Dear Friends,
Here is the final part of my (all-too-lengthy) editorial foreword to the upcoming sixth edition of Star Wisdom, From Eclipse to Apocalypse.
Prior sections can be found here:
In the coming days I will also be sharing a portion of one of my other articles that attempts to paint a picture by bringing into relationship certain Arcana of the Tarot with chapters from the Book of Revelation and our current time period. I hope that this will give additional food for thought for the upcoming Sophia Foundation retreat, and into the coming year.
Be well,
Joel Matthew Park
VI. A Final Perspective
In Valentin Tomberg’s Christ and Sophia, he indicates that Christ’s second coming unfolds in reverse order to Christ’s first coming. Two thousand years ago, Christ united with Jesus in the River Jordan; then came his ministry; then the Mystery of Golgotha; then the Ascension and Whitsun; and finally the preaching of the Gospel. In our time, claims Tomberg, it will occur the other way around: first will be the preaching of Christ in the etheric; then comes the Pentecostal event; then Ascension, and so on.
If the time period of the Second Coming lasts for 2,500 years, as indicated by Rudolf Steiner, we could imagine that this moving backwards through time is related to the rhythm of Mars. Mars takes 1.881 years to circle the Sun; if each day in the life of Christ plays itself out in one Mars year, this would be the equivalent of 2,500/1.881 = 1329.08 days. This is exactly the amount of time from the Baptism in the Jordan (September 23, AD 29) to Ascension (May 14, AD 33). The Whitsun event of the Second Coming, then, would have occurred 18-19 years (10 x 1.881 = 18.81) prior to the start of this 2,500 year period.
It is difficult to say precisely when the starting point of this 2,500 year period is. We could certainly think of the work of both Rudolf Steiner and Peter Deunov as “preaching the Gospel” of the Second Coming. For Peter Deunov, March 22, 1914 was the return of Christ to Earth; whereas we might see from the work of Robert Powell that Ascension Day (May 25) 1933 marked the start of the Second Coming. (In terms of the date March 22, 1914, see here. In terms of the date May 25, 1933—as well as earlier references to the passage of Christ’s ego through the sub-earthly spheres, and the recapitulation of the Forty Days of Tempation—see Robert Powell’s The Christ Mystery.) Note that these two dates are 19 years apart—perhaps the first was the Whitsun event, and the second was the Ascension, the “true start” of 2500 years?
On the other hand, the external presentation of these events seems to have a bit of a lag. For example, we might look to the event of the burning of the first Goetheanum (and the subsequent Foundation Stone Meditation the following year) on December 31, 1922 as an outer expression of this Whitsun event—around nine years after March 22, 1914. And we could look to the teaching of the Our Mother Prayer by Valentin Tomberg during the Lord’s Prayer Course in March, 1942, as the outer expression of the Ascension event—again, around nine years after May 25, 1933. This would place the end of the 2,500 year period somewhere between 4433-42—perhaps around the time period of the final incarnation of Maitreya. This would place the modern equivalent of the Mystery of Golgotha somewhere in the years between 2006-19; if we take March 22, 1914 as the moment of Whitsun, then the time period from the Resurrection until the Last Supper is from May 2006 until early 2011. If instead we use the burning of the Goetheanum as the Whitsun event, then this time period from Resurrection to Last Supper is from March 2015 through the end of 2019. This aligns fairly well with the time period of the incarnation of Ahriman, and the start of our current 4th Turning.
But perhaps this recurrence of the life of Christ in reverse order occurs on different scales and at different time periods in the midst of this 2,500 year period. This certainly seems to be the case in the years surrounding our current Age of Eclipse. On Easter Sunday, April 20, 2014, Jupiter at 18° Gemini opposed Pluto at 18° Sagittarius, whereas on the original Easter Saturday, they opposed at 17° Gemini and Sagittarius respectively. Then there is the strong resonance with the Raising of Lazarus on August 21, 2017—a New Moon at 3° Leo. There were 252 days between Holy Saturday and the Raising of Lazarus, whereas there are 1219 days from April 20, 2014 to August 21, 2017. This would indicate each day of the life of Christ became 4.84 (1219/252) days in our time. The April 8, 2024 eclipse is 2,422 days after August 21, 2017—this points to a date 500 (2422/4.84) days prior to the Raising of Lazarus on July 26, AD 32: March 14, AD 31. Remarkably, this is only one day shy of March 15, AD 31: the Feeding of the Four Thousand, when the Sun was at 25° Pisces—the same degree as the eclipse on April 8, 2024!
According to this timing, Whitsun would align with August 2013; Ascension with October 2013; and the Mystery of Golgotha with April 2014. The time period equivalent to Christ’s journeys into Egypt would then align with the years 2015-17. The Raising of Lazarus in our time was signified by the August 21, 2017 eclipse. Shortly after that, we began to journey through the “eclipsed portion” of Anne Catherine Emmerich’s visions (from May AD 32 - July AD 31). This is the time period from 2018-22. At the heart of this time period is the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction, which could signify for us the sixth miracle of the Healing of the Man Born Blind. We can now look forward to a kind of Transfiguration event occurring between the October 14, 2023 and April 8, 2024 eclipses; and shortly after the 2024 eclipse, the equivalent of the fourth and third healing miracles.
Moving ahead, the equivalent of the Baptism in the Jordan would occur around May 2031—around the midpoint of the 2017 and 2045 eclipses, and seven years after the eclipse of 2024. This gives us a time period from August 2013 through May 2031 as a kind of recapitulation in reverse of the ministry of Christ—a time which aligns very well with the crisis period of the 4th turning! The start of this period also aligns with the time of the Mystery of Golgotha in the larger time period of 2,500 years, between 2006-19. This would indicate that this miniature time period embedded within the larger is analogous to the Mystery of Golgotha, which itself was the miniature expression of the entirety of Christ’s ministry embedded within it. Somehow, through the tragic events of the past ten years and throughout the next seven, we are being shaped into the proper vessel to receive the Etheric Christ—we are being made whole.