As every statistician knows, the Greek alphabet consists of symbols like "delta" and "pi" that also work as numbers. Starbird suggests that using Greek alphanumerics to encode relevant passages, early "heretical" Christians hid verboten material in otherwise inoffensive text. Irenaeus, a church father of the 4th century who ordered the destruction of Gnostic material (such as the books found at Nag Hammadi) knew of this practice and forbade it. However, the "heretics" did not listen to him, and they hid material about the Magdalene in the New Testament - in the synoptic gospels and the mysterious Book of Revelation. Starbird says modern computers have provided scholars the means to decode these arcane messages. (She provides a Greek key you can use to interpret passages in Greek included in the book).

Hidden numbers aside, Starbird poses a question asked by other scholars - why do specific numbers appear in the books of the Bible and do they matter. For example, why were 153 fishes caught in a net (John 21:11) or why were there x number of loaves and fishes? The Book of Revelations suggests the `beast' is 666. In gemetric code, 666 = the solar principle. Starbird suggests the solar principle without a lunar principle leads to a desert. Day without night or Sol alone = "raw abusive, power, the power of the tyrant" or the male element run amuck. When the male element is combined with the female (lunar or night =1080) they form 1746 the symbolic equivalent of "the grain of mustard seed" or "the kingdom of God within." The marriage of sol and luna or masculine and feminine (1746=union of opposites) is also the gematria for "Jerusalem the city of God."

This wonderful book continues Starbird's exploration of messages about the Magdalene hidden in plain sight for two millennium. And, don't miss the land of milk and honey (it has to do with sol and luna).

http://www.amazon.com/Magdalenes-Lost-Legacy-Symbolic-Christianity/product-reviews/1591430127

Novus Ordo Seclorum

The other motto on the reverse, 'Novus Ordo Seclorum', seems to have a solar connotation. Valued at 1742, it falls between Χρυσομαλλος - Chrysomallos - at 1741 and Γνωμων - Gnomon - at 1743. The first is the name of the ram that bore the golden fleece - this was a solar symbol and pointed to Aries, the first sign of the zodiac and the start of the sun's annual journey. The latter is the upright member of a sundial (or a builder's square). The pyramid and obelisk are both types of sundial and both may represent the upright member of the god Seb.

 

The Number of Fusion
1746 is an extremely important symbol of harmony for esoteric initiates, as it represents the fusion of the solar number 666 and the lunar number 1080 (5). On the Great Seal we find both components of this number united, because 'E Pluribus' has a value of 666 and 'Novus' 1080.

A Coincidence
'Ordo Seclorum' has a value of 1369. This is suspicious as it is also the value of the letters giving the date MDCCLXXVI (1776 when counted as Roman numerals). 1369 is an important number for it represents 37 squared - and 37 is the keystone of sacred geometry in the Bible (and elsewhere). The fact that we have a square number at the base of the pyramid seems very fitting - a solid foundation. The number 37 may also signify the Hebrew words 'AVL' and 'GDL'. 'AVL' means strength, or a powerful person. 'GDL' means power or majesty. Both of these words aptly describe the potent god Seb.

In Hebrew the number 1369 very importantly denotes the phrase VRVCh ALHIM MRChPhTh AaL PhNI HMIM - 'And the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters' (Gen. 1,2). This maintains the theme of divine creation.

1776 - Date
The overtly intended date of 1776 would certainly have been chosen for numerological reasons. It, too, is factored by 37, being the product of 37 and 48. It may be intended to represent 'Jesus of Nazerus' - who has this value in English gematria (and as 888 x 2 also signifies the doubling of his first name in Greek) and Jesus is an important figure to the Freemasons. In Greek we find that the phrase Ιησους εστι λογος - Jesus is the Logos - also has this value. We notice that in Ephesians 2,20 Jesus is described as the chief corner stone in the foundation of the temple of God. (6)

The Roman numerals of the date MDCCLXXVI also generate the solar number 666. This comes about through a pattern of three pairs: MDCCLXXVI - the first red pair giving 600, the second 60 and the last 6. The intentionality of this is further indicated by the fact that the remaining numbers - MCX - give us, in a regular pattern, 1110. This is a particularly important number in gematria and signifies harmony and completion. We can also see that 666 and 1110 lie in a 3:5 ratio and therefore can signify two sides of a 3-4-5 right-angled triangle. What is the length of the missing side? It is 888 - the number of the Gnostic Ιησοθς - the stone which the builders disallowed (i Peter 2, 7).

Christian enthusiasts, ignorant of cabalistic numerology, invariably interpret the number 666 to signify the devil. This is a mistaken assumption in many respects and shows a disregard of St John's injunction that the 'number of the beast' was counted only 'for him that hath understanding'. The cabalist with understanding knows that 666 refers as much to the 'Beast' as it does to Jesus Christ. The reason for this is that the words John used were, Και ο αριθμος αυτου Χξς΄ - 'And the number of his name is 666'. These critical words have a value of 2368: this number is unambiguous to the cabalist as the value of Ιησοθς Χριστος - Jesus Christ. Was St John predicting that the great Beast might usurp the name of Jesus Christ?

