MARY MAGDALENE:
THE ILLUMINATOR
William Henry
ADVENTURES UNLIMITED PRESS
Visit our website at:
www.adventuresunlimitedpress.com
MARY MAGDALENE:
THE ILLUMINATOR
The Woman Who
Enlightened Christ
William Henry
Mary Magdalene: The Illuminator
Copyright 2006 by William Henry
All rights reserved
Published by
Adventures Unlimited Press
Kempton, Illinois 60946 USA
www.adventuresunlimitedpress.com
ISBN 1-931882-63-0
Printed in the United States of America
Cover art by Dana Augustine
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
MARY MAGDALENE:
THE ILLUMINATOR
The Woman Who
Enlightened Christ
Dedicated to the 3 wise ones
and to the Bird of Light that delivered them.
Visit William Henry at his web site at:
www.Williamhenry.net
CONTENTS
1. The Golden Legend
2. The Tower of Light
3. The Bird of Light
4. Magdalene=153
5. The Fish Gate
6. Mystical Magdala and Fish Code Clues
7. Mary Magdalene and the Merkaba Myths
8. Mary Magdalene and Mari
9. One Night In Capernaum
10. The Sin Wave
11. Teach the Bread of Life = 153
12. The Alabastron
13. The Mystery of Perfume
14. Solomon’s Key
15. The Templar’s and Skull of God
16. Mary Magdalene and the Skull of God
17. The Lost Meaning of Magdalene
18 The Inchristed Ladder = 153
19. Mistress of the Waters
Conclusion: Mary, the Maya and Manna
Appendix
And as we wind on down the road,
Our shadows taller than our souls
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When All are One and One is All
To be a rock and not to roll
Led Zeppelin, “Stairway to Heaven”
1.
THE GOLDEN LEGEND
This book is primarily about the “supreme initiate” of Jesus, Mary Magdalene: one of the most mysterious of all literary figures. Said to be a prophetess who ‘knew the All’, a priestess of Isis and Ishtar, a “holy harlot,” who seduced men from the Eastern and Western world (including a messiah), a shining example of conversion from “sin”, a mother of future kings, and a perfumer, she’s as alluring as the “mare among stallions” the Egyptians’ enemies set loose in war to drive the pharaoh’s stallions wild. The source of her power to captivate is her refusal to be put in a box: whether it be an alabaster box, a prostitute box, a sinner box, a Christian box, a box of Gospels, or a goddess box.
So, in this book we will search for Mary Magdalene (MAG-duh-luhn, MAG-duh-leen) outside the box.
Even more, this book is a search for the lost esoteric teaching of Jesus (as opposed to the exoteric story about him) and Mary Magdalene (referred to, for convenience, as MM), which she taught and for which the popular thirteenth century French chronicler Jacobus says she earned the distinction Illuminata and Illuminatrix – the Illumined and Illuminator. Webster’s says Illuminati literally meant ‘enlightened ones’ in Latin. It comes from illuminare, to light up. It means ‘persons who had received baptism’. Hence, they were ‘lit up’.
Sometime around 1267 Jacobus de Voragine, the Archbishop of Genoa (Northern Italy), known as the ‘father of the poor’, compiled a valuable source book on the lives of the Christian saints entitled the Golden Legend. It is said that no book other than the Bible was so widely read during the late Middle Ages. This encyclopedia of wonders, mysteries and intrigue was one of the first books published when the new literary language, English, appeared in the late 15th century. It was written for the common people and widely embraced by them. Jacobus’ work, which he titled Legend of the Saints, was so influential that after his death he was venerated as a saint, and invoked as ‘the peace-maker’. The attacks on the work by the Reformers sent the book into oblivion until it was revived in 1892.
The curious thing about Jacobus’ legends is that the original authors remain ‘hidden’. One commentator writing in the introduction to The Golden Legend notes that this ‘author’ is the masses, the people themselves. “The true matter of the legend is fashioned by the mind and soul of the people, and added to, or even at times substituted for, what is authentically known about the saints.” These substitutions spring from the hearts and minds of the people. They are made to suit the ideals of the people and to fill the needs of the current era psyche.
