Holy Night Series: The Cosmic Divine Gifts of John/Raphael/Novalis
These Holy Nights and the coming year 2022, is the healing time.. the crucially important time to call in the ever present spiritual powers of the resurrection, the eternal, divine, life-giving powers gifted to us by the deed of Christ. In this painting of the Transfiguration (below), Raphael’s last unfinished work, we have a depiction of the Christ at the zenith powers of his God-given mission for the salvation of humanity. The ultimate moment, of course, is his deed on Golgotha for all humanity for all time. The Transfiguration pictures the bestowing from the Father God/Creator of the mighty Logos primal powers of Creation. Christ is being imbued with the utmost divine power to heal and resurrect humanity. The dazzling supernatural light of heaven is so great the three disciples high on the crest of Mt Tabor with him, James, Peter and John, are blinded, stunned and overwhelmed. The spiritual representatives of Moses and Elijah uphold and bear witness to the powerful moment on either side of Christ.
The deranged illness of the fallen materialistic, egocentric depraved human soul today is depicted in the tortured child. We cannot avoid or deny what is happening. And we would do so at our peril. The anxious disciples point urgently to the Christ and the higher realms, knowing that is the only source that will help and heal us. The Holy Feminine figure kneels on the ground, a wise and blessed Holy Mother presence, sharing, embracing, and enduring the destiny of the world along with all the human beings around her. With calm authority she is pointing to the need to “Wake up, take action and heal!”… now!… and it is urgent! World evolution depends on it. The greater power and healing we need now will come only from the higher realms of the divine universe.
These Holy nights are deeply challenging us to acknowledge and face the gangs of nefarious characters and caricatures of our lower selves we have hauled along behind us from past lives. It takes courage, honesty, and authenticity to identify our motley crews that have been accompanying us in our “soul boats” in our life journeys far too often preventing healing within and without at ever turn and demanding transformation.…transfiguration. With ackowledgement of the utter helplessness of our mortal limitations, may we earnestly seek for the divine grace we need to go on. We are left in freedom to choose to follow the Christ/Sophia/Michael path or not, but if we do so there will be the ever present help of the mighty warrior angel of Christ. Micha-el - the Archangel of our age will be there beside us in the battle of the soul, for the battle for our rightful evolution.
Nancy Jewel Poer, January 5, 2022, Holy Night Series
(I have made a film of The Holy Mother, Holy Child and Our Babies on nancyjewelpoer.youtube which honors the gifts of Raphael in the Sacred Incarnation Series on protecting our precious children for the sake of all the future to come.)
Raphaello Sanzio de Urbino
born Good Friday, April 6, 1483, Urbino, Italy
died on Good Friday, April 6, 1520 in Rome.
Raphael was born a blessed and beloved son for both his parents. His mother was a beautiful young woman married to the court painter of a wealthy duke in Urbino, Italy.
His father, Giovanni Santi, was a principal and gifted participant in the small but highly cultured court honoring all the arts.
Raphael’s tender and devout mother, Magia, was given a prophetic dream vision before his birth that her son would be connected
with the universal Archangel Raphael, the Archangel of healing - the Archangel working through the true spiritually healing work of all artists - then and now. For spiritually true art is that which connects and inspires the soul of the viewer with the universal beauty and truths of the spiritual world.
Raphael’s mother insisted on nursing her precious child herself which was against the customs of the time. His father painted a loving picture of them as a tender madonna and child, of baby Raphael and his lovely mother and Raphael grew up with that lovingly created artistic image influencing his sensitive soul. He learned courtly manners and knightly ways of courtesy, thus being socially at ease in all strata of society all his life.
In his ninth year, Raphael’s devoted mother and her sister, his beloved aunt, as well as his grandmother, all died, taking a trinity of Sophia-imbued feminine caregivers all principal influences in his young life, into the spiritual world. One can well imagine that from there they devotedly continued to nurture and inspire him throughout his short life of 37 years. When he was eleven, his father passed on leaving him an orphan and also becoming an inspiring influence for Raphael’s art from the spiritual world as well. At thirteen Raphael was taken in as an apprentice in the painting school of the well known artist/teacher in the area, Perugino. Raphael’ artistic gifts were so extraordinary and so developed that before he was even twenty he painted the famous School of Athens masterpiece as a papal commission.
