
The "San Andreas Fault" of institutional Christianity is its systematic denial and denigration of the "Sacred Feminine" over a period of nearly 2000 years.
Margaret Starbird's theological beliefs were profoundly shaken when she first encountered the suggestion that Jesus Christ was married and that his bloodline survived in Western Europe. Shocked by such heresy, this Roman Catholic scholar set out to refute it, but instead discovered new and compelling evidence for the existence of the lost bride of Jesus -- the same Mary who anointed him with precious unguent of nard from her alabaster jar (John 12).
Starbird's research traces the origin and extent of the heresy of the Holy Grail, whose medieval adherents believed that Jesus was married and that his wife and child emigrated to Gaul, fleeing persecutions of the infant Christain community in Jerusalem. Numerous legends, works of art, and artifacts of medieval Europe clearly reflect a widespread "alternative Christianity" brutally suppressed by the Inquisition beginning in the 13th Century. The heresy miraculously survived in an underground stream of esoteric devotees of the "sacred feminine" incarnate in Mary Magdalene--the artists, artisans, and alchemists of medieval and renaissance Europe.
Starbird draws her conclusions from an extensive study of history, heraldry, symbolism, medieval art, mythology, psychology, and the Bible itself. Her book contains evidence from medieval art and artifacts of the heresy of the Holy Grail. Her inevitable conclusion is that "sacred union" was originally at the very heart of the Christian Gospels.
The truth--suppressed for two millennia--has the power to heal the Church by restoring the
"Paradigm of Sacred Partnership" once at the very center of Christianity-- the "Sacred Union" of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
The evidence of the intimate partnership of Jesus and Mary Magdalene is found expressed in the Gospels themselves and provides a model for sacred union at all levels of experience. Margaret Starbird's work presents powerful and convincing evidence for this "Sacred Marriage" of the archetypal Bridegroom and his lost Bride. The work restores to western civilization a model for true partnership at the threshold of the new millennium.
The current crisis centered in the issue of priestly celibacy is both sad and predictable. The myth of the celibate Jesus produces a model for holiness that denies the intimate, life-bearing union of the eternal "masculine" and "feminine" as partners and "Beloveds."
The "healing" of the broken partnership mandala is the "sacred reunion" of the masculine and feminine energies embodied in the archetypal "Christ-Couple."
The Woman with the Alabaster Jar is a "MUST READ" for those who wonder why the current crisis was inherent in the hierarchical institution based on the hierarchical pyramidal power model, where obedience was extolled as the highest virtue, in direct contradiction of the admonition of Jesus to "love one another as I have loved you."
Softbound, 6x9, 240 pages