Holy Week: Wednesday

Loyalty ￫ Devotion \ Betrayal ￫ Suicide

- Mary Magdalen Annoints The Feet Of Christ

- Judas Betrays Jesus For 30 Silver Coins

Spikenard

My house smells of Jatamansi (Nardostachys), aka Spikenard or just "Nard". This is the costly herb (resin extracted from the root) Mary Magdalen used to annoint the feet of the Christ during the before-last supper, when the disciples gathered at Lazarus-John's house (one and the same character from a very important esoteric perspective).

Lazarus, the one brought back to life a few weeks previously, is the disciple John - found "upon the breast of Christ" at the Last Supper (Thursday). He is the "one who loves Christ best" which merely indicates that he has been fully initiated by surrendering his little ego-self to a Higher Spirit Self. His sisters are Mary Magdalen and Martha. The three of them represent stories of healing of respectively the spirit, soul and body. This to emphasise that the Holy Week's and the Life of Christ's core theme is Healing in the face of the Forces of Light and Darkness. Ultimately, after his life on Earth has demonstrated all kinds of necessary healing, as a Resurrected Christ, he is the doctor who doesn't proscribe or treat but asks: what is illness and what is health? He invites you to enter a harmonious state between light and darkness by acting out of love.

Endangered medicinal herb Nardostachys Jatamansi is gradually vanishing from Uttarakhand

I always wondered what the fragrance of this Wednesday was, so this year, I put on my aromalamp till the essential oil permeated my house. I find its fragrance curiously described as woody, herbaceous, warm and sensual, but also a combination of sweet, resinous, spicy, and animal-fat odors. Does the latter mean "buttery"? As a vegetarian that is pretty much as far as I can go to compare. But I liked the word in this context, because Mary Magdalen makes a great sacrifice for her Messiah in buying a 12 ounce jar of oil (almost half a litre) which Judas finds wasteful. I(A good quality spikenard oil would set you back about Had the money not better been given to the poor? Was Jesus not being a self-indulgent hypocrite and Mary Magdalen a silly, sycophantic, goosey, groupie? My doesn't Judas sound sensible, now?

With the new way of life possible, that exults the self-realsing, self-reflecting individual in service of the group rather than the group assuming each individual without differentiation outside social rank, the time for animal (Passover-lamb) sacrifice is over. The Christ is the new lamb who brings himself as Sacrifice. Mary Magdalen pre-figures this with her devotion that outpours spontaneously and generously. This gesture comes from the soul, whereas we cannot detect such selfless commitment in Judas's charitable notions.

This oil is known to be relaxing (from the Valerian family) and would make just the foot massage a man in his circumstances could do with: he has to be stressed out after a martial Tuesday, a mind blowing trip up the mountain in the evening, and forboding more trouble, which even those without a sixth senes could predict. But the event here goes a lot deeper.

Does Judas Hate Jesus?

Jesus admonishes Judas's criticism of the devoted Mary Magdalen as coming from a man of little faith and that's the CRUX, right there, for the turning point that is Wednesday, MITT-WOCH, the middle of the Still-Week, and a MERCURIAL day. This is the day of Wodan, Hermes the messenger, and Apollo, the healer-musician and prefiguration of the Christ. The day of Gemini with the mortal Castor and immortal Pollux.

For what is it exactly that makes Judas the most scorned name of all time!? Why hand your teacher, maybe even friend to the Opposition? Something must have deeply disappointed Judas? Or was it Supreme Ignorance? Christ saw it coming though. On Thursday he will even precipitate the inevitable (or further provoke it?) and the famous Leonardo Da Vinci Supper captured the moment of consternation when he drops the hint that one of them will betray him.

It is only recently that some artists reconsider this betrayal as a conundrum worth reevaluating. We have Ibsen in his (witty) "Emperor and Galilean " who finds Judas instrumental in the redemption of all mankind: he only did what he had been appointed to do in the Drama of the Sacrifice of God's Only Begotten Son. Martin Scorcese develops this farther in his provocative "Last Temptation of Christ". The 19th C. playwrite, Friedrich Hebbel had already noted that it was amazing that there was only one traitor or sceptic amongst the twelve, for which great leader can truly bank on eleven strong men unambivalently supporting them, nowadays!? (Of course, none of them stand by Christ's side as he goes towards his Crucifixion. Nobody pleads for him. Only John joins Mary under the cross....)

The big deal, however, is the one Judas makes himself, by hanging himself: Christ is not even cold before he regrets his actions.

Impatience

It seems that the salving of the feet was the final straw for an impatient Judas who was hoping for reform. Enough with the decadence and mayhem and servitude to a corrupt Rome! Time for change. He might have hoped for a revloutionary in the Christ, who now seemed to be turning into a pascha-hippy! This is one (rather simplistic) way of looking at the situation, but it does hit upon the impatience that is critical and typical of the Gemini mood! It can lead to impulses one will regret. It seems also that there is something exclusive of the feminine in Judas's reaction to Mary Magdalene's attentions. He may be mysogenist, some believe, but he could also be overly pro-unisexual in his commitment to the Bigger (political) Cause and have no patience with this woman's touch that reeks of pathos to him (wasting time as well as resources). We shall see (Friday) that the Eternally Feminine Mother will be given new significance by Christ's last words on the Cross.

