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SEVENTH PHASE: TRANSFIGURATION - THE URANUS STATION
The first part of the process which makes of a man a living God closes with the Saturn stage of the Illumined Road; but the second part also begins. Saturn, the spiritual seed, is both end and beginning. The phase of "reciprocation" is the sixth sequence; it is also the first in a new series of six phases. The distant Star in the sky toward which the illumined individual was seeking to reorient his total being and consciousness has come to be known within the "heart" of the individual, as the God-seed. The "I" which was a threshold realization — a mere feeling of transcendent identity — for the personality whose consciousness was structured by an ego concentrating upon keeping this structure intact and powerful is now, as it were, turned around. "I" becomes an expression, a power, a prolongation or off-spring, of "Him", the God whose countenance is now at least dimly perceived. "God lives me" says the Christian mystic, whose personality has become a mother, a womb within which the divine embryo is developing as an organism of spirit. The Star in the sky has become the pulsating heart of the Christ-child within the utterly renewed human person.
What we have to witness thereafter is the slow process of gestation of this divine embryo, until a phase of spiritual unfoldment is reached which parallels that of viability, then of actual birth, in the realm of life. In astrological symbolism Saturn marks the impregnation of the ego by the Ray that emanates from the Star, the definite formation or the activation of the God-seed. Uranus and Neptune refer to the mystic processes of transfiguration and trans-substantiation; while in Pluto and the planet beyond Pluto we find symbols for the last phases of the gestation of the Christ-being. The ultimate event is birth itself, the "entrance into" the Companionship of the Stars: the real Initiation.
At the usual level of astro-psychological interpretation, Uranus is seen as a stirring, upsetting, revolutionizing and dynamically transforming power. Its profoundly disturbing effect has destructive connotations whenever man is so intent upon the preservation of the structure of his consciousness and of his typical responses to life — the preservation of his ego — that any power challenging the excellence of this ego-structure appears to him and indeed factually becomes completely destructive and disruptive. Uranian events are thus to the ego what violent social revolutions are to the upper classes clinging with stubbornness to their obsolete and anachronistic privileges.In other cases, however, the Uranian challenge to ego-structures and social-religious privileges, instead of manifesting outwardly as an upheaval from the repressed and undifferentiated depths of the person's unconscious — or of the people at large — is perceived as a kind of Visitation from the spirit. It may come as a frightening Presence of light and power, or as a lightning from the sky. It may be a vision, a summons to action, a sudden realization of the next step to be taken or of the distant goal. These too may arouse such a sense of insecurity, of fear, or of utter dismay at the spiritual emptiness of years gone by, that the ego shuts tight its structures of consciousness, refusing to see, unable to withstand the power or the implications of the revelation; and the shock may be so great at times as to bring hopeless deterioration to the ego, at least for a period.
But, for the individual who has already advanced upon the Illumined Road to the point where Saturn has actually meant the incorporation of spirit within his own being as a divine seed, Uranus needs no longer be regarded as a power of negative disruption, even though its Visitations may still shake the reoriented personality to the very core of its being, and may be annunciations of eventual liberation from the earth-born body. Uranus, at this stage of the Illumined Road, is a power of transfiguration. It releases light through the personality aglow with the mystery of spiritual gestation — the light of fulfillment. The Star is focusing its rays upon the God-seed within, and this seed is an organism of light created in the likeness of that God Whose Body is universal Space: Space filled with the creative Energy-Substance which, when focused through multitudinous lenses, the Stars, men perceive as light.
The Star is the cosmic lens; but the Image of God is within the individual in whom "ego" has not become "soul". The ego was the manager-ruler of the structural responses of consciousness to life experiences — a typical masculine entity concerned with the problems of form, technique and mastery over matter and society. But when this ego, no longer straining its attention and power in the direction of structural and material factors, turns inward and Star-ward seeking to envision the Perfect Archetype of Man created in the likeness of God — and when at last the rays of the Star are able to reach the core of his being and project upon it (or awaken within it) the Divine Image, then, the man-ego becomes the woman-soul filled with the light of potential divinity, great with Christ-child.
Uranus thereafter operates as a universal power surrounding the divine seed within the personality. Uranus provides for this seed a spiritual frame of reference, somewhat as the mother's womb surrounds the embryo with a magnetic field of life radiations, interpreted by many clairvoyants as a host of elemental forces or entities directing the complex process of gestation. The personality that has become a "mother of the Living God", being thus pervaded with this Uranian field of creative spirit, shines with light. This is the Transfiguration, not merely a mysterious event that happened to one man alone, but a state of being reached after the turning point in the Illumined Road — the Saturn event, following which the individual experiences himself as a temple for the unfolding God-seed.
The Transfiguration of Jesus is a symbolic expression of what is implied in this state of being in as much as it pictures the various elements of the new situation. It has been interpreted as the record of one of Jesus' Initiations; and it may well have been the culminating moment when Jesus, Son of Man, became fully identified or integrated with Christ, Son of God. But, as we seek to understand here as clearly as possible a spiritual process potentially experienceable by every individual having passed through a particular crisis of total reorientation, it is more significant to consider, not only what happened to Jesus, but the entire scene "on the Mount" and all the participants in this mystical event.
