Arguing With Margaret Starbird

Ms. Starbird is huge in spreading the myth Mary Magdalene was married to Jesus and begot a Holy Bloodline. Dan Brown and his wife spied on groups Margaret and I belonged to before they authored The Da Vinci Code.

I posted an idea that the reason Mary was titled a “prostitute” was because she spent time in prison, like many members of the first church. Perhaps men and women were put in a large cell together, and women gave of their bodies just to survive. Also, if a woman prisoner was married, to be in the company of other men without the presence of your husband, made you a suspect for adultery as was the case of the woman judged by Jesus.

Going out of her way to ignore me and my Rose Line, Starbird was forced to respond to my idea because it knocked the slats out of her theories that have been the basis for several books. This led me to bebanned from several groups who were riding Starbird’s coattails.

Jon Presco

From: “starbird”
Date: Wed Jun 2, 2004 3:15 pm
Subject: RE: [mm-list] New, Questions about Holy Bloodline and new
tradition

We can ask the question “was Magdalene imprisoned” on a literal
level (“Was she ever locked up in a prison?”–and we probably
will never know the answer. We can also ask the question on
a mythological level: “Was she locked up??” –and the answer to
that is Yes. Ireneaus and other “church fathers” did a job on
her when they ostracised and persecuted the Gnostics who honored
her as a visionary and favorite disciple of Jesus. Then, by
identifying her with the “sinful woman” (who I consider a fiction
of Luke!) and calling her “prostitute” for so many centuries, the
heirs of the Church fathers in effect silenced her, stole her
robes of honor, handed many of them off to the Virgin Mary (who
is probably suffocating under them!!) and in effect, “locked her
up”–stole her power, her voice and her “song.”

Since “Magdala” means “tower” in Aramaic (“Migdol” in Hebrew)
it is easy to see how fairytales about princesses locked
up in a tower could be metaphors for the “feminine” embodied
in MMagdalene. The “Cinderella” story shows up in about the 9th c.
and the story of “St. Barbara” (whose iconography includes long
hair, a chalice and a tower) about the same time. Heaven knows
how old the “oral tradition” is–but fairytales and folklore are
a known repository for “truth.”

BTW, I believe the Tarot Trumps are related to the “bloodline
heresy” and that the “Tower” trump is a reference to the
citadels of the heirs of the Davidic bloodline, whose fortresses
(towers) are in ruins, their crowns in the dust (Psalm 88/89).
The “tower” in the early deck I examined has blood coming out
of the stones and could be a reference to these descendants of
“Magdala” (the “Merovingians”-“vine of Mary”?) as well as a
midrash for the Psalm. The whole “Grail” connection with the
Tarot tumps (in a nut-shell) is discussed in my “Tarot Trumps”
book, where each card is explained with reference to the bloodline
heresy and the “guardians of the Grail family” (Knights Templar).

peace and well-being,
Margaret Starbird
http://www.telisphere.com/~starbird

If a Hebrew woman spent time in jail she would be titled
a “prostitute”. Was the Magdalene imprisoned? All the Gaulish
Fairytales suggest she was, including the Sleeping Beauty princess,
Rosamond. There is a hidden kingdom about to awaken.

http://www.shee-eire.com/Magic&Mythology/Ogham/page1.htm

Here is the Ogham alphabet that is based upon trees that only grow
in certain places. There was a grove of trees that grew on the
heights of Israel that were cut down by Hezikiah ‘King of Judah’
when he pretended to find a lost covenant that resulted in all the
tribes, but Judah, leaving Israel. The Cimri are mentioned in the
Torah and are kin to the Galatians, the Gauls that lived in Turkey
who converted to Judaism around a hundred years before Jesus was
born. Did they know the Ogham?

At the center of the grove was placed the Nehushtan the “brazen
serpent” a dragon. I believe he is represented by the Hebrew letter
L Lamed “learning”. Heziakiah chopped it down, the rod of Moses who
may be the original Hermes-Thoth.

Pharamond was once a knight of the Round Table. In the
story ‘Faramond’ he married the queen of the Cimri, Rosamonde to
beget a branch of the Franks.

Jon Presco

Margaret, I think you are refering to the text on page 21. What I
appreciate about your study is your grasp of the nature of myth, and
your understanding that much has been lost, deliberately disapeared.
What remains is so very scarce, that all those drawn to study a
myth, instantly own a credibility problem.

I see myth like freeze-dried coffee, where all the water has been
removed. Your job is to put back the water and bring the coffee back
to life, give it a aroma, as the facts no longer exist. Even if they
did, this does not mean the myth would survivce and have meaning.

