The Da Vinci Code Was Too Tame: What the Beloved Disciple Actually Is

The figure to Jesus’s right in Leonardo’s Last Supper does look like a woman. Long hair, soft jaw, smooth beardless face, body leaning away from Jesus toward Peter. A modern viewer who has read The Da Vinci Code, or who has just absorbed the cultural water around it, sees a woman immediately. The conclusion seems to follow on its own. She must be Mary Magdalena, secretly married to Jesus, the mother of his bloodline, the original Holy Grail. Eighty million copies of Dan Brown’s thriller convinced readers across two decades that this was the truth Leonardo had hidden in plain sight.

She is not there.

The Mary Magdalena reading traces back to a single source, and the man who fabricated that source confessed to forging the entire thing under oath, in a French investigative judge’s chambers, in 1993, ten years before Brown sat down to write his novel. None of which is even the interesting part of the story. The Da Vinci Code was the tame version. The actual one is much weirder, and it is documented.

The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved

The whole tradition rests on five passages in the Gospel of John. At the Last Supper, John 13:23 says one of the disciples, “the one whom Jesus loved,” was reclining on Jesus’s chest. The Greek phrase is en tō kolpō tou Iēsou, in the bosom of Jesus. The verb describing his posture is anakeimenos, the same verb used in ancient Mediterranean dining manuals for guests reclining on couches around a low table, leaning on the left elbow, eating with the right hand. The position itself was not unusual. Roman and Greek guests ate that way as a matter of course. What was unusual was the singling out of one disciple as specifically beloved.

The same disciple appears at the foot of the cross in John 19:26-27, where Jesus tells him to take Mary into his home. He runs to the tomb in John 20:2-10, arrives before Peter, looks in but does not enter. He is the first to recognize the risen Jesus on the shore of Galilee in John 21:7. The Gospel ends with him still alive and a rumor that Jesus told Peter he might “remain” until the end (John 21:20-23).

Christian tradition from the second century onward identifies this disciple as John the Apostle, son of Zebedee, brother of James. The same tradition identifies him as the author of the Gospel of John, the three Letters of John, and the Book of Revelation. Modern New Testament scholarship is more cautious about the four Johannine identifications being one person, but the iconographic tradition is what matters here, and the iconographic tradition treated them as one. The Beloved Disciple of the Last Supper is the John of the Christian visual canon.

The reason he is depicted as young is structural. The other disciples are depicted as men at various stages of middle age and beyond. John, as the youngest, gets visual youth: smooth face, no beard, long hair, slim shoulders. This is already true of the earliest surviving images, on 4th-century Roman sarcophagi and in catacomb fresco fragments, where John stands beardless and Christ-like beside the heavier, bearded Peter. Patristic writers reinforced the visual choice with theology: John was a virgin disciple. Jerome’s Adversus Jovinianum (I.26) states it explicitly, contrasting the virgin John with the married Peter. The wider patristic culture of celibate-as-most-perfect-disciple, articulated by Tertullian in De monogamia and other works, sat behind the same image. A virgin disciple in the patristic moral system is closer to angelic, less anchored to ordinary masculine adulthood. The iconography followed the doctrine.

By the 9th century the convention is fully formed. By the 13th century it is everywhere in Western art. By the time Leonardo paints his Last Supper in 1495, he is working at the end of an iconographic tradition almost twelve hundred years old. None of which yet explains why so many of these images carry erotic energy. For that we have to walk into a 14th-century convent and read what the women living there were writing.

The Religious Erotics of the Beloved Disciple

The biblical text behind the entire bridal-mystical tradition is the Song of Songs. An anthology of Hebrew love poetry probably edited together around the 4th century BCE, it consists of explicit erotic dialogue between an unnamed man and an unnamed woman. His left hand is under my head, and his right hand doth embrace me (2:6). Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine (1:2). I am sick of love (2:5). I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh (5:2). The text is, on the surface, exactly what it appears to be: ancient erotic poetry.

The Song should not have been canonized at all. Erotic poetry has no obvious place in the Hebrew Bible. The reason it survived is Rabbi Akiva (~50–135 CE), who reportedly said: “All the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies” (Mishnah Yadayim 3:5). Akiva read the man as God and the woman as Israel, and the eros as the intensity of God’s covenant love. With that reading the Song was canonized in both the Jewish and Christian Bibles.

Christian commentary developed Akiva’s allegorical move further. Origen of Alexandria (c. 184–253) wrote a Commentary on the Song of Songs (only three books survive, in Rufinus’s Latin translation) and two surviving Homilies on the same text. Origen establishes the dual allegory that runs through every later Christian reading: the Song is both about Christ and the Church (corporate, ecclesiological) and about the Logos and the individual soul (mystical). Origen warns against carnal reading. He insists the eros language is necessary precisely because the love it describes is unsayable in any tamer vocabulary. Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395) developed the personal-mystical track in his fifteen Homilies on the Song of Songs (c. 390), with the doctrine of epektasis: the soul stretches infinitely toward a God it can never fully possess.

The orthodox safeguard was allegory plus a grammatical accident. The soul (anima in Latin, psyche in Greek, nephesh in Hebrew) is grammatically feminine in all three languages. The bride of the Song could be read as the soul of any believer regardless of the believer’s biological sex. A male monk reading the Song allegorically takes the role of the bride; God is the bridegroom. The eros language is preserved, the heresy danger contained.

