Jesus and the Lost Goddess
by Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy
Published by Three Rivers Press, New York, NY
Member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
www.randomhouse.com
© Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy 2001
THE GOOD NEWS
...For the original Christians, the Jesus story was a myth used to introduce beginners to the spiritual path. For those wishing to go deeper than the 'Outer Mysteries', which were only 'for the masses', there were secret teachings or 'Inner Mysteries'. These were 'the secret teaching of true Gnosis' which, according to the 'Church Father' Clement of Alexandria, were transmitted 'to a small number by a succession of masters'. Those initiated into these Inner Mysteries discovered that Christianity was not just about the dying and resurrecting Son of God. They were told another myth that few Christians today have even heard of – the story of Jesus' lover, the lost and redeemed Daughter of the Goddess.
Amongst the original Christians the divine was seen as having both a masculine and feminine face. They related to the Divine Feminine as Sophia, the wise Goddess. Paul tells us, 'Among the initiates we speak of Sophia', for it is 'the secret of Sophia' that is 'taught in our Mysteries'. When initiates of the Inner Mysteries of Christianity partook of Holy Communion, it was Sophia's passion and suffering they remembered. Amongst the original Christians, priests and priestesses would offer initiates wine as a symbol of 'her blood'. The prayer would be offered: 'May Sophia fill your inner being and increase in you her Gnosis." It was Sophia who was petitioned:
'Come, hidden Mother; come, you who are made manifest in your works, and give joy and rest to those who are bound to you. Come and partake in this Eucharist which we perform in your name, and in the love feast for which we have assembled at your invitation.'
The eradication of this Christian Goddess by the patriarchal Roman Church has left us all motherless children. Women have been denied a sympathetic rapport with the Divine Feminine. Men have been denied a love-affair with a female face of Deity. Spirituality has become part of the battle ground which separates the sexes, when it should be the sanctuary of eternal fellowship. The original Christians, however, practiced 'partnership spirituality'. They valued men and women equally, as expressions of God and Goddess. They saw the division of the sexes as a correlate of that primal duality which is the source of creation, a duality that when made one, as in the act of love, brings the bliss of union that they called 'Gnosis'.
For the original Christians the Jesus story appears at the end of a cycle of Christian myths which begins with the ineffable Mystery manifesting itself as a primordial Father and Mother and culminates in the mystical marriage of Jesus and Sophia. The Inner Mysteries reveal these myths as allegories of spiritual initiation, symbolic stories which encode a profound philosophy with the power to transform an initiate from a Christian into a Christ.
For the original Christians the 'gospel' or 'good news' is not a story written in a book. Rather they taught that:
'The gospel is the Gnosis.' The good news is that a complete transformation of consciousness is possible. The good news is that there is a way to transcend suffering. The good news is that there is a natural state of happiness which is our birthright. This is the gospel of absolute freedom. It is not a set of rules which we must follow to become 'good'. It is about discovering our own essential nature, which is good already, so that we can live spontaneously. This gospel holds out the extraordinary promise that those who understand it 'will not taste death'. But immortality is not access to Heaven as reward for living an upright life. It is the immediate realization, here and now, of our true identity, which was never born and so can never die.
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A JOURNEY OF INITIATION
... Why isn't the gospel of Gnosis common knowledge? First, because the Roman Church has spent over 16 centuries systematically destroying the evidence that it ever existed. For much of this time, merely to possess Christian works unacceptable to the established Church was punishable by a cruel death. Thankfully some of these texts have nevertheless survived. In recent decades they have been augmented by fabulous archaeological finds such as the discovery of a library of 'heretical' Christian scriptures in a cave near Nag Hammadi in Egypt. The implications of this find, and the advances in our understanding of early Christianity that it has led to, have yet to be widely appreciated.
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Academics have often failed lamentably to understand the spirituality of the original Christians because they have lacked mystical insight. The Gnosis is not an intellectual theory. It is a state of being. It is an inner 'Knowledge' which can never be truly understood from the outside. Trying to comment on the Gnosis without ever having personally experienced its life-changing impact is like writing a travelogue for a country you have never visited Any native would find it laughably absurd.
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THE ORIGINAL CHRISTIANS
It's a strange world. At the end of the nineteenth century the influential Hindu guru Vivekananda was sailing across the Mediterranean Sea on a return journey to England when he had a curious dream. A very old and venerable-looking sage appeared to him, saying:
'Do ye come to effect our restoration? I am one of the ancient order of Therapeutae. The truths preached by us have been given out by Christians as taught by Jesus, but for the matter of that, there was no personality by the name of Jesus ever born."
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After years of painstaking research we concluded that the traditional history of Christianity was at best hopelessly inaccurate and at worst a pack of lies. The evidence demanded that we think the unthinkable. Christianity was not the cult of a first-centry Messiah, but a Jewish adaptation of the ancient Pagan Mystery religion. We could find no evidence that there had ever been an historical Jesus, because the gospel story was a Jewish reworking of ancient Pagan myths of a dying and resurrecting Son of God. We even ventured an informed guess as to who may have authored the original Jesus myth – a sect of mystical Jews called the Therapeutae.
Is it possible that Vivekananda reached the truth by intuitive means a century before us? Perhaps. The psychologist Carl Jung came to believe that the whole of human history could be reconstructed from the contents of one person's unconscious.
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THE THERAPEUTAE AND THE ESSENES
... the Therapeutae and Essenes... are described by the Jewish Gnostic Philo, himself probably an initiate of the Therapeutae, as two parts of a single school of philosophy. The world they inhabited was dominated by cosmopolitan Pagan civilizations which had been trading, conquering and synthesizing with each other for centuries. As early as the fourth century BCE the Pagan Gnostic Plato had described the peoples of the Mediterranean as like 'frogs around a small pond'. A few decades later the empire of Alexander the Great transformed the ancient world into essentially one culture, and Greek became the international language. Pagan, Jewish and Christian Gnostics all wrote in Greek, thus making their ideas readily available to each other and fueling an explosion of creative eclecticism. It was an ideal environment for Gnosticism to flourish.
By the first century CE huge numbers of Jews in Judaea and throughout the Mediterranean were fully integrated into sophisticated Pagan society, none more so than Jewish Gnostics, such as the Therapeutae, who regarded themselves as literally 'cosmopolitans' – 'citizens of the cosmos'. Philo writes of being part of an international fellowship of Gnostic philosophers who, 'although comparatively few in number, keep alive the covered spark of wisdom secretly throughout the cities of the world.'.
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The spirituality of the Therapeutae and Essenes is an example of this fusion of Jewish and Pagan Gnosticism. As well as being followers of their own Jewish master Moses, they were also followers of the great Pagan philosopher Pythagoras, whose disciples had set up communities throughout the Mediterranean world. The Jewish historian Josephus informs us that the Essenes are comparable to the Pythagoreans. He tells us their wisdom stems from Greece and that 'this kind exists in many places in the inhabited world'.
Following the practice of the Cynic school of Pagan Gnosticism, these Jewish Gnostics called their spiritual tradition simply 'the Way' – a term also adopted by the original Christians. The fourth-century Christian Literalist historian Eusebius saw so many similarities between the Way of the Therapeutae and the Christian Way that he claimed the Therapeutae were amongst the first followers of Christ. But Philo's description of the Therapeutae was written before the time that Jesus is supposed to have been teaching, so he is clearly not writing about disciples of an historical Messiah, as Eusebius believed. Ironically, Eusebius was probably right nevertheless, albeit in an entirely different way from how he intended. The Essenes and Therapeutae did not follow Jesus. They created him! [emphasis added]
The idea of some sect 'making up' the Jesus myth may seem strange today, but this is because we no longer think of myths in the same way as our ancestors did. To us myths are irrelevant fantasies, but the ancients regarded them as profound allegories encoding mystical teachings. Mythical motifs represented philosophical principles. They were an archetypal vocabulary with which to think. Creating new myths was a way of exploring new ideas.
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The Christian myth of the 'return' is a powerful allegory designed to guide us through the stages of initiation which lead to Gnosis. It was created by synthesizing the Jewish myth of Exodus with Pagan myths of the dying and resurrecting Godman Osiris-Dionysus. Originally a simple and abstract myth, it was revised and embellished over the course of the first and second centuries CE to become the most influential myth ever created: the Jesus story. [emphasis added]
THE SAVIOUR KING
At the heart of the perennial philosophy of Gnosticism is a simple but powerful idea, the implications of which we will be exploring throughout this book. It is the idea of God as a Big Mind which contains the cosmos and which is becoming conscious of itself through all conscious beings within the cosmos. The purpose of Gnostic initiations is to awaken in us a recognition of this our shared divine essence.
The Pagan Gnostics mythically represented the idea of the one Consciousness of God that is conscious in all by the the image of the 'King'. Plotinus, for example, writes:
'Consciousness is the King. And we are also the King when we are transformed into the King.'
Based on this Pagan image the original Christians created the image of the 'Christ' which, as we discussed previously, is equivalent in meaning to 'King'. Paul describes Christ as 'the consciousness of God' and teaches that we are all Christ's body. When we are 'baptized into union with him' through Gnostic initiation, 'there is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and freeman, male and female; for we are all one in Christ Jesus'.
If we replace the word 'King' in the previous passage from Plotinus with the Jewish synonym 'Christ', we can see just how similar Pagan and Christian teachings are:
'Consciousness is the Christ. And we are also Christ when we are transformed into the Christ.'
Pagan and Christian Gnostics imagined the initiatory journey to be about awakening the King within. In the Pagan Mysteries, the initiate was 'enthroned' as a king as part of the initiation ceremonies. Pagan Gnostics of the Cynic school called the realized initiate a 'King' in the 'Kingdom of God'. Likewise, Christian Gnostics taught that when we realize Gnosis we will become 'self-ruled' kings in the Kingdom of God and 'reign over the All'. They imagined the triumphant Christian initiate crowned with a halo of light, declaring: 'The light has become a crown on my head.'
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THE CHRISTIAN GODDESS
The myth of the Godman Jesus can only be properly understood alongside the myth of the Goddess Sophia. After so many centuries of patriarchal Christianity it is both shocking and reassuring to discover a Goddess at the very heart of Christianity. She is, like her son/ brother/ lover Jesus, a syncretic figure created from both Pagan and Jewish sources.
Sophia, whose name means 'wisdom', had been the Goddess of the Pagan philosophers for centuries. Indeed, the word 'philosopher', first used by Pythagoras, means 'lover of Sophia'. [emphasis added] Although often pictured today as dry academics, these brilliant intellectuals were actually mystics and devotees of the Goddess. Parmenides, for example, is usually remembered as the founder of Western logic, yet his masterwork is a visionary poem in which he descends to the underworld to be instructed by the Goddess. ...
To be continued in future installments ...