Margaret Starbird

In the face of the ascending feminine identity and the waning credibility of the patriarchal institutions of Western civilisation, "Magdalene's Lost Legacy" explodes the myth of the celibate Jesus. Using New Testament gematria, symbolic number values encoded in the Greek phrases, the author reveals that the sacred couple was one of the essential pillars of early Christian teachings, before being denied by the architects of institutional Christianity and obscured by later Church doctrine. The author shows how the nuptials of the Lamb and his Bride prophesied in the "Book of Revelation" restores a crucial teaching now forgotten by the Church: the Sacred Union - the hieros gamos or "sacred marriage" - of masculine and feminine principles is the partnership model for life on our planet. She also reveals how the scandal unfolding in the Roman Catholic priesthood has its roots in the mistaken notion of a celibate Jesus and the worship of the masculine principle stripped of its feminine partner. "Magdalene's Lost Legacy" provides a powerful tool for rediscovering the faith of the earliest Christian community and restoring its tenets.It explains the true meaning of the "666" prophesied in the "Book of Revelation". It shows how the worship of a celibate Christ created the hierarchical priesthood now embroiled in scandal.

In an era that has reclaimed many aspects of the feminine Margaret Starbird's THE WOMAN WITH THE ALABASTER JAR stood out as a courageous exploration of the scorned and repudiated feminine in the Western religious tradition. But espousing the marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene created a personal crisis for this catholic scholar. In THE GODDESS IN THE GOSPELS the author tells how she was guided in her personal search and her ever-deepening study of the New Testament and gematria - number coding of the Greek Alphabet - by an incredible series of synchronicities. It was the mirroring of inner and outer worlds that revealed the Sacred Marriage of male and female - the hieros gamous - and led to her own personal redemption.

Margaret Starbird’s theological beliefs were profoundly shaken when she read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a book that dared to suggest that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalen and that their descendants carried on his holy bloodline in Western Europe. Shocked by such heresy, this Roman Catholic scholar set out to refute it, but instead found new and compelling evidence for the existence of the bride of Jesus--the same enigmatic woman who anointed him with precious unguent from her “alabaster jar.”