The vocabulary became operational in the high medieval period. Bernard of Clairvaux preached his 86 Sermons on the Song of Songs between 1135 and his death in 1153, never getting past chapter two of the biblical text. Bernard’s foundational move was to shift the dominant allegory from the older Christ-Church reading to the Logos-soul reading. To love so ardently, then, is to share the marriage bond… what is more sweet than this conformity of wills?… when she loves perfectly, the soul is wedded to the Word (Sermon 83.6). The soul as bride; God as bridegroom; the union as marriage; the marriage as contemplative and erotic in the same breath. Bernard is the founder of medieval bridal mysticism.

What follows in the Rhineland and the Low Countries is a wave of women writing in the same vocabulary. Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207–1282), in The Flowing Light of the Godhead, stages a courtly love game in the bedchamber between the soul and God: Stand naked… your noble desire and your boundless longing, these I will fulfill forever with my infinite lavishness (Book I.44, Tobin translation). Hadewijch of Antwerp (mid-13th century), in her seventh Vision, receives the Eucharist from Christ in human form and writes: After that he came himself to me, took me entirely in his arms, and pressed me to him; and all my members felt his in full felicity (Hart translation, Paulist Press 1980, p. 281). Marguerite Porete wrote The Mirror of Simple Souls in vernacular Old French between roughly 1290 and 1300, using the personified figure of Dame Amour to discuss the soul’s annihilation in Love. She was burned at the stake at the Place de Grève in Paris on 1 June 1310, partly because the Inquisitor General William of Paris and a panel of 21 theologians found her vernacular bridal mysticism too explicit and too theologically autonomous to leave standing.

The tradition runs into the early modern period. Teresa of Ávila’s Vida (Book of My Life, completed 1565) describes in chapter 29 the famous Transverberation: I saw in his hand a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love of God. The pain was so great that it caused me to utter several moans; and the sweetness this intense pain gives is so superlative that one cannot possibly desire it to cease (Kavanaugh/Rodriguez translation, ICS Publications). Bernini’s marble Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome (1647–1652) is the visual realization of this passage. Jacques Lacan, looking at the Bernini, said in Seminar XX (1972–73): she is coming, no doubt about it. John of the Cross (1542–1591) reworked the Song of Songs directly in his Cántico Espiritual (1577–1586) and Llama de amor viva (Living Flame of Love, 1585–1591). The opening of the Living Flame: O living flame of love, that tenderly wounds my soul in its deepest center.

What this tradition is doing, structurally, is using the only vocabulary that humans have for the dissolution of self into another. There is no separate language for spiritual ecstasy. There is only the language of erotic union, applied to a different object. Georges Bataille in L’Érotisme (1957) and Les Larmes d’Éros (1961) made this his central thesis: eroticism, sacrifice, and mysticism share the structure of expérience intérieure, the interior experience that dissolves the bounded self into continuity. William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902, Lectures XVI–XVII) noted that mystics across traditions reach for erotic vocabulary because no lesser vocabulary will reach as far. Carl Jung read the alchemical coniunctio of opposites (the union of Sol and Luna producing the Rebis) as both a sexual symbol and a spiritual symbol at once, and refused to reduce one to the other. Caroline Walker Bynum (Jesus as Mother, 1982; Holy Feast and Holy Fast, 1987) showed that medieval women’s bodily and erotic devotional culture was not pathology but a coherent theology of incarnation that took the female body as a privileged site of union with the suffering flesh of Christ. Amy Hollywood (Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History, 2002) traces how 20th-century French theory (Bataille, Lacan, Beauvoir) reads the medieval women mystics as the originating thinkers of dissolution-of-self.

The same convergence appears in other traditions. The Sufi tradition treats God as the Beloved (ma’shuq), the Friend (dust), the Wine-bringer (saqi); Rumi’s Masnavi, Ibn Arabi’s Fusus al-Hikam, the entire Persian-Arabic poetic tradition reads divine longing in explicitly erotic terms (Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 1975, ch. 4 and 7, on ‘ishq as a technical mystical category). Hindu and Buddhist Tantra depicts the cosmos as the union of Shiva and Shakti; Tibetan yab-yum iconography shows deities in sexual union. Mesopotamian religion ritualised the sacred marriage (hieros gamos) of Inanna and Dumuzi annually, with the king performing the male role with the high priestess of Inanna (Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite, 1969). Modern neuroscience adds a structural footnote: Andrew Newberg’s SPECT studies of meditating Franciscan nuns and Tibetan monks show decreased activity in the parietal lobule (the brain’s orientation centre) during deep contemplation, correlated with reported loss of self/world boundary. Robin Carhart-Harris’s work on the default-mode network under psilocybin documents the same kind of self-dissolution under chemical conditions. The orgasm parallel: Komisaruk and Whipple (The Science of Orgasm, Johns Hopkins 2006) report relative deactivation of self-evaluative cortical areas at orgasm. None of these labs claims equivalence between mystical and erotic experience, only structural overlap in the suppression of self-boundary.

This is the frame for everything that follows. The 14th-century nun looking at a sculpture of John leaning on Christ’s chest is doing something philosophically continuous with the Sufi reading the Masnavi, with the Tantric practitioner visualising yab-yum, with the Mesopotamian priest performing the sacred marriage, and with Teresa of Ávila being pierced by the angel’s spear. The vocabulary is necessarily erotic, because the experience the vocabulary points at is structurally indistinguishable from erotic union, and the human animal has no other vocabulary that goes that deep.

