These writings are from John Jocelyn 'Meditations on the Signs of the Zodiac' a Rudolf Steiner publication 1970.
These meditations on the signs of the Zodiac have been written under the Aquarian impulse as a direct and distinct service to all who seek to cooperate with their angel, the higher self, within them. They will prove of value to all who sek to know themselves as soul and spirit as well as body. They have been written in the hope that studying and meditating upon them will induce people to live a life that will be generative of those soul forces essential to the weaving of the 'wedding garment', the robe which the Son of Man provides. Aquarius is the sign of the Son of Man, which is the soul of man refined and purified in virtue of work done through many lives in all the twelve signs of the Zodiac. As man cleanses his astral body and denerates soul essences through action in Christ-altruism and truth, the Son of Man is created and calls down and connects with the Son of God, 'the Lord from Heaven'.
Mankind is now being awakened to the truth of Spirit and the wisdom of love, and growing numbers will concern themselves with their 'Father's business', which is not to get more personal power for themselves, but to grow in soul. This spiritual science of the stars is then the true psychology, science of the soul, for it educes the soul of man to give birth to the Christ within, as man raises and refines himself through the spiritual life of the Christ everywhere extant and accessible to man as he wills to live the true, the beautiful, and the good.
The Divinity of the Zodiac and the Magnitude of Man
In an age when humanity has become conscious of cosmic space, the traditional and conventional religious views are inadequate to fit the changed conception of our universe. As larger clothes are needed for the growing child when it has outgrown its old ones, so enlarged spiritual concepts are needed for evolving humanity. This principle was recognised by Christ Jesus when he said, 'I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now' (St. John 16:12). What can thus be known about the man's life processes, his animation, his willed action, feeling, and thinking, and his Ego-nature? The physical body soon disintegrates after the soul and spirit have departed from it. Why do not the solar system and starry worlds fall apart? Many people consider the cosmos a machine, but even a machine cannot operate endlessly without some direction by a thought-endowed being. According to Einstein (The World as I See It, 1939) 'the scientist's religious feelings take the form of a raptorous amazement at the harmony of natural law which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that compared with it, all the systematic thinking of human minds is seen as an utterly insignificant reflection'. Man's directing Ego is single and undivided, whereas the world of stars is sustained by a great multiplicity of spiritual beings, the Divine Creative Hierarchies. These supersensible beings are invisible to physical sight, yet a part of their creative activity is revealed to sense perception in the grouping of the stars, in the orderly motion of the planets, and in the light streaming from the heavens.
Although the physical earthly forces of nature provide man with food for the body, his soul and spirit are maintained by their relation to all the plurality of spirituality living in the stars. To physical sense perception, man appears to be enclosed within the boundary of his skin. In reality, he is, in his entirety, a being of body, soul, and spirit, born out of the cosmos and sustained by the cosmos as well as by the substances of the earth. He is not, as some say, just a grain of sand on a cosmic beach, the Earth. He is himself a cosmic being. He is a little world, a microcosm, the vast realm of Spirit, including the majestic Zodiac, the Great Cosmic Man. Cosmic conquest does not require a journey into space; it involves a heightened, intensified, and expanded consciousness. Highly evolved Egos can be conscious of the spiritual forces and beings of Venus, for example, or of the Sun, or Saturn. These influences are not localised to the shining stars we see in the sky. They fill entire spheres bounded by the orbital paths of the respective planets. We are perpetually immersed in them and also in all that streams to us from the Zodiac, which is as a womb in which our entire solar system is evolving. We are inseparably united with them all - each individual in a unique way - in our waking consciousness and in sleep, throughout all our earth-life, and also during the 'sphere-life' between death and a new birth. Everyone is at least vaguely aware that, without any visible external reason, the mood of one day differes from that of another, one hour from another, and often even one minute from another, but few can, in full Ego-consciousness, know of the influence broadcast from the cosmos.
