The Acts of the Apostles, in what is clearly an attempt at damage limitation, have him trying to buy the Holy Spirit off Peter, and later losing his life in a dramatic magical battle. He embodied everything the Christians hated (and continue to despise to this day), claiming to heal and raise the dead just like Jesus. As he was clearly a spectacular exorcist and healer, one might be forgiven for thinking that he must have got his powers from Satan ...
The Magus was also known as `Faustus' - `the favoured one' - in Rome, giving his name to the overweeningly ambitious Renaissance legend Dr Faustus, whose pact with the Devil went ohso-predictably wrong, as he slid screaming down to Hell at the appointed hour for him to pay for his material success with his soul. Like the Magus, Faustus consorted with the beautiful Helen of Troy (or rather, Simon considered his lady to be her reincarnation, see below). However, the most significant aspect of the Faustian pact was that it was not sought primarily for wealth or sex, but knowledge - and therefore power. As we shall see, the search for the forbidden fruits of the mind was, and is, the real Luciferanism.
The usual Christian view of Simon Magus is summed up by Rollo Ahmed: `He imitated Christianity in the reverse sense, affirming the eternal reign of evil' 95 He also claimed to be a god - which was taken seriously as far away as Rome, where a statue was raised to him. Almost worse, `his sect welcomed women and held that the world-creating power was as much female as male.'96
According to Epiphanius,97 he was an unrepentant practitioner of sex magic, or sacred sex, travelling with a black woman called `Helen the Harlot', whom he believed to be the incarnation not only of the legendary beauty of Troy but also of the great goddess Athene - just as the Magdalene came to be associated with Isis - and the Gnostic `First Thought'.
Yet Simon the Samaritan, or sorcerer (Magus) had another role to play, which the gospel writers carefully avoided mentioning while at the same time blackening his name as vehemently as they could. However, the third-century Clementine Recognitions once again provide us, however innocently, with an astonishing admission:
It was in Alexandria that Simon perfected his studies in magic, being an adherent of John ... through whom he came to deal with religious doctrines. John was the forerunner of Jesus . . .
... Of all John's disciples, Simon was the favourite, but on the death of his master, he was absent in Alexandria, and so Dositheus, a co-disciple, was chosen head of the school [My emphases] .98
Here we have the apparently puritanical John the Baptist's favourite disciple being Simon Magus, the one man so utterly loathed by the Church that he was deemed to be the very pattern of heresy. And a sorcerer and sex magician ... It is interesting that references to John's inner circle include a disciple named Helen - presumably Simon's travelling koinonos or sexual companion. Suddenly, once again, the New Testament's presentation of the Baptist seems flawed to the point of deliberate misrepresentation.
Simon's reputation was and is truly unenviable. Of course the infamous Catholic bigot Montague Summers had plenty to say in typical uncompromising style, calling him `one of the most famous figures in the whole history of Witchcraft', whose `Devilish practices' were undone, unsurprisingly, by Saint Peter. As the man who notoriously tried to buy the Holy Spirit, the Magus gave his name to the sin and crime of simony, or trying to buy spiritual preferment - ironically a favourite mode of corruption of the priests of Peter's Church. But perhaps his greatest crime was being John the Baptist's official successor and a sex magician and admirer of the Feminine. In many ways he also seems rather modern. As Tobias Churton remarks in his The Gnostic Philosophy (2003): `... it would seem that Simon was as humourous a figure as the magus Aleister Crowley two millennia later, with a magician's taste for ironic symbology.'
Yet Simon Magus was also hated because he was feared. As Karl Luckert in his landmark Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire (1991) remarks:
As the `father of all heresy' he must now be studied not merely as an opponent, but also a conspicuous competitor of Christ in the early Christian church - possibly even as a potential ally ...
