being human winter-spring 2021

being human

anthroposophy.org

rudolfsteiner.org

a quarterly publication of the Anthroposophical Society in America winter-spring issue 2021

Adapting & Thriving Online (p.18)

Beethoven, Timbre, & the Social Art (p.23)

Eurythmy as a New Mystery Art (p.27)

Gallery: Martina Angela Müller (p.30)

The Art of Yielding (p.37)

Karl König in America (p.39)

Sergei Prokofieff on Rudolf Steiner (p.44)

The NEW Experience of the Supersensible (p.46)

Martina Angela Müller Installation “Astar, Odem, Wings” (2020)

personal & cultural renewal in the 21st century

A Sophia Mosaic (p.13)

Planning for the life you want to live and for the world you want to live in. M o n e y a t w o r k i n t h e w o r l d i n t h e s e r v i c e o f t h e c o m m o n g o o d .

W e a r e a f i d u c i a r y , e t h i c a l l y b o u n d t o a d v i s e f o r o u r c l i e n t ' s i n t e r e s t s f i r s t a n d f o r e m o s t . O u r t a s k i s t o s u p p o r t o u r c l i e n t s t o f u l f i l l t h e i r i n d i v i d u a l l i f e ' s i n t e n t i o n s t h r o u g h f i n a n c i a l p l a n n i n g a n d a s s e t m a n a g e m e n t t h a t i s c o n g r u e n t w i t h t h e i r p e r s o n a l a n d s p i r i t u a l v a l u e s a n d a s p i r a t i o n s .

O

F i n a n c i a l P l a n n i n g

I n v e s t m e n t C o n s u l t i n g

P o r t f o l i o D e s i g n & M a n a g e m e n t

I n s u r a n c e P l a n n i n g

J e r r y M S c h w a r t z , C F P ®

B e r n a r d C . M u r p h y , C F P ®

K i m b e r l y M . M u l l i n , F P Q P ™

W e i n v i t e y o u t o c o n t a c t u s t o d a y !

Week 1:

June 27th to July 2nd

Virtual Courses:

Daily Lectures

Christof Wiechert will offer daily lectures to all participants

Daily Sessions Conversations on Decomposing the Colonial Gaze with Chérie and Petna Ndaliko

Curative Education with Robyn Brown

Teaching Grade 1: One Whole Class with Lori Ann Kran

Teaching Grade 2: From Form to Solid Foundation with Michael Gannon

Teaching Grade 3: Becoming a Steward of the Earth: Awakening to Self and Surroundings with Kris Ritz

Teaching Grade 4: Landing on the Earth with Both Feet with Tara DeNatale

Teaching Grade 5: The Golden Age: Feet upon the Ground, Gaze toward the Heavens with Jen Kershaw

Teaching Grade 6: From Chaos and Coldness to Order and Compassion with Anne Clair Goodman

Teaching Grade 7: A Year of Awakening and Exploring with Alison Henry Grade 8: Awakening to Adolescence in a Rapidly Changing World with Sarah Nelson

Welcome to Renewal 2021

For Waldorf teachers and administrators along with parents, trustees, artists, and thinkers seeking to deepen their lives through Anthroposophy

Week 2: July 4th to July 9th

Virtual Courses:

Sacred Hospitality: Sacraments for our Futures with Orland Bishop

Waldorf 101 with Signe Motter

The Journey Held By Love: Biography and Social Art with Jennifer Fox and Sandra LaGrega

Teaching the Physical Sciences in Grades 6,7, and 8 with Roberto Trostli

Face-to-Face Courses:

Waldorf Administration: The Human Encounter with Torin Finser and Carla Beebe Comey

Living Thinking with Michael D'Aleo

Strengthening the Whole Class with Jeff Tunkey

Honeybees and the Heart of the Consciousness Soul with Alex Tuchman of Spikenard Farm

Introducing Kairos Institute

Emergency Pedagogy

Inauguration of 12-Module

International Certificate Training at CfA/Antioch University New England Modules 1 and 2 (of 12 modules) with Bernd Ruf

Renewal Courses sponsored by

Center for Anthroposophy

Wilton, New Hampshire

Karine Munk Finser, Director Register online: centerforanthroposophy.org

Phone: 603-654-2566

Trauma Outreach Workshops with Reinaldo Nasimento (Special Needs) and Katrin Sauerland (Art Therapy)

Also Featuring:

• Singing with Meg Chittenden

• Movement with Leonore Russell

• Eurythmy with Cezary Ciaglo

Other part-time programs offered by Center for Anthroposophy: Explorations Online: Monthly Workshops in the Arts and Contemplative Practices

Waldorf High School Teacher Education Program

June 27 - July 30, 2021

Three-summers program specializing in Arts/Art History

English History

Math

Physics & Chemistry

Biology

Painting by Karine Munk Finser

Join Our Waldorf Teacher Training in Canada

Birth to Three Educator Training

Introducing Birth to Three Educator Training starting summer 2021

Early Childhood Educator Training

Grades Teacher Training

Now accepting applications for summer 2021 intake Sessions start July 3, 2021

Part time Programs: EC 2 years; Grades 3 years

5 weeks each year. 3 weeks in July, 1 week in fall and spring with additional mentoring, observation and practicums.

July session in Duncan, Vancouver Island; fall & spring in North Vancouver, BC. During Covid-19 restrictions adjustments will be made.

West Coast Institute is committed to providing quality Waldorf teacher training.

Intensive Summer Courses

Continuing Education Courses for Waldorf Teachers and others

For more information

Birth to Three & EC: Ruth Ker: ece@westcoastinstitute.org, 250-748-7791

Grades: Lisa Masterson: grades@westcoastinstitute.org, 949-220-3193

Visit our website to apply or register

D igned for working teach s.

Grade-Level Preparation (ECE to Grade 8) for the 2021-2022 school year

Experienced Waldorf instructors at each grade level and inspiring guests from the greater community. Classes cover a variety of information designed to ready the teacher with stories, art, academics and pedagogically appropriate content for the next grade level. Recommended for all teachers working in public or independent schools inspired by Waldorf pedagogy.

JULY 12-16, 2021 | DENVER COLORADO EXPLORING Di rsity, Inclusi , and Acc sibility

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and Public Schools

Inspired by Waldorf Principles

NEW COHORT BEGINS SUMMER 2021

DENVER, COLORADO | June 25th – July 10th

Gradalis training for Early Childhood and Grades Teachers is taught over 26 months, in seven semesters. Courses provide anthroposophical foundations, rich artistic training in visual & temporal arts, inner development, insights for child observation, and working with special needs. Plus, field mentoring, curriculum and school culture.

Includes: 3 two-week Summer Intensives; 4 Practicum Weekends; and on-line Interactive Distance Learning (8.7% of program) to support the working teacher with monthly pedagogical and main lesson support through two school years.

SAVE YOUR SPOT:

LEARN MORE: gradalis.edu

QUESTIONS 720-464-4557 or info@gradalis.edu

‘Teaching as an Art’

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Low-Residency Waldorf Elementary & Early Childhood Teacher Education Programs* & Specialized Subject Intensives Scholarships Available

*with SUNY MEd & MALS Option

• Summer Series Courses in Waldorf Education & Leadership Register / Apply Now for Summer 2021

www.sunbridge.edu

The Anthroposopher

Director of Programs Laura Scappaticci’s “conversations when you want them”

The Social Life of Money - John Bloom

The Great Conjunction - Personal Practices - Mary Stewart Adams

Spiritual Beings and The Holy Dynamic

Between Us - Rev. Patrick Kennedy

Against Dystopia - Conner Habib

A World Without Art - Laura Summer & Matt Sawaya

The Whole Picture - Waldorfy Podcast

Host Ashley Renwick

Creating Pictures of Peace - Olivia Stokes Dreier of the Karuna Center

Courage, Fear and a Deep BreathDr. David Gershan and Chris and Jerilyn Burke

Dr. Lakshmi Prasana - Healing, Educating, & The Twelve Senses

www.anthroposophy.org/podcast

8 from the editors

10 Rudolf Steiner Library report

11 book notes

13 A Sophia Mosaic, gathered by Signe Eklund Schaefer

18 initiative!

18 Adapting and Thriving Online, by John Beck

21 Lightforms Art Center: Facing the Unknown, Imagination in the Time of Pandemic

21 Maintaining Our Inner Initiative, by Adam Blanning, MD

23 arts & ideas

23 Archetype of Hope: Beethoven, Timbre & the Social Art, by Emmanuel AA Vukovich

27 Eurythmy as a New Mystery Art, by Clifford Venho

30 Gallery: Martina Angela Müller

37 The Art of Yielding, by David Anderson

39 research & reviews

39 Karl König in America, review by David Andrew Schwartz

41 Anthroposophy, Politics, Science: A Warning, commentary by Richard G. Fried, MD

44 Sergei Prokofieff on Rudolf Steiner, review by Stephen E. Usher

46 The New Experience of the Supersensible, review by John Beck

51 news for members & friends

51 What was the seed for Applied Anthroposophy? by Laura Scappaticci

52 Warm Hearts, Enlightened Heads, by Herbert O. Hagens

53 Insights and Perspectives, by Deb Abrahams-Dematte

54 Notes from Katherine Thivierge

54 Two Poems by John Urban 55 Gino Ver Eecke Joins the General Council 55 Hats Off to Renewal 56

57 Edward Reaugh Smith

59 Margaret Powell Chambers

59 Eugene Gollogly

61 David James Hollweger

63 The Calendar of the Soul: Dates for 2021-2022, by Herbert O. Hagens

The Anthroposophical Society in America

GENERAL COUNCIL

John Bloom, General Secretary & President

Helen-Ann Ireland, Chair (at large)

David Mansur, Treasurer (at large)

Nathaniel Williams, Secretary (at large)

Micky Leach (Western Region)

Marianne L. Fieber (Central Region)

Gino Ver Eecke (Eastern Region)

Dwight Ebaugh (at large)

Dave Alsop (at large)

Hannah Schwartz (at large)

LEADERSHIP TEAM

Deb Abrahams-Dematte, Director of Development

Katherine Thivierge, Director of Operations

Laura Scappaticci, Director of Programs

being human

is published by the Anthroposophical Society in America

1923 Geddes Avenue

Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1797

Tel. 734.662.9355

Editor & Director of Communications:

John H. Beck

Associate Editor: Fred Dennehy

Proofreader: Cynthia Chelius

Headline typefaces by Lutz Baar

Past issues are online at www.issuu.com/anthrousa

Please send submissions, questions, and comments to:

editor@anthroposophy.org

or to the postal address above, for our next issue by 5/10/2021. being human is free to members of the Society (visit anthroposophy.org/join). Sample copies are sent to friends who call, write, or email us at the address above.

©2021 The Anthroposophical Society in America. Responsibility for the content of articles is the authors’.

from the editors

Dear Friends,

Kathleen Wright’s wonderful obituary for Margaretta Bornhorst in our last issue included two insightful paragraphs (“Margaretta was blessed with healing hands...” and “Some of the best healers are those who suffer...”) that should have been attributed to Rise Smythe-Freed, who later became president of the Anthroposophical Nurses Association. Our mistake!

Anthroposophic Medicine (AM) was born just after the worldwide flu epidemic that followed on the Great War of 1914-1918. The centenaries of AM, and of Steiner/Waldorf education, were muffled, like so much else in the cultural life, by the current pandemic. The opinion-bubble effects of the new “social” media, and the problem of truthfulness vs. the pursuit of power in public life, have made either/or views popular. Richard Fried, MD, submitted a personal commentary which we decided to print because it is very clear and based on decades of work in the field; contrasting experiencebased views are always welcome. AM has the same huge potential for human evolution and culture as Waldorf schools or biodynamic farms, and for the same reasons: it begins from a full picture of human nature, and goes to meet a comprehensive reality with multiple perspectives. For AM to be identified primarily with others’ narrow positions on vaccinations would damage it and our whole movement. Should there be no vaccine for polio? Anthroposophy is not anti-science, it seeks a whole science exploring a full field of research.

In 1924 Rudolf Steiner said, answering a question about local situations, “Not for medical reasons but on general anthroposophical grounds I would emphatically not recommend any fanatical opposition to vaccination. We are not aiming to put up a fanatical opposition to these things; what we want to do is change things in an overall way by means of insight.” [Lecture in Dornach, 22 April 1924, GA/CW 314, in On Epidemics, Rudolf Steiner Press.]

We open with an offering from the ad-hoc Sophia group that formed after our 2019 Atlanta fall conference. Sophia, a divine-spiritual being, is perhaps the inspirer of that breadth of insight that marks anthroposophy. Signe Schaefer has gathered, without the dulling effect of definitions, a mosaic to point toward this power that approaches us, asking to be known.

We also share some of the online initiatives for this summer and beyond. In the arts section are articles on music and eurythmy and drama. The gallery (and covers, front and back), share the work of Martina Angela Müller, who has also been a prime mover in wonderful success of the Lightforms Art Center in Hudson, NY. We then hear a bit about Camphill founder Karl König’s time in America some sixty years ago, and his hope that from “over here” might come a redemptive response to central Europe’s collapse in the first half of the 20th century. And did you know that Sergei Prokofieff wrote about Rudolf Steiner? Steve Usher reviews a newly published “fragment of a spiritual biography.” There follows a review of The Twilight & Resurrection of Humanity, Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon’s book on 21st century spiritual challenges.

In the final section of news from the Anthroposophical Society itself Laura Scappaticci writes about the year-long Applied Anthroposophy course

that so many people were waiting for. Herbert Hagens tells us about a new book of essays about the Foundation Stone Meditation from Les Editions Perceval. Herbert’s suggested dates for the coming year of The Calendar of the Soul are on the last inside page.

Deb Abrahams-Dematte and Katherine Thivierge of the Leadership Team update us on your generosity at year end, and successful repairs to Rudolf Steiner House. We welcome Gino Ver Eecke to the General Council as Eastern Region representative, salute new members, and recall members who have died. We remember a number of unique lives well lived, each specially challenged and gifted, each touched by the transformative insights of an throposophy—the Sophia who seeks out us human be-

Anthroposophy is a source of spiritual knowledge and a practice of inner development. It cultivates our capacity to embrace the full dimensions of human experience, and the world in which we live, work and create. It is the inspiration for a wide variety of practical work including Waldorf education, biodynamic farming, medicine, arts, finance, social change and therapeutic approaches for people with disabilities.

Our world needs anthroposophy. In a time of cultural conflict, environmental destruction and widespread personal distress, anthroposophy offers deep insight and practical solutions.

Inspiration Community

EXPLORE HUMANITY’S PATH AND YOUR OWN. BECOME A MEMBER TODAY!

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IN AMERICA

Legacy Circle

Many thoughtful and caring members have provided legacy gifts for the Anthroposophical Society in America through their estate planning. We are humbled and deeply grateful for the generosity of these dear friends since 1992:

Rudolf Steiner Library

Liveliness is difficult to obtain in the current pandemic lockdown. The Rudolf Steiner Library carries its own flavor of liveliness in a dignified, steady, warm offering. We are very grateful for donations we have received, both financial and literary! During this pandemic/lockdown, RSL voluntarily follows the directives of the Capital District Library Council (CDLC), through which the Library is recognized; it helps us navigate the rules and requirements in these times.

Curbside service has been the norm since August. Our two library assistants, Kathleen Bradley and Martin Miller, have kept borrowing, book collecting, and inter-library loan work going at a brisk pace. Travis Henry has sanitized RSL while keeping the library spaces dazzlingly clean. We’d be at a loss without him! William Furze, community member at Triform, picks up batches of books and delivers them curbside for thorough cleaning. Judith Keily is watching from home, waiting to resume her volunteer work. This small team of visionaries does the hands-on work to keep RSL humming along!

Per agreement with the Rudolf Steiner Cultural Foundation (RSCF), membership in the RSL ($60 per year) is free to Anthroposophical Society in America (ASA) members, in exchange for ASA support as RSCF establishes itself.

Erika V. Asten* • Betty Baldwin • J. Leonard Benson*

Susanne Berlin* • Hiram Anthony Bingham*

Mrs. Hiram A. Bingham • Virginia Blutau*

Iana Questara Boyce* • Marion Bruce*

Helen Ann Dinklage* • Irmgard Dodegge*

Raymond Elliott* • Lotte K. Emde* • Hazel Ferguson*

Marie S. Fetzer • Linda C. Folsom* • Gerda Gaertner*

Susanna Gaertner • Ruth H. Geiger* • Ray German

Harriet S. Gilliam* • Chuck Ginsberg

Hazel Archer-Ginsberg • Alice Groh • Agnes B. Granberg*

Bruce L. Henry* • Ruth Heuscher* • Christine Huston

Ernst Katz* • Cecilia Leigh • Anna Lord* • Seymour Lubin*

William Manning • Gregg Martens* • Barbara Martin

Beverly Martin • Helvi McClelland

Robert & Ellen McDermott • Robert S. Miller*

Ralph Neuman* • Carolyn Oates

Mary Lee Plumb-Mentjes • Norman Pritchard*

Paul Riesen* • Mary A. Rubach* • Margaret Runyon

Ray Schlieben* • Lillian C. Scott* • Fairchild Smith*

Patti Smith* • Doris E. Stitzer* • Gertrude O. Teutsch*

Katherine Thivierge • Catherina Vanden Broek*

Randall Wadsworth • Thomas Wilkinson

Anonymous (18) * indicates past legacy gift

We are strengthened and blessed by the efforts of all people who strive to bring beauty and meaning to the world, inspired by the work of Rudolf Steiner. And we remain connected in deep and meaningful ways with those across the threshold who share our intentions and love.

Please contact Deb Abrahams-Dematte at deb@anthroposophy.org or (603) 801-6584 for information about planned giving & the Legacy Circle.

Some statistics from 2019: 419 active Inter Library Loan accounts (ILL); 46 new members (28 individuals, 18 ILL libraries); 203 ASA members and 20 study groups borrowed. 2,006 books were borrowed by ASA members. 233 new acquisitions to the collection and 94 new purchased titles. News for 2020 so far: 67 ILL loans in five months CDLC has been active; libraries include UC Berkeley; Sarah Lawrence, MIT. These numbers do not include the many non-ASA members.

More ephemeral are the many weekly phone calls and research requests from ASA members. RSL maintains out-ofprint or otherwise unavailable resources. Kathleen and Marty scan and copy selections for researchers, serious and convivial, from RSL’s vast collection of older books and journals.

Since our last report, RSCF has gathered four or five collection downsizings, bequests of books, and multiple inquiries about our receiving books. It is heartening to go through a collection of cherished books, and to hear expressions of gratitude as people realize that books they have loved will be used productively. Potential contributors should curate their books so that we receive only books based on anthroposophy. Also, please pack books in new boxes; old ones can carry mold.

RSCF and RSL send all of you a winter season of joy and light! These human elements have not been declared contagious. You help in sharing the dynamic ideals for a human future protected in the collection at Rudolf Steiner Library.

Book Notes

Space permits only a few full book reviews in each issue. Here we list some of the many others we encounter. Except as specified, the notes are from the publishers — Editor

Viral Illnesses and Epidemics in the Work of Rudolf Steiner, by Daniel Hindes, 131 pp. (Aelzina Books, 2020)

Through the timely efforts of Daniel Hindes, school director at the Boulder Valley Waldorf School, we have in this new book “all of Rudolf Steiner’s statements on viral illnesses and epidemics. Spanning 40+ years, they are drawn from 35 separate volumes of his Collected Works; several have never before been published in English. Newly translated from the latest German editions... an invaluable resource for anyone interested in exploring Steiner’s views on health and illness in relation to pathogens and infectious diseases. —Editor. Michael Ronall’s essay/review of this book is online at www.anthroposophy.org/ronall

Far Out Man, by Eric Utne, 368 pp. (Random House, 2020)

Anthroposophy and the counterculture is the marriage that didn’t happen. But one notable connection was made by Eric Utne, founder of Utne Reader, a major voice of all that searching by the baby-boomer generation. As for many, it was his kids and Waldorf Education that brought him to Rudolf Steiner’s initiative for a new global civilization, and his booklet about our movement, included in Utne Reader about 20 years ago, was an enormous

boost. Now Eric has written a memoir, Far Out Man, “the story of how I learned to read the spirit of the times, and what I saw. It’s also the story of how I lost that gift, what happened when I did, and how I found it again.” And note: “Utne,” he says, does mean “far out” in Norwegian. —Editor

The Anthroposophical Soul Calendar & the Incarnation Cycle of Man, by Roland Schrapp, 270 pp. (Books on Demand, 2020)

“This book takes a completely new look at the Anthroposophical Soul Calendar. It is about the deeper meaning of the fiftytwo weekly verses, which has remained essentially unexplored in the last hundred years since the first edition by Rudolf Steiner. A dense veil of Isis was spread over them, of which is well known that no mortal person can lift it. Only the immortal, psycho-spiritual human being, who knows himself at home in the extrasensory, higher worlds, is capable of doing this. Only to him the weekly verses reveal themselves as a travel guide through these worlds and lift him up to ever higher spiritual-cosmic realms until he reaches the experience of God, from where he gradually descends again into a new life on Earth, enriched in spirit and fertilized in his soul. If the reader embarks on this journey, the spiritual archetype of the Soul Calendar is ultimately unveiled to him and he achieves an extended understanding of Man and Christ. By many quotations from Rudolf Steiner’s lectures and books, the author virtually lets Steiner himself elucidate the breathtaking depths of his mysterious weekly verses.”

Teacher Training

Book Notes

A Road to Sacred Creation: A Compendium of Rudolf Steiner’s Perspectives on Technology – Volume One; Gary Lamb, editor, foreword by John Bloom; coming in Spring 2021 Technology and Natural Scientific Thinking. Technology is something that we as human beings can create, examine, and understand in minute detail. Consequently, materialistic thinking has reached a level of refinement and perfection in the technical sciences and has become a major force in shaping our modern worldview. — Goethe and the Archetypal Phenomena. Early twentieth century natural scientists typically conducted experiments to determine the causes behind phenomena. In contrast, Goethe (1749-1832) focused on the observable phenomena, simplifying and grouping them in a way that the phenomena reveal their own secrets. Ultimately, this process comes down to staying with the phenomena and learning to read and interpret their meaning. Goethe refers to these simplified facts or occurrences as archetypal phenomena.

Art and Science from One Source. It is common to view science as being based on objective facts, while art is sullied by subjective interpretations. Goethe took exception to this characterization of art. He maintained his scientific and artistic works were derived from the one and same spiritual source and, consequently, they are both objective interpreters of the mysteries of the natural world and the driving forces of reality. Science expresses them in the form of thoughts or ideas. Artists strive to imbue or imprint them in their works of art.

