Several acclaimed authors have quoted the famous text from the second century Gnostic Gospel of Philip: "Jesus loved her (Mary Magdalene) more than the other disciples and used to kiss her often on the lips" (Philip 63, 64). What they blithely ignore is the actions of many mischievous termites down the centuries which have left holes in that ancient manuscript precisely where those loaded words figure in the Coptic text. There is no word for "kiss" and there is no word for "lips" in the text as we have it. What those words may have been is anybody's educated guess, but it is certainly not legitimate research to quote the text as if no gaps existed, for we will fill the gaps with terms that suit our own interest. Several respected authors have stated that the Gnostic documents from Nag Hammadi describe Mary Magdalene as the lover of Jesus. There are no such Gnostic texts.

If you are looking for evidence of a special relationship between Jesus and Mary there is no need to look to the early 1940's Gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi. You should look to the New Testament itself. By a fortuitous accident of history the original Western redactors of the new Testament text did not appear to fully realize the import certain narratives would carry for the eastern mind, which is the mind in which the very early oral and written traditions about Jesus were formed. In an earlier article in this series (The Gods of Men, III, Bleeping Herald, July 2008) I have analyzed the several references within the New Testament canon which demonstrate beyond doubt that there was a very special relationship indeed between Jesus and Mary, so there is no need to look for dusty documents to prove it in texts found a generation ago in an ancient burial ground of the sixth dynasty Pharaohs.

But one of the issues that concerns me most in the discussion of the Magdalene today is the fascination with the secret knowledge or teachings which Jesus is alleged to have given her as "apostle of the apostles." One of the greatest delusions that has dogged humanity's path on its quest for evolution is the conviction that there exists a secret knowledge, which if only one could find it, would open up the doors to all we have ever desired. True spiritual evolution certainly requires true knowledge about how things are before we can make any progress, and we have certainly been fed with far more than enough defective knowledge about these matters from those who have decided to their own satisfaction that they are in charge of our immortal destiny. But knowledge on its own can never do it. There is no secret knowledge to be given to anyone by anybody which will automatically lay the miracles of the universe at our feet.

The second century Gnostics were preoccupied with secret knowledge, so it's no surprise to find their texts have the form they do. If one believes the moon is made of green cheese, or that the sun revolves around the earth, these are harmless enough beliefs in terms of everyday living - unless you are instructing astronauts. If you believe we were sent here by God to work out our destiny by obeying a set of rules, and that Jesus came here to suffer and die because of our sins, those are relatively harmless beliefs too, unless you happen to be advising people on how to work out their eternal destiny in this world.

But that being said, there is no secret knowledge that can deliver this to you ready made; there is only knowledge that will help you to engage that knowledge into experience and that is where the work of salvation comes in. Salvation, or working out your destiny, or evolving spiritually, or whatever term you choose to describe it, does not come from knowledge, but from what you accomplish using informed knowledge. This is why it was always called The Great WORK. Any secret knowledge that was supposed to have existed in certain exalted circles in the past, was only secret because of a prudence that the great masters used to prevent the information about how things worked from getting into the hands of those who would misuse it for their own selfish gratification, usually in the manipulation of others. This was the sense in which Jesus spoke of "not casting your pearls before swine." In the case of the Magdalene whatever so called "secret" knowledge was given her by Jesus, was given only to facilitate and guide her own personal work in the voyage of self-discovery along which mastery lies. And it would not have been given to her in the context of any personal favor or relationship, but in terms of what she had already earned in terms of personal effort and discovery of the path along which evolution occurs. Basically, that consists in confronting and dealing with our own personal issues that have kept us blocked life after life. It is not about finding any magical secret knowledge which will deal with it for us.

So if Jesus revealed certain secrets to Mary Magdalene, as he is recorded also as having done to his twin brother Thomas, it was not done because of any privileged personal intimate relationship or connection, but because of the seriousness they had demonstrated in accomplishing the degree of spiritual evolution they had already made. That now made this knowledge meaningful for them in terms of personal spiritual growth.

Mary was a very common Jewish name in the times of the New Testament. There are 16 women whose names we know from the New Testament Gospels who were associated with the ministry of Jesus and six of those were called Mary. So when the name "Mary" is mentioned in the New Testament you usually have another qualification tagged on to identify more clearly who the person being spoken of really is; for example "Mary of Clophas," " Mary of Magdalene, " etc..

In fact the Mary Magdalene of the Gospels as we have come to know her from the Christian tradition is something of a conglomerate figure ranging over the full scale from the reformed demoniac to the repentant prostitute who anointed Jesus before his passion.

Of the six Marys in the Gospels all recognize Mary who was the mother of Jesus. Then there is the Mary whom Luke calls "the sinful woman," the reformed prostitute, or the one from whom several devils were ejected, according to Mark; the one who anointed Jesus prior to his passion, according to John, and therein the one who first saw him in the garden after his passion, thus meriting the title "Apostle of the Apostles." We have Mary of Bethany, who is the sister of Lazarus. In John's Gospel it is Mary who is pre-eminent, but in Luke it is Peter. But then Luke was Peter's secretary, and there was no love lost between them. It was not until the year 591 AD, in his famous Thirty Third Homily, that all of these female figures were combined into one by Pope Gregory the Great.

So who really was Mary of Magdalene, if she is not a five-part composite of history?

At Magdala, a town near top of the Lake of Galilee, the cult of Ishtar or Astarte, mother goddess and Queen of Heaven, was common. The cult of Ishtar had a seven-fold initiation in which the sacrifice of doves was held to be important. The dove in fact was the symbol of the goddess. There is independent evidence that sacrificial doves were raised in village of Magdala.

So coming from Magdala it is extremely likely that Mary might have been associated with that cult, and the statement in the Gospel of St. Luke that she was a woman out of whom seven devils were cast might mean something quite different if interpreted correctly in a wider context.

It might not refer to an exorcism at all, but to some progress along a path of initiation wherein each of the seven levels of initiation might be symbolically expressed as the casting out of a devil from us - "facing your demons" as we would express it today. The New Testament saw that as a terrible thing. It might in fact turn out to be something quite wonderful if seen in terms of a progress of initiation in the school of the female goddess at Magdala.

We would do well to remember that in the esoteric tradition the principal teacher of Jesus during his time in the Himalayas, between the ages of 20 and 26 years, told him that when the time of his passion was imminent he would send him a jar of precious ointment as a sign to warn him to be ready, and to assure him that he was not going to be alone and abandoned during the time of his initiation.

Mary was the one who performed the anointing. Did this indicate that she had some connection with that same brotherhood and sisterhood, and did this have anything to do with the Mother Goddess Cult of Magdala?

This is not something I casually suggest. In my DVD " How Jesus Became a Christ" I said that to my mind the greatest proof that Jesus was in India and Tibet was not just the scrolls that so emphatically say he was there, the most famous of which were the ones discovered and published by Nicholas Notovitch in 1893. The real indication, even if such scrolls had never been discovered, is the well over one hundred major parallels I have pointed out between the message of the Buddha and that of Jesus, even though the Buddha was five hundred years earlier. Does that mean Jesus was a plagiarist or the Buddha his inspiration? By no means. What it indicates is that both were conduits of a much older wisdom that pre-dated each, a wisdom old as the foundations of the world.