Monthly Archives: August 2023

Perseus

Celestial Event, Upcoming Event

What can we acquire in our present age from ancient myth & legend? Every year we have the Perseid meteor shower to awaken us from our Summer slumber. Perseus is the oldest of the Greek heroes, 3 generations before Hercules, long before the Trojan War.

~Benvenuto Cellini’s bronze statue in Florence

The Perseus legend was a favorite subject in painting & sculpture – the earliest scenes from mythology appearing in art.

His tale in a nutshell: Acrisius, the king of Argos, had a beautiful daughter named Danae. The king was told by the Oracle of the Sun god Apollo that Danae’s son would take over his fertile land. To thwart the prophecy, Acrisius imprisoned his daughter in a bronze, underground chamber.

~The amorous adventures of Zeus. Danae Gubaidullin Raushan

But Zeus came to the entombed Danae in the form of a shower of golden light entering thru a crack in the roof of her chamber. And Perseus was the demigod offspring of this unusual union between Zeus, the King of the gods, taking advantage of the Sun god’s omen, to appear as a shower of golden light, & Danae, a human being from the fertile plain – Princess of the golden agricultural Argos of ancient Greece.

~Walter Crane

Perseus had a calling. Aided by Hermes & the Goddess Athena, he pressed the Graiae, the prophetic witch sisters of the Gorgons, into helping him by seizing the one eye & one tooth that the sisters shared between them – not returning it until they provided him with winged sandals (which enabled him to fly), the cap of Hades (which conferred invisibility), a curved adamant sickle-sword, to decapitate Medusa, & a bag in which to conceal her serpent head. Since the gaze of Medusa turned all who looked at her to stone, Perseus guided himself by the reflection in a shield given to him by the wise Athena. He beheaded Medusa, the only Gorgon who was mortal, when she was asleep. From the blood that spurted from her neck sprang Chrysaor & Pegasus, her two sons by Poseidon. He then returned to Seriphus, where his mothe Danae had taken refuge, to rescue her by turning the wicked ruler Polydectes & his supporters to stone at the sight of Medusa’s head.

A further deed attributed to Perseus was his rescue of the Ethiopian princess Andromeda when he was on his way home with Medusa’s head. Andromeda’s mother, Cassiopeia, had claimed to be more beautiful than the sea nymphs, so Poseidon punished Ethiopia by flooding & plaguing it with a sea monster. An oracle informed Andromeda’s father, King Cepheus, that the ills would cease if he exposed Andromeda to the monster, which he did. Perseus, passing by, saw the princess, & fell in love with her. He turned the sea monster to stone by showing it Medusa’s head, & went on to marry Andromeda.

Later Perseus gave the Gorgon’s head to Athena, who placed it on her shield. He gave his other accoutrements, including most notably the winged sandals, to Hermes. He then accompanied his mother back to her native Argos, where, as fate would have it, he accidentally struck her father, Acrisius dead when throwing the discus, thus fulfilling the prophecy that he would kill his grandfather.

The chief characters in the Perseus legend, Perseus, Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Pegasus, & the sea monster (Cetus), all figure in the night sky as constellations.

This is the peak weekend to receive, like Danae, the shooting stars which can turn wishes into the birthing of deeds. Perseus, a reflection of the mighty Archai Michael, must be reborn in us. We must cut off the head of the old way of thinking where the fates bind us, so we can consciously ‘Speak with the Stars’, thru the heart – in freedom – upholding Wisdom, with healing wings. Then we can reveal the underworld, & forge the golden light into an iron will for good.

~hag

10 August 2023 – “Speaking with the Stars”: Perseid meteors have been streaking through Earth’s atmosphere since mid-July. But the moon is now waning, just in time for the shower’s peak on the mornings of August 11, 12 and 13. ~earthsky

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day

Ultra-Violet Archer – winner of the first annual Sound Opinions Music Prize

~Dali

Sunday 13 August 2023 – Prep-Stir – Potluck – Bonfire –

*To celebrate The 2nd Harvest = Lammas

*The Perseid Meteor Showers, Venus/Sun Conjunction

*The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

*And a bon voyage Blessing for Ultra-Violet Archer

7 – 9 pm at the Lucchesi-Archer-Ginsberg domicile

Please Bring Food & Drink to share, & a jar for the prep

RSVP Hazel@ReverseRitual.com

.

