Jesus Christ Befriends Rainbow the Dragon: Diary of a Heretical Catholic Alchemist
Perhaps the most important essay I ever wrote. ✝️🌈🐉❤️🔥
A living vision that has powerfully seized my soul in recent times is that of…
Jesus Christ Befriending And Riding Rainbow The Dragon ✝️🌈🐉❤️🔥
For me this vision evokes a viscerally real integration I've been experiencing.
I have had many profound visionary and synchronistic experiences of Jesus Christ and dragons.
For me the Dragon evokes primal life force, sexual explosiveness, juicy sensuality, procreative miraculousness, and raw God-power.
Christ befriending and riding Rainbow the Dragon evokes and invokes an integration of the primal DragonForce with the Universal Unconditional Love of the Christ Heart.
I’ll share more on this later in the essay. First, let us traverse some foundational territory.
Christic Love as Alchemical Keystone
Christic Love for me is the alchemical keystone and North Star that is able to hold all parts of self in Love, allowing them to set down their burdens and harmonize with numinous wholeness, in service of the highest good of all beings in all worlds.
Christic Love is the transcendent-yet-inclusive container holding the Yin-and-Yang of Creation—a transcendent omni-centerpoint that is beyond-yet-inclusive of all polarities.
Profoundly, the cross can be seen as evoking and invoking balanced integration of left-hand and right-hand paths, vertical and horizontal paths, and ascending and descending paths, through the transcendent-yet-inclusive omni-centerpoint of Christ.
For me, visions of Christ or the cross are not merely symbols but Living Divine Presences.
This is a crucial insight: Everything is alive and communicating. The symbols of the psyche are the living mythopoetic Word from the Heart of the Creator. All inner and outer experiences are a living ecology emanating from and suffused by Spirit. As living souls we are invited to discover the unique living language that guides us Home—the living mythopoetic Song that speaks with crystalline purity to our individual soul.
This Song need not be Christic in nature—there are as many paths Home to God as there are individual souls—yet for me, it is. After leaving the church for over a decade, I experienced in recent years an unexpected full-circle reunion with my ancestral Christic tradition. God’s Love began speaking to me with unmistakable gong-like heart-resonance through this living ancestral language.
In another sense, though, all paths to God are ultimately Christic, for Christ is simply another word for God, Divine Love, Holy Grace. More on that later.
How I Experience Jesus Christ
I experience Jesus Christ as a suprapersonal reality: A Living Person who is like a dear friend, good shepherd, great teacher, Savior, and Lord of All. A face of God. A suprapersonal Heart of Pure Love. The Grace-Filled Heart of God.
For me this innermost Loving Grace of Christ feels like the Divine Essence from which all of Creation shines spontaneously forth as a great mythopoetic Poem, every moment a never-before-seen un-price-able master-artwork from the Heart of the Creator.
In our inmost center, this Loving Grace is what we all are. “In Our Heart of Hearts, We Are Always Already At Rest With The Father.” Christ’s Love is our Divine Essence. In this Essence “we live, move, and have our being.” We shine forth from and as the Christ Essence—and to the Christ Essence we shall return.
Even now we are all one body in Christ. We are all of the Essence. Emanations of Alpha and Omega. Of Mother and Father. Of Nameless Divinity of infinite names.
Living Languages
Divinity speaks countless living languages—numberless multidimensional tongues capable of speaking Living Beings into existence.
The living language of Jesus Christ is karmically appropriate and cozily soul-fitted for me. Feels right. Different strokes for different folks.
Jesus Christ, God the Father, Mary the Mother, and the Holy Spirit all resound and reverberate musically within the depths of my Heart. Christian music literally brings me to tears regularly—more than any other music—cleaning my heart and soul through the Waters of Life.
An Ancient Ancestral Backbone
And in my ancestral Catholic tradition I find a deep-rooted backbone: A mighty Gaian Sequoia whose roots ground me in ancient soils. A millennia-old Exalted Cathedral that my ancestors built brick-by-brick with unimaginable care and dedication, weaving the tradition with their deepest Soul-Sense of Grace, Love, Faith, Devotion, Beauty, Goodness, Thanksgiving, Wisdom, Innocence, Redemption, Forgiveness, Humility, Service, Revelation, Sanctification, Plenitude, Reverence, Worship, Astonishment, Atonement, Repentance, Prayer, Contemplation, Hope, Sincerity, Resilience, and Truth.
