Lynn Picknett - The Secret History of Lucifer - And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code

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.

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 incredibly, 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.