MEDITATIONS: I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE...

“A Sane Mind, A Soft Heart, A Sound Body” July/August 2000—$5.00

MEDITATIONS: I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE; I AM THE VINELET THIS MIND BE IN YOU

THE MYSTERY OF GOLGOTHA: THE REDEMPTION OF THE LUCIFERICCHRONICLE OF THE LIVING CHRIST: THE 33 1/3 YEAR RHYTHM

A CHRISTIAN ESOTERIC MAGAZINE

God, what a glory this consciousnessOf life on life, that comes to those who seek! Nor would I, if I might, to others speakThe fullness of that knowledge. It can bless Only the eager souls, that willing, press Along the mountain passes, to the peak. Not to the dull, the doubting, or the weak Will Truth explain, or Mystery confess.

Front Cover: Intimate Landscapes, Corel Professional Photos. Back Cover: Fresco (detail), Last Judgment, Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Planet Art. Above: Fellowship picture archives.

Not to the curious or impatient soulThat in the start demands the end be shown, And at each step, stops, waiting for a sign; But to the tireless toiler toward the goal, Shall the great miracles of God be known, Life revealed, immortal and divine.

—Ella Wheeler Wilcox

CONSCIOUSNESS

This Issue...Feature

Shared Grief and Shared Happiness...Unknown...................................................2

EditorialThe Anti-Christ and the Human Genome...S.R.....................................................3

Mystic LightMeditations—I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Light; I Am the Vine.....................................................................................Friedrich Rittelmeyer..........5Let This Mind Be in You...C.W...........................................................................11The Mystery of Golgotha—The Redemption of the Luciferic...V. Tomberg .....17Adonai...Anne Phillips ........................................................................................20

From Max Heindel’s WritingsWhy the Truth Seeker Must Live in the World...................................................24

Readers’ QuestionsHuman Discontent; Jehovah and the Holy Spirit; Changes in Religion.............25

Western Wisdom Bible StudyThe Book of Revelation...Max Heindel ..............................................................27

AstrologyWill Christendom Unite?...A Probationer ...........................................................31Chronicle of the Living Christ: The 33 1/3-Year Rhythm...Robert Powell........33The Great Work...John Josling ............................................................................39

Spiritual Science and ArtDante Rossetti Poems Inspired by Paintings.......................................................43

Religion and the Public RealmThe Idea of Moral Progress...John Richard Neuhaus .........................................46

News PerspectivesWe Teach But What We Know... .........................................................................52

Book ReviewsWine, the Biblical Imperative: Total Abstinence...P.F. ........................................53

Nutrition and HealthWhy Men Eat More Than Women...Max Heindel................................................55

Healing“Lord, Have Mercy on My Son”...Julia Hawthorne ...........................................57

For ChildrenFairies...Charles Perrault .....................................................................................59

MiscellaneousConsciousness (Poem)...Ella Wheeler Wilcox ...........................Inside front coverRosicrucian Song of Light (Poem)...Margaret Grant............................................9The Builders (Poem)...Henry Wadsworth Longfellow .......................................31God’s Wings ........................................................................................................53A Limerick and a Rhyming Story...Dagmar Frahme ..........................................60

“A Sane Mind,A Soft Heart,

A Sound Body”© 2000 The Rosicrucian Fellowship

A Christian Esoteric Magazine

Established byMax Heindel

June 1913

Volume 92, No. 4

July/August—2000USPS 471080—ISSN 0744-432X

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FEATURE

TWWOO MMEENN, both seriously ill, occupied the same hospital room. One man was allowed tosit up in his bed for an hour each afternoon to help drain the fluid from his lungs. Hisbed was next to the room’s only window. The other man had to spend all his time flat

on his back. The men talked for hours on end. They spoke of their wives and families, theirhomes, their jobs, their involvement in the military service, where they had been on vacation. Andevery afternoon when the man in the bed by the window could sit up, he would pass the time bydescribing to his roommate all the things he could see outside the window.

The man in the other bed began to live for those one-hour periods where his world would bebroadened and enlivened by all the activity and color of the world outside. The window over-looked a park with a lovely lake. Ducks and swans played on the water while children sailed theirmodel boats, Young lovers walked arm in arm amidst flowers of every color of the rainbow.Grand old trees graced the landscape, and a fine view of the city skyline could be seen in the dis-tance. As the man by the window described all this in exquisite detail, the man on the other sideof the room would close his eyes and imagine the picturesque scene. One warm afternoon the manby the window described a parade passing by. Although the other man couldn’t hear the bandhe could see it in his mind’s eye as the gentleman by the window portrayed it with descriptivewords.

Days and weeks passed. One morning, the day nurse arrived to bring water for their baths onlyto find the lifeless body of the man by the window, who had died peacefully in his sleep. She wassaddened and called the hospital attendants to take the body away. As soon as it seemed appro-priate, the other man asked if he could be moved next to the window. The nurse was happy tomake the switch, and after making sure he was comfortable, she left him alone. Slowly, painful-ly, he propped himself up on one elbow to take his first look at the world outside. Finally, hewould have the joy of seeing it for himself. He strained to slowly turn to look out the windowbeside the bed. It faced a blank wall.

The man asked the nurse what could have compelled his deceased roommate who haddescribed such wonderful things outside this window The nurse responded that the man wasblind and could not even see the wall. She said, “Perhaps he just wanted to encourage you.”

Epilogue: There is tremendous happiness in making others happy, despite our own situations.Shared grief is half the sorrow, but happiness when shared, is doubled. If you want to feel rich,just count all of the things you have that money can’t buy. The whole universe can be seen andexperienced through the window of your soul.—Author unknown

Angels assisting the dying, from

illustrated edition of Night T

houghts or, The C

omplaint and T

he Consolation, text by E

dward Young, engravings by W

illiam B

lake (1757-1827), Dover P

ublications, Inc.

IF WE ARE MATERIALISTIC, we mighttend to see the anti-christ as some chimericbeast like one finds in the Revelation of St.John. If we are insecure or hateful, we tend tosee the Anti-Christ xenophobically as the per-

son or people that most represent the part of ourinner being with which we most need to come toterms, which we fear because we have not shined thelight of love-wisdom upon it.

Both cases are examples of psychological projec-tion, externalizations of unredeemed soul content orunprocessed soul power in the making at which weare balking and which will stand before us until wetransform it.

The Anti-Christ may be in the external worldbut, more importantly, it is also within us. It is, asMax Heindel liked to say of God, “nearer thanhands and feet.” Also, like God, the Anti-Christ isa spirit, an attitude of consciousness. The spirit ofthe Anti-Christ is the antithesis of Christ and theLife Spirit, whose attributes are life, light and love.

As we work on soul growth we become progres-sively more capable of externalizing everythingwithin us until we reach the point where we areready to enter the inner worlds consciously. At thattime we see the composite of all of our unredeemedsins as the Dweller on the Threshold and we see ourcompounded good deeds as a “guardian angel,” analchemical mate from heaven whose wedding gar-ment is the vehicle of consciousness of our divinebeing.

If we merely see the Dweller as a being outside ofus instead as an objectification of our previouslyhidden, unregenerate character, we are also beingmaterialistic. We are seeing the form and not thecontent and we are failing our trial. We will betrapped in this materialistic illusion until we look at

every feature of the Dweller and see the sin, the mis-applied principle, the unredeemed soul powerlocked up within and behind it and begin to tame andtransform it through the Christ within.

Actually, one needn’t even see the Dweller as aform to participate in this activity. Every time we seethrough our sins and the psychological machinationsthat conceal and facilitate them, we are dealing withthe Dweller, which is a facet of our very life andbeing. This redemption can be done in retrospectionand in our ongoing daily lives. Every time we applylove where we have previously sinned, we are tam-ing and transforming the Dweller. Initiation is notsome wondrous process foreign to our lives, it is theongoing deepening, intensification and vivificationof our now relatively dull and numb lives.

The process of seeing through the Dweller andtransforming it into the Guardian Angel also takesplace collectively in humanity as a whole and in ourwork in the world. Not surprisingly, the collectiveDweller, sometimes thought of as the Anti-Christ(which may well also be the embodiment of a high-er malignant being), is also not alien to our everydayexperience. A good example of its spirit is found inthe genome project, the project to painstakinglyexplore and map the DNA genetic code.

The DNA is the gateway from the ethers throughwhich the forces of the archetype and seed atomsform dense physical bodies. The folly of materialismin thinking that all life and consciousness is a prod-uct of chemical interactions in the chemical regionof the physical world is forgivable, as is the absurdmaterialistic notion that materialism will be able tocreate life from chemicals alone without the ethersand the oceanic thinking necessary to do so. But thedeathly aspects of the genome project are moreimmediate and alarming. The deathly outlook of the

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The Anti-Christ and the Human Genome

EDITORIAL

“fall” has been sophisticated and elaborated in waysthat could inhibit or cripple our material evolution, ifgiven free reign.

The very manner in which the cataloging of thegenome is being accomplished is materialistic.Some of the work is being done in academic institu-tions. There scientists publish their findings and theknowledge is in the public domain. However, a gooddeal of the research is being done in private biotech-nology laboratories and as soon as a segment of thegenetic code is deciphered, the results are patented!

This means that the knowledge and application ofthe genetic basis for all human bodies throughout allrebirths is the property of an individual or corporateentity. This is equivalent to an initiate discoveringthe scheme of the divine spiral of evolution (whichspiral is reflected microcosmically in the DNA spi-ral) and claiming ownership of it so that everyoneelse who traverses the evolutionary spiral must paytoll. This is cosmic possessiveness, possessivenessof the Anti-Christ that is the antithesis of the freeflowing life of the Life Spirit. This attitude has soinvaded science that plants are patented straight outof nature with disregard for the common good andthe unified nature of reality.

This fallen, deathly outlook also permeates theapplications of biotechnology. Since material scien-tists are not aware of working creatively with life oreven of vital life itself, they cannot be faulted for notdoing so. However, their inability to create andevolve life does not prevent them from meddlingwith the evolutionary materials in a manner whichdemands correction.

Not realizing that illness is a consequence of mis-attitudes of the past and that it is now a correcting,learning and growing experience for the future, aredemption of past causes, there is a vain hope ofremoving illness without fulfilling its purpose—anattempted end run around destiny. The plan is to clipthe genetic material responsible for predispositionsto a given illnesses or condition. This is a permanentdeathly, eliminative act, a reduction of opportunitiesinstead of a progressive, growing, evolving and cre-ative process.

Eliminating genetic material not only decreasesevolutionary options, it can also take away protec-tions: The same gene that is associated with sicklecell anemia is responsible for resistance to malaria.The destructive attitude of material science has pro-

ceeded so far that plant seeds are designed to pro-duce plants whose seeds are sterile. This, now com-mon, practice ensures that agriculturists will have topurchase new seed annually. This is a giant step inthe same direction as birth control whereby peoplesurfeit themselves in vain pleasure without the con-sequences intended for the generative function. Itdeprives the plant kingdom, and the group spiritbehind it, of evolutionary growth and progress bymaking it impossible to pass experience on to futuregenerations to build on.

These practices of hiding the light of understand-ing behind property rights, of reducing, inhibitingand nullifying progress, and the lack of concern forother living beings except as they serve our selfishends, are clearly counter to the life, light and love ofChrist. They are outright anti-Christian.

What can we as aspirants to Christian enlighten-ment do about it?

As students we can inform ourselves about theseissues and see them in terms of the Christ light ofspiritual intelligence instead of materialistic igno-rance and selfish propaganda. As citizens we canalways take social and political action since we arethe source of social self-governance in a democraticsociety. Probably the most effective thing we can dois what Max Heindel called “occult service.” We canthink right thoughts. Thinking is the most importantservice of our humanity in the Earth Period. Oneskilled, intense thinker focussing on the truth is morepowerful and effective than millions of untrainedindividuals enshrouded in the confusion of material-istic darkness.

Prayer is one of the best and most transformativeforms of thinking. If we take the spiritual truthspointed out in the Rosicrucian philosophy andevolve them to apply to current issues in ourthoughts and prayers with sustained intensity of feel-ing, we are broadcasting the truth to fellow humansin a manner that exceeds the broadcast media.

Writing, speaking and other means of direct com-munication such as our daily conversations augmentthis occult service, but our personal participation isnot necessary to change the psychic atmosphere. Allthat is required is clear, true, loving thought emanat-ed into the cosmos with the compassion and intensefeeling we use in healing prayers. This is occult ser-vice, participation without egoistic display. p

—S.R.

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WE SHALL SOMETIMES, aswe practice our meditation,have the feeling as if within usthere were pure joy of the resur-rection. Everything is full of

resurrection music, as if in us the angels them-selves were singing over the open grave. Then webegin to have an idea of what Easter is and of howlittle men have allowed the resurrection Christian-ity, of which John’s Gospel speaks, to become areality. Perhaps what we have said may also helppeople to whom this world is still strange to feeland to find reality in their own way.

As we now pass over to the next saying ofChrist, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John16:6), we are again standing before one of themighty words of Christ, which alone might be mat-ter for the meditation of a lifetime. The context inwhich this saying is spoken is especially interest-ing. Thomas says to Christ: “We know not whitherThou goest, and how can we know the way?” Nowit is remarkable how this Thomas, of whom thelater legends record that he became the apostle ofIndia, is, in the whole manner of his being, relatedto the spirit of India. He feels strongly the destiny ofdeath (John 11:16). He is the melancholy brooderand doubter who longs for sight (John 20:25). Andhere at the place we are considering he asks for the“way,” as the Indians for thousands of years haveasked for the “path,” as Sundar Singh and Ghandi

today, each in their own manner, ask for the way.The saying of Christ in reply to the question ofThomas contains a most remarkable indication ofthe “mission” to India, which is not yet fullyunderstood. Buddha showed a path, but the saying,“We know not whither Thou goest,” is true of himalso. When he was asked what Nirvana is, he wassilent.” Concerning that, the lofty one revealednothing,” say the Indian texts.

The Indians were the people who did not wish toenter the earthly world, the world of the senses. Dr.Rudolf Steiner has given an illuminating demon-stration of this. The Indian is afraid before outward

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Meditations— I am the Way, the Truth,

and the Life;I am the Vine

MYSTIC LIGHT

This is the sixth in a series of articles taken from FriedrichRittelmeyer’s Meditation, Guidance of the Inner Life, pub-lished by Floris Books, Edinburgh. Reprinted with permission.

St. ThomasAfter Pentecost, Thomas preached the Gospel in southern India,where he was martyred for his faith in Christ. From its incep-tion, St. Thomas Christianity has taught that the laws of conse-quence and rebirth are fundamental truths of human existence.

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reality. This is expressed in the word itself uponwhich they meditate, “a-u-m.” In the sound “a” thesight is opened to reality. In “u” one is afraid beforeit. And in “m” one passes over into meditation, intoinward humming and musing. In truth the Indianseeks his way back into Paradise. He seeks to per-ceive that which lies beneath all things, that whichcomes before them. And he seeks to unite himselfwith this all-inclusive being, which is there beforethe multiplicity of appearances. And so he seeks inhis own way the tree of knowledge and the tree oflife.

And now Christ says, if we put His saying in thisway, as it might be spoken to such men: You seekthe way back into Paradise? You seek the tree ofknowledge, the tree of life? You cannot go back.But Paradise has opened and is seeking its lostchildren upon earth. I am the way. In my “I” youwill find Paradise again. I am the truth. In my “I”you will regain the fruits of the tree of knowledgeI am the life. In my “I” shall you also have thefruits of the tree of life. The two trees are no longerseparated, but united in my “I.”

When we look at this saying from this historicalpoint of view, we can easily derive from it thatwhich sanctifies the past also, our own past, aswell as the past of humanity. We here mean by thepast, not that which passes away but that whichstands. “Eternally still stands the past.” We meanthat which is the divine background of existencefor our being and our life. If we can rise to the con-templation of this, then the past is redeemed fromthe transitoriness under which men have alwayssuffered so bitterly.

When we look back with such a glance upon ourpast, we clearly recognize that it divides itself intotwo parts. The one part is transitory and can by nomeans be recalled. That is the past which alwaysbrings to us the “sorrow for the past.” But from thefriction of our experiences, the truths we havegained emerge—the victories we have gained inlife. That is the eternal part of our past. We mustbring this out of the dark mine of the past up intothe daylight and make it fruitful. Christ can help usto do this. He gives us the right way of looking atit. He is “the way” to the Father. For in these truths,these victories we have won from life, the divine

being of the Father is looking at us. And so this saying of Christ may be to us a word

for the evening, as the saying about the resurrec-tion is a word for the morning. The most fruitfulreview of our day is that which can be made underthe guidance of this saying. Naturally the sayinghas many other meanings, and permits of manyother different expositions of itself. But what weurgently require is inward work upon our past,daily if possible. It lies there like a great mound ofrubbish from which we must recover grains ofgold. If we have Christ in us, if we have the will toacquire the greater “I” which lives in peace andworks in love, then our past begins to transmuteitself into gold. We see the governance of the Father,and begin again to find our way back into theParadise where we “walk with God.”

We therefore resolve that, led by the higher “I”of Christ, we shall go back at evening through ourpast day, and seek the truths that have revealedthemselves to us during the past day, seek to bringhome that harvest for our life which has been givento us during the past day.

“And the Lord walked in the garden in the coolof the day.” (Gen. 3:8 ) We can hold this medita-tion under the figure that we are walking inParadise and are eating of the tree of knowledgeand of the tree of life. This is sufficient to make themeditation take a quite personal form. We shall seehow marvelously such an evening walk with Christthrough the past day ennobles our life, even whenwe learn nothing at all that is individual or new.We receive ever new ideas of what a man may andought to draw from his life, and what his backwardlook after death will be. All that is difficult anddark in our life will be redeemed, and will let itssecret gold shine forth when it is raised into thebright realm of “truth” and “life.”

It would be a great step forward if in this way wealso learned to walk in the garden of humanity’shistorical past—I am the way—and there to see thedivine truth—I am the truth—and to find thedivine life—I am the life. This will be the last his-tory book of humanity: that humanity will be shownhow their history has been a way to Christ, andtherefore, in a higher sense, also a way with Christ,in which He was ready to reveal Himself as the

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truth, and to give Himself as the life. Thegospel and all that which Christ reveals init as truth and life are as a lamp to this paththrough the history of humanity.

The earth is the place...in which the egodevelops towards freedom, so that it mayend in love. “I am the way,” says Christconcerning this “development.” “And thetruth,” out of that grows “ freedom.” “Andthe life,” therein lies “love.”

Again, two kinds of Christianity are nolonger possible. A Christianity is impossi-ble which looks upon the personal pastonly as on that which must be forgiven;when all the time truth and life are waitingto be won from it. And a Christianity isimpossible which looks only at the “storyof salvation” in Palestine as a thing of thepast; whereas Christ is the way which mustnow be gone towards truth and light. Andin the same way we pass beyond a point ofview which prevailed in the East, in whichthat which is passing in the world was tooexclusively seen, and not that which is becomingand remaining; and we also pass beyond a view towhich the West is inclined, in which the past isstudied and honored as if it itself remained andwere valuable to humanity, and as if it were not away to truth and life.

And now there still remains the present for us todiscuss. Often men say: “Holy is the present.” Thisis said in all possible keys. But a practicable wayto the inward consecrating of the present is seldomshown. In this sense, we can find no more fruitfulsaying than the last “ I am” of John’s Gospel: “I amthe true vine and My Father is the husbandman,and ye are the branches.” (John 15:1, 5)

This saying presupposes a quite different way ofregarding the world from that which we usuallyhave. The history of mankind does not proceed insuch a way that from beginning to end there is acontinuous development. That is the heathenisherror which is fundamental to our age’s conscious-ness of the world. But the earth was the field pre-pared beforehand; “my Father is the field laborer,”says the Greek text of this sublime parable of thehistory of the world. But one day a seed of light

struck down into the field from above, and sincethen the duty of the earth has been to help this seedof light to unfold itself. And when it is unfolded,then the old dark earth may fall away. Its task isaccomplished. In this image we see world historyin truth. Christ is the seed of light who wills tobecome the tree of life upon this field of the world.

Thus we understand the saying: “Apart from meye can do nothing” (John 15:5). We become con-scious that all we do when out of Christ and with-out Him is, in the deepest sense, “nothing.” It doesnot come into consideration in respect of the truedevelopment of humanity. We become consciousthat the real fruits for the development of humanityare only where his life-blood flows: “Herein is MyFather glorified, that ye bear much fruit: so shallye be My disciples” (John 15:8).

We become aware that every branch must bepurified if it is to bring forth more fruit—the mean-ing of our sorrows becomes apparent—and that allthe branches that do not bring forth fruit must,somehow and sometime, be cast out of the truedevelopment of the world (John 15:2) We alsobecome aware that the real life stream in the

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Fresco, Fra Angelico (ca. 1395-1455), Museo di San Marco, Florence

Sermon on the MountWhile He uttered profound truths in His Sermon on the Mount, Christ,the divine Logos, was the very embodiment of Truth in the man Jesus.

vine—the life stream from Christ—is joy (John 15:2) In this joy is strength to bring forth the rightfruits. Nietzsche is right in saying that men haverejoiced too little, if one takes this saying of hisZarathustra in such a connection. It is truth—out ofthe depths of union with Christ there first flowstrue strength and joy into every moment of the pre-sent. And on the other hand, where this strengthand joy is come valuable fruits, as if of themselves.The branch need do no more than become perme-able by the sap of the vine. This sap will of itselfripen to fruit by the sun of life.

