Early Christian fathers denounced the temples `dedicated to the foul devil who goes by the name of Venus - a school of wickedness for all the votaries of unchasteness'.R5 What this meant was that they were schools of instruction in sexual techniques, under the tutelage of the venerii or harlot-priestesses.86 They taught an approach to spiritual grace, called venia, through sexual exercises like those of Tantrism [the eastern cult of sacred sex] 87
This aspect of Venus-worship was not uncommon among goddess cults: as we have seen, God's wife Asherath had both female and male `temple prostitutes' - although this is a derogatory term first employed by disapproving and uncomprehending Victorian scholars. To the culture itself, these workers in sacred sex rituals were known as `temple servants', a role that was acknowledged with reverence. Both the females and cross-dressing males were there to give men ecstatic pleasure that would transcend mere sex: the moment of orgasm was believed to propel them briefly into the presence of the gods, to present them with a transcendent experience of enlightenment. Only men went with the temple servants because it was believed that women were naturally enlightened and therefore had no need of such rituals - a diametrically opposed attitude to the repressive misogyny of patriarchal Judaism and Christianity.
To these male-dominated religions, sex was evil because women enticed men to lust after them - often, it was claimed, against their better judgement: the unwilling gentlemen were literally `enchanted' by their `glamour' (literally their ability to cause hallucinations or actually shape-shift). Women were inherently evil because of Eve, who let Satan into the world and got mankind expelled from Paradise.
Worse, goddesses were often explicitly associated with serpents - indeed, the Egyptian uraeus snake, worn in pharaonic headdresses, was a hieroglyph for `goddess' 88 Cleopatra took the title `Serpent of the Nile' after all Egyptian queens who represented the Goddess, who took the king into their life-giving embrace. The Egyptian serpent goddess Mehen the Enveloper enfolded the ramheaded Auf-Ra - Phallus of the solar god Ra - every night, as he travelled in the underworld, symbol of their sexual union. Isis and her dark-aspect Nepthys were associated with the Serpent mother of material life and the afterlife, their knowledge specifically aiding the post-mortem traveller in the region of ferocious snakes. In ancient Crete before the Bronze Age the objects of veneration were women and snakes. Even with the later dominance of the bull cult, the priest was inferior to the snake-wielding priestess. The literal interpretation of the ancient Akkadian word for `priest' is `snake charmer' .89
Perhaps that is too cerebral a connection, for to the clergy pagan goddesses were inherently evil, basically because they were pagan and goddesses. They notoriously encouraged both men and women to worship the Feminine Principle that they so gorgeously and flagrantly embodied and taught their female devotees the mysteries of life and death, of sex, contraception and abortion. And, like Adam's first wife Lilith, goddesses notoriously took their pleasure with their consorts in the superior position, believed by the JudaeoChristian priesthood to be profoundly wicked as a deliberate overturning of God's law. (To them, the only godly way of intercourse was the `Venus observa', or `missionary position' - so called because Christian missionaries insisted that their native converts use it exclusively in their marriage beds. The natives thought it was hilarious.)
Despite the fact that the clitoris is the only human organ whose function is exclusively to give pleasure, sexual delight was frowned upon, especially for women, whose sole sexual purpose was to breed. Isis, Diana-Lucifer, Artemis, Asherah, Venus and all other manifestations of the Great Goddess would have difficulty in comprehending this: to them, every aspect of womanhood was there to be experienced and celebrated, from virginity through motherhood to a dignified and wise old age, with everything in between from warrior queen and sacred whore. Schooled in such an attitude, pagan women were often unsurprisingly assertive and independent - especially in Egypt, where in the first century they were permitted to own property and initiate divorce. Learned women were also celebrated: an inscription as early as the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2600-2500 BCE), approximately contemporary with the building of the Giza pyramids, refers to a woman in the Temple of Thoth as `Mistress of the House of Books' 90 Hypatia, the first great woman mathematician and philosopher, a native of Alexandria, was torn to pieces by an angry mob in 415 CE, some say, inspired by the Christian bishop Cyril, through envy.
Eve had acted on her own initiative, Lilith taunted both God and his angels, and Asherah had taken Lucifer as a lover. Women were clearly Satanic, the spawn of the Devil, and must at all costs be prevented from thinking or acting unless under male orders. Barbara Walker notes another historical link between goddesses and western notions of evil:
A triple six, 666, was the magic number of Aphrodite (or Ishtar) in the guise of the Fates. The Book of Revelation called it `the number of the Beast' (Revelation 13:18), apparently the Beast with Two Backs, the androgyne of carnal love. Solomon the wizard-king made a sacred marriage with the Goddess and acquired a mystic 666 talents of gold (1 Kings 10:14). Christians usually called it Satan's number, yet the recurrences of this number in esoteric traditions are often surprising. For example, the maze at Chartres Cathedral was planned so as to be exactly 666 feet long.9'
Today's Christian hell-and-damnation fundamentalists and vast numbers of conspiracy theorists see the devilish `666' in everything, as evidence of satanic influence in the government, the Freemasons or whoever they have decided to demonize. The saddest and most disturbing consideration is that even if they knew about the true background of Christianity's most notorious number, like their predecessors, they would still regard it as evil. To them, as a pagan goddess Aphrodite was clearly demonic, yet in fact she was truly Luciferan - in the sense of being an enlightener to her followers, just as were her sister goddesses. Some of Aphrodite's works were too strong even for the traditionalist ancient Greeks, to whom women should be confined to a narrow domestic life. When the lesbian poet Sappho petitioned the goddess for help in winning the favours of a particular girl, she replied: 'Who/O Sappho, does you justice?/For if she flees, soon will she pursue/and though she receives not your gifts, she will give them/and if she loves not now, soon she will love/even against her will.'92 Somehow one detects Sappho's own hand in this convenient response from the deity.