The key to its interpretation is provided by what the Synoptic Gospels record as previous to the Transfiguration. Jesus had asked of his disciples: "Whom say ye that I am?" and Peter had come forth impetuously with the answer: "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 16:16). But when Jesus soon after spoke of his coming tribulations, the same Peter protested that this should not happen; and Jesus rebuked him in extremely strong language implying that Peter had, in this protest, been the very tool of the Tempter.
This interplay of forces between Peter and Jesus is most significant, because Peter here represents the typical "disciple" with an intense urge toward the spiritual life, yet with a still strong mental dependence upon ordinary earthly values. In every individual following the Illumined Road there is a Peter as well as a Jesus. Peter, here, is the symbol of the ego-consciousness suddenly able to recognize at its innermost core the reality of the God-seed, but as yet unwilling to change the frame of reference within which this seed is to unfold its power. Peter is thus the aspirant at the Saturn stage of the Road — Peter, the Rock. He is the first to utter the new "Name", to proclaim the new fact of the incorporation of God as Christ in the individual man, Jesus. Yet he can only visualize and interpret this new fact with reference to the old kind of ego-structured consciousness. Yes, God has come among us; but God should behave as a man. "He is I", this disciple admits; but "I", to his mind, is still conditioning the ways of "Him".
Jesus' answer to Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan", suggests that Jesus himself may have been tempted to evade the destiny implied in the very fact of his being the Christ; but he rejects this fourth temptation, as strongly as he had rejected the three temptations in the desert following his Baptism. He accepts fully his Christhood, and with it the Crucifixion. The plant which bears the seed within the protective envelope of the fruit realizes that, once the seed is fully mature, the plant itself must disintegrate according to the seasonal rhythm. The seed, indeed, actually "kills" the ephemeral plant that bears it. Christ's Ascension is predicated upon Jesus' Crucifixion. Likewise, one stretch of the Illumined Road must be experienced as the Path to Golgotha.
To realize this fully and to accept it irrevocably is the meaning of the transition from the Saturn to the Uranus stages of the journey Starward. He who makes this transition successfully passes symbolically from the Peter to the Jesus state of consciousness. He is then ready for the Transfiguration, which seals, at the same time, the glorious destiny of the God-seed (the Christ within) and the final surrender (Crucifixion) of the ego; a surrender necessary to the development, out of the God-seed, of the new organism of spirit, the immortal vehicle of the celestial Self, the "Risen Body of Christ".
The scene on the Mount of Transfiguration consecrates the victory of Jesus over this fourth and Saturnian temptation. For this reason. Peter the Tempter has to be present; and he reacts to the glorious event in his typically Saturnian way. "Let us make three tabernacles. . ." which means "Let us establish this great event within the framework of our usual ego-structured and formalistic world". In polar contrast to Peter, Jesus, the Victorious, becomes transfigured; "his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light" (Matthew 17:2). And with him talk "Moses and Elias, who appeared in glory and spoke of his decease; which he should accomplish in Jerusalem" (Luke 9:30); and the Voice of God is heard, out of the cloud which soon after enfolds the whole Mount, saying: "This is my beloved Son, hear him".
In this mystical scene the human and super-human protagonists are evenly balanced in a strangely polar relationship. Not only Peter balances Christ Jesus; but the two disciples, James and John (the sons of Zebedee whom Jesus called also "sons of the thunder" in order to establish symbolically their spiritual station), are the earthly counterparts respectively of Moses and Elijah (Elias) — Moses, the Law Giver, and Elijah (meaning, Jehovah is God), the greatest of the old Prophets, who was taken up to heaven in a whirlwind. The Voice of God completes the Septenary. Thus the whole of "Man" is represented: lower trinity (the disciples), higher trinity, and Christ Jesus, the Link, in whom divine and human natures are integrated.
The light that radiates through Jesus' countenance is the Uranian light and his shining vesture symbolizes the now developing organism of spirit, the Robe of Glory spoken of by the Gnostics. Yet this is not the final step of the complete Initiation; indeed, it is, in a sense, only the definite beginning. What happens is that a new relationship between the inner world of spirit and the outer world of human society is dramatically or ritualistically established.
The individual who reaches this Uranus stage on the Illumined Road is now more than man. He not only has experienced the reality of the God-seed within him; now this seed of light shines through the flesh. It speaks out its divinity in poems of light, and the Voice of God commands: "Hear him". The transfigured individual has become a focal center for the release of the power of the Universal Mind, Ouranos, the creative god of universal Space. Men are called upon to listen to him, to catch from his radiance the contagious fervor of one in whom God is being brought to birth, whose soul is being filled to overflowing by spirit — as, often, a pregnant woman seems to overflow with a strange power of glowing life.
