Lent

[Federica]

As part of an attempt to create an appropriate Easter mood, I am reading a small book by Dennis, called “Alchemy of the Holy Week”. It is in fact a workshop transcription, and it’s equally available online. As it seems to me, Dennis does a great job at bringing to life the meaning of the Holy Week, and I’d like to report some of his insights. The focus is on the Holy Week’s cardinal value for our life here and now, so that it doesn’t risk being experienced only as a compassionate commemoration of the events that took place 1993 years ago.

The book illustrates how each day of the Holy Week is about the future: Christ had to come back to Jerusalem to open the possibility for us to leave behind the old mysteries’ consciousness. He paved the way for the new mysteries. Yet, two millennia later, the old clairvoyance consciousness of moral unfreedom, in which human conduct is strictly ruled from without the human being, is still dominant, well beyond its window of evolutionary legitimacy. This situation manifests in the world state we produce today. In this light, it becomes clear that the stages of transformation incorporated in the events of the Holy Week are all about the awakening human being’s ideal agenda to transform the future according to the Good. Moreover, in the book the story of these events is put in parallel with specific alchemical processes - yet another way to build a bridge and bring together self knowledge, world knowledge, and knowledge of the sacred records (then endeavors such as PleromaUnderground’s and similar are once and for all clarified in all their senselessness). As Ashvin writes in his latest essay,

To truly become more sensitive to the flow, we should periodically ‘release’ the content of these concepts by making a similar inner gesture as we make when releasing the breath and facial tension (or when relaxing into a stretch), trying to more intimately feel the meaningful inner process that they are pointing attention to. It is as if we are entrusting the content to the unfamiliar forces of distillation and clarification that weave in our intuitive periphery, similar to how we entrust our daily experiences to a period of sleep and sometimes awaken with fresh insights.

As described, that distillation is an inner process. At the same time, it is a symbol of a divine process, and an alchemical process experienceable in nature as well. As He enters Jerusalem, Christ begins by taking apart the old mysteries. Correspondingly, we can begin to dismantle in ourselves the old mysteries consciousness here and now, by distilling symbolic meaning out of our concepts, separating and putting aside their notional content - their corpse. Similarly, in unprejudiced chemistry (alchemy) the physical-spiritual process of distillation takes apart substances so that they can be purified of their static components - lifted out of their corpse - and then reconstituted at a higher level of integration. Hence, with Christ as our example, if we are free (and only because we are free) we can begin to remedy our separate state from two sides, and do our part on the way back, and up. When we are not yet free, we just take the separation literally and only worry about making our freefall through the tunnels of mental pictures as comfortable as possible.

This momentous process of returning to the Divine has to reverse the consequences of the fact that the creation of man included the potential for separation from the intents of the Creator. That potential became reality when the Archai - the Spirits of Personality - added their contribution to the creation of man. That’s where the inner experience of separation took shape, the Fall happened, and the sensory world appeared for humanity. From this sensory creation too we feel separated. But we have the potential to change that, and the only way to realize our union with the world - and through it with the Divine - is by deciding to transform our life, develop the new clairvoyance, and separate out our personal corpse, the static component in our human nature. As Dennis puts it, “I have to take images from the world and transform them into metaphors for my inner development”. In the same way, with alchemy “I take what is in the world and transform it into a symbol of my path back to the divine”. This entire process is encoded and encapsulated in the events of the Holy Week.

I hope I will be able to report in due time some of the metaphors presented in the book, but please anyone feel free to add any other thoughts related to this theme.

[Federica]

As said, I would like to elaborate on the characterization of the Easter events contained in “The Alchemy of Holy Week”. Paying attention to the alchemical quality of this mystery is not only an act of exploration on the path to self knowledge and self fructification (liberation of the higher self in us) but also, I guess, a possible remedy for the common ailment of instinctive antipathy to Christianity. An alchemical approach, even if shallow and vague at first, may help to see what the incarnated Christ lived through, in meaningful connection with what the incarnated Earth lives through, and what our incarnated self lives through. If we only want it enough, for the sake of truth, these apparently distinct flows of becoming can be progressively brought into the focus of clear consciousness (clairvoyance) in their fundamental quality of unity. Then, in the truth of disincarnated consciousness (Spirit), these three experiential flows begin to lose their separateness in space-time and in participation, to converge towards a wedded condition.

Approaching this more fundamental state of consciousness through alchemy (alchemical meditation) keeps the manifestations of the incarnated Earth in the loop, for the convenience of the ambitious but uninitiated ordinary self. All those pictures of matter and forces can be utilized and made active. We literally make them into keys that we can begin to operate and see through. In this way, our consciousness progressively becomes more overarching, without leaps into the completely unfamiliar. We move through approachable stages that don’t forgo our physical environment.

First of all, alchemy should not be pictured as the practice of mysterious chemical experiments in pre-scientific times. Rather, in initial approximation, it's the endeavor of retracing the deeper meaning of our world of interconnected manifestations, which includes not only the Earth, but its universal environment as well, most proximately the Sun, the Moon, and their dynamics. Easter is strongly connected with the New Sun, that is, the Sun that has just passed the vernal point (spring equinox). At the vernal point, the sun is born again. It grows towards the summer solstice, as epitomized in the observable cycle of the annual plants. Through the alchemical view, we are led to recognize that the New Sun is not only an astronomical phenomenon. It is also the higher self we are called to fructify, evolve, and progressively manifest within ourselves through the course of evolution. This is not a metaphor. The human I is the aspiration, the movement of convergence toward the inner Sun which, in the world of manifestations, reverberates in the form of the celestial body that fills the Earth’s senses and our senses with life, light and warmth.

In other words, the New Sun, as an event, continually renews the opportunity to live up to the new mysteries (they could be equally called modern initiation, occult education, or the next stage in the evolution of consciousness) arising from freedom, rather than from law. Law and precept are the way of the old consciousness, the way of the old mysteries. Instead, the way of the new consciousness and new mysteries begins with freedom - freedom to actively seek the light of knowledge that leads to wisdom, love and truth, in an uncompelled movement of the soul.

And so, Easter is the new Sun-day (the first spring Sunday able to receive full 'Moon integration', with the full astral forces of the Moon) because the Christ being - the Cosmic being of Christ - is the Sun being, the spiritual Sun. Therefore, walking the path of the new mysteries is identical with growing the impulse of the newborn Sun in our inmost being.

The Easter events are not only events of the past to commemorate, but also rhythmically recurring opportunities - encapsulated in the presence and guidance offered by the Christ being - to unite our life flow with the virtuous evolutionary flow that brings into constructive unity the incarnated universe (comprising the Sun planet), our inner world (comprising the inner Sun we feel called to conceive and give birth to) and the spiritual world at large, within which the Sun being is our most encompassing and true transformer. If there is a point of luminous intersection of all worlds that we can work toward, and hope to evolve toward, it is only because the Sun being is holding it in focus for us, across all spectra of reality. In this sense, the Easter mystery is a highly condensed path of experience that holds a key to meaningful inner progress in feeling, thinking, and will.

