IN PALESTINE A GREAT TURNING POINT IN the history of the world had been reached. Because the gods were no longer experienced as ‘out there’ in the material world, it was necessary for the Sun god, the Word, to descend to earth. As we are about to see, his mission was to plant in the human skull the seeds of an interior life that would become the new arena for spiritual experience. This planting would give rise to the sense we all have today that we each have inside an ‘inner space’.
The cosmic plan had been that human spirits should attain individuality, should be able to think freely, to exercise free will and to choose who to love. To create the conditions for this, matter became denser until each individual spirit was finally isolated inside its own skull. Human thought and will was then no longer wholly controlled by gods, angels and spirits, as it had been a thousand years earlier at the siege of Troy.
However there were dangers in this development. Not only might humanity become altogether cut off from the spirit world, there was a danger, too, that humans would become completely cut off from one another.
This was the great crisis. People no longer felt like spiritual beings, because the human spirit was in danger of being snuffed out altogether. The love that bound tribes and families, an instinctive, psychic blood-love like the one which binds packs of wolves, was weakened in the newly hardened skulls, in the new towns and cities.
Tracing the development towards a sense of individual identity, we have touched on Mosaic law, a rule for communal living strictly enforced, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We have touched, too, on the obligation to feel compassion for all living things taught by the Buddha. We saw in both traditions the beginnings of moral obligation as a path of individual discipline and development. Now the Stoics of Rome gave the individual legal and political status in the form of rights and duties.
The irony, then, was that just as individual human identity was formed, the sense that life was worth living was largely lost. The blood baths in the Colosseum showed no notion of the value, let alone the sanctity of individual human life.
Jesus ben Pandira, the leader of the Essenes, might preach purity and universal compassion, but from a point of view of a movement to withdraw from the world altogether. Stoics might teach responsibility, but to them this was a duty without joy. ‘Never let the future disturb you’, the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius would offer as a philosophy of life — ‘you will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which arm you today against the present’. These words are full of weariness.
Humanity felt itself dragged along by a tide of suffering. We may imagine how people longed to hear someone say, ‘Come with me, ye that are heavy-laden, I will give you rest.’
We saw the candidate for initiation being shown the green wheat ear in the inner sanctum at Eleusis and taught to look forward to the ‘seed time’. In the inner sanctum of great Egyptian temples, candidates for initiation had been shown Isis suckling the infant Horus. This second Horus, this Horus-to-come, would be a new king of the gods bringing a new dispensation. He was called the Good Shepherd, the Lamb of God, the Book of Life and the Truth and the Life. Isaiah had told his people to make straight the ways of the Lord. He promised their sins would be washed away as he envisioned the coming of the Messiah. In the Fourth Eclogue the Roman initiate-poet Virgil predicted the coming of the man-god, the Saviour. ‘The Golden Age will return as its first-born descends from on high,’ he wrote, ‘… all the stains of our past wickedness will be washed away.’
In fact the life of Christ Jesus as it has come down to us might look like a patchwork of events in the lives of those who came before him: born to a carpenter and a Virgin, like Krishna: born on December 25, like Mithras; heralded by a star in the East, like Horus; walking on water and feeding the five thousand from a small basket, like Buddha; performing healing miracles, like Pythagoras; raising from the dead, like Elisha; executed on a tree, like Adonis: ascending to heaven, like Hercules, Enoch and Elijah.
It is hard to find any act or saying ascribed to the Jesus of the Gospels that had not been foreshadowed in some way. Anyone minded to think corrosively will decide to see this as evidence that his life was a fiction. But in the secret history this is a universal movement of convergence as the whole cosmos strained to give birth to the new Sun god.
Looking at the great imaginative image of the Nativity as it has been depicted in history’s greatest art, and decoding it according to the secret doctrine, we can see how the whole secret history of the world had been leading up to this point.
In Mary we should sense the presence of Isis; when the sun arose in the constellation of Pisces, the sign of Jesus, the constellation on the opposite horizon was Virgo. In Joseph, the patriarch carrying a crooked staff, we see Osiris — his staff symbolizing the Third Eye. The cave in which Jesus Christ is often represented as being born is the bony skull in which a new miracle of consciousness is about to be ignited. The baby in the manger has the luminous vegetative body of Krishna. The ox and the ass represent the two ages that have led to the new Age of Pisces — the Ages of Taurus and Aries. The star that guides the Magi is the spirit of Zarathustra (‘the golden star’). One of the Magi is Pythagoras reincarnated, and the Magi have been initiated by the prophet Daniel. The angel who announces the birth to the shepherds is the spirit of the Buddha.