Natural Scientific Discipline as an Aid to Pursuing Spiritual Science. Even though Steiner considered spiritual science as a continuation of Goethe’s scientific approach, he was emphatic that natural science needs to be viewed as something that is a necessity in human evolution. However, it is important to uncover to what degree natural science is right, and when it is misplaced, too restricted, one-sided, or incomplete. Mastering the discipline of modern scientific research is a prerequisite for spiritual scientific research.

Modern Scientific Thinking and Mechanical Ideas as Preparation for Understanding Spiritual Realities. Modern scientific thinking and mechanical ideas have enabled people to think more clearly and sharply about the world. From now on a fundamental task of humanity is to comprehend the spiritual worlds with the same clarity as that evoked by the natural scientific method of study and research. In this way, the study of modern materialistic science can be an important aid for anyone seeking knowledge about spiritual laws, forces, and beings. A detailed understanding of spiritual realities will be necessary for humanity to meet the unwanted side effects of modern technology.

The Application of the Scientific Method in Researching Spiritual Realities. The critical factor in the natural scientific method of research is not the object of study; rather it is the method and soul attitude employed by researchers. It is unreasonable and arbitrary to think that the scientific method can only be applied to sense-perceptible reality. Spiritual-scientific researchers strive to use scientific methods of research that are as rigorous as those employed in natural science. However, spiritual scientific research also includes the spiritual reality that underlies the natural world.

And much more! — From the book’s preview

A Sophia Mosaic

gathered by Signe Eklund Schaefer

I am the Human Being. I am the Past, the Present, and the Future. Every mortal should lift my veil .

—Rudolf Steiner, The New Isis/Sophia Myth

Sophia is the name of a Divine Feminine being, a creative mother presence, bearing all that was, and is, and will be. Throughout time she has been revered and described in myths from around the world. She has been known by many names—The Great Mother, Isis, Tiamet, Gaia, Mary, Kuan Yin, Aditi, Ala, Skywoman, to mention only a few. Now, as Sophia, this great wisdom being, she who embraces human becoming in all its striving and suffering, is calling in new ways into our consciousness.

By what modern names might we recognize Sophia in our materialistic, right-wrong, thought heavy, partisan world? Could a concept like Rudolf Steiner’s ‘twelve world perspectives’ be a contemporary identification for her infinitely inclusive presence? According to Steiner, Anthroposophia refers to the current reality of her being on earth. In his New Isis/Sophia Myth she speaks of herself as the human being, and initially she is asleep and confused. In his lecture Search for the New Isis, Divine Sophia , Steiner offers the startling thought that in our times, “We do not lack Christ; but the knowledge of Christ, the Sophia of Christ…is lacking.” And from still another perspective, might we perhaps see Steiner’s An Outline of Esoteric Science as an effort to tell her evolving biography?

Since autumn 2019 the Anthroposophical Society has sponsored a monthly zoom meeting where a group of us have been exploring Sophia through sharing our own questions and experiences. We were drawn to this group through many different doorways, such as myth, philosophy, feminism, star wisdom, esoteric studies, healing, and contemporary life itself. The group is looking toward a future conference in 2022.

Sophia is hard to talk about because as soon as one characterization is given, it can feel inadequate. It may be true, but so perhaps is the opposite. No one description can encompass the totality of this being. The Sophia Group decided to gather one paragraph from anyone in the group willing to briefly address their individual relationship to, or understanding of Sophia. Some words are the inspiration of a particular day; others express long pondered questions, observations or insights. There was no template for these offerings, only the effort to share our own searching for meaning, our own encounters with the veil.

In sharing this mosaic of our thoughts, we invite you to explore your own relationship to Sophia. How is she manifesting, calling through the veil into your consciousness, your interest? And how are you listening?

It may not be possible to name that profoundly prophetic moment of wondrous realization that She who has been Presence, Accompaniment, Inspiration for all the decades of this life has now, in the end, quite simply become Indwelling. It is Sophia: She who lives into the humblest regions of my humanity, my life and work, consecrating every conscious deed despite all my unconsciousness. It is She who makes my life in community possible with the hope that Wisdom become Love, and Love become that healing force which would touch my confined world, and then even the whole world. Sophia in my life: like the Bodhisattva of Compassion She hears the cries of the world and transforms each day … “carrying a world-secret, indeed a World-Being.”

—Carrie Schuchardt

Sophia stole quietly into my life at an early age—I did not know her name. She entered in silence, and only spoke when my inner being was as silent as she. She stood behind the Imagination of Mary in the Luke Gospel, living in the words... And she kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. Over the years this Being of Sophia continues to open my soul to dimensions of the Divine that bring life to my spirit.

—Micky Leach

Sophia is Living Process. Not being a formed thing, she is quite difficult to express fully in words. If Sophia were likened to a story or a poem, she

would be the space between the words that allows meaning to find its way to human hearts and minds. The clearest way that I experience Her is analogous to an earthly mother’s love. A mother’s love-force is the environment that makes it possible to manifest into being from what is only otherwise potential. Sophia surrounds me all the time, she encourages me and allows for me to be the fullest self that I am willing to become. She will wait patiently, silently alongside me while I try to discern my way and occasionally she gives me a guiding nudge when I am not paying attention to what needs my attending. She is utterly receptive and yet totally giving at the same time. For me, Awakening to Sophia is to participate in a conversation that has no beginning or end, it is a beautiful movement between being heard and listening deeply, as revelation reveals revelation.

—Angela Foster

As if in a Dream after midnight and inspired by heralding Stars in silence She quietly turns her magnificence, and one might miss her if not for her gaze

White eyes wide open and crowned by the Dolomites, Mastiff Baumes or some other  ancient limestone barrier

There are Oaks and Pines spread across her brow and meadows on her cheeks Her mouth is the Sea dripping seaweed and shells down to her shoulders

Her companion the Owl rests on her left shoulder She turns to see  as she has done for eternity, her gaze upon thee

—Claudia Knudson

In contemplating the words of the New Isis Mysteries “I am the Human Being, I am the Past, the Present, and the Future. Every Mortal should lift my veil”… She beckons to me in a way that requires a particular kind of attention. An attention to the subtle, silent, shifting moments; listening for the silence in between words and the space between the notes in music.

I feel Sophia when I stand at the river’s edge and witness the vast array of colored leaves on a fall day – enlivening the palette that is the true nature of Sophia brought back to life from her white light captivity. As I witness, and breathe, and feel the arising that these colors bring to my soul, I can witness, and breathe, and enliven Sophia in me. I sense her deeply in the interlude of dusk and rising of morning light when I feel the quiet shifting of light to dark, and dark to light. She awakens in me the true understanding of life into death and death into rebirth.

—Michele Mariscal

Rudolf Steiner said “our Luciferic world picture... the mathematical-mechanical world picture of natural science” has dispersed and imprisoned Sophia in a cold starry vault of heaven, beautiful to look at, but devoid of life. He further indicates that it’s precisely our reductionist, Ahrimanic tendencies of analyzing, objectifying, manipulating and imposing that predisposes us to the world conception promulgated by abstract science. In a world marked by a numbing “busy-ness”, the divine feminine represented by Sophia invites me to be still, to listen and to behold – to deepen appreciation for intrinsic beauty, letting nature speak to all of my senses, not just my intellect, thereby inspiring imagination in a warm and living way. Practically speaking, Sophia calls out to me in my work in agriculture and the natural sciences through a burgeoning food movement that seeks to find patterns, to foster relationship, to nurture, to create harmony and to cultivate a holistic awareness of how food is cultivated, prepared and shared for health and healing. The mechanical agro-world view is “busy” creating an inter-locking world of farm robots, GMOs, remote sensing, sterile environments, synthetic biology, nanotechnology and yet more pharmaceuticals (including vaccines). We need to rediscover the garden, the commons and the hearth. Only Sophia can lead us there.

—Hunter Francis

“If you seek me with true desire for knowledge, I shall be with you. I am the seed & the source of your visible world. I am the ocean of light in which your soul lives. I am the ruler of space. I am the creator of cycles of time. Fire, Air, Light, Water and Earth obey me. Feel me as the spiritual origin of all matter…” And when I had no consort on Earth, you called me Maya. But since the cosmic Being of Love has

made his sacrifice to be ‘the meaning of the Earth ’, you O human being, are invited to contemplate your vows, to enact the Union of ‘Christ-in-me ’—Love & Warmth, with Anthropo-Sophia – Wisdom-in-me -The Light of Understanding; consecrated in the Bridal Chamber of your Heart—A Sacred Marriage of Spirit & Soul— Warmth & Light. ‘The Time is at Hand’, dear friends, to put on your Wedding Garment; and if it is your will, repeat after me: ‘The Christ-in-me, takes the Sophia-inme, that I may live in wholeness, now & for all ages to come’. I now pronounce you, Sophia-Christos. You may Lift the Veil, kiss the bride, & hail the bridegroom within.

—Hazel Archer

If I write about the Divine Feminine in my life today, I want to say that I am living with Her now in Her aspect as Sigune, from the Parzival legend. In speaking of this legend, Rudolf Steiner describes how his spiritual research led him to ask the question, “Where does the name of Parzival appear?” Eventually he realized that it is indicated in the starry script, when the Moon is at crescent phase: the illuminated portion of the Moon appears then as the chalice; sacredly cradling the “unillumined” part of itself as though it were the Host. But who leads Rudolf Steiner on this quest? Who tells him he must seek out where the name of Parzival appears? I imagine it is Sigune, she who also tells Parzival his true name. In her divine feminine role as weaver of the starry script, it is she who reveals the true name of each seeker of spiritual knowledge ~ all that seek to know themselves as spiritual beings must learn their names from her. Her task is particularly enhanced when she appears in the presence of the host and chalice, as she did this morning, September 14, 2020, when the waning crescent Moon swept by Venus/Sigune in the East at dawn. I hold it is one of the world’s most beautiful realities that the Moon will only ever approach Venus at crescent phase, so as to not outshine her in her task of weaving the starry script out of what lives as the highest and best in the human heart. With Moon presenting as chalice and host, and Venus nearby as Sigune, weaver of the starry script, we may be led to our highest, greatest truth.

—Mary Stewart Adams

The sun rose without a word throwing its light on the golding trees of autumn

And on the same day the moon will rise, silent in light til evening when its crescent joins the evening sky

As the days grow shorter

The people need your cloak around them even more to haven them against their darkness

But you have always done so, winter or summer If we but could hear your voice

in the heartbeat of the morning and the flutter of the evening

saying: “You may find me in the motion of the rising and the falling of my breath, the breath of night and day, of seasons as they come and go

in the star within the morning glory, in the unfolding of the rose and the eyes of the newborn child you hold

I am here,” She says

—Linda Bergh

We can learn from William James that reality is about relations, and from Martin Buber that reality is in the between. I believe it is easy to miss Sophia because she lives in relations and in the between. We can focus on God, Christ, Buddha, angels, and saints and miss Sophia even though she was next to God at the creation of the world, next to Christ in His incarnation, next to every high being, and next to each of us. It is easy to miss the many high and low betweens where Sophia suffers and inspires. Sophia knows where She is and what She is doing but we mostly don’t know either. Anthroposophy can help if we work at it.

—Robert McDermott

I find Sophia, the Divine Feminine, in the practice of social art which is possible in many situations. Social art is a sacred art where a small group of people simultaneously help create and enter into a safe space where each person can speak and be heard. Each person stands in their own individuality while holding the wholeness of the group. Rudolf Steiner’s Social motto exemplifies this ideal. “The healing social life is found only when in the mirror of the human soul the whole community finds its reflection and when in the community the virtue of each soul is living.” One of the most profound experiences of social art and being aware of the presence of Sophia is when doing natural death care. In this working with others the wholeness is felt where each person lovingly and reverently performs a role. It is important that each person holds the one who is crossing the threshold and all those present without sympathy and antipathy. In the presence of the dead time slows down. Reverence, beauty and awe can be experienced in the room. The veil between the physical and spiritual world thins. “Oh Holy Sophia” is in the practice of the social art of holding, with equanimity, the whole group, both the living, the dead and spiritual beings who are present.

—Sandra LaGrega

Sophia is not only the divine Feminine, she is the origin of Wisdom, which is intelligence infused with love, she is the Good, or morality tempered in experience, she is the Individual, an expression of spirit incarnated. She is also the We, striving for wisdom, goodness, and individuality, in light of the needs of all beings. Since childhood, when my teachers were called The Daughters of Wisdom, I had ambition to be – WISE!

A contradiction, for ambition has no place here. In fact, it may be that failure and sorrow can incubate wisdom far better than constant triumph. But joy has a place here, and Sophia rejoices with us.

—Joyce Reilly

you are here not there

Walk with Divine Sophia

Drink the water of life she offers and become a stream to the source

Breathe and s-t-r-e-t-c-h into everything

Fly with legs to sense the earth

Sing until heaven and earth marry

Allow the spaciousness of compassion to dissolve you

Surrender…

Lift the veil and awaken

Unite with Sophia and reveal her face in you

Take yourself home with one conscious breath

—Eyahnna DalBo

•

As the contours of my soul/spiritual life ever so gently gain in definition, I’ve begun to perceive Sophia as a prominent presence gracing my inner altar. I experience this intimate sanctuary as an architecture constructed of space rather than filled form, as mood rather than material. Yet the felt experience is far from abstract or immaterial! Sophia reveals herself to me as prayerful softening, actively receiving while giving birth to grace-filled actions. I slowly begin to comprehend how the word “Mother” shares the same source as “Matter.”

How the flow of Life moves in a figure 8 from conscious imaginations to intuitive, even playful, Will activity and back again. And how this movement passes, each time, through the heart.

—Jordan Walker

•

Bringing Sophia to Life

A shadow arrives in the desert wrapped in blue and holding a golden sphere

Opening her cloak she reveals galaxies of stars

Let her grab your feet and twist your tongue so that

•

The questions and pictures of Sophia that I live with at this time have to do with bringing the divine feminine—the mystery wisdom—into action and manifestation now, as a tool and a key to a loving and healthy future. The clues and the messages and inspiration are all around us, across time and cultures. The seeds for a better way are there, and we must ignite the will across barriers, beyond opinions and intellectuality, and transcending time and space, not to mention self-interest. How can we make this visible? Through art and nature, by recognizing and celebrating this impulse again and again. By connecting with one another. By bringing a path, a breadcrumb trail, a great blaze of light, whatever we can come up with, so that the spiritual world can collaborate with us and support us in this critical journey.

—Deb Abrahams-Dematte

There is an embrace waiting. Waiting when I lay down my self, when I lay down my mind. A vessel holding equally what it also can pour. There is a hand on one’s back, a cloak around the shoulders, a wind running fingers through the hair. There is a tidal pool in which to submerge, a dolphin playing rhythm in the waves, an awkward negotiation of rock under bare feet. There is the draping arm of a mighty oak, the generous offer of moss, the hollow call of the owl. An embrace in the shy smile at a check-out counter, the sparkling laughter between friends, the earthquake anger between two lovers, which reveals the tender love that’s fighting to be found. An embrace when a long held grief becomes untethered and is absolved in joy. Each time we encounter the unknown there is trepidation, then holy suspension, and then the opening of a mysterious new door. We are embraced each step of the way. The fear of loss becomes the gift of life. The pain of bearing witness becomes the depth of understanding. The crying out of the self becomes a resolve to heal. An embrace transforms the turmoil of bubbling dread and anxiety into the smooth liquid gold of the eternal. The night turns to dawn; the spring to winter.

Deeper we go into our soft and hard places, harmonizing the opposites. To embrace in steadiness and in shakiness. To set the bone; splint the arm; tune the heart. When I brace myself, what am I expecting? When I surrender, what can I find? From the cavernous womb of the forest floor, to the soaring heights of the cathedral sky. What will you find when you allow yourself to be held?

—Tess Parker

For me Sophia is the wholeness of the story. She holds all the polarities that perplex and inspire us—the light and the dark, development and decline, inner and outer, and all the rhythms of life and death. She holds everything with compassion. Her infinite wisdom is all around, awaiting our discovery. She resonates in our knowing, even as she comforts and challenges us in our not-knowing. Long before I heard her name, I felt ‘the Lady’ knocking in my heart. Now I feel her calling into our times—to wake us up, to help us unveil and bear what is ours to know and hold in our hearts, and also what we might bring to birth. I feel her being now as a mighty verb.

—Signe Eklund Schaefer

The term “Anthroposophy” should really be understood as synonymous with “Sophia,” meaning the content of consciousness, the soul attitude and experience that make a person a full-fledged human being. The right interpretation of “Anthroposophy” is not “the wisdom of man,” but rather ”the consciousness of one’s humanity.”

— Rudolf

If anyone would like to participate in a future collection of personal words on Sophia, please contact Signe Eklund Schaefer at signeschaefer17@gmail.com

The top border images (pp. 13-17) are details from “View of the Main Nave, looking to the west” of Saint Sophia, Istanbul, “as recently restored by Sultan Abdul Medjid,” by Gaspare Fossati, lithographed by Louis Haghe, published 1852; collection of the Library of Congress.

Steiner, Awakening to Community

IN THIS SECTION: Pandemic restrictions will likely continue at least through this summer. We share some of the new online adaptations, as well as recorded resources. It is surprisingly rich!

Lightforms

Art Center in Hudson, NY, has a new exhibit of art created in 2020. With some restrictions, you can visit in person.

Adam Blanning, MD, is not only a devoted physician but also an energetic communicator.

We share his thoughts on how the will—our old “get up and go”— is affected by our current situation.

Adapting and Thriving Online by

John Beck

The Anthroposophical Society in America began offering webinars in 2014, exploring Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Dramas. Five years later, for the 2019-2020 Holy Nights some 900 people signed up for a daily “livestream.” Last April, the third and final Sacred Gateway Conference, a gathering of special sensitivity and atmosphere, suddenly had to be moved from Detroit to the internet Zoom application. By September 2020 program director Laura Scappaticci and assistant Tess Parker were veterans leading teams to deliver a new ten-month course Applied Anthroposophy (see page 51 for a report).

For a year now everyone has been adapting, schools most dramatically, and it has been done courageously and skillfully. (The whole country is finally aware that children really need so much more than a computer for a teacher!) For adult programs, there is the benefit to individuals who can’t travel; formerly “isolated” members are gratefully present everywhere online now, and it’s nice to meet you!

In our last issue, Dennis Dietzel sketched technology’s evolving and contrasted the rich benefits of physical immediacy in “Virtual Presence, Social Distancing.”1 Rudolf Steiner made clear that we have twelve senses; their interactions in “face-to-face” meetings create a unique “noetic” (consciousness) environment. And interest and attention give sensitive cues, eye-contact gives an indirect gentle touching, and natural color and sound are continuums, manifesting the sublime quality of creation itself.

Zoom and other online services support two or three senses. The sound is at least mildly distorted, the visual is boxed and flattened. While the extremely rapid “slicing and dicing” of digital media falls below the threshold of conscious perception, down there in the unconscious it is noticed. Our bodily viewing postures also challenge the more hidden senses like balance and movement.

We can, at least for short times, reduce these deficits. As a former tv and radio guy, I know that interest, enthusiasm, and willed attention can bring these offered simulations back to life. The needed energy and intention are not easily sustained, but we can improve mediated experiences on our side.

Rudolf Steiner also made the surprising observation that our senses do not amplify outer experience, they attenuate it. What “reaches the brain” is only as much as we can bear of a far more powerful environment. If we open ourselves more fully, even reverently, to a any communication, imagination and intuition may leap the obstacles. Program hosts help with gestures like an opening silence, a wellread verse, lighting a candle, breakout rooms. I try to prepare my space, refresh my feelings, and any event met with anticipation rises higher. After all, haven’t we been making the most gigantic experiences— A Tale of Two Cities —out of flat white sheets covered with the “little inky devils” of the alphabet?

What comes next? Is “extra-sensory” perception (“super-sensible” to us) a higher tech capacity open to human development? Will it replace these training wheels of mechanical technology?

So much ahead for us online...

In 2021, the new “live” offerings and recorded programs being shared is astonishing. The people involved are admirable. Their wisdom and integrity is a wonder. Let’s make the most of it!

The Center for Anthroposophy in Wilton, NH (www.centerforanthroposophy.org ) has gained a reputation for its summer “renewal” courses held in a beautiful environment, targeting teachers but open to all. In 2020 they jumped nimbly to online and were rewarded with many new participants who could not have attended in person. For 2021 (see page 3) there are two weeks of virtual courses, June 27–July 2 and July 4–July 9, leavened with singing, movement, and eurythmy. Along with weeks for teaching grades 1-8 there will be daily lectures for all with Christof Wiechert and conversations on “decomposing the colonial gaze,” plus week-long programs on curative education with Robyn

1 Read it and other past issues now online at www.anthroposophy.org/anthrousa; choose the “show stories inside” option.

Brown, “sacred hospitality” with Orland Bishop, Waldorf 101 with Signe Motter, and weeks on teaching physical science and on “the journey held by love: biography and social art.” There are also face-to-face courses and a new Kairos Institute, a word meaning “at the right time”! The Center has also launched “Explorations Online: monthly workshops in the arts and contemplative practices” which are “ building professional learning communities to serve our children.” This ambitious program starts April 3 and “satisfies prerequisite foundational studies for Waldorf teacher training.” There is a variant for Waldorf high school teachers, both practicing and prospective. “The world is changing, and with it, the needs of our students and school communities. In this course, we will explore together the mission of Waldorf education within the context of today’s society. Explorations is designed for parents, grandparents, administrators, and new teachers in public and independent Waldorf schools, as well as those teaching children at home. Classes meet via Zoom for 2 hours on Saturday and Sunday (4 hrs. per weekend) twice a month. Classes will include artistic work (speech/ storytelling, movement, music, and pastel drawing) and contemplative studies on current issues, using Anthroposophy as a method of inquiry. We will look at a holistic view of the human being, self-development, and current social and pedagogical needs.” Also on their website is news about a Waldorf EdD program at Antioch University and administration and leadership programs.

online experience in 2020. “All Live from Home! courses begin promptly at 7:30 Sunday evening (all times US Eastern) with Zoom check-in starting at 7, and conclude with Friday morning’s session which ends by noon. In between, Monday–Thursday, you can expect at least four hours daily of focused, instructional screen time, with curriculum delivered in three separate Zoom sessions taking place between the hours of 10am and 4:30pm.”

The Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training (www.bacwtt.org ), founded by students in 2001, observes that “ in our rapidly changing world, today’s children are looking for new qualities and depths in their teachers. Our program is designed to awaken the teacher in you who is able to meet and inspire these young peo-

Sunbridge Institute (www.sunbridge.edu) in Chestnut Ridge, NY, is also teacher-focused with general interest programs extending to organizational leadership and the arts. Sunbridge is accepting applications for elementary, elementary completion track, early childhood completion track, and elementary music teacher education cohorts enrolling this summer, and is offering “Summer Series 2021: Live from Home!” based on a successful

ple.” Upcoming plans are not yet online at this writing, but recent events included a Northern California Waldorf Teachers Conference with keynote speaker Orland Bishop, and an online visiting day. See the ad on page 4 ; contact Tiffany (tiffany@bacwtt.org ) for the latest plans.