Now, the proposition in Dennis’ workshop is to approach each day of the Holy Week through a unique symbol. In the evening prior, each symbol is worked with, then brought into sleep. In the morning, the task is then to let questions take shape - using this image of the Tree of Knowledge as an attractor - without adding any comments, opinions, or possible answers.






The challenge of the exercise is to produce the patient enthusiasm and courageous humility required to be able to live with an open question without trying to anxiously ‘fix it’ with some tentative reasoning and answer. Honing this capacity is fully in the mood of the new mysteries, in which truth does not come from the forming of sides and the construction of opinions, but from the sacrifice of the old attitudes first, which allows an opening to a different quality of consciousness.

Palm Sunday

This process of sacrificing the corpse of the old mysteries to make room for the new is expressed in the symbol corresponding to Palm Sunday: the crucible. In the crucible, things get incinerated. Everything is burned down to the earth element, to dry ashes - a corpse. To allow the possibility to live through this experience of sacrifice beyond its conceptual screen, the suggestion is to inhabit the symbol (not the concept) by inwardly drawing the crucible, on the night before Palm Sunday. This activity enacts the wish of attunement to the meaning encoded in the symbol. That meaning is living, it consists of the life of spiritual beings, before it is funneled into a concept encoded in words.







This crucible meditation sets the meaning of sacrifice and crucifixion for the entire Week. Palm Sunday marks the entry into it. Christ enters Jerusalem, and we can follow His guiding gesture by entering the squared, cross-like, earthly geometry of the crucible, trying to feel the larger feelings of the Earth soul, as it approaches a specific geometric configuration in relation to the Sun-Moon upcoming 'power integration' - as the Earth becomes almost ready to receive the sacrifice to come. So we can begin to relate to the sacrifice of Jesus Christ by preparing to burn down in the crucible our soul attitudes that reflect the old consciousness. Once we feel settled and almost comfortable in the repeated drawing of the symbol, as in an environment that has become somewhat familiar, we can erase the crucible in reverse motion, to lift its pictorial form back into unmanifested condition and conclude the meditation.







On Sunday morning, we then put the crucible image into practice, by considering the top part of the Tree of Knowledge (the cloud, the hand and the split trunk), observing what questions arise. Have we been able to extinguish our anxious urge to provide fixing answers? If the exercise is done in a group, the questions can be shared, and everyone can observe what field of consciousness emerges when all refrain from 'answer fixes', letting their soul weave along the flow of someone else’s question instead. This new type of field of consciousness is probably not dissimilar from the one we begin to weave in when, in the evening, we turn our attention to the dead, attuning to our intersection with them, possibly asking a question, as Steiner describes. Later, the dead soul may begin to speak through our own morning thoughts. As those thoughts take shape as ours, but inspired by the dead person, we feel inwardly quiet.

The consciousness that grows from such activities of attunement to others and their flow has the qualities of freedom, participation, and tolerance. In Jerusalem - likewise in our world environment today - things were happening under very different conditions. Both the Romans and the Pharisees wanted to command, dictate, legislate. The donkey on which Jesus Christ enters the town symbolizes the old mysteries, the old consciousness to be overcome. Thus Christ is sitting on it. A similar meaning of the donkey exists in many other myths and tales as well, like King Midas’. He then goes to the temple and puts an end to the commerce taking place there. This disrupts the existing habits and laws. It challenges the powers in place, that were ruling by the force of laws and strict precepts. In ourselves, we are called to bring about the same disruption. We transform our soul, burning down the rule of both instinctive trading of desires and external law. In so doing, we progressively transform ourselves into an organ of perception of the Spirit, within the fabric of the new consciousness arising.


PS: Interestingly, in his illustration of the days of Holy Week, Max Leyf highlights other aspects of the Palm Sunday symbology, seeing in the donkey (which is not a horse) a sign of meekness and peaceful arrival. Naturally, more than one encoding may coexist, to offer a rich perspective on these cardinal events.

"Alchemy of Holy Week" by Dennis Klocek is freely available here.

[Federica]

Monday

According to this interpretation, Holy Week’s Monday is the day of the cursing of the fig tree. The fig tree exhibits a particular fructification process, in which the flowers are hidden inside the fruit. Fructification remains occult - a shadowy process. In the parable, this is a symbol of the old mysteries and their occult culture, and also of the shadow in our own consciousness, which we aspire to transform. By cursing the fig tree, by having it not to bear fruits again, Christ signifies the necessary overcoming of the old consciousness, through much effort, and faith. Once this is realized, external law and structure (the mountain) stops ruling, and internal law finally prevails (we can tell the mountain to throw itself into the sea, and it will be done).

After the commerce at the temple, the fig tree is another layer of the old that Christ takes apart, for our benefit. Then there is the wedding banquet. As the chosen ones refuse to come, everyone is invited. This signifies the advent of the new consciousness, the new way to be spiritually nourished, open to everyone who feels free to pursue it. However, only the ones who put in the effort to purify and rebuild their bodies (to wear the wedding garment) are able to stay. This is a picture of the alchemical wedding between Christ and the human soul, working at transforming itself. If the soul does that, what happens is what Christ came back for: Holy Week.







This 17th century illustration by Robert Fludd pictures the ‘evolutionary detour’ of material life, from the Fall onward. The circular movement is the impulse of the divine Creation (Fiat) as carried out in space-time by the Spirit, one wing beat after another. The void in the middle is what the Cosmic Christ being decides to go through, as He separates from the Father and comes up against the Passion, modeling the freedom that the human soul is called to imitate. When this happens, something of the original necessity of the “Fiat” is opposed. This impulse is necessary in order to overcome the old consciousness and its dependence on the necessity of external laws - both natural and cultural. When the old consciousness persists beyond its rightful time of expression - as it is the case today - the aspiration to a superior order, determined from without, has no longer the evolutionary backup it had in previous Earthly stages and results in the forming of opposite sides and of strong, arbitrary opinions. This tends to transform into the attitude of fundamentalism and leads to social collapse. The only antidote is freedom, which leads to moral imagination instead. That’s the raison d’être of Holy Week.

Like Christ has shown, we have to learn to oppose the Creation, in a sense. We have to undo (reverse) its necessity, as it inexorably rolls within us. Creation resulted in the appearance of matter. In order to enable materialization, the spiritual processes (the forces) working 'behind' matter had to be altered. When a force (a spiritual process) slows down and comes to a halt, a substance becomes manifest as a consequence. All matter that we can perceive on Earth is a testimony to a spiritual process that has come to rest. The substance is therefore a sort of detour, a phase of stagnation of a suprasensible process, in which waste gets accumulated, to become a sort of tax on our consciousness, that we then have to lift. That’s what the periodic table basically is, for the one who knows how to read it: the complete pricelist of everything we have to pay - how much, in what currency, payment methods and terms - for the slowing down, the materialization and coming to a halt of spiritual processes.