“As a rule the obscurity of a myth does not reside in its form of
expression. The obscurity belongs in part to the mystery of the
origin of the myth, and in part to the vital import of what the myth
symbolizes. If this were not obscure, or if there was no reason to
conceal its origin and its bearing so that it might escape
challenge, a myth would lack a raison d’etre. A law, a moral
treatise, or even some little tale able to serve as a mnemonic
summary, would do instead. No myth arises so long as it is possible
to keep to the obvious openly and directly. On the contrary, a myth
arises whenever it becomes dangerous or impossible to speak plainly
about certain social or religious matters, or affective relations,
and yet there is a desire to preserve these or it is impossible to
destroy them. There is for example no need of myths nowadays in
order to set forth scientific truths, which we deal with from an
entirely “lay” standpoint and which therefore have entrirely
everythng to gain from indiviual criticism. But a myth is needed to
express the dark and umentionable fact that passion is linked with
death, and involves the distruction of any one yielding himself up
to it with all his strength.”

Rougemont’s study of Tristan and Iseult appears to be linked to the
realtionship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, in that she is
somehow instrumental in Jesus’ death, and rebirth. ‘The Last
Temptation of Jesus Christ’ is a Grail legend, in that Jesus can not
own in the object of his love in mortal form, and thus he must die.
Turning Jesus into the very OBJECT of his most personal desires, put
an end to the love of the enchanting woman who will be the death of
you because you can not have her or know her. Making Jesus the “son
of God” demotes mortal men to a lesser status where the object
lesson is to be without sin, a impossbile attainment for all but one.

Jon Presco

Margaret, the passage you refer to in Lamentations 4 speaks of the
Nazarites; “Her Nazarites were purer then snow, they were whiter
then milk, they were ore ruddy in body then rubies, their polishing
was of saphire. Their visage is blacker then a coal; they are not
known in the streets: their skin cleavest to their bones; it is
whithered, it is become like a stick.” Lam. 4:7

“Lamentations 4 says that the “princes of Judah whose faces were
once white as milk are now black as soot. They are not recognized in
the streets.” The royal family of David’s heirs has been deposed,
disinherited, stripped of its power, lands and honor, and is
now “blackeded”

In my sixteen year study of the Nazarites I have looked at David
being a Nazarite, but, it appears he destroyed the Nazarite order,
he sparing Samuel so as to annoint him a king. I suspect Saul was a
Messiah annointed by the Nazarite priesthood that admitted men and
women as equals. Deborah “bee” was a Nazarite warrior-priestess. I
suspect Samson played the harp made of the jawbone of any ass and
made riddles that confounded the Philistines. Robert Graves says
Samson was Hercules, and thus was at Troy? David also played the
harp and my have driven Saul mad with his riddles, and was with the
Phillistines for three years. I wonder if David – the legend – was
at Troy, and he won Helen (Bathsheba) in a riddle and poetry
contest, when the Greeks and Phillistines (the Cretans) could not
guess the identity of his horse, the Nightmare, that was full of
Greek poet-warriors and a cosmology the Trojans adobted that
overcame their cosmology, and thus David won the HELENized world in
what was a poetry and joisting contest that went on for ten years in
order to dicide who would be the King of Kings.

I suspect the Nazarites are Cretans who came out of captivity with
Moeses, whose skin grew darker with the desert sun, they going into
the wilderness to blacken this skin, as did John the Baptist and
Jesus. Melkarth and Hermes also practiced this sun-burning.

Jon Presco

Margaret StarbirdFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search Margaret Starbird (born 1942) is the author of seven books arguing for the existence of a secret Christian tradition that held Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene,[1] calling it the “Grail heresy”, after having set about to discredit the bloodline theory contained in The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

Contents [hide]
1 Works and beliefs
2 Private life
3 Criticism
4 Works
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Works and beliefsStarbird’s works along with those of Lynn Picknett, Michael Baigent, Henry Lincoln, and others were highly influential upon Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code and are directly mentioned in that work.

In her 1993 book The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail, Margaret Starbird developed the hypothesis that Saint Sarah was the daughter of Jesus and Mary Magdalen and that this was the source of the legend associated with the cult at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. She also claimed that the name “Sarah” meant “Princess” in Hebrew, thus making her the forgotten child of the “sang réal”, the blood royal of the King of the Jews.[2] Her works contain many references to ancient alphanumeric codes known as Hebrew Gematria and Greek Isopsephy. She also exposes secrets encoded in classical art. Starbird believes that the patriarchal Roman Catholic church suppressed the veneration and devotion of the sacred feminine, leading to a unbalanced spirituality in mainstream Christianity.