It is also true that 666, as an emblem of the creative solar power in the cosmos, only becomes destructive when it is not balanced by its feminine counterpart - in this case it leads to authoritarianism and tyranny.

The Lightbringer
The combined value of 'Annuit Coeptis' and 'Novus Ordo Seclorum' is 707 + 1742 = 2449. This is the precise value of the phrase Ιησοθς Χριστος Νικα - Jesus Christ Conquers. In addition, it is almost certainly intended to signify Ο Φωσφορος (2448) - The Lightbringer / The Morning Star. Pictorially, this is represented by the blazing triangle holding the eye in the pyramid. In scriptural terms it is highly unlikely that 'Lucifer' can be entirely evil for the Bible ends with these words of Jesus (Rev. 21,16):

I am the root and offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.

Here too, we come across an original piece of Biblical gematria, because the Greek words for former part of the phrase, Η ριζα και το γενος του Δαβιδ are exactly equated (at a value of 1646) with an alternative name for the bright and morning star Φαεσφορος. (7)

 

E Pluribus Unum

When the expression is broken into its two components of 666 and 470, some very interesting symbolism emerges. For a start, the two numbers lie in the ratio of the square root of two - 666 divided by 470 is 1.417. More importantly, they signify the interplay of light and darkness.

666 is the number of the sun and points, for example, to to the Hebrew expressions ShMSh IHVH - Sun of God, or SVRTh - The spirit of the sun. 470 has the opposite symbolism because it denotes KMRIR - an eclipse. However, it also signifies light coming out of darkness because it is the value of the creative words of God, IHI AVR VIHI AVR - 'Let there be light, and there was light' (Gen 1,3). Therefore the complete phrase adds dramatic significance to the image it accompanies, because, according to the official guide, it shows 'a glory breaking through a cloud over the head of the eagle'. This means a burst of sunlight piercing the dark cloud. In Masonic terms we have the familiar motto 'Lux ex Tenebris'.

The fact that the eagle holds an olive branch in one claw and the arrows of war in the other further reinforces the idea of opposites reconciled. Out of the opposites of light and darkness, spirit and matter, male and female, comes life. Therefore it is appropriate that 470 and 666 generate 815, the number of Ζωη - Life, when set at right-angles to produce a hypotenuse with this length. The perimeter of the ensuing triangle is 470 + 666 + 815 = 1951. This number unites the Cabalistic man with the Cabalistic bride: ADM QDMVN (Adam Kadmon) and MLKVTh (Malkuth) - 1455 + 496 = 1951.

 

The Grand Total

The addition of all three mottos on the Seal gives us 3585. This measures a pentacle of side 717, enclosed in a 2368 circumference circle. 717 gives, 'BN IH' - 'Son of God'. 2368 gives Ιησοθς Χριστος - Jesus Christ. The Great Seal thus pays homage to the Gnostic and numerological Jesus Christ, secretly worshipped in Freemasonry.

 

All This And Shakespeare Too?

The Masonic symbolism of the Great Seal finds an interesting parallel in the esoteric symbolism underpinning the verse structure of Shakespeare's Sonnets. There are grounds for identifying a direct connection and thinking that Shakespeare may have been involved in the founding of the United States of America.

 http://www.masoncode.com/The%20Great%20Seal.htm

Page 496

" There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity.
I will cling to it .I will be good.
I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts.
For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else."

Page 496 / 497

"Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death . Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilisation, friendly and enlightened , beautiful human intercourse-always in silent recognition of the blood-sacrifice. Ah, yes, it is it is well and truly dreamed. I have taken stock I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet well remember that faith with death and the dead is evil, is hostile to mankind, so soon as we give it power over thought and action.

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. - And with this - I awake. For I have dreamed it out to the end, I have come to my goal."

After a short meeting with their good and trusted friend Thomas. Alizzed and the scribe thanked him most genuinely for the benefit of his wisdom, in the matter of their quest, and in saying their good byes, wished the other well, a not unusual seven times, and of course, promised, not to leave it quite so long in the future.

 Greek words omitted

Page156

1080 = the Holy Spirit,

= the spirit of the earth, ro

= fountain of wisdom,

== Tartaros, the abyss,

= Cocytos, a god of the abyss,

By the conventions of gematria, one digit, known as colel, may be added to or subtracted from a phrase without altering its meaning, and so to the above can be added:

1081 = the abyss,

Among other correspondences of the number 1080, which contribute' to revealing its characteristic meaning, are:

1080 = radius of the moon in miles

108 = atomic weight of silver

1080 = number of breaths drawn in one hour (traditional)

10800 = number of stanzas in the Rigveda

10800 = number of bricks in the Indian fire altar

108 = number of beads on the Hindu or Buddhist rosary

And so on. Throughout the world, in every traditional code of architectural proportion, computation of time and wherever else number is involved, 1080 is always prominent; and its reference universally is to the 'yin' side of nature, in contrast to the solar or 'yang' significance of the number 666.