A hallmark of Jacobus’ work is his radical etymologies and use of apocryphal sources to reveal a parallel tradition to that of ‘official’ Christianity.
An example of his method is the name Mary Magdalene. Jacobus says Mary is interpreted anmurum mare, bitter sea, or light-giver, or enlightened. Magdalen is the same as manens rea and means armed, unconquered and magnificent. This postulates a far different MM from the Church’s image of Mary as a repentant prostitute.
THE TEMPLAR
The enormous popularity of Jacobus’ work – which no doubt raised a few eyebrows when it revealed that Mary Magdalene was actually a ‘magnificent enlightened one’ – corresponded with the glory days of the Knights Templar, also known as ‘The Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon’. In the early 1100’s this mystic military Order claimed ownership of a mysterious ancient secret they discovered at the site of Solomon’s Temple (Sol’s Temple or Soul’s Temple) in Jerusalem. The Templars based themselves at the Dome of the Rock, an Islamic shrine atop Mount Moriah which they renamed the Temple of the Lord.
The list of what the Templars potentially discovered – the “bones” the inquisitive Templars dug up – during their cryptic excavations within the Temple is impressive: The Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, the secrets of sacred geometry, the ancient super science of the Anunnaki gods of Sumeria, the secrets of building vortexes.
Some claim the core of the Templar discovery was a secret about or even belonging to Mary Magdalene. A mysterious human skull called a ‘dead head’ (that was capable of turning a wasteland into a garden) symbolized this epic lost secret of the Templars. As we will see, MM is frequently painted holding a human skull.
All the occult mysteries speak of a key that is required to unlock mystical secrets of enlightenment. Specifically, the lost secret of the Templars, this study illuminates, is about building a better human through the release of secretions from the astounding manufacturing plant of spiritual oils, the human brain. This oil or essence was the key secret of Mary Magdalene and the Essenes recovered by the Templars, from between the temples. The skull is a protective box for the brain, eyes and hearing organs. It is the Cup of Life, the Grail, that catches these secretions from the brain. Without “the key” vibrating in our brains and radiating throughout our bodies no one can gain the higher knowledge of the gods.
Ultimately, the secret we will pursue in these pages, concerns the human body. The bones of the human body are the flexible frame work of the soul’s temple (Solomon’s Temple). Bone is the foundation of the body. In its archives are found the secret of the ages. They represent the foundati
on stones upon which sits the Temple of the Brain.
The Templar’s discovery and exploitation of the temple’s secrets led to the Order’s rapid ascent as a political and financial power. It has been claimed that the Templars’ ultimate objective was to restore true Gnostic monotheism to the world, uniting Christianity, Judaism and Islam in a New Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The ‘new’ humans that inhabited this New Jerusalem (or New Atlantis) would know and embody the secret of the Kingdom of Heaven within the brain and its capability of producing manna, dew, the food of the gods, the elixir of life, the sacred Soma, the tonic of immortality, for these terms all refer to the cosmic esse or brain substance.
One fruit of the Templar’s discovery is the cathedrals of France, the womb-like instruments designed to tune the body-brain-mind-soul to the Light. Between 1130 and 1200 57 of these ‘Templar keys’ were started in France, which incorporated a fundamentally new sacred architecture, known as ‘Gothic’. The first big ‘vessel of light’ was St. Denis, in Paris. Abbot Suger, a close friend of Templar founder Bernard de Clairvaux supervised the construction. It has been proposed that he was given access to parts of the secrets retrieved by the Templars. We will examine powerful evidence of this later.
Of course, the possibility of such an enlightened civilization threatened the Catholic Church. Even more, they were a threat to King Philip the Fair of France, whose reign desperately needed the vast Templar wealth, and who feared their magical powers. This prompted the wily king and his cunning counselors to demand that the feeble French Pope Clement V suppress the Templars. On that unlucky Friday, the 13th of October, 1307 King Philip declared Inquisition. He had all the Templars arrested on the grounds of heresy. The Templars were tortured. Some gave astounding confessions, including spitting on the cross and worshipping the Head of God.