From the fact of their common Egyptian heritage may be derived the very strength of Simon Magus' threat. The danger amounted to the possibility that he could be confused with the Christ figure himself .. 99
Like Jesus and the Magdalene, Simon seemed keen to return the Jews to a form of goddess worship, based on the Egyptian system. Luckert goes on: `[he] saw it as his mission to fix that which ... must have gone wrong; namely, the estrangement of the entire female Tefnut-Mahet-Nut-Isis dimension from the masculine godhead."0°
Presumably, then, Simon's beliefs echoed, at least in part, those of his master, the Baptist - an almost incredible thought when seen against the inevitable background of Christian propaganda. Simon himself wrote in his Great Revelation:
Of the universal Aeons there are two shoots ... one is manifested from above, which is the Great Power, the Universal Mind ordering all things, male, and the other from below, the Great Thought, female, producing all things. Hence pairing with each other, they unite and manifest the Middle Distance ... in this is the Father ... This is He who has stood, stands and will stand, a male-female power in the pre-existing Boundless Power ...101
In the light of Simon's Egyptian-style sexual egalitarianism - he first learned his magic in Alexandria - it is particularly interesting that his great antagonist was Saint Peter, who also hated Mary Magdalene and `all the race of women', and who went on to found the misogynistic Church of Rome.
The true nature of the Baptist's movement - once again, though, perhaps only the chosen inner circle - prompts another thought about young John the Beloved/Lazarus, whose later titles include John the Evangelist and John the Divine (or holy). As the late occult historian Francis X. King noted in his Introduction to Crowley on Christ:
Incidentally, the Hebrew word 'qedesh', applied to St John, which [Aleister] Crowley sarcastically claimed should be translated `the divine' and had been `grossly mistranslated' in the past, is normally translated into English as 'sodomite'.b02
(Even the ritual magician and rabid showman Aleister Crowley, the so-called `Wickedest Man in the World', may usually be quoted with confidence. Although he was said to be many things, most of them physically impossible, he was a shrewd scholar of ancient languages and customs.)
As we saw in a previous chapter, the qedeshim were elaborately cross-dressed and made-up male prostitutes who offered their services to pilgrims at the gates of the great Jerusalem temple, like the female `temple servants'. Although the word does also carry the meaning `holy/divine', clearly the two interpretations must have originated from the same custom. And as young John is associated as Lazarus with his sister the sexual initiatrix, he falls foul of Peter repeatedly in the Gospel of John, and was also perhaps the naked young man in the Mar Saba passages, it is interesting to speculate that he was quedesh in both senses of the word. How Peter must have hated both brother and sister.
However, trouble must have existed well before Peter came on the scene. It is not difficult to imagine the tensions in John's group between the two charismatic, talented and ambitious would-be cult leaders, Jesus and Simon Magus. Indeed, the very fact of Simon's association with the Baptist's movement must have worried and disgusted Christ's own devoted followers as the rivalry between the sects escalated. Perhaps it is no exaggeration to suggest that Jesus' anointing, his becoming a Christ, the chosen one, was stagemanaged to be at least partly very public so that news of it would be sure to reach the Magus. To be called `the Christ' in days when even minor Roman officials were anointed or `christ-ened' into their jobs, is a rather enormous statement of intent - not to mention ego. And far from `aping' Christ, perhaps Christ `aped' Simon Magus, probably the elder of the two and certainly John's favourite - an early role model, perhaps.
Deadly rivals
Jesus Christ may have begun his religious adulthood as one of John's disciples, but he soon became a sneering schismatic. This may seem a radical statement, but incred
ibly, the evidence is there in the New Testament, where we read that Jesus utters the following apparently contradictory statement: `I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist: yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."03 On the one hand, Jesus seems to be saying no one can be greater than John, but on the other the least impressive of Jesus' own followers is greater than him. However, once it is realized that `born of women' does not mean `everyone', as Westerners might suppose today but is an ancient Near-Eastern insult meaning `fatherless', `bastard' (in both the literal and derogatory sense), perhaps `son of a bitch', then the passage makes sense - if a somewhat uncomfortable one. (Its meaning is reinforced by the fact that John's followers, the Mandaeans, use a similar insult of the hated Christ, calling him `Son of a woman'.) Jesus is publicly taunting the Baptist in the worst kind of a way - perhaps from some deep wellspring of personal hurt, for he himself was known as a mamzer, or illegitimate child. On another occasion, when Christ says `No man puts new wine in old bottles"" - apparently an innocuous enough axiom - he may actually have been mocking John's greater age and apparent staleness as a religious teacher, for wine bottles were made of animal skins, similar to those that the Baptist famously wore. In other words, it was impossible for John to teach anything fresh and interesting - the implication being that he, Jesus, could provide just that.