As we have seen, some of the pagan goddesses, such as the huntress Diana, even took the title 'Lucifer/Lucifera', the bringer of Light into the darkness of human woe.
Another reason that the old goddesses became synonymous with the Devil is that many of them were depicted wearing lunar horns. Isis-Hathor wears a pair of magnificent cow's horns, as befits that animal's patron, and must have seemed truly diabolic to the early Christians as her cult persisted in Europe as a rival until the fourth century CE - into the fifth century in parts of Italy. God's wife, Ashereth, gave her name to Ashteroth-Karnaim in Gilead, or `Ashteroth/Ashereth of the horns'. American researcher David Lance Goines believes that the goddesses' horns are not lunar at all, but reflect their association with Venus, a planet that also produces a visual crescent shape in the night sky 93 If so, this merely reinforces the sense that the early Christians associated the Feminine Principle with horns and venery - the Devil incarnate.
No doubt it will be assumed that Christianity, like Jesus himself, sprang from a divine state of chastity with no breath of the loathed contamination of sex. But like Yahweh with his Asherah, Venus and her Adonis and Osiris with his Isis, Christ also had his sacred consort, a woman who even received the title `Lucifer' from her devotees - and who, apparently, taught the mysteries of sacred sex not only to the chosen one, but also his followers ...
CHAPTER THREE
A Woman Called Lucifer
In the twenty-first-century West, all our ideas about right and wrong, good and evil, come from our culture's Judaeo-Christian tradition. But, as we have seen, Yahweh's credentials as a noble or even particularly intelligent deity fail to match his capacity for jealousy and
smiting, and the story of humanity's fall from grace - and the subsequent subjugation of women - is a sad tale of garbled myth and blatant bias. However, none of that compares with the deliberate reworking of the original Christian story, apparently often in direct opposition to Christ's own wishes. This chapter will deal with a quite different view of Christianity, pieced together from long-forbidden texts, obscured identities and the reinsertion of passages from the flagrantly edited gospels. The result will be shocking and thought-provoking, and implicitly reverses many Christian assumptions about sacred figures, and even about their basic understanding of what is devilish and what is righteous.
In 1958 a discovery was made by Dr Morton Smith (later Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University, New York) in the library of an Eastern Orthodox closed community at Mar Saba near Jerusalem. It was a copy of a letter from the second-century Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, which, as we shall see later, includes potentially explosive material taken from a `Secret Gospel of Mark', apparently an esoteric version of the biblical Gospel, but for initiates only. Clement's letter is in reply to a Christian called Theodore who wanted to know how to deal with a heretical group called the Carpocratians who practised their own - extreme - version of the ancient sacred sex rites referred to in the previous chapter, allegedly based on a secret Gospel of Mark.
The Carpocratians were second-century Gnostics led by one Carpocrates, called by author Michael Jordan in his highly revisionist Mary: The Unauthorized Biography (2001) `a Christian pioneer who did much to advance the cause of Gnosticism'.' The modern scholar par excellence of Gnosticism, Tobias Churton, calls Carpocrates `a proto-Communist . . . [an] intellectual anarchist, who coined the dictum, "Property is theft" .12 However, this modern, if muted, admiration is a far cry from the ancients' horror at what they perceived as the Carpocratians' penchant for radical licentious behaviour. Predictably, the dogmatic and uncompromising Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon fired off a broadside at these offensive libertines, singling out their leader Marcus:
Marcus, thou former of idols, inspector of portents, Skilled in consulting the stars, and deep in the black arts of magic, Ever by tricks such as these confirming the doctrines of error, Furnishing signs unto those involved by thee in deception, Wonders of power that is utterly severed from God and apostate, Which Satan, thy true father, enables thee still to accomplish, By means of Azazel, that fallen and yet mighty angel, Thus making thee the precursor of his own impious actions.3
Irenaeus leaves us in no doubt as to his views on Marcus, whom he declares to be `really the precursor of Antichrist'. The Bishop attacks the Carpocratian leader for a litany of sins and crimes, including an `addiction to philtres, love-potions [drugs], "familiar demons", prophecies, the defiling of women, numerology ... and Satanism' .1 However, Irenaeus5 soon leaves aside the fire-andbrimstone ranting and knuckles down to specific accusations. Not surprisingly, they concern alleged sexual misconduct - `the defiling of women' - the usual accusation against rival cults throughout the ages, which may or may not have a basis in fact. He declares with a critic's, not to say bigot's,6 certainty:
Marcus devotes himself especially to women, and those such as are well-bred, and elegantly attired, and of great wealth, whom he frequently seeks to draw after him, by addressing them in such seductive words as these . . . Adorn thyself as a bride who is expecting her bridegroom, that thou mayest be what I am, and I what thou art. Establish the germ of light in thy nuptial chamber. Receive from me a spouse, and become receptive of him, while thou are received by him?
