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Week of February 8
Dear Friends,
February 9th is the feast day of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich—without whom the astrological context of the life of Christ might never have been known! It was by way of her elaborately detailed visions that Robert Powell was able to determine the planetary and zodiacal background for the ‘turning point of time’. Ave Anne Catherine!
Sunday the 8th bears the gift of a square aspect between Venus (2° Aquarius) and Uranus (2° Taurus). This aspect can beget an event that shocks the soul into wakefulness. Indeed, it was present on 28/Mar/31, when God spoke to the assembly that had gathered around Jesus, who taught from a teacher’s chair. The crowd around Jesus included the formerly paralyzed man (who’d been healed in Bethesda) as well as many Pharisees, who interrupted his discourse with innumerable objections and reproaches. Yet again, the Pharisees called him out for having healed on the sabbath. If Peter had pinned a sign on Jesus’s back that read ‘I AM THE MESSIAH’, would it have made any difference? From Anne Catherine:
But [the Pharisees] knew not God. They wanted to be saved by the scriptures, and yet they kept not the commandments.
. . . At last the Pharisees became so enraged that, shouting, they pressed against him, and sent for the guard of the temple to take him into custody. At this moment, it suddenly grew dark. When the uproar was at its height, Jesus looked up to heaven and said: “Father, render testimony to thy Son!” Instantly, a dark cloud covered the heavens, a loud noise like a thunderclap resounded, and I heard a piercing voice proclaiming through the edifice: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I take my delight!” Jesus’s enemies were utterly dumbfounded, and gazed upward in terror. [Visions, vol. 2, p. 334]
February’s Last Quarter Moon (25½° Libra) will shine on Monday as the Sun reaches 25½° Capricorn. Each month, when the Moon moves through Libra, it recalls the Passion of Christ—from the Last Supper (Moon at 3° Libra) to the Resurrection (Moon at 3° Scorpio). Today’s Moon thus recalls the Christ-I in the underworld, several hours into the journey through the subearthly spheres. We can properly understand his descent as yet another sacrifice on our behalf—one that we can honor by undertaking a personal as well as a transpersonal descent into hell. Judith von Halle explains:
This passage through different lives on earth and through the ‘personal descent into hell’, which follows each one, serves our higher evolution as human beings. . . . This kind of ‘descent into hell’ of kamaloka is thus really a process of redemption from our own inner abysses—from the deep strata of the soul that our conscious awareness often conceals from us.
As well as a ‘personal descent into hell’ (whose aim is to enable the I cleansed of desires and drives to awaken into the universal context of other I-beings) there is, however, also a ‘transpersonal’ descent into hell that one might call world-historical. Here the I of the spiritual pupil who awakens to higher consciousness will experience, while still alive on earth, how the deeds of humanity and of every single human soul relate to the evolution of their cosmic home. [Descent into the Depths of the Earth, pp. 14–15]
On Friday, the Sun leaves Capricorn and enters the realm of Aquarius: May the limited yield to the unlimited. The first degree of the Waterman is home to Sadr, the star at the heart of Cygnus (also known as the Northern Cross). The ‘unlimited’ impulse that streams from Aquarius signifies freedom: one of humankind’s universal longings! It was freedom—specifically the freedom of movement—that was restored to the paralyzed man. For 38 years, he had lain helpless beside the pool at Bethesda, hoping that he might be healed by the water after it had been stirred into movement by an angel. From Valentin Tomberg, on the thirty-eighth page of Lazarus:
In the end, however, the healing was not brought about by the paralyzed man entering the water, but solely through the words of Jesus: “Rise, take up your pallet, and walk.” (John 5:8)
. . . Now, the faculty of movement is cosmic in nature, not only according to its effect (even the least movement has an effect on the entire cosmos) but also according to the causes inducing it. We stand within a current of cosmic energies: our thoughts, in streams of cosmic thought; our feelings, in streams of cosmic soul forces; our will, in (or, engaged with) streams of cosmic will. And just as he who holds his breath without cease suffocates, so in the end will he who cuts himself off from the streams of cosmic energies suffer paralysis. This cutting-oneself-off is the root of all “sin”: against God, against other human beings, against nature.
Sin had severed the paralyzed man’s connection with the ‘cosmic stream of ensouled movement’—a connection that was restored by Jesus’s command to ‘rise and walk’. Every miracle that Jesus performed bears a gift that nourishes humanity until the end of time. The third healing miracle is the archetype of the sacrament of penance (sometimes known as the sacrament of reconciliation). What lived behind Jesus’s words to the paralyzed man will resound for eternity: forgiveness.
Have a blessed week with Anne Catherine!
~ Julie H.