A branch is the most unpretending thing there is,but it is at the same time a precious workshop inwhich the sap of the vine changes into fruit. Thefruit may be much greater and better than thebranch, if this fruit is created entirely by the vine—that concerns the vine and the fruit. If one oncelives earnestly in this Christlike feeling for life,then one will see how sound it is, how refreshingand how productive of life. That which has comeforth out of the vine as fruit will one day becomethe real fruits of earth’s development.

When a man in the course of his daily liferemembers often his existence as a branch; whenhe sees his individual work in this connection withthe world—the seed of light in the earth, whichmust grow to be the tree of life—and brings his lifeinto the ordered scheme of this great connectionwith the world; when he, wherever he is, seeks todo his work and brings his fruit out of such a unionwith life; when he thinks thus in a living way ofChrist—that he is there only for the sap of lifewhich flows into him through Christ; when he canlet the “I am” of Christ really flow through him asa new life sap; then will he be able to live rightlyat every moment, and his present will becomeholy.

One day he will remember the promise ofChrist: “I shall no more drink of the fruit of thevine till the day when I drink it new in my Father’skingdom.” And it will seem to him as if he hadalready entered into the fulfillment of this saying.His new method of work will place him in thebeginnings of “the Father’s kingdom” and hisunion with Christ will be a “drinking of the fruit ofthe vine.” The ego of Christ is a most subtle and a

most noble life sap—the life sap of a new world.And so man will acquire a new view of the presentstate of the world around him. He will believe thatthe fruits of Christ are not only there where Hisname is named, but also there where His life sapflows. And he will acquire the true perception ofthis sap of life. Therefore he will recognize muchto be in connection with Christ which is not knownto be such by men. But on the other hand he willhave the terrible power of recognizing where fruitsare growing which must inevitably go to destruction.

We propose that a man should not only some-times have such thoughts, but that he shouldexplicitly practice this meditation, at least now andthen: that he feels himself as a humble branch ofthe new vine which the husbandman plants; that hedrinks from the vine and thinks of the fruits intowhich he leads all which he can receive only fromthe vine, for whose sake he exists.

A false Christianity condemns the present andlives either in the past or in the future. From bothwe are free—from the Eastern way of living towhich the present is nothing, and from the Westernway to which it is all.

The future—a resurrection from the grave; thepast—a walking in the garden of paradise; the pre-sent—a drinking of the fruit of the vine. Undersuch pictures we hallow time as we have beforehallowed space. The darkly flowing river of timebecomes a holy stream when we let this sun shineupon it. We can in a spiritual sense do that whichthe Indian does in outward cult, when he bathes inthe holy river Ganges, and purifies himself. Weshall have the experience that thus we redeem time.

But it will be good if one does not only gothrough the individual meditations according toone’s need, and their character, but if at times onechooses a day, say an early Sunday morning, whenone goes through them all. When one has previ-ously been through the individual meditations, oneneed not remain so long over each single one. Thenone will discover how entirely new a world isaround one. We shall recognize that we are uponthe way to a “Christian outlook upon the world,” ina much higher sense than we have understood thephrase before. We shall see that we are everywhereupon the track of high perception, on the path to

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the development of the life of percep-tion in the sense of John’s Gospel:“This is life eternal, to know Thee, theonly true God, and Jesus Christ whomThou has sent”; and on the path to ahallowing of the spiritual being in thesense of the first petition of the Lord’sPrayer: “Hallowed be Thy Name.” Weshall bear this petition about in us dif-ferently, illuminated by the content ofChrist’s announcement: “I have mani-fested Thy Name unto them.”

And at the same time we shall findthat we ourselves now receive our real“I.” When we pass through the revela-tion of the “I” of Christ, we see for thefirst time the full meaning of a holy“I.” The present age is sick, simplywith the sickness of the ego. We can-not go back to the time before the ego,and we cannot content ourselves withrailing against the egoism of our race.We can only go forward to the trueego. The men of the present age must be broughtto that which “healeth the self in the depths of thesoul,” as it says in the Easter prayer of the Act ofConsecration of Man.*

Each “I am” contains a healing herb for onesickness of the ego: “I am the bread” gives helpagainst self-love of the ego; “the light” against fearof the ego; “the good shepherd” against weaknessof the ego; “the door” against cramping of the ego;“the resurrection” heals numbness of the ego; “theway, the truth and the life” heals impoverishmentof the ego; “the true vine” heals self-seeking, self-willed hardening of the ego.

But beyond all these single sicknesses of theego, concerning which a whole book might bewritten, when we are living positively in theseseven sayings we receive our higher ego, which isentirely a part of Christ and is yet our own Self aswe ought to be. Just there is the miracle.

One may also, when in the early hours ofSunday one goes through the seven “I ams,” bejustified in representing to oneself that one is

receiving all the seven sacraments spiritually. “Iam the way, the truth and the life,” that is Baptism.“ I am the true vine, ye are the branches,” that isConfirmation; “I am the good shepherd,” that isConfession; “I am the door,” that is Marriage; “Iam the bread,” that is the Last Supper; “I am thelight of the world,” that is Consecration of Priests;“I am the resurrection and the life,” that is the LastSacrament.

When we think that the first “I am” speaks ofbread, and the last of wine, we feel that there is acommunion in these “I ams,” a way of dedication,a sacred service of God, which must be found out,of which only a very little can be said.

“I in the Father and the Father in Me,” that is thecentral proclamation of John’s Gospel. It is contin-ued in us when Christ in His high-priestly prayersays, “I in them” (John 17:21-26). “I in theFather,” to that we are inwardly trained by the fourfirst “I ams,” through which we learn to live in theego of the Father as in a new space. “The Father inMe—in the ego,” that is formed in us by the threelast “I ams,” when with this new “I” we enter intothe new time. One dives deep into the ground of

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*The Act of the Consecration of Man is the CommunionService of the Christian Community, a movement for therenewal of religious life through a living experience of Christ.

Fresco (detail), ca. 1411, Fra Angelico, Museo di San Marco, cell 6, Florence

Transfiguration of ChristChrist was transfigured by spiritual light on Mount Tabor as the figures ofElijah and Moses appeared on His right and left, respectively. Elijah, whowas later reborn as John the Baptist, represents the Way; Moses representsthe Truth; and Christ Jesus the Life that transfigures the Mosaic law withLove and reorients the ascetic, anchoritic way to service in community. Theartist, a Dominican, also depicts Mary and his order’s founder, St. Dominic.

the world when on all sides, in all four spiritualdirections, one meets the face of the Father’s“ego,” which is everywhere “love.” “No man hathseen God at any time; the only begotten Son,which is in the bosom of the Father, He hathdeclared Him” (John 1:18). And one “unites withthe world’s evolving,” as it says in the Act ofConsecration of Man, when one lets the three last“I ams” grow into reality, and so receives thatwhich can be truly called “peace.”And so theseven sayings are united to our basic meditation ofpeace and love.

When we spoke above of the Indians, we sawthat their whole attitude to the world is expressedin the word on which they meditate “a-u-m.” Atotally different attitude to the world lies in theword “ani,” which is the Hebrew for “I.” Here alsois reality felt, “a,” but then it passes—we see theother direction clearly—into the “n,” which con-tains the negation of the reality just given, theopposite negation to that of the Indians. It is noretreat, it is a breaking through. In “i,’’ the soundwhich expresses the light of the inwardness of theego, appears the new reality.

The Hebrew says, as it were, to the reality whichsurrounds him (and that was his difference fromthe “heathen” around him): “Thou art not thatwhich I seek; I must tear myself away from thee: Imust negate thee.” In the ego comes a new realityfrom within. In the Hebrew race especially the“ego” in humanity had to be formed. Still morelaboriously, more darkly and more stubbornly doesthe ego work itself through in the other Hebrewword for “I,” “anoki”....

It would be a favorable sign of the reality of ourmeditation if we learned to say this word “I” withdifferent feelings in everyday life. The evangelistJohn would not use the word “I” for himself afterhe had heard it in the mouth of Christ. He callshimself only by a circumlocution “the disciplewhom Jesus loved.” We live in the time of self-seeking, and of false dark perception. We mustredeem this time, and redeem it first in ourselves.Then we learn to speak the word “I” in a new way,with our speech indeed, but above all, with ourwhole being; to speak it in such a way that Christis in it with His peace and love. (Continued) p

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Rosicrucian Song of the Light

O threefold radiance of the Sun, O robe of Life divine, Through whom, o’er all the Universe, Our triune God doth shine.

O stars and planets and soft moon, Who traverse heavenly ways, And with a wide diversity Reflect the solar rays.

From all the kingdoms of the Earth, From man and beast and bird, From tree and plant, from soil and stone, Acclaiming praise be heard.

Jehovah’s rays of red create All forms that serve and die; The whirling atoms take new shape, Drawn by His energy.

Christ’s golden rays in matter forge New vistas for the Light; Evolving Roses come to birth, Unfolded through His might.

The Father’s rays of blue, in form The seed of Life bestow, That, through in-dwelling, spirit may In conscious wisdom grow.

Accept our worship, God of Light, From spirit, body, soul; May all Thy children rise and be One praising, shining whole.

—Margaret Grant

THE TEXT of the Temple Service readsix nights a week in the RosicrucianFellowship’s Ecclesia, or HealingTemple, cites a passage from Paul’sletter to the Philippians (2:5,7-8) as

worthy for meditation. The words are:

Let this mind be in you which was also inChrist Jesus, who made himself of no reputa-tion, and took upon himself the form of a ser-vant, and was made in the likeness of men. Andbeing found in fashion as a man, he humbledhimself, and became obedient unto death, eventhe death upon the cross.

The key word in this passage is “mind.” If weadopt this mind, we are able consciously to followChrist, we can know His way and discern the TruthHe presents in His Person because He is also theLight that illumines the way out of our sense-locked personalities.

Paul’s letter contains a clause that has beenomitted from this Temple service text, words wedo well to remember—that Christ, “who, being inthe form of God, thought it not robbery to be equalwith God.” The revised edition of the Reims-Challoner Catholic Bible is more emphatic:“Though he was by nature God, [Christ Jesus] didnot consider being equal to God a thing to be clungto, but emptied himself, taking the nature of a slaveand being made like unto men” (2:5-7).

Christ emptied Himself of divinity to becomehuman and to serve humanity. What kind of mindcan do this? A Godly mind, whose divine nature isreflected in the ability to give away what it is, to

love it away that the poor in spirit and the pure inheart might receive it and become like unto theGiver.

Possession of an indwelling mind is the distinct-ly human attribute. It distinguishes man from hisyounger brothers, the animals. Both have physicalbrains. But whereas animal intelligence resides inthe Group Spirit, an archangelic being who trans-mits thought as an instinctive impulse into the ani-mals under its charge, mind inheres in man as aconscious and independently functioning faculty,to be used as desire, volition, and the reason thatmind confers dictate. Reason is nothing other thanthe wisdom of instinct become conscious.

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Let This Mind Be in You

MYSTIC LIGHT

St. PaulAlbert Schweitzer called Paul “Christianity’s patron saint ofthinking.” The first exponent of a “Christian gnosis,” infourteen surviving letters Paul heralds the resurrection ofconsciousness and proclaims Christ’s redemption of thinking.

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The cosmos of man’s nascent mind, endowedduring the Atlantean Epoch, was a magnet forother spiritual beings who saw in this faculty aresource that could serve their own purposes,much in the way that Group Spirits influence thelives of animals. Both the angelic Lucifers and theAhrimanic Spirits, a wayward faction of the Lords

of Mind, sought out this pristine mental dimensionto gain control of human emotions, will, and think-ing itself, manifesting in egotism and materialism,respectively. Paul refers to these mind-manipula-tors as “principalities,” a term describing the Lordsof Mind, and “spiritual wickedness in highplaces,” indicating the Lucifers.

Ideally, the mind serves the purpose of enablingmankind to freely (self-consciously) participate inGod’s evolving creation by individualizing Hisown spirit, the I AM that characterizes the Being ofChrist. Only a self-aware mind can say “I am.”That is, an Ego must have a mind to know itself.Knowing is predicated on thinking. Thinking is theability conceptually to relate objects, or the not-I,with the subject, the I, the thinker.

It is possible to think without being consciousthat one is thinking. To the extent unconsciousnessdetermines action, to that extent an entity is notfree. Animals are not free, in this sense, though themore domesticated species are approaching thehuman threshold.

The Lucifers’ needs are met when human think-ing becomes highly subjective and self-centered,tending to grandiosity, fantasy, irrationality, andpassionate emotionality, especially anger. Ahriman’spurposes are served when human thinking is soul-lessly abstract, mechanical, exclusively functionaland sense-bound.

The mind that Christ brought to the Jesus vehi-

cles was hallowed in an understanding of God’swill for His human children. That will was and isthat humans re-cognize the image and likeness inwhich they are created so that they may truly knowthemselves and attain to the conscious realizationof the god within their individual beings as an inte-gral member of God’s cosmic Being.

With mind humans can participate in creationknowingly, collaboratively. Knowledge does notalter the essence of a thing. Rather, it is a form oflove, of getting close to, a deep seeing into. It per-tains to the how, the what, and the why of things. Itbrings us into conversation with God’s mind.

Mind discerns dualities and distinctions. It iden-tifies the content of God’s ideation and creation.As invisible whole light refracts into lower vibrat-ing visible colors, so the unity of God processesbefore the Adamic mind in a festival of logoic mul-tiplicity. Ideal human intelligence identifies formswith names that intone their vibratory keynote.Mind can return to God by acknowledging the one-ness in which all subsists. True synthetic under-standing, however, is really the province andpower of intuition, which grasps the living whole-ness of creation, a creation the Holy Spirit mani-fests in myriad facets and activities.

If Christ is not born within human conscious-ness, self-conscious assimilation to God is not pos-sible. To prepare for this spiritual nativity, thisawakening into the divine mind, the Christian isenjoined to make a straight path in the desert of hisfallen consciousness, in the wilderness of hisdesire body. (Mark’s gospel account of Christ’stemptation after the Baptism was simply, he “waswith the wild beasts.”) John the Baptist exhortedhis contemporaries to repent, a misleading transla-tion of the Greek word metanoia, which is betterunderstood as to change one’s thinking.

While Christ emptied His mind of divinity, weare to learn regularly to empty our minds of senso-ry images and their impulsions in our souls. Wevoid consciousness of the pullulating data of secu-lar circumstance so that through the mind of Christwe may participate in divine consciousness. Paulenjoins us, “be ye not conformed to the world butbe ye transformed by the renewing of your mind,that ye may prove what is that good, and accept-

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As invisible whole lightrefracts into lower vibratingvisible colors, so the unityof God processes before

the Adamic mind in a festi-val of logoic multiplicity.

able, and perfect will of God” (Rom. 12:2). God’swill cannot be proved if this soul-purging by retro-spection and concentration does not take place.

Christ sacrificed not a mere reputation but a cos-mic status, an exalted identity, to be buried inhuman nature. Humans are called to spurn theallures of worldly reputation, the petty power rank-ings and laureate crowns conferred by fickle pub-lic approval, for real spiritual attainment whichenrobes the mind with light.

Paul tells us that we have the mind of Christ (1Cor. 2:16). This is heady stuff—until we rememberthat of the exalted One it was derisively said “Hesaved others; Himself He cannot save” (Matt.27:42); that is, Himself He would not save. Christcame to serve others, not himself. He is ourMaster. The servant is not greater than his master.And the Master dedicated his life to be a server. Isthere a message here?

Another line from the aforementioned TempleService answers our question: he who would be thegreatest among you, let him be the servant of all.The way to the heights begins in the depths; thetallest structures have the deepest foundations.What is He who ascended but also He whodescended, even to Hades. One who intentionallydescends, who is firmly grounded, whose self-willis ground down, who is lowly and meek in heart,such a one is taught by physical substance itself,by supine water and by prostrate earth. He knowshumility. He makes himself of no reputation; hecommunes with sinners, he sits in the low places;his person is subject to rank abuse. Isaiah foresawsuch a One. He called Him a man of sorrows,acquainted with grief.

The Christ mind demonstrates a perfect humili-ty only love can achieve. That mind was planted inthe humus of humanity. What grows from thisdivine root of humility? The tree of the cross—thecross of towering patience, the noble work of silentsuffering, the embodied prayer for world atone-ment, the power sign that appeared to Constantineinscribed with the words “In this [sign] conquer.”

What fund of high will holds up this humility!Only one who knows great heights can be thishumble. The will bent to this high purpose must, ina sense, will against itself, must serve a higher, the

Father’s will, by being obedient unto death, even adeath upon a cross.

Everything the mind can seize upon as remedyfor pain and adversity, all thought of redress orrelief—the recourse to eloquence which couldchange a court’s verdict from guilty to innocentand a crowd’s mass mood from execration to exul-tation, the invoking of supernatural assistance—allis rejected by the Christ mind obedient to a willthat God did not mandate, but that the love ofChrist freely offered to serve the Father’s holy pur-pose—that none of His children be lost—whichpurpose His Son, the Good Shepherd, knew, hon-ored, and sought to accomplish.

The mind that would and can put on Christ, thetransformed mind renewed in the spirit-baptizedconsciousness that has informed thousands of jubi-lant martyrs, truly belongs to the world of Life

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Created by Ariel Agemian exclusively for the Confraternity of the Precious Blood

The Royal Way of the Cross“There is no health of soul nor hope of eternal life but in thecross....Because if thou die with Him thou shalt also live withHim, and if thou art His companion in suffering thou shaltalso partake in His glory.”—Thomas à Kempis

Spirit. It is not the merely logical “Greek” mind,which sees Christian values as foolish becausethey are not conditioned by the requirements andrewards obtaining in the physical world. The mindwhich actuates Christian conduct, notwithstandingthe superlative rationality of Thomas Aquinas andother Doctors of the Church, seems gratuitous andirrational to the secular humanist. This mind ofChrist is not of our making; it is other-worldly. It isa gift. We do not think ourselves into it—thoughwe can, and must, think ourselves toward it. Butthe conversion, the donation, and the essence ofthis mind are the spiritual substance of Christgraced upon us through the Holy Spirit, Who wasreleased by the effectual power of the mystery ofGolgotha. It is the universal mind that rent the tem-ple curtain before the Holy of Holies, that burst therestraints of mental legalism and priestly elitismprevailing until Christ became the Earth’sindwelling Lord.

The high resolve implicit in Christian obedi-ence, so graphically figured in the stark fixity ofthe Cross—which can be surmounted only bymounting—this dedication conveys the humanSpirit toward the source of Light and Life, towardthe Logos of St. John’s Prologue. But this Lightand Life cannot be willed. Rather the soul submitsitself to guidance of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit ofTruth working in the mind of the Christian seeker,whose knowledge is faith, and whose light is hope.

Committed will can bring human consciousnessto aspiration’s mountain top, but there it must stepaside, it must wholly give itself to what it is not.The mountain top may be the extremity ofendurance, the summit of suffering or sacrifice (aswhen Abraham was called to offer Isaac). It maybe the inverted mountain of a soul’s desolation,which obedience refuses to desert. Here the lightof Christ may irradiate. Here the Other may trans-figure in the power of that Name that is aboveevery name.

In the world we will have tribulation. That’s acertainty. Those who are in the world and of it seekto avoid suffering at all cost, not knowing it maybe the handmaiden of Christian rebirth andChristian becoming, which benefit, according toPaul’s remarkable statement, even applied to

Christ Jesus, Who, “though he were a Son, yetlearned he obedience by the things which he suf-fered; and being made perfect, he became theauthor of eternal salvation unto all them that obeyhim” (Heb. 5:8-9, italics added).

We may say that obedience is required (1) whenwe are ignorant and need to be directed for oursafety and well-being, as when parents direct anddiscipline their children; (2) when we are told to dosomething (suffer, admit, forgive) whose refusalcould have grave consequences; (3) when a higherauthority prescribes it for a benefit we cannot com-prehend.

Obedience is practiced in ways great and small.Whenever we conform our actions to proposedprinciples and plans we are being obedient. Indoing what we intend, we are obedient; in provingour easy words with difficult deeds, we are obedi-ent; by listening carefully, speaking truthfully,being punctual, in fact, when all we think, do, andsay is directed toward serving the Lord Christ(Col. 3:24), we are practicing the holy obediencethat expresses God’s will for us.

Exoteric obedience responds to outer laws,authorities, and necessities. Esoteric obedience isthe response of the soul to the still small voicewithin, to conscience, to the promptings of theindwelling Christ. Derived from the Latin meaning“to hear” (ob + audire), Christian obedience seeksto hear the silent Word and incarnate it.

Obedience is required of a servant, one who isbondage. Christian obedience is freely given. Chris-tian service is elected bondage. Paul was a prison-er of Christ not because he was in Roman chainsbut because he was yoked by love to Him Who isthe deliverer from “this body of death.” Christ tellsus the goal of our obedience: Be ye perfect, even

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Exoteric obedience respondsto outer laws, authorities, andnecessities. Esoteric obedi-ence is the response of thesoul to the still small voice

within, to conscience.

as your Father in heaven is perfect. How do we dothis? By doing all things as unto the Lord; morecorrectly, by doing all things as if Christ were in usdoing them, as in “what would the Master do?” Ifwe don’t know, we ask within, for “other founda-tion can no man lay than that which is laid, whichis Christ Jesus” (1 Cor. 3:11).