THE SECRET TRADITION SOMETIMES HAS a propensity to see how things are with a, child-like simplicity.
The two Gospels with infancy narratives, Luke and Matthew, give very different, indeed inconsistent, accounts, starting with the different genealogies ascribed to Jesus, the time and place of the births, and the visit by the shepherds in Luke and by the Magi in Matthew. This is a distinction rigidly maintained in the art of the Middle Ages that has since been lost. While it may be glossed over in church, academic theologians accept that where these accounts conflict at least one must be false — perhaps an uncomfortable conclusion for anyone believing that scripture is divinely inspired.
In the secret tradition, on the other hand, there is no problem, because these two narratives describe the infancies of two Jesus children. These boys had a mysterious kinship. They were not twins, though they looked almost identical.
In the Gnostic text the Pistis Sophia, contemporary with the canonical books of the New Testament — and considered by some scholars to have equal claim to authenticity — there is a strange story concerning these two children.
Mary sees a boy who looks so exactly like him that she naturally takes him to be her son. But then this boy disconcerts her by asking to see her son, Jesus. Fearing that this must be some sort of demon, she ties the boy to the bed, then goes out into the fields looking for Joseph and Jesus. She finds them erecting vine poles. The three of them go back to the house. The boys gaze at each other, amazed, and embrace.
The secret tradition that traces the subtle, complex process by which human form and human consciousness was put together has a parallel in its tracing of the extremely complex process by which the incarnation of the Word was brought about. In this account it was necessary for one of the two Jesus children, who carried the spirit of Krishna, to sacrifice his individual identity in some mysterious way for the sake of the other. The spiritual economy of the cosmos required him to do this so that the boy who survived would in time be ready to receive the Christ-spirit at the Baptism. As the Pistis Sophia says, ‘ye became one and the same being’.
This tradition of the two Jesus children was maintained by the secret societies and can be seen on the north portal at Chartres, in the apse mosaic of San Miniato outside Florence and in the paintings of many initiates, including Borgonone, Raphael, Leonardo and Veronese.
‘IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, and the Word was with God and the Word was God… All things were made by him… And the light shineth in darkness and darkness comprehended it not… He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.’
The author of the Gospel of St John is here comparing the creation of the cosmos by the Word with the mission of Jesus Christ, the incarnated Word. John presents this second mission as a sort of second creation.
At a time when the material universe had become so dense that it was all but impossible for the gods to manifest themselves on the earth’s surface, the Sun god descended.
His mission was to plant a seed. This spiritualizing seed would grow to provide the space that would be the new arena in which the gods could manifest themselves…
The crucial point here, usually overlooked outside the secret tradition, is this: Jesus Christ created the interior life.
We have seen an intimation of the interior life in the still, small voice heard by Elijah. Similarly in Jeremiah the Lord says, ‘I will put my hand in the inward parts and in their heart I will write it.’ But the planting of the sun seed just over two thousand years ago was the decisive event in the process which has led to each of us experiencing inside of ourselves a cosmos of infinite size and variety.
We also have a sense that others have infinity inside them. Over many hundreds of years, the conditions had been coming together which would make possible a sense of individual identity, what we today sometimes call the Ego. But without the intervention of the Sun god, the Ego would have been a small, hard, self-centred point, operating in isolation, intent only on its own immediate gratification, open to no outside interests other than the very lowest. Every human being would have been at war with every other human being. No individual would have any sense at all of any other as an independent centre of consciousness.
When his parents took Jesus to the Temple, at the time of the disappearance of his kindred spirit, he showed himself very wise. What passed into him from the other Jesus was the ability to read minds, to see deep into other people’s souls, to see how they related to the spirit worlds and to know what to do or say to make things right for them. He felt other people’s pain as his own. He was experiencing something — the gift of empathy — which no one had ever felt before.
Once an individual or small group develops a new faculty, a new mode of consciousness, it often spreads around the world with remarkable speed. Jesus Christ introduced a new kind of love, a gracious love based on the gift of empathy. An individual would be free to transcend the bonds of his or her isolated existence to share in what was taking place in another person’s innermost nature.