The relation this bears to our present subject is that it reveals the esoteric meaning of the phrase, a grain of mustard seed; for the sum of the letter comprising that term is 1746, and 1746 is the sum of the numbers 666 and 1080. It is in fact the 'number of fusion', representing the fruitful union between the two opposite principles in nature. This same number, 1746, is given by many other sacred phrases, all referring to the product of that union, such as (1746), the Spirit of the World.

According to the alchemists, life is created out of the fusion of two, elements, mercury and sulphur, the first representing the receptive, 'female' principle in nature which is animated by the second, the positive 'male' force. The two numbers corresponding to these in the old numerical philosophy were 1080 and 666, and the sum of these, 1746, is represented by the 'grain of mustard seed' at the Pyramid's tip.

In this formula are expressed the nature and purpose of the forgotten science of which the Pyramid, like all temples and monuments in the ancient world, was designed as an instrument. The operations of the medieval alchemists were the last flickerings of a scientific tradition

/ Page 157 /

which flourished in prehistoric times, when the elements of sulphur and mercury were brought to fusion, not merely in an alchemist's retort, but on a far grander scale within the great retort or womb of the earth itself. The element of mercury in this operation was represented by the spirit of the earth, which was ceremonially 'wedded' at certain seasons with the sulphurous element, radiating from the sun.

The marriage of heaven and earth took place at the Pyramid as a union between the terrestrial current, accumulated in its rocky mass, and the divine spark of celestial fire distilled from the ether at the point of its gold and crystal apex. From this union was born the life essence, the vitalists' elan vital, formerly known by such phrases as the Spirit of the World whose number in the Greek cabala is 1746.

It is recognized by the Hebrew cabalists that a similar operation was performed within the Holy of Holies in the Temple at Jerusalem, where lay the Ark, the Israelites' source of power from the days when they were a nomadic people. The effect produced by that operation is described in the Old Testament phrase: 'The Glory of the Lord filled the House' - an effect of light and power, capable of striking dead any of the priestly operators unprepared for it, from a fusion of energies in the generation of the life spirit by which the whole country was made fertile. In the Greek scriptures this phenomenon is referred to as 'the Glory of the God of Israel' the -value by gematria of which phrase is 1746. Temple legends, as recounted by Raphael Patai in Man and Temple, tell of the underground streams and fissures leading from beneath it to all parts of the land, by which the vital spirit was universally dispersed. The chthonic mysteries of the earth goddess were celebrated in vaults below the Temple, into which ran metal rods, connected to golden spires on the temple's roof. By these the positive charge of atmospheric electricity was introduced into the veins of water and metal within the earth's crust. Thus in many various ways the temple formed an instrument offusion between the elements from above and those of the earth beneath.

One of the ways in which the number of fusion, 1746, relates to the Great Pyramid is illustrated in the diagram overleaf, (diagram omitted) in which the profile of the Pyramid is placed in association with that basic figure of sacred geometry and architecture known as the vesica pis cis or 'vessel of the fish'. The figure of the vesica is formed by the intersection of two equal circles, the circumference of each of which passes through the centre of the other. It is not merely a figure of abstract geometry, for it occurs in many of the patterns of nature. It represents a state of perfect equilibrium between two equal forces, and in the symbolic (Diagram omitted)

/ Page 159 /

vocabulary of the old geometers it was an image of the inter- penetrating worlds of heaven and earth, spirit and matter, and other such complementary elements. In this case, the height of the vesica being that of the Pyramid, some 481 ft., the diameter of each of the two circles forming it is equal to that number divided by half the square root of 3, or 555.5 ft., and the circumference of each circle is therefore 1746 ft.

These two circles of 1746 ft., intersecting at the Pyramid's tip and the centre of its base, take the form of a magnetic field, illustrating a feature of the Pyramid which belongs to it by tradition, supported by modern experience: its magnetic quality.

Of the many mystics and occultists who have been drawn to study the Great Pyramid, one of the earliest and most imaginative was Captain G.B. Caviglia, a Genoese mariner, who saw the Pyramid during a trip to Egypt early in the nineteenth century, and abandoned his ship and seafaring life in order to live within it and probe its mysteries. He took up residence in a small apartment above the King's Chamber, and began intensive searches for hidden rooms and other undiscovered features of the Pyramid's interior. At. the same time this sensitive man pursued studies of magnetism and the esoteric sciences 'to the very verge of what is permitted man to know', as he told a visitor, Lord Lindsay (who described the encounter in a book, Letters from Egypt). Lindsay described him as having become so integrated with his environment that he was 'tout a fait pyramidal'.