In his book My Utmost for His Highest, OswaldChambers writes: “The golden rule to follow toobtain spiritual understanding is not one of intel-lectual pursuit, but one of obedience.” If a persondesires knowledge and insight into the mind ofChrist Jesus, “he can only obtain it through obedi-ence. If spiritual things seem dark and hidden tome, then I can be sure that there is a point of dis-obedience somewhere in my life. Intellectual dark-ness is the result of ignorance, but spiritual dark-ness is the result of something that I do not intendto obey.” It is the evasion of the deeds required byChrist Jesus’ words that make “religious impos-tors.” If we are rigorously honest we will let theSpirit of God uncover our spirit of self-vindication,our self-righteousness.

If Christ Jesus Himself was made “perfectthrough sufferings” (Heb. 2:10), who are we toreject such opportunities. This higher kind of law,which may entail suffering unto life eternal, isreferred to when it is said, “I will put my laws intheir mind, and write them in their hearts” (Heb.8:10, 10:16). Many atheists and agnostics are intel-lectually hostile to religion because they areunable to reconcile the existence of pain and suf-fering with the existence of a loving God—it’s notrational, they say. These minds are simply lacking,or refuse to admit, all the facts that would rational-ize their observations; such as the twin laws ofrebirth and consequence. In time they will discov-er that suffering can be a benevolent catalyst toinduce God-mindedness, particularly when othermeasures do not avail.

Were the rational mind truly obedient, it wouldbe open, be it by default, to first principles; butwhen locked into the physical world, it is thrall tomaterial causes and effects. It requires too great aleap into the unquantifiable and incommensurable,the God-dimension, for which faith is the unerringinstrument that computes and measures. For the

“enlightened” relativist the idea that life is intelli-gent and unitary smacks too much of anthropo-morphism. However this intuition simply confirmsman as God’s creation, made in His image. If crea-ture man is endowed with reason, the Creator Godmust be reason’s archetype. So is the Holy Spiritidentified—the Agency manifesting the mind ofGod. Material science would prefer an abstract lawthat describes the form and motion of physicalphenomena, in a vacuum, as it were. It balks atpositing cosmic intentionality and intelligence toaccount for the physical universe.

The term “mind’ can be used as a synonym forintention, as when one “has a mind” to do some-thing. Lest we falter or become infirm of purposein our Christian calling, Paul admonishes us:“Consider him that endured such contradiction ofsinners against himself, lest ye be weary and faint

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William Blake (1757-1827), from Jerusalem, the William Blake Trust, London

Albion, representing fallen humanity, is revived by a visionof the Redeemer. In emulation, he fuses with his thought,echoing the Paracelsian doctrine: What man thinks, “he is,and a thing is also as he thinks. If he thinks fire, he is a fire.”

in your minds” (Heb. 12:3). True to his directnature, Peter is more explicit: “Beloved, think itnot strange concerning the fiery trial which is to tryyou, as though some strange thing is happening toyou: But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers ofChrist’s sufferings” (1 Pet. 4:12-13), for this is suf-fering unto immortal life. In the same epistle Peterurges, “Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered forus in the flesh, arm yourself likewise with the samemind” (4:1)—the mind which possesses the wholearmor of God, the Christian virtues Paul cites inhis letter to the Ephesians (6:11-17).

If affliction and difficulties tempt one away fromfaith in Christ, then one has refused the mind of

Christ, Who came into the world “that I shouldbear witness unto the truth” (John 18:37). It is spir-itual man, the I, that bears witness to the truth thatis in Christ. The mind of Christ was given to Jesusand is given to all humanity. And it is Godlyhumility that enables us to take His yoke upon us,Him who is meek and lowly in heart. For Christbears the preponderance of this burden. That iswhy His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

The esoteric mind devours bookish theosophy,mystic insights, and occult truths. Yet at times itmust exist as if it knows nothing, must do withoutthe consolation and light of philosophy, becomeignorant for God. It must enter an inner spacewhere all it has is the resolve to register what itmeets with good will and to hold fast to the faiththat it can walk through any adversity, any meta-physical darkness. One can and does do thisbecause the mind of Christ is already in place, hasbeen gifted to humanity, thereby schedulingGethsemane, Golgotha, and Resurrection Sundayas destined experiences for each individualgrounded in Christian faith.

Faith pertains to what we think, what we believe.It is the precursor of knowledge. Obedience per-

tains to what we do. Faith is dead without deeds(James 2:17, 20), or rather, it is stillborn, for to befruitful, faith must issue in action. There it is tried.Faith that endures the temptation of irresolution,what James calls double-mindedness (1:8), comesto fruition in right doing. This requires holy obedi-ence, by which one comes to know (God) even ashe is known (by God).

In adopting the mind of Christ we turn towardthe unitary vision, we make the conceptual eye sin-gle so that the whole spiritual body is full of theLight that is God. The “fallen” mind is teemingand pluralistic. It is God in diaspora. It is the dis-membered Osiris. The mind of Christ is the one-

pointed mind whose focus is God, as in “I and theFather are one.” The parable of the Prodigal Sonrecounts the decision of the lower mind to return toits divine archetype. Famished feeding on thehusks of material appearances causes spiritual ane-mia and spiritual amnesia. In time, by the grace ofGod, the Ego remembers its divine estate and turnstoward its informing essence, the one Life thatensouls all form. In time each physically-involvedsoul surrenders a cherished and miserable sense ofseparateness. It dies to the cipher of the body-based personality and its material holdings thatshore up the illusion of worldly sufficiency.

The mind of Christ is a compass to point ustoward our spiritual home. It is evolution’s herma-neut. Mind is given to read God’s signature in allcreation, to discern the presence of the Above inthe below. It reads the stellar script that informs usof God’s plan for us, which is to be Self-realized asa cosmos of love, to know and to show the love ofGod which is in Christ, by which we shall eventu-ally know ourselves as our heavenly Father nowknows us—as His Sons and Daughters, heartraysof His Love-sourcing Being. p

—C.W.

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The “fallen” mind is teeming and pluralistic. It is God in diaspora. It is the dismembered Osiris. The mind of Christ isthe one-pointed mind whose focus is God, as in “I and the

Father are one.” The parable of the Prodigal Son recounts thedecision of the lower mind to return to its divine archetype.

THE COSMOS OF LOVE’S evolutionbegins at the Mystery of Golgotha,which is the seeding of the newCosmos. Just as the whole futureorganism is already contained in the

seed, so the whole future of the world is containedin the Mystery of Golgotha. For this reason RudolfSteiner was accustomed to make the statement:The Mystery of Golgotha is the meaning of theEarth. And the Earth is the arena upon which isfought the decisive battle between Good and Evilin the Cosmos.

Initially this conflict takes place with regard to aquite definite territory—which includes everythingin the universe upon which Lucifer works, hasworked, or can work. For the territory of Lucifer isthat region of the world which may either fall preyto Ahriman, or be won back by the Hierarchies ofGood. This territory includes, on the one hand,parts of the realm of the Spiritual Hierarchies, and,on the other, the Kingdoms of Nature. In the centerof the territory, however, stands Mankind, who hasabsorbed the Luciferic into himself. Therefore thepivot of the territory in dispute lies in Man who, asthe center of the field, forms the link between therealm of Nature and the realm of the Hierarchies.

The struggle between Good and Evil is initiallyin the Luciferic territory because the Luciferic isnot only inwardly opposed to the Hierarchies of

Good and to the Ahrimanic, it has also somethingin common with both the one side and the other;and therefore for each side there is the hope that itmay be completely won over. For in common withAhriman, Lucifer has the pride of opposition,while with the Hierarchies of Good he has love incommon. Lucifer is like Janus in character: withone side of his nature he loves the Christ, but withthe other he has affinity with Ahriman. It isbecause Lucifer is so constructed that both sideshave the prospect of winning the whole field of hisactivity; the Spiritual Hierarchies hope to acquireit for Love, and Ahriman hopes to incorporate itinto his dominion.

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The Mystery ofGolgotha—

The Redemption of the Luciferic

MYSTIC LIGHT

*This is the second of three articles on the cosmic conse-quences of the Mystery of Golgotha. It is drawn from ValentinTomberg’s Studies of the New Testament. Reprinted withpermission of the Anthroposophic Press, Hudson NY 12534.


In the cosmic sequel to the casting down of the Lucifers,signifying their regressive need to evolve through humanexperience in the physical world, Christ Jesus atones fortheir errors and redeems them through His earthly sacrifice.

In the period directly preceding the Mystery ofGolgotha, the situation was such that the wholeLuciferic field might be regarded as the assuredprize of Ahriman. This was the case for humanityalready in the year 666 A.D. when a sort of “fan-tastic wisdom” (the expression is Rudolf Steiner’s)emanating from Gondishapur, the spiritual centerof the New Persian empire, had spread over theworld. This type of wisdom was “fantastic” in sofar as it was a combination of “iron logic” with avisionary perception of fantasms. It was not mere-ly a question of forms produced by human fancy,which in themselves would have been relativelyharmless, but rather of Luciferic imaginationswhich Ahriman had given spectre-like existence,and which would be therefore really not fancies,but precisely, fantasms.

Thus the “logic” which was combined with themediumistic visions would not be that thought-lifewhich forms a link between the human head andHeaven, but a logic of the lower man, of the meta-bolic man; it would be a pragmatic logic of theWill which, in conjunction with the visions, wouldproduce a force against which Man would not beable to stand. For then the essentially human ele-ment, the heart, would not only be completely shutaway, as it were, “imprisoned,” but it would alsobe dumb and powerless; it would have no thoughtby which to make itself known, and it would haveno influence on the Will to accomplish deeds.

The net formed by the visions and the logic ofWill would have contracted round the heart,detaching it completely from the Spiritual World,so that it must of necessity wither and abandon therealm of its existence to Ahriman.

One of the characteristics of that “fantastic” wis-dom would have been that it produced no univer-sal human truth at all; instead of that, importancewould be attached to “geographical” “truths”“founded on blood-ties,” with their origin not inHeaven, but in earth and blood. For instance, therewould be one “logic” and one world-conception onAmerican soil and another world-conception onthe soil of Eastern Europe. And the visions of onegroup of men united by blood-ties would be differ-ent from the visions arising from the blood ofanother such group. Different gods and demons,

ascending from the blood-fumes, would revealthemselves to different groups of men and wouldassume the direction of those groups with oracularauthority. Men would speak of the “awakening” ofthe gods and ancestors from the past, and theguidance of those gods and ancestors would be fol-lowed with implicit obedience.

But those things did not happen—at any ratethey only happened partially in a blunted andweakened form. And the reason why it could nothappen so lay in that event wherein the sacredBlood flowed on to the hallowed soil. When, in theMystery of Golgotha, the blood of Christ Jesusflowed onto the ground, a force was implanted inthe blood of Man and in the soil of the Earth whichcounteracted the demonic element in the blood andthe enslaving influence of the SubterraneanSpheres working through the medium of the soil.

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The purifying and regenerating power of Christ Jesus’bloodis celebrated in the sacrament of the Eucharist. His bloodhad to flow to enable His Spirit to enter the Earth. The artistaffirms the planetary, indeed cosmic, impact of this sacrifice.

And this counteracting influence brings it aboutthat human blood is the bearer not only of the sub-jective illusions of the demonic fumes, but also ofthe objective impulse of conscience; further, thisinfluence not only robs the ground of its enslavingpower, but also speaks of the yearning and hope ofNature for redemption through mankind. By ithuman blood receives the capacity to reflect moraland spiritual truth as water in Nature reflects thesky, but the ground receives “blood,” as it were,and thereby the capacity of “groaning togetherwith the whole creation.”

This mystery of the Christ-influence on bloodand earth is referred to in St. John’s Gospel in thefollowing words: “But one of the soldiers with aspear pierced His side, and forthwith came thereout blood and water. And he that saw it bare record,and his record is true; and he knoweth that he saithtrue, that ye might believe.” (John 11: 34, 35)

But for mankind this influence on blood andearth means the restoration of equilibrium in theseregions and hence establishment of freedom. Itnow depends upon Man himself whether he willyield to the enslaving influence of earth and thefantasm-producing influence of blood, or whetherhe will regard the whole terrestrial globe as thevictim of the Fall of Man and will make the bloodthe bearer of conscience. The “fantastic wisdom”of Gondishapur has no longer power simply tooverwhelm mankind with coercive force; it onlyappears, and then incompletely, when and in so faras Man accedes to it.

But establishment of equilibrium, and therewithof human freedom, is not the only consequence ofthe Mystery of Golgotha. It was also the beginningof the step-by-step retrieval of the territory ofLucifer. For the spirit who had severed this territo-ry from the region of the Hierarchies of Good him-self experienced now an inward conversionthrough the Mystery of Golgotha, True, this con-version concerned in the first place only Luciferhimself, and not, for instance, the Luciferic influ-ence in Man. This latter is still active in the olddirection and can only be changed by Man himself.But the Prince of the Luciferic hosts changed hiscourse in consequence of the Mystery of Golgotha.The conversion took place within him when look-

ing at the Crucifixion at Golgotha it pierced himwith penetrating insight that it was actually he whoshould have borne those sufferings. And now theOther was bearing them in his place.

Pierced by that pain, there arose in Lucifer atthat hour a ceaseless longing for suffering andhumiliation. To the proud spirit, to the shining spir-

it of beauty personified, nothing thenceforward hasbecome more hateful than the incense of admira-tion for his character—it burns him like fire—andnothing more desirable than the recognition of hiswrongdoing and the humiliation of his spirits. Thisis as balm to him, soothing his pain. And he isfilled with a passionate hope that at some time inthe Cosmos he may be allowed to experience amartyrdom equalling that of the Other.

This hope of Lucifer’s was reflected in worldhistory when, in the first centuries after theMystery of Golgotha, there was among men agreat wave of enthusiasm for suffering martyrdom.A current not only of readiness to be martyred, buta yearning quest of martyrdom inspired vast cir-cles of mankind during the first Christian cen-turies. Behind this aspiration was the longing tosuffer as He had suffered, and behind that longingstood Lucifer with his hope of a martyrdom thatwould equal His martyrdom... For the Spirit ofSelf-conscious Beauty had recognized that the trueand highest beauty is in sacrifice, and that all beau-ty which continues to nurse itself after it has seenthe suffering of the righteous One of God, is, intruth, ugliness.

This inward conversion of Lucifer was thebeginning of the retrieval of the whole Lucifericterritory for the work of Goodness, and therewithalso the sealing of the future fate of Ahriman, the“Prince of this World.” p

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The Spirit of Self-conscious Beautyrecognized that the true and highest beauty is in sacrifice,

and that all beauty which continuesto nurse itself after it has seen

the suffering of the righteous Oneof God, is, in truth, ugliness.

PERHAPS THE MOST com-pelling name by which Hebrewmystics saluted their God was thename Adonai. The very wordcontains within itself a peculiar

radiance, not adequately expressed in itsEnglish equivalent, Lord. Although it wasused as a substitute for the ineffable Tetra-grammaton, yet it had an inner meaning andglory of its own. By the inner eye, the eye ofthe spirit, it was seen as the golden disc ofthe sun, a glory of light encircling the formof a great Archangel.

In early Christianity the word haloreferred only to the partial halo, or aura, oflight surrounding the head of a saint or god;the light surrounding the whole body was aGlory. This is the personal equivalent of theShekinah Glory.

Now when the neophyte begins to sense theinner, or spiritual worlds, be becomes aware of aSun which shines in that world as our physical sunshines in ours. That spiritual Sun is the light of thespiritual worlds. Its heat is the warmth of the spiri-tual worlds. Without that spiritual Sun, the spiritualor inner worlds would perish as surely as our phys-ical world would perish without the physical sun.

At first the Spiritual Sun, to the still untrainedvision of the student-seer, is seen only as a globe oflight, and its warmth is felt by the psychic senseseven as physical warmth is felt by physical senses.But there comes a time when to the fully openedEye, the Sun is seen to be the aura of that Archangelwho dwells at the heart of our world, the Solar

Logos. Hebrew seers, whose vision was open tothat Angel-in-the-Sun, hailed Him by the name ofAdonai, Lord.

Now the spiritual Sun, when seen spiritually,really consists of three great Beings, called inChristian esotericism the Father, Christ, and HolySpirit (Jehovah); but, under certain metaphysicallaws which govern spiritual phenomena, Jehovahseems to reside not in the solar orb but in the moon,and He was therefore worshiped as a moon god bythe Chaldeans and Hebrews, for He works onlywith planets having satellites. As there is a spiritualSun which shines in the interior world, so there is aspiritual Moon, and that spiritual Moon is Jehovah,or the Holy Spirit. Hence, the Moon is his symbol. Ata still later stage, we learn that there is a spiritual

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Adonai

MYSTIC LIGHT

Die Bibel in Bildern, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1789-1853)

The TransfigurationThe Light of the Angel-in-the-Sun, the Archangelic Christ, irradiatesJesus’ dense and vital bodies on Mount Tabor. He is shown aboveclothed in glory. So does Luke describe the halo of light surroundingElias (9:31), absent in this portrayal. Christ “shall come in his ownglory” at the Second Coming. Technically, this almond-shaped aureole,signifying great sanctity, resulting from a highly evolved body of lightether, is called the vesica piscis (literally fish bladder) or mandorla.

Earth, and Initiation conducts us through its ninestrata to the Core of Fire at its heart, theSubterranean Fire which is also a SUN to the spiri-tual vision, and which was also hailed as ADONAI,Lord! For all Life is a mystery of the twofoldDivine Fire such as Moses saw leaping in the Bush,and the Bush (the universe) was not consumed butnourished thereby.

When the Initiate looked into the Spiritual Sun, itwas that great Archangel whom we now call Christwho was seen. And behind Him was the overshad-owing blue orb of the Father, which extended itselfto infinity before the spiritual vision, like the azurereaches of Heaven itself.

Such knowledge as this constituted the centralcore of the HebrewMysteries, for theHebrews shared the SolarMysteries in commonwith the rest of the so-called pagan world. Ofcourse, ancient peoplesdid not use all the samenames since they spokedifferent languages.However, the Idea was the same in all languages,for language is the fruit of the Race Spirits who areRays of Jehovah-God, after a manner of speaking.That is, they are channels for His influence.Technically, they are called Archangels.

It was an established faith among the Egyptiansthat the Spiritual Sun was the creator of life, andMoses, as an Egyptian Initiate, could hardly havebeen ignorant of this teaching. In fact, theScriptures abound with cryptic references to an eso-teric Sun worship, which far-reaching persecutionin late centuries was never able wholly to eradicate.Even so late as Malachi we are still able to find evi-dences of it: “The Sun of Righteousness shall arisewith healing in His wings.” A poetic figure ofspeech? Surely, but fact as well. The Winged Sunwas, and is, a well-known symbol of the EgyptianMysteries.

The Archangel in the Sun was visible to the seersof every race and nation and epoch. How could itnot be? Even in comparatively recent timesSwedenborg, unacquainted with the Mystery teach-ings in this respect, suddenly had his vision opened

and saw the spiritual Sun. His followers naturallythink this was a unique experience but it is nothingof the kind. Many mystics, over periods of thou-sands of years, have known this experience; butSwedenborg’s case illustrates for us how ancientseers in pre-Christian times may also have seen theArchangelic Christ before His incarnation inPalestine. To the Persians this Archangel wasMithra; to the Chaldeans Shamash, later identifiedwith the Word in Christendom; to the Greeks theArchangel was Apollo and Dionysus; to theEgyptians Osiris; to the Phoenicians Adonis andOsir, these being but two names of the god Osiris.

But not only was He visible in the Sun; Heseemed to be really present with His worshippers

when they entered thespiritual worlds bymeans of the rites of theMysteries. We havealways to rememberthat space in our physi-cal sense of the word isvirtually nonexistent inthe spiritual worlds.Space is there, but

space and distance are not synonymous spiritually.Therefore the Archangel-in-the- Sun is close athand or far away, according to our own love of Himand understanding of His Truth.

The Spirit-in-the-Sun was worshiped as a Savior,the Savior Sun, and was understood to be the repre-sentative of the Principle of Light in the universe.As the moon shines by reflected sunlight, soJehovah-God shines spiritually by reflected Christ-Light. Until Christ’s advent, His influence reachedus from without by way of the Jehovistic Principleas a channel.

Light in the spiritual world indicates the presenceof Divine Intelligence; heat in the spiritual worldindicates the presence of Divine Love. (But there isa “false light” and a “false heat” which pertain tothe Hell consciousness.)

Now it was in keeping with divine revelation tobelieve that some day the Lord of Light, visible toInitiates in the Spiritual Sun (the Manicheans andGnostics called Him Primal Man in the Sun), woulddescend upon the earth as an earthly Savior, bring-ing to an end the reign of darkness and establishing

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The Winged SunEmblematic of the three persons of the Egyptian Trinity,the wings, the serpents and the solar orb are the insigniaof Ammon, Ra, and Osiris, respectively. Variations of thisemblem also symbolize the clairvoyant center in the brow.

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in its stead a New Heaven and a New Earth. Suchan earthly incarnation had become necessary, saidthe Initiates, because of the materialism amongmen, which was shutting out the light of Spirit, par-ticularly in the Occident.

