Revelations of the Aquarian Age

by Barbara Hand Clow

  Sarah dropped her glass of water on the floor and it shattered. Dante sprung up and streaked past to run out of the library scraping and scrambling across the stone floors. They all sat with their mouths wide open staring at Simon. Claudia looked at Sarah who was staring at her empty hand in disbelief and said, “Oh my God, I never connected the dots. Damn it, Simon, leave it to you to make the connections; I’m impressed as always. Does this have anything to do with your work for the Times? ” Sarah carefully picked up pieces of glass while Armando sponged up the water, breathing a sigh of relief because she’d been wondering the same thing. She’d gotten used to being alone, and lately Simon acted like a madman. They were so lucky to have the apartment with the little library and gas fireplace for him to use late at night.

  “Well, there are more dots to connect,” he said in a determined voice. “Let’s go back to the Talpiot tomb. Even though Israeli authorities, the Catholic Church, fundamentalist Christians, and Jews ignore these fantastic tomb discoveries, they are sacred to Christendom and should be protected and venerated. The Templars were obsessed with the Holy Family and made Crusades to take Jerusalem and rule it. Well, why would the Templars go to so much trouble to go down and take Jerusalem from the Saracens? Think about what a challenging and crazy idea that was! So, why would they do that? Running on logic, the early Christians would have known where that tomb was, and there is evidence for that. Wouldn’t that be a good reason to take Jerusalem? Remember, bones were sacred, like the reliquaries in the Medici chapels, more valuable to some people than diamonds.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that? This cover-up is so intense and insidious that it fogs my brain, you know? The constantly repeated fake story diminishes our intelligence, fogs our minds.”

  “Yes. My brain isn’t scrambled because I’m coming at this through the limited window of the Talpiot tomb, the key that opens the lock, the key that everybody needs. And for your 2012 records, Claudia, the James ossuary was validated in 2012! This is a vast topic, it’s late, so I’m going to save a piece of this story for another meeting, soon I hope. But I want to add one little teaser because I think what we are talking about is part of the experience of seeing Armando’s painting Monday, since the Medici arranged for this display and they are probably Templars. Armando, I’m sure your father is a modern Templar or something close to it. The fundamental issue is, did the Templars visit the Talpiot tomb during the Crusades? There is evidence—the three skulls. Claudia, you read about in The Jesus Family Tomb. Do you remember the three skulls they found on the floor of the Talpiot Tomb?”

  “Yes, I dimly remember that, and I will reread the book immediately. When I first read it, I couldn’t hold it in my head, but now I’m registering it. Simon, I’m so happy you are home; we need you. We need each other as we put all this together because this awakening is so mentally taxing, emotionally intense, and maddening. It is best not to go any further with this right now until we’ve absorbed this part.”

  “Yes, Claudia,” Armando responded. “I’m getting tired, and I can tell Jen is too, so let’s call it a night. Okay with you all?”

  Sarah nodded saying, “Yes, of course it is, but I won’t sleep tonight. May Simon and I use the library for a little longer, since Teresa will be asleep in our room? As you will see in a few weeks, I went down this path in my novel but from a different perspective. Things are coming together in a magical way, but it is so mind-bending. Your painting will rock the world, Armando, so tomorrow we get to observe people responding to it. Remember, millions in the world are wrestling with the things we’re talking about tonight and adopting a whole new view of the past. We know that because of all the popular books about Jesus and Mary Magdalene.”

  27

  Two Messiahs

  After making sure Teresa was soundly asleep, Simon and Sarah crept back down to the library to enjoy the last of the fire, rehash the evening’s discussion, and have a few moments alone. He handed her a cup of tea as she shivered. “Even though I’ve read your novel in rough draft and loved it, I know you well enough to know you’ve already moved way beyond it in your current thinking. What have you been thinking about these days, Sarah? You are the resident expert on early Judeo-Christianity, and much of what we know comes from you. So as I piece things together, I’d love to hear anything more you have to say about the early Christians.”

