Monthly Archives: August 2016

“The Human Self in Course of Time Shall Ripen”

August 21, 2016Poetry, Quote, Remembering, Rudolf Steiner Quote~hag

21 August 2016 – Astro-Weather: Asteroid 2 Pallas reaches opposition & peak visibility today- The second-biggest asteroid orbiting between Mars & Jupiter. You can find it on the border between Pegasus & Equuleus, the star that marks the nose of Pegasus the Winged Horse. The lovely globular star cluster M15 lies north & a touch east of Pallas. The 3 Beings lie about halfway to the zenith in the southeastern sky after darkness falls

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Feast day of Our Lady of Knock*

“We learn from history that we don’t learn from history!” ~Desmond Tutu

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

1192 – Minamoto no Yoritomo becomes Seii Tai Shōgun -the de facto ruler of Japan

1680 – Pueblo Indians capture Santa Fe from the Spanish during the Pueblo Revolt

1772 – King Gustav III completes his coup d’état in Sweden, installing himself as an enlightened despot

1831 – Nat Turner leads black slaves in a rebellion in Virginia

1852 – Tlingit Indians destroy Fort Selkirk, Yukon Territory.

1838 – Deathday of Adelbert von Chamisso, German botanist & poet. Author of Peter Schlemihl, a famous story about a man who sold his shadow

1858 – Birthday of Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, Crown Prince of Austria. In 1889, he died in a suicide pact with his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera. His death left no direct male heir. As a consequence, his brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig, was next in the line. His death in 1896 made his oldest son, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive. In 1914, Franz Ferdinand’s assassination precipitated World War I & sparked a chain of events that caused the dynasty’s collapse. Rudolf Steiner spoke quite a bit about his former incarnations, the most important being as Nero, in Karmic Relationships Vol. 2, lectures 7, 27 & Vol. 4 lecture 24

1863 – Lawrence, Kansas is destroyed by Confederate guerrillas Quantrill’s Raiders in the Lawrence Massacre

*1879 – Observers stated that there was an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, Saint John the Evangelist, angels, & Jesus Christ (the Lamb of God) Knock Shrine (Irish: Cnoc Mhuire, “Hill of Mary” or “Mary’s Hill”) is a Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in the village of Knock, County Mayo, Ireland.

1883 – An F5 tornado strikes Rochester, Minnesota, leading to the creation of the Mayo Clinic

1888 – The first successful adding machine in the United States is patented by William Seward Burroughs

1897 – Oldsmobile is founded.

1904 – Birthday of Count Basie

1911 – The Mona Lisa is stolen by a Louvre employee

1914 – Deathday of Pope Pius X. particularly devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the specific title of Our Lady of Confidence; his papal encyclical Ad diem illum expresses his desire through Mary to renew all things in Christ, which he had defined as his motto. He promoted Thomas Aquinas as the principal philosophical method to be taught in Catholic institutions. After the 1908 Messina earthquake he filled the Apostolic Palace with refugees, long before the Italian government acted. He rejected any kind of favors for himself or his family

1921 – 1^st publication of the weekly Das Goetheanum

1940 – Deathday of Leon Trotsky, murdered on Stalin’s orders

1942 – World War II: The flag of Nazi Germany is installed atop the Mount Elbrus, the highest peak of the Caucasus mountain range

1942 – World War II: The Guadalcanal Campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru

1957 – The Soviet Union successfully conducts a long-range test flight of the first intercontinental ballistic missile

1959 –President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an executive order proclaiming Hawaii the 50th state of the union

1963 – Xá Lợi Pagoda raids: The Army of the Republic of Vietnam Special Forces vandalizes Buddhist pagodas across the country, arresting thousands & leaving hundreds dead

1968 – Deathday of Margareta Morgenstern, anthroposophist & wife of poet Christian Morgenstern

1986 – Carbon dioxide gas erupts from volcanic Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing up to 1,800 people

1988 – The 6.9 Mw Nepal earthquake shakes the Nepal–India border leaving 1,450 people killed & thousands injured

1991 – Latvia declares renewal of its full independence after the occupation of Soviet Union

1991 – Coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev collapses

1993 – NASA loses contact with the Mars Observer spacecraft

2013 – Hundreds of people are reported killed by chemical attacks in the Ghouta region of Syria

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Ella Manor Lapointe

Calendar of the Soul – 22nd Week [August 21, 2016 – August 27, 2016]

The light from world-wide spaces

Works on within with living power;

Transformed to light of soul

It shines into the spirit depths

To bring to birth the fruits

Whereby out of the self of worlds

The human self in course of time shall ripen.

