11 September 2016 –
Astro-Weather: The Moon is just about equidistant from Altair, & Mars.
Asteroid 2 Pallas the second-largest object orbiting between Mars & Jupiter remains in the evening sky. You can find it in the dim constellation Equuleus the Little Horse, which lies just west of its big cousin, Pegasus, climbing nearly two-thirds of the way to the zenith in the southern sky around 10 pm CDT.
***
“It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”~Benjamin Franklin
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Birthday of Abraham, ancestor of the Semitic Hebrews & Arabs
354 – Deathday of Saints Protus & Hyacinth mentioned in “Depositio Martyrum”
1826 – Captain William Morgan, an ex-freemason is arrested in Batavia, New York for ‘debt’ after declaring that he would publish The Mysteries of Free Masonry. This sets into motion the events that led to his mysterious disappearance
1830 – Anti-Masonic Party convention; one of the first American political party conventions
1851 – Christiana Resistance: Escaped slaves stand against their former owner in armed resistance in Christiana, Pennsylvania, creating a rallying cry for the abolitionist movement
1893 – Parliament of the World’s Religions opens in Chicago, where Swami Vivekananda delivers his speech on fanaticism, tolerance & the truth inherent in all religions
1897 –Menelik II of Ethiopia captures Gaki Sherocho, the last king of Kaffa, bringing an end to that ancient kingdom
1919 – U.S. Marines invade Honduras
1921 – Nahalal, the first Jewish settlement in Palestine, as part of a Zionist plan to colonize Palestine creating a Jewish state, later to be called Israel
1932 – Deathday of Fritz Lemmermayer an Austrian writer, journalist & closest childhood friend of Rudolf Steiner in Vienna. Fritz was a passionate anti-materialist, he wanted to devote his life to the creation & maintenance of spiritual values.
In 1883 he completed his novel “The Alchemist”. Rudolf Steiner met Lemmermayer again in 1886 in the circle of the poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie. An extensive correspondence attests to the close friendship between the two (see GA 38 ).
In ” My Life ” Steiner says: Fritz Lemmermayer, with whom I was later on terms of intimate friendship, I came to know at one of delle Grazie’s afternoons. A highly noteworthy man. Whatever interested him he expressed with inwardly measured dignity. In his outward appearance he resembled equally the musician Rubinstein and the actor Lewinsky. With Hebbel he developed almost a cult. He had definite views on art and life born out of the sagacious understanding of the heart, and these were unusually fixed. He had written the interesting and profound romance, Der Alchemist(3), and much besides that was characterized by beauty and depth. He knew how to consider the least things in life from the view-point of the most vital. I recall how I once saw him in his charming little room in a side-street in Vienna together with other friends. He had planned his meal: two soft-boiled eggs, to be cooked in an instantaneous boiler, together with bread. He remarked with much emphasis while the water was heating to boil the eggs for us: “This will be delicious!” In a later phase of my life I shall again have occasion to speak of him (see GA 028, p 141f )
Lemmermayer & Steiner joined the ranks of the Viennese artist circle in the house of the protestant priest Alfred Formey. In 1891 Lemmermayer was vice president of Schrifstellerbundes Iduna , named after Iduna , the Norse goddess of youth & immortality a counterweight against the currents of naturalism.
Lemmermayer became a member of the Anthroposophical Society in 1920. He Steiner on many trips through Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Holland & England. This led to his 1929 published memories, where he spoke about Rudolf Steiner, Robert Hamerling & other personalities of the Austrian intellectual life of the 80s. In addition, Lemmermayer published in the weekly ” Das Goetheanum “.
1940 – George Stibitz performs the first remote operation of a computer
1941 – Ground is broken for the construction of The Pentagon
1941 – Charles Lindbergh’s Des Moines Speech accusing the British, Jews & the Roosevelt administration of pressing for war with Germany
1943 – World War II: Start of the liquidation of the Ghettos in Minsk & Lida by the Nazis
1950 – Korean War: President Harry S. Truman approved military operations north of the 38th parallel
1954 – Hurricane Edna hits New England as a Category 1 hurricane, causing significant damage & 129 deaths
1961 – Hurricane Carla strikes the Texas coast as a Category 4 hurricane, the second strongest storm ever to hit the state, 129 people die
1968 – Air France Flight 1611 crashes off Nice, France, killing 89 passengers &six crew
1973 – Deathday of Salvador Guillermo a Chilean physician & politician, known as the first Marxist to become president of a Latin American country through open elections. Allende’s involvement in Chilean political life spanned a period of nearly forty years. As a member of the Socialist Party, he was a senator, deputy & cabinet minister. In 1970, he won the presidency. Allende adopted a policy of nationalization of industries & collectivisation; due to these & other factors, increasingly strained relations lead to his death. On 11 September 1973, the military moved to oust Allende in a coup d’état sponsored by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As troops surrounded La Moneda Palace, he gave his last speech vowing not to resign. He was assassinated by the CIA assault rifle attack.
