“In the ancient world, Virgo was considered to be the lead constellation in the zodiac circle,” states Reverend Bill Darlison, in The Gospel and the Zodiac, the book guiding this 12-part series on the 12 intelligences for spiritual advancement.
On one hand, this makes sense, because, “Symbolically, Virgo is … where we become ‘children’ once more, stripped of our pretensions and our cynicism, and open to the promptings of the Spirit.”
However, when you look deeper into the meaning of Virgo, it’s obvious that it is not the right place to start the Zodiacal circle, particularly for modern man in our age of materialism.
While it is the stage of the Virgin, it’s not the stage for the neophyte spiritual seeker. It’s an advanced step. Not a beginner step. Souls need to have already gathered other higher intelligences before getting to the place where they can understand the power of the virgin phase of their journey.
Among the skills required are the preceding five intelligences gathered from Aries to Leo — confidence, steadfastness, single-mindedness, serenity, and self-mastery. Without advanced wisdom, the incredible power of Virgo could easily be missed.
The intelligence that we must gather in Virgo — humility. To achieve this goal, we have to understand surrender, service, and sacrifice.
Humility — The Virgin Mary Metaphor
In my former life in the cult of a Hindu guru, we were constantly told that we needed to surrender our lives to the guru and continually serve him. That was the only way to receive his divine grace and transcend this world, he said.
While Hindus are culturally programmed to understand these two concepts (whether or not they follow them), Westerners are not as familiar. To wrap my mind around the concept of surrender, for example, I had to look to Christianity, a religion I had rejected long ago. I turned to the Virgin Mary for understanding.
I wrote about this experience in my book, Sex, Lies, and Two Hindu Gurus:
“The best example of total surrender I could think of was from the Bible. Luke 1:26–38 recounts the story of Mary, mother of Jesus, and how she said yes to an illogical request from the angel Gabriel with barely a moment’s hesitation:
“In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, ‘Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.’
“Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.
“But the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.
“The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end.
“‘How will this be,’ Mary asked the angel, ‘since I am a virgin?’
“The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be barren is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible with God.’ (Note: the sixth month of the Zodiac is Virgo.)
“‘I am the Lord’s servant,’ Mary answered. ‘May it be to me as you have said.’
“Then the angel left her.”
Although I’m not a Christian, ironically, I held this story as an ideal of surrender while following my Hindu guru’s teachings.
Faced with a daunting, illogical directive from on high, Mary responds, not with tears, rage, or doubt, but with humility and surrender: “I am the Lord’s servant.”
In this ancient myth, she gave us a perfect act of both surrender and service — something requiring utmost humility to achieve.
Surrender — Thy Will Be Done
The myth of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus are not original to Christianity. In fact, these stories (actually, all of the “biblical” stories) were co-opted from ancient mysteries.
“The ancient zodiacs invariably depict Virgo as a woman holding something. In the Egyptian zodiac of Denderah, for example, the figure is drawn carrying a distaff, and when she represents the Egyptian goddess, Isis, she appears with wheat-ears in her hand, or clasping the young Horus in her arms,” writes Darlison.
“In the middle ages, this ancient figure reappeared as the Virgin Mary with the child Jesus … The image of Isis with Horus in her arms has become, in Christian iconography, the Virgin Mary carrying the child Jesus.”
Joseph Campbell writes: “When you stand before the cathedral of Chartres, you will see over one of the portals of the western front an image of the Madonna as the throne upon which the child Jesus sits and blesses the world as its emperor. That is precisely the image that has come down to us from ancient Egypt. The early Christian fathers and artists took over these images intentionally.”
They also bastardized the story, losing the original deep layers of meaning for the past 2,000 years — leaving us with a superficial spiritually bereft counterfeit. What we have been missing is the deeper knowledge.
What we are supposed to learn from the virgin stories is this: The virginal, untainted state is a prerequisite for understanding God.
This is a big lose, because we need this wisdom to understand that we cannot achieve the important virginal level of advanced spirituality without extreme surrender and sacrifice.
Jesus said (metaphorically) that in order to save our life we must lose it. He also said that suffering and self-denial are a necessary part of following Christ: we can only realize our true divinity by relinquishing it.
In the Letter to the Philippians, St Paul said:
“Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death — even death on a cross!
This is the principle of kenosis, self-emptying: our divine nature is only realized to the extent that we serve the divine in other people.”
And, thus, we come to the purpose of gaining humility — to be in service.
Service — Devoted Servant to Humanity
“The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity,” stated Leo Tolstoy (by chance a Virgo).
On a psychological level Virgo exemplifies “coming to a realization of our own divine nature necessitates accepting that other people share the same intrinsic status. Such a realization produces a sense of the immanence of God in all things and, especially, in all people, in the light of which we can only be humble.
“This is one of the numerous paradoxes of the spiritual life, whose laws operate in a manner quite different from the ordinary laws of physical life.
“This aspect of Virgo as the devoted servant has been well described by Charles Carter: It is not the sign of leadership, but of service; it does not aim at brilliant results, but at useful ones. It is patient and does not turn from routine drudgery; it hates show and shuns responsibility and publicity. It is not ambitious, but is satisfied with a straight job and a fair wage.
“If we translate the elements of this somewhat unflattering psychological portrait into spiritual categories, we can see that the Virgo phase of experience is characterized by service, discipleship, living out the precepts laid down by the spiritual master.”
In other words, “the virginal (empty) state is necessary if we are to bring to birth the God who lies dormant within the soul.
Sacrifice — We Must Empty Ourselves
According to Meister Eckhart in the twelfth century: “Mary is blessed, not because she bore Christ physically, but because she bore him spiritually, and in this everyone can become like her.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by Angelus Silesius in the seventeenth century: “Though Christ were yearly born in Bethlehem and never had birth in you yourself, then were you lost forever.”
However, like childbirth, this gifted state of our spirit doesn’t come without a cost.
A sacrifice, to be real, must cost, must hurt, must empty ourselves,” says Darlison.
If you believe that the journey to higher consciousness is meant to be easy, consider these words: “Jesus informs his followers that discipleship demands the most strenuous exercise of the will in a constant battle to maintain spiritual integrity.
“It is not simply a matter of withdrawing from life and insulating oneself in the kind of religiosity which takes refuge in prudishness and convention; the kind of pseudo-spirituality which believes that cleanliness is next to godliness, and that going to bed early and disapproving of bad language fulfill the duties of the spiritual life.
“On till’ contrary, the spiritual life is a life of crisis — choice, discrimination, decision — which demands, in Dane Rudhyar’s words, ‘the purification of desire and the steeling of the essential will.’ as well as ‘strength, courage, inner stillness, and an unemotional and unglamorized type of devotion.’
“Without such qualities we are cold-blooded and insipid, and, like salt that has lost its saltiness, fit only to be discarded.
“With them we become suitably pure, virginal receptacles from which the Christos may be born in the soul.”
In this way, “Life is led as an act of love.”
