Symbols of Mary Magdalene

"Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row."

The following piece was published in Heretic Magazine in 2016. 

Why Symbols?

Nearly all languages of the world today in the twenty-first century are dialects of the same language, words and letters; a language so restrictive that it erases aeons of our knowledge, history and art, and our greatest heroes, tragedies and triumphs.

(Image: Magdalene by El Greco)

Symbols are a language of allegory, created long before the lettered words we are imprisoned by today. As an art historian, my job is to investigate the inspirations for creations such as symbols. ‘A picture tells a thousand words,’ which my father would say when I was growing up in Australia, perfectly describes the language of symbols. The human thought process is so complex that computer scientists have yet to match it. Combined with oral tradition, symbols are just as effective at containing and recalling information as any computer – possibly more so.

Of all the saints, Mary Magdalene has the most number of symbols that I have encountered during my years of research into religious art history. At the last count I had found around eighty symbols relating to Mary Magdalene, each with multiple versions, interpretations, interconnecting relationships and histories preserved and handed down through millennia. No other woman has so many symbols, not even Mary, mother of Jesus. Mary Magdalene appears to have been a lot more important than an impoverished Jewish lady of the night who had met Jesus for only fifteen minutes of fame. So much information is generated from her symbols that they begin to colour many grey areas and total blanks of history. The trail of such symbols is not always clear nor easy to find. A broken twig or half a paragraph here, a bent blade of grass or the etymology of part of a word there; a tiny tuft of fur on a branch or the photo of part of a broken artifact over yonder.

By tracking her symbols, Mary Magdalene’s story and forgotten tracts of history can be found in plain sight in the most surprising places. Her symbols are everywhere in modern artifacts and decorative motifs on houses, the designers mostly unknowing of their original meanings; for example, in the art, curiosities and Victorian houses of Haight Ashbury, San Francisco.

Symbols of Mary: A Jar

In all four books of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) a woman anoints Jesus with ointment of pure spikenard from an alabaster container. In Biblical lore Mary Magdalene anoints Jesus in an emotionally charged scene. The famous pint jar of ‘nard’ (or spikenard) was one of the most expensive luxury items of its day, suggesting that Mary may have been more affluent and more important than written legend would suggest. In the Book of John, Judas Iscariot complains of the waste of so much money. And understandably so; the ointment remains too expensive for anybody but the very wealthy, even today.

Legend recounts that the jar of ointment was given to Mary the Virgin by a visiting king at the birth of Jesus. At that time the oil was used strictly only by high-ranking royals for marriages, coronations and burials. Mary Magdalene anointed Jesus in an ancient marriage ritual by bathing and oiling her husband’s feet and head with perfume. According to a member of the Catholic ‘Black Nobility’, ‘Mary Magdalene anointed Jesus’ head in a coronation ceremony of a king, which only a priestess and imperial royal can do. She benedicted him.’

Of all her symbols, Mary Magdalene’s jar identifies her not only in the Bible, but is syncretistic with any depiction of a woman with a jar. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 1864 watercolour painting, How Sir Galahad, Sir Bors and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanct Grael, which inspired my original research, Percival is bowing and receiving a chalice from a woman holding what looks like a small perfume container in her left hand. When I showed photographs of Rossetti’s painting to Catholic friends, their question was, ‘What is Mary Magdalene doing in an Arthurian painting?’

According to Sarah Borel-Jacquet, Grandmaster of the Order of St John (an Essene dynastic order based in Paris, France, that claims to have only members and initiates who are blood descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene or their relatives), ‘the Arthurian legends are an allegory of the real story of the Sangraal (Jesus and Mary Magdalene).’

From my own research into the histories of the symbols of the people in the Bible, a few things have become apparent: in particular, that only ancient orthodox religions and private orders or secret societies have any inkling of anything outside the box of the genetically-modified frozen cookie dough the general public are pacified on. The old orders know different versions of history, because these are handed down and preserved over centuries and millennia in private libraries. Their initiates spend years and decades learning to understand different kinds of languages, such as allegorical symbolism in prose and visual design. Once it is calibrated into the mind’s collection of visual words, the symbol of Mary Magdalene’s jar starts to appear everywhere. Sometimes Mary’s jar is disguised as a knob on the back of a chair, or a series of capped urns along a park walkway, or in details on a Victorian mansion. The most symbolically charged depictions are Mary with the jar’s lid open (symbolic of Pandora’s Box, but in reverse), such as in sixteenth-century works by Lucas van Leyden, Quinten Massys or Bernardino Luini. In the orthodox Catholic and Masonic versions Mary’s secrets can save the world.

