being human summer-fall 2022

personal & cultural renewal in the 21st century

soul & life

summer-fall issue 2022

being human

the dragon of autumn meeting in the garden “biology worthy of life” working out: soul gym

listening into the future gallery: Johannes Gaertner teaching in an age of paralysis consecrating humanity

sophia rising soul size sacred creation introducing steiner

S

O U R T E A M :

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 . 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

E s t a t e P l a n n i n g

P h i l a n t h r o p i c P l a n n i n g

O U R

E R V I C E S I N C L U D E :

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 !

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 ™

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 .

Healing in a World of Need KAIROS INSTITUTE

at the Center for Anthroposophy in Collaboration with the Transdisciplinary Studies in Heal ing Education at Antioch University New England

Online Kairos Course, Fall 2022

Kairos Institute, a member of IArte, is dedicated to offer a professional training in Art Therapies and in Speech and Drama with core courses as developed by the International Standards in Artistic Therapies: Painting, Clay, Drawing, and Animal Therapies; Therapeutic Speech will be added later We are working towards full recognition and pathways to a diploma from the Medical Section, Goetheanum. While benefiting from stellar international faculty, we strive to create a training that springs from the needs perceived in America.

Kairos students are encouraged to take 3 semesters per year towards the required 1500 synchronous hours. Former training with relevant content or training in TSHE will be translated into contact hours. Please register for entire season or individual courses.

Module 2 (Fall 2022): Healing Foundations

(Module 1 can be taken at a different time)

Online: September 14 – December 2, 2022 (Wednesday evenings, 7-8:30 pm ET; some Saturdays, times TBA)

Information Session, September 14: Overview of Kairos 2022-2023 with Karine Munk Finser (Kairos Director), Debbie Spitulnik (Core Faculty, Speech and Drama), and Lisl Hofer (Kairos Manager)

September 21, 28, October 6: Trauma in America with Orland Bishop

October 12, 19: Healing Stories for Social Emotional Challenges with Gleice da Silva

October 29 (4 hours), 1-3 pm ET and 4-6 pm ET:

Introduction to Painting Therapy: Diagnostic Foundations 1 with Karine Munk Finser

November 2, 9, 16: Working with Karma, Part 1: From the Past, in the Present, and for the Future with Torin Finser

November 12, 19: Sounds and Rhythms: Healing Aspects with Geoff Norris

December 3, 10 (8 hours), 1-5 pm ET: Meditative Images of the Autism Spectrum: Hindrances and Opportunities, Part 1, with Lakshmi Prasanna, MD

Module 3 (Spring 2023): Artistic Therapies

Spring Residency: April 21-26, 2023, in Keene, NH

Addressing Restlessness and Soul Hardening with Sylvia Borau, a clay therapist from Parzival Schule (Bernd Ruf's school), Karlsruhe, Germany

Early Childhood with Therapeutic Training: Exploring the Work of Children's Drawings with Laurie Clark

Painting Therapy, Part 1: An Introduction to Healing through Color with Karine Munk Finser

Trauma and Anxiety: Healing Movement and Speech with Maria ver Eecke and Debbie Spitulnik: TUITION: $950 for each semester | Total for Year One: $2,850 | Individual courses $225-$350 per unit

If interested in earning an accredited M.Ed. or Certificate in Healing Education through Antioch University New England, or wishing to take further training in artistic therapies, send your inquiries to Karine Munk Finser, Director of the Transdisciplinary Studies in Healing Education Program at kfinser@antioch.edu

For more information and to register, visit centerforanthroposophy.org/programs/kairos-institute

WALDORF TEACHER EDUCATION

FULL-TIME PROGRAMS FOR GRADES & EC

Now that RSCC is recognized as a Private Career College by the Province of Ontario, we can accept students into our full-time one-year Waldorf Teacher Education and Waldorf Early Childhood Teacher Education programs who are changing careers and have not taught before.

RSCC offers one of the few full-time programs in North America for grades and for early childhood.

PART-TIME PROGRAMS FOR TEACHERS

RSCC also offers a part-time Professional Development for Waldorf Teachers program for currently practising grade school teachers.

On the early childhood side, both the two-year, parttime Birth-to-Seven Professional Development for Waldorf Early Childhood Teachers program and the one-year part-time Birth-to-Three program start new cohorts in June of 2022.

HEALING EDUCATION AND

REMEDIAL TRAINING

RSCC offers a part-time H.E.A.R.T program which is fully online and can be taken remotely from anywhere with an internet connection. This program is intended for those who have already completed Waldorf teacher education. Details on rscc.ca

Part-Time EURYTHMY TRAINING

ALL IN CANADA, STARTS NOV. 2022

This new part-time eurythmy training is a collaboration between Auriel Eurythmy and RSCC. The first four sessions will be Nov 8-14 2022, Jan 26-Feb 3 2023, April 6-20 2023, June 5-16 2023. For full details see: rscc.ca/eurythmy-training/

FOUNDATION STUDIES IN ANTHROPOSOPHY DISTANCE

START ANYTIME, FROM ANYWHERE

Learn at your own pace. The program consists of 32 one-on-one mentoring sessions over phone or Zoom with study in between. In-person Foundation Studies Encounter program is offered at RSCC Thornhill.

