The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (17 page)

It might be objected, reading between the lines, that the Baptist was nothing short of a holy terror about anything connected with sin and therefore would never have contaminated himself by contact with louche foreign priestesses. But the real John, too, proves very surprising.

Despite the implication of the New Testament account that the Baptist was merely a local holy man, who spent his lonely days and nights in the Judaean wilderness living frugally off the land on locusts and honey, he was actually based in the great Egyptian seaport of Alexandria - presumably in its flourishing Jewish colony. His movement, which has been described as `an international following'," was taken to Ephesus by an Alexandrian called Apollos. As we noted in The Templar Revelation, this was 'suspiciously the only reference to Alexandria in the whole of the New Testament' 92 That city was also home to the great Serapeum, the museum-and-temple complex dedicated to the new god Serapis, whose consort was the considerably more venerable Isis. Serapis was a riverine deity, most commonly associated with Dionysus/ Bacchus/Pan - all wilderness gods, who seem almost interchangeable in Leonardo's works with the Baptist. (In 395 the alleged ashes of John's headless body were buried in the gorgeous new basilica in Alexandria, on the site of the famous old temple to Serapis.)

The usual image of the Baptist is as an apocalyptic ranter - such as might star in the insane forum of religious fanatics depicted in Monty Python's Life of Brian (1978) - and a zealous puritan along the lines of the much later Scottish fire-and-brimstone preacher John Knox, fulminator against `the monstrous regiment of women'. Certainly, with his camel-hair garments, desert retreats and constant call for the masses to repent of their sins and be baptized, the Baptist does seem the archetypal righteous teacher, disapproving of all worldly delights and normal human relationships. But that would be very wrong, although the truth about him can only be approached by piecing together non-biblical evidence about his life.

According to John's surviving cult, the Gnostic Mandaeans - of whom more later - the Baptist was a married man with children, leader of a much-persecuted religion that had both priests and priestesses. As it seems that young John/Lazarus was originally a disciple of the Baptist, presumably he was an officiating priest of the sect. Presumably, too, his sister would therefore have been a high-ranking Mandaean priestess ...

Their holy books recount the clash of the two messianic titans, John and Jesus, on the banks of the Jordan. They claim that Jesus had to beg John to baptize him, and that when he acquiesced, the dark goddess Ruah (similar to the Jewish Holy Spirit) threw a black cross over the water to indicate her disapproval. John sends Jesus off with the abjuration, `May thy staff be as a dung-stick.' Clearly no love was lost between the two, despite the picture painted in the New Testament of a sickeningly obsequious Baptist, grovelling at the Messiah's feet. The triumphant Jesus sect felt confident not only to hijack the Gospels dedicated to the Baptist, as we have seen, but also to rewrite his relationship with Jesus so that Christ emerges as by far the superior. In real life, however, this does not seem to be the case - quite the reverse, in fact.

Rehabilitating the Magus

If there was one New Testament character whom the early Church loathed, it was not so much John or the Magdalene, as their `first heretic', Simon Magus, who allegedly aped Christ. Yet if true, his very imitative success deserves acknowledgement. According to French occult historian Andre Nataf, `As a rival to Christ, Simon the Magician is a historical character without equal.'9; Nataf notes `He attained legendary status within his own life time: "he made statues walk, could roll in fire without burning himself, and could even fly" ...°9a

The Acts of the Apostles, in what is clearly an attempt at damage limitation, have him trying to buy the Holy Spirit off Peter, and later losing his life in a dramatic magical battle. He embodied everything the Christians hated (and continue to despise to this day), claiming to heal and raise the dead just like Jesus. As he was clearly a spectacular exorcist and healer, one might be forgiven for thinking that he must have got his powers from Satan ...

The Magus was also known as `Faustus' - `the favoured one' - in Rome, giving his name to the overweeningly ambitious Renaissance legend Dr Faustus, whose pact with the Devil went ohso-predictably wrong, as he slid screaming down to Hell at the appointed hour for him to pay for his material success with his soul. Like the Magus, Faustus consorted with the beautiful Helen of Troy (or rather, Simon considered his lady to be her reincarnation, see below). However, the most significant aspect of the Faustian pact was that it was not sought primarily for wealth or sex, but knowledge - and therefore power. As we shall see, the search for the forbidden fruits of the mind was, and is, the real Luciferanism.

