The Christian Wheel of the Year: The Immaculate Conception

The Immaculate Conception

December 8th is the Feast Day of the Immaculate Conception, which is the conception of Mary. This feast always falls during Advent, and so is the first Marian feast of the year. And that is proper, as it is the feast of her conception, the moment her soul descended into the material world.

Now, the Eastern Churches also celebrate the conception of the Virgin Mary on this day, but they don't use the term "Immaculate Conception." This term is specifically used in the Western Church to refer to Mary's being conceived without original sin.

The idea of "original sin," meanwhile, has different meanings in the East and West, so let's talk about that for a moment.

Original Sin, East and West

In both Eastern and Western Christianity, the original sin is the sin committed by Adam and Eve when they disobeyed God's command and ate from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, at the suggestion of the serpent. Everyone agrees on that, but here the two branches of Christendom part ways. In the East, the belief has always been that, at this moment, Sin and Death entered into the world. It's as if the transgression itself opened a kind of doorway. Sin and Death, now, aren't just actions or ideas-- in a sense they're real beings, who did not have access to our world before our First Parents' transgression, but now do. The consequences of the Original Sin, then, are twofold: First, Sin is now in the world. We've become capable of it, we are always tempted by it, and almost all of us fall into it. The second consequence is quite simply that we die, since Death has been allowed into the world.

The West takes a rather harsher view of Original Sin. Following St. Augustine, the teaching of the Western Church for many centuries is that every baby born into this world is, already, themselves, guilty of the sin of Adam and Eve. For this reason, infant baptism is raised almost to the level of an emergency, as Baptism into the Christian Church is the only thing that can free us from the guilt of original sin. Lacking Baptism, a baby who dies prematurely is unable to enter into Heaven. Where it actually goes is a matter of debate; some, including Augustine, held the position that unbaptized babies descend immediately into Hell, while others believed that they departed to a middle realm called the Limbo of the Infants (Limbus Infantium) where they enjoyed every possible natural happiness, but were denied the Beatific Vision itself.

Now, because the Christian West holds that every infant is conceived in sin and guilt, it was necessary to develop the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. According to this view, God intervened in Mary's conception, removing the stain of original sin from her, in order to create an unblemished vessel for the incarnation of Jesus. Many of the Church Fathers write that she was restored at the moment of her conception to the Original Justice of humanity before the Fall.

As the Christian East does not view original sin as a particular guilt possessed by every human infant, they did not require special intervention by God to render Mary's conception sinless. They still celebrate her conception, though, as a miracle accomplished by God, who granted a child to Sts. Joachim and Anna, the parents of the Virgin Mary, in very old age.

Original Sin for Esoteric Christians

Readers who belong to one of the mainstream churches, or simply agree with their Mariology, are welcome to take any of the positions described above regarding the nature of original sin. The perspective of this blog is rather different, though, and I want to explore that here.

According to the perspective of Esoteric Christianity, original sin has at least three different meanings:

1. Past Life Karma. Our perspective is that none of us is here for the first time. As Plato wrote in the Phaedo, everything existing comes from its opposite; death comes from life, and the living come into this world from the dead. We aren't meant to remain here, but to transcend this world and return to the vision of God, from which our souls departed unnumbered aeons ago. The fact that we are here, though, living in this world in which Sin is possible and Death comes to us all, shows us that we still have work to do. Only the sinless can enter into the presence of God-- and so the fact that we are reborn here shows that we still have the consequences of sins committed in prior lifetimes to work out. Borrowing a term from Eastern philosophy, this is often referred to as our karma or past-life karma.

2. Collective Karma. We human beings are not isolated individuals. We participate in society from the moment of our conception, when we share a body with our mother. We are dependent on and are part of our mothers, our families, our towns, regions, and nations. All of these collectives of human beings share a kind of collective mind and a collective soul, and every member of the collective participates in that soul. To one extent or another, we also all participate in the karma of the collectives into which we are born, for good or ill; the sins of our people, however defined, are, in a sense, ours. This manifests in our lives as the patterns of thought, reaction, emotion, and behavior that are programmed into us by our families and our cultures, and which we manifest automatically. A major part of the work of spiritual development is the work of freeing the original spirit from the conditioning of its culture.

3. Humanity's Karma. There is an odd, possibly false, but fascinating idea that one finds scattered around 19th century occult literature. This is the idea that the old legends about the Fall of Man that one finds in many ancient sources refer to a real event, many long millennia ago, in which human beings deliberately contacted the Demonic Plane. Demons, according to this way of thinking, are leftover souls from previous universes who refused the hard work of spiritual evolution. All that is left of those souls are these kinds of shells or husks, driven entirely by passion with no capacity at all for reflective consciousness. Like living addictions. They're incapable of growth or change; they seek only to quench desires that are unquenchable, and to make any soul they encounter more like them. Because of this, they were walled off from the rest of the universe in some odd corner of the Astral Plane. And that's where human beings found them and released them, for purposes unknown. And so the rest of us get to spend the rest of our time as human beings dealing with an Astral Plane in which the ordinary human difficulties of cultural programming (the world) and unruly passions (the flesh) are compounded by the presence of evil spirits (the devil) who feed on and encourage our worst impulses.

The Immaculate Conception for Esoteric Christians

If Mary was conceived without Original Sin, she was conceived without being subject to any of the three forms of original sin described above. What would that mean?

First, she had worked out all of her individual karma through many lifetimes of spiritual practice. When she returned to material incarnation, it was as a being free from any debts from previous lifetimes.

Second, because she was such an advanced soul, she never allowed herself to be subject to cultural conditioning. Now, every source shows us that she did willingly and gladly participate in her culture. But she did so as a free spirit-- one who can choose one's own thoughts and actions, rather than having them chosen for you.

Third, she was not subject to the influence of malevolent spirits. How could that be? In old China, when a mountain was known to be infested with demons, they would find a Taoist adept and send him to the mountain. There he would find a cave, sit, and meditate. It was said that a great meditator could calm every demon and unquiet ghost within a thousand li. It's likely that, in life, Mary would have been just such an adept, spreading peace through the whole world by her mere existence.

Only such a being could become the vessel that could contain the Living God, the channel for all the grace poured out by God into the universe. Today we celebrate her entrance into the world of matter and her great role in the history of salvation.

Prayer and Meditation

Today, take the Immaculate Conception itself as the theme for your meditation-- either the mainstream or orthodox version, or the esoteric interpretations that I provide.

It's worth noting, too, that Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception is the patron saint of the United States of America. If you happen to have any concerns about the current direction or ultimate fate of this country, today is a good time to make that known in prayer.



O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.