while St James had turned up in Spain at Compostela, and St Mark had arrived at Venice. 

Unfortunately the great ninth century Romanesque church at Vezelay had been dedicated to the Virgin Mary, but as she had bodily risen to heaven at her assumption, there was no question of finding her relics. But Vezelay lay along the profitable pilgrimage route from Germany to Compostela, and the profits to be gleaned from the passing trade, not to mention the prestige and the protection to be had, made the happy discovery of some suitable remains all but unavoidable. And who better than Mary Magdalene, the very essence of the redemptive power of the Church, both as witness to the crucifixion and the resurrection, and as a fallen woman saved by her submission to Jesus. 

The shrine of Mary Magdalene at Vezelay became immensely popular, but how, the faithful wondered, had her bones come to Burgundy? A pious fiction was circulated saying that her relics had first been in Provence but were threatened by Saracen raiders, and so they were removed and brought to Vezelay for safekeeping. But how had the bones come to Provence in the first place? Another legend was invented to conveniently explain that Mary Magdalene and her companions had escaped from the Holy Land by sea and landed at Marseilles, or in an alternative version at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, from where she made her way inland and died at St-Maximin-la-Ste-Baume. It was from there that a monk from Vezelay had dug up her bones and taken them back to Burgundy. 

Mary Magdalene’s bones were soon performing miracles; she was associated with the liberation of prisoners, assistance with fertility and childbirth, spectacular cures and even the raising of the dead. Such wonderful stories demanded yet wider circulation, a challenge taken up in the thirteenth century by the Dominican writer Jacobus de Voragine, the Dan Brown of his age. To his account of Mary Magdalene in his compendium of saints’ lives called the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend), he added the plethora of new miracles put about by Vezelay and produced what very quickly became a medieval bestseller that was soon translated from Latin into nearly every European language, including Dutch and Czech. 

Meanwhile King Charles of Anjou (1226-85) was establishing a Mediterranean empire based on Naples, Sicily and his newly acquired territory of Provence. Learning from the Legenda Aurea that Mary Magdalene’s bones had originally been associated with St-Maximin-la-St-Baume, he went to have a look for himself. And what did he find? The bones of Mary Magdalene. Clearly the church at Vezelay had been mistaken. Charles installed the Dominician Order as caretakers of Mary’s shrine, and they in turn proudly broadcast the importance of their mission by fabricating the Book of Miracles of Saint Mary Magdalene, documenting all the miraculous intercessions and cures the saint had wrought at her provencal sanctuary, a publication whose success was measured by the fact that Vezelay as a centre for the miraculous soon went into decline. 

Indeed, still the pilgrims come to Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to see where Mary Magdalene came ashore and visit St-Maximinla-St-Baume to kneel before her bones. 

The Lost Goddess 

But there are further stories still. To the claims of Vezelay and St-Maximuin must be added those of Senigallia, near Ancona, which also possessed a body of Mary Magdalene as did the church of St John Lateran in Rome and the church of St Lazarus in Constantinople. Abbeville in France claimed to have her skull and Aix-en-Provence her jaw. Cologne had two arms, Sicily another, Hainault yet one more, as well as Venice and Marseilles. Mary Magdalene’s fingers were also widely distributed; the cathedral at Exeter possessed one until it was thrown away during the Reformation. There are many more examples, but also there may be some double-counting, as some say that the body in Rome was that which had previously been in Constantinople, which in turn had been brought from Ephesus at the end of the ninth century. But at Ephesus they disagree, for in addition to the tradition saying John the Evangelist settled there accompanied by the Virgin Mary, there is another saying that with them was Mary Magdalene, returning as you might expect to familiar company with Artemis and Cybele. 