Programs at Colorado-based Gradalis Teacher Education ( gradalis.edu) provide support for the working teacher. See their ads on pages 5 and 11. New cohorts of their teacher training begin this summer.

West Coast Institute (westcoastinstitute.org ) in British Columbia is another notable source of teacher education, both early childhood and grades. New groups are starting this summer, and special face-to-face summer programs will go online as necessary; see the ad, page 4

Some accumulated riches of Sacramento’s Rudolf Steiner College faculty are now online. A case in point is the re-designed website of the remarkable Dennis Klocek (dennisklocek.com). “Artist, scientist, teacher, researcher, gardener, and alchemist, Dennis’ work focuses on soul work, meditation, consciousness and physiology, biody-

Strength & Courage to Meet Today's World

(www.rudolfsteiner.org/annarbor) for its “first Tuesday” talks. The Sacramento Faust Branch (faustbranch.org ) has fine speakers on Wednesday evenings. URL’s for other local possibilities are at www.anthroposophy.org/local.

Like an impatient amaryllis, Colorado’s Front Range Anthroposophical Café (frontrangeanthrocafe.org ) burst on the scene last year with its Friday evening talks with breakout groups and conversations, in a warm, reverent, informal atmosphere. Karen van Vuuren was the inspiration, Tom Altgelt and Jamie York are the co-hosts for these ninety-minute events, also available recorded under the “guest speakers” tab.

namic gardening, weather, and teaching”—and much of it is newly organized as a “School of Soil, Soul and Spirit.” The offerings are essays, articles, videos and more, in six areas: BioDynamics, Mineral & Plant Alchemy, Body Health, Soul Health, Alchemy & Natural Sciences, and Spiritual Paths. Dennis’ books are available, and in the shop there are both paid and free audio offerings. Of related interest is the Coros Institute (coros.org ), co-founded by Dennis and RSC colleague Patricia Dickson.

Wise Cosmos (www.wisecosmos.org ) features another long-time, highly-regarded RSC teacher, Brian Gray, along with Lelan Harris, Robert Schiappacasse, David Tresemer, Mary Stewart Adams, and Alice Stamm. Again, the offerings— “video courses and articles investigating the teachings of Rudolf Steiner primarily about anthroposophy, esoteric Christianity, spiritual science, and Waldorf wducation” — are both paid and free. One rather astonishing course is “the ultimate Parzival,” seventeen sessions from Brian Gray and Alice Stamm!

Groups, branches, international

Individual groups and branches of the ASA have also jumped online, along with the Central Region (www.rudolfsteiner.org/central-region) and its on-going Karma Project. The Chicago Rudolf Steiner Branch (www.rudolfsteiner.org/chicago) has been notably active. The San Francisco Bay Area (anthroposophybayarea.org ) has had regular Friday night get-togethers. Check in with the New York Branch (www.anthroposophynyc.org ) for its public study groups online, and the Great Lakes Branch

The Goetheanum (www.goetheanum.org/en), always near-yet-far for us in North America, has jumped into its global role in new ways: richer online content, more email communications, and livestreaming and videos. The adult education program (studium.goetheanum.co/en) now features online studies as well; interactive study work takes place in separate groups in German, English, French, Portuguese/Spanish, the joint courses are in English.

EduCareDo (www.educaredo.org ) began in Australia. To its 26-lesson foundation course is added, since June 2020, a number of subject courses, each twelve lessons in length and sent out monthly, in inner development, speech and drama, social life, painting, and agriculture and nutrition. “Tutors are provided for each participant and are available for support and feedback. Communication with the tutor is confidential, and questions and comments are welcome. EduCareDo is run by a community of volunteers. The course fees collected are reinvested into community projects around the world.”

John Beck is editor of being human; if we have missed your offerings here, contact editor@anthroposophy.org to be mentioned in our biweekly e-newsletter.

Facing the Unknown

Imagination in the Time of Pandemic

Lightforms Art Center, Hudson, NY, Jan 8–Apr 3, 2021

Lily Morris, Millicent Young, Osi Audu, Martina Angela Müller, Patrick Stolfo, Laura Summer, Elmer Orobio & Richard Neal

The pandemic with its great loss of life has created a new inner and outer environment: mourning those we have lost; disappearance of livelihoods, homes, and close interactions with others. Great shortcomings in our society have been uncovered. We have been seismically shifted into isolation and experience a stymied cultural life that usually sustains our well-being.

Some families have also spent more time with each other, people have drawn more within, found sustenance turning to meditation, nature, reading and artistic pursuits, turning pandemic into a vessel for positive change.

How are artists finding a way to grow through these times of isolation, uncertainty, death and new perceptions

of our social connections and issues? Are there channels of light that have opened up? Wings of hope that lift us out and above the current situation for a distanced survey?

The work in this show, created in 2020, allows for a glimpse into the imaginative process of the artists and how it serves as a much-needed refuge within which to weave a new web of spiritual, inner and outer connection.

Maintaining our inner initiative

by Adam Blanning, MD

Note: Recent posts by Dr. Blanning were seen at the Faculdade Rudolf Steiner (frs.edu.br) in São Paulo, Brazil, and he was interviewed by Paula Franciulli for their Revista Jataí. We share his observations on the source of initiative—the will.

Long periods of isolation and virtual (online) education are a major challenge to the will. In terms of the fourfold constitution of the human being it is the working together of the I into the astral body, into the etheric body, into the physical body that allows us to have will activity. They interweave whenever we unfold our will. They must all work together. They can act separately too,

but that is a different kind of activity which is much more related to our breathing or to our thinking.

When we engage in any kind of virtual experience we mostly bypass that interweaving. If you are looking at a screen—say watching a movie, playing a video game, even typing on a computer—we see many fast visual changes which make us believe that the world outside us is changing because of our activity. But that is mostly a false perception. It can make me believe that I only need to do very small things in order to make a big change.

Think of handwriting a letter and then delivering it

to a friend, versus typing an email or sending a text message. Virtual “short-cuts” for full activity can be very helpful and useful. We risk, however, believing that a virtual meeting and a face to face meeting are the same—they are not! We do not sense the other person or unfold our own physiology (or our spiritual activity) in the same way.

One could argue, “If I am living in a world where it is not so necessary for me to use my limbs in order to unfold my will, that is fine. If I can do many tasks virtually, tasks which in the past would have required a lot of physical work, then that is not a bad thing.” That argument is only possible if we do not hold a true view of the whole human being. That logic relies on a view of health and development that stays too much in the head. It believes that the head is the control center, the most important part of our being, and the rest of the body is just tools (such as organs, bones and muscles) to carry out the instructions of the head (brain). Spiritual science provides two very important insights that counter such an argument.

The first centers around our morality. We may think of morality as a set of rules by which we interact and behave. In truth, morality is a process, an active process of sensing that is completely connected to the will. For me to really be able to sense another person I have to bring my interest, my warmth (from the I) into my feeling life (guiding my astral body), then stir those impulses into my etheric and physical bodies. To properly sense another person I have to be very active, not just a passive receiver of impressions. Moral sensing is a true will activity. And then my moral will activity meets the other person—first

HIGHER

their physical body, then their etheric (are they living?), then astral (what are they feeling and experiencing?), and if I am patient and really interested, the other person’s I (what is the core of this beautiful spiritual being?).

With social isolation and virtual activities, we risk blunting our capacities for true moral sensing. I think many people are hungering for real contact with others because deep inside we know that we need that connection. We need it not only to fully sense other human beings but also to properly feel ourselves. The will is such an important way to feel at home in our body and to know that it is a good place.

A second insight from spiritual science—still a bit of a mystery for me, but which I sense to be true—is that we need our limbs and our will to make judgements. Maybe not the everyday decisions—what I would like to have for dinner. No, we are speaking about deep judgements around truth, intention, meaning. Steiner says in several places that mental images belong to the head, but judgments to our legs. I think that is, surely, why people have gone on long pilgrimages or journeys—partly to explore, but really to move their limbs and come into a new understanding of their life.

This time feels weighty with the need for many deep judgments about our life, about our planet, about how we want to be with each other as human being. That is a completely different process from the quick, clever, sometimes very cynical ways of interacting that come from manipulating ideas or facts. I think a real judgment is so true that you feel it all the way to your bones.

One more comment about our fourfold nature in this time: the astral body, the formative body of forces for our sensing and emotional life— has so much to take in right now. We have so many impressions, so much information trying to capture our attention. So our astral bodies are very, very busy, but with less chance for uniting with the I on the one hand, and less uniting with the etheric and physical on the other. That’s a kind of spiritual physiology too—a nervous one that keeps us vigilant and if too strong makes us feel short of breath. When the astral body is so active by itself it wears down our life forces. I think that is part of why many people feel quite tired right now.

Adam Blanning MD (www.denvertherapies.com) is president of the Anthroposophic Health Association. He founded and directs the Denver Center for Anthroposophic Therapies, which offers anthroposophic medicine, therapeutic eurythmy, art therapy, and rhythmic massage. He consults and is school doctor for Waldorf schools in Denver and Boulder. He lives in Denver with his wife and two daughters.

"Exploring the Twelve Senses" with Joan Sleigh, Harlan Gilbert and Jane Swain

"Healing Forces" with Dr. Adam Blanning, Dr. Carmen Hering, Elizabeth Sustick RN & Dr. Steven Johnson

"The Challenges & Gifts of Aging" with Dr. David Gershan, Dr. Renee Meyer & Dr. Pat Hart

A

PERSPECTIVE ON HEALING visit anthroposophy.org/webinars

Photo by Mary Stewart Adams

arts & ideas

IN THIS SECTION:

Beyond the wonderful work of lyre players, music is surprisingly little talked about in our circles.

Emmanuel Vukovich takes us into Beethoven’s world, in honor of his recent 250th birthday.

Clifford Venho continues his sharing of wonderfully clear insights into the art of eurythmy. Our gallery (and both covers) present some of the beautiful work of Martina Angela Müller.

David Anderson of Walking the dog Theater takes us into “the art of yielding.”

Archetype of Hope: Beethoven, Timbre & The Social Art

by Emmanuel A A Vukovich 1

“The only philosophy which can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.”

—Theodore

Adorno 2

“Our artistic heritage is, in a way, the DNA of our civilization. If we let that go, we risk losing the spiritual genome, so to speak, of the future. It is our shared human identity; an identity we share even with our enemies.” —Carter Brey, principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic

Recent events have catapulted the world toward a defining moment of historic proportions. Last year marked the 250th anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven’s birth. The expected triumph of music’s Promethean hero and representative of humanity’s musical freedom was all but silenced (at least outwardly) by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This text asks whether this current musical and cultural void might be seen as a kind of reflection of Beethoven’s deafness, a metaphor for the collective deafness and turning-point of our time.

The Threefold Nature of Music

Throughout history, cultures from around the world have evolved the language of music through three primary musical elements: rhythm, melody, and harmony. While rhythm was born out of music’s role in ritual and dance, melody evolved out of the singing in chant and prayer. In the evolution of Western music, the development of harmony and tonality became the primary musical language for becoming conscious of, and communicating, the awakening of feeling within the human individuality.

In The Inner Nature of Music, Rudolf Steiner speaks of the modern human being’s relationship with music as being based in feeling, the realm of harmony:

Today, harmony is at the very centre of all musical experience. Our experience of music is based on feelings. Harmony addresses the feeling life directly and is experienced in feeling. But the human being’s whole feeling-nature is twofold. We have a feeling that tends more towards thinking, and a feeling that tends more towards the will.3

Out of this twofold capacity of feeling developed the archetype of the human being as a threefold being, an imagination reflected in the archetype of music.

1 The following essay has been revised from doctoral essays [www.emmanuelvukovich.ca/6964645-essays] and an article on music and the Foundation Stone Meditation written for a forthcoming book by Les Editions PERCEVAL in English, German, and French.

2 In Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1951).

3 Rudolf Steiner, “The Human Being’s Experience of Tone,” GA 283, lecture of March 8, 1923, Stuttgart.

Ludwig van Beethoven: String Quartet Opus 130, “Cavatina”

Actually, it would not be so very hard to give the idea of the threefold human being popular currency if people today were conscious of their musical sensibility… If the experience of music became vivid and vital in people, they would feel that the etheric4 head lies in melody, the etheric middle system lies in harmony, and in the limbs we have the rhythmic element of music. You then have the etheric body incarnate before you. It is just that instead of “head” we say melody, instead of “rhythmic system” we say harmony, and instead of “limb-system” we say rhythm.5

Thus, we arrive at an image of the archetype of the “being of music” in which melody, harmony and rhythm resonate in the etheric threefold human being as thinking, feeling and willing.

Beethoven

Beethoven’s music has long been associated with the archetype of heroic freedom born out of the threefold ideal of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, & fraternité. This Promethean narrative of autonomy emerged out of Beethoven’s middle period beginning with the Eroica Symphony completed in 1803, and casts a long and singular shadow persisting into our present time. When we hear Beethoven’s music, we think of human freedom. However, this heroic narrative has become increasingly problematic; the individuality and autonomy it asserts can divert into forms of egotism and authoritarianism while the liberal independence it espouses can degenerate into prejudiced and discriminatory ideologies.6 Might it be possible, today, to re-envision an alternative framework for Beethoven’s music?

In Beethoven & Freedom, renowned contemporary scholar Daniel Chua discusses the great 20th-century German thinker Theodore Adorno’s seminal yet unfinished work Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music 7 and, in a certain sense, completes the philosopher’s opus. Inspired by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Chua transforms the long-held Promethean narrative of autonomy through which all people are free and equal—“Alle Menschen werden Brüder”— into its mirror image of alterity (or “one-another-ness”) as the capacity to relate to anoth-

4 The etheric is the field of living formative forces, which carries also in the human being the powers of thought and memory. –Editor

5 Steiner, ibid.

6 Daniel KL Chua, Beethoven & Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)

7 Theodor W Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed Rolf Tiedemann, trans Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 34

er—“Eines Freundes Freund zu sein.” 8 The inclusion of equality, fraternity, and our common humanity based on friendship, is the fulfillment of Beethoven’s music and its promise of freedom for our world today.

If we place these two narratives of Prometheus and Orpheus side by side, a Beethovenian meta-narrative begins to emerge. On one side stands the self-realization of the autonomous individual, while on the other is the recovery of the individual through the encounter with another. At the centre of this form, however, is a void. The act of self-realization engenders a loss of freedom. In the act of assuming the divine fire, Prometheus is condemned to eternal suffering. Yet this void is simultaneously also the necessary precondition enabling the recovery of freedom. Orpheus’ encounter with Eurydice in the underworld initiates the possibility of a recognition: to see the individuality of another.

Cavatina

In the 4th movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 130 titled Cavatina (meaning tone or song), we hear music that transforms its listener not through a Promethean act of heroic autonomy, but rather through the fragility and vulnerability of alterity. In the middle of this song, Beethoven inserts an eight-measure “interruption” creating a kind of opening void or wound:

The Cavatina reveals the most intimate and vulnerable side of Beethoven in a lyrical outpouring that seems to flow from the deepest wellspring of human experience. Beethoven even confided to a friend that every time he thought of this piece, it brought tears to his eyes. In the middle section of this movement, he marks Beklemmt (meaning choked). Music’s most natural impulse – to spin itself out in melody – seems to be in serious danger, as if the singer of the Cavatina’s song has choked or lost their voice. This music is in C-flat major, a key which lies beyond the normal harmonic spectrum and which, in a sense, exists only in relation to other keys. Enharmonically it may seem identical to B major, but not in the hands of string players sensitive to the nuance of its color and to the context in which the key is reached: by a slow, simple stepwise descent from the home key, E-flat, to D-flat, and finally to C-flat. The coda of the first movement of the Eroica Symphony, composed more than two decades earlier, descends similarly, but from E-flat to D-flat, and to a bright and assertive C-major, instead.9

8 Schiller/Beethoven “Ode to Joy”; literally, “all human beings shall become brothers” and “for one friend a friend to be.” –Editor

9 Eugene Drucker, Emerson String Quartet, Stony Brook University, 2019

Composed at the end of his life, the Cavatina invites us to reconsider our understanding of Beethoven’s musical legacy. Rather than asserting itself in heroic individual autonomy, this music opens a space of waiting... Waiting perhaps to receive the “gift” of alterity (otherness). Through this act of hospitality, it offers the listener the possibility of being seen in specific and complete individuality. Judith Butler calls this “our willingness to become undone in relationship to another; which constitutes our chance of becoming fully human.”10 Often in conversation it is not the meaning of the words spoken that matters most, but the quality with which they are spoken, the tone and timbre of the voice, and then the quality of listening following speech, which ultimately touches the heart and opens the soul to the vulnerability, fragility, and intimacy of our shared humanity. In music this quality is known as timbre. 11

Timbre

Contemporary musical creation, performance, and discourse does not focus on melody, harmony, or rhythm; timbre has emerged as a fourth element. While this new element has, in fact, always been present in musical performance practice as a fundamental human experience of sound, it has only recently become conscious in musical thought.

Timbre is the phenomenological and qualitative experience of a unique musical tone; it is often described through associative sense-experience qualities such as light and color (bright/dark), temperature (warm/cool), texture (rough/smooth, wet/dry) and clarity (transparent/ opaque). Timbre is that aural quality of music enabling us to distinguish a unique individual performer, voice, or instrument, from another.

One of the central questions of musical discourse today is whether timbre can be articulated and communicated similarly to the way in which rhythm, harmony and melody have each evolved into a unique, independent, and differentiated element of musical language. Rudolf Steiner foresaw this when he said:

If the inner wealth of feelings experienced in music can be transferred to the single tone, then we will experience the single tone, in all its inner wealth and multiplicity, as a melody. In the future, the single tone will come to be experienced as something musically differentiated. In the single tone will lie a whole range of musical differentiation. So far there is scarcely any sense or inkling of this.12

The Social Art

The question of timbre is considered today to be a future frontier of music. The challenge of communicating timbre, however, is that it has multiple interpretations depending on the perspective of its performer, the instruments through which it is voiced, and the environment in which it is experienced. Evolving a compositional notation and formal language for timbre, therefore, requires the recognition, reconciliation, and collaboration of alternative and often polarized or diametrically opposing points of view. For this very reason, timbre has the possibility to connect music with some of the most pressing global environmental, societal, and spiritual questions in the world.

Over the course of his life, Beethoven pushed the limits of music. Recent research by performers, composers, and scholars comparing the manuscripts with the first and subsequent printed editions of his works, suggests that he may have also evolved a more highly sophisticated compositional language for notating “expressive markings” than has previously been printed, published, or analyzed. It is known that Beethoven first wrote out the pitched rhythms in black ink, and would return after with a coloured wax crayon to notate expressive performance indications such as dynamics and hairpins,13 articulations, slurs and phrasings. This indicates that he might have considered this as a separate creative step to the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic compositional process. While today we have roughly nine different dynamic markings between ppp – fff , 14 Beethoven had developed at least 36 dynamics markings. The same is true of his markings for articulation (accents, dots, sforzandos), hairpin and swells (crescendo & decrescendo), and phrasings (slurs). This much more highly nuanced spectrum of expressive markings indicates the possibility that hidden within the often-illegible manuscript scribbles of Beethoven’s own hand are the humble beginnings of a new formal compositional language for timbre.

With the emergence of a new musical consciousness around timbre, it might eventually become possible to realize Steiner’s vision of melody within a single tone. A deeper understanding of this question (in light of anthroposophy) could enable a musical awakening, similar to

13 “Hairpins” are angle marks (like < and >) of variable width, standing for crescendo (“getting louder”) and diminuendo (“getting quieter”). –Editor

14 The p and f stand for Italian piano, quiet, and forte, loud; so ppp is to be played very, very quietly, and fff very, very loudly. –Editor

10 Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 13

11 In Latin, Tympanum, bell; in German, Klangfarbe, tone color.

12 Steiner, ibid

the way in which the renewed study of the kingdom of fungi has given rise to a renewed understanding of the deep and invisible interrelationships within nature.

From Threefold to Fourfold

Beethoven’s music offers us a vision of the historic turning point we currently find ourselves in: a transformation of consciousness. In music, this metamorphosis is manifesting itself through the emergence of a fourth element, timbre, within the threefold musical language of rhythm, harmony, melody. In the human being it is a transformation of thinking, feeling, and willing from the individuality to the collective—“ego to eco.” Perhaps the most powerful musical expression of this archetype is the opening four notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony:

merchants would have flung themselves on the ground at the edges of your music as if you were a storm. Only a few solitary lions would have circled round you at night, afraid of themselves, menaced by their own agitated blood.16

Conclusion

Today, humanity faces a similar collective social and cultural deafness of global proportions.

These days, it seems like the happenings of social life are everywhere framed in a narrative of polarities: true/ fake, mask/no mask, vaccination/anti-vaccination, racist/anti-racist, individual rights/social rights, spiritual/ material. This kind of binary narrative, without the willingness to open a middle inclusive way, sets the ground for divisive forces that are both powerful in their clarity and disempowering in encouraging into sleep our capacity for discernment and honest conversation. —John

Bloom17

The above musical gesture, as simple and compact a motive as it is possible to conceive, expresses three upbeats leading to a downbeat. The three upbeats, equal in pitch and length and preceded by a rest, lead over the bar-line to a new pitch that is equal in length to the entire measure before it. The musical archetype of these four notes, and the silence out of which they emerge, have become the instantly recognizable individuality of this monumental work; a cornerstone of the Western musical canon.15

Perhaps it was necessary for Beethoven to lose his hearing, and gain, in the words of Rilke, the countenance of him whose hearing a god had sealed; so that there might be no sound but his own... He in whom sound was clear and enduring; so that only the toneless senses might bring the world to him, silently, a tense world waiting, unready, for the creation of sound.

Your music: would that it were about the world, not only about us. Would that a pianoforte had been built for you in the Theban desert, and an angel had led you to that solitary instrument through desert mountain ranges where lie kings, courtesans, anchorites. He surely would have flung himself upwards out of fear that you would begin.

And then you would have poured forth, Pourer-forth, unheard, giving back to the universe only what the universe can bear. Bedouin out hunting would have galloped by in the distance, superstitiously; but

15 Matthew Guerrieri, The First Four Notes: Beethoven’s Fifth and the Human Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012).