~Rudolf Steiner, English translation by Ruth & Hans Pusch

***

Your soul is the best friend you keep forgetting you have. It’s closer than your breath & older than death. It dreams like a mountain, laughs like a river, & communicates with you in the exuberantly mysterious style of animals & gods. You are animated because of your soul! It loves you with nonstop unconditional ingenuity. Isn’t it right, then, to devote at least one special day each year to honoring it & giving thanks for its blessings?

Today (along with the Baptism I will perform for a beautiful family this afternoon) I have scheduled my Soul Celebration Day:

Dear Soul-Self- Be my slow-motion dance. Be my centennial earthquake. Be my ripe pomegranate floating in a blue plastic swimming pool on the first day of winter. Be my handstand on a barstool, my whirlwind week in clown school, my joke shared with a Siberian shaman while shopping for socks at Wal-Mart. Be my puzzle with one piece missing. Be the waves crashing on a beach in New Zealand in the 22nd century. Be my golden hammer resting on the moss of a ten-million-year-old rock…

This kind of poetic thinking prompts me to ask: What would it be like to take a trip in your imagination to the future, where you will visit the person you’ll be, say 4 years from today? What is the most important message you have to convey to that future Self?

Blessings & Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg

Well-spoken in the Thunder

August 20, 2016Poetry, Remembering, Rudolf Steiner Quote~hag

20 August 2016 – Astro-Weather: Look toward the south-southwest during evening twilight and you can’t miss Mars. The Red Planet shines brightly & remains visible until it dips below the horizon around midnight. Mars resides on the border between Scorpius & Ophiuchus.

The Moon reaches perigee, the closest point in its orbit around Earth, (228,074 miles away from us) tonight at 8:19 pm CDT

“…We have the ways and means to move toward a human future that will find again the stars on the foundation of freedom and love. We will again experience, but with full consciousness, the star companions beside us. We must rise to become a free cooperator with the stars.” ~Willi Sucher

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ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

14 – Deathday of Agrippa Postumus, adopted son of the late Roman emperor Augustus, is executed by his guards while in exile under mysterious circumstances.

636 – Battle of Yarmouk: Arab forces led by Khalid ibn al-Walid take control of Syria & Palestine away from the Byzantine Empire

1000 – The foundation of the Hungarian state by Saint Stephen, celebrated as a National Day in Hungary

1083 – Canonization of the first King of Hungary, Saint Stephen

1153 – Feast day of Bernard of Clairvaux, French theologian & saint, who wrote the rule of St. Benedictine

1308 – Pope Clement V pardons Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, absolving him of charges of heresy

1391 – Konrad von Wallenrode becomes the 24th Grand Master of the Teutonic Order

1794 – Battle of Fallen Timbers: American troops force a confederacy of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa, &Potawatomi warriors into a disorganized retreat

1854 Deathday of F.W.J. Schelling a German philosopher, at the midpoint in the development of German idealism, between Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his mentor in his early years, & Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his former university roommate, early friend, & later rival. Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger & Slavoj Žižek have shown interest in re-examining Schelling’s body of work. Rudolf Steiner speaks about him in Karmic Relationships GA 238 as being inspired by Tycho Brahe

1858 – Charles Darwin first publishes his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace’s same theory

1866 – President Andrew Johnson formally declares the American Civil War over

1882 – Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture debuts in Moscow, Russia

1890 – Birthday of H. P. Lovecraft

1914 – Brussels is captured in the course of the German invasion of Belgium

1920 – The first commercial radio station, 8MK (now WWJ), begins operations in Detroit

1940 – In Mexico City, exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally wounded with an ice axe by Ramón Mercader. He dies the next day

1944 – World War II: The Battle of Romania begins with a major Soviet Union offensive

1950 – Korean War: United Nations repel an offensive by North Korean

1962 – The NS Savannah, the world’s first nuclear-powered civilian ship, embarks on its maiden voyage

1965 –Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels, 26, is martyred; murdered by an unpaid sheriff’s deputy, sacrificing his life for young black activist Ruby Sales whom he pushed out of the way of a shotgun blast

1968 – Soviet Union-dominated Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring

1975 –NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars

1977 –NASA launches the Voyager 2 spacecraft

1991 – Dissolution of the Soviet Union, August Coup: More than 100,000 people rally outside the Soviet Union’s parliament building protesting the coup aiming to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev

1991 – Estonia, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, issues a decision on the re-establishment of independence on the basis of historical continuity of its pre-World War II statehood

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My POD (Poem Of the Day)

~Before I was dust

A fine powder of thought

Settling over the brown feet of women,

I was

Zagging in the lightning

Well-spoken in the thunder

Heavy in air I breathe today

~hag

***

The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric, Lecture VI, by Rudolf Steiner

“Since the prehistoric time of Zarathustra and before Moses appeared among men, the Spirit who had hitherto dwelt in the Sun had descended upon earth.