Love BC had been tribal or familial. Now individuals were able to rise above blood ties and to choose freely who to love. It is this that Jesus meant when, in Mark 3:32 he appeared to deny the importance of his own mother to him and when, in Matthew 10:37-8 he said: ‘He that loveth father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.’
Esoteric teaching is above all about loving in the right way. It says that when you cooperate with the gracious forces that form the cosmos, the force flows through you in such a way that you may become conscious of it. This process is called thaumaturgy, or divine magic.
Whether at this level or at the level of ‘little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love’ or the ‘little way’ of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the way of self-denial and acts of charity in small things, the new Christian perspective was focused on the inner life. If we compare earlier moral codes, such as the law of Moses or the even older Code of Hammurabi, with the Sermon on the Mount, it is clear that they were only rules to regulate behaviour in the Outworld — do not worship idols, steal, murder, commit adultery etc. The moral teaching in the Gospels, on the other hand, is directed towards inner states. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit… they that mourn… the meek… the pure in heart…’
When Jesus Christ said, ‘But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’, he was saying something no one had ever said before, that our innermost thoughts are as real as physical objects. What I think ‘privately’ has a direct effect on the history of the cosmos.
In an idealist universe, intention is of course much more important than in a materialist universe. In an idealist universe if two people perform exactly the same action in exactly the same circumstances, but one in a good-hearted way and the other not, the consequences are very different. In some mysterious way the state of our soul informs the results of our deeds, just as the elevated state of the soul of a great painter informs his paintings.
In esoteric interpretation of Greek myths, ambrosia, the food of the gods, is human love. Without it, gods fade away and their power to help us is diminished. In esoteric and mystic Christianity angels are attracted to us if we ask for their help, but if we fail to do so they fall into a twilit, vegetative state, and the phantoms and demons that insinuate themselves around our lower beings work on us instead.
We can of course resist the demons and train our baser animal selves in the same way that we train a dog — by a process of repetition. In esoteric teaching it is said that daily repetition of a meditative exercise for twenty-one days is needed to effect a deep-seated change in our habits.
But there is a yet deeper part of our animal selves which lies completely below the threshold of consciousness and is inaccessible to it. We cannot transform this part by the exercise of free will, no matter how persistent, because the corruption of our animal selves has seeped down into our vegetable and mineral selves.
In order to purify and transform these parts of ourselves we need supernatural help.
The mission of the Sun god, then, was to sink right down into deepest matter, introducing his transforming spiritual influence. The Sun god has the ability to reach right down into the most material part of humanity, which is why it was written ‘None of his bones shall be broken’.
THE TWELVE-PETALLED LOTUS RADIATES outwards from the region of the heart and envelops those we choose to love. It is also an organ of perception. What I truly love will open itself up to me and reveal its secrets.
Enveloping someone in love in this way is an exercise of the imagination. Of course imagination is not to be confused here with fantasy. It is a true perception of a higher reality — and the organ of this in both East and West is the heart chakra. This is what is being referred to on the road to Emmaus, where disciples who have just recognized who it was they have just encountered say to themselves, ‘Did our hearts not burn within us while he talked to us on the road?’
When the heart chakra blossoms and shines, we may perceive the Outworld in a supernatural way. A loving heart can give me conscious experience of the heart of the cosmos, of the loving intelligence that lives beyond the Outworld and controls it. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’
Love works on the will as well as powers of perception. When we really love someone, we are willing to do anything for them.
This is why the heart chakra blossoms when love moves me to act according to my conscience. I am not then acting wearily, like Marcus Aurelius. I am not acting in a cold, unenthusiastic or inauthentic way. I am not doing my duty while part of me resents it. I am acting out of love and devotion.
Initiation forges a new form of consciousness. It revives ways of being conscious of the spirit worlds that were common in the earlier stages of human evolution, but now with new elements. The initiations of Pythagoras that set the tone for the ages of the ascendancy of Greece and Rome, for example, had been concerned with achieving an alternative state of consciousness involving free communications with the spirit worlds that had been an everyday occurrence for, say, Gilgamesh or Achilles, but with a crucial difference. Initiates of the school of Pythagoras were able to think about their spiritual experiences in a considered, conceptual way that would have been impossible for Achilles or Gilgamesh.
