Only by restoring the sacred feminine to her traditional role in the divine, can people achieve the healing and togetherness so needed today.

That was the message author Margaret Starbird brought this weekend to Sancta Sophia Seminary at Sparrow Hawk Village.

Starbird’s best-known works include “The Woman with the Alabaster Jar,” “The Goddess in the Gospels,” “Magdalene’s Lost Legacy,” and “Mary Magdalene: Bride in Exile.” Her work was cited by Dan Brown in his best-selling “The DaVinci Code.”

Through decades of research, she came to believe Mary Magdalene was the physical as well as spiritual bride of Christ – a role first suppressed because of the danger posed by the Romans, then virtually obliterated by Roman Catholic Church authorities during the centuries.

But a hidden church, a “church of love,” persisted, depicting Mary Magdalene’s role through a series of art works and beliefs passed on discreetly, a message considered heretical and also dangerous.

“You’re wondering what a nice Catholic girl like me is doing here,” she said after opening her lecture Friday evening reading a passage by Khalil Gibran, depicting the first meeting between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. “This is a journey I never intended to take.”

She was, perhaps, an unlikely candidate for such an odyssey. When it began, she was a staunch lifelong Catholic, the mother of five, a choir singer and teacher in the church, the wife, daughter and granddaughter of military men.

“It was a rather regimented life,” she said. “I didn’t even realize I had been indoctrinated.”

When she was first handed a copy of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” in 1983, she refused to read it, saying she was appalled by the idea that Jesus perhaps had not been celibate as commonly believed, but married to Mary Magdalene and even the father of a child.

Two years later, she read, “In God’s Name,” a book detailing the death of a high-ranking priest amid financial misdoings in the Vatican. She learned that Pope John Paul II, who led the church only just more than a month before his death in 1978, was found dead on the day he planned to reveal money laundering in the Vatican bank. Some believed he was murdered to suppress this information. This revelation shook her to the core.

“My hair positively caught fire,” she said.

She returned to “Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”

“I thought nothing could disturb me more [than ‘In God’s Name], and I was totally wrong,” she said. ”I was even more upset. I thought the thought that Jesus was married couldn’t be true.”

She described a series of events, expanded upon in “The Goddess in the Gospels,” surrounding the prayer group she joined when she and her husband moved to West Point. The group often sought counsel by opening passages of the Bible and reading the verses they found within.

For some time, her concerns about the plausibility of the Mary Magdalene question, as presented in “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” remained a “closet thing” for her. She shared her thoughts with a friend, who was equally unready to accept the theory.