Bathurst St. #4, Thornhill, ON L4J 8C7

HUMAN

Understanding Waldorf Education’

SEPTEMBER – APRIL | ONLINE

Designed for schools with teachers not yet Waldorf trained who need an introduction to Waldorf principles. Monthly Philosophy Discussions with Bonnie River Grade Level Mentoring w/ experienced instructors Subject Teacher Mentoring (foreign language; music; handwork; games)

Art Lessons: Drawing and Watercolor Painting Movement lessons

On-site mentoring for teachers in the program for schools with 5 or more teachers in the program (2 times per year)

Unite your Faculty as they gain foundational understandings of Waldorf principles. One, Two and Three Year Options available. Clock hours are accredited for CEUs when students attend the online classes.

by Accrediting Council for Continuing Education & Training

LEARN MORE: gradalis.edu 720-464-4557 | donna@gradalis.edu

The Calendar Of The Soul New Book Available; With Eurythmy forms

This is the first time that the verses of the Calendar have been published together with the eurythmy forms that R. Steiner indicated for each weekly verse. As originally given by him these forms require multiple eurythmists. However, R. Steiner indicated as well, that these eurythmy forms will be very stimulating before branch work (or perhaps meditative life) and then they can be performed by a solo person. The introduction to the book gives new insights to the esoteric background of the Calendar. Also a very nice additional preface by Virginia Sease. For even better understanding also see the Calendar of the Soul webinar at the Kolisko Institute. Both the book and the webinar can be purchased via the Institute website.

koliskoinstitute.org

All profits go to the research work of the Kolisko Institute.

Where would we all be without the Rudolf Steiner Library that holds and cares for the books that hold the ideals, ideas, thoughts, and words of Rudolf Steiner? The Rudolf Steiner Library is now open fully after a year of quietly waiting for members to be able “to just touch the books,” as one participant plaintively registered during this last year! Open and busy again—note our all-new logo above!

Interlibrary loans, curbside pick-ups and deliveries, and sorting through the abundant gifts of books, prints, and portfolios we have collected as bequests and personal library downsizings have made the RSLibrary as busy as it ever has been. Our members have been caring and understanding. Consider

joining them as a RSLibrary member. Find the rich considerations of Rudolf Steiner and many other authors here on broad topics of Anthroposophy, spirituality, relationships, meditation, and life on earth and under the stars.

As work continues to develop a more formal fundraising effort (sorting mailing lists and print schedules), contributions can be made via PayPal and the Rudolf Steiner Library homepage: rudolfsteinerlibrary.org

Pencil sketch, from the RSLibrary collection

12 from the editors

14 Book Notes:

Waldorf Book of Blessings, Warren Lee Cohen

The Experience of Thinking, John B. Thomson Looking for the Human Being, Anne Weise

Parzival: A Journey of Initiations, Séamus Maynard Posthumanism, Mieke Mosmuller

The Great Reset and the Health Dictatorship, Harrie Salman The House You Were Born In, Tanya Standish McIntyre

The Coronavirus Pandemic Vol. II, Judith von Halle Steiner, Dunlop and Keynes, Christopher Houghton Budd Becoming Fully Human (CW82), Rudolf Steiner An Enchanted Place, Jonathan Stedall 19 Listening to the Future, by John Bloom 20 Teaching in an Age of Paralysis, by Douglas Gerwin 22 Working Out in the Soul Gym, by Dennis Klocek 23 Sacred Creation, review by Matt Cain 24 Meeting in the Garden, by Angela Foster & Jordan Walker 26 Biodynamic Demeter Alliance 27 Sophia Rising, by Maria ver Eecke 28 Gallery: Johannes A. Gaertner 35 And Yet Not Full, by Jordan Walker 35 Art Section / Social Science Section News 36 “The Dragon of Autumn,” by A. Roz Mar 38 Introducing Steiner, by Robert McDermott 42 What is “Biology Worthy of Life”? by Steve Talbott 43 Soul Size, review by Fred Dennehy 45 Consecrating Humanity 46 news

being human

On the Cover:

for

members

&

friends 46 Thank You, Katherine! 47 Welcome, Angela! by Tess Parker 47 Hospitality to New Generations, by Nathaniel Williams 48 Love > Fear, by Deb Abrahams-Dematte 49 Welcoming New Members 50 Philip Incao, by Rev. James Hindes 52 Diane Elizabeth Mamroe 54 David Gershan, by Alicia Landman-Reiner and by John Bloom 57 Mary Ellen Willby, by Jonathan Alexander 58 Marianne Schneider 59 Gertrude Reif Hughes 59 Saluting Members Who Have Died 60 Elizabeth Trocki 61 Kent Metcalfe

“In One Voice Rising” by Anca Hariton (www.Sacristima.com) “is the third in a series of three flags. It is shimmering and supposed to be accompanied by music. In it the stars become winged and the people rise to reach them, like a song that uplifts us, like the smoke of a candle, like birds becoming angels and angels turning to stars. While not published yet, it is waiting and wanted to be seen in a tryptic formation with the other two.” Anca Hariton is a multidisciplinary American artist, writer, teacher and a former architect from Eastern Europe. Her children’s picture books, posters, greeting cards and poems have been published in the U.S. and abroad. Together with her educational plays, songs/ lyrics they have earned her repeated honors, awards and grants.

