Ashley On - The Search for the Holy Grail with Margaret Starbird

On this epsiode of Ashley On we are joined by a woman whose research and writing have helped reshape modern understanding of the Christian tradition — particularly when it comes to the often-misunderstood figure of Mary Magdalene.  Margaret Starbird is the author of several groundbreaking books, including The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, The Goddess in the Gospels, and Mary Magdalene, Bride in Exile. Through her scholarship, Margaret invites us to re-examine the sacred feminine, decode hidden symbolism, and explore the possibility that the Christian story we’ve inherited may be missing one of its most powerful truths.  In Dan Brown's famous book, The DaVinci Code, three books are cited as reference material; Margaret Starbird wrote two of them.  Enjoy the show!  

Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
Hello and welcome

SPEAKER_02 (00:22):
to the show.
Today's episode is one I've beenlooking forward to for a long
time.
We're joined by a woman whoseresearch and writing reshaped
modern understanding of theChristian tradition,
particularly when it comes tothe often misunderstood figure
of Mary Magdalene.
Margaret Starbird is the authorof several groundbreaking books,
including The Woman with theAlabaster Jar, The Goddess and

(00:43):
the Gospels, and Mary Magdalene,Bride in Exile.
Through her scholarship, sheinvites us to reexamine the
sacred feminine, decode hiddensymbolism, and explore the
possibility that the Christianstory we've inherited may be
missing one of its most powerfultruths.
Whether you're a seeker, askeptic, or a spiritual
explorer, I think you'll findher insights illuminating and

(01:04):
deeply human.
Thank you so much.
I hope you enjoy the show.
Hello, this episode is broughtto you by Morrison Alley.
Morrison Alley providesconsulting focused around
strategy, leadership, and teamdevelopment.
as well as AI implementations tostreamline effectiveness or
marketing solutions or appdevelopment, and then leadership

(01:26):
development from our Fire andRain leadership development team
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learning.
Check it out, morrisonalley.com.
Thanks.
Margaret Starbird, thank you somuch.
Welcome to the show today.

SPEAKER_01 (01:40):
Thank you.
I'm happy to be able to joinyou.

SPEAKER_02 (01:43):
Well, it's awesome to see you and to meet you.
As I mentioned, we'd like tojust kind of dive right in on
this show and get right into it.
So I'd like to start with yourgroundbreaking book, The Woman
in the Alabaster Jar, reallychallenged a lot of the
traditional Christiannarratives.
Interested in justunderstanding, how did you first
become interested in the searchfor the Holy Grail and Mary

(02:07):
Magdalene being the bride ofJesus and reclaiming the sacred
feminine?
Give us a little bit ofunderstanding of how you became
interested in these topics.

SPEAKER_01 (02:16):
Well, I started off Catholic, of course, as a child.
And in my teen years, I was ableto go to Omer Amargal for the
amazing passion play that theyhave every 10 years there.
I don't know if you're aware ofit.
But every 10th year, theyproduce this huge panorama,
really, of the crucifixion anddeath of Christ.

(02:39):
And it starts in the early partof that week with the anointing
by the woman with the alabasterjar.
And then it takes it through thewhole passion narrative and then
the resurrection in the garden.
And I hadn't realized as ayoungster how important Mary
Magdalene was to that narrativeuntil I saw that show.

(03:00):
And because I didn't understanda lot of German at the time, the
German part went over my head,but the visuals were what I was
noticing.
And she was really important inthat rendition of the passion
play and she was everywhere andshe was crying she was she was
just really emotional about ituntil Easter morning of course

(03:21):
then she's overjoyed to meet herbeloved in the garden but it was
the visuals that got to me Ithink even at that early age I
think I was 17 when I saw it sothen later when I had my you
know I went through my life Igot married had kids all that
and my husband was teaching atWest Point and I joined a little
prayer group there a little campgroup of Catholic women whose

(03:41):
husbands were also involved withthe faculty there.
And so we had some really deepmeditations and things.
And over one period, we wereshown that something was missing
from early Christianity.
We weren't sure what it was orhow it would fit in.
It had something to do with thefeminine, but we didn't know
what.
And in those days, in the 70s,people weren't really talking
about the feminine yet.

(04:02):
It was sort of on the fringes ofthings.
And so I didn't think much of itat the time.
We all prayed about it, and thenwe went on our merry way.
Did

SPEAKER_02 (04:12):
everyone experience this?

SPEAKER_01 (04:14):
We've experienced it at a group and shared it with
each other and thought andprayed over it for a while, and
we weren't sure what was meantby this lost piece or this lost
something from the foundationsof Christianity that was
missing.
Okay.
That was always lingering in theback of my mind.
And then a friend asked me toplease read Holy Blood, Holy
Grail.

(04:35):
So I went to the library.
This is about 1982 or three.
I went to the library and foundthe, you know, that was back in
the days of card catalogs.
We didn't even have computerstelling us where the books were.
So I went to the stacks andthere was the book.
I picked it up.
I looked at the front cover.
It said, Holy Blood, Holy Grail.
And on the back, it said thatJesus Christ was probably

(04:56):
married.
And I almost dropped the book.
It was like a hot potato.
I couldn't get rid of it fastenough.
I wanted to leave.
I fled from the library.
And I didn't read it for anotheryear, I guess.
And when I finally did, it wasso upsetting to think that the
church could...
At first, I thought it wasblasphemy.
And I sat down to think, oh,okay, this can't be true.

(05:18):
And I told my friend about it,my best prayer group friend from
my years at West Point, and shedidn't believe it either.
We were both apoplectic andsaid, this can't be true.
The church would have told us,right?
So we didn't believe it.
And...
Let's see, what was thesequence?
I don't know if you want to hearthe whole story, but a bunch of
things.

(05:38):
No,

SPEAKER_02 (05:38):
absolutely

SPEAKER_01 (05:39):
we do.
Okay, the synchronicities werereally powerful.
So I said to myself one day, myfriend hated this idea of this
book.
I'm going to pray about it.
So I sat down with my Bible andmy Holy Blood, Holy Grail in my
lap, and I said, okay, Lord, I'mgoing to burn this book.
Not the Bible, but the HolyBlood, Holy Grail book.

(06:00):
But first I need to know whatyou want me to know about this
book.
Now, our prayer group had had apractice for years of just
opening scripture with aquestion and then looking down
and see if the answer to thequestion might be on the page
that we were looking at.
So I opened my Bible, and Iopened, coincidentally, if you
will, to the page between theOld Testament and the New

(06:21):
Testament.
And it said, New Testament,revised edition.
And I thought...
Oh, that's really intriguing.
Maybe I better ask anotherquestion.
So I said, Lord, if something inthe New Testament needs to be
revised, could you show me whatit is that needs to be revised?
And I opened my scripture again,and this time, my Bible, and

(06:43):
this time I was in the book of,I think it was 3 Kings or
something.
I can't remember all the detailsanymore.
I'm so old.
But it said, Restore my wifewhom I espouse to me.
And I...
decided that was my marchingorders.
So other things happened thatday, but I went to the phone and
I called my friend that had justcome back from Tel Aviv.

