28 | August | 2023 | Cognitive Ritual

In the reckoning of Spiritual Science, humanity is experiencing now in Our Present Age, a ‘recapitulation’ of Ancient Egypt. In that time Sirius was called the Star of Isis – the Sister/Lover/Resurrector of the Sun-god Osiris. On a spiritual-physical level, the body of Osiris was seen as Egypt itself. This was a precursor to the sacrifice of the Cosmic Christ who become the meaning & body of the whole Earth. In that time, the body of Osiris was like an overlay upon the land, dying, & returning to life each year with the flooding of the Nile, which occurred thru the rising of the Star of Isis – the rescuer & life-giver – ‘The soul of Egypt’. The annual appearance of Sirius just before dawn (starting at the Summer Solstice, in those days) heralded the Resurrection of the Nile, on which Egyptian agriculture depended. (And now the rising of Sirius happens 2 months later due to the precession of the equinoxes)

Temple inscriptions describe the star as the ‘Divine Sepat’, meaning the ‘Soul of Isis’.

And here’s an interesting Ah-Ha to roll around with: All these references in Sumerian & Egyptian texts before 500 AD, describe the star as ‘red -orange’ in color.

But dear friends, after that date, the references change – & Sirius is described as blue!

Today, we can look up into the dawn twilight & see that Sirius is the bluest & brightest most scintillating star in the sky.

It makes me think about how Steiner points out that in the ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer, the Iliad & the Odyssey, we read: ‘Wine-dark sea’ from oînos (οἶνος, “wine”) + óps (ὄψ, “eye; face”) oînops can also refer to oxen-blood, in describing a reddish color. Steiner tells that the human being of ancient Greece was not able to perceive the color blue!

There is a Hopi story that speaks about this shift in color; tying it to a change in epochs: “When the blue star Kachina makes its appearance in the heavens, the Fifth World will emerge.”

The ancient Shinto of Japan called Sirius ‘our second sun’ & aligned their Temples in its direction.

This gives me hope that we can continue to evolve in each epoch – so that in time & with intention, we will ALL be able to see what many cannot see today…Christ in the etheric…

Anthroposophy gives us a powerful imagination that describes how when physical matter was forming there was a lot of upheaval on earth, a picture involving the separation of Sun & Moon – no small thing – So most of humanity, still in our formative state, left the volatile earth & spent time in other planets or stars, until our karma brought us down, when the earth was more stable physically.

Well, maybe you have guessed since I speak so much with Sirius, that I resonate to that, & feel that Sirius is ‘My Star’.

What is YOUR Star?

~hag

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Today 28 August in 1749 – The Birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German author, poet, playwright, & diplomat. In 1888, as a result of his work for the Kürschner edition of Goethe’s works, Rudolf Steiner was invited to work as an editor at the Goethe archives in Weimar. As well as the introductions & commentaries to 4 volumes of Goethe’s scientific writings. Steiner wrote 2 books about Goethe’s philosophy: The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World-Conception (1886), which Steiner regarded as the epistemological foundation & justification for his later work, & Goethe’s Conception of the World (1897). Steiner writes about Goethe in many places in his huge exegesis, including commentaries on his play Faust.

Goethe and the Evolution of Consciousness, by Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, August 19th, 1921

“…As a young man Goethe necessarily grew up in the outlook of his contemporaries and in the way in which they regarded the world and the affairs of human beings. But he really did not feel at home in this world of thought. There was something turbulent about the young Goethe, but it was a turbulence of a special kind. We need only look at the poems he composed in his youth and we shall find that there was always a kind of inner opposition to what his contemporaries were thinking about the world and about life.

But at the same time there is something else in Goethe — a kind of appeal to what lives in Nature, saying something more enduring and conveying much more than the opinions of those around him could convey. Goethe appeals to the revelations of Nature rather than to the revelations of the human mind. And this was the real temper of his soul even when he was still a child, when he was studying at Leipzig, Strassburg and Frankfurt, and for the first period of his life at Weimar.

Think of him as a child with all the religious convictions of his contemporaries around him. He himself relates — and I have often drawn attention to this beautiful episode in Goethe’s early life — how as a boy of seven he built an altar by taking a music-stand and laying upon it specimens of minerals from his father’s collection; how he placed a taper on the top, lighting it by using a burning-glass to catch the rays of the sun, in order, as he says later — for at seven years he would not, of course, have spoken in this way — to bring an offering to the great God of Nature.

