Dear friends – While attending the Sunrise this morning in my wild garden, I was remembering our community Pentecost gathering, in the evening after our online offering which you can view here. It was perfect weather, good food, Prep-making, sky gazing with Venus & the Twins, & beautiful insightful conversations around the bonfire. After going around the circle speaking with tongues of fire, answering the question: What qualities does a true conscious community have – a hummingbird appeared! The perfect affirmation that the Spirit was amoung us.
When we attune ourselves to beings such as Raphael, Archangel of Spring, we can awaken to the way spiritual entities constantly interact with earth thru the elements.
The messengers of cosmic warmth in the rays of the Sun activate the ascension of the element of water. Through its union with air, clouds originate. In the cloud, between depths of earth & heavenly heights, in the sphere of the etheric realm, a mobile balance manifests.
Blossoms & fruits are in reality not just products of earth but heavenly forms filled with earthly substance, like us.
The phantom body of Christ is a reconstituted New Adam, & the Resurrection Body points us in the direction of our future evolution, not back to the garden, but going forward toward the New Jerusalem. Materializing & dematerializing at will.
The ‘ Resurrection Body’ encompasses the whole of humanity – Rudolf Steiner calls it a redeeming of the group-soul of mankind. It is like a cell that is multiplying; growing ever more evident in the etheric realm.
The expression “Put on the Resurrection Body” used by the apostle Paul is a true picture of what can happen for us. An imaginative picture of this is secreted in the allegory of the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz .
Goethe’s Fairy Tale is another powerful imagination that captures the essence of the Ascension & the working of the Healing Spirit
It’s been said that The Green Snake & the Beautiful Lily, which is full of esoteric symbolism, was born out of Goethe’s reading of The Chymical Wedding .
And Goethe’s Tale was written as a response to a work by Friedrich Schiller called ‘Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man’. Über die aesthetische Erziehung des Menschen
One of the central ideas discussed so often by Goethe & Schiller centered on the question of human freedom. Schiller was trying to build an inner bridge between reality & the ‘ideal human being’.
Schiller wrote his ‘Letters’ during the time of the French Revolution, which was driven by a desire for outer social changes, to enable human beings to become free.
But both Schiller & Goethe recognized that freedom cannot be ‘imposed’ from the outside, it must arise from within. So Goethe took this inspiration & set about writing a Fairy Tale that would show, in imaginative pictures, the way in which a human soul could become whole & free by bridging the abyss between the human & the divine within.
Last night, on the anniversary of the death by fire of Jeanne d’Arc, a group of us went to see the fully restored silent movie “The Passion of Joan” made in 1928. It was accompanied by a live band playing a powerfully dynamic score. Afterward we related how hers was like a baptism by fire from the Holy Spirit…
xox
~hag
31 May 2023 – “Speaking with the Stars”: Our solar system’s brightest planet, Venus, will shine brightly in the western evening sky all month. She is shining above the reddish star Aldebaran & the delicate Pleiades star cluster. Venus will move from the constellation of Taurus the Bull to Gemini the Twins this month.
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY (Rudolf Steiner’s orginal Calendar of the Soul, Wikipedia Commons)
‘The Feast of the Visitation’ – The visible actors (see Luke 1:39-45) are Mary & Elizabeth, although Jesus & John the Baptist steal the scene. John leaps with joy in the womb of Elizabeth, who in turn, is filled with the Holy Spirit & addresses words of praise to Mary—words that echo down through the ages. Then comes the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55).
One of the invocations in Mary’s litany is “Ark of the Covenant.” Like the Ark of the Covenant of old, Mary brings God’s presence into the lives of other people. As David danced before the Ark, John the Baptist leaps for joy. As the Ark helped to unite the 12 tribes of Israel by being placed in David’s capital, so Mary has the power to unite all in her Son.
1809 – Deathday of Austrian composer Franz Haydn
1819 – Birthday of Walt Whitman, American poet, essayist, & journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism & realism, often called the father of free verse. His work was very controversial in its time, particularly his poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene.
1875 – DSeathday of occultist Eliphas Levy. Steiner refers to his Mexican incarnation in the Karma lectures Vol. 2
1942 – Deathday of Reinhard Heydrich, assinated in Prague. A high-ranking German Nazi official during World War II, one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Many historians regard him as the darkest figure in the Nazi elite; Adolf Hitler described him as “the man with the iron heart”.
1962 – Deathday of Adolf Eichmann, a German Nazi SS, one of the major organisers of the Holocaust. Eichmann was working with Reinhard Heydrich facilitating & managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to extermination camps. In 1960, he was captured in Argentina by Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. Following a widely publicized trial in Israel, he was found guilty of war crimes & hanged on this day in 1962.
Saturday 24 June 2023 – Our St. Johns-Tide Festival at Zinniker Farm. Details coming soon.