(07:04):
They'd lived in Tel Aviv forthree years and came back.
And she, I told her what hadhappened and that I'd gotten
these readings from thescripture and she was horrified.
And she said, it just doesn'tsound right.
They can't have not told us allthis.
So she said, she would prayabout it.

(07:25):
And she called me the third day,three days later.
She said, I hope you're sittingdown.
My husband finally authorized meto call the plumber because our
new house has a leak in thetoilet in the master bedroom
bathroom.
The bridal chamber bathroomtoilet is leaking.
She said, I called the plumberand he crawled around and

(07:47):
finally he called me in andshowed me a crack around the
base of the commode, and sowhenever it's flushed, the clean
water is pouring out onto thefloor in trickles, you know,
just this trickle on the floor.
She said he took the thing, thecommode out, and he replaced it
with another one, the same makeand model, and he installed it,

(08:07):
and she said, I went in afterlunch, and I flushed the toilet
again, and it's still leaking.
It's leaking again.
She said, this time I crawledall around the commode, And the
crack in the commode is in theexact same place.
She said, it's a design flaw.
She said, I finally understand.
And I finally believe everythingyou said about the design flaw.
There is one word written on mytoilet.

(08:31):
The word is church.
So apparently this showed her,this crazy synchronicity showed
her that I was onto somethingmaybe.
And we, so then we decided topray about it.
We told the whole prayer groupto get on it and they, About
that time, my husband, military,of course, got orders to
Nashville, Tennessee.
He was to be the districtengineer in Nashville,

(08:52):
Tennessee.
So, well, the last place youwant to be a heretic is
Nashville, Tennessee.

SPEAKER_02 (08:58):
I'm from about an hour and a half north of
Nashville, Tennessee, so I know.

SPEAKER_01 (09:03):
Oh, you know all about it.
Well, we spent a lot of time atFort Campbell, so you must know
where Fort Campbell is.
My

SPEAKER_02 (09:09):
dad did, too.

SPEAKER_01 (09:10):
Oh, really?

SPEAKER_02 (09:11):
Clarksville.

SPEAKER_01 (09:12):
Okay, so anyway...
When I got there, one of thethings I ended up doing was
going down to VanderbiltDivinity School.
I got permission to sign in.
They had a program for laypeople to study with their
candidates for ministry.
And I took some classes.

(09:33):
The first thing I did was go tothe library.
And they had books there thatwere helpful.
And I just...
started researching and I keptin touch with my friends back in
Virginia and the other prayergroup people had gone to other
places somewhere in New York andthere were only seven of us so
it was pretty easy to keep closecontact.
We just mailed letters to eachother in those days.

(09:54):
We didn't even have email.
We had no quick communicationsbut I shared with them and they
kept praying for me and Ifinally became convinced myself
that this thing that we thoughtwas blasphemy was actually more
than likely And I hadn't foundthe proof yet, but I had found
enough circumstantial evidencethat I decided it might be time

(10:15):
to sit down and start writing.
Even if I never publishedanything, I could at least write
the book.
So I sat down and wrote thebook.
1990, I wrote the book.

SPEAKER_02 (10:27):
So many years later.

SPEAKER_01 (10:29):
Well, I read Holy Blood, Holy Grail in 84 or
somewhere in there.
So it wasn't huge, huge manyyears later.
But, you know, we'd all beentold that there was something
about the foundations that had,you know, a design flaw in the
foundation that had somethingmissing.
And then when we discovered thatit was something as important as
the bride, that kind of.

(10:49):
made it important that we not atleast keep it all to ourselves.
We should try to share it asbest we could.
And I was the one that had themaster's degree in literature or
whatever.
So I was, I guess, thedesignated person to do the
actual writing and producing.

SPEAKER_02 (11:05):
So in your research then, when you began researching
the book, how did you begin toconnect Mary Magdalene to the
concept of the Holy Grail?

SPEAKER_01 (11:17):
Okay, so that's in the Holy Blood Holy Grail in the
book.
They actually tell you that themisunderstanding of the word
sangral, S-A-N-G-R-A-A-L,everyone drops it or breaks it
up after the N, so it's holy andgrail, but no one ever heard of
a grail, right?

(11:37):
That was a mistake they made.
They called it a holy grail.
If you take the same word in OldFrench and divide it after the
G, it means blood royal, right?
the song real.
And that's a whole differentthing.
You don't carry the blood royalaround in a jar, right?
The blood royal flows in theveins of a child.
And in that case, the vessel ofthe grail, the vessel of the

(12:00):
holy bloodline is the mother ofthe child.
And that would of course be MaryMagdalene in this case.
So it's a long, complicatedstory.
At Vanderbilt, when I went totake classes there, one of the
courses that I signed up for wasinterpreting the gospels.
And so I decided to pray aboutwhich gospel to choose.

(12:23):
Instead of just choosing itmyself, I would open scripture
and just ask for the propergospel.
And I knew the gospels were inthe back of the book, of course.
So I opened toward the back ofthe book and I was in Mark 14.
It said, a woman with analabaster jar came to Jesus
while he was at a banquet atBethany.
And she broke the jar and pouredthe contents on his head.

(12:47):
And the apostles were angry atthe wasted value of the perfume.
But Jesus said, she has done mea favor.
And wherever this story is told,it will be told in memory of
her.
So I started there.
That was the research topic thatI was studying.
gonna use I decided based onwhat I just opened and I didn't

(13:11):
realize at the time that thatwas the whole connection to the
bride but but that was let's seethat was 1988 I guess 88 yeah
fall of 88 so I went to thelibrary and looked up anointing
and I found all this stuff fromthe ancient goddess lore about

(13:32):
the anointing of the bridegroomking and and how he is later
sacrificed, mutilated, executed,laid in the tomb.
And it's in several of theancient fertility cults in the
Middle East.
And that was the clue.
It's actually the prerogative ofthe bride to anoint her
bridegroom.

(13:53):
And then that's a prefiguring ofthe anointing that happens in
the bridal chamber where theyhave coitus.
And then when they return, thepeople all celebrate and the
bridegroom Joy from the bridalchamber spreads out into the
crops and herds and into thepeople of the land and everybody
lives happily ever after.
Just like all our fairy taleswhen we were young.

(14:14):
All the little fairy tales wherethe bride and bridegroom are
finally reunited and everyonelives happily ever after.
So that was a really intriguingjourney going through this
research for this paper.
And knowing that the anointinghad everything to do with the
bride.
And then of course, if you'reCatholic, All your life, you've

(14:35):
been told that Mary Magdalenewas the person who anointed
Jesus at the banquet and also atthe tomb on Sunday morning.
So she becomes then the bride ofthe Easter mysteries, doesn't
she?
She's the one who carries theointment, anoints her king, and
then a few days later when he'ssacrificed, she goes to the tomb
to anoint him again after theAfter the Sabbath, she has to

(14:57):
wait until the Sabbath is over,and then she goes again on
Sunday morning and finds himresurrected in the garden.
And that's a reenactment of theancient pagan myths of the
bridegroom king and his beloved.
So that's what we're celebratinghere at Easter.
Just next week, actually, the14th of April, is the
celebration of the anointing bythe woman.
And that is the beginning of thePassion narrative, starts with

(15:20):
the anointing at the banquet,because she's proclaiming him as
the Messiah King of Israel.
So there she is.