THE ATON
The forty or so years between Jacobus’ publishing of the Golden Legend and the demise of the Templars saw the emergence of a new world order and the appearance of a new Magdalene. As the ‘illuminata’, the enlightened, Jacobus upholds, the Magdalene was illumined with the light of perfect knowledge in her mind and illumined with the light of glory in her body. In this case glory describes the splendor and bliss of heaven. Glorify means apotheosize, to raise-up, to make one a god. It also literally means to illuminate = to give light = glow ray(s).
By ‘light’, I believe, is meant something more like the meaning of the term when used by the Egyptian mystic Akhenaton, that is, glowing rays of love and spiritual consciousness from ATON = the Lord. I’ll refer to it as ‘Love-Light’.
Akhenaton, Nefertiti and family receive the rays of the ATON. The hands from the ATON offer the Key of Life.
Akhenaton inhales the Key of Life from ATON and then breathes it into his daughter’s face.
Akhenaton’s emphasis on light is one ‘fingerprint’ that has led researchers such as Robert Feather, author of The Secret Initiation of Jesus at Qumran, to investigate the connection between the teachings of Jesus and the Qumran-Essenes and the religion of the Disk. In fact, a generation of scholars of the Essenes of Qumran and their writings, the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi Scrolls, believe that the Essenes discovered the “torch of illumination” that the followers of Akhenaton hid after his reign.
Akhenaton and his bride, Nefertiti, had a profound influence on the First Christians, including bequeathing to them a spiritual technology for embodying the light. Though they left no written teaching the inscriptions that tell of it say Akhenaton placed the Love-Light in the hearts of his subjects. Depictions show him inhaling the Key of Life from the ATON and then breathing this consciousness into his daughter.
Jesus (called ADON or ADONOI = Lord) also transmitted the Holy Spirit to the disciples by breathing upon them. As Jesus’ chief initiate it is probable that MM received the Holy Spirit and advanced spiritual consciousness in this manner. Importantly, Nefertiti is portrayed receiving the rays of love in an alabaster jar. Mary Magdalene was later referred to as “the woman with the alabaster jar” that contained a precious oil or ointment. It is believed the alabaster (‘Egyptian crystal’) box of Mary Magdalene was made from alabaster mined at the lost city of Alabastron, noted by classical authors. This was Akhetaten (The Horizon of Aten) built by Akhenaton. One of our primary quests in this book will be to search for the secrets of MM’s anointing oil and how it may have caused her to glow-rays of Love-Light.
COSMIC RAYS
In the several minutes it took to read this far several hundred cosmic rays will have passed through your head and penetrated into your body. The passage of cosmic rays through your body can leave various fluids within your body momentarily ionized. Nobel prize winner H J Muller found that mutations and changes in human genes can be caused by ionizing radiation such as cosmic rays. Therefore it is thought that cosmic rays may be capable of changing your DNA make-up by hitting individual cells, and may even have human evolution implications. However, it should be stressed that this is a very rare occurrence as cosmic rays of an energy high enough to cause such changes are rare at ground level. Still, these “blue apples” from heaven (the alchemical symbol for the ultimate, the impossible) are to be found. I will show that Jesus and MM were deeply interested in this topic.
Science is rapidly approaching a new understanding of cosmic rays, which heretofore have been a puzzle. It has long been hypothesized that they accelerate human evolution. This raises a bit of a paradox. At the apex of human evolution is our colonization of the moon and beyond. One barrier to this colonization is the harmful cosmic rays. The astronaut has a couple of options available to him to reduce the radiation, which include wearing a protective spacesuit as well as shielding the spaceship. Lead would be the ideal material for this job, however it is very heavy and would not be suitable for a spaceship. A substitute for lead therefore has to be found.