His light shone in the burning bush and in the fire on Mount Sinai; He was in the earthly elements.

Yet a while — and the Spirit whom the great Rishis divined but could not clairvoyantly behold, the Spirit whom Zarathustra sought in the Sun, who proclaimed himself to Moses in thunder and lightning — the same appeared in human form in Jesus of Nazareth.

That was the course of evolution: out of cosmic space He descended, first to the physical elements, then into a human body.

The divine Ego from which man issued, and to which the writer of St. Luke’s Gospel traces the lineage of Jesus of Nazareth, was born again. Herewith was consummated the sublime event of the rebirth of God in man.”

In the New Testament it says that the second coming of Christ will occur in the realm of the clouds. What Steiner’s lectures make clear is that some of these clouds will be very dark, bringing thunder & lightning.

Blessings & Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg

I am an oar made ready

August 19, 2016Insight, Poetry, Remembering~hag

19 August 2016 – Astro-Weather: You’ll want to keep your eyes on the western evening sky all week. A trio of bright planets — Mercury, Venus, & Jupiter — lurk low in the twilight, forming an elegant triangle that changes shape with each passing day. Use brilliant Venus as your guide to the other two, above the horizon 30 minutes after sunset.

Jupiter, to Venus’ upper left, while Mercury below Jupiter. You’ll need a clear, unobstructed horizon to see the three worlds.

Distant Neptune reaches opposition & peak visibility two weeks from today, but the view now is essentially the same. The ice giant planet rises around 8:30 PM CDT & climbs nearly halfway to the zenith in the southern sky by 2 am. The planet lies in Aquarius, southwest of Lambda Aquarii.

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Raffaello

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” ~H.G. Wells

The Feast of the Transfiguration in the Gregorian Calendar

World Humanitarian Day

295 BC – The first temple to Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty & fertility, is dedicated by Quintus Fabius Maximus Gurges during the Third Samnite War

43 BC –Caesar Augustus, compels the Roman Senate to elect him Consul

14 AD – Deathday of Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus

1612 – The “Samlesbury witches“, three women from the Lancashire village of Samlesbury, England, are put on trial, accused of practicing witchcraft, one of the most famous witch trials in British history

1662 – Deathday of Blaise Pascal a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer &Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy, while still a teenager he started some pioneering work on calculating machines.

Following a religious experience in late 1654, he began writing influential works on philosophy & theology. His two most famous works set in the conflict between Jansenists & Jesuits.

Rudolf Steiner wrote about him in GA 131, From Jesus to Christ: Lecture I: Jesuit and Rosicrucian Training

1692 – Salem witch trials: In Salem, Province of Massachusetts Bay, five women, & a clergyman, are executed after being convicted of witchcraft

Daguerreotype of Louis Daguerre in 1844 by Jean-Baptiste Sabatier

1839 – The French government announces that Louis Daguerre’s photographic process is a gift “free to the world”. Viewing a daguerreotype is unlike looking at any other type of photograph. The image does not sit on the surface of the metal, but appears to be floating in space, & the illusion of reality.

1854 – The First Sioux War begins when United States Army soldiers kill Lakota chief Conquering Bear & in return are massacred

1868 – Jules Janssen discovered Helium during a solar eclipse

1919 – Afghanistan gains full independence from the United Kingdom

1934 – The German referendum of 1934 approves Hitler’s appointment as head of state with the title of Führer.

1936 – Deathday of Federico García Lorca, Spanish poet, playwright, & director He was executed by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War

1944 – World War II: Liberation of Paris: against German occupation with the help of Allied troops

1945 – August Revolution: Viet Minh led by Ho Chi Minh take power in Hanoi, Vietnam.

1953 – Cold War: The CIA & MI6 help to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran & reinstate the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

1955 – In the Northeast United States, severe flooding caused by Hurricane Diane, claims 200 lives

1960 – Cold War: In Moscow downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is sentenced to ten years imprisonment by the Soviet Union for espionage

1960 – Sputnik program: Korabl-Sputnik 2: The Soviet Union launches the satellite with the dogs Belka & Strelka, 40 mice, two rats & a variety of plants.