The Hebrews did not look for a miraculousdescent of the Messiah, or Deliverer, but held thatbe would be born as a man among men, having bothfather and mother. In the Book of Enoch He isdescribed as pre-existing with God. This is one ofthe many Gnostic doctrines which the orthodoxChurch suppressed. Yet the book of Enoch is quot-ed in the New Testament in a manner which showsthat Christ Jesus accepted it as a true book of reve-lation, and that He referred to its esoteric teachingsas knowing that His disciples were already familiarwith them.

From all of which, we are better able to under-stand Zacharias’ statement in the New Testament(Luke 1:78): “Through the tender mercy of our God,whereby the Dayspring from on High hath visitedus.” Also, it helps to know that the Therapeutaeprayed each day toward the rising sun, asking thatthe Divine Light of Truth illumine their minds.

In India it is Krishna who is worshiped as thespiritual Sun. In Egypt, the spiritual Sun was repre-sented by a blue figure in their hieroglyphs, signi-fying Atum, the Father Principle or, as Max Heindelspeaks of it, the invisible Father Fire. Now Krishna,in Hindu sacred art, wears the golden robe of love(the Hindus speak of it so), and his body is also alovely delicate blue. He therefore stands as a proto-type of a new spiritual race as yet unknown uponthe earth. The Spiritual Sun is saluted in prayer bythe lover of Krishna: “May that Sun who contem-plates and looks into all worlds be our protection.May it illumine our intellect!” Thus in India, too,the Mysteries of the Spiritual Sun were, and are,known, although as yet India has not come tounderstand the connection between her own ancientdoctrine and the advent of the Christ in Palestinetwo thousand years ago.

We know that in Greece Dionysus was likewiseidentified with the Mystic Sun, the Light whichshines in darkness, the Light that lighteth everyman. Euripides says that when Dionysus came toGreece his worship was already known all overAsia, Asia Minor, Chaldea, Egypt, and Syria. Syria

here includes Phoenicia and its neighbor Palestine. Thus we learn that the Mystery of Adonai is a

universal Mystery, shared by all the ancient world,even to the name in some instances, which amongthe Greeks became Adonis. Adonis is theHellenized form of the Phoenician word for Lord,and as we know, Adonis is Osiris, and Osiris isDionysus. (Herodotus quite definitely identifiesOsiris with Dionysus.)

We have mentioned that the Mystery of Adonaihad its subterranean (Chthonian) aspect, as well as

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Mithra in the Form of the Lionheaded Kronos

Many Mithraic mysteries were performed in grottos andcaves. Meta-time is personified as ruler of the three dimen-sional cosmos (bowing figures). Mithra is wrapped in ser-pent coils representing the spiral motions of heavenly spheresthrough the zodiac. He resurrects from the tomb of man-con-ceived time into the realm of boundless duration, from whichthe past and future are severed and the eternal present reigns.

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celestial. This accounts for the underground tem-ples, grottoes, and crypts in which the SolarMysteries were frequently celebrated. TheLabyrinth of Crete seems to have been a SolarTemple of this kind, The Mysteries dealt with themysteries of the spiritual worlds and held out thehope of immortality for the soul. They taughtrebirth, and ultimate salvation from rebirth whenthe spirit should “stand’’ and go no more out; hencethe term “pillars of the Church.” Peter, James, andJohn are designated Pillars. In other words, the sub-terranean temple represented a descent into thegrave and a rising therefrom, in the manner of anOsiris or an Adonis or a Dionysus —these threebeing one. It is well known that Osiris was preemi-nently a god of the underworld. So also wasDionysus-Zagreus as worshiped in the OrphicMysteries: Zagreus means the Devourer (in oneinterpretation of the word), referring of course todeath. The central Mystery of the Orphic, as of theOsirian and Adonian cults, was the death and resur-rection of the god—Dionysus, Osiris, and Adonis,respectively. The Mystic Marriage also figuredprominently in these cults, as it did later among theGnostics.

Since these are Solar Mysteries, we expect themto have an allegorical connection with the progressof the Sun through the zodiac and with the life cycleof the earth and its vegetation. Pherecydes, theteacher of Pythagoras and reputed founder of theOrphic Mysteries of the sixth century B.C., madeuse of a cave to demonstrate the solstitial andequinoctial turnings of the Sun in its annual circuit.This reminds us of the Mithraic grottoes, and sug-gests also a remarkable parallel with the birth ofJesus in a grotto and His coming forth from a cave-tomb on Easter morning, events which everyRosicrucian student knows occurred at the wintersolstice and vernal equinox, respectively.

There is an ancient tradition that a secret cryptexisted under the Temple of Solomon in which eso-teric teachings of Enoch were hidden. Enoch also isassociated with the Solar Mysteries. This namemeans “the Initiated,” or “the Teaching,” and hewas a Son of Cain. To our own day Mt. Moriah ishoneycombed with artificial caverns, due to the factthat the surface of the hill was not wide enough toaccommodate all of the Temple structures, and the

hill was therefore built up, tier upon tier, leavingmany subterranean passageways and eaves in itsinterior under the Temple area.

When the Christ, so long foreseen and Hisdescent told in the Mysteries, at last did come toearth, He, as the supreme Hierophant of allMysteries, set aside the ancient rites and the secre-cy and limitation attendant upon them, saying,“Whosoever wills may come.” The ancient schoolshad outlived their usefulness, and with the comingof the Christian Dispensation they went into the dis-card—not primarily because of persecution butbecause an entirely new cycle was inaugurated bythe Archangelic Christ. p

—Anne Phillips

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The RosicrucianMysteries

By Max Heindel

Written in almost narrative style, intendedespecially to give busy people a solution tolife’s basic problems by enabling the heart toaffirm what the rational mind has sanctioned.Includes:

The Order of Rosicrucians

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The Visible and the Invisible Worlds

The Constitution of Man

Life and Death

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The sublime truths of the

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Teachings

AFTER THE TRANSFIGURATIONscene, when the Christ and His dis-ciples were making ready to descendfrom the Mount, the latter wouldfain have stayed and suggested mak-

ing dwelling places so that they might remain. Thiswas not permitted, however, for there was work todo in the world which would have remainedundone had their plan been carried out.

The Mount of Transfiguration is the “Rock ofTruth,” where the freed spirit may behold the eter-nal realities. There in the GREAT NOW (the pastsymbolized by Moses and Elijah) the prophets ofthe ancient dispensation met Christ, the ruler of theKingdom which was to come. Every spirit who ispermitted to behold the supernal splendors of thiscelestial realm, to hear the sublime strains of theharmony of the spheres, and to view the wonderfulcolorplay which accompanies the music, is like-wise loath to leave.

Were it not that we seem to lose our form andpersonality, and encompass this whole realm with-in, ourselves, we should probably not have thestrength to return to earth, but this feeling that weretain “heaven within” fortifies us when it is timeto again turn our gaze outward and attend to thework in the world.

Objects in the physical world always hide theirinward nature or construction; we see only the sur-face. In the Desire World we see objects outsideourselves, inside and out, but they tell nothing ofthemselves or the life that ensouls them. In theArchetypal Region there seems to be no circum-ference, but wherever we direct our attention,

there is the center ofall, and our conscious-ness is at once filledwith knowledge concern-ing the being or thing, atwhich we are looking. It is easier to catch in aphonograph the tone which comes to us from heav-en than to set down the experiences we encounterin that realm, for there are no words adequate toexpress them; all we can do is to try to live them.

But to live them, however imperfectly, we mustbe in the world; we have no right to remain seclud-ed with the truth we have found. That is the greatlesson taught when Siegfried leaves his beloved.He must not remain. Life is a constant flux; stag-nation is the cardinal sin, for new experiences arethe very life breath of progress. If we have foundtruth, it is our bounden duty to seek also a fieldwhere it may be of use. And according to our judg-ment in that matter, and the diligence wherewithwe plant and water, will be our harvest.

This is a matter we should each carefully con-sider: “What use am I making of the teachings I re-ceive?” We may be off in the mountain in dream-land, though we live in a city, and as deaf to the cryfor light which sounds in our very ears as if theseeker were thousands of miles away. Unless wegive out by our lives—which speak louder thanwords—the truth we have found, we incur a heavyresponsibility, “for unto whom much is given, ofhim shall much be, required.”

Let us remember that “Knowledge puffeth up,but, love edifieth,” and that service is the standardof true greatness. r

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Why the Truth Seeker Must Live in the World

FROM MAX HEINDEL’S WRITINGS

QUESTION: I’ve often been dissatis-fied with my life and longed for a“change,” though I can’t put my fin-ger on exactly what sort of change.One author I recently read said thatwe are dissatisfied because we

haven’t yet reached our potential—that we have alot to give but haven’t yet found channels throughwhich to do this adequately. Would you commenton this?

Answer: Many people, we believe, suffer fromvague, if not pronounced, feelings of discontent orrestlessness. Much of this is due to the fact thatspiritual longings which we do not yet fully under-stand are beginning to stir in us. If nothing else,our subconscious is aware that there are higherconcerns than our physical and material well-beingtoward which we are meant to be striving.Ultimately it is the destiny of every human beingto be quite literally “as our Father in heaven.”Within us already, in latent form, are His Light,Powers, and Attributes. We came from out of Godeons ago and descended into matter in order togain the experiences which will potentiate our Godessence. We are now embarking on our return jour-ney to God. The physical Earth is not our truehome; it is only the temporary field of our presentactivity and consciousness.

Basically, our discontent, whatever form it maytake and whatever its surface manifestations, is theexpression of an ineradicable longing to return tothe abode of Spirit. This return will take addition-al eons of time, most of us requiring many futureearth lives before we can live in continuous Spiritconsciousness. This goal can be most effectivelyrealized by dedicating our lives to service in the

physical world, which will help us to evolve thespiritual qualities of compassion, altruism, andselflessness. By doing this—serving the LordChrist in thought, word, and deed, voluntarily andunstintingly—we placate our spiritually-basedrestlessness and longing for our eternal home .

Thus the author of whom you write is quite cor-rect in saying that we have not yet reached ourpotential and also that we have a lot to give buthave not yet found the channel through which todo so. The ultimate channel for us at this time isthat of selflessness. It is only as we give of our-selves, and to the extent that we give of ourselves,that we find peace and fulfillment. This applies tothe offering of our talents in service for the uplift-ment of our fellow humanity, to the routine workassociated with physical existence that we all mustperform, to the thoughts of love and blessing thatwe send to others, and to the relinquishing of lowdesires, the fulfillment of which renders us unfitfor the higher work of life.

JEHOVAH AND THE HOLY SPIRIT

Question: The teaching of the New Testamentas touching the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, so win-some and so gracious, makes it difficult to identifythe Holy Spirit with the vengeful Jehovah of theOld Testament. How is this to be reconciled?

Answer: It was the mission of Jehovah and HisAngels to multiply whatever is upon the earth. Inother words, He was the giver of children. Take theannouncement of the angel to Mary: “The HolySpirit shall come upon you and you shall con-ceive.” There you have already a connecting link;but just as there are two sides to every question, sothere are two sides also to the Holy Spirit. One

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Human Discontent ll Jehovah and the Holy Spirit ll

Changes in Religion

READERS’ QUESTIONS

phase of His work is done from the outside as agiver of law, and law when it is applied without, isa taskmaster that drives us to do this or that or pro-hibits us from doing other things. It demands aneye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. There isJehovah, the author of the law; but when the timecomes that we have received the law within andare not driven from without, the taskmasterbecomes the Comforter.

The whole universe is governed by law.Everything in the world rests upon law, and it isour safeguard as well as our taskmaster. In themorning we leave our homes without concern,depending upon the law of gravity to keep them inplace during our absence. We know that upon ourreturn we shall find them where we have left them,although our planet is rushing along in its orbit atthe rate of 65,000 miles per hour. We rely upon theexpansion of gases for our motive power. In fact,everything in nature is based upon laws, andwhether we know it or not, we are their slaves untilby knowledge we learn to use them, to cooperatewith them, and thus make them do our bidding andsave us labor.

Similarly it is with the moral laws given byJehovah upon Mt. Sinai. They were designed tobring us to Christ, and when Christ is born within,the law of the Holy Spirit also enters in. Man thenis symbolized by the ark that stood in the Holy ofHolies and had within it the tables of the law. Youwill notice that the Comforter who came to themen of old was not an outside Comforter, but onewho worked within, one who entered into themand became a part of them.

When the Spirit of Law, the Holy Spirit, entersinto us, He is the Comforter, because we do will-ingly the things which are prompted by this innerurge, while we resented and begrudged doing thebidding of the exterior taskmaster.

CHANGES IN RELIGION

QUESTION: Why have there been changes in thereligions of the world? If one religion were true,why should it not, be satisfactory for all ages?

Answer: In his first epistle to the Corinthians(13:11), Paul says: “When I was a child, I spoke asa child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child,

but when I became a man, I put away childishthings,” and his message is so plain and clear thatit cannot be misconstrued when applied to the indi-vidual. Yet there is a broader application implied,the application to all mankind in the process of itsevolution. One often speaks of the childhood of arace or the infancy of a people, meaning in its earlystages of growth.

Christ in one of his last meetings with His disci-ples before His betrayal and subsequent crucifix-ion and resurrection says, “ I have yet many thingsto say unto you but ye cannot bear them now.”Who will venture to deny that He has been givingus the message from that time to this through themultitudinous voices of nature, yet, “We have eyesand see not, ears and hear not, neither do we under-stand.” Sometimes we have to be knocked down,so to speak, by the truth before we see it and rec-ognize it as such.

Literature, art, music, invention, and religionhave evolved side by side with the development ofman. They are all expressions of his inner con-sciousness and by a careful analysis of any repre-sentative of its period, its time in the world’s his-tory may be determined.

So religion has evolved side by side with man andthus it must ever continue to do or it will be cast asideas the outgrown garments of a growing child. p

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Illumination, folio 283 recto in Latin manuscript 2 of the Urbino Collection, Vatican Library

PentecostThe Holy Spirit as communal Comforter and Advocate firstappeared fifty days after Christ’s Resurrection.

SINCE THEY WERE INSTITUTEDby the Lord Christ, Initiations into theChristian Mysteries have been observedin a temple located in spiritual realmsabove the physical city of Jerusalem.

This was well known among early Christians, andin true early Christian literature and legendsappear frequent references pertaining to this mys-tic Jerusalem.

After this I looked, and, behold, a door wasopened in heaven: and the first voice which Iheard was as it were of a trumpet talking withme; which said, Come up hither, and I willshow thee things which must be hereafter.—Rev.4:1

And he carried me away in the spirit to agreat and high mountain, and He shewed methat great city, the holy Jerusalem, descendingout of heaven from God.—Rev. 21:10

It was the custom of the most advancedChristian disciples, both men and women, to meettogether on the first day of the week, the Sun’sDay, and so unify themselves in consciousness thatthey were able to lift themselves upon waves ofecstatic exaltation and view the wonders of theGolden City—the spiritual realm and its greattemple. Veiled from the masses but revealed to thefew, Revelation is the beloved St. John’s descrip-

tion of his Initiation into the Christian Mysteries inthis temple.

Saying, I am Apha and Omega, the first and last:What thou seest, write in a book.—Rev. 1:10-11

St. John’s Revelation is recounted in twenty-twochapters. Twenty-two is a mystic number in occultnumerology. The 22nd chapter of this sublime ini-tiatory revelation details the transcendent experi-ence of any highly Illumined one found worthy tostand in the presence of the blessed Lord Christ.

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The Book of Revelation

WESTERN WISDOM BIBLE

Miniature from the Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duke of Berry, Musée Condé, Chantilly

Saint John on PatmosThe beloved of Christ Jesus presents visionary experiencefrom the etheric region and the Desire and Thought Worlds,the latter indicated by the angels sounding their trumpets.

Planet A

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This article is excerpted from Volume VI of the New AgeBible Interpretation, by Corinne Heline, a pupil of Max Heindel,who proposed this 7-volume project to the author. Now pub-lished by the New Age Bible and Philosophy Center, SantaMonica, CA, the book is available from the Fellowship.

The twenty-two chapters outline the initiatorypath as it has been described in the Mysteries sincehumanity was first sufficiently advanced to begiven sublime spiritual truths embodied inInitiation. All the Mysteries have followed an iden-tical pattern. The aspirant, under the guidance ofhis teacher or master—St. John designates thisbeing as an Angel—enters a temple to undergomany trials wherein his strength, will power, andperseverance are tested to the utmost. If the disci-ple is victorious, his reward comes as his spirit isbathed in Elysian air and he is companioned byangelic beings of transcendent beauty and splen-dor. This outline is followed in the mystic revela-tion of St. John.

John describes the Mystery Temple as havingtwelve gates. They typify the twelve paths ofdevelopment on which mankind is evolving withthe guidance of the twelve great zodiacalHierarchies.

And the wall of the city had twelve founda-tions, and in them the names of the twelveapostles of the Lamb.—Rev. 21:14

The twelve Disciples stand before the twelvetemple doors as teachers of those found worthyand qualified to enter those sacred portals to beprepared for life’s most momentous experience:meeting the blessed Lord Christ face to face andhearing His loving commendation, “Well done,thou good and faithful servant. . .enter into the joyof thy lord.”

The influence of the immortal Twelve is as pow-erful and far-reaching today as when they livedand labored with mankind upon the earth. One setof Apostles has served from the beginning and willserve to the end of the Earth Period.

Under the tutelage of the twelve Disciples whoguard the twelve gates of the temple, the neophytegradually awakens the twelve flower or star cen-ters within himself, thus enabling him, as St. Johnphrased it, to “walk in the light, as he is in the light.”

The transition of the holy Twelve proved to beno barrier to early Christians. By their ability torise in consciousness to the celestial realms of theNew Jerusalem, their contact with these IlluminedOnes continued without interruption. From their

sacred observance on the Sun’s Day there aroseamong them a lovely half-prayer, half-chant: “Sopart we sadly in this troublous world, to meet withjoy in sweet Jerusalem.”

Every Mystery Temple the world has ever seenwas founded upon two mighty columns of truthrepresenting perfect equilibrium of polaritybetween the masculine and feminine forces—astate which must exist before an aspirant is quali-fied to pass between these two columns and enterthe temple. Part of the sacred vow he takes afterpassing into the holy place is a dedication to thepurpose of bringing about sustained and perma-nent equality between man and woman in allaffairs of the outer objective world.

In the Christian Mystery Temple the masculinecolumn represents the Lord Christ, the gloriousArchangel of the Sun whom John describes inRevelation 19:16: “And he hath on his vesture andon his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS,AND LORD OF LORDS.”

In ancient symbolism a horse represents the Sun.In this wonderful vision of St. John, the whitehorse is the Lord Christ. He is coming, amid Hisgreat solar splendor, to end this dark age of mate-rialism, bearing a reward of truth and heralding thedawn of that New Age when the horse (Sun) shallreign supreme.

And a crown was given unto him: and he wentforth conquering and to conquer.—Rev. 21:14

The feminine column represents the supremewoman, Master of the world, the blessed VirginMary, Mother of the most holy Jesus.

And there appeared a great wonder in heav-en; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moonunder her feet, and upon her head a crown oftwelve stars.—Rev. 12:1

The important Initiations of the year were thefour sacred seasonal observances. From the earli-est days of Christianity it was understood that theparticular events dealing with Christ’s life, com-memorated in great Christian anniversaries, weremystically repeated in the initiatory temple duringthe holy period of the Solstices and the Equinoxes.It was in accordance with this program that a

28 RAYS 00

Christ mass on Holy Night(our Christmas Eve) was atrue watch night for thefaithful, in which wasobserved a mystical reitera-tion of the Nativity.Tremendous spiritual forceswere generated in this ritualwhich served both heavenand earth. Down throughthe ages this mighty forcehas drawn highly sensitizedindividuals to Jerusalem atChristmas and Easter.Many who go cannotexplain a strangely divinepower they feel, althoughtheir souls revel in theecstasy of its down-pour-ing. Ever and always thefour sacred seasonal obser-vances are occasions whenconsecrated ceremonialsrelease the powers of those high Initiates wholabor with the Lord Christ for the redemption ofman. For the sincere aspirant the three months pre-ceding each observance is a time of dedicatorypreparation. The first month’s work is purificationof the body; the second, spiritualization of themind; the third, unifying the forces of body andmind with spirit.

The ultimate goal of the Christian Mysteries isto prepare the aspirant—under the ministry of theDisciple-Teacher through whose gate he is foundworthy to enter—to pass into the Holy of Holiesand there, among earth’s elect, to serve under theguidance of our blessed Lord Christ. In the finalchapter of Revelation St. John describes the gloryof this exalted place. In verse 4 he says of thosewho enter, “And they shall see his face; and hisname shall be in their foreheads.”

In our three volumes of Old Testament interpre-tation has been traced the impress of the LordChrist, the supreme Teacher for all mankind, uponall world religions, and also His influence upon theMystery Temples which have served every civi-lization of the earth. It has been shown how His

influence inspired Initiates, teachers and prophetsof the entire Old Testament Dispensation.

Christ is the highest of the archangelic Host andplanetary Regent of Earth. The fragrance of Hislove and sacrifice permeate its every sheath likethe out-breathing of a mighty cosmic flower.

Those who are ordained to pass into the Holy ofHolies of the Christian Mystery Temple and tobehold Him—no longer as through a glass darkly,but face to face—comprehend the deeper signifi-cance of His words as inscribed in the 22nd chap-ter of Revelation: “I am Alpha and Omega, thebeginning and the end, the first and the last.”