The Anthroposophical

John Bloom, General Secretary & President Helen-Ann Ireland, Chair (at large)

Nathaniel Williams, Secretary (at large) Hazel Archer Ginsberg (Central Region) Gino Ver Eecke (Eastern Region) Christine Burke (Western Region) Margaret Runyon (at large)

LEADERSHIP TEAM

Deb Abrahams-Dematte, Director of Development

Katherine Thivierge, Director of Operations Tess Parker, 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, by 12/10/2022.

being human is sent free to ASA members (visit anthroposophy.org/join) and shared free at many branches and initiatives. To request a sample copy, write or email editor@anthroposophy.org

©2022 The Anthroposophical Society in America. Responsibility for the content of articles is the authors’.

from the editors

Dear Friends,

A year ago we celebrated a decade of being human, and this issue will now be my last as editor. I’m stepping back as director of communications as the General Council works on a reorganization. It has been a pleasure and an honor to serve in this role. (Continue to use editor@anthroposophy.org for ASA communications matters, but to reach me personally, email jhbeck23@gmail.com.)

In 2015 we cut back from four to two issues per year, and the backlog of articles and remembrances we could not print has grown. A number of these will be sent out now as a one-time PDF supplemental issue, electronic only. It will be linked from a blog post at anthroposophy.org. This “extra issue” includes much worthy material, and I hope you will take a look.

Great thanks are due to Fred Dennehy, who brought a wonderful acuteness and style over from the Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter of 2009 into this publication. His review inside of James Dyson’s book Soul-Size is another example of how to point out a “worthy read” and at the same time give a real taste of that book. Dr. Dyson has been doing important work with the Association for Anthroposophic Psychology, but has rarely been seen in print.

Our cover image by Anca Hariton was painted after 9/11; there is a note about it on the Contents page. The gallery offers a collection of drawings by the late Prof. Johannes Gaertner, made available by his daughter Susanna, both ASA members. This group reveals a fine hand, a discerning and receptive eye, flair, wit, creativity, and compassion. It’s a fitting companion to the professor’s book on the virtues.

This issue may have something of a theme—“soul and life” ? Soul is certainly manifested in Maria Ver Eecke’s report of the Sophia Rising! conference, in Angela Foster and Jordan Walker’s account of the Applied Anthroposophy Course, in Dennis Klocek’s “soul gym” exercises, in A. Roz Mar’s story of the dragon (and archangels) of autumn, in the book Soul Size reviewed by Fred Dennehy, and in the work of the Christian Community, now one hundred years old, of “consecrating humanity” to its ongoing cosmic tasks.

Life is central to the new Biodynamic Demeter Alliance, and to the work of high school teachers in overcoming student paralysis in this anxious time, and to Steve Talbott’s profound calling-to-account of the profession of biology. And as in every issue we offer lives and life-works. In this issue the most widely known may be Chris Bamford, Gertrude Hughes, David Gershan, and Philip Incao, but also vibrant are the stories of individuals whose recognition was more localized: teachers, artists, community builders. All of them were just being human, but from anthroposophy each had gained resources and confidence—the conviction that becoming fully human matters, and that we will all be back to keep working on it.

Rudolf Steiner’s last great push forward for this Anthroposophical Society came in 1923. “Humanity first” might be written on the banner for our cause as we reach the centenary. Not because humans are more important than our sisterbrother animals, or the environment and life of Earth herself, but because we see this “humanity” as an initiative of the cosmos, full of meaning and purpose. When we get humanness right, there will be a liberation of all creatures. Meanwhile, we keep working at it, together.

John Beck

You would be in the middle of a conversation with Chris Bamford about anthroposophy and the spirit, and he would say something, gently, that gutted the easy categories of understanding you were auditioning for him. You’d be stopped short, and suddenly old words would point to previously undreamt of meanings. Then he’d break out into a light, welcoming laugh, and his eyes would tell you, “Yes! It’s just that astonishing. But it’s much, much more!”

Chris was as good a scholar, thinker and writer as anthroposophy has had since the generation of those who knew Rudolf Steiner personally. But he was much, much more. It is one thing to be able to say that love recognizes the unconditional significance of an other, and something very different to live it. Chris lived it, translating the uncompromising acuity of the spirit into the green warmth of the soul.

For years, friends and colleagues had urged Chris to put together a collection of his remarkable introductions to The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner and other compilations of Steiner’s writings. Encountering Rudolf Steiner, Introductions to Essential Works, is the result, the book that, in Robert McDermott’s words, “was begging to be written.” Robert’s review here, excerpted from his comprehensive introduction to the volume, documents how Chris’s art of the introduction enables a reader to form into his or her understanding what Rudolf Steiner is giving, “within and beyond his words.” In something of the same way, the rich offerings of this volume may provide the reader with the means to catch onto Chris Bamford himself in flight, and travel for a time with him in living understanding.

Also in this issue is my own review of Soul-Size: The Eternal Psychosomatic Dilemma , a compilation of scholarly writings and workshop talks by Dr. James Dyson, together with interviews of him, that bring to light the thinking and doing of one of today’s most brilliant practicing anthroposophists.

Fred Dennehy

The ASA invites you to join the Michael 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 Association of Waldorf Schools of North America

Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training Biodynamic Association

Camphill School – Beaver Run Carah Medical Arts

Cedarwood Waldorf School Council of Anthroposophical Organizations GRADALIS Waldorf Consulting & Services

Great Lakes Branch House of Peace Rudolf Steiner Fellowship Foundation

NOTICE OF ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

The General Council hereby gives notice that the annual general meeting of members of The Anthroposophical Society in America, Inc., will be held Friday, October 7, 2022 via Zoom for 90 minutes from 7pm Eastern, 6pm Central, 5pm Mountain, and 4pm Pacific time.

