Out Of Egypt

Two thousand years after Jesus, John and Mary lived out their strangely significant lives in a backwater of the Roman Empire, millions of people still believe in the story as told in the Gospels. To them, Jesus was the Son of God and of a virgin, who happened to be incarnated as a Jew, John the Baptist was his forerunner and spiritual inferior, and Mary Magdalene was some woman of dubious reputation whom Jesus healed and converted.

However, our investigation has revealed the picture to be very different. Jesus was not the Son of God, and neither was he of the Jewish religion—although he may have been ethnically a Jew. The evidence points to his preaching a foreign message to the land in which he mounted his campaign and began his mission. Certainly his contemporaries thought of him as being an adept of Egyptian magic, a view that is also expressed in the JewishTalmud. This may simply have been malicious rumour, but several scholars, notably Morton Smith, have agreed that Jesus' miracles were part and parcel of the typical Egyptian magician’s repertoire. Besides, he was actually delivered to Pilate with

142Picknett, Prince, Templar Revelation, Chapter 17

the words that he was ‘a doer of evil’—in Roman law that specifically meant a sorcerer.

John did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. He may well have baptized him, because Jesus was one ofhis disciples, perhaps even rising through the ranks to become his second-in-command. Something went wrong, however: John changed his mind and nominated Simon Magus as his successor. Shortly afterwards John was killed.

Mary Magdalene was a priestess who was Jesus' partner in a sacred marriage, just as Helen was Simon Magus’s. The sexual nature of their relationship is attested in many of the Gnostic texts that the Church prevented from being included in the New Testament.

She was also ‘Apostle of the Apostles’ and a renowned preacher—even rallying the despondent disciples after the Crucifixion. Simon Peter hated her, as he hated all women, and she may have fled to France after the Crucifixion because she feared what he might do to her. And although it is impossible to know exactly what her message was, it is certain that it would have borne little relationship to what is now known as Christianity. Whatever else she was, Mary Magdalene was not aChristian preacher. The Egyptian influence in the Gospel story is undeniable: Jesus may well have been consciously fulfilling the prophesied role of Jewish Messiah to gain popular support, but he and Mary seem also to have been enacting the myth of Isis and Osiris, probably for initiatory purposes. Egyptian magic and esoteric secrets were behind their mission, and their teacher was John the Baptist. Two of his disciples—his successor Simon Magus and the ex-prostitute Helen—were an exact parallel to Jesus and the Magdalene. Perhaps they were supposed to be. The underlying knowledge was sexual—that ofhorasis , enlightenment through transcendental sex with a priestess, which was a familiar concept in the East and also just across the border in Egypt.

Despite the Church’s claims, it was not Peter who was Jesus' closest ally, nor—judging by his repeated failures to understand his master’s words—was he even in the inner circle. If anyone was Jesus' successor it was the Magdalene. (It must be remembered that they were actively spreading the teachings and practices of the already very ancient Isis/Osiris cult, not some kind of Jewish heresy as is often thought.) Mary Magdalene and Simon Peter set out on different journeys, ending with one of them founding the Church of Rome, and the other entrusting her mysteries to generations of those who understood the value of the Feminine Principle: the ‘heretics’. John, Jesus and Mary were linked together inextricably by their religion (that of ancient Egypt) which they adapted for the Jewish culture—as were Simon Magus and Helen, who targeted Samaria for their message. Definitely not part of this inner circle of Egyptian missionaries were Simon Peter and the rest of the Twelve. Mary Magdalene was revered by the underground movement in Europe because she founded her own ‘Church’—not a Christian cult in the generally accepted sense of the term, but based on the Isis/Osiris religion. Something very like it had been preached by both Jesus and John. John was venerated by the same tradition of ‘heretics’ because they were the direct spiritual descendants of those to

whom he was their ‘sacrificial king’, the martyr of their cause who had been cut down in his prime. The shock and atrocity of his death were underscored by the highly dubious circumstances that surrounded it, and by what was perceived to be the subsequent callous manipulation of John’s followers by his old rival. There is however, another side to this story. As we have seen, there was a rumour circulating during his lifetime that claimed Jesus had worked black magic on the dead Baptist. Certainly, the work of Carl Kraeling and Morton Smith has shown that Herod Antipas believed that Jesus had enslaved his soul (or consciousness) in order to gain magical powers, for it was understood among Greek and Egyptian magicians that the spirit of a murdered man was easy prey for sorcerers—especially if they owned a part of the victim’s body. Whether or not Jesus went through any such magical ceremony, a rumour that John’s soul lived on under the control of his erstwhile rival would have done the Jesus movement no harm.

In that magically-minded era it would have virtually ensured that the majority of John’s disciples would have gone over to Jesus, particularly as he seemed to have miraculous powers. And as Jesus had already told his followers that John had been the reincarnated prophet Elias, he would have seemed to be all the more authoritative to the masses.