  She warmed her hands around the cup while organizing her thoughts. “I will, but on one condition: tell me more about the three skulls in the Talpiot tomb as soon as you can, and I will get into what I’ve been thinking about. The gospels were revised to marginalize the family of Jesus because the Church decided to mold Jesus into a celibate kingpin for their global religion. But, his mother, the virgin, was the mother of at least seven children! You get mad about the cover-up on the ossuaries, well the cover-up on Mary and her children is what makes me angry. Imagine what it was like to bear all those children during such chaotic times! The Syrian refugee mothers with so many children make me remember Mary’s true story. James Tabor wrote a very good book about the Jesus family—The Jesus Dynasty—and he thinks Jesus had to support them all because Joseph was so old when he married her. Regardless of all that, the person to focus on is James, the younger brother of Jesus, who led the early Christians and was murdered by the Romans. James led the Nazarenes, or Ebionites, the group that followed Jesus and John the Baptist. This is why the discovery of the James ossuary is so important.”

  “The what?” Simon broke in. “Ebionites? What are they?” He got up to stir the fire with an intense expression on his face.

  “The followers of James were called Ebionites—Jewish Christians who were also sometimes called Nazarene or Nasoreans. Paul hijacked the early church from these early Jewish Christians. Roman Catholicism is Pauline Christianity; it has little to do with Jesus, James, or John the Baptist. Catholicism is not the religion of Jesus; it is St. Paul’s Christ, a limpid, Greek divinized apostle.”

  “Sarah,” he broke in after he came back to sit down. “Now I remember where I heard that term. Alan Butler and John Ritchie say in Rosslyn Revealed that the Templars were Ebionites, so you’ve just connected the dots for me. In other words, maybe the Templars were a secret organization that intended to carry on the James church to protect what Jesus taught, they actually have! I think the gospels were altered to make it look like Jesus didn’t have brothers and sisters to erase the memory of James, and that’s why the authorities are trying to discredit his ossuary!”

  “It is sick,” Sarah growled. “Tabor believes Jesus supported a family of seven children and his mother. If this is true, the Church buried the human aspects of his life as a hardworking man and a compassionate spiritual teacher; they even lied about the woman he loved. But this story will not go away! When I viewed the James ossuary in Toronto, tears ran down people’s faces. We are salvaging the true story of a real man who has so radically impacted our beliefs. We can see how the historical winners altered every aspect of his life because we understand their motive—to create a new religion of power. But, Jesus was a respon-sible son, husband, and father who became a great spiritual teacher. I can’t wait to talk to my parents once they’ve read my novel.”

  “Yeah, I’d love to hear what William says. What does the recovery of the life of John the Baptist mean to you? He sounds like a wild man to me.”

  “Yes, he was. Except for baptizing Jesus by the river Jordan, he was mostly written out of the Bible. Yet, now the discovery of his ritual cave is bringing him back to life. He appears in history with a large following just a few years before Jesus shows up. Considering how long it takes for a teacher to gather followers, especially during Herod’s reign, he must have been teaching some years before Jesus came on the scene. Since he didn’t have to care for a huge family, he began teaching early. These ideas feel right to me, so that’s how I portrayed John and Jesus in my novel.

  “Regarding the Ebionites, after age fifty, Paul focused on the bigger population, Gentile
s, the ideal power base for the new religion. Paul attracted pagan and magical Greco-Romans, but he denied the spirituality of sex, the value of women, and the importance of family. He transformed Jesus into a spiritual king who gives access to the divine through the Eucharist—eating the body and blood of Christ—but this was and is absolute anathema to Judaism! Paul subverted Jewish Christianity by marginalizing the Ebionites, and then Jerusalem fell into chaos when the Romans destroyed the Temple and the Ebionites had to go into hiding. Then along came St. Jerome who said Mary was a virgin and James and the brothers were the cousins of Jesus. Since few people could read Aramaic in the fifth century, Jerome had free rein to edit and rewrite scripture according to his beliefs when he translated the Bible into Latin. If the Nag Hammadi scrolls and other early sources had not been found, we would have no way to uncover the real early church, but now we are. The Ebionites are the closest to what Jesus and John taught.” She stopped to catch her breath.

