The Magdalene Version

The Magdalene Version:

Secret Wisdom from a Gnostic Mystery School

Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Part One: Essenes and Gnostics

1. Alariel

2. The Essene and Gnostic Heritage

3. Yianna and the Essenes

4. Lyn

5. Sara and the Crystal

6. The Essene Healing Skills Perfected by Jeshua

7. Joseph as the Connecting Thread

8. A Turning Point

9. The Identity of Mary Magdalene

10. The Gnostic World

11. Church and Mystery School

12. The Existence of Secret Teachings

Part Two: The Secret Teachings of Mary Magdalene

13. The Inner Structure of Reality

14. The Sacred Universe

15. The Journey of the Soul

16. The Nature of Salvation

17. The Way

18. Balance and Harmony

19. Truth and Freedom

20. Oneness and the All

21. Key Questions and Answers

22. Parallels with the Gospel of Thomas

23. The Final Farewell

Part Three: The Sacred Earth

24. The Web of Life

Part Four: Mary Magdalene in Perspective

25. A Woman of Mystery

26. A Spiritual Partnership

27. The Philosophy of Mary Magdalene

28. Summation: The Lady Magdalene

Part Five: East and West

29. The Coming Together of East and West

30. The Way of Oneness

Part Six: The Old and the New

31. The Emergence of Gnostic Zen

32: The Real Voice of Mary Magdalene

Part Seven: Transition and Beyond

33. Karma in a Time of Transition

34. Truth and Transition

35. The Totality of Being

Part Eight: The Essene Soul Family

36. A Doorway to the Infinite

37. A Time for Gathering

38. The Trilogy Emerges

39. Relationship Charts

Part Nine: Conclusion

40. The Continuing Journey

41. The Song of Ascension

42. Epilogue: On Faith in the Heart

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Feedback from Readers

Other Books by Stuart Wilson and Joanna Prentis

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One Energy and Consciousness in all that is and all existence as one Web of Life.

The Way of Light quoted by Alariel in Beyond Limitations.

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Part One: Essenes and Gnostics

The teachings of Mary Magdalene were the culmination of the whole arc of Essene and Gnostic development.

Alariel in Chapter 29

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1. Alariel

We have been writing these books very much on the basis of our inner guidance and have learned to trust that guidance over the years. When Joanna and I were working on our first book, The Essenes: Children of the Light, we focused entirely on the past-life evidence, and although that evidence opened a window on the world in Israel 2,000 years ago, it did not give us access to all the information we wanted. Working within the framework of past-life research, there will always be areas which you cannot access simply because you are unable to find the right people in the right place at the right time. For example, it might seem to some people that anyone who had a life 2,000 years ago in Israel might be a useful source of information on the group around Jeshua, but a very conservative Pharisee living at that time may have regarded Jeshua as a dangerous radical who was undermining the Judaic tradition!

Note: We have used the name Jeshua throughout this book as it has not been proved that he was ever called Jesus during his own lifetime whereas the evidence for him being called Jeshua or Yeshua is substantial. We have also used BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era) as being more universally acceptable than BC and AD.

When Joanna and I got as far as investigating past-life experiences in Atlantis, we were beginning to move into new and more challenging areas. Part of that research focused on my life as an architect on Atlantis called Anquel, and his story is told in depth in our book Atlantis and the New Consciousness. We were surprised and excited when our inner guidance told us that Anquel had found a most interesting source of information. This source would be difficult to access, and our best chance would be to ask Anquel a question which we knew he would be unable to answer.

This was an unusual piece of guidance, but we decided to follow it and starting casting about in our minds for a suitable question to ask. We already knew that Anquel had an interest in a slow meditational form of movement, and this sounded to us something like an Atlantean form of Tai Chi. Taking this as our starting point, we then constructed a question along the lines that our guidance had suggested and put this to Anquel

Joanna: We are interested in the slow meditational form of movement that you mentioned. There is a group of people called the Essenes who live many thousands of years in the future from your time. We understand that the Essenes have a form of meditational movement and wonder if you could research this for us.

Anquel: I have never heard of these people, and if they exist in the future, I would have no way of researching this information by conventional means. However, I do have an angelic source who might be able to help. I will ask him to speak to you directly.

