Lifelong Odyssey Bears Forbidden Fruit for the Vatican Da Vinci Code Researcher Has Unusual Past of Her Own A kind, unassum- ing military wife with above aver- age offspring may be partly respon- sible for the prem- ise underlying the blockbuster novel.

November 1, 2006 ot long after releas- ing The DaVinci Code, began to field a lot Author Margaret Starbird with a slide of the painting Derelicta in of questions about a the background. subject in which he was no expert. Media outlets the world over N the Alabaster Jar, first published Point for more than 20 years. demanded from him all the in- triguing particulars concerning in 1993, and The Goddess in the Not exactly the background one , the alleged Gospels, which followed in 1998, you’d expect from someone at prostitute who knew – in the recently stopped in the Bay Area Ground Zero of a religious contro- biblical sense, it seems. to discuss the fascinating real-life versy. In the novel, of course, events surrounding the sensation- Starbird was baptized within Brown’s protagonists have to flesh al bestseller. a stone’s throw of that bastion of out these details themselves. Run- She lectured at Dominican warfare studies in New York in ning from the law, they hightail it University in San Rafael and at 1942. After her husband complet- across Europe and eventually end the California Institute for Integral ed two tours of duty in Vietnam, up in a library, reading several Studies in San Francisco. Both he was stationed back at West scholarly works. One such title is schools offer curriculums in theol- Point to teach nuclear engineer- the widely known Holy Blood, Holy ogy and spirituality. ing. Grail, for which Brown would later Now, most people hear the The theologian bore and be sued for copyright violation. name Margaret Starbird and im- raised five children, including two Of the others, two were written by mediately picture some sort of Stanford graduates. One of them a woman from Washington State. retro flower child or a new-age is Kate Starbird, an all-time lead- At her home outside Tacoma, mystic. ing scorer of the women’s basket- this mild-mannered theologian Yet Starbird is the wife of a ball team. Michael Starbird works received a phone call one evening, West Point graduate by that name. for Microsoft in Mountain View. asking for help. Her own father retired from the And of all unlikely places, Margaret Starbird, author of army a major general, and her it was at West Point during the the groundbreaking Woman with grandfather taught history at West continued seventies that Starbird began to As Starbird describes it, reach- money laundering. unravel the Vatican cover-up that ing the end of his talk, the priest The pontiff served for only took the world by storm a few asked the tiny congregation “if 33 days in 1978, and died shortly years ago in Dan Brown’s best- they were ready to receive the after agreeing to allow Italian in- seller. baptism of the Holy Spirit. And vestigators comb through Vatican To hear the mother of five they bowed their heads and he accounts. Evidently the govern- speak, you don’t get the impres- held out his hands and said, ment was searching for illicit sion of a dutiful homemaker. ‘Come, Holy Spirit.’ And all the transfers between organized crime “I think the denial of the bride lights came on.” and the Holy See. The Vatican is the very first heresy,” she asserts That Twilight Zone moment announced that the pope had died on the telephone after the first of would prove prophetic in the of heart disease, then cremated his her two San Francisco appear- years to come. When Starbird body. ances. joined the Emmanuel Community, Even before In God’s Name was It’s a charge that might have the group had adopted the habit published, Starbird knew some- earned her a death sentence in of asking God what he’d like to thing was up with the Catholic the Middle Ages, but she explains share with them each time they Church. In 1980, another member that she is by no means cynical met. Then they would open the of her prayer circle asked every- about Catholicism. “There are randomly to a page and one to do a novena in concert with some wonderful things that aren’t read. her vacation visit to the remains of wrong. It’s just that at the very Sometimes called scriptural Herod’s Temple in Jersualem. heart is what I now call the design roulette, or the “oracular” method As it happened, the last day flaw. It’s that they lost the bride.” of imbibing the word of God, ac- of the Novena fell on Mary Made- Most scholars concur that cording to Starbird, “One of the lene’s feast day, and the next day, Mary Magdalene played a much readings we kept getting over and Starbird says a photo on the front larger role in the development over was from Maccabees - the as- page of the newspaper showed of Christianity than she is given sassination of the high priest and Mt. Saint Helens blowing up back credit. Starbird is one of a hand- the plundering of the temple.” in her home state of Washington. ful who believe she may also have It would not be until 1985 that Saint Helen, Starbird points been married to