THE ULTIMATE VISION

The Old Testament opens with the Book ofGenesis containing an account of the sin of the firstrace man. It tells of the war waged in his spiritualconsciousness and how his consciousness fell byreason of the abuse of the holy creative life forcewithin his body. The result was a consciousnessfocused thenceforth almost entirely on the physicaland material planes. This Testament closes withthe prophetic utterance of Malachi to the effect that

RAYS 00 29

Oil on canvas. Giuseppe Angeli, 1712- 798. Samuel H. Kress Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Elijah Taken Up in a Chariot of FireThe individuality known as Elijah was later born as John the Baptist, a fulfillment ofMalachi’s prophesy in the Old Testament’s penultimate verse: “Behold, I will send youElijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.”

ON AUGUST 23, 1948, 350 repre-sentatives from 147 denomina-tions, mainly Protestant, con-vened in Amsterdam, Holland, tofound the World Council of

Churches (WCC), “the most ambitious expres-sion of religious unity since the ProtestantReformation.”1 It was just 3 years and a weekafter World War II’s end, and there was hope that aunified Church would not only help prevent anotherterrible conflict, but also strengthen its own thrustinto a hostile world. How will this effort fare?

In any chart, the Ascendant always describes the“what factor,” and here the Sabian symbol ofSagittarius 0.21° is interpreted as “ferventreunion.”2 How precise! But the same point alsoinforms us of its fates with the first degree rising—this project is premature.

For additional testimony, we find a fiery grandtrine of sorts, including the Moon, Jupiter, andSaturn. Fire is impulsive! Regarding fiery grandtrines it has been stated, “Slowing down is next toimpossible.”3 The number one member of thisconfiguration, because it is in a cardinal sign andreceives the closest major aspect from the Part ofFortune, the Moon position has a Sabian symbolinterpreted as “immature,”4 another indication ofbeing “out of sync” timewise.

The Ascendant’s closest aspect, a square (chal-lenge), is to the Sun, the intrinsic nature of theendeavor, also in the first degree of a sign.5 Thesolar orb is afflicted by Saturn, planet of time, inits detriment in Leo in the impulsive fiery decanateof Aries. Saturn’s Sabian symbol is “Daybreak,”

also dealing with the element of time, as does theSabian symbol for the degree of the I.C., “A newmoon.”6

The cusp of the 12th house of self-undoingalways holds a key to a chart’s problem. Here theSabian symbol describes “Children playing.”7

Children obviously are a symbol of immaturity,which trait is repeated in the symbol of Lilith,important here because it is in the lst house: “A fatboy mowing the lawn.”8

The M.C.’s degree symbol is “A boy with acenser.”9 What is a censer? A container in whichincense is burned. That makes it symbolic of ritu-als, in which material objects are used as part ofworship. But if we are to worship God in “spiritand in truth,”10 there can be no genuine worship ofthis kind if it is intermingled with material methods.

This chart contains a T-square. In such a config-uration the point opposite the apex sheds lighton answers, solutions. Here it is 12° Capricorn, “a

RAYS 00 31

Will Christendom Unite?

ASTROLOGY

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student of nature lecturing.”11 A basic law of nature,of life itself, is that “to every thing there is a sea-son.”12 And before the Aquarian Age with its exalt-ed spiritual vibrations make it possible, the presentbarriers of separation cannot be removed.13

This observation ties in with the symbol forJupiter, planet closest to the Ascendant and in the1st house, hence significant in conveying what theWCC’s initiative is all about: “Men cuttingthrough ice.”14 Ice is created by nature, so “cuttingthrough” obviously means going against it, likeacting prematurely, failing to recognize, aspira-tions notwithstanding, Christendom’s unreadinessfor unity at this time.

This diagnosis is reinforced by another look atthe solar orb, which, as already mentioned, isafflicted by Saturn, the time-keeper. An afflictedplanet can be “helped” by means of its closestassisting aspect, here a sextile from Uranus.15

Uranus is the New Age planet, in Gemini and itsown decanate of Aquarius, opposing impulsiveLilith in the lst house. Its Sabian symbol is“Bathing beauties.”16

How does this description relate to churchunity? A bathing beauties is a perfectly developedhuman specimen, whose high stage of develop-ment is incompatible with immaturity. Bathing issymbolic of purification. The implied presence ofwater signifies the spiritual.17 Thus in the NewAge, when enlightened beings shall worship inspirit and in truth—Aquarius is also the sign ofTruth—then the barriers of the present shall van-ish, for “when that which is perfect is come,then that which is in part shall be done away.”18 p

—A Probationer

l. Moody Monthly, December 1986, p. 89. 2. Astrology of Personality, Dane Rudhyar, p. 367. 3. Horoscope, January 1987, p. 55. 4. Dane Rudhyar, opt cit.#, p. 344. 5. Any planet in a first degree is weakened since its solstice point

falls in a degree of expiation in another sign. See Here andThere in Astrology, Goldstein-Jacobson, p. 11.

6. The Sabian Symbols, Marc Edmund Jones, pp. 296, 325. 7. Marc Edmund Jones, op. cit., p. 195. 8. Marc Edmund Jones, op. cit., p. 239. 9. Marc Edmund Jones, op. cit., p. 324. 10. John 4:23. 11. Marc Edmund Jones, op. cit., p. 251.12. Ecclesiastes 3:1; also John 7:30; 8:20; 13:1; Galatians 4:4.13. Sun, Mercury, the M.C. and the Moon’s solstice point are all in

Virgo, sign of separativeness; there are no planets in the New

32 RAYS 00

Age sign Aquarius, which brings people together. 14. Jones, op. cit., p. 229. 15. Admittedly this sextile is weakened by being “overlapping” or

“out-of-sign,” but this is compensated by Uranus’ solsticepoint making a very close sextile to the Sun.

16. Jones, op. cit., p. 238. 17. 2 Kings 5:10; John 7:37-39. 18. 1 Corinthians 13:10.

THE BUILDERS

All are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time;Some with massive deeds and great , Some with ornaments of rhyme.

Nothing useless is, or low; Each thing in its place is best; And what seems but idle show Strengthens and supports the rest .

For the structure that we raise, Time is with materials filled; Our todays and yesterdays Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fashion these; Leave no yawning gaps between; Think not , because no man sees, Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of Art , Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute an unseen part; For the Gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well, Both the unseen and the seen. Make the house, where Gods may dwell,Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete, Standing in these walls of Time, Broken stairways, where the feet Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build today, then, strong and sure, With a firm and ample base; And ascending and secure Shall tomorrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain To those turrets where the eye Sees the world as one vast plain, And one boundless reach of sky.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

AT THE CONCLUSION of hisGospel, Saint John wrote: “Thereare also many other things whichJesus did; were every one of them tobe written, I suppose that the world

itself could not contain the books that would bewritten” (John 21:25). In light of these words, anybook about Christ Jesus and the mysteries sur-rounding him can be only a “drop in the ocean.”This book has been written with the intention ofencouraging others to investigate further into themysteries surrounding the life of Christ Jesus; it isan attempt to somewhat penetrate the circum-stances surrounding his conception, birth, anddeath.1

The prelude to this holy life was the “star of theMagi” referred to in the Gospel of Saint Matthew,and the accompanying conception and birth of theSolomon Jesus2 at the time of the triple conjunc-tion of Jupiter and Saturn in 7/6 B.C. Then camethe birth of Jesus of Nazareth (the Nathan Jesus) in2 B.C., announced by the proclamation to theshepherds, as described in the Gospel of Saint

Luke. The time interval between the birth of Jesusof Nazareth on the night of December 6/7, 2 B.C.,and the resurrection at sunrise on Easter Sundaymorning, April 5, A.D. 33, was 12,173 1/4 days.Rudolf Steiner spoke of the resurrection as the“birth” of Christ Jesus as the Risen One, andreferred to the importance of the 33 1/3-yearrhythm of the life of Christ Jesus leading up to this“birth.” The time interval of 12,173 1/4 days is33.329 years and is therefore almost exactly 33 1/3

RAYS 00 33

Chronicle of the Living Christ:

The 33 1/3-Year Rhythm

ASTROLOGY

1. This is the first of several articles excerpted and reprintedwith permission from Robert Powell’s Chronicle of the LivingChrist, The Life and Ministry of Jesus Christ: Foundations ofCosmic Christianity, published by the Anthroposophic Press.The Chronicle provides a calendar-specific outline of the lifeof Christ Jesus, including 40 maps, and 33 horoscopes of keyevents in the life of Jesus, Christ Jesus, and other beings. Toestablish an historically accurate chronology the authorconsulted the highly detailed visions of Anne CatherineEmmerich, and information advanced by Rudolf Steiner.2. For a study of the existence of two Jesus children—theSolomon Jesus of Matthew’s Gospel and the Nathan Jesus ofLuke’s Gospel—see the March/April 1998 Rays, pp 4-9.

Watercolor, James J. Tissot (1836-1902)

The ResurrectionThe resurrection at dawn Sunday, April 5, 33 A.D. marks thebirth of the Risen Christ Jesus and the initiation of a tempo-ral rhythm, established through the 33 1/3-year life of ChristJesus, which has great significance for Earth evolution.

years. The exact period of 33 1/3 years equals33.333 and thus the life of Christ Jesus differedfrom this by only 0.004 years, which amountsto 1 1/2 days—that is, the exact length of thelife of Christ Jesus from birth to the resurrec-tion was 33 1/3 years less 1 1/2 days. RudolfSteiner pointed out that, in addition to the vari-ous cosmic rhythms (the one-year rhythm ofthe Sun, the 29 1/2-year rhythm of Saturn, andso on), since the beginning of the Christian eraa new rhythm—the 33-1/3-year rhythm of thelife of Christ Jesus—has become one of themost important rhythms in the unfolding histo-ry of humanity and the Earth. How does thisrhythm manifest itself in our time?

Since the rhythm of 33 1/3 years occursalmost exactly three times in one hundredyears, it is easy to follow it through the courseof the centuries. But since the exact rhythm is 11/2 days less than 33 1/3 years, a slight adjust-ment must be made. Starting at midnight onDecember 6/7, 2 B.C., the first cycle was com-plete at the resurrection at dawn on April 5, A.D.33. Adding 12,173 1/4 days, the second cycle—thefirst following the Mystery of Golgotha—lasteduntil mid-day on August 3, A.D. 66. Then, addinga further 12,173 1/4 days, the third cycle—the sec-ond since the Mystery of Golgotha —ended at sun-set on December 1, A.D. 99.

Proceeding in this way through the centuries, thefifty-eighth cycle since the Mystery of Golgothastarted on January 8, 1933 and lasted until May 9,1966, followed by the fifty-ninth cycle—the pre-sent one—which will last until September 6, 1999....[Steiner identifies] the point in time three hun-dred years after the Mystery of Golgotha, the year333 (nine 33 1/3-year cycles)...as the centralmoment in the unfolding of the seven post-Atlantean cultural epochs, since it is the midpointbetween the start of the first post-Atlantean civi-lization in 7227 B.C. and the end of the seventhpost-Atlantean civilization in A.D. 7894. It was aturning point in the whole of humanity’s spiritualevolution....

With respect to this temporal rhythm, the readermay wonder why we take the moment of the res-urrection and not the crucifixion as reference

point. The whole intricate series of events we havetried to elucidate in this work led up to thismoment. The resurrection, at dawn on Sunday,April 5, A.D. 33, was indeed the moment of birthof this being, the Risen Christ Jesus.

We have accounted for the rhythmic interval of33 1/3 years, but can we understand in more detailthe spiritual reality that lies behind it? In the caseof a human being, the etheric body, together withthe astral body and I (ego), separates from thephysical body at the moment of death, leaving thephysical body behind on the Earth as a corpse. Thehuman being then lives on, not in his physicalbody, but in his etheric body, in which areinscribed all his life experiences. Thus, for a shorttime (approximately three days) immediately fol-lowing separation from the physical body, thehuman being beholds in a panorama the events ofhis life between birth and death....[T]his panoramafades away as the etheric body gradually dissolvesand is membered back into the universal ether. Inthe case of Christ Jesus, the etheric body did notdissolve but retained all his experiences, from theMystery of Golgotha back to his birth in Bethlehem33 1/3 years before. All these experiences were

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The lineage and life of the Nathan Jesus child is given by St. Luke.

inscribed in this etheric body, which was preservedintact, and this is the basis of the 33 1/3-yearrhythm. In fact, this etheric body was the source ofthe four Gospels. The evangelists Matthew, Mark,Luke, and John were four human beings able toexperience the etheric body of Christ Jesus, inwhich the panorama of all the events of his lifewere inscribed. With this 33 1/3-year rhythm areconnected profound mysteries. Most important forus is the mystery of the second coming, the so-called “Parousia,” or return of Christ into theetheric world.

We have mentioned the year 333, but we mayfollow the rhythm further to arrive at other signif-icant dates....Rudolf Steiner mentions in particularthe year 666 [in connection with the “beast” spo-ken of in Revelation 13:18]. Going further, wecome to the year 966, which represents a turning

point in the unfolding of the impulse of this Divineetheric organism. In 966, after twenty-eight cyclesof 33 1/3 years, a “cosmic high point” wasreached. Proceeding forward a further 28 cyclesfrom the year 966, we come to the year 1899, theend of Kali Yuga. Here, from the year 1899onwards, we find the beginning of the re-entry intothe Earth organism of the etheric body of ChristJesus.

Thus, the end of Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, wassignaled by the return of Christ Jesus in the ether-ic, heralding the start of the New Age, the Age ofLight. Underlying what is nowadays referred to asthe New Age, starting in 1899, is a definite cosmicphenomenon, bound up with the 33 1/3-yearrhythm of the etheric body of Christ Jesus. Let ustry to attain a clearer understanding of this rhythmduring the period leading up to 1899, starting A.D.33.

Following the resurrection on April 5, A.D. 33,several appearances of the Risen One to the disci-

ples are described in the Gospels. These appear-ances were not in the physical body but in theetheric body, which remained intact. With theascension forty days later, on May 14, A.D. 33,these appearances ceased. Christ Jesus withdrew inhis etheric body to cosmic spheres of existence.There then began an expansion of the etheric bodyoutward through the solar system. This expansionlasted until midway between A.D. 33 and 1899,i.e., 966. Then a contraction began, which contin-ued between 966 and 1899. That is, we have twen-ty-eight 33 1/3-year cycles up to the year 966, tothe “cosmic high point,” and then a “descent”through a further twenty-eight 33 1/3-year cyclesup to the year 1899. [The expansion of Christ’setheric body continued up to the outermost limit ofthe etheric cosmos. This was in 966. Then beganthe contraction from the outermost boundary,

returning toward the earthly plane of existence.]We can date this rhythm very precisely. As has

been mentioned, the exact interval is not 33 1/3years, but 1 1/2 days less, so that, making the nec-essary adjustment, we find that the end of KaliYuga (denoting at the same time the start of whatis called the “Satya Yuga,’’ or Age of Light), whichRudolf Steiner dates to the year 1899, actuallytook place on September 10, 1899. Following this33 1/3-year rhythm further, we find that the “inte-gration” (incarnation) of this etheric organism intothe Earth’s aura was accomplished on January 8,1933. One could say that the Age of the SecondComing began in an earthly sense on January 8,1933, the New Age having begun in a cosmicsense on September 10, 1899....[In his lecturecycle Esoteric Christianity and the Mission ofChristian Rosenkreutz, Steiner stated that] “In ourage it is essential that Christ shall be proclaimed inhis etheric form....”

If we now examine the matter more closely, it

RAYS 00 35

As Christ’s ministry “crowns” the prototypic 33 1/3-year rhythm,so may Christmas trees be decorated with thirty red roses,

representing the thirty years of Jesus’ life up to the baptism, andthree white roses crowning the tree, for the three years of ChristJesus’ ministry—from the baptism to the Mystery of Golgotha.

becomes obvious that the most important timein the original “prototype” of the 33 1/3-yearrhythm is the period from the baptism in theJordan to the Mystery of Golgotha, its “ crown-ing” so to say. It is interesting to note in thisconnection that Rudolf Steiner suggested thatChristmas trees be decorated with thirty redroses, representing the thirty years of Jesus’ lifeup to the baptism, and then three white rosescrowning the tree, for the three years of theministry of Christ from the baptism to theMystery of Golgotha. The reliving of the timeof this ministry is the most intense period ineach repetition of the 33 1/3-year period—atime when an inner intensification or reawak-ening of the Christ impulse may take place.

In our own century we have 33 1/3 yearsafter the end of the Kali Yuga on September 10,1899—the start on the earthly plane of the Ageof the Second Coming on January 8, 1933,three days before the day of the Full Moon.According to the research presented earlier inthis book, the birth of the Solomon Jesus tookplace on the night of a Full Moon. At his birththere were no planets visible in the heavens otherthan the Full Moon, but the Moon was in conjunc-tion with the planet Pluto, with the Moon and Plutoin opposition to the Sun.

At the Full Moon on January 11, 1933, the Moonwas again in conjunction with Pluto, with both inopposition to the Sun, “echoing,” as it were, thenight of the birth of the Solomon Jesus child. And,just as at that earlier time the birth of the SolomonJesus child was followed by the evil king Herodthe Great’s Massacre of the Innocents, so in 1933the inception of the Age of the Second Comingwas followed by another “massacre of the inno-cents”—the Holocaust. This was the backgroundfor the onset of the second coming of Christ in thiscentury. So the 33-1/3 year rhythm in the life ofChrist lies “behind the veil” of the events takingplace in our time, and it can help us find the innerspiritual heartbeat pulsing behind these times, ifwe but know how to look....

Thus, June 29, 1929, signified the beginning andJanuary 8, 1933, the end of the first three and one-half year period of the working-in of the Etheric

Christ—June 29, 1929, being the approximate dateof the “etheric remembrance” of the baptism andJanuary 8, 1933, that of the resurrection. This wasthe first crucial three and one-half year period ofthe Etheric Christ in the twentieth century; that is,since the end of the Kali Yuga. It was a time whenfierce opposition to the Christ impulse began toemerge in the shape of National Socialism (seebelow).

Moving forward from the unfolding of thisetheric organism, the Parousia, the presence ofChrist, on January 8, 1933, we come, 33 1/3 yearslater, to May 9, 1966. The particularly significantthree and one-half years of the ministry thereforebelong to the period going back three and one-halfyears from this date. Looking at the world situationat that time, we see that this was the time of thebirth of a worldwide consciousness of peace andlove. Unfortunately, there also arose a “drug cul-ture” which disturbed and destroyed this newChristian impulse of love and peace, as will be dis-cussed in more detail below. And what about theend of the century, when the next of 33 1/3 years

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“A voice came from heaven saying, ‘Thou art my beloved Son,today I have begotten thee.’” At that moment Christ, the Logos, unit-ed with Jesus of Nazareth and the ministry of the God-man began.

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will have been completed? This will occur onSeptember 6, 1999; and so the three and one-halfyears prior to that, from 1996 through 1999,should be a period of tremendous significance fora new unfolding of the Christ impulse. This time isnearly upon us , and it is imperative that we use allthe means at our disposal to prepare ourselves forit. This book [copyright in 1996], indeed, is a mod-est offering to this end—not to let the opportunityslip by unheeded.

How can we find a real connection with the newimpulse of Christ in his etheric body (EthericChrist) at this time? The chronicle of the life ofChrist given in Part II offers a key, if it is trans-posed to the present time. Using the transposedchronicle, the possibility is opened up of enteringinto a relationship with the Etheric Christ, medita-tively reliving the three and one-half years ofChrist’s ministry imprinted in his etheric body....Interms of the rhythmically recurring 33 1/3-yearrhythm of the etheric body of Christ Jesus, trans-posing to the present 33 1/3-year cycle, the fol-lowing correspondences are found:

Baptism in the Jordan: Saturday, February 24,1996

Resurrection: Monday, September 6, 1999

....Starting on Monday, October 30, 1995, thechronicle can be meditatively relived day by day,following the travels of Jesus leading up to thebaptism by John, denoting the historical event ofthe union of Christ with Jesus. The etheric remem-brance of the baptism in the Jordan, signifying theonset of a new three and one-half-year period ofintensified activity by the Etheric Christ, occurs onor around Saturday, February 24, 1996.

The principle underlying the reliving in the pre-sent of events from the life of Christ is the “ether-ic return,” or rather, the return of Christ in hisetheric body. As stated above, this began in a cos-mic sense in 1899, ushering in the New Age, andbecame more a reality within the earthly spherefrom 1933 onwards. With the return of Christ inhis etheric body, the 33 1/3-year rhythm hasbecome the most important rhythm for the NewAge, the Age of the Etheric Christ. And the last

three and one-half years of each 33 1/3-year peri-od represent the culmination, when the EthericChrist works particularly intensively, bringing anew revelation. The question naturally arises:What is the nature of the new revelation of theEtheric Christ at the end of the twentieth century?And what kind of counter impulse can be expectedto oppose the new Christ revelation?

