Measuring the syllables- In the haiku of my life

17 August, 2016 – Astro-Weather:

corn-moon

The Full Corn Moon officially arrives at 4:27 am CDT tomorrow morning, but it will look completely illuminated throughout the night tonight. It appears low in the east as the Sun sets & reaches its peak in the south around 1 am. Luna resides among the dim background stars of northeastern Capricornus.

The Sun, Earth, & Moon will be very closely aligned, so some sources are listing this event as a penumbral lunar eclipse. The Full Moon crosses the northern edge of Earth’s penumbral shadow. Just 2 percent of our satellite dips into this subtle shadow, so observers won’t be able to detect any dimming, & yet as spiritual scientists we know that holding these cosmic events in our creative imaginations can bring great insights.

Spiritually eclipses can be seen as a “safety-valves” – there to avert danger, to provide an outlet at the right moment. In an eclipse of the moon, the earth comes between the sun & the moon; we see the shadow cast on the moon by the earth. Since the sun is not able to purify the unbridled, often immoral subconscious thoughts from humanity as well as from cosmic sources, these unpurified urges stream in through the darkness down upon the earth.

See Rudolf Steiner’s Human Questions, Cosmic Answers

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history cartoon

“Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. (To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.)” ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

1560 – The Roman Catholic Church is overthrown & Protestantism is established as the national religion in Scotland

1585 – A first group of colonists sent by Sir Walter Raleigh under the charge of Ralph Lane lands in the New World to create Roanoke Colony on Roanoke Island, off the coast of present-day North Carolina

1586 – Birthday of Johann Valentin Andrea, who wrote: The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz

1687 – Deathday of Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen , kidnapped at the age of 10 by Hessian soldiery, – in their midst tasted the adventures of military life in the Thirty Years’ War. He was made Schultheiss (magistrate) at Renchen in Baden where he devoted himself to literary pursuits. Greatly influenced by previous utopian & travel literature, he wrote the Simplicissimus series, inspired by the events & horrors of the Thirty Years’ War which devastated Germany from 1618 to 1648, it is regarded as the first adventure novel in the German language & the first German novel masterpiece. The full subtitle is “The life of an odd vagrant named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim: namely where and in what manner he came into this world, what he saw, learned, experienced, and endured therein; also why he again left it of his own free will.” It attained a readership larger than any other seventeenth-century novel

1668 – A magnitude 8.0 earthquake causes 8,000 deaths in Anatolia, Ottoman Empire

1798 – The Vietnamese report a Marian apparition in Quảng Trị, an event which is called Our Lady of La Vang

1807 – Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat leaves New York City for Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world

1911 – The 1st performance of Rudolf Steiner’s 2nd Mystery Drama, The Trial of the Soul, in the Gardener’s Place Theatre in Munich. In all 4 four plays. Steiner showed how spiritual development might manifest in a freely formed, but karmically-knit group of people. The experiences of the main characters of the play, particularly Johannes, Capesius & Strader, represent 3 different aspects of the path of initiation – “differing according to the karma of the respective individualities.” Steiner described his process of artistic creation as “images that grew like the leaves of a plant”.

1918 – Bolshevik revolutionary leader Moisei Uritsky is assassinated

1924 – Rudolf Steiner visits Tintagel, mystery center & court of King Arthur. (***see more below)

1942 – World War II: U.S. Marines raid the Japanese-held Pacific island of Makin

1943 – World War II: The U.S. Eighth Air Force suffers the loss of 60 bombers on the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission.

1943 – World War II: First Québec Conference of Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, & William Lyon Mackenzie King begins.

1943 – World War II: The Royal Air Force begins Operation Hydra, the first air raid of the Operation Crossbow strategic bombing campaign

1950 – Hill 303 massacre: 41 American POWs are shot to death by the North Korean Army

1959 – Quake Lake is formed by the magnitude 7.5 earthquake near Hebgen Lake in Montana

1959 – Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, highly influential, best-selling jazz recording of all time, is released

1962 – Peter Fechter is shot & bleeds to death while trying to cross the new Berlin Wall

1969 – Category 5 Hurricane Camille hits the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing 256 & causing $1.42 billion in damage

1969 – Deathday of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a German-American architect. Along with Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius & Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture. He called his buildings “skin and bones” architecture. He is often associated with his quotation of the aphorisms, “less is more” & “God is in the details”.

1982 – The first compact discs are released to the public in Germany

1999 – A 7.4-magnitude earthquake strikes İzmit, Turkey, killing more than 17,000 & injuring 44,000

***

~Measuring the syllables

In the haiku of my life…

~hag

***

tintagel01

Rudolf Steiner visits Tintagel:

On his final visit to Britain, Rudolf Steiner’s schedule of lecturing was hectic. He delivered three lectures a day during the Anthroposophical Society’s Summer School at Torquay (11-22 August 1924) – but that is another story…Steiner took one day out of that busy schedule, to go as far west as he ever ventured in that lifetime – to the west coast of Cornwall.

Tintagel is the legendary home of King Arthur, Merlin, the sword Excalibur, the Lady of the Lake, the Knights of the Round Table, Sir Lancelot, Queen Guinevere, & the court of Camelot.

Midway through the Torquay Summer School, on Sunday August 17th, Rudolf Steiner declared “I want to go to King Arthur (see Eleanor Merry, 1956, in Villeneuve, 2004, p.1051). A cavalcade of three cars ventured forth from the southern beachside resort town of Torquay, across the verdant moors of Dartmoor, to the spectacularly positioned Tintagel, on the west coast of Cornwall.