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

Saint George Slays the Dragon, by Laura James

LegacyCircle

Erika V. Asten*

Betty Baldwin

J. Leonard Benson*

Susannah Berlin*

Hiram Anthony Bingham* Mrs. Hiram A. Bingham

Virginia Blutau* Iana Questara Boyce*

Marion Bruce*

Robert Cornett

Helen Ann Dinklage*

Irmgard Dodegge* Raymond Elliot*

Lotte K. Emde*

Hazel Ferguson*

Marie S. Fetzer*

Linda C. Folsom*

Gerda Gaertner*

Susanna Gaertner

Ray German Ruth Geiger Harriet S. Gilliam* Chuck Ginsberg

Hazel Archer-Ginsberg Agnes B. Granberg* Alice Groh Bruce L. Henry* Ruth Heuscher*

Richard Hicks* Christine Huston Ernst Katz* Cecilia Leigh

Anna Lord*

Seymour Lubin*

William H. Manning

Gregg Martens*

Barbara Martin

Beverly Martin

Helvi McClelland

Robert & Ellen McDermott

Robert S. Miller*

Ralph Neuman*

Martin Novom Carolyn Oates Mary Lee Plumb-Mentjes

Norman Pritchard*

Paul Riesen* Mary Rubach* Margaret Runyon

Ray Schlieben*

Lillian C. Scott*

Fairchild Smith*

Patti Smith*

Doris E. Stitzer*

Gertrude O. Teutsch* Katherine Thivierge

Jeannette Van Wiermeersch*

Catherina Vanden Broek* Randall Wadsworth

Pamela Whitman

Thomas Wilkinson Anonymous (22)

* indicates past legacy gift

Legacy giving is an excellent way to support the work of the Society far beyond a person’s current giving capacity.

There are a variety of ways to make a legacy or planned gift. If you would like to learn more please contact Deb Abrahams-Dematte at 603-801-6484 or deb@anthroposophy.org

www.anthroposophy.org/legacy

Here are some of the many books we encounter. Notes are from the publishers unless specified otherwise. — Editor

Waldorf Book of Blessings from Around the World, by Warren Lee Cohen, 126 pp. (Waldorf Publications, 2022)

Here is a robust, beautiful collection of verses, songs, and prayers in various languages with sentiments of recognition and gratitude for the food we eat! Keep it on the table and travel worldwide to experience all the lovely, humble ways that families pause before “digging in’’ to remember the work and the gift that our nourishment brings—countless gestures of “grace” before a meal! It is a blessing to remember how lucky we are to have the food we eat and to remember those who grow it for us and the earth itself for providing it for us. This little treasure promises to become a favorite for the whole family. — Black and white illustrations by Lilliana and Martha Cohen; cover design by Ella Lapointe.

The Experience of Thinking: Plato to Buber, by John B. Thomson, 238 pp., (Alkion Press, 2022)

“This is a book on European philosophers from Plato to Martin Buber about their way of understanding the world and what it is to be human. The key to this is their experience of thinking. In presenting the ideas of the philosophers I have made the assumption that in successive epochs there is a change in human consciousness and this will mark the way philosophers conceptualize their world and find its meaning. Rudolf Steiner has given rich insights into this change which is an evolutionary one. This must not be confused with the notion of human progress or with a progression of ideas. The biological evolution in which humanity has its place is generally accepted. The evolution of consciousness is in need of recognition and gives insight into our understanding of Greek and Mediaeval Philosophy. It also is a feature of other elements of cultural life. This book offers for the general reader an introduction to the thoughts and perceptions of some remarkable thinkers. In the modern period there is a tendency for philosophy to divide into two streams, one emphasizing observation of the world, the other the experience of the self.” — Education, philosophy and art have been the passions of John Thom-

L eaving a L egacy of W i LL The Anthroposophical Society in America

THAN K YO U! to these members, who support the Society’s future through a bequest or planned gift

photo by Javier Allegue Barros

son’s long life (age 96-97). After studying humanities and law he turned to teaching and eventually found his vocation in Steiner education. After 25 years teaching children, he moved to Emerson College, Sussex, to train teachers. This required research on the philosophical basis of Waldorf education. He gave public lectures on the tasks of education and philosophy, which involved travels in the USA and Asia. On retiring he added painting and poetry to his activities.

Looking for the Human Being - Alfred Bergel Sketches of a Forgotten Life, by Anne Weise, Temple Lodge (2021), 308 pp.

In a remarkable deed of original scholarly research and detailed detective work, Anne Weise recreates sketches of a lost life—of one of the millions of forgotten souls whose lives came to a violent end in the Holocaust. Her focus is Alfred Bergel (1902–1944), an artist and teacher from Vienna who was a close associate of Karl König—the founder of the Camphill Movement for people with special needs—who wrote of Bergel in his youthful diaries as his best friend ‘Fredi’.

After the annexation of Austria, Alfred Bergel found himself unable to escape the horror of the National Socialist regime. Subsequently, in 1942 he was deported to the Theresienstadt camp. Imprisoned there, he produced numerous artistic works of the inmates of the ghetto and taught drawing, art history and art appreciation—sometimes in collaboration with the Bauhaus artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Dur-

Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 where, tragically, he was murdered. His name and his work are largely forgotten today, even amongst Holocaust researchers, but Weise succeeds in honouring the life of the Jewish artist by lovingly piecing together his biography, based on numerous personal testimonies by friends and contemporaries and supplemented with documents and many dozens of photos and color reproductions of Bergel’s artistic works. This invaluable recreation of a life provides insight not only into the desperate plight of a single individual, but also illustrates the human will and determination to survive in the context of one of the darkest periods of recent history.

