Monthly Archives: November 2017

Redeem that which has fallen

7 November 2017 – Astro-Weather: TODAY marks the actual ‘Cross-Quarter’ between the Autumn Equinox & the Winter Solstice.

The variable star Algol in Perseus reaches minimum brightness around 9:56 pm CST. If you start tracking it this evening, you can watch it more than triple in brightness by dawn. This eclipsing binary star runs through a cycle from minimum to maximum & back every 2.87 days. Algol remains visible all night, passing nearly overhead around midnight.

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Gerry Hompel

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

680 – The 6th Ecumenical Council commences in Constantinople

1492 – The Ensisheim meteorite, the oldest meteorite with a known date of impact, strikes the Earth around noon in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France

1665 – The London Gazette, the oldest surviving journal, is first published

1775 – Goethe arrives in Weimar

1775 – John Murray, the Royal Governor of the Colony of Virginia, starts the first mass emancipation of slaves in North America by issuing Lord Dunmore’s Offer of Emancipation, which offers freedom to slaves who abandoned their colonial masters to fight with Murray and the British

1837 – Death-day of Elijah Parish Lovejoy an American Presbyterian minister, journalist, newspaper editor & abolitionist. He was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois, during their attack on his Press

1867 – Birthday of Marie Curie, Polish chemist & physicist, Nobel Prize laureate winner

1870- Papal Infallibility is proclaimed by Pius IX

1879 – Birthday of Leon Trotsky, Russian theorist & politician, founded the Red Army. Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks just before the 1917 October Revolution, immediately becoming a leader within the Communist Party. He would go on to become one of the seven members of the first Politburo, founded in 1917 to manage the Bolshevik Revolution

1893 – Women in the U.S. state of Colorado are granted the right to vote, the second state to do so

1913 – Birthday of Albert Camus, a French philosopher, author, & journalist. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay The Rebel that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957

1922 – The Order of the Freemason’s official ‘condemnation’ of Rudolf Steiner

1944 – Franklin D. Roosevelt elected for a record fourth term as President of the United States of America

1962 – Death-day of Eleanor Roosevelt, American humanitarian 39th First Lady of the United States

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Paula Belle Flores

POD (Poem Of the Day)

~I rise above the waning moon
Gentling the horns with peat moss & beeswax,
Rounding up to the stars reaching
Beyond numbers that bind minds into boxes –
Let the vultures gobble the sin with the flesh…
Thru me the past flows like blood
Renewed in the heart convulsing –
A formula forthcoming
A blueprint unfolding gold
~hag

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From: Sun in Libra: Threshold and Altar by Jonathan Hilton https://sway.com/SytvUPtZUOdpExsB?ref=Link&loc=endofstory

The Sun has entered the fixed star constellation of Libra, the Scales.

Of course, we are accustomed to thinking of the Sun entering Libra at the autumn equinox when, astronomically, the Sun, in its annual apparent path, descends below the celestial equator, marking, in the northern hemisphere, its descent into the darker season. But this equinox Libra is the “sign” Libra which marks this astronomical event in the solar year.

In Greek and Roman times this Sun sign also corresponded roughly with the actual stars of the constellation of Libra.   However that is no longer the case. The cosmos of stars moves in relation to the evolution of consciousness.  Now the Sun does not enter the actual stars of Libra until October 31st

Since the preceding constellation of the Virgin stretches large in the sky, we have had over six weeks of the Sun passing through the Virgin – first through the crown of stars on her head,  then through the heart and middle “clothed in the Sun“,  passing Spica, which is both the star of wheat or the bread of life, as well as the star of “the Child” being born, and finally the Sun passing “the Moon under her feet“. (These images refer to the description of Sophia from Revelation 12.)

The stars of Virgo indeed are an image of the Divine Sophia in all her divine majesty and wisdom.  During these six weeks, many planets have joined the Sun in passing through the Virgin: Mars, Venus, Mercury, and of course the long movement of Jupiter in Virgo for the past 14 months, including its great loop around the star Spica over the past year.  Jupiter will finally begin its transition into the stars of Libra on November 13th.