Is it possible that the binary narrative, this great wound of separation that we experience today, may also be the very condition necessary for our redemption—the opening of a middle space “waiting to receive the ‘gift’ of another”? Beethoven’s music offers us this archetype of hope: to hear once more the inner voice and song, the timbres and colors of our shared humanity, connecting us with our ancient stars and preparing us for the future of a new age.

Our time will never rise above the barriers that the past has erected unless the great souls of the past come to its aid. We are reunited by what we admire in common, by what we revere in common, by what we comprehend in common. —Charles

Maria von Widor, 1907

16 Rainer Maria Rilke, in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

17 John Bloom: From the General Secretary, January 18, 2021, at www.anthroposophy.org/blog

Emmanuel Vukovich, (www.emmanuelvukovich.ca) born in Calgary, Canada (1980). Waldorf education in Calgary and Spring Valley, New York. Violin and music studies at The Juilliard School, McGill University, New England Conservatory of Music, and Stony Brook University. Studies in Environment & Agriculture at McGill University and Biodynamic farming at The Pfeiffer Center. As a concert violinist Emmanuel has performed throughout North & South America, Europe, and Australia. He is founder and artistic director of The Parcival Project, an international collaborative of performing artists, and co-creator of Parzival & Feirefiz, a new musical narrative of the grail. His interest in collaborative leadership and musical timbre has led him to explore the role of music in human evolution.

Eurythmy as a New Mystery Art

by Clifford Venho

“The divine Logos accompanies all the arts, itself teaching men what they must do for their advantage; for no man has discovered any art, but it is always God.”

—Epicharmus, Fragment 57

In my previous article, I discussed how the art of eurythmy emanates out of the Mystery stream of the Logos, the Word.1 In the present article, I would like to look more closely at the connection between eurythmy and the Mysteries of antiquity.

We hear in the Prologue to the Gospel of John, “In the beginning was the Word.” But, as Rudolf Steiner points out, in writing his Prologue, St. John sought to forge a connection with a form of Mystery wisdom whose spiritual threads can be traced back to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. As Steiner describes,

the writer of the John Gospel could read in the Akashic Record about Ephesus that for which his heart thirsted, the right form in which to clothe what he wanted to say to humanity concerning the mystery of the beginning of the world.2

These Ephesian Mysteries played an important role in Steiner’s own spiritual research 3 and in the development of the art of eurythmy, which from its inception in 1911 was intended to be “a matter of the word.” 4 Eurythmy is an art that seeks to uncover and enliven the soulspiritual experience of the creative Word as it reveals itself microcosmically within the human organism.

In a lecture in 1923 about the Mysteries of Ephesus, Steiner describes how in the Temple of Artemis, the pupils came to experience the spoken word as a microcosmic reflection of a macrocosmic evolutionary process. Our present earth has been formed out of the working of the Word within the substances of an earlier earthly condition. This activity of the Logos, which was at work in the atmosphere of the earth, is mirrored in the process of human speech. The Ephesian pupil came to experience

1 “A Path to the Word,” being human fall 2019; www.issuu.com/anthrousa

2 CW 232. Mystery Centres. Trans. H. Collison. New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1943, p. 55

3 Cf. CW 233 World History in the Light of Anthroposophy ; CW 235 Karmic Relationships

4 CW 277 Eurythmy: Its Birth and Development. Trans. Alan Stott, Anastasi Ltd., 2002, p. 15.

how what we speak into the air is transformed, on the one hand, into the element of warmth, which ascends toward the head and takes up the content of our thought, and is transformed, on the other hand, into the water element, which descends downward to become inwardly perceptible to our feeling. This twofold rising and falling process was a picture of a macrocosmic process that had taken place in the evolution of the earth. Thus, upon entering the Temple of Artemis, the pupil of the Mysteries was greeted with the words: “Speak, O Man! and thou revealest through thyself the evolution of the world.” 5

At the beginning of their training, the pupils of Ephesus were instructed to speak words and to “notice what you feel when the word sounds forth from the mouth.” 6 They would speak short phrases that led them into the feeling of what lived in the activity of speech. If we compare this with the instruction given to Lory Smits by Rudolf Steiner at the beginning of her work with eurythmy, we find a striking similarity. He instructed Lory to speak a sentence containing only one vowel sound and to try to experience the dynamic that lives in the speaking of the sentence: “Barbara sass stracks am Abhang” (all ‘a’ sounds are pronounced “ah” as in “father”).7 She was to feel where the dynamic rose and fell, where it undulated, and so forth—in essence, the inner rhythm of the sentence— and then she was to dance it. This was a first step toward revealing how not only the spoken word but the whole human being is a microcosmic Logos. The activity which would otherwise take place through the larynx and neighboring speech organs is now extended, according to Goethe’s law of metamorphosis, to include the whole body. In eurythmy, the human being becomes all larynx. In addition, what is otherwise suppressed and hidden in the experience of the human ‘I’ during speech can be made visible—thus realizing Goethe’s statement that art is “the revelation of the hidden laws of nature.” As Steiner explained in a lecture to teachers in 1919,

When one person says something, the other listens; he engages in his ‘I’ with what lives physically in the

5 CW 232. Mystery Centres, p. 52.

6 Ibid., p. 51.

7 CW 277 Eurythmy: Its Birth and Development, p. 19.

sounds, but he suppresses it. The ‘I’ always participates in eurythmy, and what eurythmy puts before us through the physical body is nothing other than listening made visible.8

Thus, eurythmy takes an inner spiritual process, which would usually remain unconscious, and makes it visible through movement. The vocabulary, so to speak, of this movement arises in the first place out of the sounds of language, out of the alphabet.

In the Speech Eurythmy Course of 1924, Steiner describes how in the Mysteries, the alphabet was experienced as an expression of the human etheric body.9 He describes throughout the lectures how the sounds can be experienced in their inner quality and dynamic, and how these, in turn, are connected with what was taught in the ancient Mysteries. For example, the sound ‘f’ he describes in connection with the breathing exercises of the ancient eastern Mysteries and early Egyptian Mysteries. ‘F’ was felt as an expression of the wisdom of Isis, which permeated the whole structure of the human organism and could be experienced through the yogic breathing exercises. With the in-breath, one felt permeated by this wisdom, and with the out-breath in the sound ‘f’, one felt this wisdom sounding forth as knowledge. Thus, with ‘f’, we wish to say, “Know that I know.” 10

Steiner also speaks about the sound ‘l’ in the context of the Mysteries as having a formative, magical power, a power to overcome matter and shape it to one’s will.11 This is brought beautifully to expression through the eurythmy gesture for ‘l’, which seeks to transform substance into spirit, laying hold of the earth and making it permeable to spiritual light. Similarly, the sound ‘s’ was felt in the Mysteries as having a magic power that could penetrate into the essence of things. It is a sound that brings calm through mastery.12 Think of how you would feel if, in a public space, someone began speaking the sound “sss” until the room fell totally silent. Indeed, something like this is required in the crowded hall of the Sistine Chapel, where the guards are often forced to shout, “silencio!” Steiner also connects the sound ‘s’ with the Staff of Mercury and the form of the serpent. Indeed, when we draw

8 CW 294 Practical Advice to Teachers, Lecture 4. Trans. Johanna Collis. Great Barrington, MA: Anthroposophic Press, 2000, p. 56

9 The etheric is a dynamic body of formative life forces which organize an organism’s mineral substance and support thought and memory. –Editor

10 CW 279 Eurythmy as Visible Speech. 3rd Edition. Trans. Alan Stott, et al., Anastasi Ltd., 2015, p. 44.

11 Ibid., p. 57.

12 Ibid., p. 49

this form with its double curve, we can feel how it requires a certain inner mastery—as opposed to a straight line, for example, which can be drawn without much thought.

Steiner also speaks of the sound ‘m’ in connection with the sacred Indian word “aum.” It is that which penetrates the world with understanding. Steiner uses an example from everyday life, pointing out that when someone says something to us and we want to express our understanding, we naturally respond with the sound, “mmm.” Thus, with ‘m’ we penetrate into matter with insight and even take on the form of the thing we understand—we “mold” ourselves to the world in understanding, in sympathy for what is there.13

All of these examples belong to the development of an inner experience of the qualities living in sounds. Steiner remarks that if we spoke only out of an inner experience of the sounds and not with words, “we would indeed possess a simpler and more primitive language, yet it would combine with this simplicity a much deeper intimacy and understanding.”14 Interjections are the most immediate expression of our inner experience, unadorned by any conventional or intellectual content. When we see a flower in the meadow or a starlit sky, we cannot help but express our wonder in the sound “ah.” When curiosity overtakes us, or also when we experience fear, we utter the sound, “oo.” When an infant lies resting in its mother’s arms, and we experience a loving connection with this infant, we say, “ohhh.” Indeed, the primeval, original language consisted of such expressions of pure inner experience through sound, especially through the sound of the vowels, which radiate from our inner life.

This relationship to a living experience of language once belonged to humanity but was gradually lost in the course of history. The transition from the Greek to the Roman epoch marks the loss of the ancient wisdom and with it the ancient feeling for the sounds. We could say that this transition really began with the burning of the Temple of Ephesus, the house of the Word. The Greeks still called the sounds of their alphabet by name: Alpha, Beta, etc. They thereby expressed their experience of the beingness of sounds. It was the Romans who abstracted this beingness of the sounds into the abstract letters of the alphabet: a, b, c, etc. With the Greeks, we feel how the al-

13 Ibid., p. 57.

14 Ibid

Steiner’s drawing of eurythmy form M.

phabet was a living expression of the whole human being. We can feel the vowel A (as in “father”) as containing the whole potential of the human being, the primeval sound that expresses his creation out of “two different directions of cosmic space.”15 We can also think of Christ’s statement, “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” the beginning and the end. Sensing in the Alpha this creative power of the human being in his full potentiality, we can then add the Beta. We can feel the enveloping quality of the Beta, again a formative creative power, but now coming out of the realm of the Zodiac, enshrining the human being in an outer form, in a body Thus, with the Alpha and Beta, we have, as Steiner puts it, “Man in his house.”16

One of the tasks of eurythmy is to enliven the experience of the beingness of the sounds of language, of the living alphabet. But this can no longer be done out of a dependence on the divine spiritual world, as it was in the past, but only out of human freedom. It is individuals who, out of their own initiative, must find their way from the barren desert of abstraction, having attained day-waking consciousness, back to the spiritual fields of life.

Eurythmy takes its starting point from this waking consciousness that we have acquired through our separation from the divine world, our expulsion from Paradise, and seeks to expand it to encompass a living experience of the etheric, soul, and spiritual members of the human being and of cosmic being. Before eurythmy had yet appeared in Steiner’s work, he had already given exercises in his esoteric lessons in which he describes how one can work with the qualities of the sounds of speech in a way that awakens deeper and higher consciousness. In fact, it is a necessity for any path of meditation. For example, he gave various forms of meditation that work with the sounds IAO (as in “ea gle, fa ther, o val”). In one of the esoteric exercises, which bears a close resemblance to IAO in eurythmy, the pervading mood is described: “IAO is the name of Christ. This is connected to the secret of how Christ works in the human being.”17 We can sense how this threefold utterance, which gives expression to the human being balancing ( I ) between two

15 Ibid., p. 51.

16 The Alphabet. Trans. V. E. Watkin. Mercury Press, 2013, p. 2.

17 CW 264 From the History and Contents of the First Section of the Esoteric School 1904-1914. Trans. Hella Wiesberger. SteinerBooks, 2010.

polarities (A and O), can tell us how Christ, the Word, is active as a harmonizing force in the human being.

The first real exercise for eurythmy given to Lory Smits was IAO.18 Here Steiner told Lory to experience herself as a column, whose base was her feet and whose capital was her head. He told her to experience this upright column, in which the weight rests on the balls of the feet, as the vowel sound I. She was then told to move the head of the column so that it was behind the base, with the weight on the heels, and to learn to experience this as A. Finally, she was told to shift her weight so that the head of the column was in front of the base, with weight on the toes, and was told to experience this as O. Thus, the threefold gestalt meditation was given to Lory as a seed from which all eurythmy would arise. She was told to learn to experience each position as a sound, to allow the microcosmic Word to sound forth not only from the larynx and mouth but from the whole human being.

Steiner also speaks of the significance of IAO in many of his lectures, notably in his Easter lectures of 1924 in connection with the Mysteries of Ephesus. There he describes how the pupils of Ephesus could experience themselves in the sphere of the moon, in the condition of the human being prior to incarnation. There, as the pupil built himself up out of the sunlight transformed by the moon, there sounded forth the sounds I, O, A, as if raying from the sun itself. He felt the sound I as enlivening his ‘I’, while O enlivened his astral body. With A, he felt the approach of his radiant etheric body. Then, rising from the earth toward him, came the sounds eh-v. As Steiner describes, “In this word, Ieh OvA [Jehovah], the Mystery student experienced himself as a complete human being. Through the consonants, he felt a premonition of his earthly physical body.” 19 The Mystery student could experience himself through the creative sounding of these cosmic vowels as a threefold being, ‘I’, astral, and etheric, within the sphere of the moon—the consonantal element then approaching from the earth in preparation for incarnation. Today, we stand firmly on the earth and have developed the physical body, the consonantal element, but we must reach back up out

18 CW 277 Eurythmy: Its Birth and Development, p. 23.

19 The Easter Festival in the Evolution of the Mysteries. Trans. Brian Kelly. Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1988, p. 54.

Above, A/Alpha, below, B/Beta

of our ‘I’-nature to what we are as spiritual beings. Thus, we have the sounding from earth: I, A, O. We are no longer looking down to the earth but rather reaching up to the heavens.

In Atlantean times, when human beings needed no help in experiencing the cosmic aspect of their being but simply lived in the creative working and weaving of the spirit, they experienced the Divine speaking from all of creation. Rudolf Steiner describes how the atmosphere at that time was permeated with the water element, with thick veils of mists. But these mists had a special connection to the human being of that time. Through them, the soul was made receptive to the mysterious language of God. It could be heard in all of nature—in the rushing waves and the rustling leaves. It sounded forth to them as the sacred sound of TAO.20 Here, the spirit streams into the human being from out of the whole circumference of the cosmos through the sound ‘T’. This spiritual in-streaming was a preparation for the IAO, which can be experienced as welling forth from the inner being of the ‘I’. In ancient Atlantis, the word of the gods spoke to us from the whole cosmos; now the word of the human ‘I’ on earth must speak to the cosmos. The IAO has developed as “the name of Christ”, the ‘I am’, at work within the human being.

That is not to say the TAO does not have a place anymore in the spiritual life of humanity. In fact, Rudolf Steiner later developed an exercise in eurythmy, which he called a “eurythmy meditation,” based on this mystery of the TAO.21 He developed it for eurythmists in order to help them enliven their instruments, to bring divine spiritual forces into their hardened bodies, making them supple and permeable again. This permeability and flexibility, not only of the physical body but most importantly of the soul, has always been an aim in the development of eurythmy. Thus, we can see how eurythmy is an art that is permeated with the wisdom of the ancient Mysteries and, at the same time, that seeks to offer itself as a building stone in the temple of the new Mysteries.

20 CW 266/1 From the Esoteric School. Esoteric Lessons 1904-1909. Trans. James Hindes. Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks, 2007, p. 179.

21 CW 278 Eurythmy as Visible Singing. 3rd Edition. Trans. Alan Stott. Anastasi Ltd., 2013, p. 88.

Clifford Venho is a eurythmist, poet, translator, and a visiting faculty member at Eurythmy Spring Valley, where he also teaches poetics. He is as a translator and editor for Chadwick Library Press and SteinerBooks. His poetry is forthcoming in the anthology Without a Doubt: poems illuminating faith and has appeared in various literary journals. He lives with his wife in Harlemville, NY.

Gallery Martina Angela Müller

Martina Angela Müller is a visual artist practicing in a number of different fields. The main body of her work is abstract painting, but she also works in sculpture, environmental art, and installation. She is Senior Artistic Director at Lightforms Art Center in Hudson, NY. She creates her paintings, sculptures, and installation pieces by bringing meditative content inspired by the work of Rudolf Steiner and great spiritual documents from many spiritual traditions together with the living forces of nature. Her work often starts with the inscriptions that the life force in nature writes into sand, clouds, stone or the soft fibers of wood. Those manifestations in the cellular structure of wood, stone and sand then get transformed in the studio through deep artistic/meditative immersion, drawing on the insights of spiritual activity into paintings, sculptures, or installations. Upon completion the sculptures find their way back into nature when installed after having undergone the transformative artistic process. Through magnification and amplification of the smallest, inconspicuous inscriptions the open secrets of nature become visible to others and displayed in their full majesty.

Martina is on the faculty of the Alkion Center and works as freelance artist and teacher in Ghent, NY, where she maintains her studio. Born and raised in Germany she studied at Ruhr University Bochum; Emerson College, England; and Institute for Waldorf Pedagogy in WittenAnnen. Her main teachers were:

Hudson River School Painter

Thomas Locker, Ted Mahle at Rudolf Steiner College and Annemarie Martin-Habig.

For more information and other pictures of her work please go to www.martinaangelamuller.com

Martina Angela Müller: Flight (2020), cast aluminum 5’x4’x1’

Martina Angela Müller, Installation: Astar, Odem, Wings (2020)

Martina Angela Müller: Herald (2019), oil and pine needles on canvas, 4’x6’

Martina Angela Müller: New Nike (2020), porcelain 21”x15”x15”

Martina Angela Müller: Anchor Radiance into the World, detail, 4’x6’ oil on canvas

Martina Angela Müller: Uplifted (2016), oil, ash, earth and gold on canvas, 40”x30”

The Art of Yielding

by David Anderson

Yield and maintain your integrity, be whole and all things come to you.

— Tao Te Ching

The moment we enter a space, especially if it is a space new to us, we might observe some micro-happenings. What happens? First, my senses sharpen and tune into what is there. They make a scan of who is there, what’s happening, the tension and qualities of the atmosphere, dynamics between people, whether or not I feel safe. In this first moment, like all first impressions, I take in perhaps a hundred pieces of information. My senses are “‘a tiptoe”, as Shakespeare says. Once I’ve assessed all this, my senses relax (if the space allows for that). In an emergency situation, my senses might stay at or even intensify the heightened state of awareness. But usually I settle into the environment. Unconsciously or overtly, I seek: where can I get comfortable or have a little taste of what’s familiar? At home, I plop on the couch, unless I identify an urgent need in the house. In the social field, I might move towards someone I know—someone who will most support my presence there, most accept my everyday habit self. My body is drawn to a place in the room where I don’t have to work too hard.

In these moments of falling back into my safe and familiar self, I notice my senses grow passive and dull. They stop taking in new things and they reheat the old meal of known impressions, judgments, and feelings. I go to sleep a little.

Sometimes life demands of my senses a more sustained and focused attention. I enter a space and meet an upset partner, a conflict situation, an emergency. A situation that requires effort. If I resist this demand, I feel exhausted by it. If I welcome it, say Yes! to it, I feel exhilarated and enlivened. If it challenges me, I might grow through encountering it. My senses awaken a new capacity of response-ability. If I fail to meet the challenge, I also get learning. I see what doesn’t work.

Even without a demand from life I can choose to sustain this heightened awareness of my senses. When entering a beautiful landscape, observing a flower, experiencing a piece of art or a moment in poetic time, I choose to engage my senses. The beauty or the well-spring of life

inspire my interest.

Sometimes, without any obvious reason, outer provocation, or a recognizable catalyst from the world, I stay in there. I keep perceiving, even without a focus point or a central object for my perception. As if something in me were asking: What is this? What is here? What is speaking? I inwardly lean into the symphony of sensations and notice how they assemble themselves—how they organize and coalesce into a picture or wholeness or meaning or insight. No longer seeing, hearing, or sensing what is tangibly there, an intangible yet objective perception emerges.

This seems only possible after my senses have alighted in the space, become present within my body and within the body of the space. I have to be there first. I show up. My senses lean in. Then I can pull back and give space to what wants to emerge from these perceptions. Without retreating to a passive comfort zone, I stay present in my sensing but I yield to what speaks through these perceptions. I am as present as I was before, but I give space to the intangible qualities, movements, and meanings. In this it can feel like an expansion of presence, an enlarging of the field of my perception. If a hint of passivity or laziness enters this, these perceptions can become full of fantasy, illusion, projection, or desire. If I can sustain this yielding without filling it with my own habit responses or judgments, the senses can go beyond what they have sensed before. They seem to evolve. Borrowing from Goethe, a new organ of perception awakens. It is an organ for this unique revelation of presence at this moment in time and space—something like discovering a new star in the firmament. It was always there, I just hadn’t developed a capacity to see it yet.

My interest in this process can allow it to become more objective and scientific. Subject and object, space and time, come into dynamic relationship, each working with the other, both contributing to what unfolds or comes to consciousness between us. Together we open a curtain for the light of a new star.

This process has a kinship with the soul movements we can experience in speaking. If I let the sounds of my speech find a fully-embodied and pure presence, with the right amount of my offering will, a space is born. The

sounds and the life of the words create a space. If I yield to that space, together the space and my attendance create a vessel or perceiving organ for revelation. Something can enter the speaking that wasn’t there before. A sense of living Word may emerge.

I might experience this as joining hands with what is perceived. I am not fixed on the object. I let my attention soften without letting go of the activity of sensing. This vessel, created by the subject and object in tandem, holds the space for another level of perception. I actively give over to its voice.

This process is familiar in preparing for meditation or artistic practice. I show up in the space, sense all the outer and inner traffic and noise, perceive the tensions in the body. My sensing alights upon all of them. My awareness fills the form of my body. I lean in to what speaks. I likewise engage with the space around me. Then I gently pull back and make space. The space inverts.

Sometimes I get stuck to some experience and it won’t let go. I get entangled. Sometimes I back away so far that I fall asleep. But in the dynamic middle is a sweet

spot. I am there, not so much there as to crowd the space but not so little as to be passive. I actively yield to a space that opens at the intersection of my perceiving senses and what is perceived. I surrender to that inter-relational space. This convergence and inter-relationship beget a new field of phenomenology.

The next time we enter a new space together, rather than passing through these micro-events at the threshold, let’s stay awake to them and sustain their processes of perceiving. Let our senses reach out, unite with what is there, and then patiently, humbly, receive what would be born from that union. Let’s attune to what lives between us. Open our senses to the dynamic field and inter-play of our togetherness, full of infinite potential for unfolding and empowering intangible presences, in this space, at this time.

David Anderson is a co-founder in 1997 and the Executive Artistic Director of Walking the dog Theater (wtd.hawthornevalley.org) in Hudson, NY. He facilitates courses and workshops in Drama and Inner Development throughout Asia. He lives in Taiwan with his family.