1964 – Syncom 3, the first geostationary communication satellite, was launched

1989 – Several hundred East Germans cross the frontier between Hungary and Austria during the Pan-European Picnic, part of the events that began the process of the Fall of the Berlin Wall

1991 – Dissolution of the Soviet Union, August Coup: Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is placed under house arrest while on holiday in the town of Foros, Ukraine

2003 – A car-bomb attack on United Nations headquarters in Iraq kills the agency’s top envoy Sérgio Vieira de Mello & 21 other employees.

2010 – Operation Iraqi Freedom ends, with the last of the United States brigade combat teams crossing the border to Kuwait

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My POD (Poem Of the Day)

‎~I am an oar made ready…

Like water – adaptable

I follow my-Self

Flowing on...

~hag

***

The modern English word “weird” is derived from the Old English term *wyrd,* meaning “destiny.” By the late Middle Ages, *wyrd* had evolved into a concept similar to the Eastern notion of karma. It implied that the momentum of past events plays a strong role in shaping the future, but that human willpower can nevertheless also have a hand in creating upcoming events. In some uses, *wyrd* could even mean “the power to control destiny,” as exemplified by the 3 Weird Sisters of Shakespeare’s *MacBeth* or The Fates (Nornir) from the Northern Mysteries.

Wyrd is ordered by The 3 Fates. The eldest is Urd, who governs the laying of the threads of wyrd in the well of memory. The middle is Verdandi, whose name means becoming; & the youngest is Skuld, whose name means obligation. She is occasionally said to be one of the Valkyries as well, because it is Her hand that cuts a person’s thread & determines the extent of their “obligation”.

I bring this up, because my Wyrd Factor is pretty high these days. While the consequences of the past are certainly impacting my present, I’ve rarely had a greater ability to co-create with these forces through the strength of my intentions.

On a not unrelated note, here’s Caroline Myss’ explanation of faith: “Faith is the power to stand up to the madness and chaos of the physical world while holding the position that nothing external has any authority over what heaven has in mind for you.”

If you don’t like the word “heaven” in Myss’ statement, substitute a term that works for you, like “higher self” or ”destiny” or “my soul’s code.”

We are always called on to modify what’s not quite right for our needs. Let’s keep tinkering with fate…

XOX

Blessings & Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg

She carries me like precarious egg light

August 18, 2016Poetry, Quote, Remembering~hag

18 August 2016 – Astro-Weather: So did you see the Moon last night! Did you feel the almost eclipse this morning?

Alex Grey

Have you been following the Summer Triangle? Although Saturn reached its peak in early June, it remains conspicuous on August evenings. You can find the planet in the south-southwest around 9pm CDT when it forms the vertex of a another sweet triangle that includes Mars & Antares

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“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” ~Winston S. Churchill

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

According to Rudolf Steiner’s Original Calendar of the Soul:

Birthday of Joachim, Father of Mary

274 – Feast Day of Saint Agapitus a martyr saint. According to his legend, 15-year-old Agapitus, was thrown to wild animals in the local arena at Palestrina. The beasts refused to harm him, & he was beheaded

326 – Feast day of St. Helena, the consort of the Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus & the mother of Emperor Constantine the Great. She is an important figure in the history of Christianity & the world due to her major influence on her son & her own contribution in placing Christianity at the heart of Western Civilization. She is traditionally credited with a pilgrimage to Syria Palaestina, particularly to Jerusalem, during which she is claimed to have discovered the True Cross

670 – Feast day of Saint Fiacre of Breuil, who built a hospice for travelers in what is now Saint-Fiacre, Seine-et-Marne in France. Fiachra is an ancient pre-Christian name from Ireland. The meaning has been interpreted to mean “battle king”, a derivative of the word fiach “raven”, found in ancient Irish folklore, such as the Children of Lir.

849 – Deathday of Walafrid Strabo, an Alemannic monk – historical, poetical & theological writer

1227 – Deathday of Genghis Khan

1587 – Birthday of Virginia Dare, granddaughter of Governor John White of the Colony of Roanoke – the first English child born in the Americas

1590 – John White, the governor of the Roanoke Colony, returns from a supply trip to England & finds his settlement deserted

1612 – The trial of the Pendle witches, one of England’s most famous witch trials, begins at Lancaster Assizes.

1634 – Urbain Grandier, accused & convicted of sorcery, is burned alive in Loudun, France

1735 – The “Evening Post” of Boston, MA, was published for the first time

1774 – Deathday of Meriwether Lewis, co-leader of the Lewis & Clark Expedition. There is still doubt as to whether he committed suicide or was murdered?

