(All zodiacal degrees are sidereal.)
Dear Friends,
Our week opens with a rather special cosmic correspondence: the annual alignment of the Sun with zodiacal longitude of Sirius (19°21ʹ Gemini). To the Ancient Egyptians, the heliacal (i.e., with the Sun) rising of Sirius announced the beginning of the long seasonal flooding of the Nile. To those within this great culture, the Sun’s alignment with Sirius celebrated the astonishing fecundity of the Nile floodplain.
Positioned within Canis Major, forty degrees south of the ecliptic, Sirius was known in Egypt as the star of Isis, the beloved of Osiris. This can easily be understood when considering the nearness of Sirius to Orion—within whose stars Osiris was believed to have dwelt.
To the Egyptians, the floodwaters represented Isis’s tears of sorrow for the murder of Osiris (by his brother Seth), and for the subsequent scattering of the fourteen severed pieces of the body of Osiris across Egypt. The fourteen days between New Moon and Full Moon thus signified the ‘re-membering’ of these pieces of the slain king—and the Full Moon itself, the glorification of Osiris. It's no coincidence that Christ was glorified on Golgotha under a Full Moon.
We gain an understanding of the importance of the Moon and its phases within the ancient Egyptian culture through the light of anthroposophy. Although the Christ spirit was still united with the Sun as it had been throughout the Ancient Persian period, the Christ-Osiris worked through the Moon. (Christ would descend further, to the elemental world, at the time of Moses—who beheld it in the burning bush—and to the level of the physical Earth at the Baptism in the Jordan.)
You’d be right to wonder how the inundation of Nile could possibly begin on the sixth of July! The answer to this riddle lies in the phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes, which results in the slow backward movement of the Sun’s zodiacal degree at the onset of spring and autumn. (This occurs at a rate of 1° every 72 years.) Accordingly, if we go back in time to the estimated year of the construction of the Cheops pyramid at Giza (2500 BC), we’ll find that Sirius rose with the Sun nine weeks before it does today: at the midpoint between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice.
Early on Monday, Mercury (16° Cancer) will recall its degree when Jesus healed ten lepers (12/Jun/32). Moreover, before the week’s end, we’ll encounter two additional planetary correspondences to the same healing miracle: the Sun at 21° Gemini (Tuesday), and the Full Moon (23½° Sagittarius) on Thursday.
And he went on, on his way to Jerusalem, right through Samaria and Galilee. And once, as he came to a village, he was met by ten lepers. They stood at a distance and called with raised voices: ‘Jesus, master, have compassion on us!’ When he saw them he said to them, ‘Go and show yourselves to the priests.’ And as they went, they were healed. But one of them turned back when he became aware that he had been healed, praised the revelation of God with a loud voice, fell on his face at Jesus’s feet, and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan. Jesus said, ‘Were not ten healed? Where are the other nine? Are they not returning to praise the power of God? Why is it only this foreigner who does that?’ And he said to him, ‘Stand up and go your way; your faith has healed you.’ (Luke 17:11–19)
Anne Catherine enhanced this gospel passage with her own observations from the Book of Life: the moral chronicle of humankind. Before the leper returned to Jesus to praise God, Anne Catherine observed a father from a shepherd village approach Jesus, begging him to return to his village:
[His] little girl, who was about seven years old, was already four days dead. Jesus laid one hand on her head, the other on her breast, and, raising his eyes to heaven, prayed—whereupon the child rose up, alive. Then Jesus told the apostles that even so should they do in his name. The child’s father had strong faith and, full of confidence, he had awaited Jesus’s coming. His wife had wanted him to send word to Jesus, but he was full of hope and waited until he came. Soon after, he gave up his business to another. And when his wife died, after Jesus’s death, he became a disciple and acquired a distinguished name. [Visions, vol. 2, p. 474]
Opposite July’s Full Moon, we’ll find the Sun at 23½° Gemini on Thursday—its zodiacal position 100 days before the Baptism:
Jesus visited the madhouse in Dothaim. There, a number of people were raging uncontrollably. As Jesus began to speak to them, they became quiet. When they were calmed, Jesus sent them back to their homes. The people of Dothaim were astonished, and invited him to a wedding on the following day. [Robert Powell, Chronicle of the Living Christ, p. 186]
We, too, might be astonished by this intimate glimpse into the capacities of Jesus before the Baptism in the Jordan. The Sun’s zodiacal degree today is the precise location of Pluto on the day of its discovery in 1930. Although Pluto stands for the lofty spiritual faculty of Intuition, it is also rightly characterized as the planet of possession: when the human soul has been captured by forces that derive from below.
Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered;
let those who hate him flee before him!
As smoke is driven away, so drive them away;
as wax melts before fire,
let the wicked perish before God! (Psalm 68)
Many blessings on your week!
~ Julie H.