Comment by Stuart: There followed a long pause, and Joanna sensed that a different energy was starting to focus through me. Then the communication began again: This is Alariel, speaking for a group of twelve angels who work with the Order of Melchizedek . . .

Once the communication had been established, we were able to dialogue freely with Alariel although he made it clear that he was not an omniscient source—indeed, he denied the existence of such a source anywhere in the universe. He told us he had regular contact with archangels, and they worked closely with the Elohim, the highest level of Beings who could be regarded as personalized to any degree—beyond the Elohim, he said there was only the totally transpersonal Energy and Consciousness of Father-Mother God. Even the Elohim, he told us, do not claim to be omniscient and for a very simple reason. In star systems where there is free will, the unexpected is always happening, and if you are unable to predict these outcomes, you cannot possibly be omniscient! Alariel told us that the very idea of omniscience is a strange and illogical human invention.

Alariel was also clear about the questions that he would not answer. When Joanna asked him about questions he might be forbidden to answer, this was his reply.

Alariel: There are some questions that we choose not to answer, and these come into three categories:

1.There are Words of Power which give access to control frequencies in the angelic world. We obviously would not reveal these.

2.There is information which forms part of the research which other groups on Earth are well advanced on, and will soon reveal: we would not wish to ‘steal their thunder.’

3.And finally there are concepts so far beyond your present understanding that they would disorient you and cause you distress. It is not a kindness to reveal this type on information, and we will not do so.

Having said that, there is still a vast amount of information for you to explore.

We did not realize it at the time, but this last sentence understated the situation quite dramatically. When we went on later to ask Alariel one big question—How do we create our own reality?—a whole book emerged from that single question! (It was published as our third book, Beyond Limitations: The Power of Conscious Co- Creation.) However, even in our second book, Power of the Magdalene, Alariel’s involvement changed and eventually entirely transformed our work. As we continued to explore this area, we discovered that many things were simply not clear to the people on the ground who were going through their lives in Israel from day to day.

For example, even if we had asked our main contact in our first book—the Essene elder Daniel Benezra—he might not have been able to give us the answers we wanted. If we had asked Daniel how many female disciples of Jeshua there were, he might simply not have known or might have answered, Oh, many or Quite a few. and this would not have advanced our research very much. But when we asked Alariel about this, what we got was a precise answer that transformed our knowledge of discipleship at that time.

Alariel: It’s important to understand that the discipleship system that Jeshua set up was designed to mirror the greater symbolism of the universe. The balance of Father-Mother God was mirrored in a balance of male and female disciples, so there were six circles of twelve, making seventy-two male disciples, and six circles of twelve, making seventy-two female disciples, a total of 144 disciples in all.

Comment by Stuart: Of course, Alariel did not stop there, and he gave us a vast amount of information on the female disciples, especially the first circle of twelve which contained some remarkably advanced Initiates like Mother Mary (Mary Anna) and Mary Magdalene.

Our relationship with Alariel changed and evolved over time, and gradually through this contact we came to see him as a channeling source of remarkable depth and clarity. Some of the information we received surprised us, and much of it stretched our imagination and challenged us to expand our awareness. Our dialogues with Alariel transformed our work, and his insight and knowledge gave our research a depth which a past- life process alone could not have provided. And these dialogues have taken us on a journey that has opened up a window onto a vital and fascinating time in history—a journey in which we now invite you to share.

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2. The Essene and Gnostic Heritage

Despite a rapidly growing literature, the Gnostics remain strangely enigmatic. Though it is widely assumed that Gnosticism was an exclusively Christian movement, there is now mounting evidence that many of the most active gnostic groups traced their origins back to much earlier roots. Some of the main strands of Gnostic thought can be found in Judaism before the birth of Jeshua, but other elements go back to Persian and Zoroastrian traditions—and perhaps even earlier to ancient Babylon. Far from being simply a heretical offshoot of Christianity, Gnosticism seems to be emerging as a quite separate movement with strong pre-Christian roots.

