Dear friends, We are being asked to awaken in our soul forces of Thinking, Feeling & Willing, to recognize the signs of the times. There is an occult rule that what is revealed must often lay in the grave for 100 years before it can bear fruit. Here is a Quote from Rudolf Stiner given 102 years ago which I believe speaks especially to our current world crisis:

“There are in fact a large number of people, for example in the West, who are not simply reincarnated human beings but are the bearers of beings who make use of the metabolic system of these Western human beings….Thus, for example, a large number of those individuals who belong to Anglo-Saxon secret societies and who have great influence — we have spoken on a number of occasions in past years of the roll of these secret societies. In this way a completely different spirituality is working into present-day human beings and it will be an essential task to be able to take up a stand towards life from this point of view.

The first kind of beings are beings that have a particular attraction to the elemental forces of the earth and are thus able to sense how, in any particular place, colonization could be carried out in accordance with the conditions of the climate and any other conditions of the earth, or how a trading connection can be established there, and so on.

The second kind of spirits of this nature are those that set themselves the task within their sphere of action of suppressing consciousness of self, of preventing full consciousness of the consciousness-soul from emerging, and thus produce in other people around them, amongst whom something like this spreads like an epidemic, a certain desire not to call themselves to account concerning the real motives behind their actions. 

One could say that an untruthful element which does not wish to look into the real impulses, but glosses over them; uses beautiful words, and all the while there is beneath it nothing, basically, but untruthful impulses. These [second kind of] beings, therefore, incarnate through the rhythmic system of certain people in the West.

The third kind of beings that work in the West are those which make it their task to cause the individual abilities in the human being to be forgotten — those abilities which we bring with us from the spiritual worlds when, through conception and birth, we come into physical existence — and to turn human beings more or less into a stereotyped replica of their nation. This is what this third kind of being gives itself as its special task: to prevent the human being from coming to individual spirituality. This last class of beings incarnates in the West through the head system, through the sensory-nervous system

So, while the first kind of beings had an affinity with the elemental nature of the ground of the earth, of the climate and so on, the second kind has a particular tendency to breed a certain superficial, untruthful element, and the third type of being the tendency to root out individual abilities and to turn people more or less into a stereotype, a copy of their nation, their race.

Thus we have here, observed from different angles, the characteristic of the Western world, by getting to know a fairly large number of people who are scattered in secret societies, in sects and the like, but whose humanity is constituted in the fact that it is not simply a matter of repeated incarnations, but the incarnation, in a way, of beings who in their development are prematurely here an the earth and who, therefore, attract particular followers or radiate like an epidemic their own exceptional qualities onto other human beings. These three different types of beings do indeed work through human beings and we understand human character only if we know what I have just related — if we know that what lives in public life cannot be simply explained superficially but has to be explained in terms of the intrusion of spiritual forces of this kind.

The appearance in Western human beings of these three kinds of forces, of beings at this particular stage of development, is encouraged by the fact that it is given to the West to develop a specifically economic way of thinking. The economic life is, as it were, the ground and soil from which something like this can spring up. And what then, in total, is the task these beings have set themselves?

They have set themselves the task of keeping life as a whole restricted to the mere life of economics. They seek gradually to root out everything else — everything of the spiritual life which even where it is most active, has shrunk into the abstractness of Puritanism — to root out spiritual life, to chip away the political life and to absorb everything into the life of economics.

In the West the people who come into the world in this way are the real enemies and opponents of the threefold impulse.

The beings of the first type prevent the emergence of an economic life that stands as an independent entity alongside the political-legal and spiritual facets of the social organism.

The beings of the second type, who make superficiality, phrase-mongering and untruthfulness their task, seek to prevent the establishing, alongside the economic life, of an independent democratic life of the State.

And the third kind of being those that suppress the individual abilities of the human being and do not want the human being to be anything other than a kind of stereotype of his race, his nation — work against the emancipation and independence of the spiritual life.