1783 – A huge fireball meteor is seen across Great Britain as it passes over the east coast

1868 – French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovers helium

1891 – Major hurricane strikes Martinique, leaving 700 dead

1892 – Secret military convention to Franco-Russian alliance

1894 – The Bureau of Immigration was established by the U.S. Congress

1903 – German engineer Karl Jatho flies his self-made, motored gliding airplane four months before the first flight of the Wright brothers

1917 – A Great Fire in Thessaloniki, Greece destroys 32% of the city leaving 70,000 individuals homeless

1920 – Women gain the right to vote

1939 – Deathday of Karl Heise a German writer, of esoteric & conspiratorial works. He became known as the author of the book The Entente Freemasonry and the World War II (1919), in which he revealed a Germany conspiracy of Freemasons who were responsible for the outbreak of the First World War. Rudolf Steiner wrote the forward to this book!

1940 – World War II: The Hardest Day air battle, part of the Battle of Britain. The largest aerial engagement in history with heavy losses sustained on both sides

1983 – Hurricane Alicia hits the Texas coast, killing 22 people & causing over US$1 billion in damage

1990 – The first shots were fired by the U.S. in the Persian Gulf Crisis when a U.S. frigate fired rounds across the bow of an Iraqi oil tanker.

1991 – An unsuccessful coup was attempted in against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev. The Soviet hard-liners were responsible. Gorbechev & his family were effectively imprisoned for three days while vacationing in Crimea

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My POD (Poem Of the Day)

~Fuddling in the muddy puddle

I grab onto a Rolly-Polly curled up tight

She carries me like precarious egg light

Silent with the pregnant pause of possibility

I grow within

The ball of silence

Waiting to unfurl in her release…

~hag

***

Edward Burne Jones

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves,” said Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.

His advice might be just what we need to hear right now. I ask you: Have you struggled to change a stagnant situation that has resisted your best efforts? Is there a locked door you’ve been banging on, to no avail? If so, I invite you to redirect your attention. Reclaim the energy you have been expending on closed-down people & moldering systems. Instead, work on the unfinished beauty of what lies closest at hand: YOURSELF.

What do you typically do just before you fall asleep & right after you wake up?

These rituals are important for our mental/spiritual health. Without exaggeration, we could say they are sacred times when we’re poised in the threshold between the two great dimensions of life.

What would it be like to give special care & attention to those transitions in the coming week?

Perhaps, as much as possible, to avoid watching TV or surfing the Internet right up to the moment you turn off the light, & what about not leaping out of bed the instant an alarm clock detonates. How about not using the alarm clock?

Become primed to receive special revelations, even ringing epiphanies, while in those in-between states.

Can you manage to be both highly alert & deeply relaxed? Could you be wildly curious & yet also serenely reflective? Can you imagine yourself being extra hungry to crack life’s secrets, but also at peace with your destiny exactly the way it is?

If you can honestly answer YES to those questions, you’ll get a lot of help in the coming week. The universe may even seem to be conspiring to educate & heal you. You will receive a steady flow of clues about how to get closer to living your dreams.

“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, & thinking what nobody has thought.” Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Hungarian biochemist

The best way to prepare for a Big Shift, is to cultivate mental & emotional states that ripen us to be ready for anything:

* a commitment to not getting lost inside our own heads;

* a strategy to avoid being enthralled with the hypnotic lure of painful emotions, past events, & worries about the future;

* a trust in “the ever present help of the spiritual world” over our time-worn beliefs & old habits;

* a talent for turning up our curiosity full blast & tuning in to the raw truth of every moment with our beginner’s mind fully engaged;

* and an eagerness to dwell gracefully in the midst of all the interesting questions that tease & teach us.

Together, in our own individual way, we can become prime for an enduring, simmering & steady brand of mindfulness — a state of being more-or-less perpetually in the Tao, in the groove, in the zone…

See you there

XOX

Blessings & Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg

Measuring the syllables- In the haiku of my life

August 17, 2016Quote, Remembering, Rudolf Steiner Quote~hag

17 August, 2016 – Astro-Weather:

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

***

“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 1^st performance of Rudolf Steiner’s 2^nd 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

***

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

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~Confessions of a Modern Rosicrucian

Monthly Archives: August 2016

“The Human Self in Course of Time Shall Ripen”

Well-spoken in the Thunder

I am an oar made ready

She carries me like precarious egg light

Measuring the syllables- In the haiku of my life

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