The Rough Guide To The Da Vinci Code 

Michael Haag and Veronica Haag  

Other Links 

Hierophant Self Discovery: Theft Pt lll. The Lost Knowledge. Only Love is Real. An Excerpt from Dr Brian Weiss  

http://ameraziganiirao.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/theft-pt-lll-only-love-is-real-excerpt.html  

Hierophant Self Discovery. Thunder. Perfect Mind. The Lost Knowledge. The Gnostic Gospels. The Nag Hammadi Library 

http://ameraziganiirao.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/thunder-perfect-mind-gnostic-gospels.html

Hierophant Knowledge: The Psychology. Men and Women. The Sacred Prostitute. Nancy Qualls - Corbett

http://ameraziganiirao.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/psychology-sacred-prostitute-second.html 

Hierophant Knowledge: Sadomasochism. The Chains of Love. Nancy Friday

http://ameraziganiirao.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/sadomasochism-chains-of-love-nancy.html 

Hierophant Self Discovery. Portrait of a Priestess. Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. The Lost Knowledge. Joan Breton Connelly

http://ameraziganiirao.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/hierophant-self-discovery-portrait-of.html

And God Created Woman. A Self Portrait. Amera Ziganii Rao Photography  

AMERA ZIGANII RAO

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The Super Sacred Father Brother Lover™ 

The Return To The Source. Ascension.

The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. When we were giants. All of us. When you did more than rape me.

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Neo Feminist™, Post Tribe Social Reformer™ and Sacred Sexualist™. Human Rights Healer. Metaphysical Philosopher, Writer, Spiritual Intelligence Teacher, Hierophant (Interpreter of The Universe) and Mentalist Self Actualiser.

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The Sacred Whore High Priestess Hierophant™ and Sacred Pimp Warrior Protector, Brother Lover™ Society. The kings and queens of old. Angels and Sorcerers together in each of themselves and in the other. The Wizard life. Forever. Living and loving from The Source. Sourcery, Carlos Castaneda first said. I'll say it again. Sourcerers together. Living a life worth living. At last.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Re Writing The Human Race 

Ascension therefore, is as political as spirituality can get. You have to stand up for Eve. Adam has to stand up for Eve. Publicly and completely. The Return to a new Atlantis takes nothing less than that. No one is ascending without the women. Not this time. Because this time, it’s real ascension. Not the male made version. Heaven is on earth. Heaven on earth, is honouring Eve. And honouring The Great Mother Universe that she comes from. To serve you. Honour her. Treat her as you treat yourself. As monarchy. You have to accept FEMALE power, in female. Female POWER. Honour that, you honour Eve. Dishonour that and you get nothing. Ascension cannot be achieved without total equality. It is the original state. Soul. 

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Witches are healers. Witches are the Love Healers and SOURCErers of The Lost World, when we were the giant warriors. We were good and so were were you. 'The World of Men'. The Tribe of Misogyny and Bourgeois™.

Gives us all a bad name. And poisons all hearts.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

Feminist Lolita Intellectuals™. You lucky man. A place at the table, a place at the Executive Table. That's all. The rest is easy.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2013

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS: APPLIED CONSCIOUSNESS™, NEO FEMINISM™, METAPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY & SACRED SEXUALISM™. POST TRIBE SOCIAL REFORM™. POWER IS THE NEW LOVE. FREEDOM + HOPELESSNESS + SEX. NIHILISM FOR A SUCCESSFUL LIFE™ THE LOST KNOWLEDGE™ THE WIZARDRY OF BEING™ POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY™ TRUE NEW LOVE. BEYOND THE REVOLUTION™

SOCIAL REFORM. THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM AND LOVE. SHAMANISM. PHILOSOPHY. TRUE (UNIVERSAL) LOVE. NEO FEMINISM™. ANTI MISOGYNY. THE ARTIST'S WAY. WIZARDRY. TRUE INTELLECTUALISM™. WISDOM. GONZO SPIRITUALITY. NIHILISM. SEX. SOUL. GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE™. SPIRITUAL EXISTENTIALISM™. THE VOID OF CREATION™. ALCHEMY & LIBERATION & HUMANITY™. HELL. SUFFERING. GROWTH. ASCENSION. LOVE. LIFE. DEATH. WARLORDS OF LIGHT™ TRUE LOVE & TRUE SEX. THE POST TRIBE SOCIETY™

The Company.

Writer, Speaker and Enlightener, Amera Ziganii Rao, is now putting together a comprehensive and unique programme of Alchemy & Liberation & Humanity™. A programme of learning that is specifically about one particular kind of woman. And one particular kind of man. The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the true society that they come from and the one they, in particular, she can and has to return to and that anyone can join her and him in. This is about Paradise on Earth.