Here it is possible to give only a brief indicationin response to these questions. Looking at the threeand one-half-year culminating periods within each33 1/3-year cycle since the start of the New Age in1899, the following dates emerge:

Period I : June 29, 1929—January 8, 1933Period 2: October 27, 1962—May 9, 1966 Period 3: February 24, 1996—September 6, 1999

In each case it is a matter of renewed activity ofthe Etheric Christ, at the same time countered byforces of opposition. (The background underlyingthe oppositional forces is depicted later.) In Period1 (1929-1933), Christ was working to inspire anawakening to the Divine Presence within eachhuman being and to usher in a new era based onthis awakening. Instead of awakening to theDivine Presence within, a temptation came fromwithout, in the form of the Fuhrer (leader), whopromised the German people everything, “If youwill fall down and worship me” (Matthew 4:9).This was the temptation of the “will to power.”When this temptation was presented to ChristJesus in the wilderness two thousand years ago, hereplied: “You shall worship the Lord your God andhim only shall you serve” (Matthew 4: 10). Thesewords could perhaps be expressed in modern termsas: “You shall seek the Divine Presence within andact only out of (its) moral intuitions to serve thegood of the whole.”

In Period 2 (1962-1966), the Etheric Christ wasactive in awakening love and community betweenpeople. This was the time in the 1960s when“flower power” was born. At the same time a newand powerful temptation arose in the shape of thedrug culture. This temptation can be characterizedas that of “casting oneself down from the pinnacleof the temple” (Matthew 4:5). It is the temptationof a hedonistic self-surrender to instinctual urges,

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often with the help and powerful inducement ofintoxicating substances, to obliterate the clear lightof conscience and reason (“pinnacle of the tem-ple”) and to cast oneself down by abandoning egoconsciousness in favor of subconscious drives andimpulses.

From this brief outline of the first and secondperiods—about which much more could be said—is it possible to anticipate something of the natureof the third period? In the sequence of three temp-tations, the archetype of which is to be found dur-ing the forty days oftemptation in thewilderness, it is thetemptation “to turnstones into bread”(Matthew 4:3) that isthe keynote of thecounter impulse dur-ing Period 3, extend-ing from February,1996, to September,1999. This is thetemptation to substi-tute lifeless matter, orstones, in the place ofliving substance, or bread. This applies not just onthe physical level but also on other levels. Thewhole phenomenon of virtual reality, for instance,is a clear example of this: lifeless, computer-gen-erated images are substituted for living reality.

All in all, at the close of the twentieth century anexceedingly powerful temptation is being present-ed to humanity by the powerful means of techno-logical science. In part, this temptation opposes—directly and also indirectly—the central thrust ofthe new Christ revelation, which is concerned withunveiling the living being of Nature, referred to invarious traditions as the Divine Mother. Takingplace worldwide is a growing awareness of theplight of Mother Nature, as well as a widespreadawakening to the Divine Feminine in general.Underlying this is the renewed activity of theEtheric Christ, the culmination of which will bethe new Christ revelation during the last three andone-half years of this century. It will be especiallythe unveiling of the Eternal Feminine in her vari-

ous aspects—Mother Nature and Sophia, DivineWisdom—which will be the central impulse of theEtheric Christ during Period 3.

Of course, the 33 1/3-year rhythm will continueon into the future, and there will be a new impulseof the Etheric Christ in the next period (Period 4),signifying the etheric remembrance of the threeand one-half-year period of the ministry at the cul-mination of the next 33 1/3-year period. Periods 4,5, and 6 below indicate the times of major activityof the Etheric Christ in the course of the twenty-

first century:

Period 4: June 23,2029-January 3, 2033

Period 5: October22, 2062-May 4,2066

Period 6: February19, 2096-September1, 2099

The 33 1/3-yearrhythm of the EthericChrist is one of themost important rhy-thms for the future.

As the primary rhythm of the New Age, the Age ofthe Etheric Christ, it will be of major significanceuntil the year 4399, which is 2,500 years after thestart of the New Age in 1899. The date 4399 fallsclose to the end of the Age of Aquarius. The nextage, the Age of Capricorn, starts shortly after, in4535, exactly 2,160 years after the start of the Ageof Aquarius in 2375.

Note that the length of the New Age, 2,500years, is half that of the former Dark Age of KaliYuga, which was 5,000 years long, from 3102 B.C.to A.D. 1899. In Hindu chronology, each succes-sive Age is progressively shorter, indicating a qual-itative speeding up in an evolutionary sense. Theduration of the New Age (2,500 years) amounts to75 cycles of the 33 1/3-year rhythm. At the end ofthese 75 cycles Christ will begin to work from astill higher plane of existence than the etheric, anda new impulse will enter around the time of transi-tion from the Age of Aquarius to the Age ofCapricorn. p

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The renewed activity of theEtheric Christ during the lastthree and one-half years ofthe twentieth century was

seen in the increased globalawareness of the plight of

Mother Nature, as well as in awidespread awakening to theDivine Feminine in general.

DURING THE MIDDLE AGES thatwhich was called the “Great Work”was prosecuted by a few souls con-nected with the science and learningof the day. These men were mystics

and alchemists, who, being lovers of God and thusHis true votaries, knew something of His secrets.The outward claim was that these men convertedor transmuted baser metals into gold; yet for themost part all these men died poor. However, all ofthese souls were the happiest of men.

It is now known to present day scientists thatbaser metals can be converted into higher ones. Ithas been the modern fashion of our spirituallyignorant scientists to ridicule the idea of alchemy,looking upon such men as Hermes Trismegistusthe father of alchemy, Albertus Magnus, NicholasFlamel, von Humboldt, Cagliostro, Thomas Vaughan,and many others as helpless fools, self-deluded, orout-and-out imposters. However, with the facts andforces of Uranus positively impinging upon ourplanet now, the truth of the claims of these great soulswill become apparent to even such contrarians.

Alchemy and astrology are so inextricably con-nected as to be one divine science in truth, for bothhold within them the scriptures of the world, theirmass of symbols, myths, and allegories, all con-taining and illustrating the One Great Work. Thiswork is the entry and transmission of the Word—the One Divine Life—in and through matter, andthrough the long slow process of evolution, trans-muting the base and lower into the refined andhigher, the human into the Divine, bringing allforms to their ultimate perfection. Thus is theSaturnian lead turned, transmuted into the Uranian

or spiritual “gold.” Would that students of Western Wisdom

Teachings could understand that both Saturn andUranus represent the Christ, Saturn being the nec-essary Darkness and Uranus the Light that shinesin that darkness or shadow. But no soul knows theUranian Christ until the forces of the Great Christ

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The Great Work

ASTROLOGY

Illustration from Der Compass der Weisen (Knowledge), Ketima Vere, Berlin, 1782

Alchemical and astrological symbolism depicts the “philoso-pher’s compass” between magnetic poles, represented by thetwo Masonic columns of Solomon’s temple—Jachin and Boaz.Synthesized stellar (angelic) energies produce the archetyp-al man or lapis potentiating its individual human counterpartfrom the quintessence of seven material elements, with anti-mony, the Saturn source material, said to be the greatest poi-son and the supreme medicine, shown as the imperial orb.

Photo A

rchive of Alexander R

oob

Teacher are truly earned and His Purity and Truthpossessed. Saturn is therefore intrinsically themajor benefic in a true astrologer’s mind and notthe mere malefic of the general run of books onastrology. Never could we take on the Aquariansuperconscious state without the work and help ofthis pedagogue of pain, and Initiator, Saturn.

When we speak of the Great Work, we do notstop at man only, in his transmutation of the lowerinto the higher, but include all contained in ourplanet. The “gold” which we seek to make is thatspiritual Oneness with our Father in Heaven, thedivine union of the whole life wave of our planetproducing the ultimate fulfillment of our evolu-tion. Thus the symbols of alchemy which elucidatethe Great Work seek to explain and demonstrate,through results, the idea and truth of the One Life,and how man may consciously work upon himselfand the lower kingdoms and thus forge far aheadof the ordinary planetary effort of evolution.Through Christ in us we are allowed the sooner tomake ascension and union with the Divine; wework with God in cooperation; we cease to besluggards and become true Masons. Only thusshall we get our real degrees, the degrees of thecolleges being so much dross in comparison!

The Great Work recognizes instantly that man isa little cell (microcosm) within the Great Cell(Macrocosm), that we are each living cells in thebody of what all alchemists know as the HeavenlyMan. All have a part and place in that HeavenlyMan. Being thus united above in the One Life, wedescend into the Saturnian earth school below andmust by the power of true alchemy transmute andat last make the “below” as it is “above.”

Why did the great alchemists of the past give upall that man holds dear in physical life? Why didthey pass through the most severe tests and trials?Why did they often take the hate and insult of thebrawling crowd? Why were they often burned atthe stake? Why? Because their souls were free!Christ’s truth had made them free, and they carriedwithin themselves the divine poise and balance ofpower which comes only to those who haveaccomplished and become victorious in the GreatWork. They had made and transmuted the basemetal into the Christ Gold.

Through the mediation of a meditation produc-tive of a proper imaginative power working in con-cert with a firm free-acting powerful will, thesesouls became conscious of the One Life. They thusdiscovered at firsthand the truth that there is in factbut One God, and that man is truly made in Hisimage; therefore he has the power not only toaccelerate his own evolution, but also that of thelower kingdoms.

The large degree of free will allowed man hasproduced a distinct arrest in evolution through theLuciferic forces of enmity and selfishness. Butnow in this new Day that opens to our gaze insplendor there will be no excuse for anyone toknow of and use the seeming miracle which turnsbaser metals into the gold of Christ.

Thus transmutation is a marvelous example ofthe powers which lie latent in mankind, whichpowers he may awaken through producing a puri-fied Will in conjunction with an effectiveImagination; from this twain is the Christ born.

You who look for the elixir of life, you who seekthe fountain of youth, you who would defeat deathand overcome the second death (“He that over-cometh shall not be hurt of the second death.”),what would you do or pay for this privilege, thisChrist boon? There is but one thing you can do tosecure the Prize, and that thing is to engage withtrue earnestness in the Great Work, for it is throughthe alchemical forces of transmutation that we atlast become correlate, at one, with the One Life ofChrist. To the extent that we make union with Himdo we purify and transmute the atoms of our fleshand once again become young with Him.

The world has moved forward swiftly inextreme intellectual development since the days ofthe alchemists, and in the pride of its spiritualignorance it has sought to set aside the idea of Godas well as all that has anything of the transcenden-tal attached to it. But as we enter this higher spiraland come into the Aquarian Age, scientists in thefullest sense of the word will appear—scientistswho will know of and work in both the form andlife sides of Life. These and a growing number ofother illumined souls will dispose of the jeers andignorance of this fading dark age, an age of truebarbarism wherein we still judicially murder our

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brothers and sisters. Those of us who are aware of the powerful

forces of transmutation know that evolutionadvances in cyclic waves in spirals, so that we everadvance and never stand in the same place twice; itis an upward and onward movement. We havecome through the slowest phase of evolution, butthrough transmutation we attain to perfection andlearn to accomplish on every part of the Path andin and through all states of matter, in all worlds,until we attain to the highest rung of the spiral,which is unity with our Father. The time will comewhen man will have complete dominion over allearth forces and forms, but while in passagethrough matter, his divine Ego must unfold and useall those faculties he already has within as latentabilities—just as the latent forces of the seed pro-duce the tree or flower. But before the completetree or flower exists, leaves, trunk, stem, andbranches must first form.

Not only do egos reincarnate. So too do ideas,forces, and the Earth itself, during major and minorcycles of manifestation. Today we are witnessing arebirth of the old alchemistic days, yet on a higherspiral. Increasingly now will mankind’s great idol“gold” collapse, its power to become null and voidas man earns and puts on the true, the incorruptiblegold of the Christed spirit.

To reach that ideal and make it real man learnsgladly to give of himself in true sacrifice. He willseek to give and perform for his total environment,for the world at large. He will become Christ-inclusive in his ideas, views, and aims. There willbe no aliens or strangers or foreigners in his soul’spurview. He will know without doubt that neitherhe nor the world can grow unless he works formankind and the world and gives his utmost in joy,the joy of selfless service.

There are many who, realizing the possibility ofproducing this spiritual gold, set out enthusiasti-cally to accomplish the Great Work, overnight as itwere. They eagerly attend every meeting they can,read occult books, wade through courses in philos-ophy. Yet when it comes to their being asked tothrow in all of their life resources into the cruciblewhich produces and accomplishes the Great Work,by giving up many of their habits, pleasures, pur-

suit of money, and even surrendering their worriesand mean worldly cares to tend this fire, theyquickly detach themselves from any attempt at realeffort and say that spiritual gold is just analchemist’s dream, or that some other life will dofor starting the work. But some other day will notdo, for now is the acceptable year of the Lord. And

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Miniature, Jehan Perréal, 1516, court of Margaretha of Austria, Musée Marmottan, Paris

Nature advises the “aimlessly wandering alchemist” toleave the narrow circle of mechanical laboratory chemistry(“opus mechanice”): “You will never attain knowledge ofanything if you come not to my forge.” This forge is the treeof knowledge that grows from the three roots Mineralia,Vegetative, and Sensitiva (dense physical, vital, and desirebodies). The four (etheric) elements are refined to a “veg-etable gold.” Alchemy (the path of Initiation) follows thework of nature, but seeks to shorten the ripening process.The angel of the Work, whose lowest body is etheric, wearsa crown raying the seven cosmic energies, signified by theseven planetary symbols. Note the lemniscate (figure eightsymbol for eternity) and the similarity of the tree’s structureto the design on the covers of Rosicrucian Fellowship books.

I cannot impress this fact too strongly, for everyearth moment is precious and God-given to pro-duce this essential “gold”; it cannot be made in thespiritual worlds between “death” and a new birth.

In the Great Work we are much helped by aknowledge of the divine symbology of the zodiac,for if we are true alchemists we learn and know ofthe various imports and impacts of the signs (con-stellations) and planets. We come to realize theimportant part that Mercury plays as messengerbetween earth and heaven; it becomes borne inupon us that we have a lower mind and a highermind, and that even in the lower aspect of mindthere is a very important work to be done. Thehuman intellect is first colored and conditioned bythe Moon, then as the Ego works on its vehicles itlifts itself up into Mercury’s sphere. A further ele-vation is given those who truly work into the con-sciousness of Neptune, this latter producing thatsublimation which is Christ-consciousness. Theintellectual faculty in man must learn to obey thevoice of the spiritualized Will through Uranus andproduce in the world through performance andaction the pictures of the spiritualized Imaginationthrough Neptune.

Here occurs the transmutation which producesthe sublimate of the true spiritual gold, for now thehigher Self is in command of the lower man andmind—the personality.

Over the great gulf between the personality andthe higher Christed human there is a bridge beingbuilt, a bridge constructed by the great Christ archi-tect, Saturn, the night-side ruler of the eleventhsign, Aquarius. The comprehension of the OneLife manifesting through all things and beings ismade and realized as a unity through Saturn, work-ing in and upon the concrete or lower mind of man.This is where the true transmutation of the basemetals occurs. Because of our sorrows and trialsthe task may seem hard, but when we becomeaware of God’s plan for us, then through increas-ing strength and quality of Will and Imagination dowe project a bridge from the lower to the highermind and take the sacred lance which the UranianChrist confers—the lance which heals others at atouch but must never be used to profit one’s self.

The attainment of the Great Work and the con-

ferring of Christ Knighthood is well shown by themaster mystic Richard Wagner in his treatment ofthe Arthurian legend of Parsifal, and it is true thatone must become this “pure fool” for Christ’s sake;that is, artless and without guile.

If you would get to work in putting your bridgeacross from the lower to the higher man then youmust think of yourself not as a personality but as aspiritual being and one with God. To be a truealchemist you must center your life on one divineidea which is ever the directing idea. So centeredyou begin to transmute all of the ideas and viewsand habits of the lower man and make of them thereal gold of the spirit.

And remember, we must not get the idea that wehave to kill anything we may find in the lowerman. Rather do we throw into our Christ-crucibleall that is ill and negative in us, allowing theChrist-Fire of Divine Love and Wisdom to redeemthis base matter through transmutation. This is theGreat Work. And what a large part Mars andScorpio play in this work of regeneration, and howfast and far this force of Fire and Water in the high-ly evolved can carry them in their evolution ofconsciousness! No finer force is in the hands of thewise alchemist than that of Mars-Scorpio toaccomplish the Great Work—to transmute the per-sonality into individualized spirituality.

If you would have this priceless pearl, thisDivine Love and Wisdom animating your wholebeing, you must learn to keep no part back foryourself; you must sell all you have of the person-ality, and follow Christ. You must learn to trans-mute on all planes—the physical, psychic, mental,and spiritual planes. You must learn of and knowthe real in very truth. You must have faith, knowl-edge, absolute trust, humility, and purity. Youmust definitely discipline yourself and ever putinto practice the law of transmutation which isregeneration. This is the Great Work and the wholeboon and burden of life on the Earth plane, for thisis the workshop for the soul and spirit. You mustlearn to know the great Presence, for He was everwith you, and now as the Comforter He comesthrough Uranus to bring all things to your remem-brance, for He taught us all things. p

—John Josling

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Dante Rossetti Poems Inspired by Paintings

RELIGION AND ART

For

OUR LADY OF THE ROCKSBY LEONARDO DA VINCI

Mother, is this the darkness of the end,The Shadow of Death? and is that outer

seaInfinite imminent Eternity?And does the death-pang by man’s seed

sustainedIn Time’s each instant cause thy face to

bendIts silent prayer upon the Son, while HeBlesses the dead with His hand silentlyTo His long day which hours no more

offend?

Mother of Grace, the pass is difficult,Keen as these rocks, and the bewildered

soulsThrong it like echoes, blindly shuddering

through.Thy name, O Lord, each spirit’s voice

extols,Whose peace abides in the dark avenueAmid the bitterness of things occult.

—Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Pla

netA

rt

National Gallery, London

John the Baptist seeks the blessing of his cousin Jesus. In a nearly iden-tical version of this painting in the Louvre, Paris, the angel next to theinfant Jesus points to the Baptist child, who is not pictured with the cross.

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I

This is that blessed Mary, pre-electGod’s Virgin. Gone is a great while, and sheDwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee. Unto God’s will she brought devout respect,Profound simplicity of intellect, And supreme patience. From her mother’s kneeFaithful and hopeful; wise in charity;Strong in grave peace; in pity circumspect.

So held she through her girlhood; as it were An angel-watered lily, that near God Grows and is quiet. Till, one dawn at home She woke in her white bed, and had no fearAt all—yet wept till sunshine, and felt awedBecause the fullness of the time was come.‡

II

These are the symbols. On that cloth of red I’ the center is the Tripoint: perfect each, Except the second of its points, to teach That Christ is not yet born. The books—whose headIs golden Charity, as Paul hath said—Those virtues are wherein the soul is rich:Therefore on them the lily standeth, whichIs Innocence, being interpreted.

The seven-thorn’d briar and the palm seven-leavedAre her great sorrow and her great reward. Until the end be full, the Holy One Abides without. She soon shall have achievedHer perfect purity: yea, God the Lord Shall soon vouchsafe His Son to be her Son.

† Rosetti’s first Pre-Raphaelite painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-49), shows an adolescent Mary working at a pieceof embroidery and surrounded by devices that prefigure her fate. The angel clasps a lily, a symbol of purity, which is to be pre-sented at the Annunciation. The dove on the trellis represents the Holy Ghost through whom she shall conceive. The lampstands for piety, the vine bears the grape whose wine symbolizes the Redeemer’s blood and the sacrament of the Eucharist.‡ The last four lines of this sonnet are the subject of Rosetti’s second painting, The Annunciation, in London’s National Gallery.

The

Trustees,TateM

useum,

London

MARY’S GIRLHOOD(For a Picture†)

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Oil on panel, Hans Memling (1435-1493), National Gallery, London

The Virgin and Child with Saints (The Donne Triptych)†

FORA VIRGIN AND CHILD

BY HANS MEMMELINCK

(In the Academy of Bruges)

Mystery: God, man’s life, born into man Of woman. There abideth on her brow The ended pang of knowledge, the which nowIs calm assured. Since first her task began She hath known all. What more of anguish thanEndurance oft hath lived through, the whole spaceThrough night till day, passed weak upon her faceWhile the heard lapse of darkness slowly ran?

All hath been told her touching her dear Son, And all shall be accomplished. Where He sits, Even now, a babe, He holds the symbol fruit Perfect and chosen. Until God permits, His soul’s elect still have the absolute Harsh nether darkness, and make painful moan.

FORA MARRIAGE OF ST. CATHERINE

BY THE SAME

(In the Hospital of St. John at Bruges)

Mystery: Catherine the bride of Christ.She kneels, and on her hand the holy ChildNow sets the ring. Her life is hushed and mild,Laid in God’s knowledge ever unenticedFrom God, and in the end thus fitly priced. Awe, and the music that is near her, wroughtOf angels, have possessed her eyes in thought: Her utter joy is hers, and hath sufficed.

There is a pause while Mary Virgin turns The leaf, and reads. With eyes on the spread book,That damsel at her knees reads after her. John whom He loved, and John His harbinger,Listen and watch. Whereon soe’er thou look, The light is: starred in gems and the gold burns. p

† The painting shown above is neither of the two for which Dante Rossetti composed his two sonnets. Memling painted sever-al versions of the Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine, including those in Bruges and one in the Louvre. With respect to sym-bolism, this National Gallery painting is a composite of the two poems. Saint Catherine is standing on the viewer’s left proffer-ing the hand that other pictures on this subject show being ringed to signify the mystic marriage of the soul to the Christ with-in. On the right, Saint Barbara’s normal pose of reading scripture is assumed by the wife of the triptych’s donor. Two angelsbear musical instruments and one is holding “the symbol fruit.” John the Beloved is on the right panel holding the cup of regen-eration and John the Baptist (“harbinger”) is on the left, he who first identified Jesus with the words, “Behold the lamb ofGod, which taketh away the sin of the world.” Memling painted himself partially visible behind the pillar in this left wing.