The mystery of the unfoldment of the God-seed within the man whose ego has become transformed into soul is rooted in the spiritual manifestation of Saturn; but it begins to radiate outward only after the Uranus energy is released. Uranus is lightning, but it is also the creative power of the mystic Sound that, according to the old tradition of India, pervades all spaces — the Akasha or (higher) Astral Light. This Sound, like lightning, may kill; but it is also the Voice of God within the spirit- impregnated soul. It must be heard; because spirit is always and forever that which fills all needs, which restores harmony wherever the ego-mind and matter have pulled apart. In- deed, there can be no real manifestation of spirit except two polarities are present and, being present, are integrated.
Thus on the Mount of Transfiguration the realm of spirit and the realm of aspiring humanity are polarized to each other; and Christ the Son is the integrative light that binds spiritually the two realms, while the Voice of the Father arouses and summons earthly man — man at the disciple stage, but still overshadowed by fear.
This great drama is one that takes place within the highest realm of the individual consciousness (the "Mount") of the man having reached the Uranus stage of the Illumined Road. What occurs within the individual soul need still be performed at the collective level of society. This performance is the Passion — the confrontation with the violent inertia of obsolete social and religious structures; the opportunistic judgment of Pilate, agent of an imperial society which, when confronted with the need to transform the very spirit and quality of its basic relationship, can only evade the real issues and wash its collective hands of any sense of guilt; then, the public Crucifixion.
In this phase of the drama between the transfigured individual and the materialistic power-greedy rulers of a soulless society we must see the logical working-out of the Transfiguration; and it is on the sacred Mount of Transfiguration that Moses and Elijah announce to the Christed Jesus his death in Jerusalem on the Mount of Calvary (meaning, skull). What is crucified is the whole past of the individual — that which supported the formation of the seed of man's divinity, the mother of the living God. The transfigured individual must arise from all sense of subservience and inner bondage to any "mother" that enfolded his growth as an organism of consciousness. He has to prove his Sonship to the Father, by dying to all earthly "mothers" — to all that is collective and un-individualized, traditional and binding.
But in this death it is the collectivity that finally does the repudiating. The privileged classes repudiate the transfigured individual whose spirit-radiating and contagious example menaces their privilege, but whose spiritual being is now energized and sustained by another power — the power of Uranus, of creative Space. The Crucifixion frees the Christ-being from the society that rejects him; it frees him from the past. Henceforth he can be solely a precipitate of the future into the evolving present. He can be an unhindered creative power of spirit. He can be the creative future focused in and through an "organism" of light and spirit — the Risen Body. He has won immortality through death. . .thanks to Judas.
This is the great mystery, or spiritual paradox, at the core of Uranus' activity. To ordinary egocentric man, Uranus is the revolutionist, the arouser, the peace- shattering power that destroys the attitude of unquestioned reliance upon the seemingly secure past. Then, Uranus appears to the freer mind as the inspirer, the revealer, the spiritual fecundator, the transfigurer. Finally one more function needs to be accomplished. Uranus must evoke the Adversary of the individual he has transfigured.
There are always elements in any personality which cannot become transfigured, which resist metamorphosis until the very last crisis. Even the "Peter" aspect of the individual's consciousness seeks forever to materialize and to organize what is of the spirit. Even Peter will thrice deny his Master when to say "Yes" to his divinity menaces his personal security, later, in Rome, he will flee from persecution, until the vision of Christ shames him into returning to meet his own crucifixion.
At the Saturn stage of the journey toward the Star, a sense of spiritual self- satisfaction often arises within the traveler's consciousness. Has not God been found to dwell like a seed of light within his soul? Has he not recognized the divine Presence, and given up many things to "follow" this Christ within? It is this sense of spiritual achievement and self-complacency which Uranus will shake and destroy — and this is the work of the Adversary, whom Uranus
evokes.To all Peters seemingly secure in their fervent discipleship to Christ must come the shattering of hope, the sense that they have totally devoted themselves to one who has failed, the tragedy of denial of the most cherished Ideal. Their Saturnian inertia must once more be broken; now at the seemingly spiritual level. The power of the God-within must overcome the fear and insecurity of whatever is left of the old ego dismayed at the prospect of seeing the structures of personality which it built crucified.
Jesus says: "Nevertheless thy will be done, not mine". But Peter takes his puny physical sword (his ego will) and, even after the experience on the Mount of Transfiguration, he fails to understand, and he fights against the inevitability of the Crucifixion. He has still to learn how to rely totally upon the power of the spirit — how impossible it is for the immortal spiritual organism to be free to function, unless the body of earth-substance is completely purified and re-made of spirit-substance. Peter might have understood, had he had the power not to fear on the Mount of Transfiguration. But his fear and his materialistic attitude of traditional worship forced the entire Mount to be enveloped in a cloud; just as, in the Garden of Olives, his mortal weariness made him unable to stand, awake, by his divine Master, while Jesus made his ultimate prayer to the Father.
The cloud, the weary sleep — when the spirit demanded of Peter with extraordinary urgency complete wakefulness as a conscious participant in the Mystery: these are the negative manifestations of Neptune on the Illumined Road. Beyond and through these, the traveler should see unfolding a new power of the spirit; and to him who can pierce all mental clouds and overcome all soul-weariness there comes the new mastery: the Neptunian trans-substantiation of earth-born personal elements into divine gifts — whose symbol is the Eucharist.