One thing we can do to become fully conscious of this reality, to infuse it with freedom and undo it, is distillation. Distillation symbolizes Monday of Holy Week. It is an appropriate way to begin to take apart the old consciousness and its enmeshment with matter. It's an alchemical intention which is cognizant and respectful of how the particular piece of matter came about in the first place. With distillation, we can change things. Using the power of the elements (earth, water, air, fire) and their interactions we change matter, and we change our consciousness at the same time. That's alchemical work: to lift the corpus of the Creation back into its dynamic, spiritual condition. So we can contribute to closing the gap between Creator and Creation, in freedom. This possibility is the very reason why the gap (and with it, the corpus) were formed in the first place, giving rise to our default sense of being a person 'in here' cognizing reality 'out there'. Here again, the symbol can be meditated on the evening of the day before, that is Palm Sunday:





Once it feels familiar enough, and easy to draw (slowly), we can erase it in reverse order:






Then on Monday morning, the image of the Tree of Knowledge can be used again, to contemplate the portion with the three arms and hands, on the left and on the right, and see what open questions may arise from it, resisting the urge to add comments or formulate possible answers:








PS: For an additional perspective on this day, see Max Leyf’s Scenes from Holy Week: Monday.

"Alchemy of Holy Week" by Dennis Klocek is freely available here.

[AshvinP]

Like Christ has shown, we have to learn to oppose the Creation, in a sense. We have to undo (reverse) its necessity, as it inexorably rolls within us. Creation resulted in the appearance of matter. In order to enable materialization, the spiritual processes (the forces) working 'behind' matter had to be altered. When a force (a spiritual process) slows down and comes to a halt, a substance becomes manifest as a consequence. All matter that we can perceive on Earth is a testimony to a spiritual process that has come to rest. The substance is therefore a sort of detour, a phase of stagnation of a suprasensible process, in which waste gets accumulated, to become a sort of tax on our consciousness, that we then have to lift. That’s what the periodic table basically is, for the one who knows how to read it: the complete pricelist of everything we have to pay - how much, in what currency, payment methods and terms - for the slowing down, the materialization and coming to a halt of spiritual processes.

Thank you for this ongoing treatment of the Holy Week, Federica. I plan to try and experiment with these symbols on at least one or two days. The animated drawings showing the creation and reversal are very interesting to contemplate. This Monday treatment felt especially helpful and insightful to me. Viewing the periodic table as a (literal) symbol for the decohered price we have to pay for the Fall is excellent. It is always quite remarkable for me to notice how the events and teachings of scripture also take on a glorious new light when we view it from this deeper perspective of the evolutionary process, of whence it came and to whence it is going. I look forward to your treatments for the rest of the week!

[Federica]

Like Christ has shown, we have to learn to oppose the Creation, in a sense. We have to undo (reverse) its necessity, as it inexorably rolls within us. Creation resulted in the appearance of matter. In order to enable materialization, the spiritual processes (the forces) working 'behind' matter had to be altered. When a force (a spiritual process) slows down and comes to a halt, a substance becomes manifest as a consequence. All matter that we can perceive on Earth is a testimony to a spiritual process that has come to rest. The substance is therefore a sort of detour, a phase of stagnation of a suprasensible process, in which waste gets accumulated, to become a sort of tax on our consciousness, that we then have to lift. That’s what the periodic table basically is, for the one who knows how to read it: the complete pricelist of everything we have to pay - how much, in what currency, payment methods and terms - for the slowing down, the materialization and coming to a halt of spiritual processes.

Thank you for this ongoing treatment of the Holy Week, Federica. I plan to try and experiment with these symbols on at least one or two days. The animated drawings showing the creation and reversal are very interesting to contemplate. This Monday treatment felt especially helpful and insightful to me. Viewing the periodic table as a (literal) symbol for the decohered price we have to pay for the Fall is excellent. It is always quite remarkable for me to notice how the events and teachings of scripture also take on a glorious new light when we view it from this deeper perspective of the evolutionary process, of whence it came and to whence it is going. I look forward to your treatments for the rest of the week!

Thanks! For someone like me with no religious education, this alchemical approach is definitely helpful, and I'm glad it feels relevant even for you. Perhaps it could be particularly valuable for people like Rick as well - will see.
I have no idea who sent me the one about the periodic table, but it's not in the book, therefore I'm particularly happy it makes sense to you as well

[Federica]

Tuesday

The symbol for this day is precipitation. On Tuesday, things begin to accelerate in Jerusalem, the situation is about to fall apart. Precipitation is opposite to distillation. Through distillation, substances are transformed and lifted back into the spiritual processes that resulted in them - directly or through multiple intermediate states. In precipitation, the process comes to rest, to materialize into a sense perceptible substance - a salt. Thus precipitation is an image of incarnation (“you are the salt of the Earth”) whereas distillation is an image of excarnation, when salt is lifted again into Spirit.

Tracing the alchemical perspective on this incarnational rhythm, things look rather simple as long as we remain within the mineral realm. For example, a small puddle of sea water on a reef evaporates in the sun, and salt appears as a precipitate at its bottom. Add warm water again, and the salt disappears from view, back into solution. Now let’s consider an incarnating plant. How does the salt of life manifest, or precipitate, and how can it be lifted? That’s a more complicated and asymmetrical process. The life-giving light of the sun is used by the plant to synthesize metals and precipitate salts from them, so it can nourish itself and grow (photosynthesis). Pure metals would be toxic, but as salts, they fuel plant growth. Salt is the token of the earthy liveliness of the plant. In its innocence, the plant does that effortlessly, with impressive alchemical virtuosity, however if we wanted to reverse the process and lift the salt from the plant, it would take quite a few steps: distill the essential oil; ferment the oil into a wine; separate the alcohol from the wine; burn the wine into an ash; warm the ash in hot water; collect the salt released. From here, the alchemist begins a rhythmic, progressive process of dealbation, or salt purification. The salt is recursively boiled in water. At every reappearance (when the water evaporates) the salt turns out somewhat purer, and whiter, until it eventually becomes completely volatile. It’s not earth anymore. The salt has been given wings.

What about the corresponding process in man? How can the salt of human life be purified and lifted? Unlike plants, man uses the cosmic growth forces to fuel the head processes of thought. That’s how we make 'salt’: in our consciousness. But lifting such precipitates of thought is a task of huge proportions in comparison to the plant, and the asymmetry between precipitation and distillation is striking. It took no time for man to fall into Creation, but it takes entire evolutionary cycles to lift the higher self out of it. Christ had to come back to show us how to approach the task. Seen from the individual perspective, we continually free-fall in instant sequences of head thoughts, while the dealbation of the soul takes years, if not entire lives or multiple life cycles.