Humble Devotion as Ancient Psycho-Technology
Humble devotion for me feels indispensable. It is imperative for me to bow in reverent surrender before the Good Lord. My particular psyche requires a Transcendent Father-Mother-Son-Daughter-Spirit before which I fall to my knees and pray. This was painted on my soul and blood from the time I was born—within my beloved church-going lineage of wonderful Christian Iowans. It is vital for me to sometimes pray, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” and “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.”
Without this Surrendered Devotion to a Higher North Star of Divine Suprapersonal Presence with whom I have a personal relationship, I easily tend toward becoming akin to Icarus flying too close to the proverbial sun—and “pride cometh before a fall.” Arrogance, vanity, inflation, grandiosity, and self-aggrandizement are historic shadows of mine that tend to lead down the ‘path of destruction’ if they are not appropriately humbled through devotion. The devotional service of fatherhood and marriage has also been an ancient humbling medicine of untold sanctifying grace for me.
When integrated ‘under God’ and within the transcending-and-including container of Christic Love, however, these same prideful qualities are transfigured into healthily humbled levels of confidence, assuredness, faith, and willingness to be ‘in the spotlight’ in service of creating a more beautiful world and setting the kids free.
Balance is nourishing and leads to flourishing. Extremes tend to be unsustainable. Neither self-inflation nor self-degradation are of pristine service. Christ invites us toward the transcendent-and-inclusive omni-centerpoint of a Love that balances, alchemizes, and harmonizes all polarities. In this case, humble assuredness is the balanced result of allowing the polarized energies of self-inflation and self-degradation to bake in the alchemical fires of Christic Love.
Allowing all parts of me to bake in the oven of Christic Love ongoingly, is the ‘holy grail’ that brings forth balanced integral wholeness—a symbiosis of the inner ecology.
For me Christic Love evokes not only Love but also a balanced integration of all the innermost primal Divine qualities: Grace, Peace, Wisdom, Faith, Truth, Innocence, Thanksgiving, Omnipotence, Omnipresence, and so forth.
We Are Creators Made in God’s Image
Like Divinity, we too speak Living Presences into existence.
We greatly underestimate the magical nature of the words we are spelling regularly with our thought-energy, mouths, and vocal cords/chords. Language is inherently mythic, and our experience of reality is built upon etheric living super-structures of mythic symbol-energies in our (unconscious) mind-body-energy ecosystem. Depending on your patterns of thought, word, deed, and being, your inner architecture may resemble a breathtaking, hallowed ether-cathedral, or contrarily may resemble a suffocating dungeon of doom, or anything beyond or in-between.
This is why we are wise to take seriously the words we regularly think, speak, and absorb from other sources. If we knew every word we spoke was akin to conjuring forth a new living creature who would ~forever dwell somewhere within our inner ecology, perhaps we would be more prudent about which forces we empower within ourselves. Perhaps we would craft our inner sanctum with the same care and grace the ancients poured into their crafting of the great pyramids, temples, mosques, and cathedrals. Perhaps we would honor the Holy Word.
Experience cannot be separated from perspective. Any perspective deeply internalized tends to become experiential. Our ‘inner world’ is always projected outward and reflected back to us by the pure mirror of being. The life we live is utterly shaped by unconscious energy-configurations within our being—and we are continuously transmuting and reimagining these configurations through the ways we think, speak, act, feel, and give attention.
“Attention is actually the currency /
That we pay to what we focus on fervently”— Illuminati Congo, Stupid Fresh Wisdom
All life—both ‘inner’ and ‘outer’—is comprised of living symbolic configurations of energy. Whichever of these configurations you are regularly giving attention to, are crystallizing as core structures within your deep being. This is why church, nature worship, mystical men’s work, 1:1 sanctuary, or other forms of regular sacred ceremony are vital forces in our lives: When karmically well-fitted, the drumbeat of regular sacred ceremony is akin to vibrationally imbuing God-aligned frescoes within your soul and psyche.
