06 | April | 2022 | Cognitive Ritual

“Modern humanity is passing over a threshold at which stands a Guardian, a Guardian grave and full of meaning. And this grave Guardian speaks: “Cling not to what has come as a transplant from olden times; look into your hearts, into your souls, that you may be capable of creating new forms. You can only create these new forms when you have faith that the powers of knowledge and of will for this spiritual creation come out of the spiritual world.”

It is only through spiritual-scientific knowledge of the passing of the threshold in our present day that can give the Christ-form to this chaos.” ~Rudolf Steiner, THE SEARCH FOR THE NEW ISIS, DIVINE SOPHIA, GA 202, Lecture III https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/19201225p01.html

I stare into the Clouds
Fore-gathering
Noetic sight
Into squinting syllables.
Watch it pour out honeyed unguents –
A sweet viscus half-light
Overflowing the ashen cup of night.
My I’s washed
With April showers
Splashing like a stepped in puddle
Falling fragrant on the flower.
~hag

6 April 2022 – “Speaking with the Stars”: The waxing crescent Moon passes the Pleiades, Aldebaran, and Aldebaran’s surrounding Hyades, just after the end of twilight.

“What is to be the starting force & impulse for events in social & ethical life must come out of the spiritual world.” ~Rudolf Steiner, New Spiritual Impulses in History” Dornach 16 December, 1917

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

582- Death & Feast Day of Eutychius of Constantinople, Toward the end of his life, Eutychius maintained an opinion that after the resurrection the body will be “more subtle than air” & no longer a tangible thing. This was considered heretical, because it was taken as a denial of the doctrine of physical, corporeal resurrection.

TODAY in 1483 – Good Friday – Birthday of Raphael – Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

TODAY in 1520 – Good Friday – Deathday of Raphael – Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

“It must seem strange that Raphael was the same person as a thorny character like John the Baptist. How could it happen that this thorny man, who had to pave the way for the Mystery of Golgotha in such a violent way, reappeared as the gentle, pliable, charming Raphael? But look at this. Raphael’s father, Giovanni Santi, died when Raphael was eleven. He was a painter. He was not a great painter so far as external achievements go, but he had great ideas in his head, although he could not put them on canvas because he had no technical skill. He was also a poet. There was a great deal of fantasy in him, but the physical capacities simply were not there. He went early through the portal of death, and then his forces worked into his son. In Raphael’s hands and imagination worked all that his father could send into the physical world. One can say that the old Giovanni Santi was a painter without hands in the supersensible world, for in a wonderful karmic relationship he supplied, in combination with the Christ-filled individuality of the Baptist, what came to expression in Raphael. The supersensible world had to work with the physical world to achieve this result. It shows how the so-called dead are able to influence those who have been left behind…” ~ Rudolf Steiner, On the Relationship with the Dead, 23 April 1913

Raphael, as we know from was an Italian painter & architect of the High Renaissance. Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop &, despite his death at 37, leaving a large body of work. Many of his works are found in the Vatican Palace. From 1517 until his death, Raphael lived in the Palazzo Caprini in the Borgo, in rather grand style in a palace designed by Bramante. He never married, & was thought to be bi-sexual. He is said to have had many affairs, but a permanent fixture in his life in Rome was “La Fornarina”, Margherita Luti, the daughter of a baker (fornaro) named Francesco Luti from Siena.

The story goes that Raphael’s premature death on Good Friday, which was also his 37th birthday, was caused by a night of excessive sex with Luti, after which he fell into a fever &, not telling his doctors that this was its cause, was given the wrong cure, which killed him. At his request, Raphael was buried in the Pantheon.

His funeral was extremely grand, attended by large crowds. The inscription in his marble sarcophagus, an elegiac distich written by Pietro Bembo, reads: “Ille hic est Raffael, timuit quo sospite vinci, rerum magna parens et moriente mori”, meaning: “Here lies that famous Raphael by whom Nature feared to be conquered while he lived, and when he was dying, feared herself to die.”

Rudolf Steiner speaks about him in his various incarnations, in ‘The Last Address’ – The Individuality of Elias, John, Raphael, Novalis. Dornach, Michaelmas Eve, 1924, GA 238

1472 –Birthday of Lucas Cranach the Elder, a German Renaissance painter & printmaker

Madonna del Cardellino | The Life of Jesus — Madonna del Cardellino by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

1520 – Good Friday – Deathday of Raphael

1869 – Celluloid is patented

1930 – Gandhi raises a lump of mud and salt and declares, “With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire,” beginning the Salt Satyagraha