Caviglia has gone down in Pyramid history for his energetic clearing of rubble there and around the Sphinx, and for his discovery of some of its inner features. Of the weird experiences he underwent while dwelling in his Pyramid chamber he left no written record, but he"'" described some of them to his contemporaries, saying that at times he had been driven close to death, and added his impressions of the Pyramid's magnetic and occult qualities.

The possible nature of these experiences is indicated by the account of an adventure described in Paul Brunton's book, A Search in Secret Egypt. In the 1920S Mr Brunton received permission, harder to obtain than in Caviglia's time, to spend a night inside the Great Pyramid. Locked in at dusk by the Pyramid guard, he spent some time with an electric torch roaming the interior and finally entered the King's Chamber. Here began the adventures described in his book. An almost unbearable impression of evil reduced him to a state of terror that almost became panic until his senses, utterly distraught by grotesque and sinister visions, were relieved by the appearance of a white robed figure, banishing the horror to which he had been subjected.

666, Amorite Giants Numerology Codex of Gematria in the Ohio Valley Earthworks

• Posted by Fritz Zimmerman on August 29, 2011 at 9:58am in Pagan Articles
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Sacred Numbers in the New Testament: Part II

by Margaret L. Starbird

Graphic Provided by Abby Willowroot

[IMAGE]

Among the ancients, the feminine principle designed to off-set the solar/masculine was also expressed as a number, 1080, the "Yin" of the ancient world: the "shady side of the mountain." The gematria for the agia pneuma, the Holy Spirit in Greek, and its anagram, gaia pneuma, the Earth spirit, is 1080. This number represented feminine values, the "moist" or "lunar" principle of relatedness and intuition expressed in art, poetry, and dreams with their emotional rather than rational content. The Greek phrase phgh sophias, "fountain of wisdom" bears gematria of 1080. Peristera, "dove," a universal totem of the Goddess and of the Holy Spirit in Christian iconography, has gematria of 801, the anagram of 1080. These examples serve to illustrate the cross-referencing of the coded numbers and phrases by the authors of the New Testament.

When the sacred numbers representing the masculine and feminine, 666 and 1080, are added together, their sum is 1746, the number that Plato equates with "Fusion." This is the "sacred union" of the opposite energies, "wedded" or "fused" together in harmony, representing the "fertilized seed" or the "cosmic egg." And this same number occurs at the very heart of Christ's teaching. "The kingdom of God" said Jesus, "is like a grain of mustard seed, which when it is planted grows into a large bush and the birds come and nest in its branches." This parable occurs in the three synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke and also in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas found in Nag Hammadi based on an earlier copy written in Greek. There is consensus that Christ used these exact words for his teaching about the reign of God. Homilies on this Gospel passage tend to focus on the bush with the birds nesting in it and so invariably miss the point of the teaching. Hidden for two thousand years is the gematria of the "grain of mustard seed"--1746. What Jesus really said to those who had "ears to hear" was that God's reign is like the harmonious balance of masculine and feminine principles expressed in the Sacred Union of 666 and 1080--the hieros gamos of the ancients.

Armed with this doctrine of the "Sacred Marriage" found at the very heart of the Christian message, I searched for other traces of the lost "partnership model" and the feminine. What I found, carefully encoded in the Gospels themselves, is truly astonishing. The epithet of the Gospel Mary known as h Madalhnh, "the Magdalene," indicates that she was the acknowledged partner of Christ, the archetypal Bride as he is Bridegroom of the New Testament.

The holy name of Jesus, at which, according to Saint Paul, every knee must bend, has gematria of 888. While a close study of the Hebrew Scriptures shows the importance of 7 for their faith community, the most revered number among Christians was 8. On the seventh day, the Creator rested. Fields lie fallow during the seventh year, the jubilee or 50th year follows the seventh cycle of seven years. Seven seems to be intimately connected with end of a time cycle. But Christians, the number is 8 has utmost symbolic content. Christ was laid in his tomb on Friday and remained there through the Sabbath, the seventh day. But on the dawn of the eighth day, Mary Magdalene and the other women who went to the tomb to mourn him were amazed to find that the tomb was empty. In the symbolic system of the ancients, 8 was the number for regeneration, rebirth, and resurrection. Among earlier believers, Christ was called the Ogdoad, the "fullness of eights," and his name was spelled Ihsous in the Greek texts precisely because that spelling adds up to 888, while any other phonetic rendering of the Hebrew Yeshua does not! Jesus was deliberately identified with the number eight to reinforce the importance and unique significance of his incarnation. He was the embodiment of the "resurrection." the "dawn of the new era," and "bearer of the new age." The age dawning at the precise time these documents were being formed was the Age of the Fishes--Pisces. Jesus was its Lord.