Now we can look at the sculptures.

The Christus-Johannes-Gruppe

The most concentrated and most revealing version of the feminine John is not in a painting at all. It is a sculpture type from a small region of southwestern Germany and Switzerland, made between roughly 1280 and 1350, called the Christus-Johannes-Gruppe, or Christ-and-John group.

About 28 examples survive. Most are walnut or oak, carved at roughly life size or a bit smaller, hollowed at the back to reduce weight. They show John seated on a low bench beside Christ, leaning sideways into Christ’s body, his head resting on Christ’s chest, his eyes closed. Christ’s right arm is around John’s shoulder. The composition is intimate. The figures touch in a way that medieval Christian sculpture rarely permits.

The type-defining masterwork is at the Mayer van den Bergh Museum in Antwerp, attributed to Master Heinrich von Konstanz. It originally stood in the Dominican women’s convent of St. Katharinental near Diessenhofen in modern Switzerland. Other major examples are at the Bode-Museum in Berlin (c. 1310-1320, from a convent near Sigmaringen), the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt (c. 1330-1340, from Kloster Adelhausen near Freiburg), the Cleveland Museum of Art (c. 1300-1320, Swabian, polychromed and gilded oak; the photograph above), and the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum in Munich. The Cistercian convent of Heiligkreuztal still has its 14th-century example in situ.

The geographic concentration matters. Almost every example comes from a small ring of monasteries around Lake Constance: St. Katharinental, Adelhausen, Töss, Ötenbach, Engelthal, Unterlinden. These were Dominican women’s houses. The communities of nuns who lived in them produced the Schwesternbücher, the Sister-Books, in which named individual nuns recorded the visions, ecstasies, and conversations with Christ in the language we just walked through: Bernard’s bridal mystical vocabulary, applied to their own daily contemplative practice. Margareta Ebner at Maria Medingen, Christine Ebner and Adelheid Langmann at Engelthal, Elsbeth Stagel at Töss (the spiritual daughter of Heinrich Seuse and the editor of the second part of his Vita) all wrote in this register.

In this devotional world the Christus-Johannes-Gruppe does specific theological work. The nun standing or kneeling in front of the sculpture is meant to identify with John. John’s body, leaning into Christ’s chest with closed eyes, is the body she wishes she had. John is the Beloved Disciple. He occupies the place at Christ’s breast that the bride of Bernard’s Song occupies. The sculpture is a meditative aid for entering that place yourself.

The sculptures look the way they look because the experience the sculptures are aids to is bridal-mystical. The androgyny is theological. A bride is leaning on the bridegroom. The face that the nun looks into and the body she identifies with are the face and body of someone the soul can imagine itself becoming. Sex and gender, in the language of the Rhineland mystics, are aspects of the body that the contemplative soul transcends. Meister Eckhart, also a 14th-century Dominican preaching to many of these same convents, taught that the soul becomes one with God in a way that erases ordinary differences. John, leaning on Christ, is the visual emblem of that erasure, made for nuns whose written records show that the erasure is what they were practising.

Leonardo Inherits the Convention

Leonardo painted the Last Supper between 1495 and 1498 on the north wall of the refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. By the time he picked up his brush, the feminine John was a Quattrocento commonplace. The point is easier to see than to read about. Six Last Suppers from a fifty-year span before and just after Leonardo, with the same beardless feminine John in roughly the same composition every time:

The convention is unbroken across half a century. Same beardless John, same lean, same position, across six painters working in different cities for different patrons. Renaissance Florence had a stable visual vocabulary for the Beloved Disciple, and Leonardo did not invent it. What Leonardo did was push the convention further than his predecessors had. His John leans away from Jesus toward Peter, instead of resting on Jesus’s chest as in the Gospel and as in earlier paintings. The lean opens a visual gap between Jesus and John in the painting’s center. That gap is what the Da Vinci Code reading exploits, claiming it forms a hidden V or M shape between the two figures and that the two figures are deliberately leaning apart to show that they were a married couple.

Leonardo’s surviving preparatory drawings tell a much more boring story. The principal compositional study, Royal Library Windsor RL 12542 recto, shows the same composition with the same figures in the same positions. Head studies of named apostles survive at Windsor for Peter, James the Greater, Bartholomew, and Judas. Carmen Bambach’s four-volume Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered (Yale 2019) treats the figure to Jesus’s right as John straightforwardly. The 1978-1999 conservation campaign at Santa Maria delle Grazie, led by Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, removed centuries of overpaint and varnish without revealing any hidden anatomical detail that would identify the figure as female. The published conservation report (Brambilla Barcilon and Marani, Leonardo: The Last Supper, University of Chicago Press 2001) describes John as John.

The counting argument is the simplest rebuttal. The painting shows Christ plus twelve other figures, and the Gospels list twelve apostles at the Last Supper. If the figure to Jesus’s right is Mary Magdalena, where is the twelfth apostle?

