At the Last Supper Christ shared with his disciples, he took the servant’s role and washed the feet of each of them.
Peter, who missed the point of ritual, protested. but Jesus gently rebuked him, saying that if Peter didn’t let him wash his feet, Peter couldn’t be his disciple. Peter then goes over the top saying, “Wash my head and my hands, Lord.”
Can you imagine Jesus at Peter’s feet, looking up at him, with the basin of water before them and the cloth in his hand.
“Peter,” he says, “If you’ve already had a bath, you only need to have your feet washed.”
Jesus was a master at speaking at many levels at once. His favorite saying seemed to be “Who ever has ears to hear, let him hear!” I’m sure that if Jesus hadn’t spoken all the night about how he was leaving and the sorrows ahead, the apostles would have laughed at this wry joke. Ritual baths were quite important to practising Jews, so it might be expected that before joining a Passover ritual, the disciples would have prepared themselves appropriately. Furthermore, Jesus it seems, was reminding Peter that he had already been baptised and needed nothing more. Why then was the washing of feet important?
Jesus was the herald of the Age of Pisces. At each great Age, a new religious leader emerges as the symbol of that age. Moses was the leader of the Age of Aries, as symbolized by him going to the top of the mountain, and bringing back the Law of God to his people. When Moses returned he found his people worshipping the symbol of the age of Taurus, a golden calf. Moses rebukes his followers, reminding them of the New Covenant God made with them by leading them out of Egypt.
In the mythology of Egypt and Greece were gods who were transformed by death. Osiris, killed by his brother Set, was reanimated by his wife, the goddess Isis. The popular mystery cult of Dionysis represented tranformation in another way. The god, represented by grapes, is transformed by death and transmutation (the fermentation process) into a divine essence that confered communion with the god by the drinking of wine. Here, Christ becomes the living example of transformation, not by man animated by a god essence, but by man discarding the mortal self and thereby revealing his own divine nature.
The body part represented by mystical Pisces is the feet. Feet, being the foundation on which we stand, is an especially apt metaphore. Pisces is the the sign of our connection to the divine. Jesus, by washing the feet of his disciples, taught that it was necessary to refresh our connection to our higher selves on a regular basis: that this was foundation on which we stand. On the eve of his transformation, this was the lesson he choose to teach.
Have a Happy Easter!
You might want to check out last year’s Easter post: Resurrection Stories of the Astrological Great Ages: Inanna
Another Astrology Post on Easter: Lynn Hayes–Happy Resurrection Holiday
Photo downloaded from FreeChristImages.org