The architects of Christianity deliberately styled Jesus as the bearer of the Age of the Fishes. They developed the well-known acronym for Jesus: ICHTHYS, based on the rather contrived Greek epithet "Jesus, Son of God, Savior." The Fish is ubiquitous as a symbol for Christ and for Christians who have since forgotten why the FISH was used as the symbol for the Christian faith in its infancy. But the people who coined the phrase knew and consciously contrived the acronym so that the letters matched the symbolic numbers of their sacred canon and their cosmology.

But the Greek name for Jesus was not the only important name encoded by symbolic number in the Gospels. Hidden for millennia in the gematria of her epithet, we find encoded the tremendous significance of Mary Magdalene in the community of the earliest Christians. The Greek h Magdalhnh has gematria of 153, the exact number of the "fishes in the net" found in Chapter 21 of John's Gospel. We know from centuries of Church doctrine that the apostles of Jesus were "fishermen" and that they were to be "fishers of men." The "fish" they caught became the members of the community, the Church itself. Early Christians were known as the "little fishes" and their baptismal fonts were called "little fish ponds." So the miraculous catch of the 153 fishes represented the "catch" of converts to Christianity--the ekklesia. From the dawn of Christianity, the earliest exegetes of Scripture equated Mary Magdalene with the ekklesia, the Church that Christ loved so much, he gave his life for her (Eph. 5:25).

In their respective works, both John Michell and David Fideler discuss this "geometry word-problem." Both mention the extreme importance of the number "153" in the sacred canon of the ancients. This number was universally called the "matrix" (mother) of all geometry and represented the Vesica Piscis, the "almond" shape formed when two circles intersect. Among the ancients, this shape bore the meaning of "the materialization of spirit" and was known as the "gateway" or "portal" of life--the "door." Because of its obvious feminine connotations, it was sometimes referred to as the "vulva" and even "the holy of holies," the inner sanctum. This Vesica Piscis was often called the "153," known as "the measure of the fish" since the time of Archimedes. It was used to reference the ratio 265/153, the fraction in Greek which is the mathematical equivalent to our square root of 3. It was the most important of all geometric numbers, the "mother" (matrix) of all geometric shapes. The number, the "153," was known and honored throughout the known world--the Vesica Piscis representing the vessel of the sacred feminine par excellence.

Was THIS perhaps the reason that the Church fathers of the second century tried to discredit the use of gematria for the interpretation of Scripture. Were they trying to blot out the memory of Mary h Magdalhnh as the "Goddess in the Gospels"? Were they trying to "lose" the feminine counterpart of Jesus when they repudiated the analysis of the numbers encoded in the Gospel texts? There are other surprises in these symbolic numbers, the 8 identified with Jesus and the 153 of the Magdalene. When 153 is multiplied by 8 the result is 1224, the gematria for the Greek word diktuon, "the net," and also for ichthues, "fishes." Are these number accidental? Or was the Gospel of John deliberately encoding the formula for the "sacred marriage" of Jesus and the Magdalene in these significant numbers. Was he the Lord, was she the Lady of the Age to Come--The FISHES? The symbolic numbers encoded by gematria provide direct and irrefutable evidence for the "Sacred Marriage" at the heart of Christianity, evidence carefully hidden for nearly two millennia in the Gospels themselves. In restoring Magdalene to the paradigm of sacred union indigenous to Christian doctrine, we are restoring the feminine principle to a place of honor at all levels of existence. Together the archetypal Bride and Bridegroom stand at the threshold of the new millennium--MM.

Margaret Starbird holds BA and MA degrees from the University of Maryland where she concentrated on German, comparative literature and medieval studies, interests she pursued on a Fulbright Student grant at the Christian Albrechts Universitat in Kiel, Germany. She attended classes at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, TN, and has taught numerous classes in Scripture and spirituality. She has lived and traveled extensively in Europe including recent pilgrimages to Black Madonna and Mary Magdalene shrines and Cathar citadels in Provençe. She and her husband now reside in the Puget Sound area of Washington State where she teaches and gives seminars and retreats honoring the sacred union at the heart of Christianity. They have five grown children.

Margaret Starbird is the Author of Three Books:

 

The Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Was Jesus Married?

 

The Tarot Trumps and the Holy Grail: Great Secrets of the Middle Ages

 

The Goddess in the Gospels: A Quest for the Sacred Feminine in Christianity

 

 

 

[IMAGES OF THREE BOOKS]

http://gnosticcross.tripod.com/archive/2001_07_3sacrednum2.html

Review by Ed Conroy

God in the beginning of creation made the body of the universe to consist of fire and earth. But two things cannot be rightly put together without a third; there must be some bond of union between them. – Plato, Timaeus

There is a new Madonna in the Western world, and her name is Mary Magdalene. She is, it appears, the patroness of the people whom Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong calls "believers in exile." To her new advocates, she is herself the archetype of the "Bride in Exile," the feminine principle denied and suppressed by a patriarchal church desperately out of touch with women and their emotional lives.