Four hundred years later the initiations of Jesus Christ introduced a new element, opening up dizzying new dimensions in love.
IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE MOMENTOUS events described in the Gospels better, we must now look at Jesus’s involvement with the Mystery schools.
We are trespassing on closely guarded academic territory here. Controversial findings now widely accepted by biblical scholars, but which have not yet filtered down to the wider congregation, show that there are some early Christian texts, rediscovered in Palestine in the 1950s, which contain versions of sayings of Jesus that are likely to be closer to the originals than the versions contained in the four Gospels.
And some of these texts contain sayings which don’t appear in the Gospels at all.
And the fact that texts like the Gospel of St Thomas contain ‘truer’ versions of the biblical sayings is a reason for believing that the entirely non-biblical sayings these texts contain may be authentic.
This is important for our history, because some of them relate to the secret teachings.
The Gospels hint that Jesus gives favoured followers teachings not for public dissemination. When Jesus warns against casting ‘pearls before swine’ he seems to be talking of holding some sacred truths back from the multitude. More explicitly, Mark 4.11 has Jesus say: ‘The secret of the kingdom of God is given to you, but to those who are outside everything comes in parables.’
A more striking and revealing account of Jesus’s involvement in secret teaching is to be found in a letter written in the second century by Clement, Bishop of Alexandria. This text was discovered in 1959 in the stacks of the library of the Mar Saba Monastery near Jerusalem by Dr Morton Smith, Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University:
… Mark, then, during Peter’s stay in Rome, wrote an account of the Lord’s doings, not however declaring all of them, nor yet hinting at the secret ones, but selecting those he thought most useful for increasing the faith of those who were being instructed. But when Peter died as a martyr, Mark came over to Alexandria, bringing his own notes and those of Peter, from which he transferred to his former book the things suitable to whatever makes for progress towards knowledge, and in this way he composed a more spiritual gospel for use of those who were being perfected… and dying he left his composition to the church in Alexandria, where it is still carefully guarded.
The Bishop of Alexandria then quotes from this ‘more spiritual’ version of Mark’s Gospel:
And they came to Bethanay, and a certain woman whose brother had died was there. And coming, she prostrated herself before Jesus and said to him: ‘Son of David, have mercy on me.’ But the disciples rebuked her.
And Jesus, being angered, went off with her into the garden where the tomb was, and straightaway, going in where the youth was, he stretched forth his hand and, seizing his hand, raised him.
But the youth, looking upon him, loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him.
And after six days Jesus told him what to do and in the evening the youth came to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God. And then, arising, he returned to the other side of the Jordan…
To modern sensibility this story — which appears to be a more detailed version of the story of the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel — might seem to describe a homosexual liaison, but, as we shall see as we come to examine the nature of initiation ceremonies more clearly, it is certainly a Mystery school initiation that Mark alludes to here.
The raising of Lazarus from the dead has traditionally been seen as an encoded account of initiation. The clues are there. Lazarus ‘dies’ for thee days and when Jesus Christ raises him, he uses the phrase ‘Lazarus, come forth’ that the hierophants had used in the Great Pyramid when, after three days, they stretched forth a hand to raise the candidate from the open tomb in the King’s Chamber.
What was the initiation of Lazarus like from Lazarus’s point of view? What was the alternative form of consciousness it conferred? Readers may be surprised to learn that we know the answer to these questions. Because in the secret history the man called Lazarus in the Gospel of John later wrote the Revelation of St John the Divine. According to the secret doctrine, the opening of the seven seals and the great visionary events that follow that are described in Revelation, refer to the revivifying of the seven chakras.
Unpalatable though some may find it, the fact of the matter is that the teachings of Jesus Christ are steeped in the ancient and secret philosophy, and this is equally true of his sayings recorded in the Bible as it is of the newly discovered sayings.
I have led up to this point gently. Those of us brought up as Christians may find it easier to recognize these things in alien cultures, partly, no doubt, because of the greater focus that distance brings, but also because we are less acutely aware of treading on sacred ground. Christianity’s most sacred texts are deeply occult:
The meek shall inherit the earth
Faith moves mountains
Ask and it shall be given.
