It has been suggested by Christian traditionalists that Jesus was merely kissing Mary in the spirit of agape, or spiritual love - indeed, the Gnostics celebrated their religion at `love-feasts', which were more or less chaste depending on the group. (Of course the Carpocratians' love-feasts were somewhat more colourful.) But if he only meant to give her an affectionate spiritual peck, why did Jesus choose to kiss her on the lips, and why would it have `offended' the others so blatantly? Actually, no one knows where Jesus kissed her because, frustratingly, the ancient gospel is missing that particular bit of papyrus. `On the mouth' is merely a scholarly speculation, but of course it is extremely interesting that even scholars thought fit to suggest the mouth and not the hand or cheek. Of course the original may have said something quite different, such as `on the Sabbath' or `on the Sea of Galilee'! Another passage from the Gospel of Philip is even more intriguing:
Three women always used to walk with the lord - Mary his mother, his sister, and the Magdalene, who is called his companion. For `Mary' is the name of his sister and his mother, and it is the name of his partner [My emphases] 61
The word for `companion' is the Aramaic koinonos, a Greek loan word meaning `partner'. Previously63 when I claimed that this means `sexual partner' there were howls of outrage from certain quarters. I remain unrepentant. I maintain that koinonos means `partner' in exactly the sense of our modem word, which depends almost entirely on context for its nearest definition. If someone is introduced as `partner' in an office setting, it will be assumed this means business associate. If at a party, `lover' is more likely to fit the bill 6' Here we have the Magdalene, who elsewhere in the Nag Hammadi texts is described as being repeatedly kissed, presumably on the mouth, by Jesus. She may have controlled the purse strings, but somehow she hardly sounds like a business partner - nor would the modem British `good mate' match the context. (In which case she would probably have been described as `disciple' or `follower'.) Koinonos, in this context, can only mean lover.
The phrase `who is called his companion' is also slightly stilted, perhaps as if some kind of euphemism, as in `who they say is his companion', and Mary is specifically called his partner.
Despite the belief fostered worldwide by Dan Brown's blockbusting thriller The Da Vinci Code that Jesus and the Magdalene were man and wife - a concept that first reached the Anglo-Saxon public in 1982 in Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln's The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail - there is little to support this view, either in the Bible or, more tellingly, even in the Gnostic writings. The miracle of the turning of the water into wine at a marriage at Cana, said to be the wedding of Jesus and Mary, originally - as we have seen - came from the myths of the dyingand-rising wine god Dionysus 65 And the single most important piece of evidence for their not being married is one of glaring omission: simply, there is no mention of a `Miriam, wife of the Saviour' or `Mary, Christ's spouse' in either the New Testament or any of the known Gnostic writings. Although there was a conspiracy to marginalize her in the Gospels of Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it seems that it did not extend to air- brushing out her marital status. Indeed, the obvious distaste the male disciples feel for her may partly arise from the fact that her relationship with Jesus was not sanctioned by Jewish Law.
In any case, Jesus' disciples were forbidden to marry - although John the Baptist's followers were not - and there are other possible considerations that would prevent Christ `making an honest woman' of her. Unacceptable and unthinkable though such considerations may be, either or both of them could already have been married, or they may have been close blood relatives - too close to make their love legal. Or one or both of them could have been dedicated to chastity, most likely as priest or priestess of a foreign cult. (Even temple `prostitutes' or servants were expected to remain unmarried and observe the sexual rites only within the temple walls.) The thirteenth- century citizens of Beziers in the south of France - all 20,000 of them - willingly died martyrs' deaths rather than recant a belief that Mary was Jesus' 'concubine', which they probably gleaned from Gnostic gospels that were circulating in the area at that time, but which have since been lost 66
The Magdalene's closeness to Jesus, her relationship with `John the Beloved', and Peter's hatred, are all significant factors in her emergence as `Mary Lucifer' - for better or worse in the minds of future generations. And in order to piece together her true significance, we need to fast-forward to the late fifteenth century, where one of the world's most famous figures was concocting works of the most outrageous blasphemy.