With these proportions in mind, on Holy Tuesday we receive a sense of clear acceleration. The situation begins to spiral, and we know it will soon precipitate. Tuesday is named after the God of war, and Christ begins to fiercely and openly denounce the precipitates of old prescriptive knowledge crystallized in the law of the Pharisees. A war of words begins to rage around Him, as He heals and speaks to the people regardless of the existing rules. Meanwhile, spies survey the events and report to the authorities. Christ explicitly decries the established practices, like buying doves and abiding by the rules to obtain salvation. He fiercely states: “The Kingdom of God is within you”. Not in the crystallized teachings.

This signals the transformation of rigidified dogma into wisdom. The enthusiasm of genuine faith nourished by inner experience replaces intimidation by means of notional knowledge and precepts. This is metanoia, the cognitive inversion in which man learns to think independently, no matter what the Pharisees and Scribes decide to do. For the time being, they are already trying to trick Christ in front of the people, asking Him by what authority He is taking action. In turn, Christ asks them if the baptism of John - the vehicle of metanoia - has come from heaven or from man; to which they have to answer that they don’t know, not to provoke a rebellion in the people.

Soon, the Pharisees would persecute and attack free thinkers - Christ tells the disciples. “Even your friends and family will betray you”. That’s a picture of further acceleration and precipitation to come: the “little apocalypse”. And in the picture, Christ gives us the key to resist and invert the little apocalypse: “Do not worry beforehand how you will defend yourselves”. In other words, the pitfall would be to think about already receded knowledge, hoping that future salvation lies in there, expecting that it can be modeled, in order to think beforehand and map out the path to salvation. Instead, the free thinker will stand firm, meditate, and pray, without anxiously rushing to patched-up solutions, trusting that “not a hair of your head will perish”.

The task for the becoming Son of Man (the purified human soul) is to imitate the Son of God (Christ) in freedom, not to let anyone kill the nascent new consciousness and its eternal life of Spirit. Whoever is able to do that will be given “words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict”. In other words, the answers come precisely when we stop seeking them in the illusion of the restricted sub-flow. That’s how the Son of Man will experience genuine faith. Not by absorbing dogmatic teachings, but by direct, studious experience that develops enthusiasm for meditative prayer, and compassion instead of judgment. The Son of Man will see that judgment comes around, and will not judge. On Monday evening we can meditate on these dynamics by drawing the symbol of precipitation and dwelling on it:






Perhaps the alchemical symbol of salt can enrich the context of the meditation. Salt can be lifted, or it can precipitate. It is a reciprocation of the warm, dissolving forces of levity and the cold, depositing forces of gravity:






Once a feeling of personal involvement in the symbol has arisen, we can erase it and go to sleep:




On Tuesday morning, the section of the Tree of Knowledge to contemplate and ask open questions about is the bottom left circle, with the downward facing triangle. It shows the word: "Study".


PS: For a complementary treatment, see Scenes from Holy Week: Tuesday, by Max Leyf.

"Alchemy of Holy Week" by Dennis Klocek is freely available here.

[Federica]

Wednesday

The symbol of Holy Wednesday is oil. Jesus Christ is anointed on this day. A woman comes to the house where He was sitting with disciples and other people, in Bethany. She carries a precious jar, containing precious spikenard oil. She pours the oil on His head. Her initiative is bitterly condemned by some of those present. Judas is among them. They argue that the oil could have been sold, and the money given to the poor. But her gesture is highly praised by Christ. Upon this event, Judas quits the assembly and goes to the priests to betray Christ for money. The priests have been waiting for the convenient occasion to arrest and kill Him, and rejoice. The picture is one of a woman coming with anointing, healing intentions, while the men reason in terms of money, and what could have been done.

This act of protecting and preparing with oil marks the turning point towards the Passion, and the separation between the mission of Jesus and the mission of Christ, who will have to die within the physical body of Jesus. The anointing gesture shows a future-oriented attitude, that bears the quality of the new consciousness. It also symbolizes the rebalancing and synthesizing of the masculine and feminine principles, after times of patriarchal dominance, in turn preceded by ancient matriarchy. Now the time has come to unite both principles within the becoming Son of Man. At that table, the two expressed attitudes, past-oriented and future-oriented, are at the same time separated and brought together in the oil gesture.

In relation to the elements and forces active on Earth, oil is the compound that marks the beginning of the lifting process, for example in distillation. When fire is applied, oil is the first result of plant distillation. As mentioned before, distillation then continues through ash and salt formation (in the realm of gravity) before the salt is purified and lifted within the context of moisture. There would be much to add here, to describe the alchemical interactions taking place circularly, between the poles of levity and gravity, and through the intermediate polarities of dryness and moisture. However, the essential connection is that oil falls out of warm levity forces that are moving downward toward the dryness of carbon and ash.

The main characteristic of oil is that it forms in the interplay of hydrogen (warm levity) and carbon (intermediary dry state that leads from levity to gravity), and lacks the heavy gravity forces of oxygen. The cold and heavy oxygen principle has a combining power that connects and drags everything down (oxidation). In oil, this is not there yet, and so oil (fat) stands as a sort of energy potential that doesn’t naturally combine, hence its protective valence. We can contemplate its symbol in connection with its unwillingness to combine, in particular with water, and its availability as energy reserve, that is, as potential. An essential oil is volatile (it disperses towards levity condition if the jar is left uncapped) or, it can be processed down towards gravity, by drying it into ash, extracting the salt encapsulated in the ash, then purifying the salt with rhythmic application of moisture and warmth. In other words, it is available as potential that we can shape. And it tends to prepare and protect what is about to be born and grow - in plants for example, and in the mission of Jesus Christ.

The balancing and integration of the feminine and the masculine principles within the one individual is deepened by the meaning of Wednesday, the day of Mercury. In Latin languages, Wednesday is called “Mercury-day”. In German languages it’s Odin’s day, which in short is the same God (more on that in Max Leyf’s Scenes from Holy Week: Wednesday). Mercury is a force of mediation. In the world, the Mercury principle is the mediator between processes tending to precipitate in forms that are laid bare and divested of the intangibles of levity (light and warmth) and processes that tend to internalize those intangibles and hold them in place. At the balancing point of these externalizing and internalizing forces, there is the Mercury principle, with its characteristic droplet form. It is somewhat fluid, and yet it has some form. It neither lets itself be laid bare in precipitated form - like in a salt process - nor does it retain the intangible hallmarks of levity, as a phosphorus process does (for example). Rather, it maintains great inner cohesiveness through great dynamism. In alignment with this mercurial quality, anointing and reasoning (feminine and masculine) are both distinguished and united in Mercury, the great healer, and the great hermaphrodite - as it is often represented in alchemical literature - or Rebis, intended as the ultimate attainment of the magnum opus.

