Into the Heart’s Land

15 January 2019 – “Speaking with the Stars”: Bella Luna shines in the south shortly after dark. Below her can you see reddish orange Alpha Ceti?

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

AD 69 – Otho seizes power in Rome, proclaiming himself Emperor of Rome, but rules for only three months before committing suicide, in order to steer his country from the path to civil war. A member of a noble Etruscan family, Otho was initially a friend & courtier of the young emperor Nero until he was effectively banished to the governorship of the remote province of Lusitania following his wife Poppaea Sabina’s affair with Nero. He allied himself with Galba, the governor of neighboring Hispania. Accompanying Galba on his march to Rome, he aspired to succeed the aged emperor, but revolted & murdered Galba on being passed over for the succession. He is said to have been of moderate height, splay-footed & bandy-legged, but almost feminine in his care of his person. He had the hair of his body plucked out, & because of the thinness of his locks wore a wig so carefully fashioned that no one suspected it. He used to shave every day & smear his face with moist bread to “better his looks”.

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1559 – Elizabeth I is crowned Queen of England in Westminster Abbey, London, England.

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1622 – Birthday of Molière, French actor & playwright

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1759 – The British Museum opens.

1929 – Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.

1934 – The Nepal–Bihar earthquake strikes killing an estimated 20,700 people.

1943 – The Pentagon is dedicated in Arlington, Virginia.

1962 – The Derveni papyrus, Europe’s oldest surviving manuscript dating to 340 BC, is found in northern Greece; a philosophical treatise that is an allegorical commentary on an Orphic poem, concerning the birth of the gods, produced in the circle of the philosopher Anaxagoras. It was composed near the end of the 5th century BC, “in the fields of Greek religion, the sophistic movement, early philosophy, and the origins of literary criticism it is unquestionably the most important textual discovery of the 20th century.” The roll itself dates to around 340 BC, during the reign of Philip II of Macedon, making it Europe’s oldest.

1969 – Deathday of Maria Röschl-Lehrs – Member of the Esoteric Youth Circle. Maria Röschl was the daughter of a financial officer from Vienna. Her mother was a native of the Polish landed gentry, so she grew up multilingual. The family moved to Vienna in 1895. From a very young age she was a very serious, & reserved.

After leaving school, Röschl took painting lessons & planned an artistic career, but finally decided to study at the University of Vienna to teach German philology, classical philology, art history & philosophy. Since she was interested in the importance of sleep for the human soul, she wrote her dissertation on the ‘Dream of Goethe’. In the course of her research she was found Rudolf Steiner’s Work “How to know higher worlds”, & was deeply impressed.

After completing her studies, Röschl initially gave private lessons & then taught German, Latin & Greek for five years at a Viennese girls’ grammar school.

In 1918 she met Karl Schubert, who introduced her to the Anthroposophical Society in Vienna & in 1920 she became a member. Through Schubert’s mediation, she discovered the Waldorf School in Stuttgart & began teaching Latin, Greek & took over the free religious education there from 1922. In March 1923, together with Herbert Hahn & Karl Schubert, she was able to hold Rudolf Steiner’s “sacrificial ceremony” for senior high school students & became Steiner’s personal student. After the Christmas Conference in 1924, she was appointed director of the youth section of the newly founded Free School of Spiritual Science & held this position until the spring of 1931.

Following the death of Rudolf Steiner in 1926, Röschl organized a two-year introductory course in anthroposophy together with young doctors & scientists in Dornach. Increasingly, however, their work was hampered by the ever-increasing crisis within the General Anthroposophical Society. Therefore, she decided in 1931 to return as a teacher to the Stuttgart Waldorf School. In 1935 she took over the management of the teacher training.

However, since the circumstances in Germany became unacceptable for her after the seizure of power by the National Socialists in 1933, she emigrated to Clent, a village in the English county of Worcestershire. In the Summer of 1933, Röschl & her husband traveled to Spring Valley NY in America as keynote speakers for the 1st Summer school at the Threefold Center.

In 1935 she accepted a job as private tutor in Costa Rica. After a stopover in Arlesheim, Röschl returned to England, where she married Ernst Lehrs another Waldorf teacher & anthroposopher, who had also emigrated to England. In 1940 she took the anthroposophic work to Scottish Aberdeen along with her husband, & Charles King. At that time she also worked with Ita Wegman as editor of the First Class School of Spiritual Science.

After the Second World War, Röschl worked in teacher training in Gloucester. In 1952 she finally returned to Germany with her husband & worked until her death in 1969 as a lecturer at the curative education seminar in Eckwälden.

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1970 – Muammar Gaddafi is proclaimed premier of Libya

2001 – Wikipedia, a free wiki content encyclopedia, goes online

***

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POD (Poem Of the Day)

~Light slides thru my thoughts
As I question the air –
The chorus begins…
The empty shells of trees fill with color
The curtain of serpents parts &
Time stands still…
Rolls backwards…
& I know
It is day…
~hag

***

From: “Into the Heart’s Land” –

“It was July 1933. The Threefold Farm, on Hungry Hollow Road in Spring Valley, New York, had celebrated its seventh birthday. The Rudolf Steiner School was five years old. Eurythmy was an established presence. Dr. Christoph Linder was building a practice based on the principles of anthroposophically extended medicine, which was also served by the Weleda pharmaceutical initiative. Anthroposophy was indeed beginning to put down roots, even though these were primarily focused in and around New York City.

At this time, Ralph Courtney and the Threefold Group undertook an initiative that was to have far-reaching consequences. Three distinguished representatives of the anthroposophical movement in Europe were invited to participate in the first anthroposophical summer school, to be held at the Threefold Farm that July.

Two of the three speakers were members of the faculty of the original Waldorf school in Stuttgart. The third was the young scientist destined to play a decisive role in the further evolution of Anthroposophy in America. Maria Roeschl and Ernst Lehrs were the teachers, later united in marriage while they lived in England after the Waldorf school closed in 1938 and the outbreak of World War II. Maria Roeschl was Austrian by birth; a woman of great erudition, a classical scholar, and a doctor of philosophy. But she was also an individual of inborn spirituality, deepened and disciplined through her years as a personal pupil of Rudolf Steiner. Ernst Lehrs was a teacher of science, a man of keen intelligence, and a personal pupil of Dr. Steiner. Both Roeschl and Lehrs taught the older students in Stuttgart. Maria Roeschl was a member of the circle of teachers who carried the “free religious instruction” and the services, inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner in response to the requests of parents of the School. At the time of the Christmas Foundation, Roeschl had been asked by Steiner to lead the “Section for the Spiritual Striving of Youth,” part of the newly inaugurated School of Spiritual Science (see chapter fifty-nine).

The young scientist Ehrenfried Pfeiffer was, in a very real sense, a protégé of Rudolf Steiner. Pfeiffer was thirty-four at the time of the first summer school conference. Ralph Courtney’s initiative, wholeheartedly backed and supported by Charlotte Parker and the Threefold Group, as well as by Henry Monges and the society’s council, was a real inauguration deed. This was subsequently confirmed by the fact that every following summer, without interruption, the Threefold Community hosted one, or more, conferences presenting one aspect or another of anthroposophical activity and research. ~ by Henry Barnes, The First Summer School

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