The usual Christian view of Simon Magus is summed up by Rollo Ahmed: `He imitated Christianity in the reverse sense, affirming the eternal reign of evil' 95 He also claimed to be a god - which was taken seriously as far away as Rome, where a statue was raised to him. Almost worse, `his sect welcomed women and held that the world-creating power was as much female as male.'96

According to Epiphanius,97 he was an unrepentant practitioner of sex magic, or sacred sex, travelling with a black woman called `Helen the Harlot', whom he believed to be the incarnation not only of the legendary beauty of Troy but also of the great goddess Athene - just as the Magdalene came to be associated with Isis - and the Gnostic `First Thought'.

Yet Simon the Samaritan, or sorcerer (Magus) had another role to play, which the gospel writers carefully avoided mentioning while at the same time blackening his name as vehemently as they could. However, the third-century Clementine Recognitions once again provide us, however innocently, with an astonishing admission:

It was in Alexandria that Simon perfected his studies in magic, being an adherent of John ... through whom he came to deal with religious doctrines. John was the forerunner of Jesus . . .

... Of all John's disciples, Simon was the favourite, but on the death of his master, he was absent in Alexandria, and so Dositheus, a co-disciple, was chosen head of the school [My emphases] .98

Here we have the apparently puritanical John the Baptist's favourite disciple being Simon Magus, the one man so utterly loathed by the Church that he was deemed to be the very pattern of heresy. And a sorcerer and sex magician ... It is interesting that references to John's inner circle include a disciple named Helen - presumably Simon's travelling koinonos or sexual companion. Suddenly, once again, the New Testament's presentation of the Baptist seems flawed to the point of deliberate misrepresentation.

Simon's reputation was and is truly unenviable. Of course the infamous Catholic bigot Montague Summers had plenty to say in typical uncompromising style, calling him `one of the most famous figures in the whole history of Witchcraft', whose `Devilish practices' were undone, unsurprisingly, by Saint Peter. As the man who notoriously tried to buy the Holy Spirit, the Magus gave his name to the sin and crime of simony, or trying to buy spiritual preferment - ironically a favourite mode of corruption of the priests of Peter's Church. But perhaps his greatest crime was being John the Baptist's official successor and a sex magician and admirer of the Feminine. In many ways he also seems rather modern. As Tobias Churton remarks in his The Gnostic Philosophy (2003): `... it would seem that Simon was as humourous a figure as the magus Aleister Crowley two millennia later, with a magician's taste for ironic symbology.'

Yet Simon Magus was also hated because he was feared. As Karl Luckert in his landmark Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire (1991) remarks:

As the `father of all heresy' he must now be studied not merely as an opponent, but also a conspicuous competitor of Christ in the early Christian church - possibly even as a potential ally ...

From the fact of their common Egyptian heritage may be derived the very strength of Simon Magus' threat. The danger amounted to the possibility that he could be confused with the Christ figure himself .. 99

Like Jesus and the Magdalene, Simon seemed keen to return the Jews to a form of goddess worship, based on the Egyptian system. Luckert goes on: `[he] saw it as his mission to fix that which ... must have gone wrong; namely, the estrangement of the entire female Tefnut-Mahet-Nut-Isis dimension from the masculine godhead."0°

Presumably, then, Simon's beliefs echoed, at least in part, those of his master, the Baptist - an almost incredible thought when seen against the inevitable background of Christian propaganda. Simon himself wrote in his Great Revelation:

Of the universal Aeons there are two shoots ... one is manifested from above, which is the Great Power, the Universal Mind ordering all things, male, and the other from below, the Great Thought, female, producing all things. Hence pairing with each other, they unite and manifest the Middle Distance ... in this is the Father ... This is He who has stood, stands and will stand, a male-female power in the pre-existing Boundless Power ...101

In the light of Simon's Egyptian-style sexual egalitarianism - he first learned his magic in Alexandria - it is particularly interesting that his great antagonist was Saint Peter, who also hated Mary Magdalene and `all the race of women', and who went on to found the misogynistic Church of Rome.

