25 August 2016 – Astro-Weather: During the middle of the day today, the last-quarter Moon occults Aldebaran. The orange star will wink out on the Moon’s bright edge, then reappear from behind the Moon’s invisible dark edge up to an hour or more later.

August is prime Milky Way time. After dark, the Milky Way runs from Sagittarius in the south, up & left across Aquila & through the Summer Triangle very high in the east, on down through Cassiopeia to Perseus rising low in the north-northeast.

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“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” ~H.G. Wells

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

79 – Deathday of Pliny the Elder, Roman commander & philosopher – died while attempting to rescue a friend from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Stabiae that had just destroyed the cities of Pompeii & Herculaneum. The prevailing wind caused by the sixth & largest pyroclastic surge of the eruption overcame his ship

El Greco

1270 – Deathday of Louis IX of France, the Crusader King, devoted to his people, founding hospitals, visiting the sick like his patron St. Francis, even caring for people with leprosy. Louis united France. Every day he invited 13 guests from among the poor to eat with him.

1530 – Birthday of Ivan the Terrible

1609 – Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers

1744 – Birthday of Johann Gottfried Herder, German poet, philosopher, friend of Goethe

1814 – The U.S. Library of Congress was destroyed by British forces

1867 – Deathday of Michael Faraday, English physicist & chemist, who contributed to the study of electromagnetism.  Albert Einstein kept a picture of Faraday on his study wall, alongside pictures of Isaac Newton & James Clerk Physicist Ernest Rutherford stated, “When we consider the magnitude and extent of his discoveries and their influence on the progress of science and of industry, there is no honour too great to pay to the memory of Faraday, one of the greatest scientific discoverers of all time”.

Eduard Munch

1900 – Deathday of Friedrich Nietzsche. Rudolf Steiner mentioned that in a previous life he was a Franciscan monk. Steiner also wrote: Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom GA5. The enigmatic Friedrich Nietzsche was seen by Steiner, but was lying in a coma near death. Nietzsche’s philosophy receives a scholarly & critical treatment & is then related to Nietzsche, the man.

At one point in his life, Rudolf Steiner brought out an edition of some of Nietzsche’s writings. In seeing that Nietzsche’s ideas received a public exposure, Steiner was not identifying himself as one of Nietzsche’s disciples, but rather assuring philosophical readers that this important link in the spiritual development of occidental thought should not be ignored.

Here is Steiner’s Memorial Address The Personality of Friedrich Nietzsche

1914 – World War I: The library of the Catholic University of Leuven is deliberately destroyed by the German Army. Hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable volumes Gothic & Renaissance manuscripts are lost

1916 – The United States National Park Service is created

1933 – The Diexi earthquake strikes Sichuan, China & kills 9,000 people

1944 – World War II: Paris is liberated by the Allies

1948 – The House Un-American Activities Committee holds first-ever televised congressional hearing: “Confrontation Day” between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.

1950 – President Harry Truman orders the U.S. Army to seize control of the nation’s railroads to avert a strike

1981 – Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Saturn

1989 – Voyager 2 spacecraft makes its closest approach to Neptune

2012 – Voyager 1 spacecraft enters interstellar space becoming the first man-made object to do so

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Hieronymus Bosch

My POD (Poem Of the Day)

~To wrap mysteriously in memory

That Witch has been newly conceived,

Brings further meaning to my striving…

& growing stronger awakens

The power of Selfhood in my inward Being

For in Becoming –I give my Self to me, for you…

~hag

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“In Zarathustra Nietzsche sketches the world for which he had searched in vain in Wagner, separated from all reality…The disappointment which his idealism had caused him, drove him into a hostile mood toward all idealism. During the time following his separation from Wagner, his works become accusations against ideals. “One error after another is placed upon ice; the ideal is not refuted — it freezes to death.”

 After this Nietzsche looks for refuge in reality; he deepens himself in the more recent natural science, in order that through it he can gain a true guide to reality. All worlds beyond this world, which lead human beings away from reality, now become abominable, remote worlds for him, conceived out of the fantasy of weak human beings, who do not have sufficient strength to find their satisfaction in immediate, fresh existence. Natural science has placed the human being at the end of a purely natural evolution. Through the fact that the latter has conceived the human being out of itself, all that is below him has taken on a higher meaning. Therefore, man should not deny its significance and wish to make himself an image of something beyond this world. He should understand that he is not the meaning of a super-earthly power, but the “meaning of this earth.” What he wishes to attain above what exists, he should not strive for in enmity against what exists.

