The Anoint–ing One

Magdalene's Destiny Deed

This past Palm Sunday, my wife and I were present for our friends’ son’s receiving the Sacrament of Baptism at the Christian Community Church in Hillsdale. In successively anointing: the forehead with a triangle of water; the throat with a square of salt; and the heart with a cross of ash, the priest inscribed into the life–body of this young man the eternal etheric forms of the Father (“All that sustains”), the Son (“All that maintains”) and the Spirit (“All that renews”). As witnesses, the parents, the godparents, and all assembled could feel the magnificent working of these spirit–permeated substances, uniting Heaven and Earth, in us as well as in this young man.

As the “Anointed One” – the word Christ comes from the Greek word χριστός (chrīstós), meaning “anointed one” – Christ is anointed originally by His Father, but to fulfill His Earthly sacrifice, He had also to be anointed by a human being. Reported in all four Gospels, each Evangelist gives different details of the episode of the anointing of Jesus Christ on Holy Wednesday, including the identification of who performed the anointing. In Matthew and Mark, the woman is unnamed; in John, she is Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus; in Luke she is an unnamed “sinful woman.” Bible students have long debated, and continue to debate, as to whether the anointing one was Mary Magdalene.

The event of Christ’s anointing came into vastly widened pictorial detail with the visions in the early 1820s of the German Augustinian nun Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich. In her The Life of Jesus Christ (Das Leben unseres Herrn und Heilandes Jesu Christi, 1858–1860), Sister Emmerich clearly distinguishes Mary Magdalene as having been the one to anoint Jesus. On Wednesday, April 1, AD 33, (Nisan 12 in the Hebrew calendar), toward three o’clock in the afternoon, as Jesus and the disciples gathered for a meal at the home in Bethany of Simon the Leper – a Pharisee who had been healed by the Lord – Magdalene arrived from Jerusalem, where she had – with the help of Veronica (Seraphia) – purchased three flasks (“clear, whitish, though not transparent material, almost like mother-of-pearl, though not mother-of-pearl. . . in shape like little urns. . . [with] screw-tops”) of precious ointment. One was of spikenard, a fragrant honeysuckle from the Himalayas. Magdalene carried the vessels under a thin, bluish–white mantle (“something like the material worn by the three kings”) in a sac suspended by a cord passing over her shoulder and back.

Arriving at Simon’s home, Magdalene joined a small group of the Holy Women who sat at a separate table in a hall near the open courtyard where Simon was serving Jesus and the disciples, while Jesus moved among them, giving individualized instruction. In extraordinary detail, Anne Catherine described the decorations of the dining hall; the arrangement of the benches; the food and drink; and the manner in which Jesus at His table and the Virgin Mary – seated opposite Magdalene at the women’s table – carved the lambs for the meal.

As the apostles – “stretched forward in breathless attention” – listened to Jesus, Magdalene rose quietly from her seat and approached the men’s table:

Laying the ointment in a fold of her mantle, she passed through the walk that was planted with shrubbery, entered the hall, went up behind Jesus, and cast herself down at his feet, weeping bitterly. She bent her face low over the foot that was resting on the couch, while Jesus himself raised to her the other that was hanging a little toward the floor. Magdalene loosened the sandals and anointed Jesus’s feet on the soles and upon the upper part. Then with both hands drawing her flowing hair from beneath her veil, she wiped the Lord’s anointed feet, and replaced the sandals. Magdalene’s action caused some interruption in Jesus’s discourse. He had observed her approach, but the others were taken by surprise. Jesus said: “Be not scandalized at this woman!” and then addressed some words softly to her. She now arose, stepped behind him and poured over his head some costly water, and that so plentifully that it ran down upon his garments. Then with her hand she spread some of the ointment from the crown down the hind part of his head. The hall was filled with the delicious fragrance. The apostles whispered together and muttered their displeasure—even Peter was vexed at the interruption. Magdalene, weeping and veiled, withdrew around behind the table. When she was about to pass before Judas, he stretched forth his hand to stay her while he indignantly addressed to her some words on her extravagance, saying that the purchase money might have been given to the poor. Magdalene made no reply. She was weeping bitterly. Then Jesus spoke, bidding them let her pass, and saying that she had anointed him for his death, for later she would not be able to do it, and that wherever this Gospel would be preached, her action and their murmuring would also be recounted.

