In a year that sees the opening of yet another Hollywood movie that depicts Mary Magdalene, I would like to reflect on a bit of a disturbing aspect of what we have seen so far about her and ask the question was Mary Magdalene just a vessel for the Holy Blood?
The Biggest Secret?
The Da Vinci Code book and film were groundbreaking. Their huge popularity showed that the general public has an appetite for moving beyond the church narrative of Mary Magdalene and Jesus to finding out the truth.
Yet you could come away from the film and the novel thinking that the big secret that the church was trying to hide is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children and there was a bloodline of descendants. This was at least a change from Mary Magdalene being associated with prostitution. She was being placed back into her seemingly rightful position as Jesus’ wife and the bearer of his children.
The book was partially based on the blockbuster non-fiction book of the 1980s Holy Blood Holy Grail. Whether either project had intended this, you could be left with an impression of Mary Magdalene as just a vessel. In fact, in The Da Vinci Code, Mary Magdalene is called, ‘the Holy Vessel’. She is likened to the Holy Grail at times – the chalice that held the holy blood. This places her womb as a receptacle for the blood of Jesus, meaning his child, and emphasises that this is why she is important.
This is a progress, I guess, as it has moved Mary Magdalene from the status of sinner to that of wife and mother. And yes, that is something to celebrate, but it could also be seen as hiding other demeaning attitudes which I will discuss. It is also totally at odds with the vision of Mary Magdalene that I witnessed back in 2001.
The status of motherhood in today’s society
Bringing Mary Magdalene’s status up to mother and vessel for a Holy Baby and seeing that as the ultimate elevation does tie in with social attitudes that still prevail that say that no matter what a woman does, her ultimate purpose is to be a mother.
Although motherhood is, of course, a state that is highly important that often goes unrewarded in society, to say that it is the only ‘purpose’ of a woman is an insult to mothers and all women.
This is a highly complex issue and I do not want to go into it fully in this article. Suffice to say that when we honour a woman just because she is the oven that the bun goes into, we do women a disservice. We are saying that the only purpose for someone as a human being is that they can reproduce and take care of another human being.
The Oven for the Bun
I certainly witnessed whilst working on labour wards that women are suddenly given care and attention that they have probably never received before but ultimately it is not about them and who they are but their ability to bring another person into the world which really is out of their conscious control. A woman cannot consciously force herself to conceive as the scores of infertile people in the world can corroborate.
So to say that motherhood is the ultimate purpose for women is to actually honour something that is coming through them, not from their conscious thoughts. We are actually saying that they do not matter as a person, just this process of conception that is not under their conscious control. (The job of raising children is another matter – I am discussing the act of becoming a mother.)
By saying Mary Magdalene is the grail and vessel that receives the Holy Blood we reduce her to being the oven for the bun. It seems to me like yet another taming of a woman to conform to what is expected in the lens of the society that we have now.
If you want any proof of this you only have to look at the reams of press given to the status of Jennifer Aniston’s womb. It seems that no matter what success a woman has, she can only be truly acceptable if she has a child. High Profile women such as Jennifer Aniston and Kylie Minogue who do not have children seem to provoke nervous twitching from many quarters of society.
A lost feminine power
What I saw in my visions of Mary Magdalene in 2001 was a woman like nobody I have ever met because such a woman would not be possible now. She was a learned person but not in the way we would recognise because she had knowledge of a nature that existed before science and spirituality split off from each other – when it was just knowledge of the universe.
The closest we have to this sort of knowledge is what we call sacred geometry but the very fact that we have to add the term ‘sacred’ to it shows just how far removed we are from the unity of knowledge that used to exist. It used to be just knowledge: it didn’t need the ‘sacred’ title.
She also combined the science and spiritual, the male and female and an inner power in a way that women today would find difficult to embody. This is because we have a lot of the sense of feminine power in our society. For many years now, in Western culture, feminine power has been extinguished to the point where most people don’t even know what that is.