In ancient times the consciousness of all mankind was orientated to the spiritual world and its beings, far more than to the physical world. In order to become conscious of himself as an independent Ego or 'I', and to become a free being, inwardly free to make his own decisions and use his own creative powers, it was necessary that gradually, throughout ages of time, he awaken fully to the physical world and be asleep and oblivious to spiritual reality. Not all humanity, but most of Western mankind, do regard themselves as independent Egos, and have developed the intellect in working creatively with the physical resources of the earth. Thereby material progress has been promoted, but we have been blined to the Spirit and led to believe that we are one-earth-life beings. Having become free in the sphere of the Ego, there is a great danger that we be enslaved to material existence and remain in spiritual night. It is the time now to awaken to a clear consciousness of our own soul and spirit nature, and to a clear consciousness of our own soul and spirit nature, and to the spirtuality of the cosmos, while still retaining our complete Ego-consciousness and control, and without withdrawing from practical earthly life. If humanity is to progress, acquaintance with the spiritual side of existence is imperative.
The viewpoint of the author of this book is: 'Ever do we disclose larger vistas of truth as we reach higher levels in spirals of ascent. Our attitudes are determined by the altitude we have attained. Without elevation, no view is whole; and without an approach to a cosmic view, we must perforce live -grope rather- in illusion and error'. We must find a conscious connection with the spiritual cosmos. Every phase of human existence can be enriched and enlivened by such a cosmic, spiritual impulse, for example, education, psychology, astronomy, art, healing, and religion. It will dispel fear and insecurity in our personal life and enable us to face our destiny with equanimity. To promote inner peace and world understanding, we need to know how man is placed in the whole universal order. A clue as to how to being is found in the injunction that was given to the pupils in the Mysteries: 'If you want to understand the center, investigate the circumference, for it contains the key'. To know man, we enter upon holy ground and must approach this domain of infinitely sublime spiritual beings with humility and reverence.
In order to comprehend to some degree our relation to these exceedingly lofty beings, let us first direct our gaze downward to the kingdoms below us. Through the fact that we bear mineral substances within our physical body, we have something in common with the mineral kingdom. The plant, too, contains mineral elements, but it has something more, namely, life and the power of inner growth. Its physical body is interpenetrated by a body of life forces, termed the etheric body. The animal shares both the physical body and the etheric body with the plant and has, in addition, the capacity for sensation and movement from within its own being. This is because the animal has a third member, known as the astral body, desire body, or soul body. Man is not the highest animal as many people think. Man has a fourth principle which the animals lacks. It is the Ego, which enables him to say, 'I am', 'I think', 'I speak'. There are three latent higher members which will be referred to later.
Think of the vast difference between man and mineral! Yet man is only three stages above the mineral. Try to conceive of the sublimity of beings who are nine, eight, or even seven stages above man. These supersensible beings, the highest of the Spiritual Hierarchies, are called the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones – the First Hierarchy.
It is they who comprise the twelve differentiated groupings which we call the Zodiac, which forms as it were, the womb of our solar system. As a teacher was once a student and as a mother was once a child, so these exalted divine beings came from an earlier solar system in which they passed through their lower stages, until they were so advanced that their solar system could be transformed into our Zodiac and they could rise to mighty, creative, cosmic deeds and make the great sacrifice which gave birth to our solar system. Beyond them is the Divine Trinity, the Threefold Unity, the Godhead, who gave the ideas and aims for the new solar system to the Seraphim. The Seraphim inspired the Cherubim to apply their highest wisdom in making the plans workable, so that the Thrones, in turn, could transform into active reality by pouring out their own being.
From the twelve directions of space, they organised the warmth and laid the foundation for the twelvefold differentiated warmth we bear in our twelve-membered physical body today, from Aries-head to Pisces-feet.
There is no chance or accidental coincidence in the recurrent reflection of the heavenly pattern in earthly life. We find it in the twelve sons of Jacob, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve disciples of Christ Jesus and the twelve Knights of the Round Table.