Long regarded by the mainstream churches as a penitent prostitute, the figure Mary Magdalene is now being "resurrected" from that status by numerous writers, each with a different concept of her significance. In the general upsurge of interest around Mary Magdalene, the question of her possible marriage to Jesus of Nazareth has feverishly captured the popular imagination of the English-speaking world, firing an intense debate in the North American mass media in 2003 that continues this year.

Dan Brown’s best-selling thriller, The Da Vinci Code, of course, has been the principle vehicle for conveying this idea, with over 4.5 million copies in print. In addition, much homage has been recently paid to (and scorn once again heaped upon) Henry Lincoln, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, the authors of the earlier best-seller, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, for first broaching to a mass readership, over 20 years ago, the idea of a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

Over the past 20 years, there has been a feminist revolution in Biblical scholarship, led in many ways by the pioneering work of Elaine Pagels, whose The Gnostic Gospels made the teachings of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts known to a new generation of lay readers. In concluding her chapter "God the Father/God the Mother" in that work, Pagels wrote: "The Nag Hammadi sources, discovered at a time of contemporary social crises concerning sexual roles, challenge us to reinterpret history – and to re-evaluate the present situation."

In Pagel’s footsteps have followed distinguished feminist scholars such as Karen King of Harvard and Jane Schaberg of the University of Detroit Mercy, among others, who have re-evaluated sexual roles in Christianity through advancing the concept of Mary Magdalene as a person of considerable stature, power and authority in the early church.

Yet it is Margaret Starbird, an independent scholar and theologian with deep Roman Catholic roots, who has emerged as the most recognised advocate for the heretical idea of a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. That marriage, she asserts, was a model of sacred partnership, and a template for the union of male and female energies in the human soul as well as in our personal relationships.

Starbird has developed her position in three books: The Woman with the Alabaster Jar, The Goddess in the Gospels (her spiritual autobiography) and, most recently, Magdalene’s Lost Legacy: Symbolic Number and Sacred Union in Christianity.

In Magdalene’s Lost Legacy, Starbird formally argues that the authors of the New Testament regarded Mary Magdalene as having the status of "sacred partner" with Jesus because of the symbolic numerical value of her epithet "the Magdalene." Starbird says the meaning of "the Magdalene" is derived not from her supposed hometown of Magdala, a fishing village on the shores of Lake Kinnaret (which received its name from early Christians), but from the Hebrew word magdala (migdol) which means "tower-stronghold" or "elevated."

Her overall argument is based upon the "sacred canon of number" - the ancient, Pythagorean idea that harmony in human relationships depended upon the recognition of balance and proportion in all things - a philosophy which is encoded into books of the Jewish bible and the New Testament. Among contemporary feminist authors presently writing on the subject of Mary Magdalene, Starbird is the first to utilise the technique known as gematria (from the Greek root word for geometry) to analyse and interpret Christian scriptures in support of the idea of a sacred partnership, a marriage, between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.

As Starbird clearly defines it in her most recent book,
Gematria is a long-honored and well honed literary device employed to enhance the subtle meaning of certain verses and phrases and possibly used as a mnemonic device as well. It required a deliberate manipulation of letters and words, similar to the rhyme scheme of a poem but more sophisticated. Instead of setting their verses to music, the authors of the sacred texts set them to number.

In Greek, in which the New Testament was written, as earlier had been done in Hebrew and later even in the Roman alphabet, every letter was given a numerical value. By adding together the numerical values of the letters in a name, verse or epithet (such as "the Magdalene"), the reader is able to obtain the symbolic value of that phrase. Phrases and words in both the Jewish bible and the New Testament that share the same value thereby become linked in their significance and must be taken into account, in this ancient but now academically ignored way of explicating the meaning of sacred texts.

In constructing her arguments, Starbird gives full credit to the authors who laid their foundation. She particularly acknowledges John Michell, the author of over 20 books exploring themes of high civilisations in antiquity and the esoteric dimensions of "duodecimal philosophy," or systems of meaning based upon the number 12. He is perhaps best known for his classic work The View Over Atlantis, which outlined the relationship between the great megalithic centres of Britain and the "ley line" system of telluric currents that, he suggested, linked them in an energy grid for the benefit of nature and humanity. Michell is also noted for his many years editing The Cereologist, the first serious periodical concerning crop circles.

Michell’s book City of Revelation has provided for Starbird the basis of her arguments in Magdalene’s Lost Legacy, as she clearly recognises. She also credits the importance of the work of David Fideler, whose Jesus Christ, Sun of God is also a milestone in explicating the development of Pythagorean number mysticism in Hellenistic culture and its role in the creation of specific passages of the Gospels.