Leonardo did have a personal interest in androgyny that goes beyond the inherited convention. His standalone Saint John the Baptist in the Louvre (about 1513-16) is famously sensual and ambiguous, with full lips, a knowing smile, soft body, and a feminizing gesture. His Bacchus (also Louvre), originally painted as a Saint John in the wilderness and later overpainted to add the leopard skin and grape wreath, shares the same androgynous quality. The recently rediscovered Salvator Mundi carries some of the same softness. Leonardo’s late religious figures, in particular, sit on the line between male and female in a way that is too consistent to be accidental.

The serious art-historical literature reads this through two lenses, neither of which involves a Templar bloodline.

The first is psychobiographical. Sigmund Freud’s 1910 essay Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci argued that Leonardo’s androgynes reflected his probable homosexuality and his complex relationship with the absent and idealised mother of his early childhood. Freud’s specific reading of Leonardo’s vulture fantasy is now considered weak (it relies on a mistranslation: the bird in the original Italian is a nibbio, a kite, not a vulture, which collapses the Egyptian iconographic argument). But the broader observation, that Leonardo had a personal pull toward androgynous figures, is durable.

The second is Neoplatonic. Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Faber 1958, revised 1968) traces Leonardo’s androgynes to Marsilio Ficino’s 1471 Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum and to Pico della Mirandola’s 900 Theses (1486). In Florentine Neoplatonism, the divine androgyne is the coincidentia oppositorum, the union of opposites. Divinity unites male and female. The figure who carries divinity carries both. Martin Kemp (Leonardo, OUP 2004) and Bambach (2019) follow this reading. Leonardo’s androgynes are not biographical confessions and not coded conspiracies. They are the visual expression of a philosophical position that Florentine intellectuals took seriously.

This connects to our article on Hermes Trismegistus, where the same Ficinian translation work in the 1470s feeds the entire Renaissance Hermetic tradition. Leonardo grew up in that intellectual current. His androgynes are one visible result of it. The bridal-mystical and the Hermetic-Neoplatonic readings are not in conflict. They are two sides of the same Renaissance philosophical preoccupation with the soul that transcends the gendered body to reach divine union.

The Da Vinci Code Mistake

Trace the Mary Magdalena reading backward and you arrive in 1956 at a man named Pierre Plantard.

Plantard drew up the statutes of an organization called the Priory of Sion as a fraternal association under French law on 7 May 1956, filed at the subprefecture of Saint-Julien-en-Genevois on 25 June 1956 with the formal entry in the Journal Officiel on 20 July 1956. The association was based in Annemasse, Haute-Savoie. The actual organization had a few members and dissolved within a year or two. Plantard intermittently revived it on paper between 1961 and 1993.

What followed was a decade of forgery. Between 1964 and 1967, Plantard and his collaborator Philippe de Chérisey wrote and planted a series of documents in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the so-called Dossiers Secrets. The documents claimed to record an ancient Priory of Sion stretching back to the Crusades, with a list of grand masters that included Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, and Claude Debussy. The documents claimed the Priory protected a Merovingian bloodline that descended from a marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalena.

A French librarian who came across the Dossiers Secrets passed them to three British researchers, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, who turned them into the 1982 bestseller The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. The book accepted the Plantard documents as genuine medieval evidence and built a sweeping narrative around them. The book was treated as serious investigative history by some readers and as conspiracy entertainment by others. Either way, it sold.

In 1993 Plantard was caught up in an unrelated French political scandal. The investigation into the Pelat affair, led by investigative judge Thierry Jean-Pierre, looked into Plantard’s claim that the late Roger-Patrice Pelat had been a grand master of the Priory. French police searched Plantard’s home and recovered a large stack of forged documents. Under oath in Judge Jean-Pierre’s chambers, Plantard confessed that he had fabricated everything: the Priory’s medieval history, the genealogies, the list of grand masters. Faced with potential criminal charges from the Pelat family, he retreated from public life. He died in 2000.

By the mid-1990s, well before Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code (2003), the academic consensus was solid. The Priory of Sion was a Plantard hoax. Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood, The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved (Sutton 2003), and Jean-Luc Chaumeil’s Le Testament du Prieuré de Sion (2006), based on Chaumeil’s archive of original Plantard correspondence, are the standard demolitions.

Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code knowing the Priory was a hoax. He included the Priory in his author’s note as if it were a genuine historical society. The book was a thriller built on a confession that had already happened. None of which stopped it from selling 80 million copies and convincing several generations of readers that the figure to Jesus’s right in Leonardo’s Last Supper was Mary Magdalena.

The Da Vinci Code reading is not even interesting compared to what was actually happening. A secret marriage and a hidden bloodline is a soap-opera plot. The actual tradition is fourteenth-century Dominican nuns identifying with John as the bride-soul of Christ, drawing the language of their devotion from a Hebrew erotic poem read allegorically by Origen and Bernard, and looking at sculptures of John leaning on Christ’s chest as a meditative aid for entering that bridal place themselves.

When Leonardo, Saint John, and the Androgyne Actually Fuse

The fusion of Leonardo, Saint John, and the alchemical androgyne does happen in the historical record. It just does not happen anywhere near Leonardo. It happens in Paris in the 1850s and the 1890s.

The alchemical androgyne, the rebis (“two-thing”), is a long-running emblem of the coniunctio, the union of opposites in the alchemical work. Sun and Moon, Sulphur and Mercury, King and Queen, male and female: when these meet, the result is the rebis, a single body with two heads (or one head and visibly both sexes). The earliest surviving woodcut precedents are German, in the Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit of about 1410. The canonical sequence is the Rosarium Philosophorum (Frankfurt 1550), with twenty woodcuts including hermaphroditic figures at plates 6, 10, 13, and 17. The crowned androgyne stands on a crescent moon, two heads haloed by the sun.