MOST EVERYBODY AGREESthat progress is a good thing. Butmost self-evidently good things,when examined more closely,have a way of generating dis-

agreements. And so it is with the idea of progress,of which the idea of moral progress is part.

Thinkers arguing from the most diverse perspec-tives have agreed that no one thing is so character-istic, indeed constitutive, of modernity as the ideaof progress. To be modern is to believe that histo-ry is “getting somewhere” in overcoming the prob-lems and limitations of the human condition.Although muted among the secular-minded, thereis also the implicit belief that getting somewheremeans that history is going somewhere. Progress ismore than change; it is change with a purpose.Change is the undeniable experience; the idea ofprogress is a way of explaining that experience.Change, it is observed, is the only thing that does-n’t change....

We are routinely told that ours is an age ofunprecedented rapidity of change. In ethics andalmost every other field, it is said that new ques-tions require new answers. The same was likelysaid at the time about every age. One imaginesAdam remarking to Eve as they are leaving thegarden, “My dear, we are living in an age of tran-sition.” The modern assumption is that the transi-tion is to something better. The modern sensibility

unbounded is that of the neophiliac, the lover ofthe new. I noticed on a New York City bus anadvertisement for a telecommunications companythat bluntly proclaims the neophiliac creed:“Change is Good!” The unarticulated, and perhapsunconscious, assumption is that change is goingsomewhere; it has an end or what the Greeks calleda telos. In the language of philosophers, change isteleological. Change is good because it is a move

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The Idea of MoralProgress

RELIGION AND THE PUBLIC REALM

This article is adapted from the author’s address to theannual convention of the American College of Surgeons inOrlando, Florida and is reprinted here with the permissionof First Things, where it appeared in a longer version.

R. Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi, Vol. 1, Oppenheim, 1617, Staatsbibliothek Mainz

The heliocentric conception of the cosmos encouraged beliefin progress, since the earth was displaced from its central,stationary position, and the perfection that position implied.Here, Fludd is defending the geocentric concept of the worldagainst the new theory of Copernicus, which he consideredillogical on the grounds that it would be much simpler forthe prime mover or God the creator to rotate the wheel of thespheres from the rim than for a sun to do so from the center.

to the better on the way of history toward someunspecified, and perhaps unspecifiable, good.Such is the faith of modernity....

Today, the connections between brain, mind, andconsciousness is the subject of heated debateamong scientists, philosophers, and theologians.One elementary problem may be put this way: Thehuman brain would have to be a great deal moresimple than it is in order for us to understand it; butif our brain were simple enough for us to under-stand it, our brain would be too simple to under-stand it. It is something of a quandary, and thatquandary hardly begins to touch on the deeperquestions about the relationship between brain,mind, and consciousness.

Similar limits are becoming evident in othersciences. To cite but one obvious instance, cos-mologists who study the structure of space-timerelationships in the universe note that the billionsof light years between ourselves and the receptionof the data that we can examine means that wenever know what is happening now billions oflight years away (or even what “ now” means inthis context). And the very logic of the circum-stance means that it will not, it cannot, change inthe future. Scientists a billion years from now, ifwe can imagine such a thing, will still be billionsof light years away from the data accessible totheir scrutiny. Even if, in ways that are not nowimagined, we were able to leapfrog, so to speak,over vast spaces of time, there would always bebeyond any point reached an infinity of points notreached. In other words, there is no end, and it isthat realization that is at the heart of the idea of theend of progress....

The crucial point is that the link between knowl-edge and progress that was forged in classicalGreece and that, in the form we call scientific, hasbeen both the motor and the guarantor of themodernity project has now been broken. Or so weare told by some of the more impressive thinkersof our time....

That progress has become a false religion,indeed an idol, has been the worry of a number ofChristian and Jewish thinkers in the modern era.Few have expressed that concern with such inci-siveness and prophetic passion as Reinhold

Niebuhr. No American theologian since Niebuhr,who died in 1971, has had such a wide influence inour intellectual culture. A champion of what wascalled “neoorthodoxy,” Niebuhr attacked preciselythe link between Judeo-Christian religion and theidea of progress that Nisbet and many others havewanted to revive. In his 1939 Gifford Lectures,The Nature and Destiny of Man, Niebuhr noted:“The idea of progress is possible only upon theground of a Christian culture. It is a secularizedversion of biblical apocalypse and of the Hebraicsense of a meaningful history, in contrast to themeaningless history of the Greeks.”

Niebuhr did not intend that as a compliment toChristian culture. His point is that the idea ofprogress is a cultural distortion of authenticChristianity. A staunch Protestant writing in an erabefore the full flowering of ecumenical etiquette,Niebuhr blamed this distortion on what he calledthe “Catholic synthesis” of nature and grace as thatsynthesis was secularized in the Renaissance andthen in subsequent modernity. The secularized ideaof progress emerged from the biblical understand-ing of purpose in history, said Niebuhr, but it brokeaway from the biblical truth that the fulfillment ofhistory transcends history itself, as it also jetti-soned any notion of divine judgment. The secular-ized story of history therefore ended up with “noconsciousness of the ambiguous and tragic ele-ments in history.” It is true, said Niebuhr, thathuman history is filled with endless possibilities,but the idea of progress forgets that they are end-less possibilities for both good and evil. “History,therefore, has no solution of its own problem.”

Niebuhr was accused of offering a bleak or pes-simistic view of history. He called his view“Christian realism.” If, without the idea ofprogress, people might despair of the tasks of per-sonal, social, and scientific advance, that too, saidNiebuhr, might be to the good. There is such athing as “creative despair” that induces faith, hesaid, and such faith “becomes the wisdom whichmakes ‘sense’ out of a life and history whichwould otherwise remain senseless.” What weshould have learned from the last two hundredyears, and especially from the tragedies of thiscentury, is that history is not the answer to the

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question that is history. Niebuhr puts the pointnicely: “We have learned, in other words, that his-tory is not its own redeemer.” One may be unper-suaded by some of Niebuhr’s conclusions, but aNiebuhrian sensibility is an invaluable safeguardagainst the shallow sentimentalisms and utopianfantasies that have all too often afflicted thinkingabout history and its possibilities. Niebuhr rightlyreminds us that history is not the uninterrupted tri-umphal march of progress. In the Christian view ofthings, experience both personal and social is cru-ciform; it is the way of the cross. At the same timethe cross is not the final word. There is resurrec-tion, and it is both resurrection in history and res-urrection of history. It is first the resurrection ofthe history of Jesus—and that is the foretaste, orpreview, or promise of the resurrection of allthings. That is surely the import of St. Paul’s greatcosmic hymns in, for instance, the first chapters ofEphesians and Colossians. To the Ephesians Paulwrites, “For [God] has made known to us in allwisdom and insight the mystery of his will,according to his purpose which he set forth inChrist as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite allthings in him, things in heaven and things onearth” (1:9-10).

This vision is inseparable from an emphaticallyJewish understanding of the Messianic Age. Thechief difference between Jews and Christians isover if, or in what way, that Messianic Age isanticipated in the person of Jesus whom Christianscall the Christ. For both Christians and Jews, pastand present time participate in what Paul calls “thefullness of time.” In the call of Abraham, the elec-tion of Israel, promises given through the prophets,and (for Christians) the coming of the Christ, theplan of history is being fulfilled. Jews disagreewith Jews and Christians disagree with Christiansover the eschatological scenarios and apocalypticdetails by which the “fullness of time” will beachieved, but all are are agreed that history is not,in the words of the cynic, just one damned thingafter another; history will be fulfilled in theKingdom of God. Niebuhr is undoubtedly right tosay that “history is not its own redeemer.” But thebiblical view—a view that is utterly formative forWestern culture in both its religious and secular

expressions—is that history does have a Redeemer,and that the Redeemer is, however, veiled andsometimes hidden, present and active in historyitself.

And, ecumenical etiquette notwithstanding, be itadmitted that Niebuhr’s very Protestant reading ofhistory is in tension, if not in conflict, with the“Catholic synthesis.” In our own time, that synthe-sis is energetically set forth by the pontificate ofJohn Paul II. In October 1998, the Pope issued histhirteenth encyclical, Fides et Ratio (Faith andReason), in which he powerfully affirms that therecan be conflict between faith and reason, betweenscience and religion, between philosophy and rev-elation; all truths are one because God, the sourceand end of all truth, is one. Human beings are bynature seekers after truth, and revelation providesthe ultimate “horizon” of that search. The Word ofGod, or the logos that is the ordering reason of all

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Eustache le Sueur, 1616-1655, Louvre

St. Paul Preaching at EphesusTrue religion does not restrict scientific inquiry, for bothendeavors seek knowledge of the same ultimate Reality. Butthe right use of scientific knowledge is dependent upon one’smoral and spiritual understanding. The Christian pilgrim’sprogress is a journey toward self-conscious union with hisinherent divinity, which is one with the eternally present God.

things is incarnate in history and is the guaranteethat the search for truth is not in vain. Not until thefinal End Time will we know the truth perfectly,but along the way both believers and unbelieverswho honestly seek for the truth according to therules of science and reason will be vindicated.

This is surely an audacious vision, but is it adoctrine of progress? The answer is no and yes. Ifby progress we mean a smooth, incremental, andalmost automatic movement in time from worse tobetter, from ignorance to enlightenment, theanswer is certainly no. If, however, by progress wemean that human beings are free agents who arecapable of participating in the transcendent pur-pose that is immanent in history and holds the cer-tain promise of vindicating all that is true, good,and beautiful, then the answer is certainly yes.

Moral progress may be a quite different matter,however. We have already noted the events of thiscentury that have so brutally battered the idea ofmoral progress. We should at least be open to thepossibility that we are today witnessing not moralprogress but a dramatic moral regression. While,as we have seen, practitioners in the hard sciencesexpress a new humility about the limits of theirknowledge and control, many who work in thefield of ethical theory and practice exhibit anunbounded hubris. For instance, PrincetonUniversity recently gave a distinguished chair inethics to the Australian ethicist Peter Singer.Singer is famous, or infamous, for his champi-oning of animal rights as equal or superior tohuman rights, and for his proposal, among otherthings, that there should be a trial period of onemonth after the birth of human babies in whichthose who are defective may be legally killed.Because of his advocacy of infanticide and eugen-ics, Singer has been denied platforms in Germanuniversities, where there is a more vivid historicalmemory of such arguments and their conse-quences. As the decision of Princeton suggests,Singer is no marginal figure in our intellectual cul-ture. He is also author of the main article on ethics,a full twenty pages, in the fifteenth edition of theEncyclopedia Britannica. From Confucius andAristotle, to Maimonides and Aquinas, throughHume and Kant to Peter Singer, the article traces

the liberation of moral theory and practice fromany truths that pose an obstacle to our will topower and control. The gist of it is caught in thetitle of Singer’s 1995 book, Rethinking Life andDeath: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (St.Martin’s.). That Singer does not regret the collapseof what he dismissively refers to as traditionalethics is evident in the chilling conclusion of hisBritannica article: “The culmination of suchadvances in human reproduction will be the mas-tery of genetic engineering....Perhaps this will bethe most challenging issue for twenty-first-centuryethics.” Singer leaves no doubt that he welcomesthe challenge and the brave new world it portends.The cosmologists and molecular biologists—thosewho are bound by the disciplines of scientificmethod—reach the end of knowledge, at whichpoint they fall silent in what might be viewed as arecognition of human creatureliness. Ethical theo-rists—bound by no such disciplines—reach theend of knowledge, at which point anything can besaid, and anything can be done.

For a dramatically different account of the histo-ry of ethics and its progress or regress, we haveAlasdair MacIntyre’s much discussed and emi-nently readable little book, After Virtue—in myjudgment, one of the most important books onmoral philosophy published in this century. ForMacIntyre, the account of moral theory and prac-tice offered by people such as Singer, which is thedominant account in the academy today, results ina rationalized ethics that has broken loose fromany tradition of virtue or truth—from our knowl-edge of virtue and truth. The stark choice facingus, MacIntyre says, is a choice between Aristotleor Nietzsche, between a tradition of virtue, on theone hand, and moral nihilism, on the other. Thevarious intellectual dispositions that today rununder the banner of “postmodernism” have quiteconsciously opted for nihilism. The hubris ofEnlightenment rationalism that Niebuhr rightlycriticized has given way to the hubris of post-modernity’s irrationalism. Secular rationalismtried to do too much, but can rationally recognizewhen it fails. Irrationalism has no access to suchhumility.

In the view of MacIntyre and others, the

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Enlightenment project has failed on its own terms.Despite monumental efforts, perhaps the greatestof which is that of Immanuel Kant, it failed to pro-duce an ethics to which any rational person, actingrationally, must give assent. Society was for a timeable to live off the capital of earlier traditions ofvirtue, but now that capital has been depleted, thefailure of the Enlightenment project has beenwidely advertised, and the time has come round atlast for the triumph of nihilism. In this reading,postmodernity is the product of failed modernity,and the nihilistic avant garde is a regression to therule of the barbarians. Barbarians today, as in clas-sical Greece, are defined as those who are outsidethe civilizational circle of conversation about howwe ought to order our life together, about themeaning of right and wrong, good and evil. Theyare those who know nothing, and insist that noth-ing can be known, about such matters.

Recall the concluding passage of After Virtue.MacIntyre draws the parallel between our time andthe collapse of the Roman Empire when St.Benedict’s monastic movement provided a refugefor civilization. “What matters [now] is the con-struction of local forms of community withinwhich civility and the intellectual and moral lifecan be sustained through the new dark ages whichare already upon us. And if the tradition of thevirtues was able to survive the horrors of the lastdark ages, we are not entirely without grounds forhope. This time, however, the barbarians are notwaiting beyond the frontiers; they have alreadybeen governing us for quite some time. And it isour lack of consciousness of this that constitutespart of our predicament. We are waiting not for aGodot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”

We may think that picture somewhat overdrawn.After all, those who are called barbarians are notprimitives, they are not neanderthals; they are fre-quently those thought to be the “brightest andbest” among us. But that is to miss the point. Thenew barbarians are barbarians not because they areunsophisticated but precisely because of the hyper-sophistication with which they have removedthemselves from what I have called the civiliza-tional circle of moral conversation. In simpler

terms, that is called “traditional values.” The bar-barians refuse to be limited by what we know, bythe wisdom we have received, about good and evil,right and wrong. For them, the past is merely pre-lude.

What, then, can we say about the future of moralprogress? Within the civilizational circle, there ismoral progress (and regress!) in how we live, butthere is no progress in the sense of moving beyondthe moral truths that constitute the circle itself. Wecan develop the further implications of thosetruths, or we can step outside the circle by denyingthat there is such a thing as moral truth. It hasbecome the mark of hyper-sophistication in ourtime to echo the question of Pontius Pilate, “Whatis truth?” Pontius Pilate, an urbane Roman ever somuch more sophisticated by worldly standardsthan the prisoner who stood before him, was aforerunner of the barbarians now in power.

Those permanent truths are sometimes callednatural law. In the Declaration of Independencethey are called the laws of nature and nature’s God.Or they are called the first principles of ethics.First principles are, by definition, always first.Moral analysis cannot go beyond or behind themany more than human consciousness can go beyondor behind human consciousness. Fifty years ago,C. S. Lewis, borrowing from Confucianism, calledthese first principles the Tao. In The Abolition ofMan, he anticipated with great prescience today’sdebates in biomedical ethics about reproductivetechnologies, genetic engineering, and eugenicprogress. The Tao, Lewis said, draws support fromall religious and moral traditions in inculcatingcertain rules such as: general beneficence towardothers, special beneficence toward one’s own com-munity, duties to parents and ancestors, duties tochildren and posterity, the laws of justice, honesty,mercy, and magnanimity. Whether drawn from theTorah, the Sermon on the Mount, ChineseAnalects, Cicero, or the Bhagavad Gita, these arethe truths that constitute the civilizational circle.

Like all tradition, the Tao is vulnerable. Thosewho want to violate it ask, “Why not?”, and it isnot always possible to give a rationally convincinganswer, or an answer that is convincing to every-body. In response to the assertion of rules that set

50 RAYS 00

limits, the avant garde offers the challenge, “Sezwho?”, and the invoking of authority, even of themost venerable authority, carries little weight inour time. Most corrosive is what is called thehermeneutics of suspicion, in which every rule orlaw or custom is perceived to have behind it somehidden purpose, some power protecting its owninterests. Thus theTao is debunked,we “see through”its supposed auth-ority, and the forceof its commandsand limits is “ex-plained away.” Theresult is what PeterSinger approvinglycalls the collapse oftraditional ethics.Lewis had a keen appreciation of what washappening in our intellectual culture.Recall again that remarkable passage fromThe Abolition of Man:

But you cannot go on “explainingaway” forever: you will find that youhave explained explanation itself away.You cannot go on “seeing through”things forever. The whole point of seeingthrough something is to see somethingthrough it. It is good thatthe window should betransparent, because thestreet or garden beyond itis opaque. How if you saw through the gar-den too? It is no use trying to “see through”first principles. If you see through everything,then everything is transparent. But a whollytransparent world is an invisible world. To “seethrough” all things is the same as not to see.

To which many of our contemporaries say,“Precisely. To see through the first principles ofethics is to see nothing, which means to see thatthere is nothing except what we will to do; and, ifthere is nothing, all things are permitted.” So speakthe barbarians among us. Whether they rule us to

the degree that MacIntyre suggests, I do not know.Whether they will rule us in the future dependsupon our ability to argue—and to give publiceffect to the argument—that there is such a thingas moral knowledge. It is in the nature of knowl-edge that we can argue endlessly about what weknow and how we know it. Or at least we can

argue until, in thehappy phrase of ICorinthians 13, wefinally know evenas we are known.Lewis’ Tao pro-vides one minimalfoundation for suchargument. My sus-picion is that, whileit is useful, it is toominimal; that a

firmer and publicly effective understandingof natural law and first principles requiresthe specific acknowledgment of the God ofIsrael and the achievement of the Greeks,as these find expression in what is rightlycalled the Judeo-Christian moral tradition.That particularist tradition provides themost solid foundation for a truly universalethic. But that is a discussion for another

time. The answer to the question of whether the

barbarians will rule us in thefuture depends upon parents,religious leaders, educators,scientists, politicians, artists,

and writers who are not embarrassed to give pub-lic expression to what they know about right andwrong, good and evil. The first proponents of theidea of progress, including moral progress, wereright to believe that knowledge and progress areinseparable. There can be no progress beyond butonly within the civilizational circle of the moraltruths into which we were born, by which we aretested, and to which we are duty bound, in the hopeof sustaining the circle for those who come afterus. The alternative is the willed ignorance ofnihilism. p

—John Richard Neuhaus

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Details, title page of the King James or Authorized version of the Bible, 1611

“The Judeo-Christian moral tradition provides themost solid foundation for a truly universal ethic.”

IN AUGUST OF LAST YEAR, the KansasBoard of Education voted 6 to 4 to removeevolution, and the Big Bang theory as well,from the state’s science curriculum. Thisaction has unleashed an anticipated barrage

of quips and outraged responses. Time Magazine(August 23, 1999) opined that “the board trans-ported its jurisdiction to a never-never land wherea Dorothy of the new millennium might exclaim,‘They still call it Kansas but I don’t think we’re inthe real world anymore.’” Some modern sophisti-cates express but disdain for these religious typesand their antique notions. One editorial cartoonshowed an ape reclining in a tree telling his mate,“We are descended from the Kansas School Board.”

The two versions of the origin of humanity andits cosmos is as old as...the Bible. But the prevail-ing current version received a decisive impetusfrom the empirical studies and conclusions ofDarwin and his proteges. Now the consensus isthat definitive statements about man’s origin arethe exclusive business of anthropologists, archeol-ogists, and evolutionary biologists. Any theoriesabout where man came from that are not support-ed by material science are regarded as inadmissi-ble—quaint beliefs, holdovers from an unscientif-ic era that mixed fact with myth and superstition.

The Rosicrucian teachings make clear that theproponents of both evolutionism and creationismare correct, and even scripture supports both pointsof view. Many readers of the Old Testaments arepuzzled by the apparent discrepancy between thetwo accounts of Creation that are narrated inChapters 1 and 2 of Genesis. The first account more

closely conforms to the evolutionary take on humangenesis and has been called the Elohist version.The second creation narrative, called the Yahwistversion, begins with the creation of humankindand is followed by the creation of animals.

As The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception makesclear, the form-side of anthropogenesis is describedin the Bible’s first creation account. In the secondaccount the life or spirit side of creation is presented.In point of fact, not only humanity, but all VirginSpirits in all life waves have been differentiated inGod and bear His image. These Spirits have arche-typal being before they assume the more limitedand impermanent aspect that is determined by thevarious forms they build and use in the differentWorlds to gain experience, knowledge and power.

Technically, Western Wisdom uses the term evo-lution for that period of human developmentbeginning when the Human Spirit or Ego becameindwelling in the human physical form, endowingit with self-consciousness. Prior to that time, as heworked outside his mineral-like, plant-like, andanimal-like bodies, man was going through a stageof involution; his spirit was involving more andmore deeply in its four earth-oriented vehicles.

Creationists intuit that man’s dignity, based onbeing created in the image of God, does not admitof a descent from animals—and from the vantageof the science of spirit, this intuition is correct.Apes and other animals bodies have degeneratedfrom forms humans used to occupy. Animal formshave descended from humans.