Thus in the West there are such forces which work in this way against the impulse of the threefold social organism. And anyone who, in a deeper sense, wishes to work for the spread of this threefold impulse must be aware that he has also to take into account spiritual factors like these that are present in human evolution. Indeed the powers on which one must call when one wants to bring something new into the development of humanity are faced not only with the things that any hard-headed philistine notices but also with things that are only laid open to a spiritual knowledge.

What use is it when people of today regard this as superstition and do not want to hear that such spiritual beings intrude through human beings? They are nevertheless there, these spiritual beings! And anyone who does not merely want to go through life with a sleeping soul, but with a fully awake soul, can observe the influences of these beings everywhere. If only, from the presence of the effects, people would allow themselves to be convinced a little of the existence of the causes!

This is the characteristic we find when looking towards the West. The West takes on this form because it lives completely in the most fundamental expression of the present epoch — in economic concepts, economic thinking.

And here again there are three types of beings working in the East who likewise have a great influence. Whereas in the West one has to draw attention to individual human beings through whom these beings incarnate, in the East one must point to a kind of hierarchy that can appear to the most varied people. Again it is three types of beings; not, however, beings that incarnate through people but beings that appear to people and also inspire them during sleep at night.

The first type of these beings prevents the human being from taking full possession of his physical body, hinders him from finding a connection with the economic element, with the public conditions of the present-day in general. These are the beings who seek in the East to hold back the economic life as it is needed in the threefold social order.

The second type of beings are those that produce over-individualization — a kind of, unegoistic egoism. This is all the more subtle in the way it is so frequently found in people, particularly of the East, who fancifully attribute to themselves all possible selflessness — a selflessness which, however, is in fact a particularly subtle form of self-seeking, a particulary subtle egoism. They want to be absolutely good, they want to be as good as it is ever possible to be. This, too, is an egoistic sentiment. This is something that can be called, paradoxically, an unegoistic egoism, an egoism arising from an imagined selflessness.

The third type of being that appears to human beings of the East are those beings that hold back the spiritual life from the earth; that spread, as it were, a dull mystical atmosphere over human beings, as can be found so frequently today, particularly in the East.

And again, these three types of spiritual beings, which work down from the spiritual world, are the enemies of the threefold social organism. In this way the threefold impulse is hemmed in from the spiritual side in the East and from the human side, as described, in the West. Thus we see here the spiritual foundations underlying the differentiation.

We still have to add to this what is hostile to the threefolding in the European Centre so that, from a spiritual point of view, we gradually gain an idea of how one must equip oneself in order that the opposing powers — whether from the spiritual world, as in the East, or from human beings, as in the West, or from the Centre of Europe, in a way which I shall relate tomorrow — can be met by the threefold idea with an impulse that is of the greatest conceivable importance for humanity’s evolution. And in order to know how one must act with regard to these things one must be equipped with an armour of thoughts.

…The human being of the Centre was thrown into the extremes of west and east. He had to take in everything he experienced in the West but did not absorb it as deeply as the Westerner; he suffused it with what also came from the East. Hence the more malleable equilibrium in the Centre; but hence also the inner strife, the duality in the individualization of the souls of human beings of the Centre. The striving to find a harmony, a balancing out of this duality — which is so classicially, so magnificently, portrayed in Schiller’s Letters an Aesthetic Education in which two driving forces that are to be united — that of Nature and that of Reason — points clearly to this duality…” ~Rudolf Steiner, The New Spirituality and the Christ Expereience of the Twentieth Century, Lecture 1 & 2, Dornach, 22-23 October, 1920

8 February 2022 – “Speaking with the Stars”: The first-quarter Moon of February shines very high after dark. When you face her after nightfall, look for the Pleiades above& Aldebaran farther to the upper left. Lower left from there, Orion stands upright.

Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

According to the original; Calendar of the Soul by Rudolf Steiner today it the Birthday of King Solomon. In the ‘Temple Legend’ lectures by Rudolf Steiner, he speaks of King Solomon as the reincarnation of Abel. (And the Master Builder of the Temple Hiram Abiff, Cain)

RUDOLF STEINER’S CALENDAR OF THE SOUL
translated (with added titles) by Roy Sadler
This year verses 44 & 45 have to be extended through February before verse 46 can begin on Feb. 29th in the first week of Lent. extended CANDLEMAS Verse: Mindful of the Spirit’s Birth Fulfilled
v44
And when I grasp the senses’ new allure
the clarity of soul,
mindful of the spirit’s birth fulfilled,
imbues the world’s bewildering,
fresh sprouting growth
with my creative will of thinking.

Mindful of the Spirit’s Birth Fulfilled, “Eingedenk vollzogener Geistgeburt”,
is the only trochaic line in the Soul Calendar, as if it balances all the other 336 lines of the iambic, natural meditative rhythm, whose meaning would be irrelevant without the consciousness of the spirit’s birth fulfilled’.

The mirror verse
CORPUS CHRISTI
Lose Yourself In Light
v9
And when I let my own will go
the summer’s coming fills my soul
and spirit life with cosmic warmth;
my spirit vision is commanding me
to lose myself in light, and ardently
my foresight’s calling: lose yourself.
to find your Self.

1810 – Birthday of Eliphas Levi, a French sage, poet, & author of more than twenty books about magic, Cabbalah, alchemical studies, & occultism.

“There was a personality who lived in the later period of Mexican civilisation and was connected with the utterly decadent, pseudo-magical Mystery cults of Mexico; with an intense thirst for knowledge he studied everything with close and meticulous exactitude. My attention was attracted to him through having made the acquaintance some years ago of a curious man who is still engaged in a primitive form of study of the decadent superstitions of the Mexican Mysteries. Such lore is of negligible importance, because anyone who studies these things at the present time is studying pure superstition; it has all become decadent to-day. But the other personality to whom I am referring imbibed with fervent enthusiasm all that could be learnt from the still flourishing Mexican civilisation before the discovery, the so-called ‘discovery’ of America. In those days Mexican civilisation was still influenced by the Mysteries but was already in the throes of decline. When mention is made to-day of Taotl, Quetzalcoatl, Tezcatlipoka — the Beings of the Mexican Mysteries — little more is known than the names and a few scattered images. But this personality still knew that Taotl is a Being who as a cosmic, universal Spirit weaves in the clouds, lives in the lightning and the thunder. He knew too that under certain given conditions this Spirit could be invoked into consecrated water by enactments of sacred ritual. And he knew that Quetzalcoatl was a Divine Being who could take hold of man in his circulating blood, in the working of his breath. Living reality of Being was experienced in the Mexican Mysteries by the personality of whom I am speaking. He was reborn in a later age without any intermediate life as a woman. He had been a man in Mexico and was born again as a man. But in his life between death and rebirth this individuality passed through the super-sensible world in such a way that in the development of his karma — this in turn was the outcome of still earlier incarnations not in Mexico but elsewhere — he bore through the Jupiter region all that he had experienced in Mexico: knowledge that had degenerated into superstition but was nevertheless replete with vitality, saturated with the fruits of older civilisations. In the Jupiter-sphere all this assumed the form of wisdom, but a wisdom that is in truth automatic, unconscious, when compared with the wisdom man should make his own by individual effort.

When in the elaboration of karma between death and a new birth, the living, weaving wisdom of the Jupiter-sphere pours over what has been experienced by a man in a previous earthly life, wisdom and its light can still shine forth in the subsequent life. But the wisdom, then, is founded on the experiences of earthly life.

The individuality of whom I am speaking was born again in modern civilisation as Eliphas Levi. Eliphas Levi, therefore, had spent his previous incarnation in the Mexican civilisation, had then passed through the sphere of Jupiter with its wisdom, and in this sphere of Jupiter everything was worked through once again. But Mexican culture is a decadent culture and if you read the books of Eliphas Levi to-day you will find evidence of great wisdom spread out as it were over something extremely primitive. And one who has insight into these things will say: all this is Jupiter, but inferior Jupiter!” ~Rudolf Steiner, Karmic Relationships, Volume II: Lecture XII

1894 – Birthday of George Adams Kaufmann, a British mathematician, translator & anthroposophist. He travelled widely, spoke several languages & translated many of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures into English. Through his studies in theoretical physics he contributed to the expansion & development of the natural sciences as extended by the concepts of anthroposophy.

