Friday-the-Thirteenth

Icy roads, despite rain and warmer temps, created Portland's infamous black ice this morning.  At first we thought the roads would be deadly, but generally the drive was great and traffic sped along easily, bringing many of us to work earlier than usual.

On this morning's news, the weather reporter said, "It's Friday the 13th, so be careful out there."  

I sighed, thinking, "she knows not of what she speaks."  

The real meaning of this dreadful date may be lost on the ordinary early morning driver on his way to work. The number 13 has since antiquity been the number for the goddess, a number representing the divine feminine who for the earliest Christian Gnostics was represented by the Blessed Mother and Mary Magdalene, to whom (they believe) Jesus entrusted his "church" rather than Peter.  For many Gnostics, the date is one of profound mourning, a powerful and bloody reminder of the cost for those who stood up for another version of the Jesus story, one that could have existed alongside the Roman Catholic version, but was not tolerated and consequently exterminated by the Church.  

More than 7,000 Cathars were dragged out of St. Mary Magdalene church in the Languedoc, France, by Roman Catholic church officials, under the direction of Pope Innocent III, and were butchered to death on July 22, 1208. Then on Sunday, March 13, 1244, 250 Cathar monks were burned at the stake. Once the Cathars were wiped out of France, the Knights Templar took up their legacy, until a century later, on Friday, Oct. 13, 1307 the Knights Templar were gathered, tortured and killed. They had fought to defend Jerusalem against Islam, according to Crusade history. But, they, like the Cathars, had also stood for Mary Magdalene's secret, yet holy, order. 

In Kathleen McGowan's The Expected One, the terrible deaths borne by the Cathars is described so vividly, a reader's perspective on real courage and martyrdom and church history is changed forever.

There are many theories, but the primary one is the Gnostics who were personified in both the Cathars and the Knights Templar believed piously and ardently in the mystical and secret teachings of Jesus as carried to the world through Mary Magdalene and were willing to defend her to the death. They had carried her story, and her truth, soberly and stealthily throughout the centuries, and when they were deemed heretics and bitterly targeted by the Roman Catholic Church, as evidenced by history, they died bravely for her.