SPEAKER_02 (15:28):
Yeah.
So it's perfect timing for us tobe having this conversation.
And I was going to ask you, youread my mind for my next
question, was why did you callMary the bride of the Easter
Sunday?
Oh,

SPEAKER_01 (15:46):
the Easter Mysteries.
It's a 10-day period from theanointing on a Monday.
Well, it's almost two weeks, Iguess.
The church celebrates theanointing on the Monday before
Easter.
So it's almost a whole week.

SPEAKER_02 (16:00):
Got it.
I'm not Catholic, so I'm notaware of that.

SPEAKER_01 (16:03):
Well, it's a liturgy every spring of the same
reenactment of this ancient mythof the renewal of everything.
It's about the renewal of thelife force in the spring.
And it happens worldwide atspringtime.
Of course, on the southernhemisphere, it's opposite of
ours, but I don't know what theydo about the liturgies of the

(16:23):
Christian faith in the southernhemisphere because it's all
backwards.

SPEAKER_02 (16:26):
It's all different.

SPEAKER_01 (16:27):
I've often wondered about that because Christmas is
when it's warm and, I don'tknow, the springtime is fall.

SPEAKER_02 (16:37):
What does your research say?
I'm

SPEAKER_01 (16:44):
not getting...
What does your research

SPEAKER_02 (16:45):
tell us about the life of Mary Magdalene and Jesus
after the crucifixion?
And after the resurrection?

SPEAKER_01 (16:51):
After the resurrection.
Can

SPEAKER_02 (16:53):
you hear me okay now?

SPEAKER_01 (16:54):
Yes.
Mary Magdalene left and ran andtold the other apostles that
she'd seen Jesus.
In all the Gospels, her story...
This is the other interestingthing.
Her story shows up in all fourGospels.
The anointing at Bethanyactually...
Luke moves it to another town,but all four gospels have
anointing by a woman.

(17:14):
And only in John's gospel is shenamed, and we're told that she's
a sister of Lazarus, Mary, thesister of Lazarus.
And we already know who she isbecause she's the one who cried
when Lazarus was dead in histomb, and Jesus came and was
moved by her tears to raiseLazarus, her brother, from the
dead.
And then in the next chapter,It's Mary, the same Mary who

(17:37):
anoints Jesus and wipes hertears from his feet with her
hair.
So she is very prominent inJohn's gospel, especially.
But the other gospels allmention her.
And John is there to correct therecord.
And Jesus, in John's gospel, hesays, let her keep it for the
day of my burial.
Because the apostles arecomplaining about the wasted
value of her perfume.

(17:57):
And he says, let her keep it forthe day of my burial.
And so then in the Gospels,again, it's Mary Magdalene who
goes to the tomb.
And in some of them, she'saccompanied by other people, but
in John's Gospel, she's alone atthe tomb.
And she recognizes Jesus, and hetells her, don't keep clinging
to me.
I have to go.
And he says he's going back tohis father, and she runs and

(18:19):
tells the other apostles thathe's alive.
Okay, so what happens to themnext?
I wrote in the beginning ofAlabaster Jar, my woman with the
alabaster jar, I included alittle short story that I had
written called Mary in theGarden.
And it starts off with Marysitting there just desolate
after the crucifixion, probablySunday night, you know, after

(18:42):
the crucifixion.
And Joseph of Arimathea comes toher and he says, Mary, I have to
get you out of town.
In the book, I just say Josephcame to her, and he said, Mary,
I have to get you out of town.
It's dangerous, and you can'tstay here.
And she says, I don't care.
I just want to not go anywhere.
And he said, but I promised himI'd keep you safe.

(19:03):
And so Joseph leads her away.
She finally gets up and goeswith him, and he takes her to
Egypt.
And then it's there that shediscovers she's pregnant and has
a baby.
Anyway, she has her baby inEgypt.
And then at some point, theydecide that it's safe to go back

(19:25):
to Israel, but it's really notbecause Paul has finally decided
he's going to persecuteChristians there.
So they get in a little boat,and she and her brother and
sister and others, Maximus andSedonis, they call him, a couple
other people, are in the boat.
Mary, the mother of Jesus, andMary...

(19:48):
Mary Salome, who could be asister of Jesus.
We're not really sure.
But in any case, there areseveral women, Mary, Martha, and
Lazarus, and two men in thisboat, and a little girl who is
supposed to be the servant ofher relatives.
And they all travel in a boatthat loses its oars somehow or
never had them or something.
Anyway, they wash ashore on theshores of Gaul in France, the

(20:12):
Roman colony there.
And the peasants take them in,and they treat them like
refugees, which they are.
So they become politicalrefugees.
And so they're hidden all thistime.
And the point is that it's toodangerous for them in the Roman
Empire and even in Israel.
Nobody wanted Jesus to be kingof Israel either.

(20:33):
The Romans were occupying Israelat the time.
And you can imagine on EasterSunday, try to imagine this.
Easter Sunday, the rumor startspassing around.
All these people who've showedup for Passover, thousands and
thousands of I don't want tocall them tourists, but pilgrims
anyway, pilgrims to Passover.

(20:54):
And suddenly the news istraveling all around that this
carpenter, who was such awonderful charismatic preacher,
has been risen from the dead,just like Tammuz, their old god
of fertility from this region.
And they're all ecstatic overit.
And the Romans and the Jewishleaders are all ecstatic.
Horrified because this is thelast thing they ever needed was

(21:15):
rumors like this of thisperson's resurrection so for
that reason the family wouldhave been in grave danger and
That's why in my story That'swhy Joseph of Arimathea came to
take her away as fast as hecould to some other location
where they wouldn't be lookingfor her Anyway, they ended up on
the shores of France and that'swhere all the legends survived

(21:37):
then through the Middle Ages andinto the into the modern era
times.
The legends of Mary Magdaleneare on the shores, you know,
early in southern France,Provence and that whole region.
Very powerful legends andendless numbers of dark
Madonnas.
It's all, you know, actually...

(21:58):
Tell us

SPEAKER_02 (21:58):
a little bit more about the legends.

SPEAKER_01 (22:00):
The legends.
Well, there's not a lot to them.
They just crop up there andeverybody believes them.
They have a church where theyhave a...
Let's see, they call it St.
Mary's by the Sea in a towncalled St.
Mary's by the Sea.
There's a church called Our Ladyof the Sea that has in the
crypt, it has this statue of St.

(22:22):
Sarah.
And the gypsies think thatbecause she came out of Egypt,
she's a gypsy like them becausethat's the root word of gypsy is
Egypt.
So they're considered kin to herand she's dark.
She's black, in fact, prettyblack.
I've been there twice and threetimes.
I don't know, so many.
Anyway, she's very dark.

