It is very impressive when you can say your work has been used as research for the most successful book this decade. As Dan Brown says:

“Margaret Starbird’s work is of particular interest to me because it fuses the diverse fields of symbolism, mythology, art, heraldry, psychology, and gospel history. Her research opens doors for each of us to further explore the rich iconography of our own spiritual history.”

But this is not the most impressive thing about Margaret Starbird’s work.

For years, her many other books on this same theme have been exposing a cover-up that spans 1,700 years, the cover up to remove the empowering Pagan and Gnostic wisdom from its rightful place in the Christian belief system.

This is by far her best and clearest work on the subject.

Starbird asks, “How can a ‘Bridegroom’ not have a ‘Bride’?” Kabbalists claim the most sacred book of their Torah is “The Song of Solomon,” the song of the bridegroom to the bride, that it is the key to unlocking the secrets in the rest of the text.

Starbird raises the question, “Where has the sacred feminine gone from this Christian belief system when it exists as the activating and empowering force in every other belief system?”

This book is not a feminist tirade, yet it highlights need for reformation. Moreover, it exposes the damage done to the human psyche by skewing this paradigm of union of the human soul.

Starbird reveals the customs of the peoples surrounding Jesus and Mary in 1st century Palestine and we begin to see there was a heiros gamos or sacred marriage between Jesus and his beloved.

Starbird begins by peeling back the layers of deception and shows that:

• There was a female apostle. Her name was Mary the Magdalene – the beloved apostle. Most prominent, she was the apostle to the other apostles, rich, praised, intelligent, and loyal. Peter and she were equal and in conflict but then the apostle Peter was in conflict with many other people according to the Bible.

• ‘Magdala’ is not the name of a town in the 1st century, nor is it a term denoting a prostitute. In Micah 4:8-18 it refers to the Magdal-eder as the “Watchtower of the Flock.” This is a woman of royal blood needed to activate the Messianic King. She then becomes the bereaved and exiled bride who is reviled.

• For the Rabbi Yeshua/Jesus to have “…fulfilled the law…” he would have to be married. Mary Magdalene is recorded as having performed wifely duties for him including attending his tomb first thing in the morning to embalm the body, which identifies her as his widow.

• She was described in the gospels as a sister-spouse or what the Hermeticists called the ‘Sora Mystica,’ the mystical sister. Which leads me to believe that when the texts obliquely refer to her as “…having seven demons…,” she may have been a hermetic priestess that converted to this new Christian teaching.

Hermetic priests worked with seven main planetary entities. Hermetic Pythagorean teachings and Gematria, a literary devise used to highlight the importance of, and give life to, certain words and themes in written text, featured strongly in the early Christian writings. It has been suggested she could possibly have been a priestess in a temple to Aphrodite that may have lead to the legend of her having been a prostitute as Israelites who worship foreign deities are frequently referred to in the Bible as having prostituted themselves. Starbird highlights this using the Gematria of the 1st century spelling of Magdalene, being 153, which equates her with ‘The Great Goddess.’

In addition, Mary Magdalene had a vast quantity of Spikenard oil that she used half of to anoint the head and feet of Jesus in preparation for his burial and kept half for the embalming to take place after his death. Spikenard was very rare and very expensive, as it had to come from the Tibetan-Altai Himalayan region. It was sacred to Aphrodite and would have been used in the rituals at her temple, so a hermetic priestess to Aphrodite would have had access to a large quantity of it.

• A 2nd century prayer rug supports the Grail legend in which the exiled family, namely, Mary the mother, Mary the Magdalene, her sister and possibly a daughter of Jesus, Sarah-Kali, and some others who escaped from Palestine in a tiny boat. Explorations of Sarah, the Merovingian fish and Isis reveal logical connections to Magdalene legends.

I could go on about this book, how it is well researched and referenced, its beautiful colour plates of rare imagery depicting Mary’s central role in Christianity, the wonderful 60-minute audio CD of the author discussing “The Greatest Story Never Told.”

I read it from cover to cover as soon as I got it and then I listened to the accompanying CD. I loved it.

Being a recovering Christian, I wish I had written it as it made me revisit all of the things that made me depart from that faith. Yet it is not Christian bashing. Margaret Starbird’s love of her Christian faith shines through and she inspired fond and warm memories in me of the things I used to love about Christianity, and why I pursued a degree in theology and comparative religion to begin with.

If you only read one book this year, make it this one!

– Reviewed by Rev. Dr. S. D’Montford in New Dawn No. 97