Symbols of Mary: Pearls

Pearls represent the tears of Mary Magdalene: tears of happiness at being saved by Christ’s love, tears of repentance for her sins, and sadness from the tragic loss of her family. The pearl is also a gemstone of the goddess Venus and the month of July – Mary Magdalene’s feast day is celebrated on 22 July. Mary Magdalene, in orthodox Catholic tradition, is syncretistic with Venus, who was, in real life, a deified Biblical-flood-era matriarch of royal imperial families. The tradition went that only blood-ranked nobles were allowed to wear pearls up until about a century or so ago. Traces of this tradition can still be seen in the custom of debutantes receiving pearl jewellery from a relative for their ‘coming out’ into society.

The pearl also represents the moon, which controls the tides of the oceans, relating to Venus, born on the ocean during the Biblical flood, and a priestess of women. The moon can synchronise a group of women’s menstruation, if living away from electric light. It is said that Mary Magdalene served as a priestess of women at the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, cloistered with women for much of her time there and at home. Pope Gregory deemed Mary Magdalene a prostitute in the ninth century, due to the temple practices of sacred prostitution. In Mary’s time sacred prostitution was respectable and noble. It occurred only one day in a year and only high-born noble women were allowed to participate. The custom dates back to the Biblical flood. As there were very few women survivors, they had to take multiple husbands to regrow the population in order that it could sustain itself. Multiple husbands for a woman is still highly respectable in Tibetan and remote Chinese families. For instance, in 1992, while riding a motorbike around North India with my first husband, I met a Tibetan woman with seven husbands in McLeod Ganj (or Little Lhasa), a hamlet of Tibetan refugees in the foothills of the Himalayas. According to the local Tibetan townsfolk, multiple husbands for a wife is a very respectable tradition.

Venus, born during the Biblical flood, had seven lovers. In modern symbology this custom is referred to in an episode of Star Trek: women of the survivors of a destroyed planet each take seven husbands for their race to have enough DNA variations to survive. Before the World Wide Web, researchers could not publish this information as actual history, for fear of lynch mobs. Instead, they published it in allegory, as science fiction and mythical fantasy, the truth only discussed behind windowless walls of secret societies.

As a royal and religious matriarch, not sacred prostitute, Mary Magdalene is considered a role model for women in orthodox cultures from ancient times to the present. The pearl is an analogy of Mary Magdalene’s life. What we have been told is only a tiny bit of misunderstood grit in an epic adventure and tragic Holy royal romance – one fuzzy pixel of a whole life’s photograph album.

Symbols of Mary: The Egg

Just where Easter eggs came from and why they were red is an interesting story, with some important clues as to who Mary Magdalene and Jesus really were. We have established that Mary Magdalene was very wealthy and not a prostitute (as we know it), and that she was of royal blood. However, there are many different ranks of nobility. So, how royal was Mary Magdalene?

The orthodox Catholic story of Mary Magdalene and the egg follows Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Mary Magdalene goes to Rome and gatecrashes a dinner party of Roman Emperor Tiberius to protest Jesus’ presumed death and the treatment of people in Jerusalem. Mary brings an ordinary egg as a gift and uses it to describe the great stone door rolling open while she explains to Tiberius, ‘he has risen.’ Tiberius retorts that ‘Jesus could no more have risen than you can make that egg in your hand turn red.’ Mary holds up the egg to Tiberius and his dinner guests and again proclaims, ‘he has risen.’ At that same moment the egg turns blood red before an astonished Tiberius and his sardonically bemused dinner guests. This story is the basis for a Catholic religious festival every year at Easter, called ‘He has risen’ or Pascha. The red eggs were originally dyed with herbs and vegetables, such as beetroot. It is only in recent centuries that Easter eggs are rainbow colours and made of chocolate.