So when we see female empowerment in our culture today it is when a woman takes on what has traditionally been a man’s role – fighting for example as seen in the film Kick-Ass.
This is what passes today as female empowerment but it is not necessarily an expression of feminine power. That is a muscle that is so disused in many Western societies that it is just unfamiliar. It is still present in some other societies around the world and you can see it if you witness women elders of tribes being honoured for their wisdom.
This lack of feminine power hurts both men and women – when men are told that being emotional or vulnerable is weak, they end up suppressing their emotions. This could be a factor in the higher suicide rates in young men.
What I saw of Mary Magdalene was that she didn’t just bring her womb to the table but the whole person. She was powerful and learned in her own right. The research I have done and guidance I have been given in the terms of visions has led me to a conclusion as to who she might have been as a historical figure. If you would like to see my full insights on this check out The Magdalene Mystery School.
Was Mary Magdalene a teacher in her own right?
We see glimpses of what I think is the real Mary Magdalene in what is known as The Gnostic Gospels. The Gospel of Phillip and indeed the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, have sections that suggest that Mary Magdalene has special knowledge given to her by Jesus, something that caused protests from the other disciples.
There are also many traditions around the world that say that Mary Magdalene was a teacher – one of the most popular ones is that she ended up in France. Usually, this assumes that she was teaching the information that Jesus had passed on to her and this could well be. But there is a hint in Luke’s gospel that she could have had her own independent life as it says that she was one of a group of women who were funding Jesus’ ministry.
It is still taboo in our society to think of a woman as independent with her own opinions today. I think this sketch puts this across rather well.
Hence when we think of Mary Magdalene we are still seeing her through our lens which is that ultimately a woman’s purpose is motherhood.
Conclusions and visions for the future
In my visions, Mary Magdalene was both a mother and a person in her own right with her own ideas. Wouldn’t it be radical if we saw Mary Magdalene like this today? Maybe with the shifts in society happening at the moment, we may even start to see all woman in this way: as people in their own right whether married or not, mothers or not. We may, at last, recognise women as more than just vessels for another’s teaching or bloodline and see Mary Magdalene in a new light.
Sometimes other dimensions can appear quite dramatically into this one. This time, I am going to discuss the time I woke up to see an alien in my bedroom.
The Perfect Life?
Back in early 2002, my life was very different to how it is now. I lived in a smart area of the UK just outside of London, I was working as a doctor, my husband was a doctor; he had just acquired a sports car and we had our own townhouse by the canal.
From the outside, we looked like the perfect, successful young couple. But the cracks had long been appearing. Ironically it was the initial success of the marriage I had entered into in 1995 that had given me the safe place to grow and I ended up changing dramatically. My spiritual growth had accelerated to the point that my husband no longer understood me and I was also deeply unhappy in a medical job that reflected the reductionist, fear-based paradigm.
Little did I know that this dissatisfaction at my life was part of a greater perspective orchestrated by other levels of consciousness that, even now, I still don’t fully understand. But I guess this is why, in around February 2002, I awoke to find an alien in my bedroom.
The Night Visitor
I was sleeping in bed with my husband and around 2-3am I awoke to find I was sleeping on my right side which was unusual and had the distinct sensation that someone was rummaging around in my back! I had the strange sensation of there being fingers actually inside my back which was hot but I wouldn’t say I was burning.
And in front of me was a strange sight. I can only seem to describe it as a blue blob that had a swirling within it. It looked to me almost like a water cooler bottle on its side. And it was edging, amoeba-like, out of the door. One of my immediate thoughts was that I didn’t understand why it had to use the door as it was in a different dimension and surely the door did not exist in that one.
The other was, I must admit, a bit of fear. At the time, I had just starting channelling and the beings coming through me said that their collective name was Angelis. So inwardly I pleaded, “help me, Angelis”. But then a thought which felt intrusive as if from outside myself said, “how do you know this isn’t Angelis?” I realised that I didn’t know.