Support Circle

our major donor circle. THANK YOU to the 45 individual members, and to these organizations for their generous and on-going support:

Anthroposophical Society of Cape Ann

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Association of Waldorf Schools of North America

Bay Area Center for Waldorf

Teacher Training

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Center for Anthroposophy in NH

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Consulting & Services

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Michael Support Circle members pledge gifts of between $500 and $5000 per year for five or more years. They help the Society to grow in capacity and vitality—the basis for increased membership, new learning opportunities, and greater impact in the world.

To learn more about how you can support the strength and sustainability of our movement, contact Deb at deb@anthroposophy.org

The ASA invites you to join the Michael

IN THIS SECTION:

A small book on the visits to America of Camphill founder Karl König remind us that the world has had great expectations of this country. Richard Fried, MD, has decades of experience as an anthroposopic physician, and offers a warning.

Stephen Usher reviews a posthumous book by Sergei Prokofieff, doubly welcome because it is about the spiritual history of Rudolf Steiner.

Yeshayahu

Ben-Aharon continues to illuminate the spiritual challenges since Steiner’s passing in 1925, now with challenges for the 21st century.

& reviews

Karl König in America

review by David Andrew Schwartz

Karl König in America: A Documentation, published by the Karl König Institute; 2nd revised and enhanced edition: 2020; edited by Richard Steel; www.karlkoeniginstitute.org

Editor’s note: Camphill founder Karl König was born in Vienna in 1902, attended Ita Wegman’s course on curative education in 1927, and with his wife Tilla and young friends left Austria in 1938 after its annexation to Nazi Germany. They soon began work together in Scotland, by 1940 at the Camphill estate west of Aberdeen. In 1945 his “First Memorandum” laid out a vision for the Camphill movement. He died in 1966. (Adapted from Dan McKanan, Camphill and the Future.)

This book chronicles Karl König’s two journeys to America taken in the summers of 1960 and 1962. Less than one hundred pages long and printed in a large 8x11” format, this book consists primarily of passages from Karl König’s diary, along with letters, reports on his two journeys to America, comments from others about the visits, and photographs. The intention of the book is to honor the sixtieth anniversary of the first journey and the lecture course he gave at that time in Spring Valley, NY on the “twelve senses.” 2020 was also the 60th anniversary of the founding of Camphill in America and the 80th anniversary of the original founding of Camphill in Scotland. The front piece makes the book’s intention clear:

This little booklet does not profess to be anything like a full account of Camphill’s beginnings in America—this has already been done in a beautiful way by others. It merely gives one of many possible aspects, presenting also some of the historic documents that live in the Karl König Archive. But it is much more a token of the heartfelt connection across the world, and as a greeting from the Karl König Institute to those living and working with the Camphill impulse in America, out of gratitude for the past, looking forward to ever new tasks.

The opening word of the book is from Deborah Grace, an American and long-time Camphill coworker. In her short essay, capturing the spirit of the book, she writes regarding his first visit to America, that Karl König was aware of the opposing spiritual forces threatening to destroy America’s soul. She then quotes from a letter by Karl König to a close friend:

… As I awoke on the first morning, my head was resting on the heart of the folk spirit, and I heard the words issuing forth from it: All human beings are brothers and sisters. The feeling of joy that grew from this was truly wonderful. Through this I felt I was allowed to experience one of the mysteries of the American people.

She then offers another quote from Karl König concerning the overarching task of America and also of Camphill in America:

The whole time during my visit over there, I had the impression that it is a nation on trial. God is moving the American hearts. He tests the reins of a people whom He expects will lead humankind into a better future.

Richard Steel, editor of the book and director of the Karl König Institute, provides an introduction, drawing on his extensive knowledge of Karl König and Camphill. This introduction provides an initial view of the history of Camphill and the founding of Camphill work in America. He describes how a group of Camphill coworkers came to America and pioneered the Camphill School in southeast Pennsylvania and the Camphill Village in upstate New York. He explains that Karl König felt a call from the spiritual world to found Camphill in America.

The book includes the transcript of a lecture given by Karl König on his return to Scotland

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from his first visit. In this lecture he says: … And somehow it seems that what did not happen in Europe might come about there. One can definitely have the feeling, and perhaps more than the feeling, that what was missed here still has a chance to come about there. Perhaps altogether this wonder of America was developed in order to give to the Europeans the possibility to achieve what in Europe was not possible due to continuous quarrel and fighting: the element of brotherhood.

This quote is deeply connected to important statements that Rudolf Steiner made in a series of four lectures given in Dornach to the first group of English members to come to Dornach after the end of World War I (see Ideas for a New Europe, GA/CW 194, 12/12-15/1919). In the third and fourth lectures Rudolf explains that the task of Middle Europe to bring about the threefold social order for the sake of humanity’s social future was betrayed and destroyed by World War I. Now this task falls to the Americans who will gain world dominion in the 20th century. He explains that if Americans do not take up this task from Middle Europe, they will bring death and destruction to the world. These lectures and Karl König’s words shared in this book create an image of a spiritual bridge between Europe and America regarding the responsibility for humanity’s future. It is clear from the reading of this book that Karl König experienced that Camphill was part of the building of this bridge, and was deeply moved by this experience.

Opening our moral eye

David Adams has shared some further information on how M.C. Richards describes becoming acquainted with Rudolf Steiner in her most autobiographical book, Opening Our Moral Eye (pages 50-55). “On a 1949 visit in England a brochure about Michael Hall caught her attention. Later, back at the experimental Black Mountain College, she linked up with musician David Tudor, whom she married and was with for ten years. Tudor, she says, was ‘an exceptional pianist’; he became the musical partner of composer John Cage. Tudor is today being celebrated for his own experimental (usually electronic) music and compositions. He went to summer conferences at Spring Valley (as did M.C. while both lived at the ‘John Cage Arts Commmunity Farm’ Stony Point in Rockland County) and performed traditional classical music more

Karl König already alluded to the passing on of the “true” destiny of Middle Europe to the west when he arrived as a refugee in London at Christmas 1938. He describes sitting alone in a room lit by a candle, feeling the doom of the beginning of war in Europe, and how he could carry a morsel of the true Middle Europe with him in his new life in England. He considered this moment the inner birth of the community impulse behind Camphill. This book tells the story of the bringing of this morsel of the true Middle Europe cultivated in Camphill to America to join the already established anthroposophical work in America. As Carlo Pietzner, one of the founders of the Camphill work in America, once wrote to me, it is still an open question if this morsel will be received by America and the spiritual bridge between Europe and America will grow and develop. This matter of destiny is a essential question for the anthroposophical work in America that includes the Anthroposophical Society in America and the established daughter movements: biodynamics, Waldorf schools, the healing practices—doctors, nurses, therapists, eurythmy, Camphill. In regard to this question of destiny, the book provides a window into the reality of the inner task of anthroposophy in America.

David Andrew Schwartz (david@camphill.org) has been associated with Camphill communities in the North American Region of the Camphill Movement for more than forty years. He is a biodynamic gardener and has been teaching adults in anthroposophical training programs and inclusive learning settings for over thirty years. Currently he is associated with Camphill Ghent, an elder care community in upstate New York.

than once at the Goetheanum. Sometime after 1951, Tudor gave M.C. a book of Steiner lectures, and she explored Waldorf education via visits to Green Meadow Waldorf School and the Rudolf Steiner School in NYC. She was also reading Owen Barfield then. On visits to the Threefold Center in Spring Valley ‘a dozen miles’ away she learned about the Camphill movement with its ‘new social impulse,’ attending lectures by Karl König on the twelve senses and the Word. She also mentions a trying time of “personal crisis” in her life in 1964-65 right after her classic book Centering was published when she had major surgery, as well as surgery ‘of my emotions.’ and was given the book Meditation by Friedrich Rittlemeyer. She also discovered the work of Olive Whicher at Emerson College and went there (apparently in 1965) to take her course on plant growth and projective geometry, staying in Whicher’s house (p. 40).

Anthroposophy, Politics, Science: A Warning commentary

by Richard G. Fried, MD

Although the 2020 presidential election is over, the deep divide in the fabric of American society will likely persist for years to come. The greatest risk to our future lies in the erosion of truth as a basis for finding common ground in almost all areas of public and private life in America. Due in part to the growth and proliferation of social and broadcast media, some of which have deliberately caused widespread confusion and dissention by promoting conspiracy theories as a substitute for truth, what was once more or less a fringe movement has metastasized during the past four years, and we stand at the brink of the destruction of our social contract, risking a lapse into Trumpist neo-fascism. The seventy million Americans who voted for Trump and still support his agenda will not go away soon and, many having found their racist, nativist, and white supremacist views legitimized, are feeling emboldened and angry, while others, neither racist nor white supremacist, are intentionally or unintentionally complicit with their silence.

Anthroposophy is not a political movement, and welcomes people from disparate political persuasions. However, there are political movements whose basic tenets are so antithetical to core anthroposophical principles that we are ethically compelled to make a stand in support of basic human values and fundamental truths. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Germans were placed in a similar situation in the 1930s, and it is my understanding that the overwhelming number of anthroposophists, (but sadly not all,) did make such a stand.

This divide is affecting our anthroposophical community as well, and poses a very real threat to our movement, just at a time when our country and its citizens need more than ever the kind of spiritual guidance and clear, objective thinking which are hallmarks of Steiner’s philosophy. Unfortunately, I am witnessing with great concern as some of our medical doctors and other leaders are slipping into support for unscientific, indeed anti-scientific and conspiratorial theories having little to do with the core principles of anthroposophy. This is especially evident in two critical areas: our response to the Covid pandemic, and our statements and attitudes towards childhood immunizations. Please allow me to address them individually.

There is no longer any legitimate doubt that the coronavirus spreads through respiratory droplets and aerosols, and that transmission rates can be greatly reduced by following universal recommendations for social distancing and wearing facial masks. There are simply no legitimate reasons for not adopting these simple and relatively benign measures, and there is nothing un-anthroposophic about wearing a mask. Some people worry about the negative effect on children from having faces masked, which are certainly legitimate concerns. But children under two are anyway generally exempted from the mask recommendations. Overall, when we consider the hardships which previous generations (and millions of families currently) have had to endure, including homelessness, refugee status, war, displacement, bombings, natural disasters, famine, and food insecurity, it just seems that wearing masks in school is pretty trivial, and easily mitigated outside of school hours.

Another source of resistance comes from those in our midst who would still deny the relationship between viruses and disease. I am well aware that Rudolf Steiner said that microbes are more likely the result and not the cause of illness. For his time, he was remarkably prescient in his emphasis on the importance of what we now know as the immune system. Nevertheless, science has progressed in the last 100 years, and it is foolish to deny the role that viruses and bacteria play as a cause of illness. I am convinced that if he were alive today, Steiner would be appalled that we were still taking his ideas from 100 years ago as gospel truth. It is wrong to confuse clairvoyance with omniscience, and Steiner would—and did—reject any kind of deification.

The issue of immunizations is much more nuanced, and deserves careful consideration. One reason for the general opposition by most anthroposophists to immunization stems from comments Steiner made regarding smallpox, and the role of fear in susceptibility to illness. By 1921, vaccines against smallpox, rabies, cholera, pertussis, and tuberculosis (BCG) had been developed, but smallpox was the only widely available vaccine. The other objection has to do with routine vaccination against what used to be considered “usual childhood illnesses.” Here,

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Steiner spoke at great length about the benefit certain diseases can play in child development, specifically in helping the child to remodel his or her inherited body into a more fitting instrument for the unfolding individuality.

Regarding fear, much research has accumulated since Steiner’s time, corroborating his idea that fear and anxiety play a significant role in the complex question of why we become ill. Nonetheless, few would claim that freedom from fear, if anyone is fortunate enough to achieve that state, is anything like a guarantee against infectious disease. Regarding the coronavirus, it appears that immunological factors related to age and metabolic disease, in addition to viral exposure load, are the most important determinants of risk. Poverty and systemic racism certainly play a role here too.

While the so-called anti-vaxx movement seems currently focused on possible harmful trace ingredients in vaccines, anthroposophic medicine has traditionally been concerned rather with the beneficial effect of childhood diseases on child development. And while it is true that measles, mumps and chicken pox in childhood are generally benign, few would argue that polio or infant meningitis, or whooping cough in the first year of life, are basically good for children. Whooping cough in infancy, which I have witnessed numerous times, is an eight-week nightmare for parents and presents a genuine risk of serious complications and even death. Polio and infant meningitis are terrible, devastating illnesses. As a small child growing up in New York, I experienced the fear that gripped the entire city in summertime during polio epidemics. You could be playing in the street with a kid one day, only to hear the next day that he’s in an iron lung. During medical school and residency, prior to the availability of vaccines for meningitis, I was involved in the care of many two-year-olds with meningitis. The lucky ones became deaf; those less fortunate had lifelong brain damage and seizure disorders. As these illnesses have become a thing of the past, people have often tended to focus more on potential harmful effects of the vaccinations than the illnesses themselves. The case can indeed be made that skeptical attitudes towards these vaccines are directly due to their extraordinary success.

In reality, the current anti-vaxx movement bears, in my view, only the thinnest veneer of science. Decades ago, the movement was appropriately focused on risks from the older pertussis vaccine, which did have rare serious side effects. When that vaccine was replaced with a much safer, acellular vaccine, the focus immediately shifted to small

amounts of mercury in vaccines. This, too, was a legitimate concern, and the use of mercury as a preservative was mostly eliminated. Good subsequent retrospective studies have since shown that this form of mercury was not toxic (remember that methanol is deadly, but ethanol is quite enjoyable!), but it is still a good thing that it was eliminated.

Instead of reassurance, attention immediately turned to bogus theories linking the MMR vaccine (which never contained mercury) to autism. Despite overwhelming evidence that there was no connection, many anti-vaxxers still cling to this idea. And now it is small quantities of aluminum and formaldehyde (a natural product of human metabolism) which have become their focus. Few laymen understand that these trace substances are essential for ensuring that the vaccinations are safe and effective. Regardless of where one stands in this ongoing debate, (and I have serious concerns about the number and frequency of administered vaccines, especially those recommended for infants and small children), the behavior of the anti-vaxx crowd has convinced me that with every advance, there is a new fallback position. Some people are simply against vaccines, but it is disingenuous to use pseudo-science to try to legitimize their beliefs. It is an interesting social phenomenon that vaccine opposition, long associated with the new-age movement, has more recently become associated with the right-wing crowd, and it saddens me to see many anthroposophical doctors espousing these same arguments.

It cannot be denied, of course, that there are rare cases of children being harmed by vaccinations. However, allow me to share experiences I have had as Medical Director of Camphill School for over 35 years. Many parents claimed that their child became epileptic, brain damaged, or autistic as a result of an immunization, but most of these claims were scientifically doubtful. Simple arithmetic shows us that if vaccinations are generally given at two month intervals during the first six or more months of life, there is a 50% chance that a totally unrelated event such as a seizure or developmental regression will occur within four weeks of a vaccine, and a 25% chance within two weeks. Nonetheless, the human mind naturally seeks to make a causal link even if there is none.

Even if we would wish our children to get diseases such as measles and chicken pox, the reality is that with immunization rates of 90% or more, withholding vaccinations is very unlikely to offer children the opportunity to get them. That time is over, and we need to acknowledge it. The resourcefulness of the human ego will, and

has, found other means to achieve its ends. Whooping cough, tetanus, and meningitis still exist however, and the risk of opposition to all vaccines is not only that we are putting our children at risk, but also that it places us all too close to the growing anti-vaxx movement, which stems from a mistrust of and denial of basic science, a central feature of Trumpism, rather than any concern about the unfolding of the human Ego.

Much of this mistrust, in our circles, stems from very legitimate concerns about the materialistic basis which underlies modern medicine, and the toxic influence of the pharmaceutical/industrial complex and financial interests on medical practice and research. With these concerns I am in full agreement. Indeed, volumes can and have been written about this problem. But we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater. There is good and bad science, and good science does not mean science that happens to confirm our beliefs, but science and research which is conducted and applied according to the best possible objective standards, free from financial, philosophical, or personal bias.

In an earlier lecture (GA #75, p. 189 in the original) Steiner spoke positively about modern developments in natural science, including immunizations. He speaks about the reduction in infectious diseases which has been brought about through necessary hygienic public health measures, including immunizations. He also speaks of the anti-vaxxers of his time, so-called Impfgegner, (literally, opponents of immunization), as being groups who, although they are unable to deny the effectiveness, nonetheless have a certain irrational psychological resistance to the methods of immunization.

To my great dismay, I am witnessing reluctance on the part of some leading anthroposophists, right up to the Goetheanum, toward the use of masks and social distancing to reduce spread of the coronavirus. We all wear a seatbelt in the car, not because we are obsessed with the fear of being injured in an accident, but because it’s the right thing to do, and because not wearing a seatbelt is much more likely to provoke fear. Yet I remember the reluctance of many, including Camphill co-workers, to wear seat belts when they first became mandatory. Of course there are instances where you are better off in an accident not wearing a belt; but of course these risks are very rare compared to the benefits. Wearing a mask is still much more compelling, because it not only reduces our own risk, but those to our fellow human beings as well.

The argument has been made that the Swedish exper-

iment of trying to achieve herd immunity would be a better way to handle the pandemic. First of all, this country, along with most others, has chosen to try to reduce transmission. So even if you believe that the Swedish model would be better (a dubious conjecture), this country has chosen otherwise, and it makes no sense to try to impose one’s own approach. We lack a coherent medical system and centralized allocation of resources such as ICU beds. We also have a population very resistant to authority. And our infection rate is much higher than almost all other countries. Furthermore, I do not know of a single example of an infectious disease which has been controlled by herd immunity without a vaccine. So yes, I trust the thousands of epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists who are recommending masks and social distancing.

Trumpism is based upon the substitution of lies and conspiracy theories for truth when it is convenient and suits one’s belief-system. Thus, many may consider my concern about possible association of anthroposophists with Trumpism to be a gross exaggeration, offensive, and even a betrayal. I am certainly not suggesting that anthroposophy as a movement in general is taking on fundamental attitudes associated with extreme right-wing ideology. Certainly, there exists a middle ground regarding childhood vaccines. There is, I believe, legitimate concern that the widespread use of multiple, combined immunizations, especially in conjunction with the overuse of antipyretics and antibiotics, is suppressing healthy inflammatory responses in children which can negatively affect health later in life, and possibly predispose to certain chronic and autoimmune conditions.

But there is a danger in the rise within our circles of distrust in science which belies our core principles and runs the risk of having us seen as an anti-science cult in league with attitudes associated with Trumpism. We cannot allow this to happen, or it will be the death-knell of our movement.

Richard G. Fried, MD (richardfriedmd@gmail.com) is Past President, Physicians’ Association for Anthroposophic Medicine; a founding member, American Board and American College of Anthroposophically-Extended Medicine; Medical Director, Camphill School, 1980-2015; and Director & Founder, Kimberton Clinic for Sustainable Medicine, 1993-present.

Author’s note: My thanks to several colleagues who have read and critiqued this manuscript and added valuable perspectives, including Drs. Alicia Landman-Reiner, Christian Wessling, Peter Hinderberger, and Peter Heusser; and Diedra Heitzman.

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Sergei Prokofieff on Rudolf Steiner

review by Stephen E. Usher

Rudolf Steiner, Fragment of a Spiritual Biography, by Sergei O. Prokofieff, Temple Lodge 2020, 251 pages

Arriving six years after Sergei O. Prokofieff crossed the threshold, this book comes as a beautiful gift to those seeking a deeper understanding of Rudolf Steiner. As the title states, this is a spiritual biography, which means it is a study not only of Rudolf Steiner’s life from his birth in 1861 to his death in 1925, but also of his past incarnations, and indeed of his time in the spiritual world between incarnations. Knowing the real spiritual biography allows one to recognize the true Rudolf Steiner. The author explains that it is important not to confuse Rudolf Steiner with the individualities of other great masters of humanity. One reason for such confusion is that Rudolf Steiner, on a number of occasions, allowed one or another of these masters to speak through him while he lectured. Examples of such occasions are reported in the book. During these occurrences Rudolf Steiner was perfectly aware of what he was allowing to happen, and always with full ego consciousness.

A right understanding of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual biography—“based on the sole firm foundation of what he himself said” about himself “to the members of the Anthroposophical Society, above all,” about what he said “in connection with the heavenly development of anthroposophy—can open up the possibility of building up a true relationship to his spirit-figure. This means finding him in the spiritual world, which will be of decisive significance for the further development of Anthroposophy on earth.”

The book explains that Rudolf Steiner is a “young soul.” This means Rudolf Steiner had his first incarnation on earth rather late, compared to other souls. Most of us have had incarnations during the period prior to the Great Flood, during Atlantis, and even earlier. We have had many incarnations since our first. Consequently, we have developed much earthly karma. In contrast, Rudolf Steiner first incarnated about 3000 BC in Chaldea, thousands of years after the flood.

In fact, Rudolf Steiner’s entelechy—in his first earthly incarnation—was the figure of one of the protagonists of the ancient Chaldean myth, “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” Rudolf Steiner was then the wild man of the myth know as Enkidu. At the beginning of the myth, Enkidu goes on

all fours and lives with the animals in astral consciousness. During the course of the myth he learns to stand upright and develops a strong ego consciousness.

The second chapter of the book is titled “A Spiritual-Scientific Interpretation of the Epoch of Gilgamesh,” where the myth, its spiritual hierarchy of gods, and the relation between Enkidu and the other protagonist, Gilgamesh, the King of Chaldea, is explored. The chapter dives deep into this ancient period, exploring what the two protagonists achieved and the great consequence their deeds had for that ancient time and the future. Among other events from the myth, the book explores the two great battles the protagonists fought against frightful enemies. The one enemy is the Luciferic figure of the Heavenly Bull. The other is the Ahrimanic figure of Humbaba. Though the heroes are victorious in both battles, a consequence of the battle with Humbaba is the untimely death of Enkidu.

Enkidu (left above, right below) and Gilgamesh battle the Heavenly Bull (above) and Humbaba.

Following Enkidu’s death Gilgamesh seeks him in the world of the dead, but is unable to fully reach him. Nonetheless, after his death, Enkidu is able to send inspiration to Gilgamesh regarding how wisely to guide the destiny of Chaldea.

The third chapter has the remarkable title, “Enkidu and the Nathan Soul.” Students of Steiner’s Christology, particularly his lectures on the Gospel of St. Luke, will know the Nathan soul is the youngest soul of all. His first incarnation was as the Jesus child described in the Luke Gospel, who descended from the line of Nathan, the priest, as indicated in the genealogy at the beginning of the Gospel. At the Baptism in the Jordan, the Cosmic Solar Christ descended into this soul, living for three and a half years as Jesus Christ. In the chapter the author writes, “[In] the previous chapter, reference was made to the distinctive affinity of the spiritual destinies of Enkidu and the Nathan soul. The particular resemblance between the two destinies and also their essential differences from one another can help us gain a deeper understanding of the figure of Enkidu...” The chapter explores the similarities and differences in considerable detail.

