One wields the Sun-sword of right thinking
The other fashions the sheath of our soul,
To show us to ourselves.
Together they battle the hardening in our perceptions or
Our evasion into illusion…
One is light
The other is color
When they hold hands,
Spirit & Soul are One in Wisdoms Love
So we can be
Truly human.

Upright between Heaven & Earth,
Together with Michael & Anthroposophia
We carry the Christ-Light
Of Spirit thru Soul
Into the dark halls of matter.

Dear friends, I am honored to tread the ever winding way with all of you. Together we hold the center, ring the bell, & step into halleluiah!
~hag

21 November 2021 – “Speaking with the Stars”

RUDOLF STEINER’S CALENDAR OF THE SOUL
translated (with added titles) by Roy Sadler
There are 4 Advent verses between the death verse, 33, and the Christmas verse, 38,
which (if not, as next year, on a Sunday) is in the same week as the last Advent Sunday;
so this first Advent verse is a prelude to next week’s first Advent Sunday.
ADVENT I
Old Treasure’s Mystery Felt
v34
Mysteriously to feel
with newly risen sense of who I am
old treasure re-enlivening within me
shall rouse a tide of cosmic forces
that pouring into my endeavour for the world
will in becoming print me into that which is.

The title for the August mirror verse is from Eloise Krivosheia

LAMMASTIDE III
Feel Gratitude For Everything
v19
Mysteriously to sheathe
my life’s new seed with memory
be now my striving’s further aim
that strengthening it shall awake
my own true force within me
and in becoming give me who I am.

 Rudolf Steiner’s Lectures on this day 

 ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY – Wikipedia – Rudolf Steiner Archives –

164 BCE – Judas Maccabeus, son of Mattathias of the Hasmonean family, restores the Temple in Jerusalem. This event is commemorated each year by the festival of Hanukkah.

1676 – The Danish astronomer Ole Rømer presents the first quantitative measurements of the speed of light.

1694 – Birthday of Voltaire, a French Enlightenment writer, historian, & philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, as well as his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile & prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, & historical & scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters & more than 2,000 books & pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. He adopted the name Voltaire in 1718, following his incarceration at the Bastille. It is an anagram of AROVET LI, the Latinized spelling of his surname, Arouet, & the initial letters of le jeune (“the young”). According to a family tradition he was known as le petit volontaire (“determined little thing”) as a child, & he resurrected a variant of the name in his adult life. The name also reverses the syllables of Airvault, his family’s home town in the Poitou region. Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the Church as a static and oppressive force useful only on occasion as a counterbalance to the rapacity of kings, although all too often, even more rapacious itself. Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, & the French institutions of his day.

1783 – In Paris, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier & François Laurent d’Arlandes, make the first untethered hot air balloon flight.

1789 – North Carolina ratifies the United States Constitution & is admitted as the 12th U.S. state.

1811 – Death day of Heinrich von Kleist, German poet & author, spoken about by Rudolf Steiner in THE INNER ASPECT OF THE MOON-EMBODIMENT OF THE EARTH. How can we fail to recognise that this man’s spirit in its entirety as he stands before us, is an actual living embodiment of that which dwells in the depths of the Soul, which we must trace back to something other than the life of earth if we wish to recognise it? Has not Heinrich Von Kleist described in the most significant manner what may live within a man (a description of which you will find at the very beginning of The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind), as something transcending him and driving him, and which he will only understand later on if he does not snap the threads of his life before! Think of his ‘Penthesilea’; how much more there is in her than she can span with her earthly consciousness! We should not be able to describe her at all, did we not take for granted that her Soul was immeasurably further advanced than the narrow little soul (although it was a great one) which she could span with her earthly consciousness. Hence a situation must arise which artistically introduces the whole process of the Drama. Indeed, it was necessary to prevent the whole transaction — which Kleist introduces with Achilles — from being grasped with the higher consciousness; otherwise the whole tragedy could not be perceived. Hence Achilles is called ‘her’ Achilles. What lies in the higher consciousness must be plunged into the non-conscious. Again, what part does this subconsciousness play in Katchen Von Heilbronn, especially in the remarkable relation between her and Wetter Von Strahl, which plays no part in the higher consciousness, but in the deeper strata of the Soul where dwells the forces of which man knows nothing, which pass from one to another. When we have this before us we can trace the spiritual nature of the world’s forces of gravity and attraction. For instance, in the scene where Katchen stands before her admirers, do we not feel what lives in the subconsciousness, and how it is related to what is outside in the world which has been dryly called the forces of our planet’s attractions? Yet only 100 years ago a truly penetrating and striving mind was not able to find his way into that subconsciousness. But it must be done to-day. And the tragedy of a Prince of Homburg strikes us in a very different way now. I should like to know how an abstract thinker, one who accounts for everything by reason alone, could account for a figure such as the Prince of Homburg, who carried out all his great deeds in a kind of dream-state, even those leading finally to victory. Kleist indicates very clearly that he could not possibly gain the victory by means of his higher consciousness, for as far as that was concerned he was not a particularly great man, for he whines and whimpers over everything he has to do. Only when by a special effort of the will, he brings up what dwells in the depths of his Soul, does he play the man.

