12 July 2016 – ASTRO-WEATHER – The moon is waxing. Morning stars are Neptune & Uranus. Evening stars are Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Mars & Saturn.
As soon as it’s dark, look just north (upper right) of Jupiter for Sigma Leonis, Leo’s hind foot. Tonight they’re the closest they will appear.
The constellation Sagittarius is found due south at midnight. It is shaped like a teapot, its spout to the right. The picture was imagined as an archer to the Greeks, aiming an arrow at Scorpio, seen to the right of the teapot
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Feast day of Saint Veronica. The name “Veronica” itself is a Latinisation of Berenice a Macedonian name, meaning “bearer of victory”. The Latin word for “true” or “authentic” happens to be vera, the theory emerged that the name itself is derived from the Latin phrase “true image”, vera icon. In the 13th-century text & also in some later sources the term Veronica was used for the veil, not the person. The Encyclopædia Britannica says this about the legend:
Eusebius in his Historia Ecclesiastica tells how at Caesarea Philippi lived the woman whom Christ healed of an issue of blood (Matthew 9:20-22). In the West she was identified with Martha of Bethany; in the East she was called Berenike, or Beronike, the name appearing in as early a work as the “Acta Pilati”, the most ancient form of which goes back to the fourth century. The fanciful derivation of the name Veronica from the words Vera Icon (eikon) “true image” dates back to the “Otia Imperialia” that says: “Est ergo Veronica pictura Domini vera” (translated: “The Veronica is, therefore, a true picture of the Lord.”)
486 BC – Birthday of Darius I, the third king of the Persian Empire. Also called Darius the Great, he ruled the empire at its peak.
He organized a new monetary system, along with making Aramaic the official language of the empire. He also put the empire in better standing by building roads & introducing standard weights & measure.
Darius is mentioned in the Biblical books of Haggai, Zechariah, Daniel, & Ezra–Nehemiah.
100 B.C – Birthday of Julius Caesar
1493 – Hartmann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle, one of the best-documented early printed books, is published. Latin scholars refer to it as Liber Chronicarum (Book of Chronicles). German speakers refer to it as Die Schedelsche Weltchronik (Schedel’s World History)
1562 – Fray Diego de Landa, acting Bishop of Yucatán, burns the sacred books of the Maya
1580 – The Ostrog Bible, one of the early printed Bibles in a Slavic language, is published
1804 –Alexander Hamilton dies a day after being shot in a duel with Aaron Burr, the VP of the US.
1806 – Sixteen German imperial states leave the Holy Roman Empire & form the Confederation of the Rhine.
1817 – Birthday of Henry David Thoreau
1849 – Deathday of Dolley Madison, wife of James Madison, 4th First Lady of the United States
1854 – Birthday of George Eastman, founded Eastman Kodak
1864 – Birthday of scientist George Washington Carver
1884 – Birthday of Louis B. Mayer
1884 – Birthday of Amedeo Modigliani, Italian painter &sculptor
1895 – Birthday of Buckminster Fuller, architect & engineer, designed the Montreal Biosphère
1895 – Birthday of Oscar Hammerstein II, director, producer, &songwriter
1904 – Birthday of Chilean writer Pablo Neruda
1917 – The Bisbee Deportation occurs as vigilantes kidnap & deport nearly 1,300 striking miners from Bisbee, Arizona
1918 – The Imperial Japanese Navy battleship Kawachi blows up at Shunan, western Honshu, Japan, killing at least 621
1920 – The Soviet–Lithuanian Peace Treaty is signed, by which Soviet Russia recognizes the independence of Lithuania.
1933 – A minimum wage of 40 cents an hour was established in the U.S
1941 – Moscow was bombed by the German Luftwaffe for the first time
1943 – German & Soviet forces engage in one of the largest armored engagements of all time
1948 – Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion orders the expulsion of Palestinians from the towns of Lod & Ramla
1962 – The Rolling Stones perform their first concert, at the Marquee Club in London.
1967 – The Newark riots begin in Newark, New Jersey
1973 – A fire destroys the entire sixth floor of the National Personnel Records Center of the United States
1984, Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale named U.S. Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, D-N.Y., as his running mate.