The Splendor Solis of Salomon Trismosin (the most famous illuminated manuscript dated 1582, first printed 1598 in Trismosin’s Aureum Vellus) carries the same imagery in painted form. The 20th century inherited the symbol through Carl Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy (1944) and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955), which treats the rebis as the psychological goal of the alchemical opus, the Self as union of opposites.

In 1854-56, the French ex-priest and self-taught Hermeticist Éliphas Lévi published Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. Its frontispiece is the famous Baphomet image: a winged, goat-headed androgynous figure seated on a globe, with one arm marked Solve and the other Coagula, one breast feminine, a caduceus replacing genitals.

Lévi states in his text that the image is constructed on the model of “the androgyne of Heinrich Khunrath,” a 16th-century alchemist whose Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (1595) included Hermetic engravings of male-female fusion. The Baphomet is the bridge. Through Lévi the alchemical androgyne enters modern occultism with a distinct Hermetic-Christian flavor.

The decisive operational moment is Joséphin Péladan (1858-1918), founder of the Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris (1892-1897). Péladan had broken from the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose+Croix that he had co-founded with Stanislas de Guaita in 1888. He set up his own order, the Ordre de la Rose+Croix Catholique du Temple et du Graal, with explicit Catholic-Hermetic synthesis as its program. The Salon de la Rose+Croix exhibitions, six of them between 1892 and 1897, made the androgyne the central aesthetic of fin-de-siècle French Symbolism. Names involved: Fernand Khnopff, Carlos Schwabe, Jean Delville, Sâr Mérodack Joséphin Péladan himself.

Péladan’s three subordinate orders took as their named patrons Leonardo da Vinci (the Order of the Rose+Croix), Dante (the Order of the Temple), and Joseph of Arimathea (the Order of the Grail). The three initiatic grades carried vows of Perfection, Loyalty, and Obedience. Saint John as a separate patron of one of the orders is not documented in Péladan’s published constitutions, but the larger fusion of Renaissance Hermetic-androgynous art (anchored on Leonardo as the named patron) with Templar-Catholic-Grail symbolism is fully there in Péladan’s Paris of the 1890s. Saint John joins this milieu through the parallel Fabré-Palaprat Johannite Church (founded 1812, formalized 1828), which by the late nineteenth century was part of the same Parisian neo-Templar and neo-Rosicrucian intellectual world.

This is the moment when the strands converge. The Hermetic-androgynous reading of Leonardo, the Templar-Johannite mystique around Saint John, and the alchemical rebis tradition of Khunrath and Lévi all sit in the same late-nineteenth-century Paris. They never quite fuse into a single ritual. They sit alongside each other, mutually reinforcing, available to anyone who wants to read them backward into a Renaissance painting. Anyone reading “feminine John equals Hermetic androgyne” into a pre-1850 painting is doing so through this Lévi-Péladan-Fabré-Palaprat cluster, even if they do not know the names. The reading is not original to the paintings. It is a 1890s Paris reading projected backward onto Renaissance art and then forward, through Symbolism and Surrealism and 20th-century esoteric publishing, into the cultural water that Dan Brown drank when he sat down to write The Da Vinci Code.

This is the same Paris and the same milieu that produced the Rosicrucian revival in its modern French form. The fin-de-siècle French occult moment was a serious intellectual phenomenon with consequences that reach into 20th-century art (Mondrian, Kandinsky, the early Surrealists) and into 20th-century popular esotericism. It is real. It is also late.

Where Freemasonry Actually Fits

A note on Freemasonry, since the question always comes up.

Both Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist are patron saints of Freemasonry. The phrase “Lodge of the Holy Saints John of Jerusalem” is in the standard Masonic ritual.

The Baptist link is medieval and inherited. Saint John the Baptist (June 24) was the patron of the medieval European stonemason guilds. His feast day was a quarter-day on the working calendar, the standard date for new master-mason oaths and contract renewals. When 18th-century English speculative Freemasonry inherited the trappings of the operative craft, it inherited the Baptist along with them.

The Evangelist link is later and more deliberate. Saint John the Evangelist (December 27) was elevated to co-patron status in American Freemasonry through Thomas Smith Webb’s Freemason’s Monitor (1797). Albert Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (1873) attributes the Evangelist’s elevation to “the cultivation of brotherly love, and the mystical nature of his Apocalyptic visions.” Mackey is reading 19th-century American Masonic taste into an older inheritance, but the inheritance is real.

The “Holy Saints John of Jerusalem” phrase has a specific London origin. A “time-immemorial” lodge met at the St John of Jerusalem Tavern in Clerkenwell, the actual former Hospitaller priory. The Knights Hospitaller (the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem) had their English headquarters at Clerkenwell from the 12th century until the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The name attached to the surviving tavern, then to the lodge that met there, then to the ritual phrase. None of this implies a continuous Hospitaller-to-Masonic transmission. It implies that 18th-century London Freemasons were drinking in a building with a 12th-century Crusader name and adopted the name into their ritual.

The Templar branch of the Johannite story is even later and has nothing to do with the medieval Templars. Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat (1773-1838) founded the Ordre du Temple in Paris on 4 November 1804, presenting the Larmenius Charter, a forged Latin manuscript dated 1324, listing a chain of 22 Grand Masters from Larmenius (claimed successor of Jacques de Molay) down to Fabré-Palaprat himself. In 1812 he founded the Église Johannite des Chrétiens Primitifs, the Johannite Church of Primitive Christians, whose foundational doctrinal text was the Levitikon, a manuscript he claimed to have bought at a Paris bookstall on New Year’s Day 1814 and finally published in 1831, teaching an esoteric lineage from Egyptian Osirian mysteries through Jesus to John the Beloved to the Templars. Modern textual scholarship dates the Levitikon to the 17th or 18th century. The medieval Templars venerated the Virgin Mary, in keeping with Bernard of Clairvaux’s De laude novae militiae of about 1130. The 1307-1314 trial transcripts include all sorts of charges (denial of Christ, idol worship, the famous Baphomet) but no Johannine cult. The Templar-Johannite identification is a Napoleonic-era construction with no medieval evidence behind it.

So the Freemason connection to the feminine John is not what people expect. Freemasonry venerates both Johns for inherited and ritual reasons, but Freemasonry did not commission the paintings, did not paint John as feminine, and did not invent the iconography. The 19th-century Johannite Templar revival is its own thing, contemporary with Lévi and just before Péladan, and overlaps with the same French occult milieu where the Hermetic-androgyne reading of Leonardo gets formalized.

What the Figure on Jesus’s Right Has Been

Seven hundred years of looking at the same iconographic figure has produced at least six different readings, all internally coherent, all attached to real religious or intellectual movements, all incompatible with each other:

• The patristic reading, formed by Tertullian and Jerome and built into 4th-century Roman art: John is the virgin disciple, beardless because he is closer to angelic, soft because the body that has not been used for marriage carries less of the marks of adult masculinity.
• The bridal-mystical reading, embodied in the 14th-century Christus-Johannes-Gruppe and the Schwesternbücher and the long Bernard-of-Clairvaux tradition: John is the bride-soul resting on the bridegroom Christ, an exemplar for the contemplative nun who wishes to occupy the same place. This is the reading that ties the iconography to the religious erotics of the entire medieval mystical tradition, from Mechthild of Magdeburg to Teresa of Ávila.
• The Florentine Neoplatonic reading, articulated through Ficino’s Hermetic translations and made visible in Leonardo’s late religious figures: John is the Hermetic androgyne, the coincidentia oppositorum, divinity uniting male and female in a single body.
• The late-nineteenth-century French occult reading, available in Paris between Lévi (1854-56) and Péladan (1892-97), with Saint John imported into the same milieu through the parallel Fabré-Palaprat Johannite Church (1812/1828): John becomes available for assimilation to the alchemical rebis, the Hermetic androgyne. The fusion is not a single ritual but a cluster of overlapping movements, all sitting in the same late-nineteenth-century Paris.
• The Plantard-Brown reading, fabricated in 1956-1967 and bestseller-ized in 2003: John is Mary Magdalena, evidence of a Jesus-Magdalena marriage and a Merovingian bloodline. The hoax was confessed in 1993, ten years before the bestseller appeared.
• The psychological-anthropological reading, articulated through Bataille, Bynum, Hollywood, and the modern neuroscience of contemplative experience: John is the visual emblem of the dissolution of self into a beloved other, a structure shared by mystical experience and erotic experience because the human animal has only one nervous system and one vocabulary that goes that deep.

The first three readings have actual medieval and Renaissance evidence behind them. The fourth is a real later movement that read its own meanings into older art. The fifth is a confessed forgery that nonetheless dominates the popular imagination of the painting. The sixth is the modern attempt to say what all the others were pointing at.

The readings can stand together, because each captures what a particular set of viewers thought it was looking at. The painting at Antwerp is what its 14th-century carver and his Dominican patrons meant: the bride-soul resting on the bridegroom Christ. Leonardo’s Last Supper is what Leonardo and his Florentine intellectual milieu most likely meant: the inherited convention amplified by personal sensibility and by Ficinian Neoplatonism. The 1890s Parisian readings are what Lévi and Péladan meant. The Da Vinci Code reading is what Plantard meant when he forged it. None of the readings is the whole story. The figure on Jesus’s right has been many things to many viewers, and the iconography is open enough to receive each of them.

What it has not been, at any point in the seven hundred years between the 4th-century sarcophagi and the 1890s Salon de la Rose+Croix, is Mary Magdalena. The painters were not hiding her. They were doing something else, several different other things, in fact, and most of them are stranger than the conspiracy version. Fourteenth-century nuns identifying with the bride-soul of the Song of Songs. A Florentine Neoplatonic philosopher-painter making the divine androgyne visible. A French occult Hermeticist building Baphomet on the model of Khunrath. A psychology of self-dissolution that no language other than the erotic can carry.

The figure on Jesus’s right is John, and has always been John. What he means has changed every century or so, and that is what it is to be a thousand-year iconography. The Da Vinci Code was the tame version. The actual story is much weirder, and it is also documented.