I tried to wake up my husband to see it, but I could not rouse him. I knew it was not meant to be – that he was not meant to see it. So I relaxed a bit watching the thing move away.
The dimensional overlay
And the rest of the room was in a sort of eerie light. I could see overlays of other dimensions onto this one. I realised the futility of what we think is property ownership. We don’t really own anything in 3-D – there are many dimensions above this one that makes all that seem so irrelevant.
For the rest of the night, my consciousness seemed to dance around the planet. I went anywhere a thought would take me. I flew over the countryside of England looking at green fields and in the state that I was in, I saw different aliens just wandering around.
There are many different types that exist in the different octaves of dimensions all around us. But we don’t normally perceive them.
I wondered if they really did land on The White House lawn, so suddenly my consciousness saw the deals done behind our back between aliens and USA government agencies.
At one point, I went to visit my friend in her flat in London and her emotional body appeared like a matrix of intersection points – some seemingly thicker than other points. I intuitively knew what the emotions were that were stuck there and helped to release them.
Journeys in consciousness
For much of the rest of the night, I had more explorations in consciousness – most of which I cannot remember. At one point I was in the jungles of Central America and being shown that many more pyramids are covered by vegetation and just waiting to be discovered.
This last revelation may be already known to you but at the time a) this wasn’t often discussed if at all and b) it wasn’t something that I knew about from my education so far. A week or so later I saw confirmation of this in an article in New Scientist. In fact, at the time of writing a news story is breaking that even more extensive Mayan ruins have been found in Guatemala.
We are all from Krypton
I also got a feeling that I understood how to move my consciousness in order to do certain feats, even some we normally associate with the comic character Superman! Have you ever seen the sections of the Superman films when other visitors from the planet Krypton discover their powers here on Earth? They can fly and they can stop a bullet. Well, these are all things we can do too!
Our bodies are made up of information and consciousness – we know this from physics. At the macro level we think we are solid but deep into the atom we are ’empty space’. What I realised in the altered state was that we can actually move this consciousness any way we want. Most of us are not at the perspective to be able to do this but some people have developed themselves enough to be able to manipulate reality, although it takes a lot of practice.
That day I realised it is possible to manipulate consciousness so that we can fly. Or even will the atoms in your own hand to come together so strongly you can stop a ‘speeding bullet’.
Implanted for Blast Off
As for the hands in my back. I somehow knew I had been implanted with a geometry of consciousness that was a triangle or pyramid. I had travelled to ancient pyramids throughout the night. Later that day, I looked up a passage in the book by Barbara Marciniak, Bringers of the Dawn that discusses how we may start to be implanted with shapes including the triangle and it felt so true to me.
As you may or may not know, my life changed dramatically after that. You could say that I stepped out of the box that I had been living in so far. I wonder, but cannot know for certain, if I was somehow being prepared for the changes about to happen in my life.
If so, it is an amazing reminder of just how orchestrated our lives are at some level. I did not call in a being or even consciously wish for the changes. But somewhere in the universe, it was decided that there would be an ‘alien’ in my bedroom.
You probably can’t help but notice that in the last decade or so there has been a rise in what is called The Digital Nomad. This is when a person has a lifestyle that is location independent. People work from a laptop whilst travelling the world.
It is all about freedom and I have indeed geared my own life towards location independence myself. I have also been observing others who are living the digital nomad lifestyle and have come to understand a few things in relation to The Genius Groove so in this article we shall look at Digital Nomad vs The Genius Groove.
1. Travel in of itself is not your Genius Groove.
First, let’s get this out of the way. Travel can be wonderful; I would never tell anyone not to travel. It is one of the best ways to really transform who you are as you experience different cultures. This is especially true if you never left your country of origin whilst you were a child. So travelling can be a form of personal development in itself.