The book presents convincing evidence that the soul of Enkidu, prior to its first incarnation, participated clairvoyantly in what Rudolf Steiner calls the “Three Pre-Earthly deeds of Christ.” These deeds concern the Cosmic Christ working through the Nathan soul to ward off impending disasters in human evolution prior to the time of Christ’s incarnation on earth. Enkidu’s pre-earthly experience of these deeds of the Christ and the Nathan soul lead to significant events in Enkidu’s earthly incarnations.

Chapter Four bears the title, “A Brief Summary of Rudolf Steiner’s Evolutionary Journey—From Enkidu to Rudolf Steiner.” As the title suggests, the chapter traces the spiritual journey of the Enkidu entelechy after the Enkidu incarnation. After the Enkidu incarnation, he first incarnated as an obscure student of the Mysteries of Ephesus in the Temple of Artemis in the 5th century BC at the time of Heraclitus. This was a quiet incarnation, “a

process of calm familiarization with the Mysteries of that time,” an introduction to the Mysteries of the Word and of the future coming of Christ to the Earth.

The Enkidu entelechy next incarnated as the great philosopher Aristotle, who discovered the structure of thought, and brought Mystery knowledge to earth, essentially founding natural science. The chapter offers a breathtaking description of Aristotle and his achievements.

Following the Aristotle incarnation the entelechy appears as another obscure figure, known in the Grail legend as Schionatulander, the squire of Parcival’s father, Gahmuret. Schionatulander dies an innocent death, thereby allowing Parcival to survive and continue the Grail Stream’s evolution. The Grail legend includes a Pietà-like image of the dead Schionatulander on the lap of his beloved, Sigune.

The next incarnation is anything but obscure, it is the great Scholastic, Thomas Aquinas, who develops thinking to its greatest refinement. Aquinas died contemplating these fundamental questions, “How does Christ engage with human thinking? How can it be Christianized? How does Christ Himself lead His own human thinking up to the sphere, where Man can unite with what is otherwise only the spiritual content of faith?”

With the above questions at heart, the entelechy incarnates as Rudolf Steiner, and answers the questions. In part, he accomplished this by reversing the direction leading down to earth life that Aristotle instituted by establishing natural science. Steiner brings about this reversal by creating spiritual science, a free investigation of spiritual reality with the use of higher states of consciousness.

This brief review has only touched the surface of this profound book, a final gift to students of Rudolf Steiner from Sergei O. Prokofieff.

Stephen E. Usher, PhD (seusher@sbcglobal.net) is an an economist with expertise in money, banking, and financial markets. He was for eight years managing director of Anthroposophic Press, and has lectured and written widely on anthroposophical topics.

Note: Prokofieff worked on this book over many years starting in 1984, but he was unable to develop the project as planned. He managed to give an outline of the concept in the last chapter, thus preparing the book for publishing in April 2014. His wife Astrid Prokofieff and translator Simon Blaxland-de Lange did an excellent job assembling the manuscript for this English publication.

The New Experience of the Supersensible

The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity: The History of the Michaelic Movement since the Death of Rudolf Steiner: An Esoteric Study by

Yeshayahu (Jesaiah) Ben-Aharon;

Temple Lodge Publishing, 2020; 338 pp.

review by John Beck

Spiritual investigation, when earnestly pursued, is not a matter of juggling with ideas or words, but works its way into the actual sphere where the spiritual world becomes perceptible.

—Rudolf Steiner, Zurich, 9 October 1918, GA 182

Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon (originally introduced by his publisher as Jesaiah Ben-Aharon) has been a pathfinder and a door-opener for the anthroposophical movement for thirty years now. His unique place has been evident in three areas of work: his accounts of spiritual developments since the death of Rudolf Steiner in 1925, his broad penetration of contemporary culture beyond the anthroposophical movement, and his demonstration of paths of advanced personal development.

David Adams reviewed his 2016 book Cognitive Yoga: Making Yourself a New Etheric Body and Individuality in the spring 2018 being human, calling it “a most extraordinary book—probably the most extraordinary book that has been written within anthroposophy since the original work of Rudolf Steiner.” Now The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity brings into focus two more elements: further spiritual timelines of the 21st century, and community development as a necessary support for individual progress.

Two paths in spiritual research

There have been a number of anthroposophists of outstanding capacities since the founding generation around Rudolf Steiner. It is valuable to stop and make a list of personal encounters sometimes: so many bright spirits for whom we can be grateful! They bring their own gifts and karma, of course. There was already a divide between Rudolf Steiner’s two closest advisors, Marie Steiner with the trusted judgment, and Ita Wegman with strength of initiative.

On the path of cautious judgment we have had de-

cades of valuable work on what Rudolf Steiner had been able to bring, punctuated recently by his 150th birthday and centenary years of mystery dramas, eurythmy, threefolding, Waldorf education, anthroposophic medicine. Now in 2023-2025 we reach the last centenary observations of Steiner’s work, when something new must be made of the original impulse. We’re not still waiting for the teacher to return, are we? Will we be able to make really new beginnings?

The devoted initiative into the future seems essential now, and Ben-Aharon follows that road which was generally not taken by the Anthroposophical Society, following the simple line of Dr. Wegman, “I am for going forward.”

Evolution: the essential question

Steiner’s research unfolded in many directions, and was an extension of modern science, not the creation of another new religion. His research into questions for which there are religious revelations and traditions was immensely clarifying, bringing religions into a new complementary relationship across time and space. In the book Christianity as Mystical Fact and scores of lectures he presented his view that the cosmic spiritual being called “the Christ” is the ultimate source of human individuality, and that His incarnation brought a renewed impulse for future human evolution

The Christian Bible tells of the return of Christ, a “second coming” out of the clouds. Steiner reported that this would be a return in our time and not in a physical body. It would be in the realm of formative life forces which he called “the etheric,” for which the clouds’ fluent formations are a highly suitable image.

Ben-Aharon’s debut in the early 1990s involved Rudolf Steiner’s prediction that this “reappearance of Christ in the etheric” would begin to be apparent from the year

1933—nineteen centuries after the resurrection. Anthroposophists have acknowledged the central importance of this statement.1

This reappearance presents many challenges to anthroposophy. First, who understands who the Christ is? The name “Christ” invokes two thousand years of traditional religion with all its human and sectarian failings; the essential evolutionary role of the Christ for humanity becomes clear only via anthroposophy. Steiner even reported a second “astral” crucifixion of the Christ—in the realm of sympathies and antipathies—in the late 19th century. That was when Nietzsche stated that “God is dead and we have killed him.” Since that time many Christians have sought only the historical man Jesus, along with grandiose fantasies of a physical “rapture” to restore humans’ relationships to the divine. But it is “the dying of Christ’s consciousness in the angelic sphere in the nineteenth century [that] will lead to the resurrection of direct Christ consciousness in the earthly sphere.”2

Ben-Aharon is able to follow this line of cosmic sacrifice. “The problem is that the concepts and representations of a ‘second crucifixion’ and ‘death by suffocation’ that Rudolf Steiner applies to the understanding of the second Mystery of Golgotha, no longer suffice when we continue to follow the Christ into the 30s and 40s. We need to find a way to describe how the expected resurrection of Christ’s consciousness among humanity was suppressed and reversed to its very opposite. It’s not another crucifixion or death by suffocation, but something

1 For the 2010 centenary of Steiner’s announcement, there was a very special conference in Austin, Texas, “bathed in the art of eurythmy and brought to life through scenes from Rudolf Steiner’s first mystery drama, The Portal of Initiation, lectures by US General Secretary MariJo Rogers, Judith Brockway, and Stephen Usher, [and] a projective geometry lesson with David Booth.” 2 Rudolf Steiner, GA 152, 2.5.1913, quoted in Ben-Aharon, The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity (p. 299).

entirely new.” (p. 302).

A second problem of the reappearance is the “etheric” location: the realm of life, imperceptible to physical senses and so to most human beings even today. As Wegman and Steiner noted in Fundamentals of Therapy, “The phenomena of life have an altogether different orientation from those that run their course within the lifeless realm…” And “the etheric crucifixion and death of suffocation of the second Mystery of Golgotha took place in the etheric world; out of this etheric death the new resurrected direct Christ consciousness should have emerged from 1933 onward. But instead of this, the etherically resurrected Christ took into His heart the evil deeds inspired by the Beast that was individualized in those human souls who created the Gulags, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” (p. 303).

And third, it is these evil deeds that are all too perceptible from 1933 onward, not the redemptive return we would expect from Rudolf Steiner’s research of “the Christ being” Who is the cosmic “I am,” the source of humanity, of human individuality, of our potential for freedom and loving creativity. Instead of new experiences of this reality, however, anthroposophists experienced in 1933 and beyond, along with the rest of humanity, the blossoming of seductive powers that deny humanity’s higher potential and seek violence and destruction. It may be relevant to note, however, that the work of Ita Wegman during this dreadful time included curative medicine and homes for children with “special needs” which blossomed in Scotland into the Camphill movement’s amazing community building. Wegman also, in 1934, after a severe illness, visited Palestine.

So Ben-Aharon’s first books, The Spiritual Event of the 20th Century and The New Experience of the Supersensible, gave anthroposophists in the 1990s their first and still unique account of how, behind the visible stage of history, the “reappearance of Christ in the etheric” had actually taken place. Discarnate human beings had been able to assist the Christ in creating a new sphere around the Earth, but incarnated individuals had not been able to take part...

Ben-Aharon then lectured and conversed with anthroposophists extensively in the US and Europe. He spent more than a year living with his family in upstate New York, and wrote America’s Global Responsibility, illuminating the spiritual struggle and potential of the USA.

In the late 1990s he began to collaborate with Nicanor Perlas of the Philippines and others in an internation-

Photo of Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon by Torbjørn Eftestøl

al civil society activist group called GlobeNet3. There were meetings in Manila, in Sweden at the end of 1999, in New York City around the UN Millennium Summit in 2000, where Perlas’ Shaping Globalization was distributed. In 2003 a freak airline strike in Israel prevented him from coming to give a keynote lecture at a conference in New York called “American Spirit, Values, and Power,” in the days just after the Iraq invasion. Other conferences were co-sponsored in Stuttgart by the cultural center Forum3, and in Tel-Aviv by the Jewish Agency, the civil society organization that had helped found Israel.

A 2007 lecture in Colmar, in Alsace, France, was published in the fall 2011 issue of being human as “Anthroposophy & Contemporary Philosophy in Dialogue,” showing how philosophers like Gilles Deleuze had come prepared to engage anthroposophists, former Franciscans meeting former Dominicans, in the late 20th century,—but they had not been met. This was part of a broad cultural engagement which he elaborated in The Event in Science, History, Philosophy & Art. It revealed new consciousness breaking out widely. Again, this was little noted in the anthroposophical movement at large, where we labor to take in Steiner’s work, full of awareness of his contemporary developments that ended in 1925.

What next? Plan B?

Ben-Aharon, who had a "Damascus experience" at age 21, went to the Goetheanum to absorb Steiner’s work. Ever since he has been shouldering, in a uniquely direct manner, the great question of anthroposophy: “What next?” Depending only on what Rudolf Steiner was able to bring before his death, we are left to argue whether the Christmas Foundation meeting succeeded or failed, whether the “culmination at the end of the century” happened or not, and whether the reappearance of the Christ took place—or perhaps not.

Behind the actuality of the return of Christ in the etheric Ben-Aharon found a necessary “plan B,” developed after 1945 out of that comprehensive spiritual movement for humanity which supported Rudolf Steiner in bringing anthroposophy. This is the school and initiatives of the Archangel Michaël, serving the Christ, the cosmic “I am.” It includes the special dynamic, revealed by Steiner only in 1924, between “Platonists” and “Aristotelians,” who since the 12th century have not been together in incarnation. Platonists were to join in earthly work in the late 20th century, when a culmination was to have happened.

After the disasters of the first half of the 20th century, new approaches were required. “After a thorough overview of the catastrophic situation of humanity and the earth was completed, the participants in the consultations had to say to themselves: Humans did not hear it! We must therefore prepare a new beginning on the earth, that will start where Rudolf Steiner had to end his mission much too soon in his previous earthly life, when the Christmas Foundation Conference impulse—which is all about the new Michaelic community building—was not accepted by his pupils.” (pp. 87-88)

For ten or twelve years now Ben-Aharon has been working with others in Israel, Germany, Scandinavia, and North America to develop the training and foster the kind of community which can inspire and support the striving of human beings, incarnated and discarnate. The new book speaks of working with the great “folk souls” of those four regions, and with the complementary gifts of Platonists and Aristotelians. To what end? To achieve a new individual consciousness that can persist in the “etheric”—and thereby to recognize the creation of the next-stage human future that is taking place there.

The anthroposophy given by Rudolf Steiner up to 1925 is already vast and challenging. Ben-Aharon might appear to be piling us up a second mountain atop this first one! But can there be any question that events, earthly and spiritual, and culture, and consciousness— have been evolving rapidly, and that radical challenges face us? Nicanor Perlas recently offered Humanity’s Last Stand out of his years of attention to advanced technology and artificial intelligence. His hope is that humanity, anthroposophists in particular, will pull together to prevent what I would call a “soft extinction”—where human control of events and decision-making and creativity is ceded more and more to advancing technology. In this “post-human” future the tech superstar Elon Musk, who thinks about big questions, has said that humans would be “like house cats.”

Ben-Aharon’s Cognitive Yoga confronts these challenges by illuminating the disciplines for “making yourself a new etheric body and individuality,” in that elevated region where Steiner placed the Foundation Stone of Christmas 1923. Now Twilight and Resurrection points to a community-building process that could sustain us as we go forward against heavy resistance.

The specific content of Twilight comes from five lectures in Sweden, February 12-17, 2019:

The Amfortas-Parsifal Duality and its Healing: Personal Impersonal Observations of Biography

The Twilight of Humanity and Its Resurrection

The Universal Language of Michael and the Being of Rudolf Steiner

The Anthroposophical Movement in the Present

The Etheric Form is Alive

Afterword: The Resurrection of the Etheric Christ in the Twenty-first Century

There is much rich content, of course, but the call being sounded is for enthusiasm, even in its proper sense of “being filled with a god.” We are at a decisive moment in human becoming; can we be passive about that?

The usual idea is that feelings just come, and we select and prize the best ones. Feelings can be summoned, however, like those on the philosophers’ path Steiner mentions (implicit also in Otto Scharmer’s “Theory U”): summon wonder, summon reverence, envision the great cosmic harmony, and then with enthusiasm make the commitment to learn life-long from the fullness of reality.

Steiner had said that bringing spiritual experience into words is painfully difficult, and Ben-Aharon must face the same challenge; his reader may have to work harder than when reading Steiner. For instance, I find his occasional rhythmical strings of superlatives literally stunning, but does this echo the exalted experience of a thinking freed from the brain’s tireless grasping?

YBA often has supported his research by a vast body of footnotes linking to relevant statements of Steiner. Indeed, what he showed in Cognitive Yoga was exactly in a line with what runs from Philosophy of Freedom in 1894 through its 1918 republishing and onward, surfacing briefly all the way like a golden thread. Still, this is new stuff, and as with Steiner you may have the question, “Can anyone know such things?” Steiner noted that you cannot prove anthroposophy by material means, but asked us to notice how better and better it hangs together

I recommend using the notes with their reassuring links to Steiner. And you could well just begin with the Afterword. Above all, to profit most from this book, overcome post-modern passivity and summon enthusiasm!

Personal-impersonal observations

There are also important biographical notes. One explains the author’s heavy work to overcome obstacles to a full spiritualization of his own physiology. This is in

the first section, “The Amfortas-Parsifal Duality and its Healing.” This goes far beyond the bounds of Steiner’s day—making clear that liberating our thought life, and then our feeling life—freeing the etheric body from the constraints of the physical head and heart —is not the whole task. Physiological liberation below the diaphragm will also be required; hence, Amfortas and Parsifal.

Another biographical note informs us about YBA's encounter with Sergei Prokofieff, leader of the Anthroposophical Society in post-Soviet Russia, a member of the Goetheanum leadership from 2001 until his untimely death at age sixty in 2014, and an author and speaker who clearly could “see” and research further in the fields Steiner had illuminated. (See Stephen Usher’s review in this issue.) After initial warmth, Ben-Aharon reports that Prokofieff concluded that YBA was sharing his own experience, which would be a wrong approach.

He said that I had put my spiritual experience in the center and used Anthroposophy to explain it. But one should, he added, humbly let Rudolf Steiner’s texts speak for themselves and keep one’s own experiences in the background. I was somewhat taken aback when I heard this. For me the center of my work was not at all my personal ‘I’ or ego, but the experience of the etheric Christ, which was for me an objective, supersensible experience, the perception and cognition of which took me 15 years of intense spiritual labor, to spiritualize and transform through the knowledge practice of spiritual science.

Therefore, I could only reply to his objection by saying that for me Anthroposophy comes about by means of the actual practice of spiritual science, whatever its subject matter is; therefore, from the beginning, it must be a result of our independent, fully individualized and free, empirical spiritual experience and research. Rudolf Steiner investigated his experiences of the real spiritual world, as a natural scientist investigates his or her experiences in the sense perceptible physical world.

I said that the experience of the etheric Christ, to which my research was dedicated, is an object of empirical spiritual experience, exactly as a plant, bird or star is for natural science. And this alone stood in the center of my research, my ‘I’ was not the center, but Christ’s etheric being was—and always is—the center, to the limited extent, naturally, that I can perceive and comprehend it through my individual spiritual activity. Moreover, Anthroposophy, when it is brought to bear on the new etheric appearance of the Christ—as Rudolf Steiner hoped for and expected

research & reviews

from our time—is not put down when used to illuminate and explain Christ’s sublime mysteries, but is rather elevated and appears in this way in its true light and glory!

But it was clear that he had already made up his mind about the question, and that no further discussion about it was going to happen. And so indeed we departed, and I never met him again in physical life. This meeting was an important event because it determined the fate of my future involvement in the Anthroposophical Society and movement.

Twilight and Resurrection , p. 57-58

Ben-Aharon relates strongly to Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom , and his approach seems justified by what Steiner himself wrote in a letter, 4th November, 1894, from Weimar, to Rosa Mayreder:

I know exactly where my book belongs within the stream of contemporary culture; I can show precisely where it joins on to Nietzsche’s line of thought; I can say with confidence that I have expressed the ideas that are lacking in Nietzsche. I may admit to my friends—but only to them—that I feel very sad that Nietzsche was never able to read my book. He would have taken it as what it is; in every line a personal experience. (emphasis added)

You tell me the book is too short, and that a whole book could have been made out of each chapter. I cannot contradict this remark in as far as it is objectively meant. The explanation lies in my own subjectivity. I don’t teach; I relate what I have inwardly experienced. I relate it as I have experienced it. Everything in my book is personally thought out. Also the form of the thoughts. Anyone with a teaching disposition could extend it. Perhaps I could, too, at the right time. For the time being I want to describe the biography of a soul wrestling its way up to freedom. One cannot do anything for those who want to accompany one over cliffs and abysses. One must get oneself over. Too great a yearning for the goal burns within one for it to be possible to stop and explain to others how they can get across most easily. I believe that if I had simultaneously tried to find a suitable way for others, I should have fallen.

I went my way as well as I could; it was this way that I described. After that I could perhaps find a hundred ways which others might take, but I did not want to put down any of them on paper immediately. Haphazardly and quite individually, I have jumped over many cliffs, and have worked my way through thickets in my own fashion. It is only when one

reaches the goal that one knows that one is there. Perhaps the time for teaching in these matters is over. Philosophy interests me now almost exclusively as the experience of the individual.3

Like a number of early leaders of our movement after Steiner’s death, most notably Ita Wegman herself, BenAharon has proceeded not in competition with the institutional center but in the necessary freedom of a spiritual researcher who can see her or his own way. So there are references to the “School of Spiritual Science” which is the school started by Rudolf Steiner, but is not flowing in the channels set up decades ago from the Goetheanum.

Toward 2023

We now approach the hundredth anniversary of the Christmas Foundation Conference, often referring to our plans as a “celebration.” Most of our 2023, however, might recall the walk down the hill on January 1, 1923, from the embers of the first Goetheanum, and the year of struggle that followed to help young and old members understand each other. There is also the purported poisoning of Steiner at the end of the conference; the extraordinary blaze of inspirations afterward, and the sharing up to mid-September 1924; then six-month convalescence at the foot of the statue of the “representative of humanity” and the opposing powers; and the departure of Rudolf Steiner in early 1925, twelve years earlier, he said, than his karma would have allowed. Twelve years that would have taken him to the “reappearance” in 1933, and beyond.

To properly celebrate Steiner’s last twenty-seven months we should have some sense of where anthroposophy has to go in this next hundred years. Extraordinary good work has been done in so many particular areas, but Ben-Aharon remains the only researcher I know who has a view both comprehensive and prospective.

Steiner advised us that when we form a picture, even if we are unsure of its correctness, our etheric body will work to perfect it. The Twilight and Resurrection of Humanity would be good food for any healthy etheric body!

3 Quoted and presumably translated by Owen Barfield, in a review in The Golden Blade of Briefe von Rudolf Steiner. Volume II.

John Beck is editor of being human and director of communications for the Anthroposophical Society in America.

news for members & friends of

the Anthroposophical Society in America

What was the seed for Applied Anthroposophy? Why it was you, of course.

by Laura Scappaticci

During one of my first years as the Director of Programs, a member from Pittsburgh, PA who had attended our first few webinars, reached out via email with a question and idea. “How do we connect anthroposophy to current events and bring it to life right now?” This was not to be the last such request. A theme emerged through our contact with friends and members: a request for foundational anthroposophical knowledge, a wish for a broad ranging, long course on the principal concepts of anthroposophy in the context of our time.

This longing for relevance in a time of tumult, for depth in the modern context of online learning, continued to live within me until three years later. At our annual conference in Atlanta in 2019, the seed found fertile ground. A group of educators came together over a lunch hour to chat about anthroposophy and adult education. As we sat around the table—farmers, artists, biographers, leaders,—I could sense this wish again, and the being that accompanies it—Anthroposophia.

It is not a surprise to me that nothing concrete was determined at that meeting. What was established was a sense that something new was trying to come through for education and anthroposophy. Whether it was for young adults in the context of an art community, or farmers at a bee sanctuary, or families at a summer camp, or online learning. Would it be possible to investigate new forms? Forms without the “basic books” or traditional classroom settings?