In the early 1990s Clive Prince and myself were busily researching the secrets of the great Florentine Maestro Leonardo da Vinci, for what became our first joint book, Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994), its subtitle becoming the more self-explanatory How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History for the 2000 paperback. Our discovery of a mass of circumstantial evidence that suggested strongly he had created the allegedly miraculously imaged Holy Shroud of Turin using a primitive photographic technique will be discussed later, when analysing Leonardo's Luciferan credentials. For now, suffice it to say that as we became convinced of Leonardo's intimate link to the `Shroud', our homes rapidly disappeared beneath a mass of Leonardo reproductions, which we habitually scrutinized minutely for any clues as to what he really stood for. Concentrate as we might, however, our eventual discoveries seemed always to operate on an unconscious level - apparently spontaneously - as if a coiled spring was released explosively in our minds as a reaction to hours of intense staring. We `suddenly' saw the most astonishing things in what are, after all, the most famous works of art, and therefore the most familiar images, in the world. However, these were not simply the equivalent of imagining faces in the fire or animal shapes in cloud formations: gradually the features we had noted and our discoveries about Leonardo's own particular brand of heresy came together as an utterly consistent, coherent whole.
That he intended posterity to notice his hidden clues is certain, and reflects his attitude, as revealed in his contempt for the typical poet because `he has not the power of saying several things at one and the same time' 67 One of the first of the `hidden' symbols we discerned in The Last Supper proved astonishingly blatant, yet like everyone else for 500 years we had succumbed to the blanket of assumption that veiled our eyes. In 1994 we wrote:
Look at the figure of Jesus with his red robe and blue cloak and look to the right where there is what appears at first glance to be a young man leaning away. This is generally taken to be John the Beloved - but in that case, should he not be leaning against Jesus' `bosom' as in the Bible? Look yet more closely. This character is wearing the mirror image of Jesus' clothing: in this case a blue robe and red cloak, but otherwise the garments are identical ... [and] ... as much as Jesus is large and very male, this character is elfin and distinctly female. The hands are tiny, there is a gold necklace on show ... This is no John the Beloved: this is Mary Magdalene. And a hand cuts across her throat, in that chilling Freemasonic gesture indicating a dire warning 68
Yet if we thought we could safely leave The Last Supper behind us, we were sadly mistaken. Its symbolism proved central to our next co-authored work, The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (1997) and was of enormous significance for my own Mary Magdalene: Christianity's Hidden Goddess (2003): with each book we had something new, exciting and disturbing - like all Leonardo's secrets - to present. This trend continues here, with a major new revelation. But first, the essential background:
In the Last Supper the young `St John' leaning as far as possible away from Jesus to make a giant `M' shape with him, indicating the real identity of the character, appeared in our second book, and has also reached a huge international audience through The Da Vinci Code, which used our work as the inspiration for the whole concept of Leonardo's codes and secrets. Yes, clearly this is Mary Magdalene, her mirror-image clothes revealing her to be Christ's `other half', taking what many heretics would have believed to be her rightful place at his side as he initiates the great Christian sacrament in which the wine represents his sacrificial blood and the bread his body. And, as I noted in Mary Magdalene, the hand that makes the vicious slicing motion across the woman's neck belongs to Saint Peter, whom the Gnostic gospels make clear actually had threatened her ... But how was a 15th- century Italian painter to know about the fraught relationship of those two long-dead disciples? Did he have access to the forbidden books that were circulating in the south of France a few centuries before his birth? (Certainly he understood the value of secrets, writing about `truth and the power of knowledge'.) And why did Leonardo believe she ought to be sitting at Jesus' right hand during the Last Supper?
Perhaps he knew something about the original gospels that remains elusive even to the twenty-first century. In their book Jesus and the Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians (2001), Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy claim that the biblical Gospel of Saint John, `if it is to bear any name at all, should be The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.' They explain that although it claims to be written by `an unspecified 'Beloved Disciple', it is attributed to John solely on the basis of ... Irenaeus, at the end of the second century, claiming he had a childhood memory of being told that the gospel was written by the disciple John.'69 Noting that the late firstcentury Gnostics attributed it to their master Cerinthus, they add
Modem research suggests that the `Beloved Disciple' he makes the narrator of the story is not John, but