Some people thrive on constant travel. But do I think travel of itself is a Genius Groove? No, I don’t. The Genius Groove is about bringing through your unique creativity and although aspects of travelling constantly may be very creative, as an activity, travelling in of itself probably doesn’t lead to much creativity.
It could enable something creative – maybe you write better on a beach in Bali or love to compose music on a plane, but I don’t think the act of travelling is a person’s main Genius Groove, although it is very important. You are not creating, as such, just by moving your physical body from one place to another.
2. The Constant Search vs The Genius Groove.
It is said that to perfect any skill you need at least 10,000 hours of practice. I have discussed in the book The Genius Groove at length of how those who feel connected to the field in a particular activity are more likely to actually put in those hours.
To really be in your Genius Groove is actually quite focused. From having a wide range of activities suddenly someone may do one or two activities a day. And they are happy to be that way because they have found their joy. It is this that keeps people going even when the going gets tough.
But what I have sometimes witnessed of digital nomadism is the opposite – a constant experimenting with many different activities. And while that is absolutely wonderful and a type of creativity in itself, I get the sense that the people doing this are actually searching for a connection to something.
So they are trying on lots of hats to see what will fit, which is great and it is so wonderful that they can do this but it is not The Genius Groove. Being in The Genus Groove is often about practising a few activities for long periods of time. By doing this, the connection builds up to the point where the activity seems effortless.
I know in my own life, initially when I did talks I would feel a flutter of excitement and nervousness. Now I know that when I get talking – something kicks in and I am in the zone. It is through sheer years of practice and focus that my connection to the field has becomes so strong that I know I can just speak and something will come.
That deep practice for years to hone my art is the opposite of the experimentation that can accompany digital nomadism. Again there is nothing wrong with it at all – I am simply saying that this is not necessarily the same as being in your Genius Groove.
A Groovy Nomad?
So is there a way that you can be in your Genius Groove and be a Digital Nomad? Of course, you can be location independent and have a Genius Groove that you can do on the road and that pays money enough to sustain this lifestyle – even if that means a few hundred dollars a month because you’re living in Bangkok.
But just because someone is a digital nomad, it does not mean they have found nirvana and know who they truly are. Also just because someone is in their Genius Groove and remain close to their collection of grand pianos because this is where they feel joy, it doesn’t make them less than someone who travels.
Our connection to the universe occurs from within our own souls and that can happen from anywhere in the world (or universe). Our spirituality is truly location independent! So the digital nomad trend, although fantastic, is also a stepping stone for us to transition to a life where everybody is in their creativity and Genius Groove and living the way they want to.
People often say that The truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. When it comes to the Holy Grail, it is the subject of much fascination. Is it a cup used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper? Is it is a stone as some traditions assert or could it even be a person with Royal Blood?
The concept of the Holy Grail has inspired many writers and since the success of the book, The Da Vinci Code, interest in subjects such as The Holy Grail, Mary Magdalene and even the Cathars have soared.
But there is a story that has not reached the headlines and has been hidden away in a sleepy corner of England, pretty much ignored. It is the story of how a heretical sect seems to have escaped persecution in France and established itself a few miles north of London.
They carried with them an object of veneration and founded their order upon this relic. What was this object and its significance? Could this be the object secreted from France after the sect was persecuted? If so we have to ask the question – Is the Holy Grail Hidden in Hertfordshire?
The History of Ashridge
My interest in the story began around 2001 when I had just moved to the town of Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire UK. At the time I was still working as a medical GP. I also had acquired a dog that year which led me to go for long walks in the National Trust Land which lies just behind Berkhamsted called Ashridge Estate and today it is mainly famous for its business school.
Ashridge House. Image: wikicommons
So I got to know the local landscape including the business school which is on the site of much older settlements going way back to 1283 when a monastery was built on the site. When King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, this became the home of the young Princess Elizabeth before she was announced as the Queen. It then passed into the hands of aristocratic families before becoming a business school in the 20th century.
