30 December (the 364th day of 2018) – “Speaking with the Stars”: Orion shines in the east-southeast after dark, higher every week, but in early evening his three-star Belt is still nearly vertical. The Belt points up toward Aldebaran &, even higher, the Pleiades. In the other direction, the Belt points down to where bright Sirius will rise around 8 pm CST.
Deeply embedded in our cultural tradition of ‘Ringing out the old & Ringing in the new’ on the eve of the New Year, lives many celestial synchronicities, which change every year, but for the last 70 years, with 30 more to go – at Midnight, we are directly ‘downstream’ from the star Sirius.
Because Sirius is the brightest star in our sky, next to the Sun, in antiquity it was known as ‘The Shining One’. The ancient Egyptians called Sirius ‘Isis’ (Sothis) & built their calendar around the rising & setting of this magnificent star. It is interesting to note that our time now is a recapitulation of ancient Egypt (the 3rd cultural epoch) What can we take from that time & make it new?
The Egyptians believed that Sirius had a tremendous effect upon life on our planet. In particular, they felt that Sirius could open a portal into the spiritual world, so they oriented the pyramid at Giza to the Sirius light.
The Sirius system is directly “upstream” of our solar system within the galactic arm of our Milky Way Galaxy (the Orion arm). And of all the stars in our skies, only Sirius exactly matches the length of our solar year, 365.25 days. This exact correlation has led some to surmise that Sirius is related to our Sun as a binary star. Sirius imprints upon us, like the Sun, a realignment of our own vibrational patterns, touched by the perfection of this Golden Proportion.
Our magical midnight of New Beginnings marks the moment when the energies of Sirius, directly overhead, & the forces of the Sun shining thru the earth from the other side, bring transformational re-alignment. The Golden mean holds the codes of perfection which are eternal. To be in conscious attendance of the positional relationship of the Sun & the star Sirius in the mid-heaven at midnight -visualizing the Earth – & all life – in its ultimate perfection – enables us to receive the empowerment of the Spiritual world directly into our consciousness. ~hag
“Behold the Sun
At the midnight hour;
Build with stones in the lifeless ground,
Thus in decay and in the night of Death
Find the Creation’s new beginning,
Young morning’s strength;
Glory in the heights the eternal Word of Gods;
Shelter in the depths the Powers of Peace.
In darkness dwelling, create a Sun.
In matter weaving, know the joy of Spirit”! ~Rudolf Steiner Schmidt Number: S-1456
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Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
According to Rudolf Steiner’s original Calendar of the Soul, TODAY is the birthday of King David
1419 – Hundred Years’ War: Battle of La Rochelle
1460 – War of the Roses: Lancastrians kill the 3rd Duke of York & win the Battle of Wakefield.
1702 – Queen Anne’s War: James Moore, Governor of the Province of Carolina, abandons the Siege of St. Augustine.
1813 – War of 1812: British soldiers burn Buffalo, New York.7
1816 – The Treaty of St. Louis signed between the United States the Council of Three Fires (united tribes of Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi) living on the Illinois & Milwaukee rivers. The tribes, their chiefs, & their warriors had to relinquish all right, claim, & title to land which connected Chicago & Lake Michigan with the Illinois River.Today, Indian Boundary Park in West Ridge, Chicago commemorates this Treaty. In exchange the tribes were to be paid $1,000 in merchandise over 12 years
1825 – The Treaty of St. Louis between the United States & the Shawnee Nation. In this treaty, the Shawnee gave up their lands to the United States near Cape Geredeau. In return for Cape Geredeau, the United States government gave the Shawnee a sum of 11,000 dollars & leased to them a blacksmith shop for five years providing all tools & 300 pounds of iron annually
1853 – Gadsden Purchase: The United States buys land from Mexico to facilitate railroad building over a 29,670-square-mile region of present-day southern Arizona & southwestern New Mexico
1903 – A fire at the Iroquois Theater in Chicago, Illinois kills at least 655
1916 – This is the 101 year anniversary of the deathday of Grigori Rasputin, the Russian mystic, spiritual healer & monk, whose name became proverbial for the intrusion of occult influence on politics – murdered in the midst of the WW1. Rasputin was the spiritual & medical adviser to Tsar Nicolas II of Russia, the last Russian Emperor, his wife Alexandra, & their daughter Anastasia. He called himself the “secretary of the Tsar’s soul”. He prophesied that his death would lead to the demise of the Tsardom. And so it was, that 2 months after his death, in the February Revolution of 1917, the monarchy was abolished, & the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. The royal couple was murdered & only Anastasia survived exiled in the West, never recognized as the true heir. Rasputin’s murder was initiated by the British secret service at a decisive phase of the war to prevent a peace treaty. His reputation became fraught with accusations of decadence, so it’s interesting to read some statements about him from Rudolf Steiner. Even more intriguing are the after-death messages from Helmuth von Moltke’s soul that Steiner transmitted to Eliza Moltke his widow, which speak to Molke’s encounter with Rasputin’s soul in the after-life.
