Editor's note: Clysta Kinstler is the author of the novel "The Moon Under Her Feet," published by Harper San Francisco. She has graciously agreed to present her ideas about Mary Magdalene as a priestess in one of the fertility cults of the ancient Near East.

The College of Virgins, the convent of the priestesses of Ashera, is derived from many sources. Merlin Stone, in When God was a Woman, writes:

During Biblical times it was still customary, as it had been for thousands of years before in Sumer, Babylon, and Canaan, for many women to live within the temple complex, in earliest times the very core of the community. As we have seen, temples owned much of the arable land and herds of domesticated animals, kept the cultural and economic records and generally appear to have functioned as the central controlling offices of society.

The custom of eunuch-priests who sacrifice their manhood to the goddess is told by Sir James Frazier in The Golden Bough, pp. 369, 78, 467.

The legend of Almah Mari, or the Virgin Mary, is told in “The Protoevalgelion,” Chapters 1-2, in The Lost Books of the Bible, pp. 24-25. The name, “Almah” means “maiden” or “Young woman,” but is usually translated as “Virgin.” See Barbara Walker, in The Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, p.1049. “Mari,” see Walker, pp. 584-585, was the most ancient name of the great mother goddess.

The meaning of the term “Magdala,” according to Walker, p. 565, is:

. . . “high place,” or “Temple”; in Herod’s triple palace in Jerusalem, the sanctuary of Queen Mariamne. Thus “Miriam of Magdala” (Mary Magdalene) was either the queen herself or a high priestess, impersonating {representing} the Goddess Mari.

The “magdala” or temple gives its name to the high priestess: “she of the high place,” the Magdalene.

The temple was communal, held in common. For thousands of years before, not only priestesses, but women with no husbands, children, or aging parents to care for, were welcome within the house of the Mother, where they could live useful, happy lives in her service and that of the whole community. This practice endured through Biblical times, when temples still owned their land and herds. They stored vast inventories of olive oil and wine, grain, dried dates and figs, produced by themselves and the outlying community against the threat of famine. They traded the fine wool, cotton, and linen they produced for a wealth of gold, silver and brass from the endless caravans of traders.

Here also, the women cared for and schooled the children of the nobilest families along with the orphans they sheltered. They took in and cared for the old and the sick, kept the cultural and economic records of the people, all the while inventing and improving their methods of record keeping and written language along with their various other arts as they did so.

While in early agrarian times, the temple was central to society, it coexisted less comfortably with the patriarchal warriors who later took over the lands by force, in the name and for the glory of their warrior God. The more foolish raiders sometimes destroyed the temples and enslaved their inhabitants–all for the glory of God, of course–but the wiser saw the value of making a truce with women who not only took care of themselves and each other, but produced great wealth besides. Merlin Stone observes:

Women who resided in the sacred precincts of the Divine Ancestress took their lovers from among the men of the community, making love to those who came to pay honor to the Goddess...the act of sex was considered to be sacred, so holy and precious that it was enacted within the house of the Creatress. . . . it was upon the attempt to establish this certain knowledge of paternity, which would then make patriarchal reckoning possible, that these ancient sexual customs were finally denounced. . . .

It took only the introduction of two social concepts to accomplish their purpose. The first was monogamous marriage – monogamous for women, that is – “Holy Wedlock,” decreed by God as the natural and perfect state for his people. The second was adultery, punishable by death–for women or lower class men. The custom of marriage was too well understood to need mention by the time the first chapters of Genesis were written. Today we accept it as the “natural state” in human societies everywhere and every when. And yet–the whispered tale survives to this day, of Adam’s first wife, Lilith, so unnaturally disobedient to her master that she refused to lie beneath him and ran away to live as she would. Any such whisper, of course, loud enough to reach a young woman’s ear, could be fateful. Whispers that there was once a time when they were free beings who lived in dignity, and whose only chains were of love, must not reach the ears of good women. But of course, only the very wealthy could closet and protect their children from the truth that they were not princesses, but property; prisoners, born to produce true sons for the men who would be their masters so that private hoards of property could be passed down to the actual heirs who “deserved” it.

Even six year old Mari in The Moon Under her Feet seems just such a prisoner, being packed off to be given to the Goddess as some kind of offering. But the old grandmother, Lili, is ecstatic for her, knowing Mari will be a free woman, a high priestess, a Magdalene. Perhaps we might still live in Eden if private property had never become an issue. I doubt if it was ever a mere concept. More likely it was a full blown institution before anybody ever noticed it. Why do we not see at once that the most sacred concept of all, the engine that drives all the rest, is private property, and the attachment to possessions. Attachment so powerful that we willingly believe that whatever riches have come to us were sent by God because he loves us.

Because we are good. We must be good. Has God not blessed us? In his infallible wisdom, God has sent us this disproportionate share of the earth’s bounty. Like the patriarchs before us, we must preserve it intact and pass the care of it on to those who are most certain to inherit our nobleness of character. It is clear then that conception and birth must be controlled by rational beings, i. e., men. Women, with few exceptions, are like Mother Eve, the first to sin, and cannot be trusted to place reason above their uncontrollable desires and emotions. The best of men–those who are in charge of the world–have obviously been placed above the rest of us because they can be trusted to place power and wealth above personal feelings.