And why align with God?
The karmic meta-structure of reality bends toward Love.
Toward Christ.
Toward God.
Whatever name you prefer to give to the inmost Holy of Holies, it is our Home.
Our true Mother and Father.
And nothing truly satisfies without it.
“The porn and cigarettes cannot fill that God-shaped hole in your chest.”
— jb, god loves ugly
It is a simple empirical truth that when we abandon Loving Wisdom, our lives fall into ruin. Though some loveless beings may create an outward appearance of riches or luxury, they experience their inner and outer world as an impoverished desert of despair.
Both right-hand and left-hand pathways of life gradually teach God’s children the way of Love.
Christic Love, Divine Love—that Holy Love containing all the inmost Divine qualities of Grace, Peace, Wisdom, Faith, Truth, Omnipotence, Aliveness, Abundance, Omnipresence, and so forth.
Love is Law
Jesus Christ’s words, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” point to this Law of Love. It is a simple matter of karmic physics that Christic Love is the path to God—for Christic Love is God. Christic Love is our inmost Essence as well as a way of being we can learn to embody.
That is not to say that Christic Love always emanates forth as a likeness of Jesus Christ. We all know this Love in our Heart of Hearts. We are this Love in our Heart of Hearts. And again, Divine Love speaks to us through infinite living languages, so you are fully welcome and invited to explore and discover the living language that feels like a warm and soothing blanket for your soul.
Again, the way this Loving Essence expresses through each individuated prism will be poetically unique in every case. Such is the nature of the limitlessly dazzling, non-repeating, multiferous modes of artistry that flow effortlessly from the Heart of Infinite Imagination.
Re-Wilding Christianity
Having journeyed expansively within the foundational garden-soils of my soul, let us return now to the original living energy-configuration of Christ befriending and riding the Dragon.
This Christic Dragon emanation evokes many layers of meaningfulness.
One of these layers is that of a re-wilding of Christianity.
Christianity has historically often demonized the wild, untamed, primal, sexual aspects of our nature. It has gone so far as to present Christ as one half of a duality, with ‘evil’ Lucifer on the other side—often depicted as a wild horned animal or dragon-like entity.
Though such a model may provide useful moral clarity in early stages of human development, it creates a split within the psyche of many Christians, wherein a large portion of their own nature is (unconsciously) demonized and suppressed. This leads to a painful inner battle and imbalance.
The Alchemical Christ of Steiner and Eridanus
Both Galahad Eridanus and Rudolf Steiner independently arrived at very similar, elegant alchemical models that resolve this imbalance.
To paraphrase their models and sprinkle in my own flavor, Christ is the transcending-and-including alchemical keystone who symbiotically synthesizes all dualities in the bonfire of Divine Love.
Instead of placing Christ as one half of a duality, Eridanus and Steiner both envisaged Christ as a transcendent ‘third thing’ beyond/containing duality.
And both envisaged a new primordial duality: Both placed Lucifer on one side. And on the other side, Eridanus placed the Gnostic Demiurge, while Steiner placed Ahriman.
In these frameworks, Lucifer evokes left-hand paths, horizontality, bottom-up, id, chaos, raw life force, service-to-self, freedom, flow, destruction of hierarchy, experimentation, Dionysian ecstasy, wild power, the feminine principle, Shakti, and unbound, ascendant, sexual, creative energy.
And on the other side, Demiurge/Ahriman evoke right-hand paths, verticality, top-down, superego, order, containment, service-to-others, authority, structure, hierarchy, tradition, Apollonian control, rationality, the masculine principle, Shiva, and disciplined, descending, disciplining, grounding energy.