1990, Boris Yeltsin quit the Soviet Communist Party, saying he wanted to concentrate on his duties as president of the Russian republic
2000 – Russia launched the Zvezda after two years of delays. The module was built to be the living quarters for the International Space Station
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~Feeling One with the Ancient Sojourner…Destined
To walk a 1000 years
Until I arrive…
@mySelf…
Let the red sash that cradles the hips of Isis
Knot the ends of life & dream divine
For I am
Water & dust walking –
Crimson magic courses thru me…
Yes I am
An oar made ready…
Like water, adaptable
I follow mySelf
Flowing on…
Come friend, let’s dance along the way .:.
~hag
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July = “Selflessness Becomes Catharsis”
The fullness of the resplendent Summer with its lush, colorful gardens & flowering meadows, undulating like heat waves in a dream over the earth, embraced in a mantle of warmth. I give myself up to the motherly sun, in order to become, a sun myself. My soul a flaming glow blazing full of yearning for the open stillness of the wide starry sky.
“Lose yourself to find yourself”
Today too on my natal return, these words sound out to me from those heavenly heights. But how, after the ‘I’ has made its way into us, can we lose ourselves in order to find ourselves again in the ‘I’ of the World?
Perhaps it’s by sacrificing our intellectual knowledge to the spirit of the world! This is the secret of the Summer mysteries: the transformation of the intellectual knowledge of the head, into the warmth-bearing substance of the will!
Seen from the aspect of biography, this turning point, is mirrored after the middle of life, where the downward curve of life sets in – understood in July’s glyph of the crab, symbol of the constellation Cancer.
We are called to give up the armoring of materialism, which is a danger that lucks in the summer feeling. Only when the crab reveals its spiritual secret can it bestow its wisdom to us.
This secret is transformation. The old & worn out reaches its completion, which is expressed in the involving spiral of the shell. – This narrowing passage of the spiral leads to an end, from which there is no escape – And then we see that the new beginning of the evolving spiral is separated from the involving spiral by an abyss.
How can we cross this abyss? Only by a courageous leap over the void! This archetypal motif always appears when what is old & exhausted reaches its end, & the new approaches, which can only be achieved thru new soul forces.
Today too this turning point, not only in the wheel of the year, but of world events before us -This stream of the past, that carries the seed of death within it – This stream of materialistic understanding & formation of time, armored within a rigid structure, can only be overcome by a courageous leap. For from that rigid structure no new seeds of the future can emerge. These seeds must be developed by a completely new set of soul forces, into which streams the light of true spiritual knowledge.
The time of summer is especially appropriate for cultivating within us, with warmth, these new concept-seeds of thought, in order to shape new imaginations with which we can approach the metamorphic processes of nature. Thinking in pictures means following intuitively this cosmic transformation processes of nature, for She Herself, the great World Mother, is woven out of cosmic imaginations. Thru this we form in our souls what we see in nature right now: the ripening of fruits, the fruitification of involution, in order to bear the seeds of summer thru the winter.
This turning point of the year can stand before us a guiding motif:
“Take into your soul, in Selfless-Devotion, the rich pictorial language of outer nature, & through it, try to solve the riddle of the world pictures of cosmic happenings. Through this you walk the path of alchemical transformation which leads to catharsis (purification). For catharsis means to be ready to humbly lay aside the proud thinking which has hardened & encrusted itself in modern intellectuality, in order to sacrifice it on the altar of the world spirit, so that it can transform itself into warming forces of will & imaginative world pictures. In doing this, we accomplish the demand of our age, which requires this sacrifice of us. And at the same time we accomplish the inner purification of our souls, which only in breaking through the rigid armour of intellectual thought can experience resurrection in the realm of creative world thoughts!”
“We cultivate thinking & make it mature through developing qualities which seem not to be related at all to thinking – through devotion & insight – not so much through logical exercises, but when we observe this & that, & use processes in nature to penetrate into hidden mysteries. It is through devotion to questions of nature & humanity, through the attempt to understand complicated people, through an intensification of attention, that we make our thinking astute.
Little cultivation of insight & devotion makes us grumpy hypochondriacs. What is so very necessary for thinking does not at all depend on thinking. All self-will, all self-seeking, has a destructive effect on thinking…Devotion, willingness for sacrifice with respect to the most insignificant objects & occurrences, has a favorable effect on one’s thinking & one’s mood.” ~Rudolf Steiner GA 130, lecture 2
& tomorrow’s another day…
Until soon
Blessings and Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg