Fertility cults were agricultural religions practiced throughout the Mediterranean region thousands of years before Christianity. The hieros gamos, or "sacred marriage" ritual practiced by fertility cults has some similarities with the Gospel anointing, crucifixion and resurrection narratives. The
In the ancient world, thousands of years before Christ and even before Judaism, fertility cults flourished throughout the Mediterranean region. These religions focused to a great extent on the prosperity of the land on which the people depended; the soul of the community was tied to the cycles of nature in a world where agricultural success meant life or death.
One of the rituals often practiced in fertility cults was the hieros gamos, or "sacred marriage." In this ceremony, a woman who represented the local goddess, often a priestess, and the land was wedded to a sacrificial king, who represented the community. The king was anointed by the woman, thus receiving a kind of "divine" kingship. After they were united in marriage and celebrated their union in the bridal chamber, the king would be symbolically slain. After a span of time, his wife would seek him and find him resurrected. Often the wife was integral to his ability to resurrect.
Noting the similarities between these fertility cult practices and the Passion narratives in the New Testament Gospels, some have hypothesized that Jesus and Mary Magdalene (assumed to be the woman who performed the anointing on Jesus) were celebrating a real hieros gamos ritual. This differs from Margaret Starbird's association of the relationship between the anointing in the Gospels and the hieros gamos only in that Starbird writes that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were only re-enacting a hieros gamos ritual. This is a subtle difference that has led to two very different interpretations.
For those who believe that the Gospel anointing/hieros gamos was the real thing, the conclusion that Mary Magdalene must have been a priestess of "the goddess" seems natural. Some have proposed different goddesses as Mary Magdalene's patrons, among them Isis and Astarte. Mary Magdalene would thus have been a practitioner of sacred sexuality and would have shared in these rites with Jesus, her husband and partner in the "sacred marriage." (Magdalene.org)
