The new book by Marguerite Rigoglioso is not only a scholorly work, as she is known for, but a spiritual one. Her past books, as good as they are, were very scholorly. The Mystery Tradition of Miraculous Conception is one not to miss. It's out on April 6th in paperback, but the e-book has already been released.
Here's my quick review:
This groundbreaking book is more than a womens book; it should be required reading for anyone who reads about religion and / or history. Never have I read such an account of Mother Mary, and parthenogenesis. I add few books to my favourites list, but this one is on it.
"We can now see her not as a virgin who lacked sexuality and whose 'moral purity' should serve as a repressive model for women. Rather, we can appreciate her as an active holy woman who redirected her eros into drawing onto the earth plane another great being who would greatly assist humanity."
Description and excerpt:
Marguerite Mary Rigoglioso, Ph.D., is the foremost authority on the history of virgin birth and has taught graduate and undergraduate courses in both the United States and the United Kingdom. The founding director of Seven Sisters Mystery School, she is the author of The Cult of Divine Birth in Ancient Greece and Virgin Mother Goddesses of Antiquity. She lives in western Massachusetts.
• Explains how Mary was born into a lineage of powerful women who cultivated and passed on the ability to consciously conceive elevated beings
• Includes a complete translation of the Infancy Gospel of James and reveals the hidden codes it contains relating to the practice of miraculous conception
• Shows how Mary was trained and initiated in the “womb mysteries” and reveals the esoteric techniques she used to conceive Jesus
Delving into one of the Virgin Mary’s forgotten gospels, the Infancy Gospel of James, Marguerite Mary Rigoglioso, Ph.D., reveals a truth that has been suppressed for nearly two millennia: that Mother Mary was not a passive bystander to her own pregnancy but an advanced member of a sacred order of women trained in divine conception.
Unlocking the hidden codes of Mary’s gospel and other ancient source texts, the author reveals how Mary conceived Jesus through a careful process that she willed and initiated. She explains how Mary was born into a family of powerful priestesses, women who possessed, cultivated, and passed on the ability to consciously conceive elevated beings to help the planet. This lineage included Mary’s own mother, Anne, who conceived Mary with this method, her relative Elizabeth (mother of John the Baptist), and the biblical matriarch Sarah, the wife of Abraham and mother of Isaac. These women were schooled in the shamanic “womb mysteries,” secret knowledge of the capacity of the womb. Decoding the Infancy Gospel of James, the author shows how Mary was trained and initiated, reveals the esoteric techniques she used to conceive Jesus, and explores the birth itself and the mind-altering reality that accompanied it.
By revealing the Virgin Mary as a trained holy woman and a conscious actor in the conception of Jesus, the author corrects the impression we have been given of a passive and bewildered girl who had no idea how or why she was pregnant. She also restores Mary as the empowered feminine orchestrator of these significant events, paralleling the redemption of Mary Magdalene in recent years. Explaining how and why virgin birth was accomplished, this book allows us to make sense of miraculous conception and reveals the power that lies in all women’s wombs.
Chapter 1: Let It Be Revealed--The Hour of a New Mary
The Virgin Mary’s time has come. In fact, we are long overdue for a revolutionary understanding of her that frees her from dogmatic baggage and restores her to her rightful place as a great holy woman. In recent decades thousands of readers worldwide of books such as Meggan Watterson’s Mary Magdalene Revealed, Cynthia Borgeault’s The Meaning of Mary Magdalene, and Margaret Starbird’s The Woman with the Alabaster Jar have awoken to a Magdalene who is not a prostitute but rather a consort of Jesus. Now it is the moment for us to recognize a Mother Mary who is not a passive bystander to her own pregnancy but rather a specialized priestess who deliberately planned and carried out the miraculous conception of her son.
Who was this most famous of women, really, and what was her conception of Jesus all about? We hear painfully little about her from the canonical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Where we find the motherlode of information about her and her miraculous event is far outside of those books, in a little-known writing called the Infancy Gospel (or Protovangelium) of James, which became the basis of Mary’s feast days in the church calendar. It is this gospel onto which I throw the floodlights in this book so as to reveal a truth about Mary that is very ancient but will seem new to many readers.
That truth is that Mary indeed conceived Jesus in a miraculous way. But she did so not through some kind of divine force that was using her body for its own agenda. She accomplished this feat through a careful process that she willed and initiated, and for which she was trained by a lineage of holy women before her.
Mary was born into a family and a history of women who possessed, cultivated, and passed on the ability to consciously conceive elevated beings to help the planet. These were specialized women schooled in what I call the “womb mysteries,” secret knowledge of the capacity of the human womb, including the capability for divine birth, which women all over the ancient world shared with other promising candidates over thousands of years. Mary was one of several powerful priestesses in her family and ancestry who had command over the human conception process -- but one who took the art to a whole new level.
All of this is precisely what her infancy gospel tells us--if you know how to look. No one has known how to look before now, however, because they have lacked the broader historical view of divine birth as an actual practice of real women that spanned the ancient Mediterranean world and beyond. In my years of scholarly sifting and sorting through ancient records, I have been able to piece together that history. And I have been able to bring it to bear to decode what Mary’s gospel has been hiding in plain sight for nearly 2000 years. That deciphering is what this book is about.
You will discover not only how Mary consciously conceived Jesus in a non-ordinary way, but also how she herself was divinely conceived by her mother Anne. That means you will come to recognize that Mary was already born as an embodiment of something much-needed in the ancient world and in today’s world: the Divine Feminine, in all of her power and wisdom. Knowing the base of potency from which she was operating will help you see why she was able to birth forth an especially high-level embodiment of the divine from her own body for the benefit of humanity. You will get glimpses of how she was trained, when, and by whom, as well as some of the esoteric techniques she used to fulfill her ministry in this regard.
The book also uncovers the fact that Mary and Anne’s lineage of divine birth priestesses began all the way back with Sarah--the wife of the biblical patriarch Abraham and therefore the great matriarch of Hebrew culture. We will see how this lineage extended across their family to include Elizabeth, who was not only the mother of the miraculously born John the Baptist, but who also may have been Anne’s sister.
By exploring the reality of Mary as a trained agent in divine conception, this book corrects the impression the New Testament has given us of a passive and bewildered girl, an incidental receptacle who has no idea what is happening to her beyond a short pronouncement by the angel Gabriel. It also corrects the view that her virginity was a sign of her moral purity and that strict chastity is therefore something to be imposed on other women. This book puts this sacred woman in her rightful place, front and center in the story of Jesus, as the pivot point around which the entire Christed enterprise was able to unfold. By showing that Mary was a conscious actor who deliberately intended for Jesus to come into our world--and a priestess whose celibacy was a chosen practice needed for the task--this book restores her as the empowered feminine orchestrator of these significant events.
With The Mystery Tradition of Miraculous Conception, we are taking an important first step toward getting that fuller understanding of Mary by focusing especially on her powers of conception. In doing so, we are further anchoring true feminine spiritual power more broadly. By showing what was possible for Mary and her female kin, this book sets the stage for women to understand what powers lie in their own wombs. For Mary’s abilities were not hers alone, but were--and are--capacities open to all women who wish to go deeper on their spiritual path.
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