There is also a widely held view that Gnosticism was centralized. In fact, there was never a single, universally accepted and orthodox Gnosticism but a whole range of Gnostic possibilities. Some scholars (including J.J. Hurtak) talk of twenty or even thirty varieties of Gnostic belief. Some of these could be called sects while others focused around a single individual and his followers. It seems clear that there was a wide variety of Gnostic theory and practice. None of this added up to the existence of any kind of Gnostic Church, and, indeed, the whole concept of a Church would probably have been distasteful to the great majority of freethinking and independent Gnostics.

Many people also believe that Gnostic texts were unknown in the West prior to the discoveries at Nag Hammadi. In fact, Gnostic texts have long been known to scholars, and the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt in 1945 was only the culmination of a series of important discoveries. These include Pistis Sophia, part of the Askew Codex which was purchased by the British Museum in 1795; and The Gospel of Thomas, discovered in Egypt in 1898; the Bruce Codex, brought to England around 1769; and the Papyrus Berolinensis, acquired by a German scholar in Cairo in 1896. This last discovery is also called the Berlin Gnostic Codex or the Akhmim Codex and contains versions of the Apocryphon of John, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, and the Gospel of Mary.

For all the current interest in the Gnostic tradition and despite a plethora of books on this subject, the Gnostics remain shadowy and elusive. This is partly because they have been studied largely within a Christian rather than an Essene context. Yet the truth is that it is impossible to understand the Gnostic movement unless we start with the Essenes. Many of those who moved on to become Gnostics had originally come from Essene families, and even those who did not were influenced by many of the ideas in the Essene tradition, a subject we explored through past-life accounts in The Essenes: Children of the Light and Power of the Magdalene. That is why we are beginning this book with a reconnection with Essene lives. These experiences form a vital foundation for understanding the Gnostic impulse and putting it into perspective.

That context has resonances right up to the present day and can at times be both controversial and challenging. The more one examines the Essene-Gnostic connection, the more extensive and convincing this becomes. Some of the most powerful and far-reaching Gnostic concepts—such as the idea of God as both Father and Mother—are directly traceable to an Essene source. The combination of an Earthly Mother and a Heavenly Father was one of the central themes of the Essene tradition, and it occurs frequently in Essene texts. When one considers the links in both personnel and concepts that unite the Essenes and the Gnostics, one begins to see the Gnostics in a new way as the direct inheritors and continuers of the Essene tradition. One of the strengths of the Essene movement was its ability to draw from and absorb key elements in other wisdom traditions, including Pythagorean concepts, Egyptian Mystery School material, and Zoroastrianism. Hence, the existence of other non-Essene sources within the Gnostic movement is simply the continuation of a well-worn path of assimilation.

The more one considers the realities of the Essene-Gnostic line of development, the more absurd it becomes to see the Gnostics as a mere offshoot of Christianity. Of course, it would have been most convenient for the early Church Fathers to be able to dismiss the Gnostic movement as a misguided Christian heresy, but there is very little evidence to support this perception.

What emerges clearly from a study of this period is that there were, in fact, two main forms of Christianity: the highly structured, ritualistic, and doctrinal Church established by Peter and Paul and an alternative Gnostic form which was not a religion but a process and a fellowship of individuals following a spiritual path.

Of course, our attitudes are colored by the whole weight of history, and it might seem absurd even to question whether the form of Christianity which survived was the best one—or the one that leads to the greatest enlightenment and the highest level of spiritual development. However, recent developments within Christianity as a whole have now brought questions like these into a much sharper focus, and we now stand at a crossroads in the spiritual development of the West where the only way forward might be to consider a broader range of options. Many Christian churches are now perceived to be resistant to change and unsympathetic to the capacity for leadership now being shown by empowered women. In these circumstances it may be time to re-examine the Gnostic alternative to see if it offers a viable way forward in this modern age.

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3. Yianna and the Essenes

Late in November 2007, Jaye Woodfield, a counselor living in Gloucestershire, came to see us to do a past-life session. Jaye already had a sense of connection with the time in Israel 2,000 years ago, and Joanna took her back to this period. After the usual induction sequence, this was how the session developed.

Joanna: Can you tell me what you are seeing, sensing, or hearing?

Jaye: I’m in a crowd of people. It’s like a small market-place. Jeshua is standing on something to