Identity

Calendar of the Soul, Chicago Event, Community, Festival, History, Insight, Rudolf Steiner Quote, Upcoming Event

Greetings friends – I am just now coming back – with the 4th Quarter Moon & the building up of the Perseid Meteor showers – fresh from Seminar 4 of the Association for Anthroposophic Psychology (AAP) where the theme was dealing with the 3rd Septennial – age 14-21 asking: Who Am I ? – The Search for Identity & Authenticity.

When Home Won't Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art | ICA/Boston - YouTube

And Hallelujah – Because the border restrictions imposed by the Corona crisis finally loosened in May, Dr. James Dyson, Simon Kuttner, & Zheni Nasi were able to join us in person for the 1st time! – Bringing a distinctly glorious soul-shift in the state of our communion this go-round.

Talented 16-Year-Old Artist Turns Her Wildest Dreams Into Paintings | Bored Panda

I will no doubt be unpacking our deep dive into the polarities that get sparked during the teenage years, on the micro & macro levels – with all its astral dynamics, as the digestion proceeds.

Catherine Fraser | Cowichan Artisans

For now, I’ll just share this echo: Having gathered at Camphill Kimberton on the Full Thunder-Buck Moon during the Cross-Quarter Time of the 2nd Harvest, between the Summer Solstice & The Autumn Equinox – with the local biodynamic sweet corn plumb & golden, I could sense the ‘Spirit of Place’ standing strongly with the guiding Spirit behind AAP, vibrating thru us all.

10. Mood Swings - Biffno in 2023 | Mood swings art, Surreal art, Emotional art

And as we contemplated together the essence of adolescence – it seemed to me that in looking at the macro level of human evolution, that perhaps society at large is stuck in those teenage years – a reactive raging
turmoil – the result of a lack of identity – of not yet being able to fully achieve a connection to the Higher “I”…  

James Dyson painted a gripping picture of the Youth Movement he was part of – How in 1970, over 400 young people came together for a conference in Spring Valley. Michael Babitch, the long time Camphiller I was staying with was also at this seminal gathering, fresh from the Peace Corp.

Sparked by the success & growing interest within the Youth Movement at that time, James then went on to work with a team of young people to bring a conference to the Goetheanum in 1973. He spoke about the rigidity of the Elders there, & the many obstacles they faced. And yet over 1000 young people from all over the world came together in the light of Anthroposophy!  

Was this the longed for ‘Culmination’ that Steiner spoke about?

Reach For the Stars Painting by Linda Carmel - Pixels

James & so many others in that volatile time were helped to find their star by finding each other. Many of those earnest young people went on to become practitioners of Anthroposophical Initiates in the world.

2nd Holy Night: Christmas 2020 | Reverse Ritual

It reminded me of what Steiner said at the end of the Christmas Conference – 8:30 pm on 1 January, 1924 in The Responsibility Incumbent on Us: “And so, my dear friends, bear out with you into the world your warm hearts in whose soil you have laid the Foundation Stone for the Anthroposophical Society, bear out with you your warm hearts in order to do work in the world that is strong in healing. Help will come to you because your heads will be enlightened by what you all now want to be able to direct in conscious willing. Let us today make this resolve with all our strength. And we shall see that if we show ourselves to be worthy, then a good star will shine over that which is willed from here. My dear friends, follow this good star. We shall see whither the gods shall lead us through the light of this star.

Light Divine
Christ-Sun,
Warm thou
Our hearts,
Enlighten
thou
Our heads!“

Goetheanum - Wikipedia

Many questions arose about whether this Responsibility Incumbent on Us was heeded. Has Dornach become simply a place holder, a memorial – at worst a mausoleum…? –

File:Wandtafelbild - Gotheanum-Motiv (1924).jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Or is it perhaps a sheath – an inverted chalice over the etheric essence of the 1st Goetheanum – a protective Michaelic Sheild – a concrete cradle, like the moon, holding the host of the etheric substance of ‘The Word’ released by the sacrificial fire to flow into & permeate the cosmic ethers..?