Michell attaches particularly great importance to the number 153, which, according to chapter 21 of the Gospel of John, is the number of the fishes the disciples caught in their net when fishing on the sea of Galilee. Both Michell and Starbird point out that the number for one of the Greek words for "fishes" is 1224, which is the product of 153 x 8 – eight being the number of regeneration. In addition, the Greek word for "net" has a value of 1224. Moreover, the Greek phrase "multitude of fishes" has the value of 153 x 16 – a doubling of the previous factor of eight. Michell’s interpretation of these numbers, with which Starbird agrees, is that the "multitude of fishes" refers to "the harvest of humanity," or, in Christian terms, the ekklesia, the "Bride of Christ," all those who are converted to the path of Jesus.

Mathematically, 153 is also related to the square root of 3, which before the use of the radical sign in mathematics was expressed by the ratio of 265 to 153. That ratio is geometrically derived from the pattern commonly known as the vesica piscis (the "fish’s bladder"), and is formed by the intersection of two circles of equal radii whose circumferences pass through each other’s centres. The central shape formed by the intersection of the two circles is at once a symbolic vulva, and also the source of the "fish" symbol utilised by Christians since antiquity to identify themselves. If one draws a cross from the centre of that symbol to obtain the horizontal and vertical axes of the diagram, the ratio of those lines to one another is 265 over 153 – the square root of 3.

David Fidler expanded upon Michell’s discovery of the importance of 153 in Jesus Christ, Sun of God, noting that the square root of 3 is the governing ratio of a complex and beautiful diagram which he describes as "the cosmic ‘fish net’." As he puts it, "To the early Christian Gnostics the net was an important cosmological symbol, but this natural symbolism predates Christianity and represents the woven web of nature or the vivifying power of harmony which enforms (sic) the pattern of creation."

Starbird said that she met John Michell at a conference of the Fortean Society in 1993 and asked him if he had ever considered what might be the gematria of "the Magdalene." "He replied that no, he had not," Starbird said, "but then looked at me and said ‘Maybe that’s your job!’"

The number value of "the Magdalene" that Starbird obtained by gematria from the Greek, she states, is none other than the significant 153, the number of the Hellenistic "net," and the number of vesica piscis, the "fish’s bladder," long identified exclusively with Jesus. The sacred form of the two intersecting circles and their unique generative properties had been known since antiquity, and Michell argues it is represented in the design of Stonehenge, as well as in the floor plans of the great Gothic cathedrals.

Starbird is both modest and critical of conventional attitudes in her assessment of her contribution.

"The only really original contribution I made was to check out the number for Mary Magdalene and to realise her connection with the whole ‘153’ gematria and sacred geometry, which I feel was overlooked by the men because they never gave her the time of day (since she was a ‘prostitute’)," she said.

"For me, the ‘sacred marriage’ is the ‘pearl of great price hidden in the field,’ a metaphor for the kingdom of God. No one ever thought to look for it – since they didn’t realise it was missing!"

Michell recalled his original meeting and, having read her arguments concerning a possible marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, told this writer in a telephone interview from his home in London that "her arguments are highly plausible, and it is a delight to see someone take one’s work and expand upon it for a good purpose."

Michell added he concurs that Starbird’s association of Mary Magdalene with "153" and the vesica piscis, is her own unique and original contribution to the growing debate over the identity and significance of Mary Magdalene.

As the joining together of two circles of equal radii, creating a third intersecting area that is symbolic of the vulva and the womb, the vesica piscis is one of the fundamental symbols of sacred geometry, and the origin, as well, of the Tree of Life of the Kabbala.

Simone Weil, the remarkable 20th century philosopher/social worker, in her extraordinary meditations on the meaning of Pythagorean number mysticism, wrote this passage, which Gordon Strachan quotes in his own book, Jesus the Master Builder:

It is impossible that the disposition or arrangement of two of anything, so long as there are only two, should be beautiful without a third. There must come between them, in the middle, a bond which brings them into union. The most beautiful of bonds is that which brings perfect unity to itself and the parts linked. It is geometrical proportion which, by essence, is the most beautiful for such achievement.

This concept of the beauty in perfect proportion is fundamental to Pythagorean number mysticism, and appears to have been completely embraced by the authors of the New Testament. At the heart of Starbird’s arguments concerning the relationship of Mary Magdalene and Jesus lies her assertion they created a beautiful model of sacred partnership – a "bond that brings them into union" – that was to have been the birthright of humanity. As she put it in my feature profile of her for the National Catholic Reporter in 2003, that birthright was "hijacked" by a male dominated church until the present time.

Sacred partnership, to Starbird, is much more than equality of the sexes in domestic and professional terms. She says the incarnation of Jesus is not correctly understood as the imposition of an exclusively male son of God as king of the Earth, but rather his life showed he was here to demonstrate that wisdom is the result of the balancing of opposites, in human terms of male and female energies.