Eleanor Merry & D.N. Dunlop were the two organizers of the Torquay Summer School. Both were part of the entourage to Tintagel. Merry reports that: “At last we came again to the sea, and straight ahead of us, at the top of a green cliff, were the last fragments of King Arthur’s castle of Tintagel. A deep rocky chasm divided this from a second rugged cliff, where still other remains could be seen (quoted in Villeneuve, 2004, p.1052) Merry continues: “Dr. Steiner was at first silently absorbed in the wonderful view. All around was sunshine, and fleeting cloud-shadows and little hurrying rainbows – and a stormy and angry sea”.

The entourage included at least two of the 11 attendees of Steiner’s Agriculture Course at Koberwitz, namely Dr. Elisabeth Vreede & Guenther Wachsmuth. That course (7-16 June, 1924) laid the foundations for the development of biodynamic agriculture.

Wachsmuth remembered: “On that unforgettable day Rudolf Steiner went with us to the place on the rough rocky western coast of Cornwall, Tintagel, where the castle of King Arthur had once stood … That strangely densified spiritual atmosphere we shall never forget, so intensely to be felt as Rudolf Steiner climbed the strange projecting cliff on the lonely coast of Cornwall where the last walls of the castle of King Arthur towered over the roaring sea … He spoke there, standing on the cliff, about the experience of the Knights of King Arthur … He spoke of the teachings of Merlin … The immediacy of the spiritual vision in this place was so intense that, during his descriptions, the entire reality, the external life and action … of King Arthur’s knights, stood before us as actual experience” (Wachsmuth, 1989, pp.563-4)

The Tintagel visit occurred just two months after Steiner’s Agriculture Course & less than six weeks before Rudolf Steiner retreated from public life entirely. On this, his tenth visit to Britain, Steiner taught about Anthroposophy & Waldorf education. An opportunity for agriculture lectures in Britain did not arise, & there had been no British attendees at the Koberwitz course. We can speculate that the attendance of Wachsmuth & Vreede, who had attended at Koberwitz – as well as Tintagel, in this case along with Marna Pease – may have seeded the early interest in Britain in Anthroposophic agriculture which evolved into biodynamics.

Marna Pease went on to be the secretary of Britain’s Anthroposophical agricultural Foundation which was founded in 1928. Elizabeth Vreede attended, in London, as a guest at the first Annual Meeting of the Anthroposophical Agricultural Foundation.

Despite the intensity with which Rudolf Steiner engaged with his missions, including the Torquay Summer School, he was, by this time terminally ill from being ‘poisoned’ eight months earlier. Wachsmuth described this final visit to Britain: “During … the last trip of Rudolf Steiner in his life on earth, he suffered tragically from the destructive illness. Outwardly, nothing of this could be observed. He met daily all the requirements of the comprehensive program & his lecturing activity. He spoke introductory words at artistic programs, had numerous conferences, & took part in the excursions, but every meal caused in his ill condition renewed suffering, which he bore courageously without a word of complaint … He permitted nothing to be known by those at the conference regarding his illness” (Wachsmuth, 1989, p.563).

Just a month after this tenth visit to Britain, Rudolf Steiner retreated entirely from public life (on 28 September, 1924), & he died on 30 March 1925

References:

AAF. (1929). Annual Meeting of the Anthroposophical Agricultural Foundation, Minutes: 3 pp. typescript.

Ashley, M. (2010). A Brief History of King Arthur. London: Constable & Robinson.

Collison, H. (1925). Rudolf Steiner. X a.m. 30th March, 1925, R.I.P.  Anthroposophical Movement, 2(13), 101.

Kolisko, L. N. (1936). The Moon and the Growth of Plants (M. Pease, Trans.). London: Anthroposophical Agricultural Foundation.

Paull, J. (2011a). Attending the First Organic Agriculture Course: Rudolf Steiner’s Agriculture Course at Koberwitz, 1924. European Journal of Social Sciences, 21(1), 64-70. Paull, J. (2011b). Biodynamic Agriculture: The journey from Koberwitz to the World, 1924-1938. Journal of Organic Systems, 6(1), 27-41.

Pease, M. (1937). A New Farming and Gardening: For Enquirers (Leaflet No. 2, 2nd Series). Bray-on-Thames, Berkshire: Anthroposophical Agricultural Foundation.

Steiner, R. (1924a). On the conduct of this news-sheet, & the share members should take in it. Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain Monthly News-Sheet for Members, January, 8. Steiner, R. (1924b). To all members: Our summer courses in Torquay. Anthroposophical Movement, 1(24 August), 81-83.

Steiner, R. (1933). Nine Lectures on Bees: Given in 1923 to the workmen at the Goetheanum (M. Pearse, Trans.). London: Anthroposophical Agricultural Foundation.

Villeneuve, C. (2004). Rudolf Steiner in Britain: A Documentation of his Ten Visits, Volume 11, 1922-1925. Forest Row, UK: Temple Lodge.

Wachsmuth, G. (1989). The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner

Wannamaker & R. E. Raab, Trans. 2nd edition; first published in German 1941). Blauvert, NY: Spiritual Science Library.

Whitehead, A. (2010). Rudolf Steiner: Journey of a Grail Knight Warrior. Blackheath, NSW: Golden Beetle Books

Blessings & Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg 

3 thoughts on “Measuring the syllables- In the haiku of my life

  1. Wow, what a crusader! Poisoned or not he saw some things!

    I want to see and understand why Steiner choose to help agricultural help for society?

    1. Well, 1st arson, the burning down of the 1st Goetheanum, then some say poisoning, but really i think the ‘poison’ was from taking on the karma of everyone when he took on being the president of the newly founded Anthroposophical Society, after the Christmas Conference.

      In the agricultural courses he gave, you can see that by bringing the cosmic energies back to the earth, into the soil, it not only made the food more nutritious, it helps to make earth a sacred planet!

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