The Holy Wednesday event of Mary Magdalene’s anointing of Christ was given new clarity, resonance, and quickening just eight years ago, in Through the Eyes of Mary Magdalene, Book II: From Initiation to the Passion – a work dedicated to Anne Catherine Emmerich by the contemporary Christian visionary Estelle Isaacson. To Anne Catherine’s already astonishing descriptive portraits, Estelle adds even greater detail: Magdalene’s clothing (“a deep crimson tunic with bands of sapphire blue and gold”); the flask of spikenard (“translucent stone shot through with opaque white filigree”); the presence of Sarah, Magdalene’s Egyptian servant (“Sarah’s ebony hair and amber eyes were set off by the deep blue of her garment”). She notes the inlay pattern of the stone floor, the tapestry depicting a battle scene that is hung on the wall near the Holy Women, the murmur of conversation.

What sets Estelle Isaacson’s account of the anointing – and all of the other events she describes – apart is not its lavish, almost synaesthetic sensuality, but its attentiveness to Magdalene’s most inwardly intimate emotions. Penetrating with her unparalleled clairvoyance the heart of Mary Magdalene, she tells us how Magdalene feels faint at the moment of entering the men’s dining hall, even leaning on a stone arch for support: “A part of her was resistant and did not want to proceed. Certain forces were pressing her to turn her aside.” Taking a deep breath, and sensing the Lord’s presence on the other side of the wall, Magdalene enters the courtyard:

Her sudden appearance caught the men midstream in their conversation. She was quiet, but full of an inner fire. Indeed, with her long red hair and passionate countenance she truly was like fire! She stood motionless, awaiting permission to enter. She did not truly think she required such permission, but had set her mind to follow prevailing custom.

I looked at Jesus. He sat at the head of the table. I was startled at that moment, for he and Magdalene looked so similar! Even his hair seemed to take on a redder cast as he communed with Magdalene. He looked at her with a soft and sweet expression. Magdalene bowed her head before his loving gaze.

Simon sat beside him on one side of the table. Peter sat across from Simon on the other side. Some of the men at table were not pleased with Magdalene’s abrupt arrival, but none voiced their displeasure. I understood that she had entered the room at precisely the right moment, a providential juncture that for aeons the starry heavens had foreordained. She was simply obeying their call.

Underscoring repeatedly that both Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were fully aware that the anointing was the fulfillment of destiny, Estelle also is conscious of its astrological/astronomical dimension:

I understood that an important planetary configuration was just then forming in the heavens and that the time was auspicious for a vitally important ritual—a ritual Magdalene felt impelled to carry out for Jesus.

Geocentric chart of planetary alignments at Mary Magdalene’s Anointing of Jesus Christ on 1 April AD 33, at 3 PM

Having anointed with the spikenard oil both Christ’s head and feet, the weeping Magdalene shut her eyes and placed her hands upon the Lord’s head:

I saw that at this moment the Moon was almost full. Magdalene was in line with a force radiating from the heavens and directing it into the body of Christ Jesus. At the same time she was somehow directing certain symbols into his body through the light center at the crown of his head.

Estelle goes on to elaborate the golden, shining symbols – “keys to a spiritual script” – as “cyphers for resurrection.” Identical with the symbols taught in the ancient Egyptian Mysteries, Magdalene applied them in a new, fully conscious way; watching Magdalene, Estelle could see the cyphers working upon Christ’s body:

The beings of the cosmos were working through her to bless him. At that moment she was acting as priestess, directed in her ministrations by spiritual beings. Seen spiritually, Magdalene was like a fiery, brilliant rose-red angel. Her presence was suffused with great power augmented now by that instreaming from the spiritual world.

Astonished that in the space of five minutes, “so much was happening with Jesus and Magdalene and the starry cosmos while the men, all unknowing, sat at table,” Estelle then hears the words spoken by Christ (and echoed in the Matthew and Mark accounts):

Let her alone. What she does for me, she does for my burial. I accept her anointing. She will be remembered throughout time for this deed.

“For my burial” barely hints at the true spiritual – and world historical – significance of Magdalene’s destined deed of anointing Christ Jesus. After observing each of Christ’s chakras lighting up with the symbols and resounding with resonant tones as God’s breath moved through them, and at the same time noting the demons – infuriated at the imminent prospect of Magdalene fulfilling her mission – pressing against Judas Iscariot, Estelle then fully unveils that mission:

When [the Lord] said “burial” he was of course speaking in one sense of the burial following his death, but he was alluding also to the descent he would soon make to the center of the Earth, where one must journey to receive the resurrection body.

Magdalene was preparing him to descend to the center of the Earth, where he would lay gifts at the feet of the Mother, and where She would cloak him in the resurrection body.

I was taken then in vision to the center of the Earth, to the golden realm of the Mother.

I saw the Holy Mother like a Sun at the center of the Earth. Her head was crowned with a headdress like a Sun. She glowed in an effulgence of warm, golden light.

Countless beings, whom I can scarcely describe, lined a path leading to Her. They were thus arrayed to greet the Christ at his triumphant entry into Shambhala. They emanated golden light also. I saw Christ descend into their midst as they sang in ethereal voices that resonated throughout the Earth. This took place just after Christ Jesus died upon the cross.

When he reached the realm of the Mother, these beings were present to greet him and touch him as he passed by, praising him and rejoicing in triumph.

I could feel that this was the most important moment of all time! Never before had Christ penetrated into the fallen Earth to visit the Mother! I could hardly fathom that by anointing him, Magdalene—a human being—had prepared him for this moment!

As he reached the Mother, She “cloaked” him in his resurrection body. Of course, I saw this in a symbolic way. The light streaming from him was astonishingly brilliant! There at the center of the Earth he became a luminous star. His light burst out from there through portals upon the face of the Earth, and thence out into the cosmos.

As Jim Wetmore comments in his wonderful Foreword to Through the Eyes of Mary Magdalene, Book III: From the Ascension to Journeys in Gaul:

It is as though Anne Catherine brings the Holy Women into sharp relief in a kind of historical diorama, in preparation for the interior depth with which they will later appear in Estelle Isaacson’s visions, where their voices resound down the centuries, speaking to their “sisters” in our time. In these latter visions, the Holy Women sometimes allude specifically to their understanding at the time of Jesus that they had a primarily background role, but that now, on the cusp of the Second Coming, they—and in principle all women—are to take on a new role of the very greatest significance.

That resounding is most thunderous in the revelations of another modern seer, Judith von Halle, who, in her And If He Had Not Been Raised: The Stations of Christ’s Path to Spirit Man (2007); Secrets of the Stations of the Cross and the Grail Blood: The Mystery of Transformation (2007); and Descent Into the Depths of the Earth on the Anthroposophic Path of Schooling (2011), as well as in her recent magnum opus Das Wort (2022), reveals at this time of the Second Coming the multiplicitous mysteries of Holy Saturday’s ordeal of the descent to the center of the Earth – and the Mother’s bestowal of the Resurrection Body.

From Rudolf Steiner we know that Mary Magdalene was in an earlier incarnation a member of the Primal Family – Abel, who initiated the priestly stream in human spiritual evolution. In June 2007, in a series of talks given at the Sophia Foundation of North America’s annual conference at the Santa Sabina Center in San Rafael, California, Dr. Robert Powell lifted the cover on another profound “Magdalene Mystery,” revealing out of his karmic research that the Abel/Mary Magdalene individuality had been incarnated also as King Solomon, the builder of the Temple and the recipient of Divine Sophia’s revelation in the form of the Book of Proverbs. Almost as if in anticipation of the new Gospel of the Etheric Christ that Estelle Isaacson would bring a few years later, Robert beautifully unfolded Mary Magdalene’s destiny as an archetype for all humanity:

Who could be a more appropriate person to anoint [Jesus Christ] than the one who is looked upon as humanity’s first priest, Abel? Mary Magdalene, the reincarnated Abel, anointed him not so much as a human being but because she recognized him as the King of Heaven. She was his spiritual sister who, in a way only a woman could, was united in a mystical union with the soul of Jesus, just as Lazarus was united with the spirit of Jesus. . .

A blessed, Christ– and Magdalene–anointed Holy Wednesday to you, dear readers!