After working in Camphill institutions in the US, Anne Weise has been jointly responsible since 2011 for the Karl König Archive in Aberdeen, Scotland. She also works as an editor at the Rudolf Steiner Archive in Dornach, Switzerland.

Parzival: A Journey of Initiations, by Séamus Maynard, Inner Work Books (2021). Foreword – Lisa Romero, illustrations – Ella Manor Lapointe. www.developingtheself.org/usa-bookstore

This new verse adaptation of the Parzival legend by Séamus Maynard was written with the intention of supporting all those wishing to understand the Grail mysteries more deeply. It is written in verse, so it can be worked with artistically as well. Class plays, group recitation, and individual artistic explorations are also possible ways of utilizing this work.

As a figure, Parzival symbolizes the spiritual initiation of the individual human being in our age of consciousness, rife with the complexities and subtleties of a life fully lived. The Holy Grail, that singular aim that leads Parzival into the world, can be seen as a symbol of the transformed and spiritualized human heart. Iambic pentameter was chosen for this rendering of the story—the poetic meter that most closely reflects the human heartbeat. The esoteric and spiritual underpinnings of this epic journey can support greater insight

and understanding of the path of initiation. Contact us at contact@developingtheself.org

Posthumanism—About the future of mankind, a novel by Mieke Mosmuller; 238pg.; (Occident, 2022)

‘These transhumanists are not prepared to delve into the meaning and significance of the physical body itself. They simply want to get rid of it, having distilled from it what is most important to them: an algorithm based on computer science, which also contains certain creativity, as we know it in gaming. You have to be content with that creativity, further developed, of course. You then have to be happy with the unprecedented computing capacity as a basis for intelligence. Those future machine people, who will be something completely different from robots, will then take the place of biological humans.” — “When you meditatively absorb these insights, you find the opposite image and you more or less spontaneously arrive at the step in the development of humanity which is the ‘other half ’ of this and which still lies in a distant future.”

Imagine humanity in a distant future. How would human society look like? How would human beings think? And above all, what would the human form be? In the form of lectures and conversations, this book shows this “other half” of trans- and posthumanism. It is a spiritual vision of the future, not science fiction.

The Great Reset and the Health Dictatorship, by Harrie Salman; (Threefold Publishing 2022)

This new and compelling book by Harrie Salman is a manifesto in which he analyzes the ills of our times, calls out those persons and institutions he sees as responsible for those ills, and issues a call to action. He addresses that call to action to all of us who believe that individuals and groups working together can renew and liberate our society. He calls on us to become fully human and enrich our social lives—impoverished by the lockdowns of what he calls “the health dictatorship”—from the bottom up, with inspiration from the Divine. It is a noble call, and Harrie is quite aware that the tasks he outlines will not be easily accomplished.

Today, however, to take a stand for humanity is nothing less than a radical act of rebellion, of defiance, against a veritable blitzkrieg of dehumanizing technologies that are assault-

ing all human beings—in body, soul, mind and, most of all, spirit. From synthetic biology to geoengineering to universal covert and overt surveillance of everyone and everything, we human beings, all around the globe, are moving, like it or not, into a very Brave New World.

Harrie Salman presents a way out of a tragically polarized situation, in which people find themselves on one side or another believing that those on the other side have been “brainwashed.” He coolly and succinctly identifies the pieces of the puzzle and puts them together in a coherent pattern that anyone, of any political persuasion, can recognize.” –From the Preface by Ed Conroy

The House You Were Born In, by Tanya Standish McIntyre; 144 pg.; (McGill-Queen’s University Press www.mqup.ca , 2022)

A stunning debut by a promising new poetic voice, haunting and uplifting in equal measure. a keeper of things forgotten, a vase for pictures made by words, a riverbed for the stories you tell, an earthen silhouette of a child

Tanya Standish McIntyre

The House You Were Born In

With vivid imagery and endless compassion for her sub jects, Tanya Standish McIntyre’s words breathe life. Her richly lyrical phrases capture both the fear and the beauty of growing up in a rural working-class community, anchored by the magical bond between a young girl and her grandfather.

Way’s Mills, Quebec, is the setting for these poems, although as with Mark Twain’s Mississippi, physical place becomes a place in the heart in this elegy for lost ancestral farms.

(Author’s note: My recent path in becoming certified in Biography & Social Art influenced this book’s creation substantially...)

The Coronavirus Pandemic Vol. II, by Judith von Halle; translated by Frank Thomas Smith; 90 pg., (anthroposophicalpublications.org 2022)

From the foreword: “In this book, the main focus is not on the distressing social developments that have arisen as consequence of the coronavirus pandemic–and for good reason: Although there are already (thankfully) many quality descriptions and articles about this complex of problems and questions, at the same time on the other hand a dangerous knowledge-vacuum has arisen. Therefore in this book I will refrain from elaborating on the problems already made widely visible in favor of this knowledge-vacuum, which will be outlined as an addition to what has already been described in Vol. I.

“Gaining higher knowledge is possible for everyone. But it doesn’t just fall into your lap. One must be prepared to do something for it, and also to leave something. In order to avoid

Steiner’s Economics Course 100 years on... The Economics Conference of the Goetheanum held a series of worldwide zoom meetings each of the 14 days of the original course, 24 July through 6 August... The marathon event reviewed a wide range of topics from money-as-bookkeeping to financing initiative, from the demise of gold to the financial literacy of women in Brazilian favellas, and from questions of labour to digital finance.

