20 August 2016 – Astro-Weather: Look toward the south-southwest during evening twilight and you can’t miss Mars. The Red Planet shines brightly & remains visible until it dips below the horizon around midnight. Mars resides on the border between Scorpius & Ophiuchus.

The Moon reaches perigee, the closest point in its orbit around Earth, (228,074 miles away from us) tonight at 8:19 pm CDT

“…We have the ways and means to move toward a human future that will find again the stars on the foundation of freedom and love. We will again experience, but with full consciousness, the star companions beside us. We must rise to become a free cooperator with the stars.” ~Willi Sucher

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ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

14 – Deathday of Agrippa Postumus, adopted son of the late Roman emperor Augustus, is executed by his guards while in exile under mysterious circumstances.

636 – Battle of Yarmouk: Arab forces led by Khalid ibn al-Walid take control of Syria & Palestine away from the Byzantine Empire

1000 – The foundation of the Hungarian state by Saint Stephen, celebrated as a National Day in Hungary

1083 – Canonization of the first King of Hungary, Saint Stephen

1153 – Feast day of Bernard of Clairvaux, French theologian & saint, who wrote the rule of St. Benedictine

1308 – Pope Clement V pardons Jacques de Molay, the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, absolving him of charges of heresy

1391 – Konrad von Wallenrode becomes the 24th Grand Master of the Teutonic Order

1794 – Battle of Fallen Timbers: American troops force a confederacy of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa, &Potawatomi warriors into a disorganized retreat

1854 Deathday of F.W.J. Schelling a German philosopher, at the midpoint in the development of German idealism, between Johann Gottlieb Fichte, his mentor in his early years, & Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, his former university roommate, early friend, & later rival. Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger & Slavoj Žižek have shown interest in re-examining Schelling’s body of work. Rudolf Steiner speaks about him in Karmic Relationships GA 238 as being inspired by Tycho Brahe

1858 – Charles Darwin first publishes his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace’s same theory

1866 – President Andrew Johnson formally declares the American Civil War over

1882 – Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture debuts in Moscow, Russia

1890 – Birthday of H. P. Lovecraft

1914 – Brussels is captured in the course of the German invasion of Belgium

1920 – The first commercial radio station, 8MK (now WWJ), begins operations in Detroit

1940 – In Mexico City, exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally wounded with an ice axe by Ramón Mercader. He dies the next day

1944 – World War II: The Battle of Romania begins with a major Soviet Union offensive

1950 – Korean War: United Nations repel an offensive by North Korean

1962 – The NS Savannah, the world’s first nuclear-powered civilian ship, embarks on its maiden voyage

1965 –Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Daniels, 26, is martyred; murdered by an unpaid sheriff’s deputy, sacrificing his life for young black activist Ruby Sales whom he pushed out of the way of a shotgun blast

1968 – Soviet Union-dominated Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring

1975 –NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars

1977 –NASA launches the Voyager 2 spacecraft

1991 – Dissolution of the Soviet Union, August Coup: More than 100,000 people rally outside the Soviet Union’s parliament building protesting the coup aiming to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev

1991 – Estonia, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, issues a decision on the re-establishment of independence on the basis of historical continuity of its pre-World War II statehood

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My POD (Poem Of the Day)

~Before I was dust

A fine powder of thought

Settling over the brown feet of women,

I was

Zagging in the lightning

Well-spoken in the thunder

Heavy in air I breathe today

~hag

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The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric, Lecture VI, by Rudolf Steiner

“Since the prehistoric time of Zarathustra and before Moses appeared among men, the Spirit who had hitherto dwelt in the Sun had descended upon earth.

His light shone in the burning bush and in the fire on Mount Sinai; He was in the earthly elements.

Yet a while — and the Spirit whom the great Rishis divined but could not clairvoyantly behold, the Spirit whom Zarathustra sought in the Sun, who proclaimed himself to Moses in thunder and lightning — the same appeared in human form in Jesus of Nazareth.

That was the course of evolution: out of cosmic space He descended, first to the physical elements, then into a human body.

The divine Ego from which man issued, and to which the writer of St. Luke’s Gospel traces the lineage of Jesus of Nazareth, was born again. Herewith was consummated the sublime event of the rebirth of God in man.”

In the New Testament it says that the second coming of Christ will occur in the realm of the clouds. What Steiner’s lectures make clear is that some of these clouds will be very dark, bringing thunder & lightning.

Blessings & Peace ~Hazel Archer Ginsberg