(22:43):
And the gypsies, the gypsy womenin these different clans sew
this beautiful series of gowns.
She has seven gowns or eight, Idon't know, some number from the
different clans of the gypsies.
And on the 22nd, 23rd, and 24thof May every year, they have a
celebration in this town wherethe gypsies, in full regalia of

(23:05):
all their clothes, all theirimportant costumes, take the
statue of little St.
Sarah and take her on a whitehorse and carry her out to the
sea.
Oh, the men are on white horses.
I guess some of them arewalking, carrying her.
But anyway, they're carrying heron some kind of platform and

(23:25):
they carry her out to the sea toremind everyone that she came
from far across the sea to bringthe gospel to France.
And she and her friends andfamily, and they were all...
They're also honored in thistown.
Two other women, Mary Jacobi andMary Salami, are the other two
women on the boat.
And they're, besides MaryMagdalene, her sister.

(23:45):
Anyway, they're all, the legendspermeate the southern part of
France and everybody celebratesthis thing every year.
It's a big pageant.
People come from all over theworld to visit St.
Sarah and the Feast of St.
Sarah.
It's a celebration on the 23rd,24th of May.
Very exciting.
And the Gypsies all bring theirfiddles, and they celebrate with

(24:06):
music and dancing and joy andlaughter.
It's wonderful.

SPEAKER_02 (24:12):
So it sounds like it.
But you'd be unable to attendthis, you said,

SPEAKER_01 (24:17):
right?
I've been there twice for thecelebration of that.
So

SPEAKER_02 (24:23):
how did this knowledge and this memory of the
sacred union then manage tosurvive?
In Western Europe, if everybodywas kind of, I mean, it has
survived.
How has it survived?

SPEAKER_01 (24:34):
Well, the Inquisition was formed in part,
I think, to liquidate it orobliterate it.
And in fact, there's thishorrible story from the town of
Béziers, which is also insouthern France.
The people fled to the Church ofMary Magdalene to get away from
persecutions by the armies thatwere sent against them.

(24:56):
They were besieging the town.
And when the armies, it wasactually Simon de Montfort who
besieged Béziers, I think thedate was 1209, they got into the
town and they burned the churchdown over these people's heads.
And the chronicler later saidthat it was just retribution

(25:16):
because of their scandalousblasphemy that Christ and Mary
Magdalene were partners.
So, I mean, that's kind of anasty little trick, but the
Inquisition was well aware ofthe heresies of this region and
they tried to get rid of them.
So they went underground andthey went into art, paintings,

(25:41):
special symbols that they usedto signal the bride, unicorn
tapestries, tarot cards,watermarks in their bibles they
the same crowd the catharsprinted their by their
scriptures on paper that theymanufactured themselves and they

(26:02):
printed some of their symbols inwatermarks in the paper and
Uncannily, I was onto that earlyon and found a book that was
full of pictures of thesethings, and some of them are so
obviously connected to the Grailheresy.
It was almost impossible not topick up on it, and I put some of
that in my alabaster jar book aswell, little drawings of some of

(26:23):
these amazing watermarks thattied up the Grail heresy with
this catharsis.
crowd who were heretics,according to the church.
And I keep thinking, what if thefirst heresy was the denial of
the bride?
In which case, the people whoare called the heretics are
really the people who aresticking to the tradition of the

(26:44):
sacred marriage that was at theheart of the Christian community
when they walked with theirsister wives around Israel and
did their preaching.
When Jesus sent them out two bytwo, he didn't send them out in
pairs of men.
He sent them out as couples.
Paul even says the brothers ofJesus are all traveling around
with their sister wives.
And the word sister wife is evenindicative because it comes

(27:06):
straight out of the Song ofSongs where the bridegroom calls
his bride, my sister, my wife,my sister, my spouse.
So it's all linked to theancient mythologies from the
ancient Near East of the holymarriage, the sacred union.
of bride and bridegroom.
But you know, it's more thanthat because in our country, in

(27:28):
our culture now, we're justtrying to get away from this
thing that has been totallymasculine-oriented for so many
generations and centuries evenin the Western world.
because our church taught usthat we had a celibate male God
and no other gods before him.
And so what you worship, youbecome, right?

(27:51):
So we became a society that waswarped in that way that we
weren't balanced.
And we can watch it playing outtoday, looking around the globe
and what's happening.
We know exactly what the sourceof all this was, was a
preference for everything male.
And the denigration ofeverything female for so long.

SPEAKER_02 (28:10):
Is that a form of control, do you think?
I mean, I understand at thebeginning, right?
It

SPEAKER_01 (28:15):
might have been an accident.
You know, in my book, in myAlabaster Jar book, I suggested
that Joseph of Arimathea tookher away because it was so
dangerous for her to stay.
And so the story of her, Paulnever met Jesus.
and his friends never told Paulthat he was married.
And so Paul just went on withthe risen Christ and taught the

(28:35):
church all doctrines of thePaulanity, sometimes they call
it.
It's not the teachings of Jesusnecessarily, it's what Paul made
of it, but he never knew aboutMary Magdalene.
And meanwhile, she's an exile orrefugee in incognito in Southern
France, and no one knows whereshe is even.
And one of the reasons they losther was because her child was a

(28:57):
daughter.
and not a son.
I myself thought she was goingto have a son.
I was writing the book, or theshort story.
I was typing away, and I got tothe point where she went into
labor, and I burst into tearswhen I realized suddenly that
the reason that they lost herand couldn't find her anymore
was because the child was not ason.

(29:17):
If it had been a son, they wouldhave tried to keep track of her
because he could have led theirarmies back into battle against
the Romans.
But that was what all thezealots wanted them to do.
But that's not what happenedbecause the child was a
daughter.
So then I, yeah.
So I cried and then I continuedthe story and her child was a
daughter.

SPEAKER_02 (29:39):
So many questions for you.
Yeah.
You know, why do people todayThis doesn't take anything away
from me, from my view of Jesusand from his message and what he
stood for.
If anything, it makes it morereal and makes him even a

(29:59):
greater cultural figure andhistorical

SPEAKER_01 (30:03):
figure.
Because he had every experienceunder the globe instead of just,
yeah.

SPEAKER_02 (30:07):
Right.
But so many people...
that are probably listening tothis, even, and friends of mine.
I've had conversations with someclose friends that I was going
to talk to you, and some arevery interested and said, this
sounds great, and others arelike, oh my gosh, this is

(30:27):
blasphemy.
I just don't, why would people,I don't know what to say to
people like that.
I feel like this doesn't takeanything away from Jesus.
What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 (30:38):
Okay, so here's, well, I wouldn't have published
the book if I hadn't felt I wasbeing shown to do just that
because somebody needs to tellus that we've been out of
balance all this time.
But I took it to my priestbecause I was this nice Catholic
girl and I didn't want to be theone to spill the beans without
permission.
So I took it to the pastor atFort Lewis, Washington, where my
husband was stationed, and Ihanded it to him and I said, I

(31:01):
need you to read this for me.
And when he called me back, tocome and get it.
He said, this could heal thechurch.
He said, but you have to know.
He said, I was reading itstarting at the beginning and I
read three or four pages beforeI realized you weren't talking
about the same Mary and the sameJoseph we always talk about on
the flight into Egypt.

