Greetings friends on this Eve of Epiphany – Today was the last day of our Holy Nights Storytelling Journey with the Epic of Gilgamesh sponsored by the ASA. May we take the energies we have raised together into a deep digestion, & may the many seeds planted & the insights shared light the way for the Wise Kings, thru the warming of our shepherds hearts.
Yesterday in Tablet 11 we heard how after his failed initiation, Gilgamesh returned to Uruk. In the evening lectures of the Christmas Conference Steiner speaks to this saying: “He travelled along the Danube, following the river on its northern bank, until he came again to his home, to the home of his choice.” When we connect the dots we find that this little fact opens us to a clue in Rudolf Steiner’s autobiography, where we learn that as a young man Steiner himself walked along the northern bank of the Danube River every day for 7 years to & from school. And so it is, that destiny brought young Rudy into Austria-Hungary, in part to experience first-hand the connection with the powerful Atlantean Mystery Center in Burgenland where Gilgamesh meets ‘The Faraway Man’ – Utnapishtim, who Steiner likens to Manu or Noah, & calls the “High Priest of Atlantis”.
The entire Epic, being a telling of Steiner’s own biography as Eabani, has much to offer us. Our storytelling was a good start in the unveiling of the many secrets hidden in this ‘Hero’s Journey’ of human evolution – a story of karmic ties & friendship – & a quest for the meaning of life – revealing Steiner’s core mission of bringing karma & reincarnation to the west.
At the end of our final chapter in the reading of Tablet #12 today, Director of Programs Tess Parker announced that Dr. David Gershon had crossed the Threshold.
Interesting to conceive that this amazing individual choose to cross the Threshold during the appearance of The asteroid A1 Leonard, the Quadrantids meteor shower, with Venus, Mercury, Jupiter & Saturn speaking with the crescent Moon in the South West after sunset.
I have had the privilege of knowing the good doctor for many years. His dry sense of humor & will-filled enthusiasm never failed to enlighten & inspire me. So many stories…He was always volunteering me for things. One time sitting in a large circle of colleagues at the Michael Fields Institute, folks were having a hard time communicating, so he starting waving his hands calling for a stop. When he had everyone’s attention, he said: ‘What we need is for Hazel to bring everyone together in a Michaelmas festival – the farmers & the city folk, the families & Anthro-heads together under the sword & shield of Michael.’ And so for a year we planned together what that could look like. And in 2019 we brought these diverse groups together at Angelic Organics Farm for a big fest – including an amazing ‘Farm to Table’ dinner. This awoke the social artistry that lives so deeply in Farmer John Peterson; & it dove tailed into Chuck Ginsberg & me creating the Family Farm Initiative with the Zinniker Farm.
As an Anthroposophical Doctor David knew how important nutrition is, so he was a big supporter of biodynamics.
“The dead rise and walk about / the eternal fields of thought”. ~From Wendall Berry as an opening quote for a book of remembering.
Dear David, I will rise to meet you in my thinking so that together we can continue to walk in those ‘eternal fields of thought’
Blessings on your Hero’s Journey in the Spiritual World.
~hag
Hi Hazel,
The mission of Gilgamesh wasn’t a failed mission as he returned to Uruk. He had gone westward in order to find the secret and truth of Immortality. And he found it in a little place in the Burgenland of Austria. Thus, the allusions to Rudolf Steiner, who crossed the frontier from Neudorfl, Hungary to Wiener-Neustadt, Austria over the seven years from 1872 to 1879. His father decided that he should attend a kind of Aristotelian-style school for his further education, and this was because he had shown so much interest for “all things mechanical and technological” since childhood.
Now, for clarification, it is possible to show that Utnapishtim, as the Hierophant Priest of this little colony of the latter-day Hibernian Mysteries that Gilgamesh found, was actually Xiusthros, which translates as Zarathustra.
When Gilgamesh received the modified initiation via the plant of renown, and knowing that he had a whole culture to serve, protect, and save, he was given this as a means to return to Uruk as an initiate. Yet, just before entering Uruk on his return, he found out that evil forces had been foisted on Uruk in his absence; the forces of Istar, the Babylonian goddess that ruled with synthetic-chemical forces. Thus, his anger caused him to have his initiation obliterated. It remained only as a memory, and this was enabled by Eabani, who had fully engaged the Hibernian Mystery. Thus, the Epic of Gilgamesh was born. Gilgamesh would build a circumferential wall around his beloved Uruk for the protection of his people. Eabani would write the Epic as a matter of Initiation Science. The loss becomes the gain in the overall scheme of things.
Zeruane Akarene was broken into when Gilgamesh returned to Uruk with the modified initiation. His anger became the clarion call of the Epics, which refer to times of transition. His building the wall around Uruk was a spatial dimension. Eabani responded with the time dimension, which preserved the remembrance of the entire experience in going westward. The Mysteries first receive conscious recognition here.
Yes, wonderfuly rendered…
And interesting how that trait of anger was still resonating in that individuality into the incarnation with Alexander & even into Ita Wegman…
“Sing to me, Oh Muse, of the anger of Achilles” is how the Iliad of Homer begins. Thus, anger can be a big ‘time bender’. I did not know that Ita Wegman had any issues with anger, although her treatment by the GAS was reprehensible. Steiner should have verbally declared her as his successor before he died. Then, there would have been no doubt. What better leader could there have been, considering the matter of past lives as qualification.
I can relate, as anger tends to fire up in me as well, it’s a tendency in some
The Mission of Anger By Rudolf Steiner, Munich, 5th December 1909
https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA058/English/RSP1983/19091205p01.html
Of all things that the Sentient Soul experiences, let us therefore consider anger.