In the theosophical tradition they speak of the seven cosmic rays. As each ray is mastered the initiate becomes clothed in the energy of the ray until finally they are an illumined one. The mastery of the seven rays is described in Gnostic texts as putting on a spiritual garment, a robe of glory. This garment, veil, sheath or covering is necessary equipment for the soul as it journeys through the halls (holes) of the mystic mansions of creation, a journey MM is credited with taking in the Gospel of Mary. NASA, and other space agencies, would be well served were they to study this Gnostic work, as well as the Hymn of the Pearl, which describe this garment of light.
The secretion of the oil of Krist or Chrestos in the skull, called Gulgotha, the place of crucifixion, in the bible, and the igniting of our real spiritual light which produces the garment of light, I hypothesize, is the secret possessed by Mary Magdalene for which she was given the title the Illuminator.
This is quite an amazing study. An almond-shaped area of the brain, the amydala (uh-mig-dah-la) is the brain’s fear center (we share it with fishes). It is the part of the brain that decodes emotions. Stimulation of the amygdala – which sounds like Magdala or Magdalene – produces lust and memories of sexual experiences. By inhaling chemicals or hearing certain sounds we can stimulate the neurons of the amygdala to open ourselves to channels of higher level experiences.
THE WATERS OF LIFE
Jacobus says MM was called “illuminatrix” because she “drank avidly” of the (love) light which afterward she poured out (glowed, rayed) in abundance, and through “inward contemplation” (or manipulation of the hidden power of the human brain) she received the light with which she later brought gnosis or enlightened others.
As we study this story through the lens of mystic anatomy and in the light of neuroscience we will see that what Jacobus is describing is the rising of a wondrous oil (called Chrestos by the Essenes) in the sacral (“sacred”) or lower part of the spinal cord and its passage into the pineal gland (the “lamp” or “candle”) referred to as the “third eye” in the center of the human brain. When this lamp is lit illumination results. This oil becomes more than a fuel
. It oils the body’s spiritual machinery. It purifies the body, and may give it a beautiful opalescent color characteristic of the Shining Ones, the illumined ones.
Scanning electron microscopy has revealed that the human pineal is covered by unusual faceted, geometric crystalline structures called calcite microclusters and “Brain sand” that effectively make it an antenna sensitive to electromagnetic stimulation which, I propose, the ancients referred to as “waters of life”. The cell phone industry is studying these crystalline structures on the pineal and is describing the gland as a “wireless transmitter” capable of receiving even faint messages through resonance. They think the pineal gland is a natural wireless transmitter.
URSA MAJOR: THE CELESTIAL SPRING
So, who’s calling us? From what distant shore does this transmission arise? Ancient legends of numerous cultures and modern astrophysics are crystal clear. The constellation of seven stars known as the Big Dipper is one source of higher energy charged particles known as cosmic rays that MM may have captured and rode, like a beam of light.
In January, 2005 New Scientist magazine reported that a celestial “spring” of mysterious particles that slam into Earth from all directions may have been discovered by a US physicist. Glennys Farrar, a physicist at New York University in New York City used a new analysis technique to identify five Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays appearing to originate from the same area of space. They came from a ‘hole’ about as large as a full Moon seen from Earth and from the direction of Ursa Major.
As New Scientist reported, when Farrar and colleagues searched celestial databases to find what objects lay along that line of sight, she found essentially nothing but empty space for quite some distance. But then, at 550 million light years from Earth, she discovered two crowded galaxy clusters - containing about 50 galaxies - crashing into each other. Farrar concluded that the five cosmic rays were accelerated to high energies by the galactic collisions themselves or by some other phenomena within the galaxies. She cites several possibilities for the underlying source of the cosmic rays. It could be a long-lived process -such as a super-massive black hole slurping up surrounding matter. Another possibility is magnetic shocks produced by the colliding galaxy clusters. A third source is a sudden, cataclysmic event called ‘starburst’, when an explosion of matter and energy at the center of a galaxy gives off a gamma-ray burst.
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