“When the Russian Tsar & Tarina used the inner experiences of Rasputin for the purposes of government, the people had a right to be afraid of that, because revelations from the spiritual world should only have a role in spiritual life, not in the political field. In this field only what has become our sound reason by way of the spiritual revelations should intrude. Rasputin had not developed sound reasoning, although he had revelations”. ~Rudolf Steiner 14 Feb. 1920 Dornach
“Rasputin worked directly on the will. That should not be. But people want that. He really is an unrestrained man, the ‘Rasputin’ (Russian: one without a path) Everything said about him is true, but he is nevertheless a God-Seer, that is an occult term for a grade of initiation. It is only thru him that the spiritual world, the Russian Folk-Spirit, can now take effect in Russia, thru nobody else.” ~Rudolf Steiner according to Assya Turgeneva in the early years of WWW1, recorded in her book Erinnerugen an Rudolf Steiner
1936 – The United Auto Workers union in the Flint, Michigan, stages its first sit-down strike. Workers occupied several General Motors plants for more than forty days, & repelled the efforts of the police & National Guard to retake them. A wave of strikes followed, but were put-down by the end of the decade, as the courts & the National Labor Relations Board ruled that sit-down strikes were illegal & that strikers would be fired
2009 – A segment of the Lanzhou–Zhengzhou–Changsha pipeline ruptures in Shaanxi, China, and approximately 40,000 US gal. of diesel oil flows down the Wei River before finally reaching the Yellow River
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POD (Poem Of the Day)
~laser stare pulsing
from the lemon-yellow crystals
of my pineal pyramid
into the circle squared…
a mistletoe waiting…
~hag
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“On New Year’s Eve it is always fitting to remember how past and future are linked together in life and in the existence of the world, how past and future are linked in the whole life of the Cosmos of which man is a part, how past and future are linked in every fraction of that life with which our own individual existence is connected, is interwoven through all that we were able to do and to think during the past year, and through all that we are able to plan for the coming year…
What we are striving for in Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is this: To receive with goodwill all that is seeking to enter through spiritual revelation from another world — from a world, however, which bears within it this world of ours — and to clothe these revelations in terms by which they can be communicated to humanity. These revelations are nothing less than that which definitely (in a certain respect) guarantees the future of mankind.
As long as questions of this kind are not considered with due earnestness, we have not arrived at the right understanding of the Cosmic New Year’s Eve. At the present moment, it is essential to reach this right understanding. It is essential for us to extend our sympathies — alas, our sympathies often arise from egoistic sources — to the great human relations, and to feel for the whole of mankind that human sympathy which impels us to make a spiritual movement like this effectively fruitful for the evolution of mankind.
May you experience, my dear friends, at this very time, that it is the Spirit of the Cosmos itself, which has been seeking entrance. May you experience during the coming night, that this Spirit which seeks to enter humanity, shall here so be served that the souls of those, who will to feel with and who will to think with Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, may feel their union with this new Spirit which wills to enter the world — the Spirit which alone can bring to the earthly world, the world that is destroying itself — the new upbuilding impulse out of Heaven. In this hour, a symbolic hour every year, demanding that we experience it as the decisive hour between past and future — in this hour may you unite your souls with the new Spirit; may you so experience in your souls the contact of the past year with the coming year, that the Cosmic Year which is passing away, may contact itself with the dawning Cosmic Year.
But the passing Cosmic Year will still send many an after-effect into the future; destructive forces into the spheres of Spirit, of Equity, of Economics. Therefore it is all the more needful, that as many men as possible shall be seized in the innermost depths of their souls by the New Year of the Spiritual Future, and shall develop a Will which may be the foundation of a new spiritual world, a world to be built into the future evolution of mankind”.
~Rudolf Steiner The Cosmic New Year, lecture 4, 31st December, 1919
May we all meet in consciousness the spiritual powers that avail themselves to us on this Cosmic New Year’s Eve ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg
* Monday 31 Dec. Our Annual NYE Gathering 7:30 pm – 1 am In Elderberries 4251 N. Lincoln Ave.
Please bring food & drink to Share.
$20 or pay what you can (½ goes to the band ½ to the artists)
8 pm – 9:30 pm – Jutta & the Hi-Dukes Folk Dancing
9:30 pm – ‘Biography Work’ with Paulette Arnold
10:30 pm – Spacial Dynamics with Alex Boshell
11:15 pm – ‘Out with the Old’ Ceremony, with ~hag,
Lead Casting to meet the Future
MIDNIGHT: Labyrinth Walk, Singing
For more info. contact Festivals Coordinator Hazel Archer Ginsberg
* Tuesday 1, Wednesday 2, Thursday 3 January 2019, 7 pm – 9 pm – Group Study: ‘According to Luke’ by Rudolf Steiner Hosted by Deborah Rogers. Copies available to members in the library or online
* Friday 4 January 2019, 7 pm – 9 pm
“…When the Two Become One…” The Mystery of Christmas & Epiphany
Holy Night Social Discourse – Renaissance Art, & Storytelling with Hazel Archer Ginsberg,
Beeswax Candle Dipping! with Nancy Melvin
Eurythmy with Mary Ruud
$15 for supplies & Snacks to Share Encouraged
For more info. contact Festivals Coordinator Hazel Archer Ginsberg
* Sunday 6 Jan. Epiphany 2 pm – 4 pm –
The Baptism / 3 Kings/ 12th Night – Leading Thoughts with Hazel Archer-Ginsberg
Storytelling with Ann Burfiend
Social Art with Nancy Melvin
Eurythmy with Mary Ruud
$10 & Snacks to Share Encouraged
For more info. contact Festivals Coordinator Hazel Archer Ginsberg
Rudolf Steiner Branch of The Anthroposophical Society, 4249 North Lincoln Avenue. Chicago, IL 60618 (map)
Check out our Web site! (Anthroposophical Society in America)
The Elderberries 3-Fold Space & the Flex Space are available for rental on PEER SPACE for classes, events, meetings, retreats, art exhibits, family parties, etc..
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