Tag Archives: Saturn

The Festival Life: Practical Journeys into the New Mysteries

Understanding Anthroposophy Through the Rhythms of the Year

“To celebrate a festival really means to unite oneself in spirit with the cosmic spirit”.  ~Rudolf Steiner

Our festival life is structured to include activities that stimulate head, hands and heart. We engage our thinking through lectures on Spiritual Science, learning, as Goethe did, what lives behind the laws of nature, engaging in creative thinking outside the box, like Einstein demonstrated, opening to insight and intuition to better solve the problems of the world. Movement and artistic endeavors motivate our will forces, creating balance and beauty, channeling creativity in a purposeful way that deepens our thoughts through action. Activities like storytelling, biography sharing, and singing consciously involve our feeling life, reducing stress, stimulating our imagination, creating connections and goodwill.

By strengthening our thinking, feeling and willing we lead more conscious lives, better able to serve the greater community -involved parents, good neighbors, mindful citizens, purposeful workers in our chosen fields of work in the world.

The Greek meaning of the word festival is “Shining Day”.

The festivals not only commemorate great historical events, cosmic truths and traditions; they are in themselves spiritual events that manifest in seasonal rhythms, and carry a significance that grows and deepens with the development of human evolution. The celebration of the festivals let us practice what Steiner calls ‘the Reverse-Ritual’ – The idea of ‘Openness to Above’.  Instead of invoking Spirit down, as in days of old, we rise to the spirit, in our thinking. We study and celebrate these ‘Shining Days’ to sustain and renew ourselves and the world.

A festival has the quality of lifting us out of the ordinary and into the mysteries and magic of the rhythm of the seasons. Throughout history, festivals have emerged from people’s connection with their spiritual life and their search for the meaning of human existence.

“Through various festivals and rituals we acknowledge and celebrate our connection to and our responsibility toward each other and the world.” Celebrating festivals can bring us consciously to what we all experience instinctively in our daily lives, the changing cycles of the seasons and of life itself.  ~excerpted from Festivals by Marilyn Pelryme.

“Celebrating festivals illuminates our life on earth with spiritual meaning and shows us the significance of our human existence in the universe. We human beings stand between the two worlds uniting them in ourselves. We are the crossing point where the upper circle representing the heavens flows into the lower one belonging to the earth.”  ~Evelyn Frances Derry

Some Upcoming Festivals at the Rudolf Steiner Branch 4249 N. Lincoln Ave. Chicago, Il. 60618 

Michaelmas 2015: Sept. 27, 6:30pm – 11:30pm

All Souls:  Nov. 8, 2015, 2pm – 4pm

Holy Nights 2015 -2106: Sunday Dec. 27- Wed. Dec. 30, 7pm – 9pm…Thursday Dec. 31 – NYE – 7pm – 1am…Jan. 1-5 7pm – 9pm

Holy Week 2016: March 20th – Palm Sunday 2pm – 4pm…March 21-26th – 7pm – 9pm…March 27th Easter Sunday – 2pm – 4pm

Pentecost: Sunday May 15, 2pm – 4pm

St. John’s: Sunday June 19, 2016 – 2pm – 4pm

Michaelmas 2016: Sunday Sept. 25th – 2pm – 4pm

I look forward to exploring these cycles with you

~Hazel Archer Ginsberg

Easter Week – Saturn Mysteries

Dear friends –

We rest on the Sabbath, Saturn-day – In Christo Morimur.

Picture the Garden of Gethsemane as the midpoint of the earth, the epicenter of the cosmos.  Imagine that between the rocky hill of Golgotha – part of the lunar Mount Moriah, & it’s polar opposite the Solar Mount Zion, the body of Christ was laid to rest.

It was a new tomb provided by Joseph of Arimathea, & yet it was truly the oldest Tomb – formerly a primal fissure, a gorge splitting Jerusalem in two,   Called by some Adam’s Grave –known as the gate to the underworld.  The eclipse & earthquakes of Good Friday through Holy Saturday tore open the original fissure.  The veil of the Temple was “rent in twain”.