The Sun entering Libra represents another crossing or transition. The 31st, Halloween, is a Cross Quarter Day, celebrated in earlier times out of a wisdom of nature as marking a turning point for the Sun as it reached halfway between Equinox and Solstice. One could say that esoterically or in an unmanifest way, winter begins at cross-quarter and solstice actually marks mid-winter, the fullness of winter when the light already begins to change and days lengthen again.  This Halloween also marks the turn from All Hallow’s Eve to All Saints Day – a transition day, a turning point.

If we now look beyond seasonal Nature and the weaving of Sun and Earth to the stars themselves as the external garment of divine being, we can perhaps see the imagination of the Scales in new ways.  Libra is an imagination of a threshold and of the one who stands and guards the threshold,  protecting the Sophia from those who would unlawfully enter into the realm of divine wisdom.  The imagination described in the New Testament book of Revelation about the great battle of Michael defending Sophia from the dragon who seeks to devour the child to be born and casting the dragon down to the Earth out of the realm of the divine, is a great imagination of this region of the stars of Virgo, Libra and Scorpion, with Libra representing Michael between the two. Libra in the human being marks the transition from the upper human to the lower human…bodily it is the central pivotal region of the hips, a major “joint” dividing above and below and between the mysteries of the true inside and the mysteries of externalization.

Libra has an interesting history that reflects the evolution of human consciousness. It is the only constellation of the zodiac representing an inanimate object, the scales, however this image evolved during the Greco/Roman period. The early Greeks saw Libra as the claws of the Scorpion. The Arabic names for the two brightest stars in Libra translate as northern claw and southern claw.  This perhaps reflects the evolution of this constellation in the context of the evolution of human consciousness and the transition in the Greco/Roman period when there arose the longing for independence and separation, reflected in the development of philosophy and the view of the divine world as “the realm of the shades”. This evolution can be further seen in the Roman concept of the “citizen” and of justice for the individual human being, though only at its earliest stages.

However if we go back before the Greeks into the Akkadian culture of Mesopotamia around 3,000 BC, there is evidence that Libra was pictured not as scales or as the claws of the scorpion, but as “the holy altar”, representing that consciousness of the divine world and the role of the priest/magi as the mediators between the above world and the lower world. 

We are now in the time of Michael and in the time of independence. We are now called to restore, out of this separated human ego, a reunion with the divine Sophia, a new individual altar.  We are called to transform the fallen intelligence of the dragon and raise it again to the heights, through working with Michael.  The symbol for Libra can now be evolved further to become again a kind of threshold between above and below.

However the altar is not only for the initiates or priests, but becomes, since the deed of resurrection, both coffin/tomb and table/altar where we individually as Michaelites perform the reverse ritual.

The tomb, the table, the altar unite into one larger image bringing us closer to the deed of Christ in relation to Michael and Sophia. This new human activity is summarized beautifully in a verse given by Rudolf Steiner at the end of a lecture on the New Isis, given on Christmas Eve, 1920.   (See The Search for the New Isis, Divine Sophia, GA 202).  In this verse he speaks of the “slaying” of Sophia by Lucifer in human consciousness.  However, through “Christ’s will” working in us, Sophia shall be freed and through spirit cognition be called to new life in human souls.

As the Sun now passes through the stars of Libra, during this Michael season, we can carry this imagination of Libra as the threshold, the tomb, the altar, the Self – standing with Michael.  This can be a preparation for Advent when with Michael we courageously face the darkness within our own souls, and through Christ’s will  working in us, redeem that which has fallen. Advent is the time of this challenge of “Christ Will working in the human being”  to bring the transformation and redemption needed for the birth of the spirit Child at Christmas and the re-awakening of Sophia, living wisdom, in our souls.

~Jonathan Hilton https://sway.com/SytvUPtZUOdpExsB?ref=Link&loc=endofstory

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