This is about The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, and the Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity that is for all as a result of their healing and in particular, hers. This is about the kind of woman who is at the bottom of the pile in a Patriarchal Toilet Tribe from Hell Society™, the norm, the conventional world and the world of the Tribe. This is about the kind of man who is next in line from the bottom. The sensitive man and the female chattel. The High Priestess and High Priest of a profane society, that has long forgotten who they are.

This is about being at the bottom of the pile, for the forgotten and strangled shamans, and for her, the story of escape. Abused by her family, her friends, her men, her whole society, by the very nature of who she is and who they are and what has happened on this Earth. It is about women of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about men of love, of Spirit and of sex. It is about the Cinderellas of this world. It is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™. Who she is and how, loving her is the secret to Paradise on Earth and how we have been living a lie for 8000+ years. A lie of male (non High Priest) religion with a male ‘God’ and with Patriarchs and Patriarchal types and Matriarchs and Matriarchal types ruling over us and making our lives hell, all in the name of family, the tribe and the way things are and should remain. Hate, fascism and profanity. A sick society that vilifies, more than anyone else, the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, just because it was told to. A sick society that calls her Eve. A sick society that has forgotten who we all are, let alone the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and the Sacred Whore High Priest™. This is about us remembering and knowing who WE are.

This is a programme of healing for the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™, and the Sacred Whore High Priest™, to take them and particularly, her, from monstrous levels of low self esteem and lack of self knowledge, back to herself and it is a programme for all those who truly want to love her, and indeed, him. This is a programme for the greatest carers on Earth, who are vilified, destroyed, ridiculed, ignored, abused, used, misused and hated for being everything that those who would steal from us are not. This is a programme to turn Cinderellas into The Sacred Whore High Priestesses and for anyone who wants to love her or live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™. And this is a programme to turn sensitive men into Sacred Whore High Priests™ and for anyone who wants to love him and live by the values of the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and High Priest Society. Love, humanity, Spirit and sex. This is a programme to reverse 8000+ years of witch burning, women hating and healer ridicule. This is about the The Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and all those who would love her and live by her values.

This is about the chance for Paradise on Earth. This is a programme for the most beautiful, kind hearted, wounded women and men on this planet. A programme of how to implement a system of how to beat life, how to survive life and how to resurrect from the grief that is a true life. Alchemy and Liberation and Humanity of the lower mind into the higher mind, the soul and the inner heart and therefore one's true, confident, ‘happy’, successful, creative, sexual, sensual, individual, intelligent, emotionally healed, capable of loving and being loved self. How to turn grief into creation and survive and thrive, despite all the shit, all the pain and all the hurt. How to live in a world of madness, hollowness and cruelty and how to be a winner. How to stand up for oneself and to take back the power that has been stolen from anyone with heart, Spirit and sex. The art and science of Alchemy.

This is a programme, based on my scholarly and non scholarly work over 15 years (so far), if not for my whole life, and my extensive and intense, visceral experiences of self transformation from resignation, cynicism and despair to a state of relative bliss, and above all, the right to be. The programme and the courses and my speaking and indeed my forthcoming book, will cover the method of change. The psychological, sociological, spiritual, cultural, political, emotional and physical and even anthropological methods of change. Why we are here. Who the Sacred Whore High Priestess™ is and why she is here. And who the Sacred Whore High Priest™ is. Why we are here. Who we are and what we are and why we are. The beauty and glory of the truth. The meaning of life, no less. This will be on offer in the future.

My first book of consciousness, my first book of the spiritual politics of humanity, of authentic power and of self love and strength. A comprehensive series of online courses, live events and audio and visual material. Books, live events, CDs and DVDs. And one on one personal empowerment consultations. The Amera Ziganii Rao Method of Change™. The right to be and the way to have the right to be. And indeed, how to maintain the will to live without love. How to BE unconditional, self sufficient, self caring, self love. The right to be and the will to be and the unparalleled success that comes with that. The Lost Knowledge™. HOW to live. And how to heal others, the profane and the sick and the soulless. The others. My Business and that of any Sacred Whore High Priestess™ and Sacred Whore High Priest™, is Human Rights, The Right to a Sexual Society, Self Actualisation and Freedom.

