The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (12 page)

The irrepressible Reverend Montague Summers thunders: `Carpocrates even went so far as to ... [make] the performance of every species of sin forbidden in the Old Testament a solemn duty, since this was the completest mode of showing defiance to the Evil Creator and Ruler of the World"3 (the Gnostics' Demiurge or Rex Mundi - or the Old Testament's Yahweh).

However, Summers is - perhaps wilfully - missing the point, although even if he had grasped it totally, he would still hardly have approved. As Tobias Churton writes matter-of-factly:

Sex might be used either allegorically or in fact as part of Gnostic ceremonies. Semen could be regarded as a sacramental substance, as an image for the logos spermatikos (the spermatic Word cast into the world) or pneumatic spark: the fugitive fragments of spirit, diffused in Nature. Fertility was seen as a metaphor for spiritual growth. (This was how some Christian Gnostics interpreted Christ's parable of the sower who sowed seed in barren earth.)"

Of course this would have seemed like an intellectual version of making a silk purse of a sow's ear to the Church Fathers. The Carpocratians and their apologists could dress it up as they wished, but they were still filthy heretical radicals who wallowed in sin.

The Carpocratians believed that the concepts of good and evil were invented by mankind, and that everyone must suffer or enjoy the whole gamut of human experience, including the loftiest and noblest and the most humiliating and sordid acts. Every individual would be reincarnated until they had finished the immense number of possible permutations of human life. A recording angel was assigned to each person and each act, and must be invoked consciously while performing them in order to ensure that a fair karmic record is kept.

Clement's sensational slip

However, by far the most significant aspect of the Carpocratian beliefs is that they claimed to possess a secret Gospel of Mark that preached sexual rites in the name of Jesus. Highly compromising references to this were what Professor Morton Smith found in the library at the Mar Saba monastery in 1958. Ironically in his denunciation of the Carpocratians, Clement had unwittingly preserved material that possessed the potential to undermine seriously the whole concept of Christianity - not to mention the image of an eternally chaste Christ.

Of course the first objection must concern the authenticity or otherwise of the copy of Clement's letter, which Smith found written on the end-papers of a book dating back to 1646 - a common practice at that time when volumes began to disintegrate with age.15 Understandably, in the case of such a potentially sensational discovery, there will always be suspicions that Smith was deceived, perhaps by the Mar Saba monks, or that a disaffected seventeenth-century copyist was merely enjoying a bit of grim heretical humour - or even that the professor himself perpetrated an outrageous hoax. However, paleographers have established from an analysis of the letter that it was indeed written by Clement, whose stylistic idiosyncracies are well known. And as Clive Prince and myself noted in our 1997 The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ:

There are also peculiarities in the extracts from the `Secret Gospel' quoted in the letter that make it probable that they are genuine. (For example, it describes Jesus as becoming angry. Of the canonical Gospels only Mark attributes normal human emotions to Jesus - the others excised such elements from their accounts, and it is hardly something that the Church Fathers such have Clement would have invented.) 16

Indeed, it is extremely unlikely that any conventional Christian could even have imagined what Clement claimed, for he stated that the Carpocratians' `filthy' sex rites came via Saint Mark from Mary Magdalene - and ultimately from Jesus himself. Predictably Clement - who was later canonized - huffs and puffs with outrage that the cult `polluted the spotless and holy words of scripture to accord with their blasphemous and carnal doctrine, and by doing so wandered from the narrow road into the abyss of darkness'," yet he also acknowledges that the alternative Gospel of Mark was authentic ... Therefore he tacitly agreed that originally Christianity did practise sexual rites, although they seem to have been reserved for an inner circle of high initiates.

Of course, the implications of this are truly momentous and provide a double blow to Christianity: not only was, and is, the whole idea of sex rituals abhorrent, but also it has always been believed that the religion is primarily open to anyone, with no secrets and hidden mysteries, but here there is evidence that there was such a thing as a sexually-initiated elite of adepts.