The unthinkable
Why did Leonardo hate the Holy family so much that he risked a heretic's terrible death by incorporating outrageous and blasphemous symbols in his works? Why did he portray little Jesus apparently pulling the ears off the lamb that represented the Baptist, and depict Jesus' limb cutting across its vulnerable neck? And then there is the disciple in the Last Supper who is thrusting the John gesture into Christ's oblivious face as if hissing `Remember John'
Perhaps there is a clue in one of the passages excised from St Mark's Gospel, which resurfaced in the innocent Clement's letter found at Mar Saba. It is the one that seems to indicate the identity of Jesus' female Beloved: `And the sister of the youth whom Jesus loved and his mother and Salome were there, and Jesus did not receive them.'
However, there may well be a second, considerably more significant deduction to be discerned in those three lines. `Salome' is mentioned. Jesus is known to have had a female disciple of that name: indeed in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas she appears in a bizarre little scene in which she and Jesus exchange religious ideas while both lying with some intimacy on her couch.'05 Her name also crops up in the list of female disciples in the New Testament, but only once.
Of course there is another Salome connected with biblical events, although contrary to popular opinion she remains resolutely anonymous in the Gospels. In fact, Herod's step-daughter who dances the dance of the seven veils and demands the Baptist's head is only named in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews - which is strange, for if Josephus knew her identity, the Gospel writers must also have known it. Yet for some reason they not only omit to mention her name, but the redactors (or editors) of the New Testament thought to remove the otherwise innocent enough verse that ended up in Professor Morton Smith's hands at Mar Saba in which she is named as part of Jesus' inner circle, a friend of his mother and the Magdalene. But why was Salome's very identity deemed so potentially disastrous to the Christian cause as to be edited out of the New Testament?
Perhaps a resonance is found in her legendary (but sadly nonbiblical) Dance of the Seven Veils. As Barbara Walker points out, ` ... the Dance of the Seven Veils was an integral part of the sacred drama, depicting the death of the surrogate-king, his descent into the underworld, and his retrieval by the Goddess, who removed one of her seven garments at each of the seven underworld gates.' 106 This association with the sacred seven is repeated in Mary Magdalene's `seven devils', allegedly cast out of her by Jesus - and which the Gospel writers are keen to mention at any given opportunity. But we have seen how they, and the male disciples, had no idea about the significance of either the anointing or the anointer, and so the sacred drama, once again, becomes garbled and dismissively sexist. Because it involves female power, the sacred seven is transmuted into either a strip-tease or possession by demons. Jesus understood, but when did the likes of Saint Peter ever let their Master's wishes get in the way of their own god-making ambitions?
However, the concept of the ritual killing of John begs several key questions, the answers to which, once again, suggest a shocking reversal of what Christians consider good and evil. Was John himself involved to the extent that he knew the nature of his role, and his inevitable end? If so, did he accept this unenviable destiny?
We have seen how scholars now suggest that the biblical scene where the Baptist falls ingratiatingly at Jesus' feet, hailing him as `the Lamb of God' is unlikely to have happened because the two men were known to have been rivals. As the New Testament is essentially propaganda on behalf of the Jesus cult, obviously they would want to misrepresent John as the submissive, inferior sect leader - no matter how dignified and superior he might actually have been. Yet there is another, perhaps equally valid, interpretation.
In this hypothetical scenario John does fall at Christ's feet to acknowledge him as `the one who is to come' - a phrase as ambiguous as our modern equivalent, meaning either the prophesied one or one who is to follow as John's own successor. Of all his thousands of followers, the Baptist singles out Jesus Christ as the one who will carry on his work among both Jews and gentiles, perhaps running the international organization from the old headquarters in Alexandria, in Egypt. He baptizes the younger man to set the seal on the beginning of his mission, knowing that the Magdalene will similarly mark out the moment when the end is nigh by anointing him as Christ. In this scenario perhaps the older man deliberately provokes Herod in some way in order to get himself locked up and ritually slain at the hands of the ruling family, or perhaps Salome simply arranges it all. But then something happens. Something shocking and traumatic.
While in jail, John suddenly seems to have changed his mind about Jesus, sending a message out saying, `Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?'107 Significantly, however, he seems to have been inspired to harbour such doubts by something he had heard about Jesus' actions, for his words are preceded by `Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Jesus, he sent two of his disciples [to ask Jesus] ...'108 It is immediately after this - and in response to it - that Jesus stresses his superiority to the Baptist, saying: `What went ye out into the wilderness to see? ...109 A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and more than a prophet . . .' And it is then that he takes that sly dig at John as noted above, the almost incredible direct insult of `Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist ...' 10 As we have seen, `born of women' was, and is, a well-worn MiddleEastern insult, meaning fatherless, or `bastard' - in both senses of the word, as in the modern British use. With the old prophet in jail, the last sacred king about to be slaughtered, was the successor taking the golden opportunity to insult and demean him? Was Jesus making John the Baptist a laughing stock? We have also seen how Christ gibed about not putting new wine in old bottles - as bottles were made of animal skins such as the Baptist was famously known to wear, this is another crack at his expense. So was John languishing in jail, about to meet his pre-planned demise, with the sudden fatal certainty that he had chosen the wrong successor? As we will see, his chosen successor was very different from Jesus Christ...
There are many other questions, most of them deeply disturbing. What, or whom, did Salome really want John's head for? It seems that the old prophet's death was by no means the end of him, and even his physical remains were to suffer a chequered history.
Grave suspicions
Of course it is enormously difficult to piece together the dramas of 2,000 years ago, but certain aspects of John's death still raise suspicions. He was a political prisoner of great status, yet apparently he was executed on the whim of a stripper who specifically
asked for his head. As beheading was not a common method of execution in Judaea - the Jews tended to stone criminals and outlaws whereas the Romans employed the considerably crueller method of crucifixion - there is a distinct sense of ritual to the Baptist's death. For what purpose, or for whom, did Salome really want John's head?
After John's death, Jesus' mission began in earnest, but as his fame as a healer and exorcist spread, King Herod was afraid that he was possessed by the spirit of John, saying `... John the Baptist was risen from the dead, and that is why miraculous powers are at work in him'."' Bizarrely and shockingly, Herod may have had a point - at least as far as Jesus' own beliefs were concerned. For as biblical scholar Carl Kraeling wrote in the 1950s, `John's detractors used the occasion of his death to develop the suggestion that his disem bodied spirit was serving Jesus as the instrument for the performance of works of black magic, itself no small concession to John's power.' 12
To Christians the very mention of magic is abhorrent. Christ came to sweep away all the blasphemous and futile trappings of the occult, so firmly associated with pagan cults. Yet this interpretation is a modern projection: the early Christians, while of course fulminating against their enemies the pagans, were just as much involved with the occult - perhaps more so, if one considers Jesus' miracles. Outside the cosy world of faith the harsh reality is that the early Christians cast spells in the name of Jesus and that Christ himself was not averse to practices that would certainly earn excommunication from modern fundamentalist groups.
More significantly, the Carpocratian leader Marcus (see the beginning of this chapter) was described by the appalled Bishop Irenaeus as:
The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code Page 13