My Business is To Overthrow Fascism, in the Home and in the Country. My business is also mastering destiny. Overthrowing the ultimate 'fascism'. Our journey on Earth and The Return To The Source. Our healing, our ascension and our redemption. Fate. The daily crucifixions of a true life, the challenges and the fury of being healers and people of love on a planet like Earth.

Submitting to the journey to liberate and evolve oneself, through following one's heart, however much heartbreak and devastation it leads to on the long long long journey to freedom and then the longer journey to happiness. 'Long Road to Freedom', as Nelson Mandela says. My business is always taking risks, never giving up and making the endless sacrifices it takes to become whole. Enlightenment, Nirvana and then Parinirvana and beyond. My business is pain. My business is bliss.

My business is seeing the truly glory of Spirit on Earth. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Society™ and all that it is. Spirit, humanity, sex and love again at last. And the end of our legacy as either servants or witches or unpaid carers or indeed, ignored mistresses, other women, other men even, and the weirdos that are at the bottom of society. This is our world and it is time to take it back and I can show you how. And that makes my life, truly, worth living.

I want you to feel the way I do. Alive, with the right to be and the belligerence to exist in this profane and male ‘God’ led world of male supremacy, female supremacy, domestic, casual fascism, tribe rules from hell, with beautiful and kind, love intelligence laden, female and male Cinderella warriors at the bottom, caring for everyone else and getting nothing but hatred, ridicule and isolation for it. The meek are already inheriting the Earth and I can show you how.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They told you I and my kind were dictators and that you were slaves, when all we had done was love you, honour you as companions and above all, we had let you just live.

We were the holy communers, the ones who gave birth to human beings, the leaders of society, the creators of society, the vehicles of Divinity on Earth and the channels of wisdom. The ones who looked after everything and the ones who built everything and ran everything, because we could. And because we loved it. We are and were the force of creation. And you loved us and you lived.

But they told you that you ‘deserved’ power too and that we were the ones standing in your way. And you believed them. The oldest ‘divide and rule’ strategy of hate in history and it worked. They used it and you bought it, hook, line and sinker. You had to give up sex, love, magic and your own spiritual gifts and you burnt, destroyed and violated me for 8000 years.

The world calls that male supremacy. And indeed, family supremacy, Matriarchal supremacy and supremacy of the material world and all who believe in it. Men and women like you. When all that you are are slaves to a reptile force to generate hate energy for them to live and thrive and vampire the human race. The puppets of a hate force, that chose to destroy women and men like me, for hate to grow, so they could live. You bought it and it worked. The greatest fraud in the history of the world.

I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past and I forgive you for becoming enslaved and taken over by the machines of the alien reptile force that invaded and took over Earth 8000 years ago. They taught you to hate me and my kind and you believed them. They taught you that my mind was evil. My mind, my sex, my body and my ways of life.

The humanity, the glory of sexuality and the glory of creation and creativity and the glory of Divinity in each and every one of us. Our souls. They taught you that human beings are separate from Divinity, that sex was wrong and that women who have minds of their own are uppity slaves. They vilified us but much much worse than that, they destroyed your relationship with all that is unseen, all that we honour and love.

They taught you to hate what is really God. By teaching you to hate us, you hated all that is good in yourselves. They taught you to hate the light. They taught you to kill us. The daughters of The Universe. The High Priestesses of God. The Spiritual Mothers. The Sacred Whore High Priestess Avatars of The Universe™. The Sacred Army of Love on Earth.

The Shamans, the Mystics and the Communers. The Hierophants.

They called me Eve and blamed me for the downfall of the human race and created the awesome profanity that is religion. Of men, by men and from men. Of reptiles, by reptiles and from reptiles. Christianity, Islam and Judaism and every other philosophy around the world was poisoned. There are no female spiritual leaders left. It is all profanity. They chose you to represent them because they wanted to divide us and they did. They told you to hate me. And you believed them. Now I am back and I forgive you.

I forgive you because I can. Because I came here to save your soul. And because I finally know who I am. I am THE High Priestess Monarch of the ancient past. I came here to return your soul to The Source. God, The Mother, The Universe. To return you to what is really God. Because I love you. And because She loves you and your kind, whatever you have done.