And with same principle mankind, with Earth at the midway station, is evolving the three spirit principles: the spirit-self, life-spirit and spirit-man. All mankind will evolve them somewhat in the course of their future incarnations, and fully in the future planetary existences, called the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan Periods, through which the Earth will pass in the future, before the beings of our solar system reach the stage of creativity when they can participate in the birth of a new Zodiac and solar system. For man is becoming the Fourth Hierarchy, named the Spirits of Freedom and Love. At the end of the Earth Period, love should be part of everything, as wisdom is now.
For an approach to this consciousness, we need an enlarged- a cosmic –concept of the Christ, the sublime Sun Spirit who incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth from the Baptism till the Mystery of Golgotha, when he become the Spirit of the Earth and ‘The Lord of all the heavenly forces upon Earth.’ Christ is the being who in the Sun Period selflessly gave himself up in devotion to the Twelve Voices of the Word of Worlds, which kindled in him such Light that he can say, ‘I am the light of the world.’ He belongs to our cosmos as a whole and spreads life throughout our entire universe. For those who direct their thought to him during waking life, he becomes their guide through the cosmos during sleep and between death and rebirth. The Midnight Sun; The Spiritual Sun.
Our Piscean Age
Our Piscean Age
Pisces, The Fishes, the twelfth sign, completes the circle of the Zodiac. The symbol consists of two crescent-shaped fishes swimming in opposites directions yet tied to each other by a connecting cord, indicating the restricting nature of this sign. The dualism is obvious, and one may assume a third element, the water in which the two fishes swim, the universal solvent.
One interpretation is that the soul is bound to the body within the ocean of the Spirit.
One cannot easily fathom the Zodiac and its signs, least of all this sign of mystery, Pisces, the loftiest note in the sublime symphony. Here is pure Spirit, virgin divinity, undifferentiated, yet to be made into manifest forms, spoken into being by the creative Word. Something of the mystery of Pisces is sensed in the picture of the Earth, when it ‘was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’.
The manifestation of the Great Unmanifest is the result of the union between the Pisces feminine formless with the masculine form of the Saturnine Capricorn. The ultimate ideas expressed in forms come to manifestation through the Son-Aquarius. Capricorn, Aquarius and Pisces are designated as Father, Son, and Mother, the Divine Trinity, yet One. The trident of Neptune, one of the rulers of Pisces, is a symbol of the Trinity in manifestation.
Pisces represents ‘The Great Deep’, the water that is the universal solvent. It stands for Chaos, as against Christian Aquarian Cosmos. Thus, in Pisces may be seen the power of the unresolved, that which is to be born and built and brought to life and form through the instrumentality of the Christ, that all may be fructified with self-consciousness, yet clothed with Spirit-life.
At present, Pisces is especially important for all mankind, for we are passing through the Piscean Age; that is, by precession of the equinox, the vernal Sun now rises in the Fishes, the twelfth sign of the Zodiac, the sign of destiny as duty. Through the formless Spirit’s imprisonment in flesh, there has now developed a phase of life so dense that the divinity in man has been largely forgotten. This has produced a mode of consciousness stepped down to such an extent by the brain as to make man unresponsive to, and unaware of, the spiritual realms and beings, and of his true nature of soul and spirit.
In the development of the intellect, man lost touch with the truth and his soul. The result is chaos, which Pisces gives in its negative phase. This time of transition, terribly testing for all mankind, shows profound misunderstanding and the consummation of human sorrow and self-undoing, the purchase of pain self-wrought by man and being brought to a head now in this Piscean Age.
Pisces being the loftiest note in the Zodiac, the power of pure Spirit, the unexpressed essence of God, it is small wonder in an age so intensely intellectual and godless, that many people fail to express the spiritual and gravitate more easily toward intellectualism and materialism. When the negative expression of this sign of divinity inverts the power of God, then must matter be raised from the dead by the Spirit, through the topmost facet of the zodiacal diamond, the pure Spirit of Pisces.