Other Artwork by Rudolf Steiner

Are we willing & able to do the hard work of not only reading the Cosmic Script, but actually putting what has been inscribed in the ethers into practice in our lives, thru the purifying of our soul forces, for the highest human evolution…?

Why cows have horns

The years of biodynamic farming on the Dornach hill gives the land a spiritual glow; & the ancient Hermitage still seems to have some juice – At best – can the Goetheanum become a guiding light to the future…?

It’s up to us – & yes, ‘the Ordering of Space & the Course of Time’ will tell –

Mercury, as evening star, stood in the sign of Libra, the balance.” | Reverse Ritual

What I do know is – that it’s 100 years since the re-founding – And these are the kind of questions we must be asking.

Christian Rosenkreutz Drawing by Elena Soldatkina - Fine Art America

And of course, as we have discussed many times here on RR – it is a Rosicrucian law that after 100 years ‘the Tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz is opened’. This imagination reveals a deep occult truth – The seeds that were planted by the great Christian Initiates that were not able to bear fruit in the last century, can now rise from the grave to become not only a Resurrection, but a furthering, & a Renewal – an opportunity to meet “I” to “I” to enact the New Mysteries of Love & Freedom.

Christian Rosenkreuz | ReverbNation

And what became clear to me sitting in our circle of 50 earnest souls, is that the Association for Anthroposophic Psychology is a true guiding light, a practical, experientially based Mystery School for our time – chalk full of all the pushes & pullings that are the key notes of initiation – The not so beautiful karmic realtionships, that so sorely test us, & the intense trials that inner development brings…

The Time is at Hand' | Reverse Ritual

Dear friends, together we can stand with the ‘Representative of Humanity’ spared by the flames of jealousy, to unveil the New Isis = to live into the truth that: “Love is the result of Wisdom that has been reborn in the I” – ever cultivating Anthroposophia within ourselves as we ‘Awaken to Community’ – To fulfill ‘the Mystery of the “I” giving back to the Gods’, in the co-creation of a New Golden Civilization – “I” into it”.

~hag

8 August 2023 – “Speaking with the Stars”: Early tomorrow morning, the waning crescent moon will pass the dipper-shaped Pleiades star cluster, aka the Seven Sisters. And on Thursday, the even thinner moon will be close to bright orange star Aldebaran, fiery Eye of the Bull in the constellation Taurus. 

Ripening on the Vine Painting by Ramona Kraemer-Dobson - Pixels

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

The vision of St. Dominic receiving the Rosary from the Virgin by Bernardo Cavallino

1170 – Saint Dominic, founder of the Dominicans

1576 – The cornerstone for Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg observatory is laid on the island of Hven.

1876 – Thomas Edison receives a patent for his mimeograph.

1879 – Deathday of Immanuel Hermann Fichte, German philosopher and academic

1908 – Wilbur Wright makes his first flight at a racecourse at Le Mans, France. It is the Wright Brothers’ first public flight.

1929 – The German airship Graf Zeppelin begins a round-the-world flight.

1946 – First flight of the Convair B-36, the world’s first mass-produced nuclear weapon delivery vehicle, the heaviest mass-produced piston-engined aircraft, with the longest wingspan of any military aircraft, and the first bomber with intercontinental range.

1974 – President Richard Nixon, in a nationwide television address, announces his resignation from the office of the President of the United States effective noon the next day.

 

Lily Fortenou

RUDOLF STEINER’S CALENDAR OF THE SOUL
translated (with added titles) by Roy Sadler
LAMMASTIDE II
Can I Imagine My Soul’s Need?
v18
Can I make wide my soul
that she unite with seed
of Cosmic Word conceived?
I feel my foresight asking me
to find the strangth my soul will need
to form her spirit garment worthily.

This is the Soul Calendar’s first question verse
and its mirror is the only other one.

ADVENT II
Can True Being Inspire Me?
v35
Can I experience true being
that it may find itself anew
in soul’s creative urge?
I feel a power trusting me
to make my Self with modesty
a member of the Cosmic Self.