Certainly, Professor Smith himself believed, largely on the basis of this long-lost document, that Jesus may have headed a `libertine circle'. What prompted him to make such a remarkable statement is another passage from Clement's letter, a different version of the story of the raising of Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary of Bethany (also known as Mary Magdalene)' which puts quite a different complexion on the original Jesus movement. Found in the Gospel of John in the New Testament, it famously tells how Jesus received a message that his beloved friend Lazarus was grievously sick at his home in Bethany, a village only two miles from Jerusalem. But Jesus deliberately waited four days, by which time Lazarus was not only dead but stinking in his rock tomb. As soon as Jesus arrived on the scene, Mary fell at his feet, sobbing: `Lord, had you been here, my brother would not have died"' - which perhaps contains more than a hint of bitter accusation. Jesus told Martha: `I am the resurrection and the life. He that believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.'20 Then he commands that the stone be removed from the mouth of the tomb and, raising his voice, orders Lazarus to step forth. It must have been a remarkable moment when the corpse immediately shuffled out, still in the `strips of linen' that comprised his grave bandages. It was this event that finally prompted the Jews to take action against Jesus, for they would have seen this as a clear example of necromancy, devilish dealings with the dead. (Anything connected with the grave was and is abhorrent to Orthodox Jews.) It was after this, too, that a woman bursts into a house in Bethany and anoints Jesus - in one of the strangest and most misunderstood rites in the New Testament, which will be discussed below.

However, the raising of Lazarus in the secret Gospel of Mark owned by the Carpocratians and quoted by Clement, has `a certain woman' approaching Jesus for help because her brother has died. But when Jesus arrives at the tomb he hears a loud cry from within, clearly indicating that the young man is not dead, at least not in a literal, physical sense. Jesus then rolls away the stone and raises the youth from the ground. `And the youth looked upon him and loved him and began to beseech him that he might be with him.''

Together they went into the house, where Jesus remained for six days, instructing the young man in the ways of the kingdom of heaven. On the last day the two men spent a sleepless night together, `naked [man] with naked [man]'.22 Perhaps this apparently compromising scenario was an invention of the unknown real author of the secret Gospel of Mark, who might well have been out to vilify Christianity with heavy hints about sexual practices. However, there does appear to be some circumstantial corroboration for that offending passage, ironically in the New Testament itself. This episode is in the otherwise mysterious verses in the authorized Gospel of Mark about `a young man wearing nothing but a linen garment"' who followed Jesus after his arrest - when all the others fled to save their skins. He then suffered a traumatic embarrassment: `When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind' 24

But does spending the night unclad with a religious teacher automatically imply that some kind of homosexual activity took place? Of course not, but Professor Smith himself had no doubts about Jesus' `libertine circle', and the possibility that his followers were admitted, `singly and by night, to the mystery of the kingdom, by certain ceremonies derived from ancient erotic magic' 25 Based on his knowledge of this tradition, Smith conjectures that the young man's thin linen garment was removed and his naked body immersed in a baptismal pool or bath to a background of prayers `and some kind of rite of manipulation' - presumably masturbation, possibly prior to other sexual rituals - accompanied by a breath control technique that induced ecstasy, and possibly a hallucination of heavenly bliss. `The disciple was possessed by the spirit of Jesus and so united with him.'26 Professor Smith surmised that `Freedom from the [Jewish] law may have resulted in completion of the spiritual union by physical union.'27

Perhaps it is significant that, as Marilyn Yalom points out in her A History of the Wife (2001): `As for Christianity, Jesus said nothing on the subject of homosexuality - and this in contrast to numerous condemnations of adultery.'28 (While discussing the pressure on Sr Buttiglione to stand down from the European Commission in November 2004 because of his traditionalist values, Daily Mail columnist Andrew Alexander also noted: `For myself, I would delight in debating with our Italian friend why homosexuality is not singled out for condemnation in the gospels. Was it due to the gospels' authors failing to take proper notes, or divine incompetence or what?')29 Yalom points out that the criticism of same-gender sexuality originated in the Christian movement with Saint Paul, who `explicitly condemned both male and female homosexuality (Romans 1:26-27, I Corinthians 6:9, and 1 Timothy 1:10Y.11