It points to what will come about in the future. To begin with, anger expresses a judgment of some event in the outer world; then, having learnt unconsciously through anger to react to something wrong, we advance gradually to enlightened judgments in our higher souls. So in certain respects anger is an educator. It arises in us as an inner experience before we are mature enough to form an enlightened judgment of right and wrong. This is how we should look on the anger which can flare up in a young man, before he is capable of a considered judgment, at the sight of injustice or folly which violates his ideals; and then we can properly speak of a righteous anger. No-one does better at acquiring an inner capacity for sound judgment than a man who has started from a state of soul in which he could be moved to righteous anger by anything ignoble, immoral or crazy. That is how anger has the mission of raising the Ego to higher levels. On the other hand, since man is to become a free being, everything human can degenerate. Anger can degenerate into rage and serve to gratify the worst kind of egoism. This must be so, if man is to advance towards freedom. But we must not fail to realise that the very thing which can lapse into evil may, when it manifests in its true significance, have the mission of furthering the progress of man. It is because man can change good into evil, that good qualities, when they are developed in the right way, can become a possession of the Ego. So is anger to be understood as the harbinger of that which can raise man to calm self-possession.
But although anger is on the one hand an educator of the Ego, it also serves strangely enough, to engender selflessness. What is the Ego’s response when anger overcomes it at the sight of injustice or folly? Something within us speaks out against the spectacle confronting us. Our anger illustrates the fact that we are up against something in the outer world. The Ego then makes its presence felt and seeks to safeguard itself against this outer event. The whole content of the Ego is involved. If the sight of injustice or folly were not to kindle a noble anger in us, the events in the outer world would carry us along with them as an easy-going spectator; we would not feel the sting of the Ego and we would have no concern for its development. Anger enriches the Ego and summons it to confront the outer world, yet at the same time it induces selflessness. For if anger is such that it can be called noble and does not lapse into blind rage, its effect is to damp down Ego-feeling and to produce something like powerlessness in the soul. If the soul is suffused with anger, its own activity becomes increasingly suppressed.
This experience of anger is wonderfully well brought out in the vernacular use of sich giften, to poison oneself, as a phrase meaning “to get angry”. This is an example of how popular imagination arrives at a truth which may often elude the learned.
Anger which eats into the soul is a poison; it damps down the Ego’s self-awareness and so promotes selflessness. Thus we see how anger serves to teach both independence and selflessness; that is its dual mission as an educator of humanity, before the Ego is ripe to undertake its own education. If we were not enabled by anger to take an independent stand, in cases where the outer world offends our inner feeling, we would not be selfless, but dependent and Ego-less in the worst sense.
For the spiritual scientist, anger is also the harbinger of something quite different. Life shows us that a person who is unable to flare up with anger at injustice or folly will never develop true kindness and love. Equally, a person who educates himself through noble anger will have a heart abounding in love, and through love he will do good. Love and kindness are the obverse of noble anger. Anger that is overcome and purified will be transformed into the love that is its counterpart. A loving hand is seldom one that has never been clenched in response to injustice or folly. Anger and love are complementary.
A superficial Theosophy might say: Yes, a man must overcome his passions; he must cleanse and purify them. But overcoming something does not mean shirking or shunning it. It is a strange sort of sacrifice that is made by someone who proposes to cast off his passionate self by evading it. We cannot sacrifice something unless we have first possessed it. Anger can be overcome only by someone who has experienced it first within himself. Instead of trying to evade such emotions, we must transmute them in ourselves. By transmuting anger, we rise from the Sentient Soul, where noble anger can flame out, to the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul, where love and the power to give blessing are born.
Transmuted anger is love in action. That is what we learn from reality. Anger in moderation has the mission of leading human beings to love; we can call it the teacher of love. And not in vain do we call the undefined power that flows from the wisdom of the world and shows itself in the righting of wrongs the “wrath of God”, in contrast to God’s love. But we know that these two things belong together; without the other, neither can exist. In life they require and determine each other.
Hi Hazel,
This lecture, which I never heard of from December 1909, is really important. The parameters of Anger. I personally have a lot of anger working in my life, and I think you do too. This has the effect of carrying the mission forth, and I think that Steiner realized this with this lecture in particular. It only serves to carry the conversation forward, and I thank you for that. We all have so much anger to deal with. In today’s age, it is paramount. That is why pandemics occur, just like a hundred years ago, with the pan flu epidemic of 1918. Today’s situation is no less.
It is how we deal with it now that is important. As such, Spiritual Science is on the very low barometer of current experience, even with all of the efforts of the GAS. As such, we can only trust ourselves in this day and age. To say that Anthro’s should unite to the cause seems very weak, but maybe that is all there is.
Thank you once again, dear Hazel,
For the incredible amount of work (under-appreciated as I’m quite sure it was) to get the Gilgamesh project accomplished. (I am SO GLAD I was able to be there most of the days) AND
now especially for your very lovely tribute to David, a dear dear friend, — – – – – what shock his passing was for so many of us!)
AND, as I know I said in several of the chats online (which I have no knowing of whether you got any of them or not) I look forward to a time when we will be able to do some kind of work together in the future, whenever and wherever that might be!
DMM
Greetings Brother DMM –
I have been feeling into David’s journey, last night & this morning upon awakening. That he was called thru the gate at this time has a deep significance for his next life where we will all meet again.
Yes, there is much to do, may we all support the work in our service to Anthroposophia.
Blessings