One would expect that with so much personal loss of close family members he would be left with a troubled and saddened soul, but Raphael continued all his life to be a center of harmony, and joyful interest and love for all the world. In his next incarnation as Novalis he continued that passionate, poetic, spiritual joy in all of life.
Raphael is unsurpassed in his many renditions of the universal theme of Mother and Child. Rudolf Steiner in his Last Address describes him journeying in the spiritual worlds between lives, resonating there, being permeated there, by mighty spiritual beings, the spirits of harmony, form, balance, color and beauty, and bringing this all into his work. A serene and sublime quality permeates his every piece of art, even Christ’s countenance during the crucifixion!
As one of the trio of famous Renaissance master painters, Raphael stands between the tumultuous, ambitious, and driven artistic genius personalities of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The contrast couldn’t be greater. Raphael’s harmonious personality was welcomed by everyone for his open, gentle, compassionate radiating calm. He was able to oversee his own unusually large painting school of budding artistic temperaments with amazing leadership skills.
Rudolf Steiner designates Raphael’s Sistine Madonna as one of the greatest painting of all time. It was divinely inspired. Raphael was working on it but couldn’t complete it as he wanted. Then one night he woke from a troubled dream and to his astonishment there vibrant spiritual image was on the wall of his room. In that holy moment the revelation was unveiled before him, shimmering with life. Inspired and fulfilled, Raphael translated the peerless work into the famous painting for the ages to come.
The image is the artistic mirroring of the holy innocent Mary and child described in the Luke Gospel. Both of these souls, mother and infant son, were the purest souls ever to come into earth evolution, for they represented the higher souls of the archetypal first human couple, Adam and Eve. A part of their souls were held back in the sun radiant Mother Lodge of Humanity and therefore protected from the materialistic and egotistical consequences of the Fall of Humanity. Bringing primal paradisal wisdom and innocence they appeared in their first ever earthly incarnations. Gentle vitality lives in their expressions mirroring the heavens - sunlike - life-filled with the energies of the moving planets, stars sparkling in their eyes with the wisdom on the universe, revealing the alchemy of God’s revelation of eternal virginity, eternal potential, eternal promise and eternal peace and hope radiating divine, grace, beauty and calm. This is the Holy mother the Holy Christ child born in the stable in Bethlehem and honored by the devout shepherds. highest capacities.
The Holy mother and child, shining with cosmic remembrance, with deepest inward soul seeing, the painting is an cosmic image given to inspire the souls of we viewers to quicken the birth of our own higher being out of our own soul striving work - an exquisite cosmic challenge to birth the Holy Christ child, the higher “I AM” out of our own soul’s
The Sistine Madonna is unique even among Raphael’s many calm and tender madonnas, for Raphael spent years carrying in his soul the image he longed to paint. He was striving to bring through memories of the beloved mother and child he knew and loved so deeply as a little boy in his former incarnation when he was John the Baptist. Raphael had this longing for many years as expressed in his later writing in his following incarnation as the poet Novalis…(Novalis was initiated by his beloved sweetheart, the young Sophie van Kuhn, also a holy innocent soul. When Sophie died at fifteen before they could marry she initiates him from beyond the threshold into the higher divine mysteries. Below is a collage of the ever youthful soul of Novalis and his beloved Sophie, his muse, guide, inspirer of cosmic wisdom. Novalis writes of the Holy Mary:
In countless pictures I behold you, Mary but none of these depicts you as my own soul sees you arrayed.” Novalis
“I see you in a thousand pictures Maria, Lovingly expressed
But none of them can describe you As my soul sees you
I only know that since then
the tumult of the world is blown away like dreams And heaven too sweet to name
Lives forever in my heart. “ Novalis
Raphael’s painting here shows the devotion of the little boy John for the Holy Mother and her deep connection to him.… The next picture is an imagination of Novalis and his beloved Sophie teaching him from the spiritual world. He writes of his soul journey in Hymns to the Night
Countless healings, awakenings, stunning quickening of conscience and consciousness have taken place in those viewing this magnificent work of the Sistine Madonna. Indeed in his subsequent incarnation as Novalis, Raphael himself is deeply touched when he comes to view great painting he has done in his past life, moved by the eternal truths of the great and merciful Holy Feminine presence given to the world by the legacy of his former incarnation! Rudolf Steiner writes that the child pictured is indeed a picture of the Christ as shown in the similarity to the Transfiguration the painting Raphael was working on when he died. Even as Rudolf Steiner died in the workshop where he had worked so long on the great statue of the Christ as the Representative of evolved humanity, so, too, Raphael died under his message-filled masterpiece of the Transfiguration that is so relevant for us today. Even as the Christ of Steiner’s statue is showing the way forward for humanity in holding and balancing the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman in our souls and in the outer world. This is the powerful message for the journey we are all on.