Nietzsche looks within reality itself for the germ of the higher, which is to make reality bearable…Humanity has the possibility to become superhumanity. Evolution has always been. The human being should also work at evolution. The laws of evolution are greater, more comprehensive than all that has already been developed. One should not only look upon that which exists, but one must go back to primeval forces which have engendered the real.

An ancient world conception questioned how “good and evil” came into the world. It believed that it had to go behind existence in order to discover “in the eternal” the reasons for “good and evil.” But with the “eternal,” with the “beyond,” Nietzsche had also to reject the “eternal” evaluation of “good and evil.” Man has come into existence through the natural; and “good and evil” have come into existence with him. The creation of mankind is “good and evil.” And deeper than the created is the creator. The “human being” stands “beyond good and evil.” He has made the one thing to be good, the other to be evil. He may not let himself be chained through his former “good and evil.” He can follow further the path of evolution which he has taken till now. From the worm he has become a human being; from man he can develop to the superman. He can create a new good and evil. He may “reevaluate” present day values.

Nietzsche was torn through his spiritual darkness. The evolution of the worm to the human being was the idea which he had gained from the more recent natural science. He himself did not become a scientist; he had adopted the idea of evolution from others. For them it was a matter of the intellect; for him it became a matter of the heart. The others waged a spiritual battle against all old prejudices. Nietzsche asked himself how he could live with the new idea. His battle took place entirely within his own soul. He needed the further development to the superman in order to be able to bear mankind.

Thus, by itself, in lonely heights, his sensitive spirit had to overcome the natural science which he had taken into himself. During his last creative period, Nietzsche tried to attain from reality itself what earlier he thought he could gain in illusion, in an ideal realm. Life is assigned a task which is firmly rooted in life, and yet leads over and above this life. In this immediate existence one cannot remain standing in real life, or in the life illuminated by natural science. In this life there also must be suffering. This remained Nietzsche’s opinion. The “superman” is also a means to make life bearable. All this points to the fact that Nietzsche was born to “suffer from existence.” His genius consisted in the searching for bases for consolation.

The struggle for world conceptions has often engendered martyrs. Nietzsche has produced no new ideas for a world conception. One will always recognize that his genius does not lie in the production of new ideas. But he suffered deeply because of the thoughts surrounding him. In compensation for this suffering he found the enraptured tones of his Zarathustra. He became the poet of the new world conception; the hymns in praise of the “superman” are the personal, the poetic reply to the problems and results of the more recent natural science.

All that the nineteenth century produced in ideas, would also have been produced without Nietzsche. In the eyes of the future he will not be considered an original philosopher, a founder of religions, or a prophet; for the future he will be a martyr of knowledge, who in poetry found words with which to express his suffering”.

~Rudolf Steiner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom, Part 4: The Personality of Friedrich Nietzsche, A Memorial Address

21 August 2016 – Astro-Weather: Asteroid 2 Pallas reaches opposition & peak visibility today- The second-biggest asteroid orbiting between Mars & Jupiter. You can find it on the border between Pegasus & Equuleus, the star that marks the nose of Pegasus the Winged Horse. The lovely globular star cluster M15 lies north & a touch east of Pallas. The 3 Beings lie about halfway to the zenith in the southeastern sky after darkness falls

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Feast day of Our Lady of Knock*

“We learn from history that we don’t learn from history!” ~Desmond Tutu

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

1192 – Minamoto no Yoritomo becomes Seii Tai Shōgun -the de facto ruler of Japan

1680 – Pueblo Indians capture Santa Fe from the Spanish during the Pueblo Revolt

1772 – King Gustav III completes his coup d’état in Sweden, installing himself as an enlightened despot

1831 – Nat Turner leads black slaves in a rebellion in Virginia

1852 – Tlingit Indians destroy Fort Selkirk, Yukon Territory.