Margaret Starbird has outlined her conviction that “Christianity at its inception included the celebration of the Hieros gamos (“holy wedding”) of opposites, a model incarnate in the archetypal bridegroom and his bride – Jesus the Christ and the woman called “the Magdalen”. This model of unity, tragically lost in the cradle of Christianity, is patterned on the fundamental blueprint for life on our planet, and manifested in the leadership role played by certain women in the community of Jesus’ first followers.” Starbird claims this sacred partnership was the same as that which existed in other regions of the Near East that predated Christianity, comparable to the cults of Inanna and Dummuzi, Ishtar and Tammuz – being part of a fertility cult that brought well being to its people.[3] This marriage honored “the cosmic dance of masculine and feminine energies and the eternal cycles manifested by the Life Force”, with Mary Magdalene designated the “Queen of Heaven”.[4]

Starbird does not believe that Mary Magdalen originated from the town of Magdala, saying it was originally named Taricheae in biblical times before its destruction in AD 67, and when rebuilt after the death of Mary Magdalen was renamed “Magdala”.[5]

[edit] Private lifeMargaret Starbird holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from the University of Maryland, where she majored in Comparative Literature and German Language. She has studied at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany. In 1988 Margaret Starbird took courses in Scripture and religion at Vanderbilt Divinity School, later teaching religious education and Scripture in Catholic parishes.[6][7]

Married in 1968 to retired Army Colonel Ed Starbird, she is the mother of Stanford basketball star Kate Starbird.[8]

[edit] CriticismAlthough Starbird’s works have very little mention of a continuing sacred bloodline of descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalen which is also a significant portion of the premises behind The DaVinci Code, she did state in The Woman With the Alabaster Jar that “there is evidence to suggest that the royal bloodline of Jesus and Mary Magdalen eventually flowed in the veins of the Merovingian monarchs of France”,[9] also believing the fleur-de-lys was the royal emblem of Clovis I and “heraldic emblem of the Merovingian bloodline” – when in fact the symbol was a “Capetian innovation, first employed by Robert II of France before the science of heraldry even existed.”[10] The connection of the fleur-de-lys with the kings of France dates to the twelfth century. An anonymous twelfth century poem about the Battle of Tolbiac (c.496) first claimed that Clovis replaced his toad-covered buckler with the fleur-de-lys.[11]

Starbird’s theories have also been criticized for being based on medieval lore and art, rather than on historical treatment of the Bible.[12] Both Darrell Bock[13] and Bart D. Ehrman[14][15] have stated that “There is no reference to Jesus’ marriage or a wife in the Four Gospels” and, “There is no reference to Jesus’ marriage or a wife in any other early Christian writing”.[16]

Starbird’s interpretation of the Gnostic Gospels as suggesting an amorous relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalen is not widely accepted amongst Biblical scholars or skeptics. The (non-canonical) Gospel of Philip asserted that Mary Magdalen was Jesus’ “companion”, that Jesus “loved her more than all his disciples”, and that he “often kissed her”. Nonetheless, it is disputed whether this is meant to be indicative of a sexual relationship, and it has also been observed by one scholar that the Gospel of Philip goes so far as to say “that marital relations defile a woman.”.[17] Likewise, Starbird has claimed that the medieval Cathars believed Jesus was married to Mary Magdelen, through an interpretation of the Tarot cards, but this is also disputed.[18] Even if one were to acknowledge Starbird’s interpretation of these, critics of The Da Vinci Code such as Robert M. Price[19] have noted no institutional continuity exists between 2nd century Gnostics and medieval Cathars, nor between the Cathars and the Knights Templar as The Da Vinci Code suggests. The Freemasons claim institutional continuity with the Knights Templar, but others have doubted the claim.

[edit] WorksThe Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalen and the Holy Grail (Bear & Co, 1993). ISBN 1-879181-03-7
The Goddess in the Gospels: Reclaiming the Sacred Feminine (Bear & Co, 1998). ISBN 1-879181-55-X
The Tarot Trumps and the Holy Grail: Great Secrets of the Middle Ages (Bear & Co, 2000). ISBN 0-9678428-0-8
Magdalene’s Lost Legacy: Symbolic Numbers and the Sacred Union in Christianity (Bear & Co, 2003). ISBN 1-59143-012-7
The Feminine Face of Christianity (Godsfield Press Ltd., UK, 2003). ISBN 1-84181-184-X
Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile (Bear & Co, 2005). ISBN 1-59143-054-2
Co-authored with Joan Norton

14 Steps to Awaken the Sacred Feminine: Women in the Circle of Mary Magdalene (Bear & Co, 2009). ISBN 1-59143-091-7