Mary Magdalene, therefore, was much more than a "Mrs. Jesus," in Starbird’s arguments. As Jesus’ royal consort, she was his partner in the sacred enterprise of his ministry as well as his beloved. That the church could not accept this role for her, and that she was cast in the role of penitent prostitute, is to Starbird not merely a tragedy, but directly linked to the sexual scandals now plaguing the Roman Catholic Church, and to the wasting of the natural world, the global ecological crisis brought on by centuries of denigrating the female.

To completely "round out" her argument, Starbird delves even deeper into Michell’s City of Revelation to explicate his interpretation of the Book of Revelation.

As is widely known, the number 666 has now been appropriated by evangelical Christians as not only the "number of the Beast," but the number of Satan, the devil, the fallen angel. As Starbird points out, however, John Michell has explained the significance of 666 as the number routinely used in ancient texts to refer to the power of the Sun in its symbolic role as the male, procreative force of the universe.

The number 666 is obtained through constructing the "magic square" of the Sun, in which the numbers 1 through 36 are arranged in a box of six rows of six numbers each. Each line (vertical, diagonal and horizontal, from corner to corner) adds up to 111, and the sum of the entire box is 666.

Michell also points out, Starbird says, that the complementary number to 666 is 1080, the number of the Moon, and these two numbers take on a dynamic meaning in Jesus’ parable of the mustard seed: "The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which a farmer sowed in his garden. Although it is the smallest of seeds it grew into a tree with great branches and the birds came to nest in it." (Mark 4:30-32)

The phase "the grain of mustard seed" in Greek has the value of 1746, which is the sum of 666 (the male force) and 1080 (the feminine principle), pointing to the union of opposites – within oneself and within society – as inherently involved in the process of coming into relationship with the Divine, what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven.

"Jesus was really the first feminist," Starbird says. "He came to liberate women from a social tradition in his times in which they were completely subjugated to men, and in doing so, he wanted to create a condition of harmony and balance."

To lay even more firmly the foundation for that argument, Starbird utilises Michell’s interpretation of the Book of Revelation as a critique of unbalanced, unchecked solar power – 666 out of relationship with 1080 through the deification of Jesus as a celestial god.

As she put it in Magdalene’s Lost Legacy:

The prophetic warning at the heart of the Apocalypse insists that the raising of the human Jesus to an image of cultic worship, as an image of an all-powerful and wrathful God of Justice, Power and Might, is itself a deification of the solar 666, the male power principle: ‘This calls for wisdom. If anyone has understanding, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man, and his number is 666’ (Rev. 13:18). John Michell added up the gematria of the phrase ‘and his number is 666’ and discovered that the sum of the letters is 2368, the same sum as the Greek letters for the name of the man in question – ‘Jesus Christ.’

Clearly, both Michell and Starbird have given mainstream Christian theologians plenty to consider, particularly as popular interest in apocalyptic scenarios has never been higher.

So far, the academic theological community has tended to ignore Starbird’s formal arguments in Magdalene’s Lost Legacy, just as they did with Michell’s earlier City of Revelation and his related work The Dimensions of Paradise. Perhaps some dialogue may be stimulated in the future by feminists attracted to Pythagorean philosophy, as Simone Weil was.

In the interim, though, Starbird’s work has attracted an appreciative reader and commentator in the person of Lesa Bellevie, who runs the website www.magdalene.org, by far the most comprehensive source of information on the many facets of Mary Magdalene and the emerging spiritual/cultural movement coalescing around her figure.

In 1992, Bellevie gave a talk entitled "Brides In Exile: A Primordial Religious Impulse Latent in Western Civilisation" to the Seattle Pagan Scholars, in which she provided a remarkable overview of the current spectrum of scholarship and speculation concerning Mary Magdalene. (The entire text is available at Bellevie’s website.)

At the conclusion of her talk, Bellevie had the following observation to make, which is an apt summation of the current state of considerations concerning Mary Magdalene, Jesus and the concept of "sacred union":

The concept of sacred union is one that affects a variety of religions, particularly those of Abrahamic origin…. With that in mind, I think that ‘the bride in exile’ is an archetypal expression of our sense of being apart from the divine, however we conceive of it.

To make an absolutely unscholarly statement, I think that the rejuvenation of goddess-oriented and earth-centred religion, as well as the awakening of Mary Magdalene in the collective awareness, is indicative of the divine yearning toward union within us. The modern pagan and magical culture is much more receptive to the idea of balance and the reconciliation of powers than the followers of Abrahamic religions, and in this regard, I think we’re leading the way in what could be some very powerful spiritual movements.

Ed Conroy is a Texas journalist and author of Report on Communion: An Independent Investigation of and Commentary on Whitley Strieber’s Communion.

© Copyright 2004 by New Dawn Magazine and the respective authors.
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