Yet despite the peculiar notion of a Jesus who was believed to have had control of the souls of at least two other prophets, the secret of the underground tradition is not concerned with him. In fact, even though the heretics revere John and the Magdalene as real historical individuals, they have also always seen them asrepresentatives of an ancient belief system. It is what they stood for that was most important to them—as High Priest and High Priestess of the Kingdom of the Light. The two traditions—one centring on the Baptist and the other on the Magdalene—only really became discernible around the twelfth century, when, for example, the Cathars emerged in the Languedoc and the Templars rose to the pinnacle of their power. There is an apparent gap in the transmission of the traditions: it is as if they disappear into a black hole roughly between the fourth and twelfth centuries. It was around 400 CE that the Nag Hammadi texts—

which emphasized the role of Mary Magdalene—were buried in Egypt: as we saw in Part One, strikingly similar ideas about her importance persisted in France, having some influence with the Cathars. And although the Church of John apparently disappeared after approximately 50 CE, its continued existence can be deduced from the Church Fathers' fulminations against John’s successors—Simon Magus and Dositheus—for about another two hundred years. Then, again in the twelfth century, this tradition also surfaces once more in the Templars' mystical veneration of John. It is impossible to say with any certainty just what happened to both traditions in those missing years, but at the end of our investigation we feel we can hazard an educated guess. The Magdalene

‘line’ continued in the South of France, although any records confirming this would have been destroyed during the systematic devastation of the Languedocian culture that accompanied the Cathar crusade. But echoes of the tradition have come down to us through the Cathar beliefs about the Magdalene’s relationship with Jesus and the

Cathar-influenced tractSchwester Katrei , some of whose ideas were clearly taken from the Nag Hammadi texts. It is likely that the John tradition survived independently in the Middle East through the ancestors of the Mandaeans and the Nosairi, yet we know that it appears in Europe centuries later. But how did it come to Europe? Who saw its value and decided to uphold its beliefs in secret? Once again we find the answer in the warrior-monks, whose Middle Eastern military operations hid their driven quest for esoteric knowledge. The Knights Templar brought the John tradition to Europe to join that of the Magdalene, thus making sense of what might appear to have been separate male and female mysteries. And it must be remembered that the original nine Templar knights had emerged from Languedocian culture, the heart and soul of the Magdalene cult—and that occult tradition has it that they learned their secrets ‘from the Johannites of the East’.

In our opinion it is highly unlikely that the Templars' uniting of these two traditions was merely coincidental. After all, their primary aim was to seek out and make use of the most arcane knowledge. Hugues de Payens and his eight brother knights went to the Holy Land with a purpose in mind: they sought the power of knowledge and may have also looked for some artefact of great value, which was unlikely to have been simply monetary. The Templars appeared to know of the existence of the Johannite tradition before they found it, but how they learned of it no-one can say. Clearly what was at stake was much more than some vague religious ideals: the Templars were nothing if not practical men—primarily concerned with the acquisition of material power—and the penalty for upholding their secret beliefs was unimaginably horrific. It cannot be over-emphasized that these beliefs were not merely some spiritual notions they had decided to espouse for the good of their souls. These weremagical andalchemical secrets that, at the very least, may well have given them the edge in what we would now call science.

Certainly the superiority of their knowledge in such matters as sacred geometry and architecture found expression in the Gothic cathedrals that are still with us today, those secret books of stone that contain the fruits of their adventures into the esoteric. In their trawl of the world’s knowledge the Templars sought to expand their understanding of astronomy, chemistry, cosmology, navigation, medicine and mathematics—the benefits of which are self-evident.

But the Templars were even more ambitious in their quest for hidden—occult—

knowledge: they sought the answers to the great eternal questions. And in alchemy they may have found at least some of them. That mysterious science, which they espoused, has always been thought to yield the secrets of extending life itself, of longevity, if not actual physical immortality. Far from simply extending their philosophical or religious horizons, the Templars sought the ultimate power: the actual mastery over time itself, over the tyranny of life and death. And after the Templars came generation after generation of ‘heretics’ who took up the gauntlet and carried on the tradition with equal

fervour. Those fanatically sought-after secrets obviously had an appeal that inspired incalculable numbers of people to risk everything—but what was it? What was there about the Magdalene and Johannite traditions that provoked such zeal and devotion?

There is no one reply to these questions, but there are three possible answers. The first is that the Magdalene and John the Baptist stories offer between them the secret of what

‘Christianity’—their original mission—was supposed to have been, in stark contrast to what it actually had become.

While all around them women were demeaned and sex degraded, and priests held the keys to heaven and hell, the heretics looked to the secrets of the Baptist and the Magdalene for comfort and enlightenment. Through these two ‘saints’ they could covertly join the unbroken line of Gnostic and pagan worshippers that ran right back to ancient Egypt (and possibly beyond): as Giordano Bruno taught, the Egyptian religion was far superior to Christianity in every way; and, as we have seen, at least one Templar rejected the primary symbol of Christianity, the cross, as being ‘too young’. Instead of the stern patriarchy of Father, Son and (by now male) Holy Spirit, the adherents of this secret tradition found the natural balance of the old trinity of Father, Mother and Child.