The story of Mary Magdalene, Tiberius and the egg is very strange and not only because the egg turned red (for the tale is a symbolic variation of a common dream women have when they become pregnant), but also because Mary Magdalene was able to gatecrash a Roman emperor’s dinner party. Surely this woman could not have been a Palestinian prostitute, and certainly not a Jew. To be able to get that close to the emperor of Rome, Mary Magdalene would have had to have been born to an imperial Roman family and her rank acknowledged, not only by Tiberius, but by all his court and imperial guards. She would certainly not have been a poor Jewish woman, no matter how beautiful. A commoner can never marry into royalty and be thought of by royals as a royal – they can only be born with royal blood. It is the way the tradition has been since before the Biblical era. To that end, two hundred years ago Kate Middleton and Prince William’s marriage would have caused major civil unrest and international political scandal. In this context, Mary Magdalene, if a Jewish lady of the night, would have been put to death before she reached three hundred feet of Tiberius or his dinner guests. But she was not, so this puts Mary Magdalene in a completely different social set than Hollywood movies depict. The legend of Mary Magdalene and the egg tell us that Jesus and Mary were not poor and not Jewish.

According to Professor Dale Martin, in his lectures on New Testament history and literature at Yale University, ‘... nowhere in the Bible does it say that Jesus was Jewish.’ The Bible states only that Jesus was of the house of Melchizedek, who was a Canaanite imperial priest king, not Jewish. Melchizedek was of the original kings of Salem, the original name for Jerusalem.

Imperial families traditionally belong to all faiths, in order to keep the peace between them.

"For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." (Isaiah 9:6)

These are normal day-job ceremonial titles for imperial monarchs. An imperial monarchy represents all the many different nations, cultures and creeds of the world. It also represents the ethereal, because it is the head of the Church – a one-world imperial monarchy to maintain peace and fair trade and to rally help in times of need. Due to mistranslations of language context, from lack of knowledge about royal intentions and traditions, we have forgotten all this.

Symbols of Mary: The Rose

"The Bride: I am the Rose of Sharon, and the Lily of the valleys.

Solomon: As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.

The Bride: As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste. He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love. Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me. I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please."

(Song of Solomon 2, King James Bible)

A member of the rose family is the apple, the forbidden fruit of the Bible. As allegory, the apple is fully loaded with stories and has many meanings, the most ancient of which are related to secrets, as the apple is an allegory for secrets of the Holy Grail.

The Latin phrase ‘sub rosa’ (‘under the rose’) in King Henry VIII’s time meant that something was secret. Some rooms where important secret meetings of state have been held for centuries often have ceilings decorated with roses. In the twenty-first century the phrase sub rosa is a commonly used term for covert military operations.

The so-called ‘rose windows’ of churches and cathedrals, do not look like roses. They are, in fact, chrysanthemums, a very long story that has been a secret for centuries, ‘under the rose’. On old confessionals are carved five-petalled roses to assure parishioners, who couldn’t read, that anything said in the confessional would be held in confidence.

Mary Magdalene’s story, since the Reformation, has been a secret and only recently started to come into world view after the fictional movies, The Da Vinci Code and Bloodline. Whenever we see the rose in older styles, pre-mid-twentieth century architecture and symbolic art, we hear Mary Magdalene mystically whispering her story to us.

Symbols of Mary: The Pentagram

Venus is the morning and evening star, and is sometimes known as the Jewel of the Sky; the five-pointed star of the planet Venus, not to be confused with the Wiccan pentacle, the official planet of the Roman goddess, Venus. Venus is veiled by many goddesses: in Babylon it was known as Ishtar; Palestine: Ashtart; Greece: Aphrodite; Aztec: Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli; and Norse: Sif.

The pentacle or pentagram gets its name from its five points, penta is five in Greek. The Venus pentagram symbol is derived from the way the planet moves, orbiting the Sun at a different speed to the Earth. When we connect the points where Venus comes closest to the Earth, they form the shape of a pentagram, where Venus ‘kisses’ the Earth five times. But, hang on a starcrossed minute! How did people 5,000 years ago know about Venus’s unusual orbit? Schoolbooks say we discovered that the Earth was round and planets had orbits only a few hundred years ago. These sort of quirky geek observances and questions alert us to the Matrix; something not right in institutional and commercial education and media.

Five is a commonly used important symbolic number in Masonic traditions, both ancient and modern. Mary Magdalene, in Masonic tradition, is descended from (and in orthodox Catholic traditions syncretistic with) the goddess Venus. In Roman and other ancient traditions, real royals were direct blood descendants and reincarnated women who were syncretistic with the goddess Venus.