(31:23):
He said, you were talking aboutMary Magdalene and Joseph of
Arimathea going to Egypt and notthe other Mary and the other
Joseph from the early gospels.
And I said, yes, so what did youdo, Father?
And he said, well, I had to goback and read the whole story
again.
And I said, well, Father, that'swhat I want you to do.
I want everyone to have to dothat.
I want everyone to go back andread the story again.

(31:43):
Because the circumstantialevidence that I have found is
powerful in many, many ways.
And it'd be very hard to go backand put Pandora's box back
together again.
Once you've let it out, too manypeople have seen the evidence
now, and it's so obvious allaround us that the original

(32:04):
thought of the Christ communitywas to unite the masculine and
feminine energies and have themwork with each other as partners
and not this celibate stuffanymore.
And even if you go back intoancient Israel, they allow that
God had a partner as well,Yahweh and his Asherah.

(32:29):
So anyway, it's all aninteresting story, but I don't
know what else to tell themexcept that the evidence, the
most important evidence I foundwas actually in the sacred
numbers.
And I don't know if you want meto go into that at all, but the
gematria.

SPEAKER_02 (32:46):
Yeah, please do.

SPEAKER_01 (32:49):
Do you want me to do that?
Okay, it's complicated.
Okay, so where to start?
Back when I first became aborn-again, if you want to say,
a born-again Catholic, which iskind of awkward to say, I went
to the library and I got out abook called The City of

(33:09):
Revelation, and it was sointeresting.
It was by a man named JohnMischel, and he said that the
important phrases in the NewTestament, but also in the Old
Testament, are number-codedbecause the alphabets in both
Hebrew and Greek, the OldTestament in Hebrew, the New
Testament in Greek, had...
a value for every alphabetletter.

(33:30):
So alpha is A and beta is B istwo, alpha is one, beta is two,
and gamma is three.
And in Hebrew, it goes the sameway, one, two, and three.
And then there's a series.
So it's on three tiers, if youwill.
And so it goes through up until,in Greek, it goes up to 800 and

(33:50):
omega is 800.
And so you can read in myMagdalene's Lost Legacy,
actually is the book where Ielucidate all this, detail but
but the point is that thesephrases have number values and
when you add up with the phraseyou find that the value is very
important so years later I metJohn Michelle after I'd read his

(34:12):
book I met him and I asked himif he'd ever looked up the
number for Mary Magdalene and hesaid no maybe that's your job so
I went home and told my littlemy son who was a computer geek
at the time.
He was about 12.
I told him to please fix thisGreek alphabet with the right
letters and then let me know soI could type the Magdalene into

(34:35):
a little program and come upwith the right numbers.
So he programmed the thing forme and I wrote it out and typed
it in and the Magdalene, the wayit's spelled in Greek, adds up
to 153.
Well, that's really interestingbecause John Mischel talks at
length about how valuable andimportant the 153 is.
153 is the number for the sacredfeminine in the ancient world.

(35:00):
It's the denominator of afraction that exposes the square
root of three.
And so it's tied up with theVesica Pisces symbol, what they
call the Yoni symbol.
in India, but it's the womb.
It's the doorway to life.
It has everything to do with thefeminine orifice.
And 153 is the number thatdenotes that.

(35:25):
Among the ancient Greekphilosophers, they call it the
153.
And what they're talking aboutis the Vesica Pisces symbol,
which is the matrix, the motherof all forms.
And then it has thismathematical importance.
And they also have euphemismsfor it, the doorway to life.
and the bridal chamber.
I mean, they call it all thesethings that have to do with the

(35:46):
bride and the feminine.
So it's the number that'sassociated with the goddesses of
love and fertility in theancient world.
And it's Mary Magdalene'snumber.
The title they gave her adds upto that number.
Now, the interesting thing isthat all the Maria's add up to

(36:07):
152, Maria itself, the wordMaria.
adds up to 152.
But the one that nails it is theMagdalene, 153.
And so that's how I know fromhaving, from John and Michelle
telling me it was my job tofigure it out.
I know that they were trying tosay this is the woman who was
the bride.
She is the goddess of love andfertility from the Gospels.

SPEAKER_02 (36:31):
Okay, that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_01 (36:32):
It is, it is.
That's all in my Magdalene'sLost Legacy book.
It's the one I published in...
2001 or so.
So

SPEAKER_02 (36:41):
what does...

SPEAKER_01 (36:42):
Alabaster jar.

SPEAKER_02 (36:44):
What does Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper have
to do with Mary Magdalene andThe Lost Bride?

SPEAKER_01 (36:52):
That's a fun story.
Okay, so the beautiful paintingThe Last Supper, if you notice
old copies of it, you can seeit's really dark and kind of
gloomy looking.
But in the middle 70s, thePope...
assigned a woman the job ofcleaning it up.
And so they did all the mostmodern things they could do to

(37:13):
clean up this painting that hadgotten smoke and damage over
centuries sitting in thecafeteria of a monastery.
And when she got throughcleaning, she found that in the
top corner on the left side,there's this very funny thing in
the wall that When you standaway from it, it's kind of an
optical illusion, but when youstand away from it, it looks

(37:35):
like a chalice.
And it's standing above the headof the apostle that's on the far
left.
And that apostle has beenidentified as Bartholomew.
So Bartholomew has this chaliceabove his head.
But then if you draw a line fromthe chalice diagonally all the
way across the painting to thebottom corner on the far right

(37:58):
side, you're going to, I guessthis goes this way, you're going
left to right, you're going tofind the knot, a knot in the
tablecloth.
And if you've studied...
enough art history or something,you'll come across a little line
somewhere in somebody's writing,and I'm not sure who anymore,

(38:19):
but I was told this by JavierSerguera, who wrote a book about
the Last Supper.
He said a gratuitous knotanywhere in the painting in the
Middle Ages tells you that it'scoming from the secret
tradition, the undergroundtraditions, the secret.
It's like code, a gratuitousknot.