After several online meetings with a larger group of adult educators, Applied Anthroposophy was born. It has been carried on the wings of the Butterfly Lectures by Rudolf Steiner, with an image of the stages of butterfly evolution and the word “emerge” at its core. Focused on the themes of Freedom in Thinking, the Power of Love, Personal Ini-

tiative, and Service to Humanity, the full course began in September 2020. Its intention has been and continues to be inclusiveness, accessibility, and anthroposophical application to current events.

How is this intention achieved? We’ve noticed the program itself is still in a process of becoming, so we move along with it in an emergent process, breaking out of the cocoon. The overall mood of the program—courage, warmth, ease, openness, and a connection to this moment in time,—is our primary guidance and means of staying true to that wish and the seed that was planted by people like you. We change and adjust to meet the needs of our participants, while holding strongly to our key course elements and intentions of bringing anthroposophy to life in 2020 and beyond. Mostly though, the program is guided through its connection to the four key themes, through individual biography work, and by an invitation into personal research for all participants.

There are levels of engagement. Some participants come together just for the Leading Thoughts—distilled presentations on these themes in our time—offered by presenters like Dr. Lakshmi Prasanna, Lisa Romero, Rev. Patrick Kennedy, Orland Bishop, Nathaniel Williams, Megan Durney, and many more.

Some go further into Chrysalis Groups—a place for small group sharing and exploration. These groups are led by Angela Foster, Jordan Walker, Jolie Luba, Patrick Foster, Andrea de la Cruz and her partner Nicolas Cribez, Joaquin Munoz, and Jerilyn Burke. All of these fearless guides are growing into the program along with the participants, creating a space and learning more about living anthroposophy. In addition, each theme is linked to biography work with Chris Burke and Anne De Wild. As we move into personal initiative, Joaquin Munoz and Andrea De La Cruz have invited all full-program participants into a personal research project that will be presented at the end of the program in May 2021. This research is meant to be focused on a burning question they are holding. Something that they come back to again and again throughout the course and in their life. Presentations may be artistic, academic, or performance-based. Our deep

Ninetta Sombart, Jacob’s Wrestling with the Angel

wish is to be together face-to-face this summer to hear this research, meet one another, and experience the fruit of our online time together. And if we aren’t together, we will share online in the sacred spaces we have created there.

What is the next step for Applied Anthroposophy? First, we will review. Review with our participants and our team, find out what worked and what can be improved upon. Then we will tune in and listen again to what the world is asking of us as related to anthroposophy and adult education. This year we enrolled about

230 people overall. Some for the full program with the Chrysalis Groups, others for the Leading Thought sessions only, and some for the Introductory Sessions with Sherry Wildfeuer and Alex Tuchman. We hope to offer Applied Anthroposophy again next year—and we have no doubt that this butterfly of 2020 will lay eggs, grow into a caterpillar, and be a new creature again in fall 2021.

Laura

Scappaticci (laura@anthroposophy.org) is ASA Director of Programs. You can read more about this first year of Applied Anthroposophy at appliedanthroposophy.org

Warm Hearts, Enlightened Heads

by Herbert Hagens

Soon to be published by Les Editions Perceval press: The Foundation Stone Meditation and the Challenges of our Time, Arie van Ameringen and Christiane Haid, editors; appearing early spring in English, French, and German.

Rudolf Steiner first sounded the Foundation Stone meditation at the Christmas Conference on December 25, 1923 in Dornach, Switzerland. He characterized for his listeners the words of this mantra as “the essence of what may stand before your souls as the most important findings of recent years… let our ears be touched by [these words], so that out of the signs of the present time we may renew, in keeping with our way of thinking, the ancient word of the Mysteries: ‘Know thyself.’”

Much has been spoken and written about Steiner’s offering ever since that meeting. The editors of this latest book on the Foundation Stone bring together essays from 14 leading anthroposophists who share the “findings” of their own intensive research and inner experiences with this awesome meditation. The backgrounds of these international writers span the fields of history, philosophy, education, therapy, medicine, agriculture, architecture, geometry, eurythmy, speech, the visual arts, and music. The authors present a wide variety of meditative practices which can help us to “internalize the Foundation Stone and to make it a living reality for ourselves” (Helene Besnard, Quebec). They guide us in exploring the sights, the rhythms and the mysteries of time and space, across a landscape of soul and spirit. It is like taking a tour through an art museum and marveling at what

the docent points out in each work of art. Of course there are always more secrets and deeper truths yet to be discovered. The underlying objective is to nurture a healthy life of the soul so that we can effectively meet the challenges of our time.

One thread that weaves through the essays is the transition from the original copper dodecahedron Foundation Stone laid in the earth for the First Goetheanum (1913) to the second Foundation Stone laid in the hearts of the members of the Anthroposophical Society (1923). Both “stones” serve as the foundation of a mystery temple, one that was once visible on the earth, and one that exists in the spiritual world. “It is a future that can grow out of the Foundation Stone meditation, the Foundation Stone of Love, the seed for a new building, a spiritual-social building, the seed for a new civilization” (Ruediger Janisch, Pennsylvania). Rudolf Steiner stated the following at the end of the Christmas Conference: “We have here laid the Foundation Stone. On this Foundation Stone shall be erected the building whose individual stones will be the work achieved in all our groups by the individuals outside in the wide world… Bear out with you your warm hearts in order to do work in the world that is strong in healing. Help will come to you because your heads will be enlightened by what you all now want to be able to direct in conscious willing.” The essays in The Foundation Stone Meditation and the Challenges of our Time will surely warm our hearts and enlighten our heads as we strive to bring about the good.

Herbert O Hagens, Princeton, NJ, USA hohagens@aol.com

Arie van Ameringen, Christiane Haid

Insights and Perspectives

by Deb Abrahams-Dematte

This past year has been rich and full in ways I never would have imagined. Our opportunities for self-reflection, the ways in which we interact with others, the state of the world, all are transformed in significant ways. I see beauty and challenges, a tapestry of dark and light.

I’ve taken inspiration from members and friends across the country. We have and continue to study and explore together despite physical distance. The learning and connections bring me comfort, strength and hope for the future. I hope you are experiencing this too. Friendships are deepened, insights and perspectives are shared. I am grateful for my online study groups and the work we are doing together. And I yearn for the time when we will all meet in person again.

I’ve been working with the Holy Nights in a more focused way than ever before. My own meditative and writing practice has been centered on this and there has been new space and opportunity to dive in. The ASA’s Holy Nights Seeds gatherings offered many voices and perspectives, along with a beloved community with whom to practice. We lit our candles together, turned our attention to the holy and the divine, each in our own place and way. We’ve worked deeply with the many faces of Sophia and the virtues as well. All so rich, but this stands out for me: Patience becomes understanding and insight. This reminder couldn’t have come at a better time and gives momentum and tools for the coming year.

Something I’m always thinking about is, How can we, as individuals and as an anthroposophical community, contribute positively to the larger whole? There are many answers, of course. Some that come to immediately to mind, especially given my own choleric temperament, are attention, intention, perseverance, and love. Another piece of the answer that has come up for me recently though is the idea of surrender. Not from weakness or disinterest, but as an action and as an act of love. The ultimate open-mindedness, perhaps.

Rudolf Steiner speaks of it this way: “An inclination to judge or form opinions wants to be continually arriving at truth at every step; surrender on the other hand, does not set out to force an entrance, as it were, into this or that truth, rather do we seek to educate ourselves and then quietly wait until we attain to that stage of maturity where the truth flows to us from the things of the world, coming to us in revelation and filling our whole being.”

Anthroposophy brings the possibility, through intention, thought and practice, to experience the spiritual realm in full consciousness and bring that work into the world. As we move into this new and unexplored year, I am grateful to be on this journey with you.

Appeal Update

Our 2020 year end appeal Courage for the Future is wrapping up and we want to say thank you! We are thrilled to let you know that we’ve received $75,492 in gifts, passing our $50,000 goal. We are grateful for your generous support of the ASA and our mission in the world.

Legacy Circle News

We are deeply grateful and moved by a generous bequest to the ASA from the estate of Patti Smith. Patti crossed the threshold on St John’s Day, June 24, 2020. She was a beautiful and fiery spirit with tremendous initiative, bringing interest and warmth to all who knew her.

Patti joined the Society in 1985 and was a member of the School for Spiritual Science. Most recently, she served on the board and led workshops for the Center for Biography and Social Art, and was an active collaborator in bringing the deepening experiences of biography work to ASA events and gatherings over the past several years. Her influence and impact will continue on into the future. Visit anthroposophy.org/pattismith for a remembrance of Patti from her friend and colleague Signe Schaefer.

Legacy giving is the ultimate multi-generational conversation, bringing your goals and intentions into the future. With much gratitude, we share that four additional members have let us know of their intention to make a bequest to the ASA. If you’d like to join the Legacy Circle or learn more about the transformative possibilities of legacy giving, please visit anthroposophy.org/legacy or contact me at deb@anthroposophy.org

Deb Abrahams-Dematte is ASA Director of Development.

Pack Monadnock, Temple, NH; photo: Amy Kleine

Notes from Katherine Thivierge

Rudolf Steiner House in Ann Arbor now has an entirely new heating and cooling system. We shut down the boiler in March due to many unpredictable boiler pipe

years, and will continue to serve on the Finance Committee. His sharp eye and quiet good judgment have made it possible to move from the very difficult cutting back of 2015 to the sustainable position we now enjoy. I am hearing that we may now enjoy another side of Dwight as he has been asked to share photographs for the biweekly e-newsletter. Dave Mansur will take on the responsibilities of Treasurer.

leaks, and investigated our best options for heating in this northern clime. We ended up abandoning the nearly 100 year old pipes in the walls and installing a new boiler and water heater. The second floor of guest rooms now has forced air heated by hot water from the boiler and system air conditioning. The main floor is primarily heated and cooled with electrical split units, which will also provide the lecture hall with quiet air conditioning.

Steiner House remains closed to outside events, and some staff continue to work on site at their distanced desks, with health safety protocol in place. We all miss the life that the branch activities, study groups, and meetings bring to Steiner House. It was an unexpected joy to see that the Great Lakes Branch erected its annual Christmas tree in the lecture hall, though they are not able to meet there for lectures or festivals.

I would also like to mention that Dwight Ebaugh is reaching his term limit as a member of the General Council and the Treasurer of the Anthroposophical Society in America soon. We will no doubt continue to see him here in Ann Arbor when branch events resume, face to face. He has also been an enormous help over the last 5-6

An Argument For Higher Knowledge

Corollary: The World fiddles

While the World burns.

—John Urban

The

—John

Urban

Katherine Thivierge (katherine@anthroposophy.org) is ASA Director of Operations.

Rudolf Steiner House: new boiler, water heater, and control systems.

Gino Ver Eecke joins the General Council

At its January 2021 meeting the ASA General Council accepted the nomination of Gino Ver Eecke by the Eastern Region Holding Group as the regional representative on the council. He replaces David Mansur who becomes a member at large and will soon assume responsibility at Treasurer of the Society, as Dwight Ebaugh reaches his term limit.

Gino met Anthroposophy in his birth town of Roeselare, Belgium, at the young age of 16. After working for a year on a BD-farm in Switzerland, he moved to New York to study eurythmy, receiving his diploma from Eurythmy Spring Valley in 1994. For eight years he performed as the character of Benedictus with the Threefold Mystery Drama Group, culminating in the performance of the Four Mystery Dramas in the summer of 2014. During the Mystery Drama Conference at the Goetheanum in July 2018, Gino performed the last scene of “The Soul’s Awakening.” Currently he guides the work of the Threefold Branch of the Anthroposophical Society in Chestnut Ridge, NY. He also serves as the President and Treasurer of the Eurythmy Association in North America.

Hats Off to Renewal

Ronald Koetzsch and Anne Riegel-Koetzsch: 29 years representing Waldorf education

In June 2020, AWSNA (The Association of Waldorf Schools of North America) celebrated the retirement of Ronald Koetzsch and Anne Riegel-Koetzsch, and twenty-nine years of Renewal: A Journal for Waldorf Education.

“Anne Riegel-Koetzsch studied Philosophy and Art at Oberlin College. She became a copy editor for a Wall Street firm and held positions at Shambhala Publications, Anthroposophic Press, and others. Anne completed graduate studies in Studio Art and the History of Art at Hunter College in New York. She traveled and studied across Europe, Central Asia, India, and Japan where she spent two years studying Japanese language and culture and art history. In 1995 she became chief copy editor for Renewal, and in 2007 the artistic director. During 25 years of service she demonstrated love, beauty, aesthetic, and an unbelievable editing eye. Renewal is a testament to her care and seriousness in presenting Waldorf education to the world.

“Dr. Ronald Koetzsch is a professional stand-up comedian. In the past twenty years, Ronald has given over

500 performances in North America, New Zealand, Australia and at the great hall of the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. He received his BA from Princeton and MA and PhD from Harvard, and taught at Boston University, Dartmouth College, Hampden-Sydney College of Virginia, and Rudolf Steiner College. He was a senior instructor for the Outward Bound School and also a writer and columnist for East West Journal . At the request of Henry Barnes, Ronald became founding Editor in Chief of Renewal twenty-nine years ago.”

AWSNA’s board resolution said that “Ronald made Waldorf education visible to the world with literary grace, artistry, and endless care and devotion, and provided education and insight to parents and teachers across the globe so that children would benefit from the wisdom of Waldorf pedagogy and the nurturing impulse of anthroposophy.” It concluded, “Ronald lives life with dignity, principle, and resolve, and has surrounded us all with humor, compassion, and love for humanity and the earth.”

New Members

Anthroposophical Society in America, 7/21/2020 to 1/31/2021

Femi Adedeji, Philadelphia PA

Carla Susana Alem Abrantes, Fortaleza, Brazil

Suzanna Alexander, Wildwood GA

Marcia Allard, Saint Joseph MN

Autumn L Almanza, Sweey Home OR

Robin Andrews, Philmont NY

Andrea Aranda, San Francisco CA

Lynn Archambeault, South Egremont MA

Ashton Arnoldy, Chico CA

Carlos Arvizu, Seagoville TX

Angela Assis Nascimento, Corinth TX

Mari E Avicolli, Keene NH

Kymberlee Baginski, Placerville CA

Sharif A Ball, Seattle WA

Sandra Bamford, Primrose Sands, Australia

Abby Bangser, New Canaan CT

Julie Behnken, Boulder CO

Regina A Blakeslee, Yorktown Heights NY

Tara Bowers, Wilton NH

Shannon Boyce, Valley Cottage NY

Beverly K Boyer, Wilton NH

Julia Brennen, Calgary AB Canada

Tomasina Burgess, Prunedale CA

John Capanis, Walnut Creek CA

Silvia Lissett Carabias Martinez, Boca Raton FL

Priscilla Carrion, Providence RI

Karisa Centanni, Adams MA

Chik Ying Chai, Setia Alam, Shah Alam, Malaysia

Desmond Clark, Dothan AL

Anthony Corcoran, Pittsburgh PA

Carlos Correa, Miami FL

Amber D Correa, Santa Cruz CA

Erin Craig, Wanganui, Australia

Gail Cronauer, Dallas TX

Barbara L Cunningham, Phoenix AZ

Nathanial C Dawe, Cornelia GA

Maryejo Del Meijer, Santa Barbara CA

Andrea Dencker, Boca Raton FL

Christine Ditzler, Newark DE

Bridgette Lyn Dolgoff, Reno NV

Lynn Donofrio, Fairfield CA

John Donovan, Oceanside CA

Anna Drubel, Great Barrington MA

John T Echelmeyer, O’Fallon MO

Arthur Egendorf Aka Vipperla, Bronx NY

Daniel B Ehrlich, Sarasota FL

Vaios Eleftheriou, Woodbury MN

Katherine Estember, Stuttgart, Germany

Shawnee Faught, Plymouth MI

Ben Fish, Great Barrington MA

Cheryl Fisher, Milwaukie OR

Rebecca Flynn, Whitmore Lake MI

Alejandra Folguera, Santa Barbara CA

Heather Foote, Keller TX

Ryan Fukuda, Running Springs CA

Mike Galbraith, Calgary AB Canada

Jennifer Galbraith, Beaverton OR

Armando Garcia, Boca Raton FL

Noa Goren, Phoenixville PA

Veruschka Mercedes Goyo, Oakland CA

Amanda Gruss Chambers, New York NY

Lisa Hall, Florence MA

Erin Hallal, Novato CA

Albert K Hall-Faul, Bloomfield CT

Sean O Halloran, Ballygarvan, County Cork, Ireland

Debbie Hazelton, Dothan AL

Roth A Hensley, San Francisco CA

Alyssa Herold, Ghent NY

Nicholas Hilliard, San Francisco CA

Stephanie Hoelscher, Montpelier VT

Leah Hoenen, Topsham ME

Timothy A Hollman, Rockwood MI

Tim Housley, Royal Oak MI

Ann Hubbard, Lucerne CA

Jennifer Inchiostro, Columbus MI

Amanda Jacobs, Grand Junction CO

Kellie S Johannik, Littleton CO

Rebecca Johnston, Watertown MA

Emily D Jones, Kimberton PA

Meryem Kabsy, New York NY

Erin Kemp, Richmond CA

Marjorie Kieselhorst-Eckart, Trinidad CA

Eva Knowles, Portland OR

Claudia Knudson, Santa Barbara CA

Nickolai Kukhtarev, Los Angees CA

Luiza Teresa Kwiatkowska, Miami FL

Brigitte Labrentz, Santa Barbara CA

Caitlin Lam, Goleta CA

Thomas Lee, North York ON Canada

Jing Li, Portland OR

Michele Limas, Portland OR

Mary Frances Linzer, Wales WI

Deborah A Markus, Milwaukie OR

Donnie Marshall, Richton Park IL

Marta Mascaro, Goleta CA

Kerry McCarthy, Worthington OH

Verlyn McGilvray, Incline Village NV

Bryce A McGuire, Cranberry Township PA

Melissa B McIntyre, Marietta PA

Chiara Meloni, Avontuur, South Africa

Tonya S Miller-Hire, Nashville TN

Scott Mitsching, Morganville NJ

Sophia Y Montefiore, Glendale, Australia

Jessica E Moore, Freeport ME

Helen J Moorefield, Hillsborough NC

Laura Muraco, Ottsville PA

Gabriela S Muresan, Decatur GA

Lois Mae Myers, Mooresville NC

Amy Kristine Myrrh, Fair Oaks CA

Vanessa Nielsen, Sebastopol CA

Krista L Niskanen, Phoenix AZ

Lucy Nordin, Ann Arbor MI

Pam Nummela, Saint Cloud MN

Mauricio Nuñez Oporto, Miraflores, Peru

Ivone C Osborne, Aldie VA

Frederick L Otto, Louisville KY

Ann S Pasquinelly, Spring City PA

Timothy A Pierce, Sharpsburg GA

Anne-Marie Pope, Decatur GA

Diane Prusha, Great Barrington MA

Jamie M Quirk, Milwaukie OR

Kate Reese Hurd, High Falls NY

Scarlett Reyes, Marblehead MA

Margaret Riley, Fallbrook CA

Tiago Rodrigues Antao, Salem MA

Laura Rudish, Boca Raton FL

Lawrence Clark Sandlin, Dallas TX

Joseph Schissel, Mathiston MS

Joseph S Schofield, Fair Oaks CA

Martee H Seuss, Grass Valley CA

Elena Shakirova, Quincy MA

Caroline Sloss, Munith MI

William Z Smith, Petal MS

Robert Lewis Spann, College Station TX

Jesse Stewart, Toronto ON Canada

Asha Sukha, Naples NY

Monika Sutherland, Viroqua WI

Sherry L. Sutherland-Choy, Kaaawa HI

Sheri Sutton, Altadena, CA

(Maria) Barbara Tagliaferro, Brooklyn NY

Catherine Thieme, Sunnyvale CA

Georgiana B Thomas, New York NY

Mark Thompson, New York NY

Meral Topcu, Grand Rapids MI

Brendan Tracy, Longmont CO

Tracy L Trefethen, Oak Grove OR

Marcela Chantal Urrutia, Pasadena CA

Heather Van Zyl, Waratah, Australia

Helen Louise Walker, Philmont NY

Karin H Weinrich, Spencertown NY

Renannah Weinstein, Ashley Falls MA

Stella Welmers, Baltimore MD

Jocelyn Wensel, Yakima WA

David S. White, Dallas OR

Joseph Cameron Williams, Granbury TX

Rebecca Wuenschel, Rockport MA

Harya Yohannes, Addis Abeba, Ethiopia

Nurys Zepherin, Carbondale PA

Johanna Berkowitz Wilton CT joined 2001 died 11/15/2020

Elaine H Bily Bluffton SC joined 1999 died 06/29/2020

Eugene Gollogly Great Barrington MA joined 1972 died 1/07/2021

Members Who Have Died

Fern Henderson Eugene OR joined 1976 died 2/22/2020

David J. Hollweger Solomons MD joined 1980 died 07/18/2020

Fred Janney Pinckney MI joined 1991 died 11/09/2020

Edward Reaugh Smith

September 23, 1932 – August 12, 2020

Kerry Virginia Lee Spring City PA joined 1986 died 09/08/2020

Ingelore Maier Chatham NY joined 1971 died 01/01/2021

William McCormick Santa Fe NM joined 1983 died 07/22/2020

Edward Reaugh (pronounced “Ray”) Smith was an Illinoisan transplanted to Texas at mid-century. He was a husband, father, and grandfather with broad interests in life. A successful lawyer and businessman, amateur musician, and athlete, his lifelong search for the deeper meaning of the Bible—which he taught for over twenty-five years before discovering the writings of Steiner—expresses itself in his many works.

Ed died in Lubbock August 12, 2020. He was born to Frank E. and Frances R. Smith on September 23, 1932 in Flora, Illinois. He was a schoolboy athlete, musician, academic student, and Bible student, adding debate and writing in college. By his twenty-fifth birthday, he was a licensed lawyer, certified public accountant, and honorably discharged twoyear army veteran.

He became a Texan when his family moved to Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1950. Soon his father’s illness and death prompted the family to move back to Illinois, but Smith had met his then sixteen-year-old future bride (Jo Anne Myers), enrolled in the local university, and stayed in Texas. He and Jo Anne married in 1954 and had three children, all married with families.

Ed graduated from Midwestern University in 1953 and from SMU Law School in 1957. Drafted during the Korean conflict, following infantry basic at Fort Bliss he

Hilmar Moore San Antonio TX joined 1976 died 11/21/2020

Terrie Murphy Albuquerque NM joined 2014 died 01/02/2021

Elizabeth Ann Pratt Peterborough NH joined 1958 died 01/01/2021

Hartmut Schiffer Carbondale CO joined 1963 died 09/27/2020

Edward R. Smith Lubbock TX joined 1990 died 08/12/2020

Sally Voris Taneytown MD joined 2017 died 10/02/2020

served the remainder of his enlistment with the Army Audit Agency in Los Angeles. He was licensed a CPA in 1955 while in the army, and very actively practiced law from 1957 to 1984, primarily in the firm Smith, Baker, Field & Clifford, in Lubbock, Texas.