But all through the pages of the Old Testament, the Goddess still had the trust and devotion of the common people, sprung from the indigenous tribes who had worshipped her for thousands of years before Abraham’s God appeared as a burning bush to lead him to the “promised land.” Their devotion was so stubborn and immovable, that it was usually easier to appease than to punish them. A king who desired the goodwill of the “earthlings” would be foolish not to wed a priestess of the Goddess, receive the sacred crown of Dumuzi, her beloved spouse, and rule with her blessing. Even Yaweh was celebrated in Temples all over the land, as the beloved spouse of Inanna-Ishtar-Isis–Ashera, or whatever of her names was favored in any particular place. S.N. Kramer details the Sumerian version in History Begins at Sumer:

The most significant rite of the new year was the Heiros Gamos, or holy marriage between the king, who represented the god, Dumuzi, and one of the priestesses, who represented the Goddess Inanna....The idea arose that the king of Sumer, no matter who he was or from what city he originated, must become the husband of the life-giving goddess of love, that is, Inanna of Erech. . . . The kings of Sumer are known as the “beloved husbands” of Inanna throughout the Sumerian documents from the time of Emmerkar (about 2600B.C.) down to the post–Sumerian days, since they seem to have been mystically identified with Dumizi.

But as Theseus discovered in his story so well told by Mary Renault, The King Must Die, those who wed the Goddess-on-Earth, were likely to have a short reign. Her people commemorated the death of the god king by ritually reenacting his sacrifice. Dumzi, beloved spouse of Isis-Ashera-Inanna-Ishtar, was the oldest and best known of the sacrificed spouses of the Goddess.

J. J. Bachofen, in Myth, Religion and Mother-Right, p.215, writes of the dependence of kingship on the marriage with a representative of the Goddess. Sir James Frazier, confirms the putting to death of the king by various means including that of decapitation. The Golden Bough pp 273-328. He also writes:

When kings were bound to suffer death, whether at their own hands or the hands of others, it was natural they should seek to delegate the painful duty, along with some of the priveleges of sovereignty to a substitute who would suffer vicariously in their stead.

It is impossible to emphasize too strongly the power of the myth of the god who dies and is resurrected in the ancient world. His most widely worshipped incarnation was as Osiris, murdered and dismembered by his evil brother, Seth. Isis, his wife and twin sister, searches the world until she finds all his dismembered parts and revives him, long enough to impregnate her with their son, Horus, who will avenge his father.

William Irwin Thompson, in The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, Chapter 5, treats Seth, the brother of Isis and Osiris as the personification of limitation and particularity, creator of material existence (the Gnostic Yaltabaoth.) See John Robinson, The Nag hammadi Library in English, P.98, where he explains how the creator then mistakes himself for the Highest God. The Coffin in which Seth imprisons Osiris symbolizes the entrapment of the soul in space and time, and the tree that grows round it, the spinal column, the body. Thompson writes, pp.232-233:

That Seth is an archon and a power from the days before civilization is clear, for he is presented as a hunter in the night. In finding the body of Osiris and cutting it into fourteen pieces, he is dismembering the moon and its fourteen pieces from full moon to the new moon. Seth not only kills the spirit by imprisoning it in space and time, but he dismembers it into the fragmentary bits that are the incarnations of little personalities that live their fragmentary lives one after another in the sublunary world. To gather up the bits and pieces of our lives on the astral plane and fuse them into one integral being who sees beyond the limits of the life of one ego is the task for both Isis (the Soul) and Osiris (the self) imprisoned in the particularity of time and space.

Osiris’ worshippers, and those of every other version of the myth, believed that the first food plants grew where the blood of the sacred victim fell on the earth. Their staple grain, barley, became sacred to the god, and his believers performed a eucharistic rite where they ate the barley bread–his body–and drank the barley ale–his blood–in order to become like him, immortal.

We are what we eat. Some version of this story is basic to tillers of the soil in every part of the world. Joseph Campbell even narrates a Polynesian version where the consecrated victim is Hanuwele, a female, but the basic parts of the story are parallel. American indian versions tell of a corn god by many names, whose biography is the same.

J. J. Bachofen in Myth, Religion, and Mother-Right, and Sir James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, both describe in great detail, the world-wide agrarian religion of the Great Mother Goddess and her sacrificed and resurrected son whose slain body and shed blood become the elements of a sacramental feast by which his suppliants become like him, immortal. Since all this pre-history does exist, it is difficult to argue seriously that the story of Jesus is in any way new. Bachofen and Frazier do not suggest this aloud, but every line implies what they do not say.

In Yeshua, or Jesus, we have so attractive, so charismatic, so powerful a character that he has drawn to himself all the ancient mythologems of the dying, resurrected god. If anyone is offended by this, be assured , I am speaking of mythology. But Joseph Campbell says that a myth is not something that never happened; it is something that is always happening. My quest has never been for the “historical Jesus” who once walked the streets of Jerusalem and the hills of Judea. The Christ of myth, legend, and faith is ever present in the hearts, hopes and relationships of those who follow him.

There are many layers of consciousness besides the linear experience of our five senses. At those rare instances when we are aware of them we seldom allow ourselves to accept them as “real.” Hunches, dreams, premonitions, intuitions–you can name a dozen others if you think about it, are often uncannily accurate, but we dismiss them because we can’t supply a rational basis for them. Consciousness that is omnipresent, that is, outside of time, we ascribe only to God, along with omnicience, and omnipotence. Thus divine messages do not come to us via our senses, but in timeless ways.

Thus when Mari brings the message from Yeshua to his disciples, she is unable to express its grandeur to them. I sounds prosaic; ordinary.

“He has fulfilled the law.”

“Which Law?”

They begin to quibble and argue about the law.

I felt I no longer stood in the dappled sunlight of Joseph’s dining hall. I seemed to have grown very tall, and looked down as from a great height. . . . there was no past behind me, no future before, only this eternal moment, in which nothing that has been can ever be lost, and the long awaited fulfillment of hopes and dreams and sacrifices is realized and forever present. . . . and so in the timeless present, we are all redeemed; we are One. “Love is the Law,” I said, “The Law is Love.”

Clysta Kinstler
January 27, 2002
Rocklin, CA