(38:41):
in the um interesting anywherein the painting so in this case
it's in the tablecloth you don'thave a corner of a tablecloth
with a knot in it so if i drew aline across from the cup of the
chalice down to that line and itpassed right through where peter
has his hand across marymagdalene's neck trying to shut

(39:02):
her chakra off so she can'tshe's lost her voice in other
words and the apostle petersitting next to this person that
looks very feminine in the lastin the last yeah very and
everyone says oh that's john buthe shouldn't have been that
feminine looking so in any caseuh we all know that the beloved
was mary magdalene this he'sshutting off her voice and then

(39:25):
if you go With the line stillfurther, it goes through Jesus'
left hand, which is a symbol forthe feminine, the left hand
rather than the right.
And then it goes down to theknot in the tablecloth.
It goes the whole distance.
If you go to my website,margaretstarbird.net, and look
up the Da Vinci painting, LastSupper, I think it's got a

(39:47):
little thing on the menu upthere.
And you can look at the paintingitself and follow my discussion
there a little better.
But the line goes from thechalice, through Mary's throat
chakra down through Jesus' lefthand and into the knot in the
tablecloth.
And the ratio of the chalice tothe neck and then to Jesus' hand

(40:08):
is one to one.
And then the next ratio is two,which is the Fibonacci sequence,
which is a symbol for life.
So it's like Leonardo was tryingto say something really
specific.
And the funniest part of all ofthis was one night, Stone
Phillips was sitting talking toan art critic on his show which

(40:28):
was I've forgotten what his showwas called now but anyway they
had this show and they weretalking about the Last Supper
painting it was after the DaVinci Code came out and of
course Dan Brown thought thatthe V shape between Jesus and
Mary Magdalene was the sacredgrail but he didn't know
anything about this cup overhere on the corner but if you go

(40:49):
look on my website you'll seethat cleaned up picture with
this thing on this side.
Anyway, so they were laughingthat anybody who could think
that Leonardo might have been aheretic or had known anything
heretic, you know, been tryingto signal anything heretical.
And I thought, you people havejust never scratched the
surface.
You don't always knoweverything.
Well, he spent a

SPEAKER_02 (41:09):
lot of time in those areas of France, right?
I mean, that's where he...

SPEAKER_01 (41:13):
Well, you don't need to go to France to see this
picture.
It's all over the internet.
All you have to do is type inThe Last Supper.

SPEAKER_02 (41:19):
No, I mean, but he would have heard these...
These legends

SPEAKER_01 (41:22):
have been aware of that.
Yeah, you would have thought,but no, he didn't know anything
about it.
He was laughing that Leonardomight have been somebody who was
in on the secret.
But all the artists, I mean,they kept this story alive.
You asked me early on, how didthis story manage to survive?
The story of the sacred union atthe heart of the Christian story
survived in art and artifactsthroughout Western Europe.

(41:45):
over the centuries for years andyears.
It just went underground andnobody talked about it because
of the Inquisition.
But they put the symbols intheir art and artifacts.
The unicorn tapestries, I can'teven start, but they're in the
alabaster jar as well.
I told people

SPEAKER_03 (42:01):
about that.

SPEAKER_01 (42:02):
And the watermarks and what else?
The tarot cards, all of it.
It's all there.
That was the fun part aboutwriting that book was revealing
all these secrets.

SPEAKER_02 (42:13):
Yeah, I bet.
Did Dan Brown consult with youat all on the Da Vinci Code?

SPEAKER_01 (42:19):
No, but he read my book, and then he went back and
read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, andI guess he looked up Lynn
Picknick's book as well, andsome others.
The interesting thing is in DanBrown's, what does he call that,
the Da Vinci Code, hischaracters are in a library, and
they talk about three books.

(42:40):
And two of them I wrote, and thethird one quotes me.
So it's like, oh, I'm thegrandmother of this whole story.

SPEAKER_02 (42:47):
That's great.

SPEAKER_01 (42:49):
Yeah, it was interesting.
And then people started readingmy books because they went to
the Internet.
I just happened to be born onthe cusp of the Internet.
All these years we've beenwaiting for a breakthrough like
this, and now everything can becommunicated so quickly.
And I just happened to bewriting my books on the cusp of
installing the Internet so thateverybody could pass it all
around as fast as possible.

(43:10):
Lightning is like spontaneous.

SPEAKER_02 (43:12):
Another good timing, right?

SPEAKER_01 (43:14):
Yeah, it's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 (43:16):
That's synchronicity.
It sure is.
It sure is.
So why is it so important thatwe reclaim the story of the
sacred union, like between themasculine and feminine in
Christianity?

SPEAKER_01 (43:32):
Well, okay, so we've had this model where we had a
celibate lord who stripped ofhis feminine partner, whether by
accident or by design.
And I believe it was anaccident.
I think they lost her and thenthey went on with Paul's
teachings.
And since she never showed upand there was never an
alternative until they'd alreadygone on with their celibate

(43:53):
priesthood and their powerinvested in bishops and all
those things.
So they didn't have any room forher to come back.
So they just left her outaltogether and just kind of,
they called her prostitute,remember?
All those years she...
And she was a penitent, and sheturned to Christ in time to be
saved, but she was definitely,you know, whatever.

(44:14):
In other words, theymarginalized her from the start.
And in marginalizing her, theymarginalized women.
And then they had this beautifulVirgin Mary, who is a wonderful
mother and And special in everyway and answered prayers
throughout the centuries forCatholics who prayed rosaries.

(44:36):
And she's been a wonderfulmentor for everybody.
But they left out the bridealtogether.
And really, a mother-soncombination is dangerous because
the mother spoils the son butnot the daughter.
In the families, it perpetuates.
And then they hang around afterthe son is married.
And so they can destroymarriages.

(44:56):
It's just not the proper patternfor human marriage.
happiness and joy and all thethings that you wish to come out
of the marriage chamber.
You end up with a distorted, youhave a distorted reality.
And we've been living with itfor 2,000 years.
So it's, I mean, we got allthese fairy tales about poor

(45:17):
Snow White.
She's current right now and herstepmother was the evil person
that wanted to get rid of her,right?
Because she was not welcome inthis paradigm.
But The prince needed her, so hewent and found her again, thank
God.
Okay, so all our fairy tales,how many fairy tales do we have
where the princess is lost,stolen, hidden, kidnapped,

(45:39):
locked in a tower?
All kinds of horrible things,and it takes forever to get the
bride and bridegroom reunited,because that is the model for
life on our planet.
No matter what else we want todo and say about everyone, we
still only have one pattern thatgives life, and that's...
the old fairy tale one.

(46:01):
So anyway, why do we need it?
Why do we need it to return?
We need balance.
And right now the masculineenergies are going rampant, as
you've probably seen in the newsand everywhere.
We need people to be balanced sothat they can hear the cries of
the poor and the underprivilegedand the marginalized and help

(46:24):
them become balanced.
part of the picture and into thewholeness and not have
everything be based on.
When things are run by a totallymasculine principle, the solar
principle we call it, masculineenergy, you end up with
hedonism, violence, and what wasthe third one?

(46:48):
I had a third one.
Violence, hedonism.
Anyway, that's enough to tellyou that it's, and greed.
It's just not healthy, right?
And so what we need is foreverything to find a partner and
be balanced and safe and wholeagain.
Harmony, all of those thingsthat come from reuniting or

(47:09):
integrating, as Carl Jung callsit, integrating the opposite
energies, the masculine and thefeminine energy.
And the study of numbers, I justreviewed that book recently.
The study of the numbers isreally important.
Jesus' number is 888.
jesus if you spell jesus 888 andthat he's the dawn of the new

(47:32):
day if you spell the the namejesus the way the greeks did in
the gospels right the greekauthors of the gospels the greek
speaking greek spelling of jesusi h s o u s it's 888 and it's
it's the epitome of of eight andthe Early church fathers called

(47:54):
him the Ogdawad, Ogdawad, Iguess, which means the fullness
of eights.
So he's 888 and Magdalene'snumber is 153.
So if you take eight times 153,it comes out to a really
interesting number, 1224, whichis the number for the fishes.
And it turns out that they arelord and lady of the age of the

(48:18):
fishes.
And it's all encoded in thesenumbers I was telling you about
earlier in the Gospelsthemselves.
The fishes is 1224, 8 times 153.
So it's Jesus and Magdalene,Lord and Lady, integrated
energy.
It's not just about a man and awoman.
It's about the energies ofmasculine and feminine, the

(48:39):
solar and the lunar energiesworking together and bringing
about wholeness.
So that's why it's important,Ashley.
Did you get that?

SPEAKER_02 (48:49):
Thank you.
You're welcome.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, I do.

SPEAKER_01 (48:51):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 (48:52):
So what advice would you give those who are trying to
reclaim this kind of wisdom intheir own lives?
Or if they're engaging with yourwork, what do you hope them to
take away?

SPEAKER_01 (49:08):
Well, I guess just the idea that this was our
birthright.
as Christians and as people ofour planet, in all of our
communities, our birthright wasto have known about the sacred
balance of the energies ofmasculine and feminine in our
partnership of Christ andMagdalene in the Christian

(49:29):
gospels.
Even if they're not Christian, Ithink Muslims actually honor
Mary Magdalene and the mother ofJesus and other people as human,
fully human.
In fact, there's a wonderfulsong out there by Ilana
Lewandowski.
I don't know if you know who sheis, but she's a wonderful
Canadian singer.
And her song is called HumanOne.
I think I have a link to it onmy website, but if not, you can

(49:55):
just go ask for IlanaLewandowski.
Lewandowski's Human One, andlisten to that song.
It's about the humanness ofJesus, and that's one of the
things that was lost, becausethey put Jesus up in heaven on a
golden throne, and at the righthand of the Father, and then
they neglected any mention ofhumanity.

(50:17):
And so they created him, andthey He's supposed to be fully
human and fully divine, butinstead they cut out the human
part and emphasized the divine.
And so that gave us anunbalanced view of who Jesus
really was in his human form,you know, as an incarnation.

(50:40):
I think of him as theincarnation of Yahweh on the
human plane.
He represents God the Father asbridegroom of Israel.
That was God's role asbridegroom of Israel.
And Jesus represents that ideaor ideology, if you will, or I

(51:02):
don't even know.
I'm losing my words in my oldage.
But anyway, Jesus representsYahweh as bridegroom of Israel.
And Magdalene represents thepeople of Israel as bride.
And if you go back into the OldTestament scriptures, you find
out that the bride was notalways faithful, and God kept
calling her back whenever therewas a problem, trying to get her
back into some kind ofrelationship with him, just as

(51:25):
he does with every human soul.
God is always trying to getpeople to come to some
understanding of who God is.
And we don't even have to callhim God.
It doesn't have to be a him.
It can be the divine, just thedivine.
It's energy.
It's not...
It's light, it's energy, it'snot in a human form, but it

(51:46):
manifests in creation.
And so it's creation that hasbeen out of balance for so long
because of our characterizingGod as only male instead of this
integrated male and femaleenergies.

UNKNOWN (52:03):
Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_01 (52:04):
I don't know if that helped.
But anyway, what I tell peopleto do is pray about it.
I told this to a wonderfulProtestant preacher who was, I
guess he was a Baptist.
And he said, you know, I lovethe story you tell, but I don't
know what to believe about it.
And I said, well, pray about it.
And the next day, he came to me.

(52:24):
We worked in the same buildingin the chapel at Fort Lewis.
He came to me.
He was jumping up and down.
He said, guess what?
He said, I prayed about it lastnight.
I pray God to show me what it isyou're trying to do.
to show me whether it was rightor what the story is.
He said, I opened my Bible theway you do, and I opened to the
anointing of Jesus at thebanquet at Bethany.
And I said, well, that's where Istarted too.

(52:47):
It's the beginning of the wholestory.
You have to know that theanointing prefigures the
anointing by the female of themale during coitus.
It's a liturgical...
anointing is just the preview ofthe marriage anointing.
It's a marriage rite.
So anyway, so that's where I'mcoming from.

SPEAKER_02 (53:09):
So from all the, you've, you know, you've put out
a lot of, you know, an amazingbody of work, and you've heard,
you know, lots of responses toit, both, you know, supporters
and skeptics over the years.
What do you think is the mostmisunderstood aspect of Mary
Magdalene?

SPEAKER_01 (53:27):
Well, I think the reason people resist this is
because they were told for 2,000years that she was a prostitute.
But even the Catholic Churchdoesn't teach that anymore.
They've actually reclaimed herback in the 1960s.
They decided that there was noevidence that she was a
prostitute.
The word that Luke uses when hesays a sinner from the town

(53:48):
anointed Jesus is He uses a wordfor someone who evades their
taxes or shortchanges yousomehow on a business deal, but
not someone who is not a sexualsin and certainly not a
prostitute.
But I think what happened wasthe early church recognized this

(54:08):
anointing scene as somethingthat came out of pagan rites.
And for that reason, they calledher a prostitute because of the
sacred prostitutes in the pagantemples that used to perform
similar rites.
during their celebrations in thespring of these sacrificed
bridegroom king figures.
I mean, we have, I guess, fiveor six of them.

(54:28):
It goes all the way back to Isisand Osiris and Ishtar and
Tammuz, Dumuzi and Inanna.
I mean, there's numerousgod-goddess couples from the
ancient Near East that havesimilar stories.
And so all of these models, ifyou will, for sacred union, just

(54:51):
in a progression, they all haddifferent names, but they had
similar stories.
And Mary Magdalene fits intothat, but in the temples when
they celebrated it, they used asacred prostitute.
So that kind of clung to her asif she were a common prostitute,
which she was not.
And finally the Catholic Churchhas come around and said, well,
she really wasn't a prostitute,but they didn't say it very

(55:12):
loud.
And so most people growing up,if they have Christian
teachings, they're usually toldthat she was a prostitute, and
that's why they resist thisstory so much.
But my own priest told me itcould heal the church, so I was
happy to hear that.
Why

SPEAKER_02 (55:27):
do you think there's such similarities in these
different stories?

SPEAKER_01 (55:34):
Well, first of all, they come out of nature.
And what you're celebrating isthe return of the life force in
the spring.
And how you do that is youcelebrate a god and goddess
together.
In fact, in the ancient world,they built temples side by side,
and the goddesses, priestesseswere with her, and then there

(55:54):
were priests with a masculine,and then they interacted, and it
was common for them to do that,I guess.
And numerous ancient gods andgoddesses, I mean, we have
hundreds, we could probablyspend all day trying to name
some of them, but they have...
Almost every culture had somekind of celebration in the

(56:14):
spring of this sacred marriage.
And whether they copied...
I mean, it's like a copycatthing.
When they conquered somebody'scountry and they found that they
had this beautiful celebrationin the spring and everybody
lived happily ever after, theydecided to do it themselves.
But they changed the names asthey went along into different
names of different goddesses orattached different attributes to

(56:35):
the gods and goddesses theyalready had.
But you have...
not just Greeks and Romans, butyou have Assyrians and
Babylonians and Canaanites and Idon't know how many.
There were many, many, but theyall had similar stories because
that's the nature of things.
In fact, Carl Jung sayssomewhere, he said, first of

(56:57):
all, we know Jesus loved thechurch, but you can't have Jesus
embracing a church.
It looks a little odd.
So what you need is for a womanto represent the church.
A woman to represent the churchso he can embrace the woman who
represents the church.
Well, the woman who representsthe community, the 153, is Mary

(57:17):
Magdalene, and she does that byway of John's Gospel in the last
chapter, 21.
21?
Yes.
Okay, so the number 153, andthis is a funny story.
So, St.
Peter is out in the boat withother disciples, and Jesus is on

(57:42):
the beach.
And Jesus calls out to them.
This is after the resurrection.
Jesus calls out to them, and hesays, have you caught anything?
And they say, no.
And he says, well, throw yournets over the starboard side.
So they throw their nets overwhat they call the lucky side,
and they catch 153 fishes, andthey bring them to shore.
Now, who's counting?

(58:03):
I don't know who would bother tocount, but somebody did because
the gospel says they caught acatch of 153 fishes.
And the people who've studiedthis say that number represented
this vesica pisces, the net, andit caught all of these fishes,
which are the symbol of theearly church.
the Church of the Fishes, andit's the Church of the Age of

(58:26):
the Fishes as well,

SPEAKER_03 (58:28):
okay?

SPEAKER_01 (58:28):
So it all ties in with the zodiac sign that was
shifting just as Jesus came intohis own as a charismatic
preacher walking in Israel andpreaching the gospel.
But he becomes the avatar of thefishes by virtue of his
resurrection, and Magdalene isthere with him.
Interestingly enough, there's achurch...

(58:53):
in Megiddo, which is in Israel.
It's now a prison built over thetop of it.
But there is a mosaic floor theyuncovered when they were
building the prison, I guess.
They uncovered this mosaicfloor.
And it was donated.
OK, the floor belonged to achapel that was built onto a
Roman army barracks so that thetroops would have a place to go

(59:16):
to church, a chapel.
And it was Christian.
It was donated.
The mosaic floor was donated bytheir officer, the centurion, in
charge, apparently.
And in the medallion on thefloor of this church, among
other things, along withinscriptions and things, is this
big medallion of two fishesswimming in opposite directions.
It's the zodiac symbol ofPisces.

(59:40):
And the people who studied thisafter it was revealed, it came
out about 10 years ago, I think,10 or 12 years ago, this whole
story and pictures of it andeverything.
And all the Christians werescratching their heads and said,
oh, it's all about the loavesand fishes.
Well, that's great, except thereare no loaves.
There's just fishes, and it'sthe symbol for the zodiac sign
of Pisces, which is what theywere celebrating because the

(01:00:02):
Roman army had been worshipingMithras and the rites of
Mithras, and then they shiftedto Christianity because the age
shifted from the Aries, I guess,to Pisces.
And so then by this time, theywere celebrating Pisces, the
fishes.
And I told you, 153 times eight,Jesus and Mary Magdalene's

(01:00:24):
sacred numbers to give you thefishes.
It's amazing.
The whole stories are...
It all falls together.
It's just amazing.
I really wish everyone would.
I mean, people talk about myalabaster jar book and everybody
loves to read it.
And that's fun because it hasall these secrets in it.
But the book that I reviewedjust recently is Magdalene's
Lost Legacy about the numbers.

(01:00:46):
And that it just it still blowsme away that these numbers are
there for people to find.
And I asked somebody once whowas studying the.
the importance of the Gospelsand how all four Gospels had
some stories that were verysimilar and others that weren't.
And Gospel of Thomas thrown inand all these different things.
I said, well, did you ever lookat the Gematria?
And he looked at me kind offunny and he said, you know, we

(01:01:07):
looked at the Gematria and wedecided we didn't know what to
do with it, so we decided not tomention it.
And I thought, oh my gosh.
They had the tools there andthey could have at least thought
about mentioning it, but no,they decided it was too much
trouble to mention it.
They didn't want to confuseanyone, I guess.
So I went and confused everyoneby mentioning it.
But it's really important work.

SPEAKER_02 (01:01:27):
Well, thank you for doing that.
I know you've got to run.
We're running up toward the endof your time.
I said, after all these yearsand all the research you've
done, how has your faithshifted?
It

SPEAKER_01 (01:01:40):
became internal instead of external.
and because my husband is soneedy i really can't even go to
church anymore because i can'tleave him for very long because
he's only happy if i'm there hedoesn't like someone else to
help him with some things thatare personal so i just have to
do everything by myself more orless that you know churching

(01:02:03):
things but it's internal now andi don't know i don't know how to
explain it but Mostly, I justtry to practice the presence of
God.
That was always my way evenbefore.
I knew that even if I waspeeling potatoes or whatever,
there's this wonderful bookabout a monk back in the Middle

(01:02:24):
Ages, Brother Lawrence.
I don't know if you know it, butit's called Practicing the
Presence of God.
And the bishop came and askedhim, you know, how is it that
you are such a holy man?
And the man said, I'm not holy.
I just practice.
know that God is always with meday and night, in all ways,
always.
And so I just am always incommunication with the God

(01:02:44):
within, right?
And so in a way, that's been myjourney as well.
And for years and years, I wentto church and did all the
outward things, but I don't dothose anymore as much because
I'm, well, I'm in my 80s and myhusband's even older than I, and
he needs help a lot, so I haveto stay close to home.
But I used to pray about the wayof the heart, and now I'm living

(01:03:07):
the way of the heart.

SPEAKER_02 (01:03:09):
Well, that's fantastic, and thank you so
much.
That's a great place to wrap.
I really appreciate you takingthe time today.
It was wonderful to meet you,and I

SPEAKER_01 (01:03:18):
wish you

SPEAKER_02 (01:03:18):
nothing but the best.

SPEAKER_01 (01:03:20):
Thank you, Ashley.

SPEAKER_02 (01:03:21):
Okay.
God bless you.
Be well.

SPEAKER_01 (01:03:25):
Thank you.
You too.
Bye.

UNKNOWN (01:03:29):
Bye.

SPEAKER_02 (01:03:30):
Hello, this episode is brought to you by Morrison
Alley.
Morrison Alley providesconsulting focused around
strategy, leadership, and teamdevelopment, as well as AI
implementations to streamlineeffectiveness or marketing
solutions or app development,and then leadership development
from our Fire& Rain leadershipdevelopment team focused on
executive leadership experiencesand experiential learning.

(01:03:55):
Check it out, morrisonalley.com.
Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 (01:04:01):
Thanks for listening to Ashley on Nothing But The
Truth for a better you and me.