In GA 139 VIII, The Gospel of Saint Mark, Steiner highlights the importance of the anointment passage, and how it strongly affirms the value of the spiritual life of the self over the reasons of sense-based existence, using the apparently sensible argument of the missed opportunity to help the poor to make the point even more striking:

Because it is very important in the further course of our considerations, let me now draw your attention to a passage which you will find in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark.

And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, a woman came in as he sat at table with an alabaster flask of genuine costly ointment of nard, and she broke the flask open and poured the ointment over his head.
But some of those present disputed among themselves and said, “Why this waste of ointment?” It could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii that could have been given to the poor”. And they were indignant with her.
But Jesus said, “Let her alone, why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you have the poor with you all the time and you can do good to them whenever you wish. But you do not have me with you forever. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body to prepare for my burial.
I say truly to you, wherever in the whole world this Gospel is proclaimed, her deed will be spoken of in her memory”. (Mark 14:3-9)


It would only be right to definitively admit that such a passage has something quite remarkable about it. And most people, if they are honest, should admit that they feel forced to sympathize with those who are arguing that the ointment has been wasted, that it is quite unnecessary to pour it over someone's head. Most people will truly believe that it would have been better to sell the ointment for three hundred denarii and give the money to the poor. And if they are honest, they might find it harsh of Christ to say that it was better to let her do what she wished to do instead of giving the three hundred denarii to the poor Here one has to say to oneself, there must be something behind this story, if one is not to be put off by the whole story. In fact, The Gospel goes even further, and in this it doesn’t manage the reader’s feelings. For if a number of people admit that it would have been better to give the three hundred denarii one could get for the ointment to the poor, the Gospel is saying that those who think this way think similarly to a certain other person. For it continues:

“Wherever in the whole world this Gospel is proclaimed, her deed will also be spoken of in her memory.”
And Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the chief Priests to deliver him up to them. And they were glad when they heard it, and promised to give him money. And he sought how he could find a good opportunity to deliver him up. (Mark 14:9-12)

Because Judas Iscariot took particular offense at the pouring of the ointment! Those who took offense at the pouring of the ointment are compared to Judas Iscariot. The Gospel is therefore not at all polite, for it makes it quite clear that those who took offense at the pouring out of the ointment are just like Judas Iscariot, who later sold the Lord for thirty pieces of silver, by saying, you see, Judas is too fond of money, and so are the people who wish to sell the ointment for three hundred denarii. The Gospel should not be glossed over in any way, for glossing over prevents an objective, correct explanation. One must find the point that matters. And we will find further examples that show us that the Gospel even adheres to presenting secondary points in a somewhat offensive manner at times, when the main point is to be brought into particularly clear focus.

What is important here? The Gospel says: it is not merely the senses that man should strive for. It is not merely what can have value and meaning in the realm of the senses, but rather the supersensible world, which humanity should above all else embrace; and it is also important to look at that which no longer has meaning in the realm of the senses. The body of Christ Jesus, whose anointing before the burial is foreshadowed here by the woman, has no meaning when it is lifeless; but one should do something for that which has value and meaning beyond the realm of the senses. This had to be emphasized particularly strongly. To achieve this emphasis, something was used which human consciousness naturally believes to be of the greatest value in the realm of the senses.

The Gospel chooses a particular example here of how one must sometimes withdraw something from the senses in order to give it to the spirit, into which the self enters when it is freed from the body. It chooses a rather irreverent example: that what is given to the spirit, what is given to the self when it is freed from the body, is taken from the poor. It does not look at what makes earthly existence worthwhile, but at what can enter into the self and radiate from it. This is presented here with particular force, by connecting it with Judas Iscariot, who commits the betrayal because he feels his heart especially drawn to the senses, because he mingles with those whom the Gospel here, in a rather unpolite manner, calls the real Philistines, not too strong a word in this context. Judas is only concerned with doing what has meaning in the realm of the senses, like those who believe that three hundred denarii have more meaning than what goes beyond the realm of the senses.

(Das Markus-Evangelium - GA 139, Dornach 1985, S. 158–160)

Following these brief intuitive threads, we can let the preparing, protecting quality of oil in mercurial context point us to the deep meaning of Holy Wednesday. In the evening of Holy Tuesday, we can inwardly draw oil, feeling its stable readiness to anoint, protect and nurture what is about to manifest (be born) and how this is a beneficial rebalancing of the prevailing telluric forces:



Once we develop good familiarity with its meaningful quality, we can undraw it in reverse movement. By the way, the animations only show one possible movement to draw and undraw the symbols. Other choices are valid as well, as long the drawing is reversed correspondingly.





On Wednesday morning, the section of the Tree of Knowledge to contemplate and ask open questions about is the bottom right circle, with the upward facing triangle. In some versions, it shows the word: "Work".


PS: For a complementary treatment, see Scenes from Holy Week: Wednesday by Max Leyf.

"Alchemy of Holy Week" by Dennis Klocek is freely available here.

[Federica]

Thursday

On Thursday evening, the disciples and Jesus gather to celebrate Passover. Before the supper, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet. This act presents us with yet another powerful picture of the advent of the new consciousness. Steiner said that “the esoteric meaning of the Washing of the Feet is that Jesus the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God, could not exist without the Apostles”. The washing of the feet is also the first stage of the Christian initiation. From GA 97 IV, The Gospel of John as an Initiation Document II:

Just as there has to be a mineral world so that the plant world may exist, so did the apostles have to exist for Christ Jesus to be there. No one can be a saint without pushing others lower down. It says in chapter 13, verse 16: ‘The servant is no greater than his lord.’ The Christ has evolved on the basis of the apostles and is therefore able to call them the lords out of whose community he has arisen. He washes their feet to indicate that he is lower than they are in so far as he owes his existence to them. This is something we must all experience in our own bodies. Anyone who has not had this experience has no true perception of the path of Christian mysticism.

Retrieved from the Rudolf Steiner Archive

In the new consciousness, we sense with our entire being what we owe to the lower realms that, taking upon themselves part of who we were, have made our evolutionary path possible - and we honor them. We also wash each other’s feet, as Christ invites us to do, and become aware of the organs of perception that allow us to sense speech (not only to hear sound), to sense another person’s thoughts as they are shared with us, and sense the other person’s self, directly and independent of what we may perceive of their physical existence, their speech, their thoughts.