1877 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.

1905 – Albert Einstein’s paper that leads to the mass–energy equivalence formula, E = mc², is published in the journal Annalen der Physik.

1916 – Deathday of Franz Joseph I of Austria, spoken about by Steiner in The History and Actuality of Imperialism

The Emperor of Austria, who now belongs to the deposed royalty, before he was chased out carried around along with his other titles a most unusual one: Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galizia, Lodomeria, Illyia and so on. Among all these titles was also “King of Jerusalem!” The Austrian Emperor also carried, until he was no longer emperor, the title “King of Jerusalem.” It came from the crusades. It would be impossible to give a better example of meaninglessness than this. And such meaninglessness plays a much greater role than you imagine. It is a question of whether we can arise to a recognition of the present-day platitudes. It is made difficult because those who live in platitudes are the verbal representatives of the old concepts that stagger around in their brains imitating thoughts. But one can only achieve real thinking again when the inner soul-life is filled with substance and that can only come from knowledge of the spiritual world, of spiritual life. Only by being relieved by the spirit can one become a complete person, after having been constipated with platitudes. What I described yesterday as a feeling of shame will result in the call for the spirit. And the propagation of the spirit will only be possible if the spiritual/cultural sector is allowed to develop independently.

1927 – Columbine Mine massacre: Striking coal miners are attacked with machine guns by a detachment of state police dressed in civilian clothes.

‘Tuning to the Stars’: Eurythmy for the Holy Nights with Jan Ranck* –
Sacred Geometry, the Planets and the Zodiac
LIVE IN-PERSON 26-30 Dec. 2021 at the Rudolf Steiner Branch Chicago 4 pm – 5 pm
And at 7pm on 31 Dec. as part of our annual NYE Conscious Community Gathering (details above)
 
$100 for all 6 sessions, or $22 for each individual session.
Make your payment using PayPal
or QuickPay with Zelle to chase@rschicago.org  
(please indicate in the notes that it is for the Holy Nights Eurythmy)
Cash at the door, or send a check to:
Rudolf Steiner Branch
4249 North Lincoln Avenue
Chicago, IL 60618-2953
USA
 
For more info. Contact Cultural Events & Festivals Coordinator
Hazel Archer-Ginsberg 
 
* Jan Ranck – Born in the USA, Jan Ranck studied music and comparative arts at Indiana University in Bloomington. She accompanied the London Stage Group on their 1976 USA tour and went on to study eurythmy at the Eurythmeum in Dornach with Lea van der Pals, where she subsequently taught. In 1984 she joined the faculty of The London School of Eurythmy. She left there to complete her eurythmy therapy training in Stuttgart in 1989, moving afterward to Israel, where she founded and directed the Jerusalem Eurythmy Ensemble (1990) and the Jerusalem Academy of Eurythmy (1992) and was an instructor in the Jerusalem Waldorf Teacher Bachelor Program in David Yellin Academic College from 1999. Jan has held Master Classes at various venues worldwide, including the Goetheanum and the MA Program in Eurythmy held at Emerson College and Spring Valley. She is the representative for Israel in the International Eurythmy Therapy Forum.

Join us for our Annual NYE Conscious Community Gathering – The Theme for 2022 is Cabaret – a Cultural Sharing! All are invited to take the stage with an offering.

Circles Edge & other Waldorf alum will also perform

31 December Doors open at 6:30 pm – 4248 N. Lincoln Ave. Chicago, IL. 60618

Please bring Festival Food & Drink to share

$20 goes to support the Rudolf Steiner Branch – the young People hosting & in The Band

7 – 8 pm – Eurythmy with Jan Ranck (separate fee $20)

8:30 pm – Circles Edge & Friends warm the stage & host the open mic

10:10 pm – Thought-Seed Circle

10:30 pm – Clean-up…;)

For more info. Contact Cultural Events & Festivals Coordinator
Hazel Archer-Ginsberg