1838 – Deathday of Adelbert von Chamisso, German botanist & poet. Author of Peter Schlemihl, a famous story about a man who sold his shadow

1858 – Birthday of Archduke Rudolf von Habsburg, Crown Prince of Austria. In 1889, he died in a suicide pact with his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera. His death left no direct male heir. As a consequence, his brother, Archduke Karl Ludwig, was next in the line. His death in 1896 made his oldest son, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive. In 1914, Franz Ferdinand’s assassination precipitated World War I & sparked a chain of events that caused the dynasty’s collapse. Rudolf Steiner spoke quite a bit about his former incarnations, the most important being as Nero, in Karmic Relationships Vol. 2, lectures 7, 27 & Vol. 4 lecture 24

1863 – Lawrence, Kansas is destroyed by Confederate guerrillas Quantrill’s Raiders in the Lawrence Massacre

*1879 – Observers stated that there was an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, Saint John the Evangelist, angels, & Jesus Christ (the Lamb of God) Knock Shrine (Irish: Cnoc Mhuire, “Hill of Mary” or “Mary’s Hill”) is a Roman Catholic pilgrimage site in the village of Knock, County Mayo, Ireland.

1883 – An F5 tornado strikes Rochester, Minnesota, leading to the creation of the Mayo Clinic

1888 – The first successful adding machine in the United States is patented by William Seward Burroughs

1897 – Oldsmobile is founded.

1904 – Birthday of Count Basie

1911 – The Mona Lisa is stolen by a Louvre employee

1914 – Deathday of Pope Pius X. particularly devoted to the Blessed Virgin Mary under the specific title of Our Lady of Confidence; his papal encyclical Ad diem illum expresses his desire through Mary to renew all things in Christ, which he had defined as his motto. He promoted Thomas Aquinas as the principal philosophical method to be taught in Catholic institutions. After the 1908 Messina earthquake he filled the Apostolic Palace with refugees, long before the Italian government acted. He rejected any kind of favors for himself or his family

1921 – 1^st publication of the weekly Das Goetheanum

1940 – Deathday of Leon Trotsky, murdered on Stalin’s orders

1942 – World War II: The flag of Nazi Germany is installed atop the Mount Elbrus, the highest peak of the Caucasus mountain range

1942 – World War II: The Guadalcanal Campaign: American forces defeat an attack by Imperial Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru

1957 – The Soviet Union successfully conducts a long-range test flight of the first intercontinental ballistic missile

1959 –President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an executive order proclaiming Hawaii the 50th state of the union

1963 – Xá Lợi Pagoda raids: The Army of the Republic of Vietnam Special Forces vandalizes Buddhist pagodas across the country, arresting thousands & leaving hundreds dead

1968 – Deathday of Margareta Morgenstern, anthroposophist & wife of poet Christian Morgenstern

1986 – Carbon dioxide gas erupts from volcanic Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing up to 1,800 people

1988 – The 6.9 Mw Nepal earthquake shakes the Nepal–India border leaving 1,450 people killed & thousands injured

1991 – Latvia declares renewal of its full independence after the occupation of Soviet Union

1991 – Coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev collapses

1993 – NASA loses contact with the Mars Observer spacecraft

2013 – Hundreds of people are reported killed by chemical attacks in the Ghouta region of Syria

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  Ella Manor Lapointe

Calendar of the Soul – 22nd Week [August 21, 2016 – August 27, 2016]

The light from world-wide spaces

  Works on within with living power;

  Transformed to light of soul

  It shines into the spirit depths

  To bring to birth the fruits

  Whereby out of the self of worlds

  The human self in course of time shall ripen.

~Rudolf Steiner, English translation by Ruth & Hans Pusch

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Your soul is the best friend you keep forgetting you have. It’s closer than your breath & older than death. It dreams like a mountain, laughs like a river, & communicates with you in the exuberantly mysterious style of animals & gods. You are animated because of your soul! It loves you with nonstop unconditional ingenuity.  Isn’t it right, then, to devote at least one special day each year to honoring it & giving thanks for its blessings?

Today (along with the Baptism I will perform for a beautiful family this afternoon) I have scheduled my Soul Celebration Day:

Dear Soul-Self- Be my slow-motion dance. Be my centennial earthquake. Be my ripe pomegranate floating in a blue plastic swimming pool on the first day of winter. Be my handstand on a barstool, my whirlwind week in clown school, my joke shared with a Siberian shaman while shopping for socks at Wal-Mart. Be my puzzle with one piece missing. Be the waves crashing on a beach in New Zealand in the 22nd century. Be my golden hammer resting on the moss of a ten-million-year-old rock…

This kind of poetic thinking prompts me to ask: What would it be like to take a trip in your imagination to the future, where you will visit the person you’ll be, say 4 years from today? What is the most important message you have to convey to that future Self?

Blessings & Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg