Bethphage

Palm procession in front of Franciscan Church of Bethphage; also shown here is the stone that Jesus Christ, is said to have used to mount the donkey on which he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

Bethphage (Greek: Βηθφαγή; Aramaic: בית פגי "house of (unripe) figs") is a place in Palestine mentioned in the New Testament, located on the Mount of Olives in the immediate vicinity of Bethany, where the raising of Lazarus took place, about halfway to Jerusalem. From here the disciples fetched the donkey on which the Christ entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the cheers of the crowds (Matthew 21:1–11, Mark 11:1–11, Luke 19:28–40, John 12:12–19). The donkey is a symbol for the physical body of man, which is also often used in fairy tales (cf. for example The Town Musicians of Bremen). In Bethphage there was also the fig tree, which withered forever the following day at the word of the Christ (Matthew 21:18–22, Mark 11:12–14, → cursing the fig tree). The figs are an occult reference to the powers of the old natural clairvoyance, which should now dry up to make way for faith, with which the seed of a renewed, no longer dream-conscious but completely self-conscious vision is planted in the soul; then the fig trees will sprout anew and announce that the kingdom of God is near (Luke 21:29–30).

„Once we have crossed the summit of the Mount of Olives, coming from Jerusalem, and we slowly walk back down the valley on the other side, where the subterranean magic mirror of the Dead Sea glistens towards us from the depths of the Judean Desert, we come halfway between the Mount of Olives and Bethany to a place enclosed in high walls. Black cypresses tower above the walls and point up to heaven like solemn signs. Here was a small settlement at the time of Jesus: Bethphage, "the house of figs". We must not think of this settlement as a village like other villages. The group of people who had moved their common life here was held together by a special spiritual-religious striving. The simple huts that may have stood there were surrounded by a grove of fig trees, from which the place took its name. But these fig trees were more than useful plants, they were sacred trees to the people who lived there, visible signs of their spiritual aspirations. They were people who sought to preserve within their circle the spiritual secret of ancient humanity, which also appears once within the New Testament in the story of Nathanael. The people of Bethphage cultivated "sitting under the fig tree", the state of supersensible seeing, which was achieved through partly physical, partly immersive exercises.

Bethphage, the house of figs, was a place where the old seeing was cultivated. From here, in the early morning of Palm Sunday, Jesus sent for the donkey and the donkey's foal through Peter and John. As there were sacred trees there, so there were sacred animals there. The donkeys that were kept there were not farm animals. They too expressed a mystery within this circle of people. In the Old Testament tradition, the magician who had once been summoned from Babylonia to curse the Israelites to prevent them from entering the land of promise was still clearly remembered. Balaam was presented as riding on a donkey. But it was known that the riding on the donkey did not only mean the way of moving. They also saw in it the expression of a very specific state of rapture, namely that somnambulistic state of soul in which the Babylonian magician once began to speak, not out of his human consciousness, but as if out of a spiritual possession, only that when he wanted to hurl the magical curse against Israel without knowing what was happening to him, it became a blessing. The sacred animals of Bethphage show that the vision cultivated there was of an unawake nature and bound to the physical body; after all, the donkey is the imaginative expression of the physical human body right up to the folk tales of modern times.“ (Lit.: Bock, p. 328f)

Literature

• Emil Bock: Die drei Jahre. Beiträge zur Geistesgeschichte der Menschheit, Urachhaus Verlag, Stuttgart 1981