This is the full perceptuality we can become aware of, when we choose to welcome and nurture the new mysteries in ourselves. Then we become aware of our own human form - not the physical form, but the organizing principle that makes our entire being grow in its uniquely lawful patterns, and live harmoniously within the Cosmos. Through perception of our human form (using it as a perceptual organ) we enable ourselves to mutually wash our feet. This is not something we can learn within the grid of conceptual reasoning. It requires working on our higher cognitive potential, to develop as fully humans, in our full, differentiated range of twelve senses. As Steiner says in GA 21 VIII, The Real Basis of Intentional Relations, about the distinctive organs that give us distinct perceptions of sound; uttered words; another person’s thoughts, and their self:

To ignore the validity of such distinctions is to import disorder into the whole relation between our knowledge and reality. It is to suffer the ignominious burden of ideas that cut us off from experiencing the actual. For example, if a man calls the eye a “sense” and refuses to accept any sense for “being aware of words”, then the idea that the man has formed of the eye remains an unreal fancy.

Retrieved from the Rudolf Steiner Archive

If we take care of that, understanding others will come not through mere dialogue and forming of corresponding opinions and judgments, but directly through pictures of the other person’s soul, and beyond the pictures, through direct sensing of their self, once the organs of inner perception have been sufficiently grown, in inner silence. Then the “I am” can be experienced. This is the same “I am” uttered by Christ in response to the band of officers sent by the priests and Pharisees to arrest him in the garden. It's been here ever since, waiting for us to join it (see Max Leyf’s treatment of Holy Thursday for an account of Christ's exact words at that occasion).

Once we become I am, we switch our focus from “content to intent” - to paraphrase Dennis’ words. Then we are freed from the superstition of Luciferic making that we are separate from the world, and from the people around us, and that the thoughts we awaken to in our mind are our own manufacture. And we are freed from the Ahrimanic superstition that nails us down into the illusion of separateness, in which everything, including others, is matter - stuff that we want to either possess or reject.

Our challenge begins with staying awake, once we withdraw from conceptual content, in this process of growing within the Divine Kingdom. Only then do we awaken to ourselves first, then to others and to the Cosmos. This is what Christ talks about to the disciples in the Garden: stay awake and resist falling asleep. But they can’t! They keep falling asleep, instead of following His act and invitation to immerse themselves in prayer - in intent without content. This is the same struggle many of us face today, when we try to pray-meditate and feel the veil of sleep surrounding us closer and closer from all sides. Then the only way to resist sleep is oftentimes to give up, and let sense perception flow into our senses again.

Hence the symbol for this day: the Ouroborus. That’s where we begin, on the path to expanding consciousness of our reality, before we can begin to sense reality at large, and its interconnectedness. The Ouroborus is a condensed picture of the nature of our challenge, as it first approaches us. We have to realize that we cannot think about our thinking like we think about anything else, because as soon as we think ‘about’, we are placing ourselves outside that thing, to contemplate it. This is not possible with thinking itself, just like an eye simply cannot watch itself. If we nevertheless try, we end up like the Ouroboros, or like Baron Munchausen, or like the hand drawing hand drawer in the Game Loop essay Part III. This impossibility can be laboriously approached in conceptual form, as I tried to do here, or it can be grasped neatly, as a condensed unity, when we bypass the conceptual layers and immerse ourselves in the symbol, letting its meaning act on us directly:





Erasing the Ouroborus signals that the illusion of catching thinking by thinking about it is over. We make space for a different quality of effort, in concentration and meditation:





On Thursday morning, the section of the Tree of Knowledge to contemplate and ask open questions about is the circle in the center containing the upward facing triangle. In some versions, it shows the word: "Pray".




PS: For a complementary treatment, see Scenes from Holy Week: Thursday by Max Leyf.

"Alchemy of Holy Week" by Dennis Klocek is freely available here.

[Federica]

Good Friday

This is the day when Christ Jesus is tortured to death. On the night before this day of Crucifixion, the Last Supper has taken place. Judith von Halle calls it the First Supper, because - although in linear time it precedes the events of Good Friday - the gift it encapsulates - the transubstantiation - is real only because of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. Only because of Christ’s sacrifice of love, and the transformation He brought about in the bodies of the Earth upon His death, were the Apostles - and all humanity ever since - enabled to take earthly bread that is the body of Christ, and the sap of Earthly plants that is His blood. Only because of Christ’s union first with the physical body of Jesus, and then with the materiality of the Earth itself and its substances, is it possible for us today to unite ourselves with Him through our incarnated life. Since then, the new mysteries have become a possibility for every human being, and the possibility for us to love one another as Christ has loved us has become real as well. “Now the Son of Man is glorified, and God is glorified in him”, as it is said at the First Supper.

But, as we know, these possibilities would not be embraced right off. To this day, we are still struggling. It begins with the Apostles at the First Supper. As Christ prefigures the salvation which we can freely seek in the new consciousness, the Devil is present - in Judas, the representative of our materialistic and rationalistic times. And yet, his betrayal is necessary. It brings about the ultimate sacrifice. And it’s not only Judas. There is Peter who, once the situation precipitates, does exactly what he guaranteed he would never, ever do: disown Christ Jesus. “You will all fall away, for it is written”, says Jesus. The disciples would initially fall asleep, forget, disown, fail to understand. And so would many more of us, through the centuries. Only John the Baptist reincarnated as the risen Lazarus - in another helping prefiguration that, in linear time, precedes the events of Golgotha - stands as an icon of the completely evolved Son of Man to come.

Now, in order to begin to relate the significance of these events to our life today, context is necessary. Speaking of Holy Thursday, the human Form was mentioned - the organizing principle that is supersensible and yet constitutes the true, original divine intention for our physical body. Physical, in its proper sense, does not mean made of the substances of the Earth - material. The human physical body existed from the very first, immaterial life of the Earth (Saturn condition) originally as a creation of the Thrones. Steiner calls it the Phantom:

Just as the thought of the plastic artist is stamped upon his material, so the Phantom of the physical body is stamped upon the substances of the earth which we see given over after death to the grave or the fire. The Phantom belongs to the physical body as its enduring part, a more important part than the external substances. The external substances are merely loaded into the network of the human Form, as one might load apples into a cart. You can see how important the Phantom is. The substances which fall asunder after death are essentially those we meet externally in nature. [...]
In fact the Phantom - invisible to the physical eye - is what was first there of the physical body of man. It is a transparent body of force. What the physical eye sees are the physical substances which a person eats and takes into himself, and they fill out the invisible Phantom. If the physical eye looks upon a physical body, what it sees is the mineral part that fills the physical body, not the physical body itself.


