The Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (Italy), completed 1305.
Easter falls, always after the full moon after the Equinox. This makes for a true Spring Moon of renewal, growth, refreshing the parts you yourself (thrown back onto your own resources in the winter darkness) cannot reach by yourself. Time to invoke the cosmic rays!
This year is special, not only because Easter Sunday will be practically ON the full moon (of Saturday) as the earliest Easter possible, but this moon is the SECOND full moon in March (1 March was the first). This makes it BLUE. Near luncacy!
Furthermore, it makes the second Blue Moon of this YEAR! (January had two moons, too.) That’s what can happen with a 28 day lunar cycle in a solar year! Our months are no longer really that lunar (and what about our menses...?)! But our days are still planetary aspects - even if the moon is no longer a planet.…
So today's Holy Week Day, Monday, is in the flavour of the Moon. It is no wonder that today The Solar Kyriot (Lord) is seen to get into a fisty-cuff at the Temple, by Giotto. Although this hostile gesture might feel more suited to the more martial Mardi/Tuesday, you have to look again and try to see this association from a spiritual perspective and read the expulsion of the money changers from the Temple as a specifically lunar-inspired event - regardless of whether it took place on any which day of the week as and when it might have back then.
Every single of the seven planets (as termed in alchemy or astrology) is assigned a metal. The moon is silver. The silver of the (30) coins will play a critical role (on Wednesday) in the ultimate betrayal of mind and matter over spirit (with Judas cast in the lead).
Every metal plays a part in our body too, associated with organ systems, in a polaric fashion. Nowehere more obviously so as with Silver, or the Moon, which rules both the brain and the sexual organs. Hmm… interesting link which explains a lot maybe…. In any case, the processes of fertility and growth (so obvious in nature) are set opposite those of stillness and deadliness (think of the actual lifeless body of our moon). Thought is dead, sex is life. Thinking about sex is deadening, raising kundalini is enlivening.
Christianity is a solar religion, with pre-emptings of its arrival in other solar-inspiried religions (Egypt with the Isis mother and Horus child; or in Zoroastrianism; but also in the Dionysian-Appollo cult; and the fire wheel of Shiva contains the same solar impulse of Higher Consciousness attainable by our species).
Judaism and Islam are lunar based religions and have great importance as such. Judaism used to be very mystical, with many prophets testifying to this. Islam has branches of mysticism too (e.g. in Sufism). But where they pertain to the mundane and aim to regulate the health and balance of nerve-sense system of the head and the generations of man, they can become hardening forces. They are related to the necessary systems for life to be possible on Earth, but Christianity explores the options of a next level, where man becomes God-like himself. It befits the modern individualisation process, and comes with the obvious dilemmas and pitfalls.
The birth, suffering, death and resurrection of Christ marks the onset of the awareness that can grow from the heart. May all the art that was stimulated by this (notably up to the Enlghtenment Era and the Age of Reason) and the politics that corrupted the ideal again, illustrate the ups and downs of these immature beginnings.
The Christ, on the Moon-day, takes his stand in mundane affairs. He rode into the physical body of Jerusalem on Sunday: brother donkey as the physical carrier of the I Am. We shall follow the Christ-light permeating the physical, etheric, astral and I world as we proceed through the week.
The ass refers back to the magician Balaam in Babylon who was supposed to prevent the Israelites from entering the "Promised Land". If we take this "Land" to mean a "State" of Soul, an Awakening, we see Balaam riding on an ass as if somambulent, spiritually possessed; because through him, instead, of his black magic curse, was uttered a blessing from higher hand, by Jahweh! This prefigures Jesus entering Jerusalem on Palm Sunday (the palm tree, with its dates, has significance in theis too, since the fig tree with its Easten-Yoga means of attaining enlightenment had withered....). Hear the Hosannas! of the Sunday, as an ecstasy of the people, echoing the spirit of Christ (Jesus as NEW Magus of the masses reactivating FREE WILL - and inspiring, hopefully, hard consciousness-work!).
When the Christ steps into the Temple chaos breaks out. He has come to separate the market floor from the sacred ground. He is breaking with the old on all fronts (both in Yoga-teaching and temple worship).
Yes, money is energy and as such a part of the current of life, but when it becomes a stream (or Steem?) of its own making (as on the stock exchange) it loses touch with the sanctity of life. It plays with trust and changes faith, corrupting hope and promise. The enthusiasm around money is madness!
In a sense he re-mystifies the synagogue back into a spiritual domain (like Kaballah does no less). Religion has to become a reference point for inititation through thinking, feeling and willing from within, not just a social forum for tribes to gather as one. The Christ smites the greed and influence of material power to one side for the restoration of a connection to the divine or eternal and infinite (i.e. renews religion and sets it outside physical and - Roman or economical - law). You can't buy karma off with taxes alone....
Needless to say, we haven’t come very far, yet, but that is the original (catholic) one true religion that is meant to be the New Impulse of Christianity. This is what is meant by "the Christ Within Me" or "He Waxes While I Wane" (as John the Baptist prophesises). It is to invite the Christ-like, radiant solar energy within, to do your bidding, living, passionate suffering; and not to leave it all up to the automated brain (reeling off on just another Manic Monday).
The Moon connects us to our past. It used to give us visionary experiences - clair de la lune... clairvoyancy. Dreamy, delicious and a nearness of heaven. However, when this becomes solidified (Soldes! Sale!) minted like money, which circulates strictly around the material world, we cannot free ourselves from our Karma (Original Sin or Ignorance and its Neglect), we willl not be truly FREE, but remain dependent on one level of God's Will (stuck at the Hierarchy of the Elohim). Time has come to invite the HIGHER rays of the future in. I have spoken of this Etheric Future in previous posts (on Spring). The Sun of the Easter Sunday Event - is an Etheric invitation of Spiritual Renewal.
Our memory also belongs to the etheric-time body, and when this becomes too rigidly programmed or based on fact and fiction, instead of a living interplay of spiritual reality with our life-existence, we end up sclerotic and with a permanent type of (deathlike) Alzheimers of the Soul. The Christ warns against this by sweeping away the business of the world on the forum of the spiritual. There is a time and a place for everything. The decadence of the age into which the Christ was incarnated was at an all-time high (think of the string of mad megalomaniacle Roman Emperors at the time!). There was hardly a place left that was still sacred and offered the heart some respite. Sounds familiar...?