There is deliberate obfuscation by Church leaders when it comes to these and other key tenets of the Christian faith. Modern liberal Christianity has tried to accommodate science by playing down its occult dimensions, but the sayings from the Sermon on the Mount listed above are descriptions of how the supernatural operates in the universe. Not only are they paradoxical and mysterious, not only are they irrational, not only do they describe what is highly unlikely according to the laws of probability, they describe the universe behaving in a way which would be completely impossible if science described everything there is.
For the meek will certainly not inherit the earth and prayers will not be answered by the forces that science describes. Neither virtue nor faith will be rewarded — unless some supernatural agency makes them so.
The New Testament is full of occult and esoteric teaching, some of it explicitly stated. The problem is that we have been educated to be blind to it. But the text quite clearly says that John the Baptist is Elijah come again — that is, reincarnated. There is magic too. The late Hugh Schonfield, Morton Smith and other academic experts have shown that Jesus’s miracles, particularly in the form of words he uses, are based on pre-existing magical papyri in Greek, Egyptian and Aramaic. When in John’s Gospel Jesus Christ is described as using spittle to make a paste to apply to the eyes of a blind man, this is not a purely godly action, in the sense of an unmediated influx of spirit, but a manipulation of matter in order to influence or control spirit.
Again, it is no denigration of Jesus Christ to point this out. One must not view these things anachronistically. In terms of the philosophy and theology of the day, this sort of divine magic — or thaumaturgy — was not only respectable, it was the highest activity to which a human being could aspire.
IF YOU POLITELY TURN A BLIND EYE TO the supernatural content of the story of Jesus Christ and the rise of Christianity, you still have to accept that something extraordinary happened which needs explanation. Because whether or not anything miraculous happened in that obscure corner of the Near East in the early years of the first century, its effect on the history of the world is unparalleled in its breadth and depth. It gave rise to the civilization we now enjoy, a civilization of unprecedented freedom, prosperity for all, richness of culture, scientific advance. Before the time of Jesus Christ there was very little sense of the importance of the individual, of the sanctity of individual life, the transcendental power of one individual’s freely chosen love for another. Of course some of these ideas were foreshadowed by Krishna, Isaiah, the Buddha, Pythagoras, Lao-Tzu, but what was unique to Christianity, the ‘mustard seed’ planted by Jesus Christ, was the idea of the interior life. With Jesus Christ not only did the individual began to experience the sense we all have now that, parallel to the limitless, infinitely various cosmos out there, we each have inside us a cosmos which is equally rich and limitless, but Jesus Christ also introduced the sense that each of us now has of a personal narrative history that weaves in and out of the general history. Each of us may fall as humanity as a whole has fallen. Each of us experiences crises of doubt and finds individual, personal redemption — very different from the tribal consciousness of earlier generations of Jews or the city-state consciousness of the Greeks.
THE MINISTRY OF JESUS CHRIST LASTED just three years from the Baptism to Good Friday on 3 April AD 3 when at the place of the skulls, Golgotha, the Sun god was nailed on the cross of matter. Then at the Transfiguration the Sun god began to transform that matter, to spiritualize it.
We have seen how in the Mystery schools from Zarathustra to Lazarus, candidates had undergone a three day ‘mystical death’ and rebirth. The candidate was put into a deep, death-like trance for three days during which his spirit travelled the spirit worlds, bringing back knowledge and power to the material world. The ‘death’ then was a real event, but on the spiritual plane. What happened with the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ was that for the first time this process of initiation occurred as a historical event on the material plane.
THE SHADOW SIDE OF THIS GREAT EVENT is contained in the story of Christ’s journey into Hell. This happened immediately after his death on the cross. It is a story which has fallen into desuetude, part of the process by which we have lost a sense of the spiritual dimension of the cosmos. Initiation is always concerned as much with lighting the way of the journey after death as with this life’s journey. In the centuries before Jesus Christ, humanity’s sense of the afterlife had shrunk to an anticipation of a dreary half-life of shades in the sub-lunar realm, Sheol. And after death human spirits lost consciousness as they started their ascent through the higher, heavenly spheres. The result was that in their next reincarnation these spirits returned with no intimations of the journey.
By descending into Hell, Jesus Christ was following in the footsteps of Osiris. He was lighting up a way through the Underworld that the dead could follow. The living and dead would have to walk together if the great cosmic mission, the Work, was to be completed.
ACCORDING TO ESOTERIC DOCTRINE, the whole history of the world can be summed up as follows:
There was a Golden Age when earth and sun were united and the sun gave the earth form.