Although Irenaeus seems only to have heard rumours rather than first-hand knowledge of these practices, he may have been quite right about Marcus's leadership, for there was indeed an early Gnostic initiation known explicitly as `the Bridal Chamber', a form of sacred sex. But sex in any form appalled the early Christians - indeed, even modern Catholicism only just tolerates it even in marriage' - and the Carpocratians were renowned for their licentiousness and the use of female prophets who channelled their powers of clairvoyance and divine inspiration for the benefit of the cult. However, as Benjamin Walker writes:
The practice inevitably led to abuse. Marcus was accused of seducing many of his young female `prophets'. Irenaeus writes that by various suggestions he makes his deluded victim believe that she has the power of prophecy. Full of false pride, and excited by the expectation of using her gift, she ventures into oracular utterance. With pounding heart she articulates any ridiculous nonsense that enters her head. Henceforth, stimulated by vanity she audaciously considers herself a veritable sibyl.'
(Nothing is new under the sun: the above passage could have been written about the legion New Age channelling cults, often run by a quasi-spiritual male leader with a libidinous personal agenda.)
Once the prophetess was established and her vanity persuaded her to continue in her new role, Marcus made his move and seduced her - or so Irenaeus and other Church fathers claimed. Perhaps they were right and Marcus was simply helping himself to the traditional cult leader's perks, or perhaps there really was a serious ritual side to their coupling, as indeed seems to be the case from the words Marcus is supposed to have uttered, quoted by Irenaeus above.
Indeed, the founder of the group, Carpocrates of Alexandria (78-138 CE), had based what was essentially a pagan-Christian hybrid religion on the cult of Isis, absorbing the complex rites of initiation - complete with secret passwords and handshakes - and baptism as an important rite. And, incredible though it may seem to Christians, Carpocrates' practices may not have been too dissimilar to those of John the Baptist's following, as we will see...
Carpocrates travelled with a woman called Alexandria, with whom he had a son, Epiphanes ('Illustrious'), the author of the influential treatise On Justice. Dead by his late teens, Epiphanes was revered as a Gnostic `aeon' with his own temple and museum complex. Carpocratian beliefs were a mixture of the teachings of both father and son.
Apart from worshipping the great Egyptian gods (with especial emphasis on the ancient Trinity of Isis, Osiris and Horus), the cult also revered the famous Greek philosophers, such as Plato and Pythagoras, besides Jesus whom they saw as partly divine. To them, there was no miraculous Virgin birth and no immaculate conception of Mary herself: Christ had been born naturally. It was rumoured that the Carpocratians possessed a sketch made of Jesus on Pilate's orders, on which they based the statue they carried in sacred procession - becoming the first known Christians to venerate a cultic image of Christ.10
The cult scandalized the more ascetic Christians on almost every level: disbelieving in both the concepts of adultery and property - they had everything in common, including sexual partners - they also banned procreation. Clearly this prohibition was more theoretical than practical, as the very existence of the holy Epiphanes proved. However, sex of all sorts was deemed obligatory, and a way of honouring the gods, as semen was the divine life-force - an aspect of Luciferanism (by any other name) that was to assume various guises over the centuries. The inborn itch of sexual desire must be honoured: `By thus sinning, the divine light of God's grace was provided with a chance to operate, a fact that was eminently pleasing to God. Sin thus became a way of salvation.'" (However, interestingly, the Carpocratians were still conventional enough to think of sex as sinning.) After the group's lavish communal meal, the room would be plunged into darkness and an indiscriminate orgy followed: as Church Father, Clement, sniffed: `uniting as they desired and with whomsoever they desired'."
The irrepressible Reverend Montague Summers thunders: `Carpocrates even went so far as to ... [make] the performance of every species of sin forbidden in the Old Testament a solemn duty, since this was the completest mode of showing defiance to the Evil Creator and Ruler of the World"3 (the Gnostics' Demiurge or Rex Mundi - or the Old Testament's Yahweh).
However, Summers is - perhaps wilfully - missing the point, although even if he had grasped it totally, he would still hardly have approved. As Tobias Churton writes matter-of-factly:
Of course this would have seemed like an intellectual version of making a silk purse of a sow's ear to the Church Fathers. The Carpocratians and their apologists could dress it up as they wished, but they were still filthy heretical radicals who wallowed in sin.
The Carpocratians believed that the concepts of good and evil were invented by mankind, and that everyone must suffer or enjoy the whole gamut of human experience, including the loftiest and noblest and the most humiliating and sordid acts. Every individual would be reincarnated until they had finished the immense number of possible permutations of human life. A recording angel was assigned to each person and each act, and must be invoked consciously while performing them in order to ensure that a fair karmic record is kept.
The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code Page 8