The betrayal, ultimately, is to your Spirit and Higher Knowledge. This is the problem with Atheism. Not so much that you don't believe in (this or that) God, but that you loose faith altogether. This costs you a doctor, a composer, a poet and a lover. It flushes the Muses down the bog along with the rest. You end up believing in "good causes". You donate to the needy. Saints will continue to do this (tearing cloaks in half if need be, see. St. Martin; feeding the birds, see St. Francis; and being patrons to each and all, from the blind and the pregnant, to the smithies and the sailors.). But where is the flow from the heart that we find in Mary Magdalen? Where is the dedication at a personal loss? Where is the surrender to grief and yearning, we find at the foot of the cross (see Friday)?

The Art Of Attention

Recall that the spikenard is an oil from the "root" of the plant, and it is used to salve the "feet" of Christ. Note also, a reference to the Song of Songs...and Solomon. (The connection to the O.T. is never lost only severed where necessary by the Christ.) We shall find Mary Magdalen dressed in flaming red attending to the deceased Christ, but not because she formerly might have been a possessed and "scarlet lady" (prostitute) but to connect us to the blood of Man, and his Kundalini (earth-born) energy and his incarnation in general. Christ is not (like the Buddha) promoting a renunciation of life on Earth but a celebration of it in the Mood of Love. Only this can lead to a glorification of the Spirit and Eternal Life. This is not to revel in nature in a materialistic or hedonistic or physically excessive way, but to lead an active and meditative life rolled into one (the Art of Attention).

He who cares / About his soul-bearing life / Loses it/ And he who hates / His soul-bearing life / In this world / Will keep it living / Throughout the ages
(John 12:25, rendering by Kalmia Bittleston)

Furthermore, we may connote the feet to the sign of Pices (the Fish) and when we read how Mary Magdalen dried these feet with her hair, and imagine this hair to flow in rivulets of silica that imitate the light of radiant love (even if the Jewish woman would have not been likely to have been a strawberry blond); it is this which the Medieval-Renaissance painters tried to capture in a living imaginative representation. This soon got lost, however, in far too much sensuality, and carnate/fleshy even sexual notions with a more psychological emphasis (which is fair enough since Mary Magdalen's story very much pertains to the astral body, which can only be purified after the mind and its emotions is stilled and harmonised).

Tomorrow, by the way, the Christ, does the lowly thing of washing all his disciple's feet before the Last Supper.... Is he returning all the little fishies (he caught in his Fisherman's Net) to the living waters for their own adventure on the open waters - or Etheric Playing Field? (Raphael's Cartoon - for a tapestry - called the "Christ's Charge to Peter" includes the river Jordan.)

Raphael - 'Christ's Charge to Peter' - 1515-16

The Eagle Rises

Mercury as the planet for Gemini is very small and very "quick" but also heavy "water" (the dark water - the quicksilver of the 30 coins). We find in the two main protagonists of Wednesday's Event representing the two sides of the Gemini energy: one is restlessness the other is childlike-spontaneity. One keeps devotion light-filled (and not blue-stockinged!); the other casts into mistrust. Judas is assigned to the Scorpio sign of the Zodiac. Poor scorpiones always get the label of mean bean. But an esoteric astrologer also connotes the Eagle to this sign (and the Evangelist John). The forces of destruction and a recreationed soaring are an interplay. This 12th disciple was not a mistake but a necessary 12th wheel.

Maybe, the only real betrayal lies in the suicide.... how that gets set straight again, is for me the most interesting and unaddressed question by any denomination outside Esoteric (Anthroposophic) Christology.

There has to be a larger redemption over and above personal karma - and the Eagle of John points onwards to the Book of Revelation....

To Esoteric Christianity the debate on whether God really had it all planned like this or had to make the most out of a bad situation in the final hour is not so interesting. We can follow the narrative closely and find it notwithstanding eye-opening, if the heart is the only eye that matters, and Judas's betrayal was a blindness (a blindspot, a closed third eye, a cold calculating heart that we can forgive as the counterbalance to flaming passion. Judas is often portrayed as a red-head!)

Remember in looking at the paintings and reading the Gospel that the imagery comes much more from the future and at the same time from within. It is a deep knowing we already have (outside the Book or any Knowledge). Maybe it is even in our DNA! Or we might have to be careful so as not to lose it from our DNA. Would that maybe constitute the greatest betrayal and faithlessness of all? (And yes, I am thinking of many innate psychotic and dysphoric disorders spreading like wildfire and intensifyingly so, through the generations).

Prededing Parts of the Holy Week Series:

Sunday
Monday
Tuesday

Credits:

• Judas by Liane Collot d'Herbois
• Detail 1 of Mary Magdalene by Taddeo Gaddi, from the fresco cycle Last Supper, Tree of Life, and Four Miracle Scenes, 1360s, Santa Croce, Florence.
• Detail 2 of Mary Magdalene by Giotto di Bondone, ca 1305 - 1309; Assisi, Churc San Francesco, , Magdalena chapel, West wall.