Alongside, a new book was published, Steiner, Dunlop & Keynes – Brothers in World Economy, (at aebookstore.com). Written by Christopher Houghton Budd, it brings together various lectures and papers that focus on these three key players in economics in the periods 1919 to 1945. It asks, in effect, what might have happened had all three met and collaborated and previews further in-depth research planned for 2023, the centenary of Maynard Keynes’s book A Tract on Monetary Reform, written when Rudolf Steiner was giving his 1922 lectures. The research will consider the possibility that, especially now, Steiner’s ideas can get traction via Keynes’s ‘unspoken mission’, while the deeper purposes and aims, or at least potential, of Keynes’s work can be illumined by the ideas of Rudolf Steiner qua monetary economist.

Steiner, Dunlop and Keynes – Brothers in World Economy, by Christopher Houghton Budd (aebookstore.com 2022)

Becoming Fully Human: The Significance of Anthroposophy in Contemporary Spiritual Life

There is no contradiction, if you look into the matter correctly, between destiny and freedom. However, in order to be able to present the concept of destiny to the world later on, it was first necessary that the concept of freedom be presented in the book The Philosophy of Freedom. — Rudolf Steiner

Published here for the first time in English, these six public lectures are among Rudolf Steiner’s most inspired—and inspiring—explorations of anthroposophy as a true science of the spirit. Our age provides abundant explanations of the universe, its nature and evolution. But underlying most scientific modalities is a passive engagement with self and world, a taking-for-granted of the faculty of thinking, and, as a result, an indifferent arranging of phenomena through logical inference. But the question remains: What is thinking? A product of chemical processes in the brain, or a spiritual activity through which we become participants in a spiritual cosmos?

This is Steiner’s starting point in all his work. He aims to cast off the unnecessary limits imposed on knowledge by a science that fails to examine its most fundamental epistemological premises. The lectures here are a remarkable contribution to this lifelong project—a compelling, eloquent, insightful study and affirmation of our very humanness.

Speaking to a youthful academic audience, Steiner does not confine himself to the arbitrary delineations of codified academic disciplines; on the contrary, he breaks down barriers, builds bridges, envisions a future academy in which the paths of knowledge are broadened through a genuine science of initiation to encompass our role as members and, ultimately, cocreators of the physical, soul, and spiritual universe.

body, who convenes a meeting in Hartfield, a village in East Sussex, to discuss the issue of a planned bypass which threatens her beloved Ashdown Forest. Soon a host of characters, including the Major, the Professor, Bouncer, Bertie, Peggy, Sheila and her young son are engaged in efforts to resist this unwanted intrusion on their forest. And so begins this delightful and humorous tale, loosely modeled on stories of Winnie the Pooh. The meeting leads to excursions in the Forest, to private conversations, and to deepening friendships among these diverse and mostly very British personalities. Behind the stories, deeper questions are explored—the meaning of life and death; the modern scientific-materialistic mindset and its consequences for nature and humanity; and the healing power of friendships. Read it in front of a fire, or aloud to each other and enjoy its many small miracles. As Bertie notes at the end of his poem to the Action Group: So we must fight with wit and nerve Not swayed by each new pound: Nor yield to plastic, froth and fakes, Or concrete on the ground. Below our feet, and in the air Are treasures that we need; But if we hack and blast and spray They’ll die through human greed.

Retired BBC filmmaker Jonathan Stedall is known for skillful biographies of Tolstoy, Jung, and Steiner (The Challenge of Rudolf Steiner rudolfsteinerfilm.squarespace.com) and for his autobiography, Where on Earth is Heaven.

Christopher Schaefer, PhD (christopherschaefer7@gmail.com) is co-director of the Hawthorne Valley Center for Social Research.

A Millennium Handbook

by John Harris Beck

inspired by the works of Rudolf Steiner and Buckminster Fuller an ongoing blog, podcast, poetry, and webinar series on humanity’s unfolding adventures

Rudolf Steiner; introduction by Clifford Venho, translated by Jeff Martin; SteinerBooks (2022)

Listening into the Future

by John Bloom

Hope and wisdom abound in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s verse Our Wishes Foretell:

Our wishes foretell the capacities within ourselves; they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish.

What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future.

We are attracted to what is already ours, in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is already possible Into dreamt-for reality.

There are some essential presentiments woven into this beautiful verse. Imagination is usually thought of as a picture or picturing, but Goethe is saying that one facet of the imagination may be where we perceive an idea, a kind of projection screen. However, that perception is just a momentary way station for the imaginative impulse from within us to move out into the world. What are our wishes, our impulses, and where do they come from? What is their source? Are they soul manifestations? They are harbingers, indicators of our capacities, and keys to self-knowledge. And following the path of self-knowledge is a high calling if one is to be of service to the world.

In the seven lines above, Goethe deftly located the individual in space that reaches from the inner depths of our being through the boundless outside. The nature of the intermediation between inner and outer is dependent upon our consciousness, which, in and of the process, is part of self-knowledge. Further, Goethe located the individual in the flow of time, not at a fixed moment but rather in a continuum, as the individual is one who carries not only the present, but also the seeds of the future. Though Goethe does not specifically reference the past, it is certainly implicit within the evolution of our capacities. So, for Goethe, each of us as an individuality is an integral part of a cosmic space-time enterprise. To comprehend this takes an intuitive path of knowledge that data from a stopwatch or tape measure will not serve.