~Dali

Sunday 13 August 2023

Prep-Stir – Potluck – Bonfire

To celebrate The 2nd Harvest = Lammas

The Perseid Meteor Showers, Venus/Sun Conjunction

The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary

And a bon voyage Blessing for Ultra-Violet Archer

7 – 9 pm

at the Lucchesi-Archer-Ginsberg domicile

Please Bring Food & Drink to share,

& a jar for the prep

RSVP Hazel@ReverseRitual.com

Breaking Bread

Community, Festival, Summer

“Bringing in the Sheaves” – Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness, sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve: Now begins the harvest and the time of reaping, we shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves. Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves, we shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves. Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves, we shall come rejoicing bringing in the sheaves…”

Today 1 August 2023 on this Thunder-Buck Full Moon, we meet the 2nd Harvest (the 1st was the herb harvest at St. John’s). The Feast of Lammas or Lughnasadh begins today & goes thru August 8th when we hit the astrological Cross-Quarter between Summer Solstice & Fall Equinox. It is a long season bringing us all the way thru Summer.

It is also the Feast Day of Joseph of Arimathea – According to all four Gospels, the man who assumed responsibility for the burial of Jesus after the crucifixion. A number of stories that developed during the Middle Ages connect him with both Glastonbury, where he is supposed to have founded the earliest Christian oratory, & also with the Grail legend.

“One must penetrate to an understanding of the Mystery of the Bread, which is said to have been broken by Christ Jesus in the same chalice in which Joseph of Arimathea caught His blood. As legend tells it, this chalice was then removed to Europe, but was preserved by angels in a region high above the surface of the earth until the arrival of Titurel who created for this Grail, this sacred chalice, a temple on Mont Salvat” ~Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, April 16, 1921

The Wheel turns from St. John’s Tide with its message of the inner Christ Sun and the mirroring of the Holy nights, to the Sun in the heart of the Lion (or at least it’s where Regulus, the heart of the lion, was a couple of thousand years ago!) Lammas, or Loaf mas, a Cross-Quarter festival traditionally celebrated at the beginning of August, marks the point when we leave the Garden, and earn our own way, “by the sweat of our brow”.

The harvest of grain, and the baking of bread, represents the first child of the cosmic union of Sun and Earth. It symbolizes the essence of humanity, born from this union, for the loaf is more than a gift of nature, it is made by the combined forces of nature with the will forces of human activity.

The harvest season is a time of judgment. We are called upon to sift through the things that have grown up during the past half-year, and decide what we will keep and what we will cut away. We must make choices, and act on them. The cycle of life turns past the peak of growth, into the time of release.

In astrology, Bella Luna, when she is five-eighths past the New Moon, is called the “Disseminating Moon”. During this phase, what has built up in the waxing cycle begins to be released into the environment. While today in the Lunar cycle we have reached the Full Thunder-Buck Moon; In looking at the relationship of Earth & Sun at this time of year – We start to see the results of our work we are beginning a ‘Disseminating phase’. Because At Lammas, the Sun is five-eighths of the way around the Wheel from Winter Solstice. Growth has reached its peak, & the life of the Sun God has begun to bleed off into the fruit & grain.

Bailey Dreggle

The King is Dead Long Live the King – for now is also the time of sacrifice, of death in service of life. Some of the first fruits are ready for harvest, but some, too unripe to be eaten, must be plucked anyway. These are culls, removed so they won’t drain the life force from the good fruit. If everything was left on the tree, the life force would be diluted, or worse, the bad fruit could weigh down a branch until it breaks, destroying the entire crop, or sometimes killing the tree. The culls are taken so the rest of the fruit, and those who depend on the crop for survival, might live.

John Barleycorn must die… ‘Cut in half and buried, then beaten with sticks, and finally crushed between stones’… as the song goes, nevertheless rises once again. Bread is the perfect sacrifice for “Loaf Mass” or Lughnassadh as the Celtics called it, for they knew that this festival is more than just the first fruits of the earth — it also involves the first fruits of human labor. Grain is processed by human craft, and joined with the four elements to make the staff of life.

So bake a loaf of bread on Lammas. If you’ve never made bread before, this is a good time to start. Honor the source of the flour as you work with it: remember it was once a plant growing on mother Earth. If you have a garden, add something you’ve harvested–herbs or onion or veggies. If you don’t feel up to making wheat bread, make corn bread, or gingerbread people, or popcorn. What’s most important is intention. All that is necessary to enter sacred time is an awareness of the meaning of your actions.

Saying Grace with you at Camphill Kmberton

~hag