Margaret Starbird, author of the The Goddess in the Gospels (1998) speaks about the process of her discovery of the lost goddess in Christianity. Her ideas are covered at www.awakenedwoman.com by interviewer Sarada. In the interview she shares the following insights that I think might bear some light on the Goddess issue in Christianity today.

“In ‘The Goddess in the Gospels’ you refer to synchronicities around the current pope, John Paul II, naming him as the pope who presides over the time of the re-emergence of the Goddess, and predicting that he could re-instate the feminine in the Catholic Church. Since you wrote this in 1998, do you still feel that he will do this?”

“Well, he brought the black Madonna image from Czestochowa, the patroness of Poland, in 1978. Everyone started looking for the goddess like crazy after that. What made me sad though, is that they all went searching outside of Christianity for Her, into the ancient past for the images of the dark goddess, Isis and others, when She was right there in the scriptures all the time.”

The following is Margaret’s description of The Black Madonna from The Goddess in the Gospels.

“The Black Madonna is a mighty patroness! But do we have any inkling of the full scope of her reality? In southern France alone there are several hundred Black Madonna shrines where she is honored as the Virgin Mary with her son Jesus on her lap. But the image of the beautiful dark mother is much older and far deeper than medieval Christian interpretations and traditions reflected in these statues. The image of the dark feminine goes back to the ancient Neolithic representations of Earth as the Great Mother, the eternal ‘vessel’ or ‘Grail.’

“Like the face of Helen that ‘launched a thousand ships,’ it was the desecrated face of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa that launched my quest for the lost Grail. In researching the image of the Black Madonna and her ancient renderings in pagan myth and artifacts, I encountered the ancient lore of the Triple Goddess as well as the neglected and forgotten Bride and the cult and mythology of the Sacred Marriage. Taken together, these have become the cornerstone of my life—the partnership mandala urging me to seek balance at every level of my experience.

“But John Paul doesn’t understand all this. The synchronicity that I see relates to an old prophecy that is well known in Catholic and Irish Celtic circles. One hundred and sixteen papacies are written about, with each one’s significance. The next to the last one, John Paul II’s, is referred to as “the eclipse of the Sun.” Thinking that the Sun/Son of the church might be eclipsed, church fathers worried that the feminine, the moon, would eclipse the Sun/Son, the masculine. What they don’t realize is that the eclipse of the sun symbolizes the conjunctional marriage, the sun and moon coming together—it’s so beautiful, a partnership model. So, even though John Paul might not be aware of the importance, he has presided over this period of awakening.”

Sarada mentions the rising goddess culture in the United States, with many women looking to the ancient past for goddess archetypes. Metaphysical beliefs systems include the feminine (Goddess) as well.

“Yes, wouldn’t it have been easier from the beginning, in grade school if they’d just taught us that Jesus had a wife! Paul’s letters are the earliest, the first. He says that the apostles traveled with their ‘sister wives.’ Jesus sent out disciples in pairs. We with our Christian overlay think of pairs of men, but I think that he was sending out pairs of men and women, couples, as models of the way it should be. Think of Noah’s Ark for example. He was to collect pairs of animals, not pairs of males!”

“The model of the sacred union, the heiros gamos, is the model for Life. I believe that Jesus was trying to incorporate that model.” “Was Mary Magdalene the feminine counterpart of Jesus, the feminine side of God?” Sarada, the interviewer, asks. “Yes, they become counselors, chaplains, fulfill all sorts of functions. A hundred different ways they find to serve. Once a priest, always a priest—it’s a calling. They just cannot officiate at the mass. Of course they do say mass, for their own families and friends at home. It’s like the early Church, breaking bread together, meeting in people’s homes. Nuns say mass as well. Christ wouldn’t have minded at all. The main point though is the blood royal, the sang raal, the Holy Grail. The chalice, the cup of blood, is the ancient symbol of the womb, the feminine. If they would just restore the Bride to the Bridegroom, everybody could live happily ever after. Even in the fairy tales, the lost feminine is expressed. The prince is always longing for her, searching for the lost bride. In the book of Revelations they speak of the nuptials of the Bride. There are countless references to the wedding feast, the Bride and Bridegroom, in the New Testament.”

“It’s hard to change your software. Christian women really want to know this. To give them a sense of their own being. Someone did a job on us, marginalized us. They stole Magdalene’s voice and called her a prostitute. The scripture speaks of her as having “seven devils.” Really, she could have been manic-depressive. But the important thing is that she represented her oppressed people. They were an occupied territory, an oppressed people, and women were subject to rape. No wonder she was sick, her whole nation was sick.”

Stephan Hoeller in The Feminine And The Multi-Centered God Image (1989)shares with us that, “Archetypes, on the other hand, behave very much as gods and goddesses might be expected to behave, and it must be remembered that many of these archetypal images are female. In this way the goddesses of the soul have reentered the arena of contemporary interest. Their triumphal march, initiated by Jung and acclaimed by mythologists such as Kerényi, Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, is taking place before our eyes.”

Continuing, he says, “Some may ask if it is realistic to expect people who were nurtured by the Christian myth to shift allegiance to the deities of Homer and Xenophanes. Yet many early Christians, especially those of the Gnostic variety, saw no contradiction in recognizing the gods and goddesses as carriers of valid imagery and power. The Church Fathers described how Alexandrian Gnostics carried the statue of Persephone in procession from an underground crypt to their church on the eve of the Epiphany. Even orthodox Christians accepted the form of Bacchus as a legitimate disguise for Christ. To this day, Catholicism is chastised by Protestants for worshipping Mary as a pagan goddess, and it can be argued that early Christianity represented an attempt to substitute a sacred polyarchy for the tyranny of the Old Testament God. We must also remember that the Kabbalah (called “Jewish Gnosticism” by Gershom Scholem) possesses a polytheistic myth in its ten sephiroth, at least three of which qualify as goddesses by any reasonable standard.

He believes that “the discovery and assimilation of early heterodox Christian scriptures (such as the Nag Hammadi library) will also facilitate the revival of goddess figures within a new Gnostic Christian mythos. Goddesses such as Barbelo and Sophia, demigoddesses like Eve, Zoe and Norea, and heroines such as Mary Magdalene are emerging from exile and are awaiting reincorporation into Christian scriptures and liturgy. Things have never looked so good for a recovery of our polytheistic heritage and of our beautiful and mighty goddesses of old. One even feels that Christ, the incarnate paradigm of the Fullness, would be pleased by the coming of a new polytheism.”

Warning us, Stephan Hoeller says, “Aeschylus, in his tragedy Aetnae, writes of Talia, daughter of Hephaestus. Having received the amorous attentions of Zeus, this divine maiden was persecuted by Zeus’ divine consort, Hera. To save her from harm Zeus hid Talia in the depths of the earth, where she gave birth to two sons, the Palikes, who to this day are responsible for emitting destructive streams of volcanic fire into this world. Marie-Louise von Franz reminds us that if we forget the goddesses and gods they will burst forth from the depths of the unconscious in destructive ways.”

He concludes by saying, “Our attachment to the monotheistic god image has caused us to repress many splendid archetypal deities. The wholeness, not only of our souls but of the world, requires us to invite these numinous beings to take their places in our religious and cultural lives. It would be best if in doing this we could refrain from trying to evoke a monotheistic feminine deity fashioned in the image of Jehovah, our long-time afflictor. Nietzsche’s Olympians exclaim in Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Is not just this godlike, that there are gods but no God?” To which we may add, “and that there are goddesses, but no Goddess!”