the Jewish man Starbird and other members of the out, is the mother of Constantine, crucified by the Romans for sedi- circle were able to decipher the the first Christian emperor. Late tion in 33 A.D. meaning of this passage. That’s in life, Helen appears to have set Starbird’s introduction to the when journalist David Yallow off on a grail quest of her own, world of vatican power politics published In God’s Name, a book searching for the cross on which and cover-up began when she was which alleges that Pope John-Paul Jesus had been crucified. She invited to join a Catholic prayer I was murdered in the wake of a never found it. group at West Point called the Em- Vatican bank scandal involving “Oh my God, this is a theoph- manuel Community. ony,” Starbird said during her This devout circle of worship- lecture at CIIS, as she recounted pers sprung up in response to an her thoughts. “This is God telling otherworldly event that took place us there’s something wrong with several years earlier. It seems a the church. It’s imploding here.” visiting priest had come to town In the mid 1980’s, after her to deliver a “Life in the Spirit” husband was transferred to Nash- seminar at the Church of the Most ville and her kids were grown, Holy Trinity, where Starbird had Starbird enrolled in the masters been baptized. theology program at Vanderbilt On the last morning of the University. five-day gathering, West Point Required to write a 15-page and the surrounding communi- paper in one of her first classes, ties were hit by a power outage. she decided to play scriptural Given the exigencies of the situ- roulette again to come up with a ation, only a few people came to topic. That’s when she landed on hear the homily that day. They the passage in Mark that describes lighted candles inside the church. Former Stanford great Kate Starbird. continued this dual male-female missionary relationship must have been Jesus and Mary Magdalene. “Christianity is always trying to tell you that this is something that sprang full-blown from the head of Yahweh,” Starbird ex- plains. “But actually it’s a con- tinuum of all the enlightenment and revelations over centuries. The old wine is being poured into new wine skins for the new age to make it relevant again. The vessel in the first century was to have been a partnership model and we lost it by accident.” DaVinci Code expert Margaret Starbird takes a question from the audience at a guest appearance hosted by the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS). For information about upcoming events, visit their website at www.ciis.edu. Rosemary Regello the woman who cracks open an of the bible as “Christian sisters”, For more info on the author and her alabaster jar full of expensive per- Starbird notes there’s no am- books, visit margaretstarbird.net. fume and anoints Jesus. bivalence in the the original Greek Starbird goes into some detail - that the correct term is sister- For more on the history surrounding about this interesting event when wives. the premise of The DaVinci Code, she speaks, noting that of only She adds that in the neolithic reade our story on Mary Magdalene four or five incidents communi- traditions that preceded Judaism in the September 2006 issue. cated in all four canonical gospels, and Christianity, all the goddesses this is one of them. were referred to as sister-wives She says the ritual of anointing of the gods. In particular, the dates back to the Egyptian legend Song of Songs (from the bible) is of Isis and Osiris. Even that tale an adaptation of those mytholo- Copyright 2006 is a rehash of myths that preceded gies. the anointment ritual in the The City Edition of San Francisco it, including the story of Inana and New Testament, Starbird asserts, www.thecityedition.com Dumuzu, Ishtar and Talmud, and comes straight out of ancient his- so on all the way back to 7000 B.C. tory from the time of the goddess The historic precedents and cultures. highlighting of the alabaster jar Interestingly, Jesus orders all incident in the gospels eventu- the male apostles to remember ally led Starbird to the realization the alabaster incident in the name that Jesus and Magdalene may of the woman who has anointed have been married. While there him. is no clear indication that this was Further bolstering her mar- the case, Starbird cites Hebrew riage theory, Starbird points to an laws and taboos of the time about unrelated passage of scripture, remaining single and the fact that where the apostle Peter is said to there was no word for bachelor. have a mother-in-law. Catholic She also cites St. Paul’s let- tradition has long maintained that ters, written in the fifties or sixties each of the apostles were celibate. A.D., before any of the gospels, Starbird believes this asser- where he states that all the male tion is erroneous and that all the apostles were sent out by Jesus in apostles were married and shared the company of their sister-wives. preaching duties with their wives. While the term is translated St. Paul indicates as much in his in the St. James English version letters. Furthermore, the model for