"He was despised:" Christmas and the Messiah

Madonna and Child with St. Anne

I would like to begin this post by noting that it took me a long time to figure out exactly what I wanted to write about for this post, but I also knew I could not let Christmas go by without writing something about it. I thought I would simultaneously revisit a previous topic on this blog – the nature of Atu XV The Devil from the tarot. While this seems like an unlikely subject to bring into a discussion about Christmas, there’s, as always, a reason for doing so.

As I get older (and one would like to imagine, wiser), I keep feeling this deep urge within myself to search out the religious experience with greater enthusiasm. For me, the holiday is not so much about presents, food, or celebrations, but has become more about meditation and penance, as well as great hope. I recognize that I am a contemplative person naturally, but this season in particular – perhaps because of the increasing cold and barrenness, the way nature wants to make us slow down – seems geared toward greater introspection.

Advent, if you may be aware, is a penitential season, not one of celebration. We are reminded that Christ is “coming” in order to die a wretched death, not to be coddled and cooed over like every other baby. This is why it is so important in Luke’s Gospel that Christ is born in a manger, shunned by everyone in Bethlehem. Christ comes into the world undesired and for the most part unloved. He dies hated for being a rebellious religious upstart, after having healed many who did not necessarily deserve His blessing.

Therefore, I cannot help but feel that there’s something profoundly bittersweet and sad about Christmas. Part of the Christmas celebration is about recognizing the salvation that comes with the Nativity, but we conveniently forget that that salvation comes at a tremendous price. I also think of the old Renaissance paintings of the Virgin and Child, where Mary looks slightly melancholy in her contemplation of the God she holds, and the Christ Child restlessly squirms in her embrace, nervous but anxious to do His Father’s Will. Both of them know what will happen. How is it that we seem to have forgotten what will happen?

The true joy of Christmas then, cannot have anything to do with transitory things that grant momentary pleasures. The pure blessings of happiness the season is supposed to bring must be received in acknowledging that we are entirely unworthy of so great a gift. It is through humility and fear of the Lord that we come to appreciate the religious significance of the holiday.

But instead, the holiday has been degraded into a time when children look forward to receiving endless things, and adults (myself included) struggle and grope to recreate the Christmases of their youth. And while there can be beautiful aspects of these as well – that is, the ideas of charity, innocence, nostalgia, and tradition – they seem to reflect only parts of the central idea without laying it bare and honestly. I sympathize with the people who want to “put Christ back in Christmas,” but also with the people who want to celebrate the holiday with exciting parties alongside their families. But if we are to be realistic with ourselves, these things make Christmas a chore, not a joy. By distracting ourselves from the main source of joy in Christmas with several other little and transitory joys, we have missed out a great deal. And we have also created an awful lot of stress and financial burden for ourselves.

I promised that I would somehow include XV The Devil into this post, and now might be a good opportunity to try. Of course, your average Christian will look at the Devil’s presence in the tarot and immediately jump to irrational conclusions about the practice of divination – “it’s satanic!” or “you’ll go to hell!” etc. All of these are of course entirely false. First of all, XV The Devil (at least in Crowley’s tarot) represents an initiated individual who has recreated their own morality based on the nature of their divine True Will. People label something as “a devil” or “evil” if they are afraid of it, or if they do not understand it. An individual who has questioned set modes of morality and made up their own mind on the subject may be unconventional or less inhibited, and could in that case be considered such absurd things by others. But at the same time, psychologists argue that real maturity comes from being able to dissolve morality learned from parents, societies, and religious institutions, and reassemble it back into a better understood, more flexible, and unique framework. The individuals who never take steps to question morality never fully develop as people, and remain in the darkness of ignorance. They are also the people who are most likely to not understand why something is right or wrong. Let this be clearly understood by those who would irrationally and rashly jump to conclusions about the Devil trump card, or tarot in general.

This is a significant aspect of the Devil card, as Crowley writes that he is a symbol of the Messiah revealed to the initiated. Indeed, some Gnostic Christians (albeit “heretical” Christians) believed that Satan and Christ were two sides of the same coin. For them,  Satan lead man to truth and wisdom and thereby redeemed man from his state of ignorance. But Christ Himself fits the description of the Devil card’s personality: He is rebellious; He disobeys the Law of the masses because He possesses greater authentic understanding of it; He advocates preaching of the Gospel by all, despite their ability to do so or not; He is hated by many, and is condemned from the moment of his birth until his Passion; He wields miraculous power over natural substances, whether it be the body, food, or wine; and He is “the Word made flesh.”

I will try to explain this last bit as succinctly as possible, since I realize it is probably the most esoteric part of this post so far. XV The Devil represents the reconciling of the highest with the lowest – the incarnation of the spirit in the flesh. In Kabbalistic term, it is the notion that Kether (IAO, the masculine Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is contained in Malkuth (the body, the Bride of Christ, and the Tabernacle of the Holy Spirit). Kether is the First Mover of the Aristotelian cosmology, and is seen as the First Logos (Word or Will) as well, since a God is synonymous with its Will. In fact, a God may only be contemplated by understanding of its Will, since His name is ineffable and His presence concealed – hence why we come to know the Father through the Son, who represents the Father’s Will. But of course, Christ was made incarnate in the flesh by the power of the Holy Spirit, and through the womb of the Virgin Mary. It is said that in this moment, God reconciled the difference between the highest and lowest, and thereby granted salvation. The Devil card is therefore a representation of the Messiah – the Zeal of the Lord of Hosts descending in joy upon the earth, Malkuth, or the lowest aspect of an individual, and thereby anointing him/her (“Christ” means “anointed one”), granting them prosperity and fertility.

There is nothing “Satanic” about this. Satan in the form Christianity has given him – the glowing red, black-winged, pitchfork-wielding human-devourer – is a fallacy invented by the ignorant in their fear of death. But the image of Satan as the fusion between the Spirit and the animal self that we cannot deny we bear, is entirely relevant.

To return to the matter of Christmas. XV The Devil in its most negative connotation is seen as materialism, and indeed as we have seen he does represent that to some extent, as it represents the incarnation of the spirit in the bowels of the earth. But there is a danger to this, as we are all too aware. When we become too materialistic, we breed egotism, ignorance, and evil. This is the real “Devil” of Christianity, whose force is exhibited in the Seven Deadly Sins, each of which is based on some base desire of the body. These, then, are the meanings contained the spectrum of meanings for the symbol of the Devil. On one hand we have Godliness and the birth of the Messiah – on the other hand, materialism and wickedness. Christmas itself contains both these polar meanings; one is superior, the other far less desirable. In our eagerness to turn Christmas into a meaningless celebration of consumerism, we have substituted the benevolence of God’s gifts with our own, and these could, based on what I have previously written, be considered “evil.”

Once again, it seems that we have rejected the Messiah because we do not try hard enough to understand Him. Like the image of the Devil in the tarot, He is despised for His independence and almost foreign nature. What Christ brought with His message was almost revolutionary. The idea of divinity incarnating as man, thereby coming to understand human suffering, and thus developing enough sympathy for man so as to grant him salvation was not new. This was the basic premise of the Dionysian mystery cult, after all. But the notion that God comes into the world hated and shamed, but still willing to sacrifice Himself out of love even for those who hated Him, was truly unheard of. What Jesus did through His acts was unheard of. His idea of morality was not understood by the majority of people, and because he resisted the power of the moral authority, He was targeted, labeled by many who feared Him as "evil," or even "demonic," and was ultimately slain. 

But of course, there are shades of gray to my argument as far as Christmas is concerned. I don’t mean to suggest that all material aspects of the holiday should be abandoned, only reevaluated. When we place all our expectations for the season in its abundance, we miss out greatly. And frankly, there is an allegorical value to the prosperity Christmas celebrations are supposed to represent. As I mentioned before, the Devil/Messiah is also a symbol of fructification and fertility, success, ecstasy, and supreme happiness. It’s as if all our cultural materialism in regards to the holiday is a reflection of God’s humor; we’re close to understanding it, but simultaneously disastrously distant from it. 

I’d like to end in the same witty vein: XV The Devil represents the sign of Capricorn, which is the sign the sun enters on the 22^nd of December. That’s right – Jesus is a Capricorn.

Da capo section of "He was despised" from Handel's Messiah

[I hope this post did not offend anyone, and only offered some points to meditate on. I would like to include as a disclaimer that I do not consider myself a Satanist in any capacity. I am simply an anti-dogmatist, and I believe in the value of pushing people outside their bounds of “right” and “wrong.” Otherwise, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and a blessed New Year.]