Following Allende’s death, General Augusto Pinochet declined to return authority to the civilian government, & Chile was later ruled by a military junta that was in power up until 1990, ending almost four decades of Chilean democratic rule. The military junta that took over dissolved the Congress of Chile & began a persecution of alleged dissidents, in which thousands of Allende’s supporters were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered.
1974 – Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 crashes in Charlotte, North Carolina, killing 69 passengers & two crew.
1976 – A bomb planted by Zvonko Bušić is found at New York’s Grand Central Terminal
1978 – Janet Parker is the last person to die of smallpox, in a laboratory-associated outbreak
1982 – The international forces that were guaranteeing the safety of Palestinian refugees following Israel’s 1982 Invasion of Lebanon leave Beirut. Five days later, several thousand refugees are massacred in the Sabra & Shatila refugee camps
1988 – The St. Jean Bosco massacre takes place in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
1992 – Hurricane Iniki, one of the most damaging hurricanes in United States history, devastates the Hawaiian islands of Kauai & Oahu
9/11 – 2001 – Two hijacked aircraft crash into the World Trade Center in New York City, while a third smashes into The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, & a fourth into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, in a series of coordinated suicide attacks by 19 members of al-Qaeda? Over 2,996 people are killed, many suffer illness associated with the clean up
***
Van James
Calendar of the Soul Twenty-fifth Week [September 11, 2016 – September 17, 2016]
I can belong now to myself
And shining spread my inner light
Into the dark of space and time.
Toward sleep is urging all creation,
But inmost soul must stay awake
And carry wakefully sun’s glowing
Into the winter’s icy flowing.
~Rudolf Steiner
***
Sir Edward Coley
Spiritual epiphany alert!
Yes, my dear bundles of rumbling DNA
Uncanny revelations are imminent!
Hope you don’t mind being shaken awake
in the middle of your regularly scheduled life…
It doesn’t matter if you’re a true believer
or a work-a-day TV viewer — YOU
will soon be invited
to have one of your logical certainties torn out
by the roots & replaced with a throbbing vision
of cosmic hoopla…
Brace yourself for the most pungent enlightenment
you’ve had since your last mudwrestle
with an angel…
…for Long-standing versions of reality
are mutating…Stories that have remained fixed
are about to acquire unexpected wrinkles…
& from the crack in the godhead
new possibilities are pouring forth…
&…there’s something You can do
to ensure that the new versions of the old vision
are more empowering than the overlay:
- Escape the cramped quarters of your own mind…
2. Slip away from the corners you’ve been backed into…
3. Stop telling the convoluted stories ‘they’ concocted
to rationalize why you should be afraid…
4. Get out of the loop & escape into the big,
fresh places that will rejuvenate
your eyes and heart…& for the foreseeable future,
5. take on the demeanor & spirit of a noble warrior
with high integrity & a fluid sense
of humor…What I pray is that we won’t be satisfied with mediocre
half-truths; that it is ok be focused
on cutting out waste, fraud, & delusion; that
it’s ok to be itchy to know more about the unacknowledged
games that are being played…Frustration, I hope,
will be our holy fuel…Unsweetened lemonade,
I trust, will be our rejuvenating drink…
These are blessings, my friend, not curses..!
I pray that you’ll pick one of those itchy scabs
until it bleeds
so the healing process can start over —
the right way this time…See…there goes that misplaced acceptance of
warped chunks of complications…Here comes
an opportunity to make a break for bubbly responsibility
True Human Freedom…
To take advantage, we’ll need to travel much lighter –
So please peel off your heart-armor – polish your sun-shield
Power the rust off your sword
Wipe that forty-pound sneer of doubt off your face –
Bury your broken-down theories by the wayside,
& donate all your unnecessary props
to the birds & the bees – Strip down –
for where we’re going, all you’ll need are
your good looks & a big fresh attitude…
I end this 9/11 epiphany with:
THE “AMERICAN” or “THREEFOLD” VERSE sent by Rudolf Steiner to Ralph Courtney, a pioneer of Anthroposophy in North America for the Threefold Group in New York City, which later established the Threefold Community in Spring Valley (now Chestnut Ridge). This verse for the American spirit speaks of the inner unity of human beings and of support from the spiritual world for our efforts:
May our feeling penetrate
To the center of our hearts –
And seek, in love, to unite with those who share our goals
And with the spirits who look down benevolently
on our hearts earnest strivings Sending us strength from realms of light
to illuminate our love.
In Peace & Good Will
***
Michaelmas Festival: 7pm -9pm, Friday 30 September, 2016 at The Rudolf Steiner Branch 4249 N. Lincoln Ave. Chicago
Heart-Thinking: Michael Beckoning
Piano & Voice – Kristen & David Wray performing Nacht und Träume + Ganymed– By Franz Schubert
Activating Heart-Thinking– Hazel Archer Ginsberg
Copper Rod Eurythmy: ALL
Grimm’s Tale “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs” by Laura Donkel
Harvest Songs-Singing with Elisabeth Swisher: ALL
Verse for the Michaelic Age: ALL
$10 Donation & Snacks to Share Encouraged
For more info. Contact Festivals Coordinator Hazel Archer GinsbergHazel@ReverseRitual.com