References

Primary sources

• Gospel of John 13:23, 19:26-27, 20:2-10, 21:7, 21:20-23.
• Mishnah Yadayim 3:5 (Rabbi Akiva on the Song of Songs).
• Tertullian, De monogamia, ch. 17 (early 3rd c.).
• Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on the Song of Songs and Homilies on the Song of Songs (c. 240; Rufinus’s Latin translation survives).
• Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, I.26 (393).
• Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs (c. 390; 15 homilies).
• Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum, 86 sermons (1135-1153). G.R. Evans translation in Selected Works, Paulist Press, 1987.
• Bernard of Clairvaux, De laude novae militiae (c. 1130).
• Mechthild of Magdeburg, Das fließende Licht der Gottheit / The Flowing Light of the Godhead (c. 1250-1282). Frank Tobin translation, Paulist Press, 1998.
• Hadewijch of Antwerp, Visions and Letters (mid-13th c.). Mother Columba Hart translation, Hadewijch: The Complete Works, Paulist Press, 1980.
• Marguerite Porete, Le Mirouer des simples ames anienties (c. 1290-1300; condemned and burned with its author at the Place de Grève, Paris, 1 June 1310). Ellen Babinsky translation, Paulist Press, 1993.
• Teresa of Ávila, Vida (Book of My Life, 1565), chapter 29. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez translation, ICS Publications.
• John of the Cross, Cántico Espiritual (1577-1586) and Llama de amor viva (1585-1591).
• Heinrich Khunrath, Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae (Hamburg 1595; expanded posthumous edition Hanau 1609).
• Rosarium Philosophorum (Frankfurt, 1550, in De Alchimia Opuscula; 20 woodcuts).
• Salomon Trismosin, Splendor Solis (illuminated manuscript dated 1582; first printed 1598 in Aureum Vellus).
• Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854-56).
• Bernard-Raymond Fabré-Palaprat, Levitikon (Paris, 1831).
• Thomas Smith Webb, Freemason’s Monitor (Albany, 1797).

Art history and Leonardo scholarship

• Carmen C. Bambach, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, 4 vols (Yale University Press, 2019).
• Pinin Brambilla Barcilon and Pietro C. Marani, Leonardo: The Last Supper (University of Chicago Press, 2001).
• Ross King, Leonardo and the Last Supper (Bloomsbury, 2012).
• Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci (Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna, 1910); English in Standard Edition vol. XI, 1957.
• Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Macmillan, 1873).
• Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist (Cambridge University Press, 1939; revised 1967).
• Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Faber, 1958; revised 1968).
• Martin Kemp, Leonardo (Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura (1435); Cecil Grayson edition, Penguin Classics, 1991.
• Patricia Simons, “Women in Frames: The Gaze, the Eye, the Profile in Renaissance Portraiture,” History Workshop Journal 25 (1988): 4-30.

The Christus-Johannes-Gruppe and medieval bridal mysticism

• Jeffrey F. Hamburger, St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (University of California Press, 2002).
• Jeffrey F. Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (Zone Books, 1998).
• Ruth Meyer, Das “St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch”: Untersuchung, Edition, Kommentar (Niemeyer, 1995).
• Annette Volfing, “Brother, Bride and alter Christus: The Virginal Body of John the Evangelist,” in Springer Metzler.

Religious eroticism and modern theory

• Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (UC Press, 1982).
• Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (UC Press, 1987).
• Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (Zone Books, 1991).
• Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History (University of Chicago Press, 2002).
• Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
• Karmen MacKendrick, Counterpleasures (SUNY Press, 1999).
• Karmen MacKendrick, Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of Flesh (Fordham University Press, 2004).
• William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Longmans, Green, 1902).
• Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1930).
• Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works vol. 12 (1944).
• Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Collected Works vol. 14 (1955-56).
• Georges Bataille, L’Érotisme (Minuit, 1957).
• Georges Bataille, Les Larmes d’Éros (Pauvert, 1961).
• Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (University of North Carolina Press, 1975).
• William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love (SUNY, 1983).
• Henry Corbin, L’Imagination créatrice dans le soufisme d’Ibn Arabi (Flammarion, 1958).
• Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite (Indiana University Press, 1969).
• David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yogini (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
• Andrew Newberg and Eugene d’Aquili, Why God Won’t Go Away (Ballantine, 2001).
• Robin L. Carhart-Harris et al., “The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8: 20 (2014).
• Barry R. Komisaruk, Beverly Whipple, et al., The Science of Orgasm (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

The Plantard hoax and the Da Vinci Code rebuttal

• Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (Jonathan Cape, 1982).
• Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday, 2003).
• Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood, The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved (Sutton, 2003).
• Jean-Luc Chaumeil, La Table d’Isis ou le Secret de la Lumière (1994).
• Jean-Luc Chaumeil, Le Testament du Prieuré de Sion (2006).
• Massimo Introvigne, CESNUR articles on the Priory of Sion (1990s onward).
• Robert Richardson, “The Priory of Sion Hoax,” Gnosis 51 (1999).
• Investigation transcripts, Pelat affair (Judge Thierry Jean-Pierre, 1993).

French occult revival, Hermetic androgyne, Templar revival

• Christopher McIntosh, Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival (SUNY, 2011).
• Frances Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Routledge, 1972).
• Sasha Chaitow, scholarly work on Joséphin Péladan.
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892-1897 (exhibition catalogue, 2017).

Freemasonry and the medieval Templars

• Albert Mackey, Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Moss & Company, 1873).
• Bernard E. Jones, Freemason’s Guide and Compendium (Harrap, 1950).
• Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Temple (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
• Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
• Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History (Sutton, 2001).