Whatever you have done to me and whatever you have done to Her. And most of all, whatever you have done to yourself. We forgive you. This is your redemption. Your freedom and your ascension. We are here to save your soul.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

You bought the Sacred Whore like a piece of meat and you called that a wife. Your trophy wives. Your dancing girls. Your chattel and serving girls. Your piece of beauty. You bought us like you would cattle. Then you called it wives. Now you call it prostitution. The High Priestesses of the real God. You bought us to buy God, The Mother, The Universe and you caged us, separated us from our Divine gifts and skills in the Temple and drove us mad and then lost interest in us, because we had no gifts left, no excitement, no hunter in ourselves and no hope or joy left. Then you just called us mad and discarded us. You called us evil and you call love obedience, even though it had already killed us. You moved into our Temples and you played with the divination tools and thought you communed. The destruction of Atlantis was your gift.

You stole us from God, The Mother, The Universe and you tried to usurp us. You vilified us, enslaved us and you still envy us today. You call it intuition. You might want to think about this when you hate us out of your jealousy. The mystic gene means physical tortuous pain and taking on the empathy of the human race. All their pains, evils and dark thoughts. We see and feel everything. We make crucial sacrifices to be near Spirit and the unseen and we go without for years. To be shaman is not glamour. I make it glamour. To be shaman is a specific Samurai existence, ascetic and harsh. We commune to be guides. And you take that and you shame yourselves because you just want the meat. You didn’t just want the meat. You wanted our beauty of spirit, our personalities and our love and kindness. And you destroyed them, because you caged us and called us wife.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The High Priestess Sacred Whores, the High Priests and the true protectors. Those who do not have the gift like either the High Priests or especially like the highest of all, the High Priestess Sacred Whores but who honour, protect and facilitate them to the world. Who honour the Shaman Sacred Whores of this world most of all, and who know who they are and who they are not. Who know the difference, who do not envy and who protect and love the representatives of Spirit, GOD, THE MOTHER, THE UNIVERSE, on Earth. Who honour their wisdom and who honour the latent Shaman in themselves too and who honour the communing ability of the High Priestess Sacred Whores. The non violators. Our only friends. The New Society exists. It is called Enlightenment. It is called Love. It is The Holy Grail.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

The master race. It's all a lie. You are brought up to be a despot king and it is only your sister who ever tells you that you have become a pratt. The master race is all a lie. There are no kings in an equal world. Your father was misinformed. What he brought you up to be was a killer. Pure and simple. A misogynist. A modern misogynist. A polite killer.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

I enter the magical hours of pure feeling, pure thought, pure imagination and I think and I write and I 'mysticise' the Universe. I escape at will, the truth of my humanless, Samurai solitude, and I pursue the truth of love in myself and in everyone else. I am philosopher. I am shaman. I am alone. I frontier the Soul to be spirit on Earth.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Amera Ziganii Rao is a former hard news journalist who is now turning professional with her art forms and indeed, her healing forms, after a long journey of inner searching, self teaching and exploring many layers and areas of both craft and wisdom. She is now working on her first book of philosophy and esoteric thought, and social, cultural and spiritual commentary. She is also showing her first photography collections. And last but most definitely not least, she is building a business to share her Sacred Whore High Priestess Society consciousness and empowering explorations to reach as many people as possible across the world. She is in her forties and lives in London.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

In the meantime, please enjoy this website. I have included many of the subjects I am covering, areas of experience and insight that I will be exploring to the fullest in my book, the courses and all the other work that is to come as a dramatist, novelist and essayist. I also of course, include many of the wise people on this planet, who have come long before me; authors, screen dramatists, playwrights, film makers, artists, and other enlighteners and grand carriers of the wisdom I have found the most helpful on my journey, to find peace and become enlightened. The seemingly impossible journey, in the face of oneself and one’s circumstances. People who have contributed massively to my healing on this mad journey called life, in this insane existence called The Universe. People who have helped to make me as good a carrier of wisdom as I in turn, can be. Thank you.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2011

Copyright and intellectual property rights are serious issues. And legally protected. Please do not reproduce my work anywhere without due credit and obviously, never for financial gain. 'Big Sister' is watching you! Other than that, please continue to enjoy my original work and the work of (credited) others, for free, while I work on using my material in further professional formats. Thank you for your interest and support.

Amera Ziganii Rao © 2012

Amera Ziganii Rao © Digital Darkroom Art

Thank you to outside source for original