Let Thine Inner Monsters Be Friends
I find it significant, delicious, and ingenious that these frameworks place ‘monsters’ on both sides of the polarity. I’m reminded of Friedrich:
“Whomsoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
— Nietzsche
These frameworks are ideal for Jungian shadow work, because they invite us to contemplate how ‘both sides’ of our being easily become monstrous when we are imbalanced toward an extreme. When one side rejects the other, both sides are ironically gravitationally summoned toward monstrosity. We see this ‘inner’ dynamic playing out through ‘outer’ wars and bloodshed across human history.
The ‘holy grail’ who resolves this tragic dynamic is Jesus Christ. Eridanus and Steiner place Christ as the ‘third one’ beyond the duality that allows its poles to symbiotically harmonize.
What had seemed like contradictory opposites are transformed and revealed through Christic Love to be twin dragons spiraling harmoniously together—ascending and descending in a contractive-expansive dance of sacred celebration.
Christ’s unconditional Love is the ‘philosopher’s stone,’ ‘axis mundi,’ and ‘elixir of life’ that allows these polarities to set aside their differences and ‘get on the same team’ in service of a Divine North Star. And it turns out that when harmoniously synergized, these two dimensions of our being go together like peanut butter and jelly.
Apollonian structure becomes the sacred container that allows the wild Dionysian bliss-geyser to be generative and of service. And from the other side, Dionysian juice animates the Apollonian architecture, electrifying it with life-giving chutzpah that makes it shine like a Christmas tree.
“Yin and Yang seem two-sided /
Until they integrated and united”— Illuminati Congo, Wei Wu Wei
Christ’s Love is that which is capable of sanctifying and unifying these apparent opposites, enabling a voluptuous syntropic tarantella that seduces both order and chaos to be dance partners co-creating in omni-beneficent service of the whole—inclusive of both self and others.
Wondrous, no?
Layers of Meaning: Christ Befriending the Dragon
We’ve journeyed far together, and we are now better equipped to illuminate the fuller layers of meaning within the living emanation of Christ befriending Rainbow the Dragon.
On one hand, Rainbow the Dragon signifies the twin dragons of Lucifer and Ahriman/Demiurge, now harmoniously integrated, united, and transfigured through the Love of Christ.
Through the Love of Christ these two dragons—which previously had seemed like monstrous enemies—are fused into one spectacular, playful, wild, wondrous, creative being known as Rainbow the Dragon. By uniting with Christ and holding Christ’s Love as North Star, Rainbow the Dragon becomes a great ally in the quest to bring Heaven to Earth—evoking a sense of the alchemical harmonization and transfiguration of our whole nature, all parts, all polarities, our whole inner ecology.
Simultaneously, we may now return to the Christian image of Christ as one half of a war-torn duality in opposition to Satan. And in this image, we may discover that it contains a hidden potential—a rich alchemical soil—setting the stage for an extraordinary transfiguration.
We may imagine a Yin-Yang container encircling this ancient Christianity-reinforced duality of Christ and Satan. Essentially, if we view the Yin-Yang container as evoking a container of pure Divine Love, we may imagine both Christ and Satan being held in the transfiguring Fire of this Love.
The Yin-Yang also evokes the interdependence, interweaving, intercreatorship, and unification of all dualities. It does so by placing a white circle within the black raindrop, and a black circle within the white raindrop. As such, we may imagine Christ and Satan not only baking in the oven of Divine Love, but also being alchemically synthesized, merged, intermelded, fused, and transmuted toward wholeness.
This vision points simultaneously toward a primal re-wilding of Christianity, as well as a redeeming of all rejected and disfigured aspects of self in the fires of Christic Love. Truly Satan represents the aspects of self and reality we have most fully abandoned and forgotten—ironically the aspects which are most in need of our unconditional Love. All aspects and energies within reality are children of God, requiring and deserving of Divine Love. The vision of Satan with a burning Heart of Love evokes universal redemption through God’s Love—the return of the prodigal son. Even the most lost and rejected children can be reconciled through Grace. “You can never stray so far away, that you cannot come back Home.”
Fascinatingly, the vision of Christ growing antlers also points to a transformation of Christ through contact with Satan—our primal, animal nature. Nietzsche once wrote, “In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.” This statement points toward the way in which traditional Christianity tends to be imbalanced toward a sanitized form of right-hand-path-ism. This puritanical Christianity made Christ in its image, ~never depicting Jesus smiling, having fun, being wild, playful, or nature-connected.