The true nature of the Baptist's movement - once again, though, perhaps only the chosen inner circle - prompts another thought about young John the Beloved/Lazarus, whose later titles include John the Evangelist and John the Divine (or holy). As the late occult historian Francis X. King noted in his Introduction to Crowley on Christ:

Incidentally, the Hebrew word 'qedesh', applied to St John, which [Aleister] Crowley sarcastically claimed should be translated `the divine' and had been `grossly mistranslated' in the past, is normally translated into English as 'sodomite'.b02

(Even the ritual magician and rabid showman Aleister Crowley, the so-called `Wickedest Man in the World', may usually be quoted with confidence. Although he was said to be many things, most of them physically impossible, he was a shrewd scholar of ancient languages and customs.)

As we saw in a previous chapter, the qedeshim were elaborately cross-dressed and made-up male prostitutes who offered their services to pilgrims at the gates of the great Jerusalem temple, like the female `temple servants'. Although the word does also carry the meaning `holy/divine', clearly the two interpretations must have originated from the same custom. And as young John is associated as Lazarus with his sister the sexual initiatrix, he falls foul of Peter repeatedly in the Gospel of John, and was also perhaps the naked young man in the Mar Saba passages, it is interesting to speculate that he was quedesh in both senses of the word. How Peter must have hated both brother and sister.

However, trouble must have existed well before Peter came on the scene. It is not difficult to imagine the tensions in John's group between the two charismatic, talented and ambitious would-be cult leaders, Jesus and Simon Magus. Indeed, the very fact of Simon's association with the Baptist's movement must have worried and disgusted Christ's own devoted followers as the rivalry between the sects escalated. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to suggest that Jesus' anointing, his becoming a Christ, the chosen one, was stagemanaged to be at least partly very public so that news of it would be sure to reach the Magus. To be called `the Christ' in days when even minor Roman officials were anointed or `christ-ened' into their jobs, is a rather enormous statement of intent - not to mention ego. And far from `aping' Christ, perhaps Christ `aped' Simon Magus, probably the elder of the two and certainly John's favourite - an early role model, perhaps.

Deadly rivals

Jesus Christ may have begun his religious adulthood as one of John's disciples, but he soon became a sneering schismatic. This may seem a radical statement, but incredibly, the evidence is there in the New Testament, where we read that Jesus utters the following apparently contradictory statement: `I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist: yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."03 On the one hand, Jesus seems to be saying no one can be greater than John, but on the other the least impressive of Jesus' own followers is greater than him. However, once it is realized that `born of women' does not mean `everyone', as Westerners might suppose today but is an ancient Near-Eastern insult meaning `fatherless', `bastard' (in both the literal and derogatory sense), perhaps `son of a bitch', then the passage makes sense - if a somewhat uncomfortable one. (Its meaning is reinforced by the fact that John's followers, the Mandaeans, use a similar insult of the hated Christ, calling him `Son of a woman'.) Jesus is publicly taunting the Baptist in the worst kind of a way - perhaps from some deep wellspring of personal hurt, for he himself was known as a mamzer, or illegitimate child. On another occasion, when Christ says `No man puts new wine in old bottles"" - apparently an innocuous enough axiom - he may actually have been mocking John's greater age and apparent staleness as a religious teacher, for wine bottles were made of animal skins, similar to those that the Baptist famously wore. In other words, it was impossible for John to teach anything fresh and interesting - the implication being that he, Jesus, could provide just that.

The unthinkable

Why did Leonardo hate the Holy family so much that he risked a heretic's terrible death by incorporating outrageous and blasphemous symbols in his works? Why did he portray little Jesus apparently pulling the ears off the lamb that represented the Baptist, and depict Jesus' limb cutting across its vulnerable neck? And then there is the disciple in the Last Supper who is thrusting the John gesture into Christ's oblivious face as if hissing `Remember John'

Perhaps there is a clue in one of the passages excised from St Mark's Gospel, which resurfaced in the innocent Clement's letter found at Mar Saba. It is the one that seems to indicate the identity of Jesus' female Beloved: `And the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them.'