The idea of metamorphosis, how forms play out over time, was central to Goethe’s scientific work. His understanding was inspired by the observation of plants, but here in this verse the principle is applied to the power of imagination. Yes, our thoughts have the power to af-

fect the world, but how do we see the imagination within those thoughts? In some ways, the entire history of visual art is filled with examples, which we would see immediately if we could but reverse the creative process and move from the materiality of the finished work back to the artist‘s inner originating process. This is a near impossibility of course, though a worthy exercise.

Instead, I would propose that we observe ourselves as a living work of art. How might we listen into the past? How might be gain insight into how we got where we are as individuals? Can we see into our experiences from the depths of our biographies? What do our hearts say? Can we listen to, hear, and see that truth? What does that truth reflect back to us as we shape our future?

Then: Listening into the future. Can we listen to and be present with our hearts voices to hear what truly matters to us as we learn from the past? What gives rise to warmth? Toward what are we drawn? Can we see into what that might look or feel like? We need not consider this seeing or feeling as an outcome, but rather as an impulse of heart such that we can create and govern ourselves out of a higher sense for what the world is asking of us. This soul condition is what Goethe was pointing to in his verse. He is painting the foundation for hopefulness and suggesting that getting there is a time-denominated process.

Fear links is us to the past; it is constructed out of what we think we know and do not know. Hope rather emerges out of a sense for the future, through aspiration and seeing real glimmers of ideals showing up in daily practices. Love, being fully present in the world, is both self-knowledge and world guidance; love is the bridge between past and future.

This love, this practice of presence, forgiveness, and vulnerability, is a work against the odds. It is the very work that we can do now knowing that it touches the depths and needs of every human being. At the same time, it is in service to spirit beings, particularly those from the other side of the threshold of death who need to connect with us now more than ever. Through passionate anticipation we cross the boundary between the spiritual and material worlds. Love is the key to this threshold, and the creative being of hope.

John Bloom ( john.bloom@anthroposophy.org) is General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America (US).

Teaching in an Age of Paralysis

by Douglas Gerwin

Perhaps even wider than the spread of Covid-19 is a pandemic of fear and anxiety reaching down from adults into the lives of young people and arresting their ability to learn. Douglas Gerwin, high school teacher and trainer of Waldorf teachers for over 40 years, reflects on the root cause and possible remedy for this condition among today’s youth.

In teaching high school students, I encounter fewer cases of truculent teenagers who say, “I won’t!” and many more cases of trepid students who say, “I can’t.” We have entered an age of heightened mental and emotional—to some extent even physical—paralysis.

More than a century ago, Rudolf Steiner predicted we would be living in an age of ever heightened anxiety. “Everywhere,” he told a German audience some six years before the outbreak of the Spanish flu epidemic, “something like nervousness is present. All this will, in the near future, grow worse and worse . . . . For there are harmful influences that affect our current life in a quite extraordinary way and that carry over from one person to the other like an epidemic.”1

Today, even more all-encompassing than the current pandemic attributed to ever new strains of the coronavirus, we live in an atmosphere of nameless anxiety that exacerbates in our students—as in ourselves—a stifling stenosis of soul.

In this context, we need to ask: Given that teenagers are growing up in an age of societal anxiety—a condition intensified, we now know, by the use of smart phones and the internet—how are they to be educated? And how best to prepare their teachers to educate them?

Stirring movement from within

Step for a moment into the shoes of a student and you will recognize that, if you are suffering an intensified state of stress or anxiety, you will probably be unwilling, or simply unable, to learn anything new. Cramming for a high school test represents an archetypal example of this condition. While feeling the pressure to organize and retain what you have been told, it is simply too risky to explore an unfamiliar perspective or be open to the epiphany of new insight. Instead, we hear students call

1 Rudolf Steiner, “Overcoming Nervousness”, Munich, 11 January 1912, GA 143, in Anthroposophy in Everyday Life (Anthroposophic Press, 1995), p. 31.

out, “Will this be on the test?”

To put it more generally, when students feel anxious, they won’t move. And yet moving—whether outwardly in physical activity or inwardly in soul and spirit—lies at the fundament of all learning.

We can say, therefore, that in educating teenagers (younger children, too) we need first to make sure they move. But here’s the rub: whatever pressure an adult exerts on a student from without will inevitably create anxiety in that student, who will feel—rightly—the alien source of this pressure. Though in younger years children need to be steered towards healthy situations and protected from harmful ones, by the time they are young adults movement needs to arise from within, not be induced from without.

In the end, all healthy movement arises from within, even if it is initially stimulated from without. This is the secret of the free human will, easily overlooked because clouded in unconsciousness and, among younger children, still largely undeveloped. With the exception of the reflex—an autonomic (and hence entirely unfree) reaction to the stimulation of the nervous system—healthy movement originates from within the human being, even if it is in response to outer guidance. And only when the kid moves will the kid learn.

By the same token, as children grow into teenagers, loving guidance administered from without must give way to inner self-direction if something is to be regarded as truly “learned”. As we know from struggling to ride a bicycle, you cannot claim to have learned the skill of balancing if your training wheels are still attached.