In time science and religion will collaborate torightly understand human origins and destiny. p

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We Teach But What We Know

NEWS PERSPECTIVES

OF COURSE you are acquaintedwith the maxim that in certain sit-uations there is danger in missingthe forest for the trees. Perhapsyou have applied this truism to

the alcohol problem: from time to time you hearor read of car accidents, divorces, murders, etc.,due to “booze abuse.” But did you ever imaginehow bad it really is? At the time Dr RobertTeachout was writing his book, Wine, the BiblicalImperative: Total Abstinence (Richbarry Press,P.O. Box 302, Columbia, SC 29202, 1983), therewere 10 million alcoholics in the U.S.; 60% of allpersons over 15 years of age were regular con-sumers. This product was implicated in 50% ofroad accidents; 65% of drowning deaths; 80% offire deaths; 22% of home accidents; 36% of pedes-trian accidents; 44% of airplane accidents; 65% ofmurders; 40% of assaults; 35% of rapes; 50% ofsuicides; 50% of domestic quarrels; 60% of childabuse. Through the welfare system, work absen-teeism and production loss, etc., the annual nation-al bill was 43 billion dollars. Due to inflation andpopulation growth the current bill is certainlyhigher. There is little reason to believe there hasbeen improvement in the other statistics.

These figures alone, the author contends, shouldbe reason enough for total abstinence. But he statesthat his desire is to demonstrate the “Biblicalimperative,” and for excellent reasons”: many pro-fessed Christians are drinking—he even quotes afamous evangelist as saying “I do not believe thatthe bible teaches teetotalism.” He considers winean important topic. In the Old Testament the word

“vineyard” occurs 94 times, “vine” 54 times, and“grape” 18 times. One Hebrew word for wine,yayin, is used 141 times. And it (the word “yayin”)serves as the major basis for the author’s caseagainst alcohol, and it can easily be summarized.

The Hebrew language has far fewer words thanEnglish; in fact, according to Dr. Hugh Ross’sbook The Genesis Connection, the ratio betweenthe size of the two languages is 1000 to 1. Hencein the Hebrew many words have to do double,triple, or quadruple duty. Yayin in one of thesemulti-use words. In 71 instances it refers to thepure, nonalcoholic drink which Scripture praises;the 70 other times cite a negative meaning.

Teachout’s approach is nothing if not thorough.He goes out of his way to emphasize that theBiblical suggestion to consume grape juice inmoderation should not be taken as a hint there isanything harmful in it. For instance, Scripture hasnothing negative to say about honey, yet one isurged to be moderate in its use (Proverbs 24:13,25:27).

How about the New Testament? The situation issimilar to the first part of the Sacred Canon. Onlyone word for wine is used, the Greek oinos, whichrefers to both the pure and fermented beverages.

RAYS 00 53

WineThe Biblical Imperative:

Total Abstinence

BOOK REVIEWS

Line drawing of fresco from the History of Noah, Benozzo Gozzoli (1424-1496), Campo Santo, Pisa

Technically, linguistically, the author concedes theKing James version to be correct, but if it werebeing written today, “grape juice” would often bewritten where the original version uses “wine.”Truth cannot contradict truth. Scripture does notsend mixed signals; it cannot both recommend andcondemn yayin and oinos.

The author makes a strong appeal to commonsense and reason. For instance, believing Solomonto have been the author of both Proverbs and theSong of Solomon, he asks: can the same man,praised for his great wisdom, sing the praises ofyayin in Song of Solomon 4:10 and condemn it inProverbs 23:29-35?

Teachout handles objections. He admits that innot one instance is the word grape juice mentionedin the King James Version; vayin and oinos arealways translated as wine. So who is he to suggestthat multiple translations of these words closerconforms to the sense of the original texts? In fact,Teachout writes that many classical scholars in the17th century reached the the same conclusions, ashave more recent Biblical scholars in England andthe U. S. They have not been mislead by relying onerroneous secondary sources, works Teachout calls“shoddy scholarship.”

He dismisses the argument that in Biblical timeswine had less alcohol, so its use was condoned, byciting Noah and Lot who both got drunk. As for thesuggestion that wine was allowed due to an inade-quate water supply, he cites Deuteronomy 8:7. Butis it not true that before refrigeration grape juicecould not be kept pure for any length of time?Teachout cites sources as proof that this contentionis not true.

What about Christ’s first miracle, turning waterinto “wine” (John 2)? That would have made thewedding guests even more drunk, and all Scripturecondemns drunkenness. Teachout cites Matthew26:29 and Mark 14:25 as proof that our Lord drankthe “fruit of the vine”—the unfermented beverage.

Dr. Teachout, a veteran pastor and seminary pro-fessor, has produced a well-researched and mostreadable study that makes a valuable and convinc-ing case for sobriety, a message sorely needed inour day. p

—P. F.

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GOD’S WINGSAn article in National Geographic several

years ago provided a penetrating picture ofGod’s wings.

After a forest fire in Yellowstone NationalPark, Forest Rangers began their trek up amountain to assess the inferno’s damage.One ranger found a bird literally petrified inashes, perched statue-like on the ground atthe base of a tree.

Somewhat sickened and saddened by theeerie sight, he knocked over the bird with astick. When he struck it, three tiny chicksscurried from under their dead mother’swings.

The loving mother, keenly aware ofimpending disaster, had carried her offspringto the base of the tree and had gatheredthem under her wings, instinctively knowingthat the toxic smoke would rise. She couldhave flown to safety, but had refused toabandon her babies .

When the blaze arrived and the heat hadscorched her small body, the mother hadremained steadfast. Because she had beenwilling to die, those under the cover of herwings would live.

“He will cover you with his feathers, andunder his wings you will find refuge.”

—Psalm 9l:4Being loved this much should make a dif-

ference in your life.

Remember the One who loves you andthen be different because of it. p

WE WILL BE HAPPY TO SEND A SAMPLE ISSUE OF

THE RAYS TO PEOPLE YOU THINK ARE LIKELY SUB-SCRIBERS. PLEASE SEND NAMES AND ADDRESSES

TO THE ROSICRUCIAN FELLOWSHIP, P.O. BOX

713, OCEANSIDE, CA 92049

INVESTIGATIONS OF THE QUANTITYof food usually taken by men and womenrespectively, have shown that men eat morethan women; and attempts made to regulatethis, on the supposition that it was an abnor-

mal desire for food on the part of the men thatcaused this discrepancy, have shown that men gen-erally do require more food than women; and sci-entists have endeavored to find the reason why.But up to the present time they have not met withsuccess and are only able to record the fact.

It must be admitted that they are very ingeniousand painstaking in their efforts to get at the truthfrom their point of view with the means at theirhands. In the investigation under considerationthey were careful to exclude all who were athletesand to select men and women of about the sameheight and weight so that the body surface wouldalso presumably be the same. Their subjects werein good health and in every way the case of oneseemed to be uniform with that of the other.

It was noted that the women generated 1355 heatunits in twenty-four hours as against 1638 heatunits produced by the men, or about two per centmore for the latter per pound of body weight. Themen produced about twelve per cent more heat thanthe women, and while the investigators are not pre-pared to make any very decisive or emphatic state-ments about the result of their investigations, itseems to be their opinion that the difference infood consumption may be due to the fact that menare more active than women, have more active tis-

sues in their body and are more free from fat. This is only another case where scientists are

doomed to fail, because they take into considera-tion only the dense body which they can see, feel,and measure. Man is, however, most emphaticallynot this body, but this body is a vesture of man.Moreover, it is his densest and most inert vehicle.Were it not interpenetrated by the vital body, com-posed of the four ethers, it would be as inert as astone. In fact, we know and notice the differencebetween dead weight and live weight. How mucheasier it is to carry a living burden of a given weightthan dead material weighing the same, because theformer has a vital body composed of ether.

The scientific investigators are of course rightwhen they speak of the inertia of fatty tissues, butthere is no ground for the assertion that women aremore subject to this impediment than men. Theexplanation of the difference in food consumptionlies in the fact that woman has the negative physi-cal and the positive vital body and therefore assim-ilates her food better than man, consequentlyrequiring a smaller quantity; while man, whosephysical body is positive, has a negative vital bodyand is therefore not able to assimilate as well aswoman. Further, the heat units which he takes inwith the larger quantity of food are quickly radiat-ed by him while they are retained for a longer timeby woman. Hence man, as said, generates twelveper cent more heat in a day than woman. Manwastes it while woman utilizes it in her economyand is therefore able to get along with less food.

In the Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception where wehave taken up this and other points connected withnutrition, we have given a number of instancesshowing the difference between the action of a

RAYS 00 55

Why Men Eat More Than Women

NUTRITION AND HEALTH

This article, written by Max Heindel, was first printed in theJuly 1915 issue of the Rays and is reprinted to illustrate thesignificance of occult knowledge in accounting for physicalfacts which material science cannot satisfactorily explain.

positive and a negative vital body as possessed bythe two sexes. Only by taking into considerationthis positive vital body of woman can we accountfor the fact that she remains warm with less cloth-ing than man, while man because of his negativevital body which allows of the radiation of heat toa greater extent than the positive vital body,requires warmer garments.

It is a truism that we live not by what we eat butby what we assimilate, and because of the positivevital body woman has certainly the advantage ofman in that respect. It will be found, however, thatmen of spiritual and devotional proclivities, menwho are really living the spiritual life, are thereby,in a measure, changing the polarity of their vitalbody so that it gradually becomes more and morepositive. This is not accomplished in one life, butin a succession of lives; and eventually there willcome a stage when the distinction which has beennoted by the scientific investigators will disappear.

It is the writer’s belief, or rather knowledge,

that, had these scientific investigations been car-ried on a few thousand years ago, the differencewould have been much more marked. For althoughwoman had not then arrived at her present stan-dard, neither had man, and he was much fartherbehind in that respect.

The last two thousand years of growing altruismunder the Christian religion have done wonders inmaking men less brutal and women more refined;and in a few hundred years, when we get to thecusp of Aquarius, the “Son of Man,” by precessionof the equinox, this distinction will probably haveceased and man and woman will be of an equalfooting in regard to the fineness of their vehicles.

Remember this, however, that man lives not bybread alone. The higher the thoughts we think, theless gross and material we shall be. So we maytake time by the forelock, and by pure thoughtsrefine our vehicles; and as we do this, we shallneed less earthy food. This is the line of improve-ment for both men and women. p

56 RAYS 00

Some of the most valuable truths about theorigin, functions and proper care of man’s

vehicles to be found on the printed page.

Max Heindel, a trained clairvoyant, dili-gently investigated the real causes of

physical and mental disorders in the super-physical worlds.

Reveals that man is a complex being, pos-sessing a Dense Body, used to fetch and

carry; a Vital Body, specializing energy fromthe Sun; a Desire Body, the emotional nature;and a Mind, the link between the threefoldSpirit and threefold Body.

Postulates that disease is a manifestation ofignorance, and points the way to perma-

nent health by giving fundamental facts nec-essary for intelligent, constructive living.

“A treasure chest of valuable information.”

“An indispensable addition to thelibraries of all those who are concernedwith the true art of healing.”

New Eighth Edition. 244 pages. Indexed.Paper. Published by The RosicrucianFellowship.

Occult Principles of Health and Healingby Max Heindel

Please orderon page 64

MY ASSOCIATION with TonyPrang, an epileptic, had its incep-tion in a prophetic, dream.Awakened at dawn from adreamless sleep, by the divine

power of another’s need, I stood for a while beforethe open window and prayed. Into the vast solitudeand silence of very early morning an unspokendesire for guidance drifted over the highway offaith but, though I listened intently, no answercame. I went back to bed and drowsed immediate-ly into another sleep. Almost at once I was trans-ported a thousand miles away.

A deeper stillness than that imparted by thedawn imbued the etheric scene before me with theprovidence of God. It was an hallowed stillness.There was no breath of movement in the grove oftall, willowy trees that encompassed a plain squarehouse, but I, quietly reverent at an entrance to thegrove, received into my heart the divine whisper ofapproaching life. I waited.

The form of a woman, dressed in white,appeared suddenly at my side. Her face was in noway defined but the burden of her need, identicalto that felt earlier, became instantly mine. It wasmore than sharing. It was the tranquil acceptanceof the weight of suffering she had so long endured.

“Lord, have mercy on my son,” she seemed topray.

The woman drew closer to me for whatever ofcompassion and release she was destined toreceive, and I put my arm around her waist to com-fort her. The very intimacy of her presence spelledher name in giant letters across the dream, and I

awakened. The name was MILDRED. Two days later a letter arrived from an unfamil-

iar town in Michigan, one thousand miles fromwhere I lived. It was addressed to me, from awoman I did not know.

“Dear Miss Hawthorne,” she wrote, “Mr. Cole,our mutual acquaintance, has told me about yourwork with children. He has suggested that you maybe willing to care for my son who is afflicted with

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“Lord, Have Mercy onMy Son”

HEALING

Watercolor, James J. Tissot (1836-1902), Brooklyn Museum

The Dumb Man possessed of a devil healed at CapernaumNote the vibratory healing jolt as shown by the straight hair.

epilepsy....”The letter continued, pulsating with the spirit of

her need, and the signature was Mildred Prang.Within a few days I reached the town in Michiganwhere she lived and was welcomed into a plainsquare house. It was encompassed by a grove ofslender, towering trees.

Ten-year-old Tony was lying on a couch in theliving room. The sight of him tore my heart. Theboy’s wasted body and the almost inhuman soundof his voice stirred the divine compassion that wasto quicken the days and nights through the monthsthat followed. And divine compassion, vibrating inthe heart of God, breathed into motion the miracleof His merciful love.

Without training as a nurse and with no knowl-edge of epilepsy, only the living God could sustainme in the care of Tony. Only through prayer and ameasure of fasting could the boy’s healing come.Tony was endowed with a natural faith as all chil-dren are. I, too, was blessed with faith; a redeemedfaith which, united with the faith of a child,enabled the heavenly Father to reveal his power.Why His healing was not quickly given to Tony,but manifested gradually through several months,rests in the wisdom of Christ. Perhaps in this agreater mercy was accomplished because thePrangs, new to the ways of the living God, couldnot conceivably have withstood the majesty of aninstantaneous miracle.

The parents went to Canada. Mrs. Prang espe-cially needed the months of release from the careof their son, and her absence freed me to fast andpray.

The seizures suffered by Tony were frequent.There were often four in one day. Through everywakeful moment I prayed, “Lord, have mercy onthis boy!” Every night I knelt beside the sleepingchild, feeling the powerful upreach of compassion-ate desire. I knew that it was reaching God. Yetseven weeks of spiritual darkness went by andthere was no apparent change in Tony’s condition.Nevertheless, I knew that he would be healed. Thevery fact of the prophetic dream which was Christmanifested, and the spiritual travail that kindledthe unceasing prayers lifted perseveringly to theheights, assured me that in the sight of God the boy

was already well. Through the eighth week the number and sever-

ity of the seizures lessened. We knew, then, thefirst joy of the heavenly Father’s demonstratedcare. A heart overflowing with gratitude addedpower to the supplications that continued night andday, and the Father blessed us greatly. Most of theninth week passed with only three attacks. Fromthen on they became less and less frequent, and atthe end of the third month of prayer and partial fastthe seizures had become rare. Finally they stopped.It seemed too wonderful to believe that it was theend of Tony’s affliction, but it was.

On the eighteenth consecutive day that their sonhad been completely free from epileptic seizures,Mr. and Mrs. Prang returned home. During theirabsence they had been receiving constant reportsof Tony’s progress but the spirit of reunion withtheir son revealed their doubts of his recovery. Onthe same day I was moved to leave Michigan,guided to other work. This grieved us all. Yet thegrief I felt was rivaled by my joy. Unaccommo-dated as they were at first to the healing of theirson, the Prangs would soon know and love the liv-ing God whose mercy had blessed us all.

After a year of silence a letter came from Mrs.Prang. It was radiant with Christ.

“Through all this year,” she wrote, “Tony hasnever had an attack!” p

—Julia Hawthorne

Visible Helpers are just as necessary as InvisibleHelpers, and our friends and patients may share in ahigh privilege, as well as add much to the power ofliberated healing force, by joining us in prayer for thesick. Our Healing Service is held every evening inthe Healing Temple at 6:30 (7:30 when Daylight timeis in effect) and in the Pro-Ecclesia at 4:15 P.M.when the Moon is in a cardinal sign on the followingdates:

July....................................1—8—15—22—29August.............................4—11—18—25—31

Relax, close your eyes, and make a mental pictureof the pure white rose in the center of the RosicrucianEmblem on the west wall of our Pro-Ecclesia, andconcentrate on Divine Love and Healing.

58 RAYS 00

ONCE UPON A TIME therelived a widow with twodaughters. The elder wasoften mistaken for her moth-er, so like her was she both

in nature and in looks; parent and childbeing so disagreeable and arrogant that noone could live with them.

The younger girl, who took after herfather in the gentleness and sweetness ofher disposition, was also one of the pretti-est girls imaginable. The mother doted onthe elder daughter—naturally enough,since she resembled her so closely—anddisliked the younger one as intensely. Shemade the latter live in the kitchen and workhard from morning till night.

One of the poor child’s many duties wasto go twice a day and draw water from aspring a good half-mile away, bringing itback in a large pitcher. One day when shewas at the s ring an old woman came upand begged for a drink.

“Why, certainly, good mother,” the pretty lassreplied. Rinsing her pitcher, she drew some waterfrom the cleanest part of the spring and handed itto the dame, lifting up the jug so that she mightdrink the more easily.

Now this old woman was a fairy, who had takenthe form of a poor village dame to see just how farthe girl’s good nature would go. “You are so pret-ty,” she said, when she had finished drinking, “andso polite, that I am determined to bestow a giftupon you. This is the boon I grant you: with every

word that you utter there shall fall from yourmouth either a flower or a precious stone.”

When the girl reached home she was scolded byher mother for being so long in coming back fromthe spring.

“I am sorry to have been so long, mother,” saidthe poor child. As she spoke these words there fellfrom her mouth three roses, three pearls, and threediamonds.

“What’s this?” cried her mother; “did I seepearls and diamonds dropping out of your mouth?What does this mean, dear daughter?” (This wasthe first time she had ever addressed her daughter

RAYS 00 59

Fairies

FOR CHILDREN

Engraving, Gustave Doré, for Perrault’s Fairy Tales

One day a woman came and begged for a drink

Dover P

ictorial Archives

affectionately.) The poor child told a simple tale of what had

happened, and in speaking scattered diamondsright and left.

“Really,” said her mother, “I must send my ownchild there. Come here, Fanchon; look what comesout of your sister’s mouth whenever she speaks!Wouldn’t you like to be able to do the same? Allyou have to do is to go and draw some water at thespring, and when a poor woman asks you for adrink, give it her very nicely.”

“Oh, indeed!” replied the ill-mannered girl;“don’t you wish you may see me going there!”

“I tell you that you are to go,” said her mother,“and to go this instant.”

Very sulkily the girl went off, taking with her thebest silver flagon in the house. No sooner had shereached the spring than she saw a lady, magnifi-cently attired, who came towards her from the for-est, and asked for a drink. This was the same fairywho had appeared to her sister, masquerading nowas a princess in order to see how far this girl’s ill-nature would carry her.

“Do you think I have come here just to get youa drink? “said the loutish damsel, arrogantly. “Isuppose you think I brought a silver flagon herespecially for that purpose—it’s so likely, isn’t it?Drink from the spring, if you want to!”

“You are not very polite,” said the fairy, display-ing no sign of anger. “Well, in return for your lackof courtesy I decree that for every word you utter asnake or a toad shall drop out of your mouth.”

The moment her mother caught sight of hercoming back she cried out, “Well, daughter?”

“Well, mother?” replied the rude girl. As shespoke a viper and a toad were spat out of hermouth.

“Gracious heavens!” cried her mother; “what doI see? Her sister is the cause of this, and I willmake her pay for it!”

Off she ran to thrash the poor child, but the latterfled away and hid in the forest nearby. The king’sson met her on his way home from hunting, andnoticing how pretty she was inquired what she wasdoing all alone, and what she was weeping about.

“Alas, sir, “she cried,” my mother has driven mefrom home!”

As she spoke the prince saw four or five pearlsand as many diamonds fall from her mouth. Hebegged her to tell him how this came about, andshe told him the whole story.

The king’s son fell in love with her, and reflect-ing that such a gift as had been bestowed upon herwas worth more than any dowry which anothermaiden might bring him, he took her to the palaceof his royal father, and there married her.

As for the sister, she made herself so hateful thateven her mother drove her out of the house.Nowhere could the wretched girl find anyone whowould take her in, and at last she lay down in theforest and died.

MORAL

Diamonds and rubies may Work some wonders in their way; But a gentle word is worth More than all the gems on earth.

ANOTHER MORAL

Though—when otherwise inclined—It’s a trouble to be kind, Often it will bring you good When you’d scarce believe it could. p

—Charles Perrault

60 RAYS 00

A Limerick and a Rhyming Story

1There once was an obstinate birdWhose singing at night could be heard.When asked not to peepWhile his friends were asleep,He said, “That request is absurd.”

2A fish went swish with his fins.That’s how my story begins.A cricket made sounds like a fiddle,My story has come to the middle.A giraffe did deep knee bends.And now my story ends.

—Dagmar Frahme

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