  Simon was smiling. “I get it now, the Templars did guard the Ebionites, in a way the Templars are Ebionites. Regardless, once the Church sanitized the scriptures and hammered out their dogma, they forgot the real history themselves and madly pursued heretics. But no matter how hard they tried to suppress people—murdering the Cathars, attacking the Jews, murdering the Templars—the protectors of the secrets never forgot, truly amazing. As the truth comes out about what the murderous Inquisitors were really doing, the Church is in for a huge backlash, since celibacy unleashed priestly sexual abuse. But, I wonder, how do the Ebionites relate to your earlier studies about Marcion?”

  “That’s an issue I worked out in my novel. Marcion was born right around the time James and Paul were martyred. Sometimes,” she went on after sipping warm tea, “I think Marcion is the big missing piece in the early second century, an essential key to what happened to devout Jews who’d adopted Jesus after Pauline Christianity took over. But his teachings as a bishop were buried because the Roman Church was taken over by an ascetic fanatic who adroitly identified the needs of the new Piscean Age. Paul got the power because he persuaded people to throw out the old stuff that was in their way.”

  “C’mon, go for it, more, babe! You’ve never been afraid of being a heretic!” he said while poking the dwindling coals and twirling his spare hand at her.

  “Okay. Paul claimed he got his knowledge from Jesus on the road to Damascus. He didn’t seem to care about what James believed, and he seemed to think he could trash anything in Judaism that was in the way of converting the Gentiles. Paul’s strong tendency to throw away the old and bring in the new utterly fascinates me because Judaism is a religion of the Age of Aries, while Christianity and Islam are religions of the Age of Pisces. Now that Piscean beliefs are being thrown out for Aquarian ideals in our times, what went on during the times of Jesus helps us reflect on the changes we’re experiencing now.

  “Back to Paul. Outrageously for a Jew of his time, Paul advised dumping circumcision and dietary proscriptions to convert Gentiles as if he was the thirteenth apostle! The times were so chaotic that James couldn’t influence Paul, and he distrusted him. This is where Marcion comes in! I think Paul’s cleansing of old Jewish practices got Marcion’s attention, since he wanted to let go of Yahweh. But Paul was entrenched, Marcion got dumped, and Yahweh got even more powerful.

  “Then, to better understand how the Great Ages change, we have to add the Gnostics to the brew. The Gnostics retained an amalgam of magical and theological beliefs that went back as far as seven or eight thousand years, the wisdom of the three or four Great Ages before the Age of Aries. They were teaching about the transitions of the Great Ages, for example in the Alexandrian Library, the repository of the wisdom of ancient times. This enabled them to identify positive new trends and encourage people to terminate negative ones, such as the mass warfare that gripped the Middle East and Europe during the Age of Aries.

  “The Gnostics were horrified by the rise of dogmatic, exclusivist Christianity based on the violent Arian war god, Yahweh! They believed Arian monotheism would inspire religious wars throughout the whole Age of Pisces, and it did—my god is better than yours. At this key moment, Paul played the game exactly right. The Gnostics went into hiding to save what was left of their records after their great library was torched a few times. Yet, some of their records have been found, and now we can see they thought Yahweh was merely a demiurge—a minor creator god that limited human potential—not the divine creator. The Gnostics feared Yahweh would become even more powerful due to the Christians retaining him, and he did.

  “The Gnostics knew Pisces was slated to be the season of love and compassion to temper Arian violence and obsession with power. Marcion, as a major Gnostic Christian, was pivotal. He wanted to cut the ties to Judaism so that Christianity could be a new religion based on love, and in that sense, he was in sync with Paul. However, Paul was a very wounded and disturbed person, a psychopath who was struggling to let go of his old God; love is not there in his theology. Once Paul got Gentile Christianity rolling, he told the people to pray to Jesus as Lord—that is pray to Jesus as Yahweh—just exactly what Marcion and the Gnostics feared the most, since Jews were forbidden to pray to any god but Yahweh.”