The sun then separated from the earth, causing it to materialize and become colder.
The god of the sun returned to infuse his spirit in the earth, so that the whole cosmos will eventually dematerialize and again become spiritualized.
This is the cosmic vision of the mission of Jesus Christ which inspired the early Christians, the Work which helped shape the great churches of the Middle Ages and the art of the Renaissance. It has been lost to modern, exoteric Christianity.
IF THE DEATH OF JESUS CHRIST WAS meant to happen on a cosmological level, we should still ask ourselves, what made it happen on a historical level? What were the immediate causes of the crucifixion?
Although Jesus Christ instructed Lazarus in private, his rebirth, and his being called forth to a new life, was a public event. It did not happen, like all previous initiations, within the closely guarded confines of a Mystery school and neither was Jesus Christ a hierophant of one of the state-sponsored Mystery schools. As a result Jesus Christ made deadly enemies of the Sadducees, who controlled the dissemination of initiatic knowledge on behalf of the ruling elite. The act of initiating Lazarus in public was a revolutionary one, signalling that the tie that bound initiates to the ruling elite was being broken. It was the beginning of the end of the Mystery schools and it prepared the way for the secret societies.
Jesus Christ also posed a threat to the Roman elite. The soldiers who draped him in a purple cloak and placed a crown of thorns on his head had no other king, no other god than Caesar. They mocked Jesus Christ by draping on him the purple cloak that was worn as a sign of initiation in the Adonis mysteries. The crown of thorns was a satire on the wreath bestowed when a candidate achieved initiation in the mysteries of Eleusis. The Caesars were the great occult enemy of Jesus Christ.
WHAT IS LESS WELL KNOWN IS THAT ANOTHER enemy was at work on the other side of the world. There an initiate wielded a blacker, more powerful magic than that wrought by the Caesars.
This magician had, according to Rudolf Steiner, worked to build up his supernatural powers over several incarnations, and he now threatened to pervert the whole course of history.
He had achieved this power on the back of multiple human sacrifices. José Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, talks of the release of spirits that the spilling of blood brings. Blood is a frightening mystery, he says. It carries life, and when it is spilled and the ground stained, the whole landscape is maddened and excited. Occulists know that humans can be killed in a particular way so that the human spirit is harnessed. We saw how great initiates like Elijah fashion their own vegetable and animal selves in such a way that they can become chariots with which to travel through the spiritual worlds. In occult circles it is also known that black magicians can use the souls and spirits of others, their sacrificial victims, as chariots.
The great enemy, a magician, was therefore able to control people beyond the grave. By sacrificing great numbers of victims, he created an army for himself in the spirit worlds.
At the turn of the millennium a Sun hero was sent to earth to oppose him. He was called Uitzilopotchtli, as we know from the Codex Florentin of Sahagun, one of the few scraps to survive the Conquistadors. Like earlier Sun heroes, his birth was prophesied. He was born to a virgin mother and after his birth the forces of evil conspired to kill him.
But Uitzilopotchli survived the early attempts on his life and after many trials he waged a three-year magical war against the black magician. Finally, he succeeded in crucifying him.
When Jesus Christ was crucified, a huge power to spiritualize the earth was unleashed. When, simultaneously, the great black magician of the South Americas was crucified, a vortex opened up that would draw into itself the great currents of world history, the extremes of both good and evil.
THE GOSPEL OF PHILIP CONTAINS intriguing hints about Jesus Christ’s relationship with Mary Magdalene. ‘Jesus loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on…’ Then intrigingly the script fragments. But this seems to be a reference to the Song of Songs, ‘Let him kiss me with kisses of the mouth’ and so, too, to the ‘love that is stronger than death’.
The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voraigne, the most popular collection of saints’ stories in the Middle Ages, describes how a particular group of Christians began to be persecuted in Jerusalem. Seven of them were set adrift in the Mediterranean in a small boat. Eventually they were washed ashore in a place east of the town known today as Marseilles.
In the centre of a great cliff rising above the shore it is still possible to see the cave where Mary Magdalene, who stepped out of that boat, spent the last thirty years of her life.
She is usually depicted penitent, naked apart from her long red hair. A painting of her by Fra Bartolomeo in a small garden chapel near Florence shows her with her jar of oil, used to anoint the feet of Jesus Christ. It is resting on a stone inscribed with the following words: