of life and death, of sex, contraception and abortion. And, like Adam's first wife Lilith, goddesses notoriously took their pleasure with their consorts in the superior position, believed by the JudaeoChristian priesthood to be profoundly wicked as a deliberate overturning of God's law. (To them, the only godly way of intercourse was the `Venus observa', or `missionary position' - so called because Christian missionaries insisted that their native converts use it exclusively in their marriage beds. The natives thought it was hilarious.)
Despite the fact that the clitoris is the only human organ whose function is exclusively to give pleasure, sexual delight was frowned upon, especially for women, whose sole sexual purpose was to breed. Isis, Diana- Lucifer, Artemis, Asherah, Venus and all other manifestations of the Great Goddess would have difficulty in comprehending this: to them, every aspect of womanhood was there to be experienced and celebrated, from virginity through motherhood to a dignified and wise old age, with everything in between from warrior queen and sacred whore. Schooled in such an attitude, pagan women were often unsurprisingly assertive and independent - especially in Egypt, where in the first century they were permitted to own property and initiate divorce. Learned women were also celebrated: an inscription as early as the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2600-2500 BCE), approximately contemporary with the building of the Giza pyramids, refers to a woman in the Temple of Thoth as `Mistress of the House of Books' 90 Hypatia, the first great woman mathematician and philosopher, a native of Alexandria, was torn to pieces by an angry mob in 415 CE, some say, inspired by the Christian bishop Cyril, through envy.
Eve had acted on her own initiative, Lilith taunted both God and his angels, and Asherah had taken Lucifer as a lover. Women were clearly Satanic, the spawn of the Devil, and must at all costs be prevented from thinking or acting unless under male orders. Barbara Walker notes another historical link between goddesses and western notions of evil:
A triple six, 666, was the magic number of Aphrodite (or Ishtar) in the guise of the Fates. The Book of Revelation called it `the number of the Beast' (Revelation 13:18), apparently the Beast with Two Backs, the androgyne of carnal love. Solomon the wizard-king made a sacred marriage with the Goddess and acquired a mystic 666 talents of gold (1 Kings 10:14). Christians usually called it Satan's number, yet the recurrences of this number in esoteric traditions are often surprising. For example, the maze at Chartres Cathedral was planned so as to be exactly 666 feet long.9'
Today's Christian hell-and-damnation fundamentalists and vast numbers of conspiracy theorists see the devilish `666' in everything, as evidence of satanic influence in the government, the Freemasons or whoever they have decided to demonize. The saddest and most disturbing consideration is that even if they knew about the true background of Christianity's most notorious number, like their predecessors, they would still regard it as evil. To them, as a pagan goddess Aphrodite was clearly demonic, yet in fact she was truly Luciferan - in the sense of being an enlightener to her followers, just as were her sister goddesses. Some of Aphrodite's works were too strong even for the traditionalist ancient Greeks, to whom women should be confined to a narrow domestic life. When the lesbian poet Sappho petitioned the goddess for help in winning the favours of a particular girl, she replied: 'Who/O Sappho, does you justice?/For if she flees, soon will she pursue/and though she receives not your gifts, she will give them/and if she loves not now, soon she will love/even against her will.'92 Somehow one detects Sappho's own hand in this convenient response from the deity.
As we have seen, some of the pagan goddesses, such as the huntress Diana, even took the title 'Lucifer/Lucifera', the bringer of Light into the darkness of human woe.
Another reason that the old goddesses became synonymous with the Devil is that many of them were depicted wearing lunar horns. Isis-Hathor wears a pair of magnificent cow's horns, as befits that animal's patron, and must have seemed truly diabolic to the early Christians as her cult persisted in Europe as a rival until the fourth century CE - into the fifth century in parts of Italy. God's wife, Ashereth, gave her name to Ashteroth-Karnaim in Gilead, or `Ashteroth/Ashereth of the horns'. American researcher David Lance Goines believes that the goddesses' horns are not lunar at all, but reflect their association with Venus, a planet that also produces a visual crescent shape in the night sky 93 If so, this merely reinforces the sense that the early Christians associated the Feminine Principle with horns and venery - the Devil incarnate.
