Christ in the Cave: The Alchemy of the Pregnant Earth

 

Today’s Advent image, or concept was the pregnant Earth. As I thought of it the old antiphon that we sang in the monastery, in the very living hills of Kentucky came to me.

℣ Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant justum
(Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the just)

℟ Aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem

(Let the earth be opened and send forth a Saviour").

The image of incarnation, though it was written eight hundred years before the Christian doctrine, the image of salvation taken by Christians as the image of the origins of the savior. Andrew Rissik in his play Dionysus has the chorus chant that the mystery of that God is heaven being joined to earth. This is the mystery of the Holy Child, of all true magic, all true power, all true and living religion. In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus heals the paralytic and we are told the crowds “praised God for putting such power in the hands of men.” By the same token Jesus refers to himself as the Son of Man, and this is telling us something we see over and over again in the Christian mystery, which is the Alchemical Mystery, the Dionysian mystery the mystery of the Craft: the true Magic, the True Magic Child, the True Christ does not come strictly from heaven, but from the alchemy, the passion, the yearning of heaven and earth. The rain brings forth the saviour, but so does the dew. Crosses symbolize this juncture and of course so does the World Tree, but the Cave symbolizes this as well, first and last. It is the liminal entrance of the cave where magic is performed, where  Persephone, Demeter, Adonis and Inanna are adored, where Mary Magdalene re-finds Jesus, but also where Ave Maria gives birth to him. The Cave is the door where the Underworld opens to this one and shouts up to the upper ones.