Image sources

• Hero (chapel altarpiece): AI-generated dark engraving (Doré-style) by Crazy Alchemist, 2026.
• Christ and Saint John the Evangelist, c. 1300-1320, Swabia. The Cleveland Museum of Art, accession 1928.753 (CC0).
• Andrea del Castagno, The Last Supper, 1447, Sant’Apollonia, Florence (PD via Wikimedia Commons).
• Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Last Supper, 1476, Badia di Passignano (PD via Wikimedia Commons).
• Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Last Supper, 1480, Ognissanti, Florence (PD via Wikimedia Commons).
• Cosimo Rosselli, The Last Supper, 1481-82, Sistine Chapel, Vatican (PD via Wikimedia Commons).
• Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Last Supper, 1486, San Marco, Florence (photo Jean Louis Mazieres, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons).
• Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper, 1495-98, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan (PD via Wikimedia Commons).
• Leonardo da Vinci, Saint John the Baptist, c. 1513-16, Musée du Louvre, Paris (PD via Wikimedia Commons / C2RMF).
• Andrea del Sarto, The Last Supper, c. 1526-27, San Salvi, Florence (PD via Wikimedia Commons).
• The Rebis, woodcut from Rosarium Philosophorum, Frankfurt, 1550 (PD via Wikimedia Commons).
• Éliphas Lévi, Baphomet, frontispiece in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, vol. 2, 1856 (PD via Wikimedia Commons).

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Gospel of John 13:23, 19:26-27, 20:2-10, 21:7, 21:20-23 (canonical)
• Tertullian. De monogamia, ch. 17. Early 3rd century
• Origen of Alexandria. Commentary on the Song of Songs and Homilies on the Song of Songs. c. 240, surviving in Rufinus’s Latin translation
• Jerome. Adversus Jovinianum I.26. 393
• Gregory of Nyssa. Homilies on the Song of Songs. c. 390
• Bernard of Clairvaux. Sermones super Cantica Canticorum (86 sermons, 1135-1153). G.R. Evans translation in Selected Works. Paulist Press, 1987
• Mechthild of Magdeburg. The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Frank Tobin translation. Paulist Press, 1998
• Hadewijch of Antwerp. Hadewijch: The Complete Works. Mother Columba Hart translation. Paulist Press, 1980
• Porete, Marguerite. The Mirror of Simple Souls. Ellen Babinsky translation. Paulist Press, 1993
• Teresa of Ávila. The Book of Her Life. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez translation. ICS Publications
• John of the Cross. Cántico Espiritual (1577-1586) and Llama de amor viva (1585-1591)
• Khunrath, Heinrich. Amphitheatrum Sapientiae Aeternae. Hamburg, 1595; expanded edition Hanau, 1609
• Rosarium Philosophorum. Frankfurt, 1550 (in De Alchimia Opuscula)
• Trismosin, Salomon. Splendor Solis. Manuscript dated 1582; first printed in Aureum Vellus, 1598
• Lévi, Éliphas. Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. Paris, 1854-1856
• Fabré-Palaprat, Bernard-Raymond. Levitikon. Paris, 1831
• Webb, Thomas Smith. The Freemason’s Monitor. Albany, 1797
• Bambach, Carmen C. Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered, 4 vols. Yale University Press, 2019
• Brambilla Barcilon, Pinin, and Pietro C. Marani. Leonardo: The Last Supper. University of Chicago Press, 2001
• King, Ross. Leonardo and the Last Supper. Bloomsbury, 2012
• Freud, Sigmund. Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci. Deuticke, Leipzig and Vienna, 1910
• Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. Faber, 1958; revised 1968
• Kemp, Martin. Leonardo. Oxford University Press, 2004
• Hamburger, Jeffrey F. St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology. University of California Press, 2002
• Hamburger, Jeffrey F. The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany. Zone Books, 1998
• Meyer, Ruth. Das ‘St. Katharinentaler Schwesternbuch’: Untersuchung, Edition, Kommentar. Niemeyer, 1995
• Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. University of California Press, 1982
• Bynum, Caroline Walker. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. University of California Press, 1987
• Hollywood, Amy. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. University of Chicago Press, 2002
• James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Longmans, Green, 1902
• Jung, Carl. Psychology and Alchemy. Collected Works vol. 12, 1944
• Jung, Carl. Mysterium Coniunctionis. Collected Works vol. 14, 1955-1956
• Bataille, Georges. L’Érotisme. Minuit, 1957
• Bataille, Georges. Les Larmes d’Éros. Pauvert, 1961
• Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. University of North Carolina Press, 1975
• Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sacred Marriage Rite. Indiana University Press, 1969
• Newberg, Andrew, and Eugene d’Aquili. Why God Won’t Go Away. Ballantine, 2001
• Komisaruk, Barry R., Beverly Whipple, et al. The Science of Orgasm. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006
• Baigent, Michael, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Jonathan Cape, 1982
• Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. Doubleday, 2003
• Putnam, Bill, and John Edwin Wood. The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved. Sutton, 2003
• Chaumeil, Jean-Luc. Le Testament du Prieuré de Sion. Paris, 2006
• McIntosh, Christopher. Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival. SUNY Press, 2011
• Yates, Frances. The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. Routledge, 1972
• Mackey, Albert G. Encyclopedia of Freemasonry. Moss & Company, 1873
• Barber, Malcolm. The Trial of the Templars, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2006