Having experienced the initiation of Pisces, and having received into himself those spiritual impulses that are the instruments of the Fishes-initiation, Jesus of Nazareth was prepared for the reception of the Christ and was enabled to baptize in the higher sense designated by John as the ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’.
So few as yet have been baptized by the Holy Spirit; many are obsessed by inferior spirits. The negative, unindividualized members of Pisces are souls whose forces are scattered. Some are usurped by spiritual thieves, spirit-controls, and earthbound human souls who victimize, steal from, and use vicariously the physical forces of such derelicts. Moreover, the power of Pisces is to perfect the man through his life of feelings and emotions; the inner, silent, secret, subtle soul life is made subject to intense sympathies in the earthly and astral environment. Large numbers of Pisceans are thus unknowingly, or knowingly subject to control by souls seen and unseen, to their great detriment in true evolutionary growth; they become psychic servants and astral carriers for the so-called dead. Frequently do they become burdened with the earthbound dead, so that life for them becomes a terrible, wretched experience.
Some Pisceans become a dismay and disappointment to themselves, for often their souls in truth do not belong to them. They are moved by all and sundry, by people here or in the unseen worlds, because of their scattered, uncollected, decentralized, psychic forces. A large number of mediums are to be found in this sign, some of whom have made doubters and skeptics change their entire life of thought. Through this avenue, however, one cannot reach the true goal, for mediumism is not the proper path to the Spirit. ‘I Am the door of the sheep’ St John 10:7 and ‘He that entereth not by the door (the solar I Am power) into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way (lunar mediumism and spirit-control), the same is a thief and a robber’ St John 10:1
The secret of their defeat, the source of sorrow and often sinister destiny in Pisces and through Neptune, lies in the lack of cohering Christ-will, which makes the man master of his life and makes him whole. Piscean souls need to learn how to retain a grip on their own Ego and thus bring into focus their thinking and their self-consciousness. When this is achieved, they can direct their own lives and give moral help and direction to others.
The purpose of Pisces is in large degree the purpose of pain. In this restricting, inhibiting sign of sorrow, man is spiritualised, perfected, and purified through intense, subtle, silent, secret emotional suffering, the most exquisitely agonizing and poignant. None but those allied to Pisces can know the power of this pain, and only those who have dedicated themselves to Christ hand have given their soul in full surrender, can know the magnitude of this mood of suffering, or the awful burden of a long drawn-out life incessantly frustrated by lack of achievement. These forces compel renunciation of whatever is designated by them. The very essence of this silent note, Pisces is, ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find ‘ St Matthew 16:24,25
Because the pedagogy of pain fructifies soul forces for the spirit, man may truly rejoice in his pain, knowing that every pang of it builds his inner man, the psychic-spiritual being, whereas this cannot be true for the animals. They derive no building power from pain. Unconsciously do most Pisceans love and protect the dumb creatures. One can resuscitate such a universal feeling, this all-embracing compassion.
By understanding the sign Pisces and its pedagogy of pain through Neptune via Saturn, we learn the nature of human death, and how through repeated earthly deaths the Father’s force works through Saturn in and on the soul of man, so that eternal life and Christ-youth are at last achieved. Thus does St Paul declare with truth ‘the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death’ Corinthians 15:26
Most people fear death in this era of Pisces when the Spirit-light in man is relatively inactive. Crucifixion of the Christ-Spirit in man continues when man, because of his intense intellectual darkness, believes that with the loss of his physical body by death all is lost and finished.