  “Sarah, why do theologians like Tertullian say Marcion hated the body?”

  “The Church Fathers wanted to get rid of Marcion no matter what because he was a major link to the Jesus family, so they falsified his message. Marcion was a leading bishop with a huge following, and the followers of Yahweh wanted him out of the way. They excommunicated him and made him into a lame duck, but that generated huge East/West tension because Marcion was a great leader for Eastern Christianity. Marcion’s belief that the new Christianity should not retain Yahweh horrified Tertullian, so he ragged on him. Paul won the game by using his Judaism to talk to the Jews and Christianity to talk to the Christians. Ironically, Paul spawned anti-Semitism.”

  “Damn, what a head scrambler you are! No wonder you are so quiet sometimes. You think about this all the time, don’t you?”

  “Yes, except when I’m cooking or playing with Teresa, the reason I love having a family.”

  “Jesus would probably agree, so bully for you, Sarah. Let’s go to bed.”

  Jennifer asked Claudia to join her for a walk after lunch to deepen their friendship before they viewed Armando’s painting. The invitation made Claudia nervous, and Jennifer knew it, but she was ready because she’d come up to speed intellectually.

  “Claudia, I’ve asked you to spend a few minutes with me alone because I want to clear the air with you, so thank you for coming. I know I’ve made you feel uncomfortable at times, but it will never happen again because of the wonderful work I’m doing with Lorenzo, he’s incredible.”

  “I agree. My only problem is, I don’t get to go to him! You are very thoughtful to reach out, so why do you think you’ve made me feel uncomfortable?”

  “I was jealous of you, Claudia. You not only were Armando’s lover when he was young, you are brilliant and also gorgeous. It must be hard being so beautiful?”

  “You are very beautiful, Jennifer. The only difference between us is I’m a fashion queen, my job. I had to do it when I was young to be independent since I didn’t marry, and after a while it was fun. Now, it is my style, and I think I entertain people, don’t you?”

  “Yes, actually that was what I was thinking when we were sitting around talking last night with you in your hot black sexy jumpsuit. You are very entertaining, you encourage women to express themselves, and I’d love to photograph you! I really want us to be friends. I don’t have very many friends here, you know, since being in Tuscany most of the time means Armando and I don’t socialize much. I enjoy Matilda and Pietro’s guests, but they are older and they come and go. I want you to know that I wasn’t really jealous of you. I seethed when you were around because of what I’d done myself. I had an affair with a married man and almost destroyed a family even though I knew better from my upbringing. So, you pushed m
y buttons because I was afraid you’d do it to me. But now I know myself better and I know you better. It is something you’d never do and I was not respecting you.”

  Claudia was listening carefully because she liked women who told the truth about themselves. “I would not under any circumstances sleep with a married man. But, I do not judge you or anybody else who does it. Maybe I’m an arrogant bitch who can’t stand the idea of sharing a man! Thank you. I am touched you’ve shared this with me, very touched.” Claudia raised a long arm and slung it over Jennifer’s wide shoulders. “You are beautiful, you know, and I could enhance your beauty even more. It would be fun for me!”

  “That’s a great idea! As soon as I’m back in Rome, I’ll come to your boutique and have you dress me. Maybe we can look for a few things for Matilda, presents for Sarah. I’d love it, and then I can take you out to lunch. Thank you for being kind about this. It’s funny, isn’t it? We can be so afraid of something, and yet it is nothing if we can just air it out and let it go.”

  “Guilt is a totally dysfunctional emotion; the sooner we get rid of it, the better. Guilt is what needs to go out with the Age of Pisces, the Age of Christian Guilt! If one has done something emotionally difficult and complex, it’s hard to let it go, yet that’s how we evolve, individuate as Lorenzo puts it. When I think of the stuff Lorenzo gets laid on him every day, sometimes I think guilt will knock him over like the leaning tower of Pisa!”