So in this way, the image of Christian Christ growing horns, transformed through his alchemical encounter with Satan, carries substantial psychic potency. In the same realm of resonance, Christ befriending Rainbow the Dragon and joyfully careening through the skies, points toward this same transformation of the Christian Christ through contact with primal, animal nature. And with groovalicious symmetry, Rainbow the Dragon—a primally playful being aligned with omni-expressive Divine Love—evokes the Christic transfiguration of the animal nature toward its most holy expression, sanctified by Grace to become an auspicious, powerful ally in the quest for Omnipresent Heaven.
Contemplating the Alchemical Transfiguration and Merging of Hell and Heaven in the Light of Apokatastasis
Such living visions also raise juicy questions of, “How is Heaven transformed through its contact with Hell? How is Hell transformed through its contact with Heaven? And what becomes of the container of Omnipresent Heaven—the ‘third thing’—the Apokatastasis which was able to hold both Heaven and Hell in the transfiguring Fire of unconditional Christic Love?”
Here is a series of living artworks which contemplate these rich questions:
The wizard-spell I gave to Midjourney in order to channel this sequence of living visions was, “heaven and hell alchemically merging and transfiguring into omnipresent heaven through apokatastasis, christian orthodox painting style, ancient, prophetic, archetypal, astounding, revelatory.”
Intriguingly, when I contemplate these images, I think of my piece on ‘Filthy Enlightenment’ from a few years ago—a piece in which I suggest we are all angel-demons in Hell-Heaven.
And this leads me to a vision of all of Creation as one gargantuan hermetic oven, in which the transfiguring alchemical fusion of Heaven and Hell is already well underway.
I am struck by the tragic beauty of these visions—the way in which the dynamic contrastive marriage of Heaven and Hell wafts forth as pungent vistas of intense richness.
“The Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the Earth but men do not see it,” Christ said.
I am visited now by a fresh sense of the already-omnipresent nature of Heaven—of God, Christ, Spirit, Divine Love. If we have eyes to see, we already live in an astonishing living painting, every moment a never-before-seen un-price-able master-artwork emanating directly from the Heart of God. The revelation or direct seeing of this constitutes a kind of enlightenment—an individual Apokatastasis.
Apokatastasis is an ancient little-known Christian idea referring to universal salvation—the redemption of all things. It suggests a revelation that there is no permanent hell, and that eventually all beings—even Satan and the most fallen demons—will return Home to God and be redeemed. Here are five living visions specifically contemplating Apokatastasis:
Personally I intuit a literal future Apokatastasis in which all beings are redeemed as the totality of Creation melts into God’s Omnipresent Love.
Again, in a profound sense all things are already redeemed—and this can be noticed directly—yet in God’s endless mystery, I sense it is also in His nature to call all His children Home in a more cosmic, all-encompassing, inferno-like rapture. The redemption of all of Creation and any single individual’s redemption through Grace feel inextricably and mysteriously interwoven.
If Apokatastasis indeed brings about Omnipresent Heaven in an all-engulfing way, I wonder how long we shall all abide in Omni-Heaven before deciding we’re ready for another rollercoasting cosmic adventure on the Hell-Heaven Express. Another dose of the tragicomic theatre play some have called Lila.
If we do find ourselves in Omnipresent Heaven, perhaps it is then that we will feast our eyes upon the stunning sight of Christ and Rainbow soaring in radiant joy. Here are a few more lightprints of these future-ancient homies:
Parallel Mythic Resonance
Wonderfully, there are visions appearing in other great world mythologies which synchronistically correspond with this vision of Christ and Rainbow.
First, consider Atreyu riding Falkor in Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, one of the greatest books and movies of all time:
Second, consider Guan Yin, the Taoist Goddess of Compassion, often depicted riding a dragon:
Third, consider the tale of young Krishna dancing atop the head of the many-headed serpent Kaliya, forgiving the serpent for poisoning the river and sending him away to live peacefully in another land:
All these living mythic visions point toward a similar theme: The awakened innocence of the Christic Child-Heart is that which is capable of befriending and transfiguring the raw creative-destructive power of the Dragon, such that the Dragon gets ‘on the same team’ with the rest of the inner ecology, in alignment with the North Star of God’s All-Redeeming Love.