From Jesus to Christ - GA 131 VI

Rudolf Steiner Archive

At the beginning of Earth evolution, man emerged constituted of this Phantom, an etheric body, and an astral body. This constitution was not yet sense-perceptible. It was through the Fall (Lemurian times) that the human Phantom got stuffed with matter, the substances that make up our perceptible semblance. This distortion of the human Form is the work of Lucifer. Through temptation, Lucifer skewed the human organization - a dangerous deed, but necessary for the development of human individuality and, ultimately, of human freedom. The result of this distortion is the dense, material constitution we are familiar with, submitted to destructive forces leading to the experience of death. This is the “body of Adam”. As a matter of fact, our sense-perceptible body of Adam bears an out-of-order, defective human Phantom, loaded with the substances of the Earth which, without the constructive forces of the original Phantom, slowly decay, until death and dissolution ensue. Since this physical body is the mirror that makes our experiences and perceptions conscious, the conscious life of the mind became in turn skewed and dulled. This situation only worsened through the ages, so that up until the events of Good Friday, humanity had been in a wave of progressive spiritual decadence, more and more in a place of not understanding the process of perception of the external world, feeling depressingly separate from it (a place we are quite familiar with today too). On the one hand, the means of the old clairvoyance had tapered, and on the other, the incorruptible forces of the original human Phantom had been compromised and were ruining the human organization. As another consequence of the compromised function of conscious mirroring of the physical body, the fourfold human being and reincarnation were also less and less participated. Today, for the most part, we are still there - scared to death by death, unable to grasp reincarnation, and struggling at the surface of all things. In "The Alchemy of Holy Week", Dennis speaks of “the drama of sensation” and the necessity to “control the inner picture”, that is, to concentrate and meditate.

Through my sensing, I kill the world, until I awaken to the fact that in my sensing I am killing the world, and then I can change the way I respond to sensing, by trying to see the action of the hierarchies in the way the world is created. When I do that, I am participating in the development of the Son of Man. And that is what Christ came back to teach us how to do.

My sensing kills the world because it flattens it to a great container of stuff, and, as a consequence, I feel insular in my thoughts: what’s not out there must be in here, in my private mind space. And around this space I build my identity, as if it indicates what is ‘typical me’, rather than the ever becoming crucible of countless other beings and their ideal habitats and attitudes. And so, as Ashvin says in part 4 of An Occult Education Through Chess, “we experience our thoughts as if they are entities contained within our perspective rather than forces shaping that perspective from an unseen angle”.

Back to the turning point of time - Good Friday - and its context. As Steiner said, “we cannot comprehend Christianity unless we understand that, at the time when the Events of Palestine took place, the human race on Earth had reached a stage where the decadence of the physical body was at its peak, and where, because of this, the whole evolution of humanity was threatened with the danger that the I-consciousness - the specific achievement of the Earth-evolution - would be lost.”

In the pre-Christian first half of Earth evolution, man had also become more and more egoistic. The nascent sense of self born within the warmth of the blood and the rhythm of the breath, was at first fully tied up with the bloodline, and 'love' was a necessity, conceivable exclusively within the confines of the bloodline. At the same time, the Form of the physical body, compromised by Lucifer, had become so broken that human consciousness was at a peak of separateness and fear. In the old mysteries it was therefore necessary to shut down the physical body of the chosen student to the limits of death, in order for the teacher to have a chance to initiate them. This is the context in which Christ intervened. Through His deed of suffering and love on the Cross, He endeavored to bring a seed of renewed wisdom to humanity: the truth of the reality of the Spirit, and through this, the new covenant of Love. Love became elevated from the blood and the stream of heredity to the heart, as a spiritual force, not any longer as a merely hereditary bond: “Whoever does not leave father, mother, brother, sister, cannot be my disciple”.

At the Crucifixion, the blood flowing from the wounds into the ground of Golgotha, reached the skull of Adam, buried at the place of the Cross, and could heal Adam’s corruptible body. As Dennis says, that event closed an evolutionary cycle. At that moment, the second Adam - Christ Jesus - was able to replace the ties of blood with the restored Phantom - a seed that each and every human being has received from Him ever since. All of us have a seed of the restored Phantom within us. It’s an unconditional gift. If we decide in freedom to honor that seed, strive in the new mysteries, and grow the new consciousness, we can become aware of that. We can create a reciprocal relationship with the incorruptible body of Christ, through our own incorruptible Phantom seed, that we already have in us - in our physiology, as Dennis says. Through a deepening within our restored human Form and its spiritual powers, our I-consciousness can grow within the drama of perception, and then in the depths the incarnational cycles. For this reason, in modern initiation a hierophant or a teacher are not required anymore. The physical body doesn't have to be put into near-death condition anymore. On the contrary, it is through the body, through the redeemed experience of perception of the world, in full awakeness, that we can come to know the truth, with the assistance of the Christ Being. As a result, the illusion of a separate world falls away, and so do the remainders of blood-egoism. The Christ Being made the path of reascent possible. “No one comes unto the Father but by me”. Indeed, the sacrifice on the Cross has restored the lost principles of human evolution, endowing humanity with a new member: the incorruptible body of Christ. This is why Steiner says, “The important thing is not what Christ taught, but what he gave: His Body.”

Just as the bodies of earthly human beings are descended from the body of Adam, the body that crumbles away, so are the Phantoms for all men descended from that which rose out of the grave. And it is possible to establish a relationship with Christ through which an earthly human being can bring into his otherwise decaying physical body this Phantom which rose out of the grave.

From Jesus to Christ - GA 131 VII

Rudolf Steiner Archive

A striking reading of how Christ Jesus factually closes an evolutionary cycle on Golgotha is presented by Judith von Halle in her book “And If He Has Not Been Raised…”. The ballast of materiality loaded in the human Phantom by Lucifer in the Fall, is effectively reversed through Christ’s corresponding immersion into matter, firstly by living within the bodily organization of a human being - being crucified and tortured to death in that body - and then by entering and transforming the depth of Earthly materiality. On Good Friday, through the deeds on the Cross, Christ worked specifically at the spiritualization of the materiality of blood, and that of breathing/speech - the two materialized bearers of the very first sense of self in human evolution. The unfolding of His untold suffering on the Cross - a scene which Von Halle, as a stigmatist, witnesses anew every Friday - gives us a testimony of the mystery by which this spiritualization took concrete place. First, the wounds let the necessary proportion of egoistic, Luciferic blood, flow out “vicariously” through the body of Christ Jesus. However, He did not die from bleeding. He died from suffocation, as a consequence of how he was nailed and tied to the Cross. And it is through a final sequence of deep, one-sided inhalations, that the spiritualization of the organs of breathing was enacted.