No doubt it will be assumed that Christianity, like Jesus himself, sprang from a divine state of chastity with no breath of the loathed contamination of sex. But like Yahweh with his Asherah, Venus and her Adonis and Osiris with his Isis, Christ also had his sacred consort, a woman who even received the title `Lucifer' from her devotees - and who, apparently, taught the mysteries of sacred sex not only to the chosen one, but also his followers ...
CHAPTER THREE
A Woman Called Lucifer
In the twenty-first-century West, all our ideas about right and wrong, good and evil, come from our culture's Judaeo-Christian tradition. But, as we have seen, Yahweh's credentials as a noble or even particularly intelligent deity fail to match his capacity for jealousy and smiting, and the story of humanity's fall from grace - and the subsequent subjugation of women - is a sad tale of garbled myth and blatant bias. However, none of that compares with the deliberate reworking of the original Christian story, apparently often in direct opposition to Christ's own wishes. This chapter will deal with a quite different view of Christianity, pieced together from long-forbidden texts, obscured identities and the reinsertion of passages from the flagrantly edited gospels. The result will be shocking and thought-provoking, and implicitly reverses many Christian assumptions about sacred figures, and even about their basic understanding of what is devilish and what is righteous.
In 1958 a discovery was made by Dr Morton Smith (later Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University, New York) in the library of an Eastern Orthodox closed community at Mar Saba near Jerusalem. It was a copy of a letter from the second-century Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, which, as we shall see later, includes potentially explosive material taken from a `Secret Gospel of Mark', apparently an esoteric version of the biblical Gospel, but for initiates only. Clement's letter is in reply to a Christian called Theodore who wanted to know how to deal with a heretical group called the Carpocratians who practised their own - extreme - version of the ancient sacred sex rites referred to in the previous chapter, allegedly based on a secret Gospel of Mark.
The Carpocratians were second-century Gnostics led by one Carpocrates, called by author Michael Jordan in his highly revisionist Mary: The Unauthorized Biography (2001) `a Christian pioneer who did much to advance the cause of Gnosticism'.' The modern scholar par excellence of Gnosticism, Tobias Churton, calls Carpocrates `a proto-Communist . . . [an] intellectual anarchist, who coined the dictum, 'Property is theft' .12 However, this modern, if muted, admiration is a far cry from the ancients' horror at what they perceived as the Carpocratians' penchant for radical licentious behaviour. Predictably, the dogmatic and uncompromising Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon fired off a broadside at these offensive libertines, singling out their leader Marcus:
Marcus, thou former of idols, inspector of portents, Skilled in consulting the stars, and deep in the black arts of magic, Ever by tricks such as these confirming the doctrines of error, Furnishing signs unto those involved by thee in deception, Wonders of power that is utterly severed from God and apostate, Which Satan, thy true father, enables thee still to accomplish, By means of Azazel, that fallen and yet mighty angel, Thus making thee the precursor of his own impious actions.3
Irenaeus leaves us in no doubt as to his views on Marcus, whom he declares to be `really the precursor of Antichrist'. The Bishop attacks the Carpocratian leader for a litany of sins and crimes, including an `addiction to philtres, love-potions [drugs], 'familiar demons', prophecies, the defiling of women, numerology ... and Satanism' .1 However, Irenaeus5 soon leaves aside the fire-andbrimstone ranting and knuckles down to specific accusations. Not surprisingly, they concern alleged sexual misconduct - `the defiling of women' - the usual accusation against rival cults throughout the ages, which may or may not have a basis in fact. He declares with a critic's, not to say bigot's,6 certainty:
Marcus devotes himself especially to women, and those such as are well-bred, and elegantly attired, and of great wealth, whom he frequently seeks to draw after him, by addressing them in such seductive words as these . . . Adorn thyself as a bride who is expecting her bridegroom, that thou mayest be what I am, and I what thou art. Establish the germ of light in thy nuptial chamber. Receive from me a spouse, and become receptive of him, while thou are received by him?