New Earth Christic Wizardry
New Earth Christic Wizards prayerfully call upon the Grace of Christ to intercede, set the kids free, and bring Heaven to Earth.
New Earth Christic Wizards are open to drawing upon all inner power sources, the full inner ecology, purifying these powers through Christ’s Love, and shamanically directing these powers toward the North Star of Omni-Heaven.
New Earth Christic Wizards partner with DragonForce in the creation of Heaven on Earth.
Concluding This Scriptural Song
For me these ~4,000 words are akin to a scriptural song of my soul depicting living revelations that have opened my Heart and shaken me to the core of my being.
I am still very much in the alchemical furnace of transformation I have depicted here. I seem to be becoming one who could aptly be called Dragon Christ. Or at the least, this name of Dragon Christ—and this shamanic vision of Christ riding Rainbow—presently serve as potent North Stars guiding my current process, pregnant with great significance.
This transformation feels likely to be ~unending, lasting till physical death and beyond, as there seems to be a bottomless depth to which one can embody Christic Love and allow it to redeem every last cell and atom of one’s being. Perhaps in the teleological omega-point of Apokatastasis we shall all know the full extent of this transformation—a transformation which is truly akin to a great remembering or unveiling of the Inferno of Divine Love that we have always been. Perhaps then we shall fully fulfill our soul’s deepest longing—to “see God face to face”—realizing then that we have never truly gazed ‘pon any other. Perhaps we shall abide in this total revelation of Omnipresent Heaven for timeless aeons, until that cosmic-chuckle-worthy moment when we collectively decide once more to forget what we are, so as to freshly embark ‘pon the wild seas of adventure—surging forth into another ‘Creation Cycle,’ a cosmic-evolutionary theatre-play of self-remembering spanning untold epochs: Billions of years of linear time—equivalent to a momentary non-linear twinkle in the all-encompassing, all-loving Eye of the Great Goddess.
A Final Prayer
God willing, I pray these visions have brought gifts for you, dear traveler.
May we be merry and joyful!
For He Lives!
She Lives!
We Live!
May we savor daily celebration and thanksgiving!
May we radiate New Earth Christic wizardry!
May we create the inner and outer Wild Cathedral!
May we embody the mighty jubilant duo of Jesus Christ soaring freely, exultantly, and exaltingly ‘pon Rainbow the Gentle Dragon Giant!
May we explode as volcano-stars in Godgasmic supernova adoration, showering all corners of Creation in redemptive joyful Love!
May we set the Kids Free!
May we notice and reveal and sing forth Heaven Now!
For He is Risen!
He is Descendent!
She is Risen!
She is Descendent!
God is Grace.
God is Goodness.
God is Lusciousness.
God is Love.
In the name of the Father, the Mother, the Son, the Daughter, and the Holy Spirit.
Hallelujah!
Amen.
Love,
Jordan
If you appreciated this, you may also find these pieces fascinating:
Christ Heart Medicine
This playlist I have been curating for years—containing many songs I sang in church as a child—is one of the most heart-powerful Christic soul-technologies in my apothecary. May it bless all who are called to it:
An Alchemical Shadow Work Ceremony
If you wish to lie down, close eyes, and experience a deep, dark alchemical journey & ceremony pointing toward the redemption of ‘Satan’ and our primal, raw aspects in the Fires of Divine Christic Love, listen to this 17-minute sound journey & story I created a few years ago:
Author Bio:
Jordan Bates is a dad, husband, friend, artist, creator, healer, spiritual non-teacher, and author of 5 books. He is a Christ-adoring shamanic mystic exploring boundless, suprapersonal, transdual reality. An integrator of many wisdom streams, Jordan prays for us to set the kids free and bring Heaven to Earth through the Medicine of Love. Thy Will Be Done. 🙏🏽❤️🔥