Margaret Starbird

This book presents an interesting idea that Dan Brown ran with in The da Vinci Code: Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene and they had a child together. It's a valid theory, as valid as any other theory that cannot be proven because there is a lack of evidence from the time period. Her evidence is that there's art throughout the Middle Ages that can be interpreted to mean that Mary Magdalene was the Bride of Christ.

While I agree that matriarchal societies and the "sacred feminine" have been show more largely forgotten in today's culture and interpretation of history, I find it hard to grasp that we should use art from 1,000 years after the fact as evidence that a person existed in a specific role.

I've been interested in learning about ancient women's history and goddess religions -- the only sources are "alternative" books which can lead one down a Graham Hancock path -- where you take your theory and only present ideas that fit into that theory. That seems to be what happened here, perhaps Graham Hancock and his Ancient Apocalypse was inspired by Ms Starbird's giant leaps to conclusions?

How did I get here? Well, there are many books that led me here. First, there was the aforementioned Da Vinci Code which put Ms Starbird on my radar well over a decade ago. More recently, it's a thread I first picked with Jean Auel's Earth's Children series, the prehistoric time period had me wondering about where the women that definitely existed throughout time disappeared to in the history and religion we're taught in school and at church. Then I discovered When God Was a Woman which has been poo-poohed by many scholars but paints a picture that seems probable: those in power suppressed or destroyed evidence of the Sacred Feminine and any mention of the goddess. I was still hunting for more ideas about matriarchal societies, so I went on a journey to discover The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Merlin Stone and Margaret Starbird both focus on art, whereas The Dawn of Everything is written by an anthropologist and an archeologist so a different perspective. While it has it's detractors, it seems that because it's written by two men, it's not perceived as kooky feminist ideas like Merlin Stone's book. Then I got distracted by chickens and dinosaurs, seeds and trees, but then I read Lilith, Femina, Tell Her Story: How Women Led, Taught, and Ministered in the Early Church, and Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal which brought me right back here to The Woman with the Alabaster Jar and my hunt for women in religion. show less

When Margaret Starbird read the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail she was infuriated by it and decided to do some of her own research to refute it. However she found herself caught up in the story and with her own variant on it. Unfortunately some of the sources she found weren't particualarly historical or accurate and some of her leaps of faith are a bit overdone.

To my mind sometimes a flower is just a flower. There are many examples of artisans finding particular shapes and colours that just show more appealed to them, and I'm sure they could have done in their sleep to fill in backgrounds. I stitch myself and I find myself being attracted to some of the same imagery over and over, sometimes I look deeper for the meaning but sometimes that pattern just plain appeals to me. I'm sure it was the same with some of the papermakers that Starbird mentions in the book. There may have been some who had meaning but there may have been others who just picked a shape because it was easy, well known, had a relationship with their master or just plain appealed to them.

And this is the main flaw of the book. Just because an image has certain meanings to certain people does not mean that everyone imbues it with that meaning. Just because certain people or peoples imbue certain items with certain meanings does not mean that all people do the same.

It may be that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, and some of the arguments for are quite compelling (the fact that non-married men were a rarity and that this would have been mentioned in the Bible is one of many); but we may never know the truth. The truth at the moment is that Christianity has ignored the female and the feminine for a long time and this is begining to be something they may not be able to ignore for much longer.

This book gained a few points for making me think but lost some for it's slightly rigid view of the feminine and the masculine. Some of the flights of literary fancy are a little overwritten, but her heart is in the right place. show less

very readable interpretation of myths and symbols that support this thesis; supports the idea of loss of the feminine in western culture due to ascendance of male gods and principles and suppression of feminine virtues and connection with nature. I really enjoyed this book a lot.

not being (currently or past) a christian, i'm lacking in some of the foundational knowledge that makes some of this information make sense, but also to matter to me one way or the other. which is to say that i've got no stake in it being either true or false, but some of it didn't make a lot of sense to me because i wasn't sure what she was talking about. that said, the postulations (that jesus was married to mary magdalen, that mary magdalen wasn't a prostituted woman at all but actually show more of a respectable family that was worthy of marrying jesus, that his mother mary was neither a virgin nor celibate during her marriage, that there are other children of mary and joseph, that there was a daughter born to mary and jesus) seem utterly believable to me. i was not under the impression that jewish history ever saw jesus as the potential messiah or even of the bloodline of king david, but i can believe this, too. the thing is, though, is that the author used a lot of art in her discussion (which makes sense,) but it seemed to be a bit like i remember english class in high school - where you find meaning in the smallest things that could have been what was intended, or maybe not. she wrote "i conclude," "i am convinced," "i believe" a lot without doing a sufficient job of convincing us. but in her defense, what she's saying is that the meaning and the true history has been erased from record, so to find evidence of it requires some leaps. i'm just not sure, without knowing what some of the meanings of things were, that she did a good enough job to convert someone who has been taught forever about the opposite of this history. show less