Rudolf Steiner tells us how powerful and significant this individuality of John/Raphael/Novalis is as a leader for us all now in The Last Address.
From Rudolf Steiner’s last public address September 29, 1924
And so we see in Novalis (the re-incarnation of the painter Raphael) a radiant and splendid forerunner of that Michael stream which is now to lead you all, my dear friends, while you live; and then, after you have gone through the gate of death, you will find in the spiritual super-sensible worlds all those others — among them also the being of whom I have been speaking to you today — all those with whom you are to prepare the work that shall be accomplished at the end of the century, and that shall lead mankind past the great crisis in which it is involved.
This work is: to let the Michael Power and the Michael Will
penetrate the whole of life. The Michael Power and the Michael Will are none other than the Christ Will and the Christ Power, going before in order to implant in the right way into the Earth the Power of the Christ. If this Michael Power is able verily to overcome all that is of the demon and the dragon [and you will know what that is], if you all, who have in this way received in the light Michael Thought, have indeed received it with true and faithful heart and with tender love, and will endeavor to go forward from the Michael mood of this year, until not only is the Michael Thought revealed in your soul, but you are able also to make the Michael Thought live in your deeds in all its strength and all its power — if this is so, then will you be true servants of the Michael Thought, worthy helpers of what has now to enter Earth-evolution through Anthroposophy, and take its place there in the meaning of Michael.
These Holy Nights and the coming year 2022, is the healing time.. the crucially important time to call in the ever present spiritual powers of the resurrection, the eternal, divine, life-giving powers gifted to us by the deed of Christ. In this painting of the
Transfiguration, Raphael’s last unfinished work, we have a depiction of the Christ at the zenith powers of his God-given mission for the salvation of humanity. The ultimate moment, of course, is his deed on Golgotha for all humanity for all time. The Transfiguration pictures the bestowing from the Father God/ Creator of the mighty Logos primal powers of Creation. Christ is being imbued with the utmost divine power to heal and resurrect humanity. The dazzling supernatural light of heaven is so great the three disciples high on the crest of Mt Tabor with him, James, Peter and John, are blinded, stunned and overwhelmed. The spiritual representatives of Moses and Elijah uphold and bear witness to the powerful moment on either side of Christ.
The deranged illness of the fallen materialistic, egocentric depraved human soul today is depicted in the tortured child. We cannot avoid or deny what is happening. And we would do so at our peril. The anxious disciples point urgently to the Christ and the higher realms, knowing that is the only source that will help and heal us. The Holy Feminine figure kneels on the ground, a wise and blessed Holy Mother presence, sharing, embracing, and enduring the destiny of the world along with all the human beings around her. With calm authority she is pointing to the need to “Wake up, take action and heal!”… now!… and it is urgent! World evolution depends on it. The greater power and healing we need now will come only from the higher realms of the divine universe.
These Holy nights are deeply challenging us to acknowledge and face the gangs of nefarious characters and caricatures of our lower selves we have hauled along behind us from past lives. It takes courage, honesty, and authenticity to identify our motley crews that have been accompanying us in our “soul boats” in our life journeys far too often preventing healing within and without at ever turn and demanding transformation.…transfiguration. With ackowledgement of the utter helplessness of our mortal limitations, may we earnestly seek for the divine grace we need to go on. We are left in freedom to choose to follow the
Christ/Sophia/Michael path or not, but if we do so there will be the ever present help of the mighty warrior angel of Christ.
Micha-el - the Archangel of our age will be there beside us in the battle of the soul, for the battle for our rightful evolution.
Nancy Jewel Poer, January 5, 2022, Holy Night Series
I have made a film of The Holy Mother, Holy Child and Our Babies on nancyjewelpoer.youtube which honors the gifts of Raphael in the Sacred Incarnation Series on protecting our precious children for the sake of all the future to come.
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