We see him growing beyond what those around him have to say, coming into a closer union with Nature, in whose arms he first of all seeks refuge. Read the works written by Goethe in his youth and you will find that they reveal just this attitude of mind. Then a great longing to go to Italy seizes him and his whole outlook changes in a most remarkable way.

We shall never understand Goethe unless we bear in mind the overwhelming change that came upon him in Italy. In letters to friends at Weimar he speaks of the works of art which conjure up before his soul the whole way in which the Greeks worked. He says: “I suspect that the Greeks proceeded according to those laws by which Nature herself proceeds, and of which I am on the track.” — At last Goethe is satisfied with an environment, an artistic environment enfilled with ideas much closer to Nature than those around him in his youth. And we see how in the course of his Italian journey the idea of metamorphosis arises from this mood of soul, how in Italy Goethe begins to see the transformation of leaf into petal in such a way that the thought of metamorphosis in the whole of Nature flashes up within him.

It is only now that Goethe finds a world in which his soul really feels at home. And, if we study all that he produced after that time, both as a poet and a scientist, it is borne in upon us that he was now living in a world of thought not easily intelligible to his contemporaries, nor indeed to the man of to-day.

Those who embark upon a study of Goethe equipped with the modern scholarship acquired in every kind of educational institution from the Elementary School to the University, and with habitual thought and outlook, will never understand him. For an inner change of mental outlook is essential if we are to realise what Goethe really had in his mind when, in Italy, he re-wrote Iphigenia in Greek metre, after having first composed it in the mood of the Germanic North. Nor is it possible to understand Goethe’s whole attitude to Faust until we realise the fundamental nature of the change that had taken place.

After he had been to Italy, Goethe really hated the first version of Faust which he had written earlier. After that journey he would never have been able to write the passage where Faust turns away from the

“… heavenly forces rising and descending, Their golden urns reciprocally lending,” where he turns his back upon the macrocosm, crying: “Thou, Spirit of the Earth art nearer to me.”

…And many other passages can be read in the same sense. Take, for instance, that wonderful treatise written in the year 1790, on the Metamorphosis of the Plants (Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erkennen). We shall have to admit that before his journey to Italy Goethe could never have had at his command a language which seems to converse with the very growth and unfolding life of the plants. And this is an eloquent indication of the place of Goethe’s soul in the whole sweep of evolution. Goethe felt a stranger to the thought of his time the moment he was obliged inwardly to ‘digest’ the result of contemporary scientific education. He was always striving for a different kind of thinking, a different way of approaching the world, and he found it when he felt that he had brought to life within him the attitude of the Greeks to Nature, to the World, to Man…” ~Rudolf Steiner

430 – Deathday of Saint Augustine an early Christian theologian & philosopher whose writings influenced the development of Western philosophy. Among his most important works are The City of God & Confessions. In his early years, he was heavily influenced by Manichaeism & afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. He “established anew the ancient Faith.” After his conversion to Christianity in 387, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy & theology, believing that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom. He is the patron saint of brewers, printers, theologians, the alleviation of sore eyes.

632 – Deathday of Fatimah, daughter of the Prophet Muhammad

1189 – The Third or Kings’ Crusade, was an attempt to reconquer the Holy Land. The campaign was largely successful, regaining the important cities of Acre & Jaffa, but it failed to capture Jerusalem, the emotional & spiritual motivation of the Crusade. After the Crusaders had driven the Muslims from Acre, Richard the Lionheart finalized a treaty granting Muslim control over Jerusalem, but allowing unarmed Christian pilgrims & merchants to visit the city.

1833 – The Slavery Abolition Act through most of the British Empire

1850 – Wagner’s Lohengrin premieres at the German National Theatre, Weimar

Image result for The Carrington event, Solar Storm d Michael Delton

1859 – The Carrington event, Solar Storm disrupts electrical telegraph services & causes aurora to shine so brightly that they are seen clearly all over the earth’s middle latitudes.

1862 – American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run

1943 – World War II: In Denmark, a general strike against the Nazi occupation

1957 – U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond, an ardent segregationist, begins a filibuster to prevent the Senate from voting on Civil Rights Act