Steiner tells us that eclipses & earthquakes can be seen as messages of unrest from the adversarial powers within the earth, stirred by human compulsions.

On Holy Saturday, vistas open into the interior of the earth. “He was lowered into the grave of the earth’, & so it was, that

The Christ went into the Earth’s Interior; His blood becoming the medicine for our continued evolution.

The darkness of Saturn is lit up from within by the Resurrected Sun. The Easter garden begins to bloom, so that our soul can behold, like the Magdalana before us, The Risen One as the gardener of the New Jerusalem.

The Tomb becomes the altar, a sacred place to commune with the gods, with the souls of the departed as our intermediaries.

The tomb becomes the Round table, & the Parsifal question leads us to find Christ in the etheric.

Before the mystery of Golgotha, the task of evolution was that the cosmos would become human, after this turning point, the human becomes cosmos -The New Sun -The imperishable Resurrection-Body uniting with the Cosmic- Sophia.

~Erkenntnisfeier~

A Cosmic Recapitulation of the Mystery of Golgotha

 

5 April 2015, Easter Sunday 2-4pmat the branch

Midwest Eurythmy Group Performanceof:

The Calendar of the Soul Verse for Easterwith speech artist Christa Macbeth

And the Hallelujah

Group Study of Emil Bock’s “Holy Week” forEaster Joy

The Legend of Shambhalla by Richard Dancey

Singing “Now the Green Blade Riseth”

Group Eurythmy: Hallelujah in the 7-pointed Star –

which Rudolf Steiner called: The ‘Lamb of God Heptagram’ with Johanna Rode

Pot-Luck to Share Encouraged

All Donations go to the Midwest Eurythmy Group

For more info Contact Festivals Coordinator Hazel Archer Ginsberg

 

 

“The Harmony of the Universe at the Moment of the Mystery of Golgotha “

 

“The moment of the (original) Mystery of Golgotha, that is, the time from the 3rd to the 5th of April 33 AD, displays a unique situation in the cosmos.

During those days there existed a harmony throughout the heavens, right down to the Earth, which did not exist before and will not return (if at all) for 26,000 years.”

 

The essence of this essay on Golgotha is that the ‘3 Zodiacs’ were aligned:

  1. The Constellations (the fixed Stars or astral body of the cosmos – World Soul)
  2. The Signs (associated with the seasons, with the yearly rhythms of life in nature – an image of the etheric, or life forces, in the universe)
  3.  The Houses (that which radiates as space segments from the geographical point where one stands – an image of the physical body)

 

“At the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, particularly on Easter Sunday just before sunrise, these space sectors were oriented into space in perfect harmony.

This wonderful harmony of the three Zodiacs, between heaven and Earth, is a vivid symbol, or image of the resurrection body that was then re-established.

 

The disharmony before was connected with the ‘Fall’ of humanity, and with the corruption of the spirit body. The ‘Fall’ in Paradise did not mean that only Adam and Eve went through

those experiences, the entire universe was affected and changed in that moment. The position of the Earth was changed.

 

We are faced in our work with the difference between the geocentric and heliocentric world conceptions. Rudolf Steiner, on the basis of his spiritual investigations,

pointed out that in the medieval Rosicrucian schools the pupil was first introduced to the geocentric view. Then, when the pupil had learned this, he was told that this is how it should be,

but that it is not so on account of the ‘Fall.’ The Earth had thereby lost its central position.

That which happened in Paradise affected the entire Earth and therefore the possibility of disharmony entered cosmic history.

 

However, on that Sunday morning, 5 April 33 AD, just before sunrise, the original harmony was re-established.

 

The cosmos was jubilant about what happened when the Christ rose from

the grave of the Earth. At the same time it was the hope of all future Earth existence and of all future humanity. ”

 

~Summary & excerpt from Astrosopher Willi Sucher‘s Cosmic Christianity pg.82