Instead of feeling guilt-stricken about sex, they knew by their own experience that it was actually a gateway to God. Instead of being told the state of their souls by priests, they found their own salvation by directgnosis or knowledge of the divine. All this was punishable by death throughout much of the last 2000 years, and all this came from the secret traditions of the Baptist and the Magdalene. No wonder they had to be kept underground. The second reason for the continued appeal of these traditions is that these heretics also keptknowledge alive. It is very easy for us today to underestimate the sheer power of learning throughout most of history: The invention of printing caused a furore, and even the ability to read and write—especially for women—was rare and frequently regarded with the gravest suspicion by the Church. Yet this underground tradition actively encouraged a hunger for knowledge even among its womenfolk: both male and female alchemists worked long hours behind closed doors to discover great secrets that crossed the boundaries between magic, sex and science—and frequently seemed to have found them.

The unbroken line of this underground tradition encompassed the builders of the pyramids, perhaps even those who raised up the Sphinx, those who built according to the principles of sacred geometry and whose secrets found expression in the soaring beauty of the great Gothic cathedrals. These werethe makers of civilization , upholding it through the secret tradition. (Surely it is no coincidence that Osiris was believed to have given mankind the knowledge necessary for culture and civilization.) And, as the recent works of Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock¹⁴³reveal, the ancient Egyptians possessed

143Bauval and Gilbert,The Orion Mystery ; Hancock,Fingerprints of the Gods ; Hancock and Bauval,Keeper of Genesis .

scientific knowledge that was even beyond that of our own age. An inextricable part of this line of heretical scientists were the Renaissance hermeticists, whose elevation of Sophia, quest for knowledge and belief in the divine nature of Man had originally developed from the same roots as Gnosticism. Alchemy, hermeticism and Gnosticism all lead back inevitably to the Alexandria of Jesus' day, where an extraordinary mixture of ideas was fermenting. And so we find that the same ideas permeate thePistis Sophia , theCorpus Hermeticum of Hermes Trismegistus, what survives of the works of Simon Magus and the Mandaean sacred texts. As we have seen, Jesus has been explicitly linked with the magic of Egypt, and the Baptist and his successors, Simon Magus and Dositheus, have also been cited as ‘graduates’ of the occult schools of Alexandria. And all the Western esoteric traditions can be traced back to the same root. It would be a mistake, however, to think that the knowledge sought by the Templars or the hermeticists was simply what we today would call philosophy—or even science. It is true that those disciplines were part of what they hungered for, but there is also another dimension to their secret tradition, one that it would be wrong to omit. Underlying all the heretics' architectural, scientific and artistic endeavours was a passionate search formagical power . Could the clue as to why this was so important to them lie in the rumour of Jesus' ‘magical enslavement’ of John? Perhaps it is significant that the Templars, whose reverence for the Baptist was known to be second to none, were accused of worshipping a severed head in their most secret rituals.

The question of the validity and effectiveness (or otherwise) of ceremonial magic is outside the scope of this book: what matters is what others havebelieved over the centuries, and what part it has played in their motives, their conspiracies and the plans that they put into action. Occultism was the real driving force behind many apparently

‘rationalist’ thinkers—such as Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton—and behind theinner circle of organizations such as the Templars, some chapters of Freemasonry, and the Priory of Sion. And this long line of secret magicians—magi—may well have included both the Baptist and Jesus. One of the least known Grail stories has, as the object of the quest, the severed head of a bearded man on a platter. Was this a reference to John’s head, to the strange enchanted power it was supposed to possess and bestow on whoever found it? Once again, it is too easy to indulge in late twentieth-century scepticism. What is important is that, in some way, John’s head wasdeemed not only sacred, but alsomagical. The Celts also had a tradition of bewitched heads, but more pertinently, there was a severed head kept at the Osiran temple of Abydos that was believed to prophesy.¹⁴⁴ In another associated myth, the head of that other dying-and-rising god, Orpheus, was washed upon Lesbos, where it began to predict the future¹⁴⁵ . (And is it merely a coincidence that one of Jean Cocteau’s most enigmatic and surreal films wasOrphée ?)

144Lurker,An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Egypt , p93.

145M.L. West, ‘Orpheus and Orphism’,Man, Myth and Magic , no. 74. p2082.

Leonardo depicted ‘Jesus’ on his fake Shroud of Turin as beheaded. At first we thought that this was no more than a visual device to convey the idea that, in Leonardo’s heretical Johannite opinion, one who was beheaded was (morally and spiritually) ‘over’

one who was crucified. Certainly the demarcation line between ‘Shroudman’s’ head and body is deliberate, but Leonardo might be suggesting something else. Perhaps it was a reference to the idea that Jesusowned John’s head, and that he had somehow absorbed him, becoming—in the words of Morton Smith—‘Jesus-John’. Remember that, in the nineteenth-century poster of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, Leonardo is depicted as theKeeper of the Grail. We saw how, in Leonardo’s work, the raised forefinger symbolizes the Baptist: John is making this gesture in the Maestro’s last painting, and in his sculpture of John in Florence. That is not so unusual, for other artists have depicted

In document Jesus was a Wicked Priest and John the Baptist was the True Christ (Page 96-110)