In 1914 he had encountered Rudolf Steiner’s “Occult Science” and become a member of the Emerson Group in London in 1916. During his time as conscientious objector he had come to know Mary Fox, a Quaker & in 1920 they married.

His interest in Steiner’s ideas on social reform & his intention to translate the book The Threefold Social Order (GA 23) caused him to visit Steiner together with Ethel Bowen Wedgwood in Dornach, Switzerland. Steiner advised him to become involved in some form of social work, something Adams could readily accept amid the social collapse in Central & Eastern Europe following the war. He went on several journeys to Poland as part of the English & American Quaker organization.

In 1920 he took part in the inauguration of the first Goetheanum building. On his return to England, he cooperated with some friends on spreading the ideas of Social threefolding as well as the anthroposophical ideas of Steiner. His wife Mary Adams began her work as librarian & translator for the Anthroposophical Society in London that she was to carry for many years. In addition, Adams was the free verbal translator of around 110 lectures of Steiner into English. He went on to translate many of Steiner’s written works, often with Mary Adams.

He was often in Dornach during these times and experienced the burning of the first Goetheanum on New Year’s Eve 1922/23 & was part of the Christmas Foundation meeting of the General Anthroposophical Society in 1923/24. In 1924 he became one of the Goetheanum-Speakers authorized by Steiner.

While working as a free co-worker of the Anthroposophical Society in Britain as lecturer & workshop holder after 1925, Adams turned again to the study of the natural sciences & mathematics, concentrating particularly on projective geometry & working with Elisabeth Vreede, leader of the Section for Mathematics & Astronomy at the Goetheanum. At the beginning of the 1930s, Adams published a series of articles & essays about projective, synthetic geometry & its relationship to physics, to Goethe’s theory of metamorphosis & to anthroposophical spiritual science, particularly the pioneering work “Of Etheric Space” in the magazine Natura of the Goetheanum’s Medical Section. Here for the first time is mentioned the concept of “counter-space”, as Steiner indicated in the third of his courses on the Natural Sciences (GA 323), explained by means of non-Euclidean geometry. Some years later Louis Locher was to discover the same thing independently of Adams. From that time on the conceptual development of the idea of counter-space in its relation to normal spatial thinking became the focal point of Adams’ further scientific research. In 1933 the comprehensive work Space & the Light of the Creation – Synthetic Geometry in the light of Spiritual Science appeared, which was an overview of the spiritual scientific meaning of synthetic geometry.

When Elisabeth Vreede & Ita Wegman were dismissed from the executive of the General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, a number of other prominent members of the German, Dutch & British Societies were expelled, including Adams. This brought to an end his cooperation with the Mathematical/Astronomical Section. When the Chairman of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, D. N. Dunlop, died in May 1935, Adams took over as general secretary.

1907 – Birthday of Charles Kovacs – born in Vienna. When he was still a young child the family moved to Nussdorf on the Danube, where the river flowed just before the house, so that he could see & hear the barges passing by, loading & unloading. Behind the house were forests of nut trees; to the left there shone a special light over the Kahlberg. It was here that he first went to school.

With the sudden death of his father, the family – his grandmother, mother & his younger brother Erwin – moved to their uncle’s lovely villa in Baden at the foot of the Vienna Woods. At that time the inhabitants of Baden were forward-looking & had high civic standards. They built fine modern art galleries to show the new styles of painting that had become popular. Charles was very interested in painting. He visited these galleries & then worked on his own pictures when he went home. He was about twelve years old when he showed his paintings to his respected art teacher, Professor Friedrich Thetter. Thetter’s two children were also Charles’ friends at the school & Charles was invited to come regularly and to bring his paintings. Professor Thetter, a long-standing anthroposophist, then introduced Charles to the fundamentals of art, to Goethe, then to Rudolf Steiner & anthroposophy. It was an encounter Charles never forgot. He was deeply grateful to Professor Thetter & they remained close friends, corresponding even when they were far apart. Charles & his brother Erwin both became members of the Anthroposophical Society, Charles when he was 22 years old.