Every human Ego has created its own destiny. There is no such thing as a helpless lot dealt out by life in some fatalistic scheme. There is a design, in virtue of which the human Ego conditions by its own free will and accord the way it will walk. It is part of man’s destiny, in Christ, to attain to full Ego or I AM consciousness and to freedom. This has entailed a descent into matter, with all the consequences of not just one Fall but many falls. In the course of incarnation, there comes to realization the means to regenerate the man, to resolve the karma, and to emerge from the prison house of the physical body as a liberated soul, willingly to make any sacrifice for the progress of humanity. In this meditation on Pisces, we should ponder on the fact that, from our time onward, Christ is to be the Lord of karma, that is, he will bring order into karma and align individual destiny with the entire Earth-karma.
Many souls feel the whiplash of Piscean destiny, a destiny that so often degrades in unspeakable ways, often because of total blindness to the purpose of life, but sometimes because of a refusal to work rightly with those forces that produce the marriage of the soul with the heavenly bridegroom in a human earthly body.
Yet, when we know how sublime, how divine, Pisces and Neptune are, and when we see the great unformed, uninformed, unfinished, laggard development of mankind, we do not marvel that there are so few evolved Egos, but are surprised that so many have already appeared. In every age, this testimony of God and divinity has been vouchsafed. Now, however, that time has come when there is to be made a leap in evolution, for many have matured and are ready to meet the Master; they have sufficient oil in their lamps to get the light.
The Light of the World, from the Father through the Christ, cannot be mirrored, unless the earthly brain of man in true and exact reflection, unless the desire or astral body of man is first cleansed. With the purification of this soul body, a commensurate cleansing quality is passed on to the etheric body, which in turn conditions man’s sensitivity to spiritual truth. The coordination of the various members of man indicates the union of the Holy Spirit, Pisces, with the purified astral body, which St John, finding it impossible to compass and confine by an earthly name, calls ‘the Mother of Jesus’ or the Virgin Sophia, Virgo. In this wise, are the complementary signs, Pisces and Virgo, closely related. They are referred to also in the feeding of the five thousand with the five barley loaves and two fishes – Virgo and Pisces – indicating the inexhaustible nourishment to be derived from these spiritual realms.
When there is a marriage between the intellect and the Spirit, the large work of Pisces will have been consummated, with growing numbers of souls becoming Christ conscious and thus free from fear, hatred, selfishness, and error. The pain wrought in this Piscean Age is the travail of purification that is bringing to the Earth in our time the gift of God indicated by Christ Jesus when he spoke of a woman’s sorrow of travail in childbirth (Age of Pisces), but after that travail, the joy that a man (Christ-Aquarius) is born into the world St John 16:21.
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John Jocelyn and his writings - interesting
Hi Caryn,
It is interesting you have put the astrological writings of John Jocelyn on this website. When I was a college student in New York, I knew John's wife Beredene Jocelyn. Beredene was already in her late 70's when I met her and she was the leader of many study groups over the course of many years, that went on in the New York City area (usually at the Steiner center). John and Beredene had a great marriage of true equals and they each worked diligently for anthroposophy in their time. John crossed over before Beredene (Beredene has also now crossed over), and Beredene continued to devote her life to the realization of anthroposophy in the world. She wrote several books and edited and promoted a monthly newsletter that she mailed to thousands. When John was alive he and Beredene did the newsletter together. John and Beredene had no children, but their child was anthroposophy herself, and their lives as partners, were the lives of true equals. Beredene's books can still be ordered over the internet.
Wishing you the very best.
Cheers,
patri
Respectful
Hi again patri
wow that is interesting you knew Beredene Jocelyn. I have a huge respect for John Jocelyn's astroposophy work - quite a remarkable insight he had. It must have been wonderful to have known Beredene. Do you think it is appropriate for me to copy out his work here? I'll wait your reply before I do.
My regards
Caryn
I don't see why not
Dear Caryn,
Lots of people on this website copy over material from Steiner and other sources so I see no reason that you should not copy over a little from John Jocelyn.
Best regards,
patri
Thanks Patri
Thanks Patri, I will be posting shortly.
Love
Caryn
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