Von Halle also shares how she hears the last words uttered by Christ Jesus. We know that Steiner reports the words, “My God, my God, how you have raised me!” or, “My God, my God, how you have revealed the Self!” which differ from the traditional translation, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”. The sound of these two different phrases and meanings is very similar in speech. Even, von Halle hears a third expression, very similar-sounding too, meaning something like "increasing in value”, which seems to converge to Steiner’s. The linguistic question between Aramaic and Hebrew and the ambiguity created by the absence of vowels in the written forms is slightly complex, but the gist of it, according to von Halle, is that both meanings were uttered. The traditional words, “Why have you forsaken me?”, are the words of the dying Jesus. He is redeeming our human fear of losing everything in death. At the same time, Christ is being born on Earth, and says, “How have you raised me!”. This is the Christ Being who permeates the Earth, born on Earth, to give us the seed of the Son of Man - the seed which we shall strive to grow on the path to the New Jerusalem, in freedom.

This freedom to pursue these new mysteries also means that each path is unique, just like the seed we all have received is a uniquely individualized one. Now we have the chance to reciprocate, to imitate the gestures of Christ, to seek a relationship with Him through soul purification. We who are alive in this time are particularly fortunate to also have the fruits of Anthroposophy to guide us in this quest. Dennis’ particular path goes through embryology, physiology, meteorology and agriculture to disclose the spiritual patterns (the work of the hierarchies) hidden behind the corpse of perception. Whatever specific world angle each of us is drawn to, our task is to learn about the world, and resurrect its corpse. This challenges us to apply a spiritual scientific approach to the world, to take all those corpses and reanimate them within ourselves, so as to experience the spiritual life of the world in its becoming.

This is the redemption of thinking, when dogma is replaced by life. As Dennis puts it, the new mysteries “involve thinking: bringing my thinking that has no thought into contact with sensation that has no object other than its own activity. We call it meditation. And I get exponential energy from my I-being to understand the karma of why I have these particular issues in my life. In that moment of recapitulating Good Friday, the Christ comes and says, ‘I can help you with this. I know what it’s like, I have been there’”. This path requires the determination to courageously resist the passive mechanism of perception, as we keep seeking the parallel world. We all have a parallel biography to live - Dennis says - that depends on our ability to "transcend our fear of memories of sense experiences". Working experimentally with symbols is part of the task. Not symbols as snapshots, but as becomings. When we picture the symbol as a becoming, “our consciousness pulls our soul away from Lucifer and Ahriman and says, 'Excuse me, but I’m involved in a dialogue with the hierarchies that stand behind the becoming of this sense experience, and guess what, you’re not invited to the party’”.

The symbol for today is digestion. The Mystery of Good Friday calls us to an ongoing inner work of progressive integration. On Thursday evening, we may experiment with this symbol. This is not a known alchemical symbol, and the book doesn’t say anything about it. The suggestion is to simply experiment with it, and see what deepening may emerge from the exercise. Here is the workshop handout, with some notes on how to work with symbols.





Giving it back to its spiritual process:






On the morning of Good Friday, one may want to consider the splitting of the Tree of knowledge of good and evil and the Tree of life from one trunk, occurred in the Fall.


PS: For a complementary treatment, see scenes from Holy Week: Good Friday by Max Leyf.

"Alchemy of Holy Week" by Dennis Klocek is freely available here.

***

Note: My intention in drafting these posts is to actively engage with the Easter mysteries, and also provide those who have an instinctive aversion to Christianity and the Christ Being with a basic reading of these events in esoteric clef. I have various examples of this attitude close to me, and we have seen it around here as well. I do realize the plain inadequacy of these notes, in the face of the infinite depth of meaning of the Easter deeds, but I still hope no one will take offence at them, given my limited intentions.

[Federica]

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday. In the crucible meditation, the marks of the old consciousness, egoism and the illusion of perception are burned into ash.

In 2024 Dennis Klocek wrote this note to introduce "The Alchemy of Holy Week":



In the liturgy of Christianity, Holy Week is a key to understanding the passion of Jesus. In the transformative alchemy of His Passion there is a universal symbolic message for all humans that transcends even Christianity. The message is to work to comprehend the mission of a suffering God.

Many cultures have recognized the intimate emotional linkage between the sufferings of humans and the Divine. Many religions have highly valued the willingness of the Divine world to suffer along with humans. Dionysos suffered and was brought to life again gestated in the thigh of Zeus. Osiris suffered but was brought to life again through the magical practices of Isis. Morally, Osiris was betrayed by another God who was his brother. Lugh, the shining one, was betrayed by his brother, Loki the trickster.

In its deepest essence, Holy Week differs from these ancient stories. In the Holy Week drama, the God and the human are the same suffering being. During Holy Week the God/human is betrayed by a human for money. These differences, regarding the differing levels of beinghood and guilt place the Holy Week events into human time frames. The drama takes place in the space of a week. That is, it unfolds in time at a human scale. It is not about the drama of gods betraying gods in some far-off time. It is about human beings needing to spiritually transform their time spent on earth. It is about life today.

The alchemists understood that timing regulates all transformation. During Holy Week, the timing of each day of the week alchemically represents a specific action of Christ working among humans to provide new revelations about soul transformation.

Monday, the day of the Moon, is about purifying the astral or moon body. To that end, Christ drives the money changers out of the temple. The warning is about equating business, politics, and religion.

On Tuesday, the day of Mars, Christ wages war against the political and economic burdens inflicted on the common people by the legislative power of the Pharisees, the priest/lawyers of the Hebrews. Again, Christ warns against business/power/politics presented under the guise of religion.

On Wednesday, the day named after Mercury the god of merchants and thieves, Judas goes to the Pharisees and betrays Christ for money. Apparently, money/power is a fundamental motif in this initial sequence of days.

On Thursday, the day of Jupiter, Christ accepts the task of sacrificing for all humans. In the old pantheon Jupiter was the ruler or king who was expected to sacrifice his life for his subjects when his time had run out. “The king is dead; Long live the king” is an image of this kingly sacrificial deed.

On Friday, the day of Venus, Christ enacts the great sacrament of love for all humanity by giving up his God/human life through suffering at the hands of power elites.

On Saturday, the day of Saturn, Christ descends into hell to purify the ancient and powerfully suffocating forces of evil found in the primal material earth. In the old pantheon Saturn was seen as a doorway through which karma unfolds. The descent of Christ into the Earth helped the Earth to stay alive. A seed was set for the redemption of human karma that is now available to all humans. That deed of sacrifice forms the basis for the future alchemical transformation of the Earth into a new Sun that will illuminate a new Cosmos.

On Sunday, the day of the Sun, Mary Magdalene meets the risen Christ thinking that He was a gardener. Indeed, He is. He has planted a seed in the material earth that will unfold in time.

Holy Week is a time-seed of a future evolution, when humans will find their place among the Divine hierarchies. This will be developed by humans recognizing the Cosmic Christ. Christ, the God-human, who dwells in the souls of all beings who suffer. For sure, it will be a long time before that kind of world comes to pass. But it may be that just knowing it can come to pass, can help to lessen the current epidemic of chronic, widespread anxiety about an increasingly uncertain future.

Dennis Klocek

February, 2024 Carmichael, California