In 1963, following a spiritually inspirational neardeath experience, Ed purchased Resthaven cemetery, adding a funeral home, until all was sold in 1993. Also in 1963, at the request of his church staff, he and Jo Anne organized a newlywed Sunday School class which Ed taught regularly until 1988 at First United Methodist Church. In all he taught the Bible through three times. But during his years of law practice and business operation, after the necessities of family support were established, the diversity so characteristic of his youth again emerged. Athletically, he began distance running, culminating with the Boston Marathon in April 1979, while also taking up classical piano performance again.

In March 1982, to dedicate a new Steinway concert grand piano the Smiths were giving to the recital hall at Texas Tech University, he played Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with an orchestra of faculty and advanced students. Practicing six hours daily, he continued giving solo recitals until April 1984.

From the beginnings of his law practice Ed was involved not only in various other business and financial investments and activities but also in numerous positions of civic, community and political activity. But from the time of his discovery of Steiner, he devoted most of his time and effort to the study and writing that constituted his final work: bringing the insights from Steiner’s vast

ocean of intuitive revelations to bear upon a deeper understanding of the Bible’s essential message.

Lake City, Colorado, in the midst of the San Juan Mountain Range, was the warm weather Mecca for the Smiths from 1960 till 2007 when, as he said, the magnificent peaks and hiking trails were becoming steeper, and they gave the home they had owned for twenty years to their children. Due to the pandemic, the family will gather next summer in the mountains.

Ed Smith is survived by his wife Jo Anne and three children, sons Mark E. Smith and wife, Jill, of Wilmington, DE; Michael R. Smith and wife, Stacey, of Colleyville, and daughter Jillian M. Rauh and husband, Donald, both doctors, of Newtown, PA. Also surviving are ten grandchildren, fifteen great grandchildren, his sister Mary Anne Ayers and her husband, Ronald, of Flora, IL, and four nephews and nieces and their children.

“True Food for Mind and Heart”

Ed Smith’s books, all available and published by SteinerBooks, are a unique American contribution to Bible study and anthroposophical Christology. “More significant for Christianity than the twentieth-century Dead Sea and Nag Hammadi discoveries is the growing North American awareness of Rudolf Steiner’s works.”

With The Burning Bush (1997), Ed launched his core project, An Anthroposophical Commentary on the Bible. He combined his extensive traditional biblical knowledge with his years of concentrated study and reflection on hundreds of works by Steiner. The result is the first Bible commentary in the light of anthroposophic insight; The Burning Bush lays out a spiritual-scientific foundation.

With The Incredible Births of Jesus (1998), Ed waded into the most surprising of Steiner’s revelations about the Bible stories: the different birth stories in the Luke and Matthew gospels describe two different children, who only later become one. “No story is so well known, nor perhaps any so little understood, as the birth of Jesus. Its mystery steals into every heart as days shorten into winter. And commercialism’s thickening veneer has neither quieted the cry of every soul nor stilled its urge to penetrate through it all to an understanding of this most magnificent event in all creation.”

A second topical book, The Disciple Whom Jesus Loved: Unveiling the Author of John’s Gospel (2000), elaborates a talk at the NY Open Center in 1999. Christopher Bamford noted that this reader-friendly origin “is not to say that it lacks sophistication or bite: it has both. Indeed,

in the field of study that it addresses, it works a quiet but profound revolution.… Anyone seeking to understand something of the mystery of Christ Jesus and his ‘beloved disciple’ will find true food for mind and heart here.’”

Ed’s second core volume, David’s Question, “What Is Man?” (Psalm 8:4) (2001), “shows that there is no difference between true science and the divine intelligence sought by true religion, as undertaken by Rudolf Steiner. What the senses show us about the physical world—when keenly observed and allowed to speak for itself instead of being abstracted into theories—become images of the spiritual world: ‘As above, so below.’”

The third main volume, The Soul’s Long Journey: How the Bible Reveals Reincarnation (2003), presents remarkable insights showing that “reincarnation is deeply and powerfully revealed in the Bible’s most fundamental aspects. How and why have these insights escaped attention for so long? They are uncovered here by a confluence of conventional Bible study and the epochal spiritual discoveries of Rudolf Steiner.”

The Temple Sleep of the Rich Young Ruler: How Lazarus Became the Evangelist John (2011) addresses the question, Who wrote the Gospel of John? The author identifies himself only as “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” and “Christian tradition tells us that this disciple was the apostle John. However, during the past century, scholars have increasingly come to doubt that attribution. In 1902, Rudolf Steiner wrote that the author of the Gospel of John was in fact Lazarus. Steiner’s position stemmed from his insight that Lazarus’s encounter with death involved far more than people realized—an initiation into higher spiritual realities that uniquely qualified him to write this gospel. Ed shows that subsequent research has tended to favor Lazarus for reasons grounded in John’s Gospel itself, and that subsequent discoveries at Nag Hammadi and Mar Saba corroborate Steiner.”

Revelation: A Cosmic Perspective (2016) concluded Ed’s series on The Bible and Anthroposophy. “Understanding Revelation presents the ultimate challenge to those who wish to penetrate its deepest meaning—a spiritual mountain whose summit has remained beyond reach. In spite of its name, Revelation is the most veiled and mysterious book in the Bible. A century ago, Rudolf Steiner opened a route to that summit.... The scope of John’s vision and Steiner’s exposition covers the vast stretch of our human journey. We are each in it from beginning to end. This book is for those who would awake to it.”

Ed also wrote a memoir, Pathways: Ancestry and

Memories from Childhood (2014), telling the story of his many-faceted life.

An online reviewer of The Burning Bush wrote, “After reading this book, I discovered a richness and depth I never knew were present in the Bible, or the world.”

—Compiled by the editor from Ed Smith’s website and SteinerBooks notes on the books.

Margaret Powell Chambers

April 20, 1937-March 5, 2020

by Alice Groh, Wilton, NH

Margaret Powell was born and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. She was the second child of an Atlanta physician father and a mother who came from a South Carolina tobacco plantation family. Margaret retained her Southern charm throughout her life, despite living in ‘the North’ and overseas most of her adult life.

Margaret studied German and German literature at Tulane University in New Orleans and began a Masters Degree in German Studies at Columbia University in New York. During her first year there she met her future husband and was quickly married. She and her husband Jack Chambers settled in Sharon, CT where Margaret first discovered her love and aptitude for playing the harpsichord and also, through a neighbor, retired Waldorf teacher Pat Erikson, she encountered anthroposophy. For several years Margaret attended study groups at the home of Paul and Joan deRis Allen. In 1970, Margaret and her husband separated and she and the children moved to Forest Row, Sussex, England, where she enrolled her two children, now age 8 and 6, in the Michael Hall (Waldorf) School while she attended Emerson College to continue her studies in anthroposophy.

In 1978, she and the children moved back to America, taking up residence in Temple, NH, sharing a house with Jennifer Greene, a former student and then teacher at High Mowing School. The house, named Temple Gardens, had a specially-built music room that served both for music recitals and also for meetings of the Anthroposophical Society in the Wilton area. Eventually Jennifer moved to Blue Hill, Maine to establish the Water Research Institute and the house in Temple became part of the Lukas Community for special needs adults.

At this time Margaret became active on the Eastern Regional Council of the national Anthroposophical Society and also became responsible for holding the Class Lessons for the School for Spiritual Science for members

in southern New Hampshire. These two activities led to a life of travel; at one point Margaret was reading Class Lessons in five separate communities in New England and Long Island! Following this Margaret joined the faculty of the Center for Anthroposophy, teaching in the Foundation Studies program and participating in the summer teacher training programs. She also took up the training in Biographical and Counseling Studies, traveling back to Forest Row in England, to the Center for Social Development for her classes. This in turn led her to become a member of the Social Science Section of the School for Spiritual Science.

In her “retirement” Margaret served on the Board of Trustees of the Christian Community in Boston, and settled into giving some biography classes in her home. She took up knitting small woolen gnomes, for which she became known amongst a network of her friends.

Margaret was always available for conversations with friends on various anthroposophical themes. Her strong meditative life gave her biographical and counseling work a deeply insightful and supportive tone. Her many friends remember her in gratitude and look forward to continued collaboration with her across the Threshold.

Eugene Gollogly

October 4, 1950 – January 7, 2021

by

John Scott

Legg

(with assistance from Christopher Bamford)

This week’s letter bears the sad tidings of the sudden and unexpected loss of our dear friend and forever colleague, Gene Gollogly. For anyone who knew or ever encountered Gene, it will not be difficult to pause, look within, and behold him, livingly, in the soul space of recollection.

While it’s certainly true that each of us, as human beings, are “one-of-a kind,” a “species unto oneself,” still, there are those whose effortlessly intense one-of-a-kindness simply shines so brightly, radiates such warmth, that the sensibilities of the observer, the conversant, the beholder, can be dazzled by the energy and vigor of this radiant individuality. Such a one was Gene. The immensity of his spirit is and will remain a marvel and a joy, ever evolving. At turns dynamic, enigmatic, amusing, humble, serene, warm, wise, alive, these words are just a stumbling beginning of a description of the man.

It will be the task of others to write a fuller biography of his life, but here is a rough, tentative sketch. The fourth

born of eight, Gene began this life on October 4, 1950, in the village of Guisborough on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors, a place celebrated for the nearby ruins of the Augustinian Priory of Mary (1119), which may well have awoken a memory of monastic spirituality deep within him. His path into anthroposophy and the work of Rudolf Steiner happened at a relatively young age, not far from his childhood home, and seemed from the start to be connected with both books and community. Back in Yorkshire after completing his studies at the London School of Economics, Gene sought a place to offer service as a volunteer and chanced upon the Camphill Community of Botton Village, where he was engaged as a short-term volunteer. He was immediately interested in learning more about this unique place and whatever it was that lay behind it. (As a foreshadowing of destiny would have it, he had already at this time literally stumbled across a eurythmy performance, in Basel, while visiting his brother Jim. They went in, were much amazed and not a little perplexed, but they liked it, especially Gene.) In my recollection of Gene’s telling me this story of his initial connection to Botton, he emphasized the warmth and welcome he received there, which he connected, in part, to the fact that he had at that time recently lost his mother. He was cared for at Botton, and the people he would meet there, such as Brian Rée, played a big role in Gene’s life story as a whole. It was here he first encountered the art and practice of biodynamic agriculture, a lifelong interest, and it was at Botton where he met the writer, researcher, and editor of Rudolf Steiner’s works in English, Paul Marshall Allen and his wife Joan Allen.

Paul Marshall Allen provided the connection and the introduction to Bernard Garber of Blauvelt, New York, real estate man and publisher of various imprints and initiatives under the “Garber Communications” umbrella, including Free Deeds magazine, Spiritual Science Library, the “original” SteinerBooks, and others. Feeling himself drawn both to the United States and to publishing, Gene came over to expand his horizons and to work for “Bernie” (at $100 a week—not good even in those days). This was the beginning of Gene’s lifelong connection with and love of the business of publishing.

It was both anthroposophy and publishing, then, that brought Gene to the United States as a young man, and he remained connected and dedicated to both. Requiring at a certain point, better wages for his work, Gene left Mr. Garber (on very good terms) and entered the world of New York City publishing where he spent the next decades of his life working for various publishing houses, initially with a focus in religious publishing.

Later, while working at Continuum Publishing, he met his future business partner, Martin Rowe, with whom he co-founded Lantern Books, in 1999. Not long after the turn of the century, Gene, who was already also on the board of the Anthroposophic Press, took on the additional role of President and CEO of this non-profit corporation established in 1928 by Henry Monges, a growing business in the year 2000, but experiencing as well some pains of growth. He had, in a way, come full circle back to anthroposophical publishing. Still living full time in New York City with his family and co-managing the affairs of Lantern, Gene also energetically took hold of this company, immediately solving an urgent financial dilemma, initiating the annual Spiritual Science Research Seminars at NYU, bringing the name “SteinerBooks” to bear on the company (as a legal alias), and beginning his tireless travels on behalf of publishing, anthroposophy, and the practical work of spiritual science in the world— most notably, perhaps, for anthroposophically-extended medicine and biodynamics, but none were excluded.

He was genuinely interested in everything and everybody, right up until the very “end,” which, as Gene well knew and often spoke of, is not, in fact, the end. He retired from SteinerBooks at the end of 2018, but was still involved in an advisory capacity. He had also just become president of the council of the Anthroposophical Society branch in New York City.

Most recently, and perhaps presciently, Gene had taken an interest in the work of “Sacred Undertaking,” the art and practical skill of caring for the dead holistically and at home, informed by the knowledge of this

transition as deepened and clarified by spiritual science. He assisted in a home funeral and carried the coffin of an acquaintance the day before he himself died. He was the proud father of four grown children.

I’m sure I speak for all of us at SteinerBooks, staff and board, past and present, when I say I will be forever grateful for the time I was privileged to spend with Gene. Our conversations, his advice, freely given, his deep connections to anthroposophy and the work of Rudolf Steiner, and his tireless work and advocacy for a more widespread knowledge and acceptance of Steiner’s work as crucial for the future of humanity remain imbued with the strength and truth of his conviction.

Gene, as is well known, was a world traveler with an unrivaled endurance for the road, the plane, the train, the car. He was never one to linger. His, to us, hasty and decisive exit from this mortal coil was, in its way, thoroughly characteristic. The mantras of encouragement he often bestowed on me and others of us at SteinerBooks, were both succinct and profound. Here are two of my favorites: “Don’t get stuck!” (i.e. keep moving forward with your work, don’t let mishaps, missteps, or mistakes deter you from forward progress in your life and in your work!) “You never know the future!” (i.e. destiny events have a way of helping us see more clearly, but these can be drastically unexpected: accept whatever life brings and keep learning from it!)

What a man. God bless him. God bless us all.

Into cosmic distances I will carry

My feeling heart, so that it grows warm

In the fire of the holy forces’ working;

Into cosmic thoughts I will weave

My own thinking, so that it grows clear

In the light of eternal life-becoming;

Into depths of soul I will sink

Devoted contemplation, so that it grows strong

For the true goals of human activity.

In the peace of God I strive thus

Amidst life’s battles and cares

To prepare myself for the higher Self;

Aspiring to work in joy-filled peace, Sensing cosmic being in my own being, I seek to fulfill my human duty;

May I live then in anticipation,

Oriented toward my soul’s star

Which gives me my place in spirit realms.

—Rudolf Steiner,

Our Dead

David James Hollweger

October 20, 1937 - July 18, 2020

by Eileen King & ASGW Branch

David James Hollweger crossed the threshold peacefully on the evening of July 18, 2020 while under the compassionate hospice care of the nurses and doctors at Georgetown University Hospital, Washington DC. He was 82 years of age and had advanced Parkinson’s Disease. Dave was born on October 20, 1937 in Oceanside, CA to Frederick Karl Hollweger and Elizabeth (McCaslin) Hollweger. He graduated from UCLA in 1961. For 38 years he worked as a Propulsion Design Engineer for McDonnell Douglas, and later Boeing in St. Louis, MO. His final 3 year-project as Propulsion Chief on the F/18 Super Hornet Strike Fighter brought them to Calvert County, MD, where he retired in January 1999. He is survived by his wife Brenda, his sister Ruth Eastham & family in San Clemente, CA, and his brother Henry Hollweger in Olympia, WA.

Many of us have studied anthroposophy with Dave and Brenda who often joined us in gatherings hosted by the Anthroposophical Society – Greater Washington DC Branch (ASGWB) in years past. Dave also studied for ten years, Brenda for three, with Portia Imle’s study group, and with Diane Carlson in study group meetings at her home.

After retirement, Dave and Brenda moved to the Asbury Retirement Community in Solomons, MD, quite a drive to and from our ASGWB events. When they were able to attend, their awake participation and keen insights were much appreciated. Throughout their marriage, Brenda warmly supported Dave in his love for anthroposophy.

Dave’s mother belonged to the Rosicrucian Society which surely made an impression upon him. He began looking for something deeper in his mid to late 30’s. Dave and Brenda met by chance when they were both in their 40’s in a study group with Ann Westerman.

Dave and Brenda often spent summers in Maine, camping in Vermont, or at the Rudolf Steiner Institute where they both loved the art classes, learning about Rembrandt, and performing skits with the other students. They also went to courses offered by Robert Sardello in North Carolina, joined the Sacred Service Study, and were deeply moved when reading the tragic history of Kaspar Hauser.

Dave was well-known and liked as a highly intelligent man who had a calm demeanor that was soothing to everyone in his presence. Never combative or confrontational, Dave would say, “That’s not my favorite person” in the spirit of “avoid the temptation to become that which you abhor.”

Life Lesson: One day, Dave’s boss, an engineer team leader, spoke to Dave about how arrogance could come across as cold superiority. His boss saw himself in Dave and felt strongly that he had to encourage this intelligent young engineer not to lord it over the other two young employees, but rather support their skills so their talents and attributes could shine, instead of finding things to criticize and condemn. Dave never forgot this conversation. In his 60’s he became a mentor for younger engineers; he knew how to study a problem from many angles before making a decision or commitment and in time could think through highly complex problems.

Many years ago, Dave attended a conference to hear Dr. Ernst Katz who invited Dave to sit at his table for lunch. Dr. Katz’s warmth and kindness touched Dave who often spoke about this encounter.

Dave had expansive interests and loved U.S. and British history, engaging in deep conversations. He was an avid reader of biographies, especially of Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Rockefeller, and Rudolf Steiner, for whom he had the greatest respect. His interests included Steiner books addressing karma and the St. John’s Gospel, every book that Peter Selg has written, Sergei O. Prokofieff’s Michael Mystery, the art, sculpture and burning of the First Goetheanum, and Arthur Zajonc’s book Meditation as Contemplative Inquiry.

Though Dave had Parkinson’s disease, he rode his tricycle with enthusiam, bringing delight to others looking out of their windows as he flew by. The Asbury Community friends shared his happiness about his ability to move freely and expressed their joy, empathy and deep relationship with Dave.

When Dave and Brenda’s friends at Asbury learned of his passing, there was an outpouring of love and support from those who knew him. They wrote Brenda about how he touched their hearts, how in a meeting or book club run by their pastor, studying C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, and other leading spiritual thinkers, he would share from a very deep place. Dave was a gift to all—to the study, the book, to each person in the group.

Dave loved poetry and would point out those elements that he thought made a good poem. Although he had a finely-tuned sense for poetry, he never composed

poems, rather he carried many favorites deeply in his heart, such as Walt Whitman’s poem “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d.”

Brenda often recalls this poem by Emily Dickenson which Dave loved, feels his hand in hers and hear his voice saying “Don’t fret .... we have a path to tread, we have the choice to uplift, remind each other and be with each other. Don’t give up hope!”

“Hope” is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soulAnd sings the tune without the wordsAnd never stops - at allAnd sweetest - in the Gale - is heardAnd sore must be the stormThat could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm I’ve heard it in the chillest landAnd on the strangest SeaYet - never - in Extremity, It asked a crumb - of me.

—Emily Dickenson

plus... The Vigil of the Heart • The Soul’s Journey

Conscious Living, Conscious Dying and the Journey Beyond

Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul Dates

from Easter 2021 to Easter 2022

April 4, 2021: #1

Easter Mood

April 11: #2

April 18: #3

April 25: #4

May 2: #5 ~ Light from Spirit Depths

May 9: #6

Sept. 26: #26

Michaelmas Mood

Oct. 3: #27

Oct. 10: #28

Oct. 17: #29

Oct. 24: #30

Light from Spirit Depths ~ Oct. 31: #31

May 16: #7 ~ Luciferic Threat

May 23: #8 ~ Whitsun

May 30: #9

June 6: #10

June 13: #11

Nov. 7: #32

Ahrimanic Deception ~ Nov. 14: #33

Nov. 21: #34

Advent ~ Nov. 28: #35

Dec. 5: #36

June 20: #12 ~ St. John’s Mood

June 27: #13

July 4: #14

July 11: #15

July 18: #16

July 25: #17

Aug. 1: #18

Aug. 8: #19

Dec. 12: #37

Christmas Mood ~ Dec. 19: #38

Dec. 26: verses #38/39

Jan. 2, 2022: #39

Jan. 9: #40

Jan. 16: #41

Jan. 23: #42

Jan. 30: #43

Aug. 15: #20 ~ Luciferic Temptation

Aug. 22: #21

Aug. 29: #22 ~ Light from Cosmic Widths

Sept. 5: #23

Sept. 12: #24

Sept. 19: #25

Feb. 6: #44

Feb. 13: verses #44/45

Feb. 20: #45

Ahrimanic Threat ~ Lent ~ Feb. 27: #46

Mar. 6: #47

Light from Cosmic Heights ~ Mar. 13: #48

Mar. 20: #49

Mar. 27: #50

Apr. 3: #51

Apr. 10: #52

Easter Mood ~ April 17, 2022: #1

Rudolf Steiner first published the 52 mantric verses we know as the “Calendar of the Soul” in 1912, and again in 1918. #1 starts on Easter Sunday. Since the observance of Easter shifts astronomically every year, the dates of the verses must also be adjusted. The dates listed here for 2021-2022 are based on the practice of meditating a new verse each week, from Sunday through Saturday. This formula was also followed in the 1912 edition. In keeping with Rudolf Steiner’s instruction, we open the new meditative year with the first verse on Easter Sunday (April 4, 2021) and continue in harmony with the seven day astral rhythm of the soul to the next Easter (April 17, 2022).

Note:

The rule for setting the cosmic date of Easter creates the opportunity to re-chart the yearly course through the Soul Calendar. Rudolf Steiner composed 52 verses, but there are 54 weeks between Easter 2021 and Easter 2022. The guiding principle here is to keep the festival verses in sync with the actual dates of Easter, Whitsun, St. John’s, Michaelmas and Christmas, including the observance of Advent and Lent. The proposed adjustment occurs just after Christmas, 2021 and again just before Lent, 2022.

The Calendar of the Soul incorporates the metamorphosis of the archetypal plant, the changing seasons, the alternating moods of one’s inner life and the influences of Lucifer and Ahriman. The verses are also studied in relation to the planets and zodiac. It is especially fruitful to recognize the polarities as well, starting with the complete shift from verse 52 to verse 1, and progressing on with 51 and 2, 50 and 3, etc. The result is that we come to treasure the Calendar as a dynamic pathway to self-knowledge and spiritual awakening.

Herbert O. Hagens , Princeton, NJ, USA hohagens@aol.com

Martina Angela Müller Installation “Astar, Odem, Wings” (2020)