The house is rarely opened to the public but I have visited under special circumstances. I have even been underneath the house to the well that the monks used. It is the monastery and the order that founded it which is of interest to us in this article as they may hold the key to a mystery that has been plaguing people for some generations; what was removed by the Cathars at the siege of Montsegur?
The Cathar Connection
To understand why this is a mystery we need to back up a bit to explain who the Cathars were and how they can be linked to Ashridge. In Southern France in the 12th Century, a sect of Christianity arose that the church would go on to call heretical and wipe out completely. They are known today as the Cathars. By a modern mystic’s standards, the Cathar ideas that remain with us are very appealing.
They believed in living humbly and focusing instead on direct spiritual experiences. Some of the sect lived a life of chastity and poverty. They were known as ‘Perfect’ people or Bonhommes – good men. Obviously, this direct access to spiritual realms was threatening to the power of the church and they were systematically wiped out in one of the worse genocides in history.
Some Cathars held out for months in a stronghold fortress on the top of a hill called Montsegur. After a while, their supplies would have become depleted and they supposedly gave themselves in and perished in the fire but with little struggle in 1244. A persistent mystery is that members of the sect supposedly scaled the perilous fortress and hill to escape with something.
We don’t know if it happened and what the object was, but it has sparked speculation ever since. Some say it is the Holy Grail which may be a cup but may be the blood of Christ. This could be an actual vial of blood or a person who was a member of the bloodline of Christ. We don’t know for sure if it happened or even what the Holy Grail was supposed to be.
Castle at Montsegur. Image: wikicommons
The Bonhommes
Whilst I lived in Berkhamsted, I came to hear about the monastery originally at Ashridge and started to research it. That’s when I discovered that a few years after the Cathars gave themselves up in Montsegur two monasteries were established with the order of Bonhommes and one of them was at Ashridge. Apparently, they believed that they had a sample of the blood of Christ which some would call The Holy Grail.
It is highly unlikely that whatever relic they had was actually the blood of the man, Jesus Christ. It may not even have been blood which would have been difficult to store. As you probably know, having a relic in the Middle Ages was big business and indeed a local resident of a nearby village uncovered a load of wall paintings in their house dating back to the time when it was used as a rest for Pilgrims coming to Ashridge to see the supposed Blood of Christ.
But even without a genuine vial of the Blood of Christ, we still are left with the fact that a mysterious order of Bonhommes established two monasteries in England shortly after the Bonhommes were wiped out in France. They had support from members of the Royal family who may have had some Cathar connections and were therefore possibly sympathetic.
In one of the few book written about the history of Ashridge called A Prospect of Ashridge (Phillimore 1980), Douglas Coult disagrees that the Bonhommes of Ashridge have anything to do with the Cathars in the south of France. However, he gives no explanation as to who they were, why there were only two orders in England and why they were called Bonhommes if they were not French Cathars.
Just wild speculation?
It is entirely possible that the during the persecution of Cathars in France in the 1200s, members of the sect who remained, who may have even possessed whatever it was that was smuggled out of Montsegur, were able to come to England under Royal patronage to set up a monastery in the 1280s. We do know that a vial of supposed holy blood was kept by the monastery at some point – whether this was THE object or not we don’t know.
It is also plausible that these were the same Good Men or Bonhommes that originated from the South of France in the Cathar community. The dates fit for a group of the order to flee the persecution and begin again in England.
If we believe that whatever was smuggled out of Monstegur was indeed an object known as the Holy Grail as many a speculative theory has suggested then it is possible that the Holy Grail is hidden somewhere in Hertfordshire.
Even without the Holy Grail aspect, it was fascinating to live so close to an aspect of the Cathar story that few know about. Many people focus on France but the Ashridge Bonhommes may have opened another chapter in the Cathar story.
Like with many other monasteries, this too was dissolved by King Henry VIII which ended the Order of the Bonhommes. Who knows – whatever it was that they were protecting could be still there, perhaps buried and hidden in Hertfordshire!
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