According to ancient and present-day traditions of imperial royalty, Mary Magdalene, as well as her family, are of equal social status with Roman imperial families of her time. Five is also how many children Mary Magdalene had with her brother-husband Jesus: two boys and three girls (that is, according to an allegorical modern poem, Lebor Clann Glas, by Frank O’Collins). In an email exchange with the author in 2012, when I asked him what his inspiration was, he replied:

"Across each great continent and land mass of this precious planet, the greatest stories, the most extraordinary and gripping tales, have been sanitised and removed from our consciousness as global systems of cultural control have been introduced: the great leaders of the American nations Dreamtime custodians of the saltwater people of Australia and the Pacific that until the last two hundred years still honoured the Mesolithic skills of the Neanderthal in telepathy and true astral travel; the long-forgotten African kingdoms. Lebor Clann Glas is but one of a series of epic writings that are progressively being completed ... Lebor Clann Glas as an epic poem, and therefore fiction based on an accurate timeline of events, provides an alternate clarity to otherwise ‘sanitised’ and ‘orthodox’ views which have never provided either the real motive, nor realistic consequence of events."

In Frank O’Collins’ Lebor Clann Glas his version of Jesus is Irish, and Frank, to my knowledge, is not a standup comic.

Symbols of Mary: The Skull

In France there is an Essene Masonic secret society called the Order of Saint John, whose members claim to be Desposyni, a branch of descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and who have an intriguing mythology. They believe that the skull represents John the Baptist, the first husband of Mary Magdalene. In particular and their battles for the fabled knowledge of immortality; the their legend purports that John the Apostle was born to John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene. The legend says that after John the Baptist was executed by beheading, Jesus married his sister, Mary Magdalene, and adopted her son John. This would have been perfectly respectable in Mary Magdalene’s time.

Another interpretation of the skull, from my own research, is that it is the skull of Sarah Damaris, daughter of Mary Magdalene and Jesus. A well-known legend is that Sarah was born in Egypt and brought to live in France as a twelve-year-old girl. In the Bible, as an adult in her early twenties, a woman named Damaris was present with Dionysus the Areopagite when apostle Paul caused a riot. Paul, also know as Saul, who had never met Jesus, but wanted to ‘be like Jesus’, tried preaching his own version of Christianity in Ephesus. Paul’s preachings upset the local matriarch goddess Artemis, which prompted a riot, as chronicled in the Book of Acts, chapters 19 to 41.

Damaris is mentioned in the New Testament in Acts 17:34, purportedly as having converted to Christianity from Paul’s teachings, along with Dionysius the Areopagite. Most mainstream scholars write on the internet that Damaris and Dionysius were married, but in the Old Master artist Raphael’s preparatory sketch for Paul at Ephesus, Damaris and Dionysius are depicted as twins, brother and sister.

The rest of the orthodox legend goes that Damaris was beheaded at around the age of twenty-two in Corinth, Greece, due to political ramifications from the riot at Ephesus and Paul’s teachings. Damaris is also known as Phoebe in Romans in a letter by Paul in the Bible:

"I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae. I ask you to receive her in the Lord in a way worthy of his people and to give her any help she may need from you, for' she has been the benefactor of many people, including me. (Romans 16:1-2)

Cenchreae is only four and a half miles from Corinth, where Damaris was beheaded. Further, in the Book of Revelations, John the Apostle wrote about the righteous being beheaded:

"I also saw the people who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of God’s word, who had not worshipped the beast or his image, and who had not accepted the mark on their foreheads or their hands."

(Revelations 20:4)

The Bible is several books in one, a code; but not just one code, or one language as we know it. If we place the ‘beast’ in John’s time, who was it, historically? Was the beast a public political opponent, or somebody closer and more established? John is writing in code, so it could logically be somebody very close, within their own circle. Could it be Paul, Saul of Tarsus?

Conclusions

One could assume I am saying in this article that the relics of Mary Magdalene and/or Jesus Christ are in San Francisco. Yet, if I were to theorise from these symbols, coded art and artifacts about what I have observed in San Francisco, it is the relics of Sarah Damaris housed in the Paris of the Pacifi c, in the new Arcadia. The YouTubers digging around abandoned caves in the middle of nowhere have not done enough research. They have not taken into account that the characters of the Bible discussed here were imperial royals who were far too important to their descendants; individuals who rule multiple nations, then and now, for such imperial relics to ever be left unattended, nor for their whereabouts to be made known to the general public throughout the past two thousand years of war all over the world. Maybe now is the time for their secrets to be allowed to come to light, because the internet makes everything so public, yet so drowned out in the information stream, that the really important things go unnoticed. Hidden in plain sight, as their story has always been.

By D. A. Hodgson in "The Heretic Magazine", issue 11, 2016, USA, excerpts pp. 29-47. Adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.