Of course a zealous Christian will simply deny the authenticity of this secret gospel and carry on believing as if it had never been drawn to his or her attention. After all, there is a distinct architecture to the faith: significant constructs are made that surround the character and the traditions of Christ; dogma that then becomes immovable, and the whole carapace hardens with time and belief. But what if the implications of the secret gospel are sound? What if Jesus' movement was really based on initiation and mysteries - including rites of a strongly erotic or even homosexual nature? Suddenly what was considered demonic, devilish, satanic, would be inexorably linked with Jesus Christ, hitherto the very epitome and literal embodiment of noble chastity. It is surely unthinkable.

In fact, there is considerably more evidence, albeit for obvious reasons circumstantial after all this time, that Jesus and his initiates were involved in the sort of cult behaviour that modern Christians would not only condemn as filthy and immoral, but actively seek to have banned from their community. This is where polarized notions of good and evil, the godly and the Luciferan, or outright Satanic, become merely the stuff of bias and therefore fair game for debate.

Lazarus, the youth involved in some kind of ritual rebirth or sexual initiation into the mysteries of the Kingdom, had two sisters - the house-proud Martha and the mysterious Mary, also known as the Magdalene, whose character and role have been discussed in detail in my previous book, Mary Magdalene: Christianity's Hidden Goddess (2003) 31 She is `mysterious' because she appears only rarely by name in the New Testament, her identity also being obscured as `Mary of Bethany', `a certain woman' or `a sinner of the town'.

Although any church goer will be quick to describe her as the reformed prostitute who foreswore her wicked ways to follow Jesus, in fact her alleged career as a street-walker was an invention of Pope Gregory I in 691 CE, based on the biblical description of her as `a sinner'. He simply put two and two together and made five: the original Greek word was harmartolos, a term taken from archery meaning `one who falls short of the mark' and was applied to those who, for whatever reason, failed to keep the Jewish Law. One major reason for not doing so, of course, was not being Jewish - a foreigner - or perhaps a follower of another type of Judaism. As discussed in my previous book, there is evidence to link Mary Magdalene primarily with Egypt, and possibly with the ancient goddess cults of Ethiopia.

Not only did the Church vilify her as a whore, but the writers of the canonical gospels clearly set out to marginalize her. In the canonical gospels she only really comes into her own at the crucifixion, when she heads a team of Jesus' female disciples who come to show their solidarity with and love for their stricken leader, when the famous men - apart from the young Saint John - have fled. She, too, takes a major role in the story of the resurrection, where she meets the risen Jesus in an almost exact re-enactment of the Egyptian mystery plays of Isis and Osiris. Yet her abrupt appearance as a significant player in the great drama seems odd until it is realized that she had been deliberately edited out of the story until it reached the point where she had to take centre-stage, perhaps simply because her part in the story was too well known to leave out. But why was her role demoted and degraded in this way? What did the writers of the gospels of Saints Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have against one apparently harmless and devout woman?

Many people would answer that the men of the early Church were too biased against an ex-prostitute to permit her to take the limelight, or that, being basically still patriarchal Jews, they were just too sexist. In fact, the answer is almost certainly rather different - and considerably more far-reaching. Mary Magdalene committed what to the early Christian men of Judaea must have been an act of blasphemous presumption, for anyone, let alone a woman who was probably foreign and possibly black (as noted previously,32 racism was not invented by the British Empire). She anointed Jesus. It happened in Bethany at the home of a man known to history simply as Simon the Leper - probably fictitious - as described in Mark's Gospel:

a woman came in with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure [spike]nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.

Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, `Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year's wages and the money given to the poor.' And they rebuked her harshly 33