Life was lively in Vienna. Charles would listen to the latest hits on the wireless in the evenings & next day he would play them to his friends, for both brothers had learned from their mother to play the piano. His uncle employed him for a time in his warehouse, selling coffee & tea, & it was his son who later, when Charles was 32, invited him out to Kenya. He enjoyed working on a large farm; the compound was so extensive that he needed a horse to get around it all & for a while he was in charge of a sawmill. It was during that time that he drew (on the backs of reference cards used at the mill) & compiled a small book of Pietas – each drawing so different!

Then came the Second World War & he volunteered to join the British Army. After the war he returned briefly to Kenya where he had started an anthroposophical study group. In April 1948 Charles came to London. A relative needed somebody to take on the responsibility of his firm in Golden Square, Piccadilly, & Charles worked there for about eight years. It was well-paid work, but it was a heavy burden. Before long he came to the anthroposophical group meeting one Monday evening; this was where he met Dora, & within six months they were married. Charles was soon asked to take over the study group at Museum Street & as part of his work for this group he translated works by Rudolf Steiner not then available in English. He became a member of the Council of the Anthroposophical Society & gave many lectures. His home was frequented by members of the group most evenings. When they had left he would often paint or draw, an activity which for him seemed a necessity. It was a member of the group who urged Charles to become a teacher. And so it came about that he came to Edinburgh in 1956 to teach at the Rudolf Steiner School.

Then his most productive years began. He took over a Class 4 of thirty-five children. As part of his preparation, he wrote out his lessons day by day so that he built into his teaching a structure, inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s curriculum, which could satisfy the growing child. These notes now stand as a fine example of the new & living way Steiner wanted his curriculum presented to children. ~Charles Kovacs – Reflecting on His Life, by Floris Books

As a Waldorf teacher, Charles’ creative talents were called on more than ever before. His special gift for painting & drawing was put to good use & his work was much in evidence around the school. For example the kindergarten, which I took over, was blessed & looked upon by the guardian angel that Charles painted. He composed songs & poems, he wrote plays for his classes; Charles was completely given over to his teaching. At the same time he held parents’ evenings, had regular study groups & gave lectures within the Anthroposophical Society & to the public. For a time he travelled regularly to Ilkeston in Derbyshire to work with a group of friends there. His pupils wanted him to come to the upper school to give them the philosophy main lesson when he had already retired.

2018 – Death day of Christopher Mann, a long time Anthroposopher, His parents knew Rudolf Steiner & did the Mann translation of the Calendar of the Soul. Christopher & his wife Martina were champions of Biodynamics & eurythmy. https://www.biodynamics.com/…/celebrating-lifelong-work…Christopher produced the movie The Alchemist – A film by Frigyes Fogel and Christopher Mann Following those on their mission who have been called upon to form the earth throughout four continents…Dedicated To all who want to heal and consecrate the earth…https://vimeo.com/181737300

The picture above is Christopher at Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, which he helped build. He came to support my workshop on the Spiritual Hierarchies. He was quite lively, sharing about his early life, & then his work with land trusts & such. He was so proud of his movie The Alchemist…After a day on Zinniker Farm he invited a bunch of us to a showing in his home, & there were several teenagers from the Chicago Waldorf School Community with us, & because of that film, 1 of them wants to go into Bio dynamic farming! He touched many lives. And now he is our ally on the other side. Blessings dear friend on your spiritual journey! xox ~hag

~I am an old soul
Many nights I look into the fire
The blue & orange tongues
of the salamander speak in the spark
My angel touches me in a glass of water
The sylphs are never silent
& the earth thinks me deep…
But Today I feel weary…
& yet I have no fear for
I quiver in communion
with The Time Spirit
His hand on my head
Lifts my limbs
to create my own destiny…
~hag