Three roles for a high school teacher

Though the development of this inner self-direction is gradual, by the time of adolescence it holds the key to a successful high school education. And yet no age group is more prone to paralysis born of anxiety than is puberty. For this reason, teachers need to stir their students into movement in three distinct yet related ways, embodying what I will call the “3PC’s” of the high school educator:

» Teacher as pedagogical coach

» Teacher as pedagogical counselor

» Teacher as pedagogical compass

As pedagogical coach, a teacher deals with how to develop practical skills, helping teenagers find purpose in work and confidence in conducting themselves in the world. This is why, in high school, the most trusted teachers are often those who can tell you how to do something by yourself. Drivers Ed instructors, gym and athletic coaches, practical arts instructors, computer techies, nurses and medics, kitchen staff: these are the faculty and staff members who may most easily garner a teenager’s respect.

As pedagogical counselor (not to be confused with psychological therapist), a teacher deals with how to handle feelings, or more precisely how to sort out the confused skein of human sentiments that so easily tie teenagers up in paralyzing emotional knots. Good counselors know to use feelings as opportunities for learning; to pose questions rather than supply answers; to jointly come up with strategies rather than provide ready-made solutions.

As pedagogical compass, a teacher deals with how to think, but again not by providing answers but rather by helping students develop leading questions that will help them discover uncharted terrains for themselves. A good compass indicates direction quietly and steadily, all the while vibrating slightly and adjusting constantly on an acute needle point to changes in orientation.

In all three roles, the teacher’s secret to success is to educate by stirring the student to move, whether that movement is physical or bodily, psychological or emotional, spiritual or mental. The teacher sets up the conditions in which the student can dare to try, to fail, to learn, and in this way to become motivated increasingly from within—eventually free, one hopes, of outer prodding.

However, as they say, “Charity begins at home.” In the context of high school teacher training (indeed, one could say this of all educators), teachers learn best how to move their students by first learning to move in new and perhaps unfamiliar ways themselves. So it is, then, that prospective and practicing teachers coming into the Waldorf training program launched a quarter-century ago in New Hampshire spend fully 50% of their time in all manner of movement: physically in eurythmy and Spacial Dynamics, psychologically through other performing and also fine arts, spiritually through the engagement in what Rudolf Steiner described as “living thinking” or “formative thinking”, distinct from what he termed

“dead thinking” or what one of my high school colleagues names “thunking”.

Aristotle asserts that all learning begins in mimesis. On this view, students coached and counseled by educators who themselves embody these kinds of movement are more likely to imitate the striving of their teachers. When teenagers begin to move, they begin to educate themselves. And in educating themselves, they gain the confidence needed to loosen the contemporary paralysis of anxiety.

Douglas Gerwin has for the past quarter-century steered the helm of the Waldorf High School Teacher Education Program, a vehicle for training high school teachers he launched at the Center for Anthroposophy (CfA) in 1996 and which is now affiliated with the Waldorf program at Antioch University New England. After 25 years on the bridge, Douglas will begin handing on the wheel to his successor, David Barham, who has been appointed Director of the high school program starting in September 2022. Douglas will retain his other chief role as CfA’s Executive Director during a further year of transition.

Post-script

David Barham head up the only program in the English-speaking world specializing exclusively in preparation of Waldorf high school subject teachers. At present the program offers six areas of specialization, each led by experienced practicing Waldorf high school subject teachers:

» Arts & art history [ Patrick Stolfo ]

» Biology and earth science [ Michael Holdrege ]

» English language and literature [ David Sloan ]

» History and social studies [ Paul Gierlach ]

» Mathematics [ Jamie York ]

» Physics and chemistry [ Michael D’Aleo ]

The program draws on long-standing faculty members including Eurythmy [ Laura Radefeld ], Creative Speech [ Craig Giddens ], Music [ Meg Chittenden ], Spacial Dynamics [ Jan Lyndes ], and Painting [ Charles Andrade ].

A Waldorf teacher for 30 years, David Barham came to anthroposophy first as a biodynamic farmer, then Camphill village worker, before signing on as a class teacher at Pine Hill Waldorf School and later at the Maine Coast Waldorf School. He also taught high school humanities at High Mowing School and, for the past 12 years, at Maine Coast. In 2018, David used a half-year sabbatical to walk the entirety of the Camino de Santiago in Northern Spain. “I knew I was ready for a new direction on my Waldorf vocational path, but could not clearly see the future.”

Working Out in the Soul Gym

by Dennis Klocek

Editors Note: This article is an introduction to Soul Course with Dennis Klocek begun in May. The four short series that make up the course are Social Soul Tools (available recorded), Soul Storytelling (starting August 23), Soul and the World, and Soul Initiation, all on dennisklocek.com

Finding it difficult to lug your suitcase upstairs? Work out a few times a week at the gym and your suitcase soon begins to feel lighter! Likewise, going to the “soul gym” every day develops your capacity to remain peaceful amidst the pressures of life. Just as workouts at the “Y” build muscular strength and flexibility, regular workouts with soul/spiritual exercises build mental strength and the flexibility to withstand the anxieties of life.

Going inside during stress periods can be like a descent into the deepest darkness imaginable. When things start to press hard in our lives it is beneficial to remember that our inner being is always living in a timeless realm. How can we draw attention away from the anxious parts of life and redirect it to the True Self or the real “I”?

Here are a series of 4 exercises that combine well to create an excellent daily workout. Future columns will offer additional exercises and workout strategies.

“30 Seconds”

Watch the second hand of the clock or analog watch tick off thirty seconds. Allow no other thoughts. If no clock is available then try counting backwards from thirty at approximately one second intervals. Count silently and avoid “automatic mode”. Stay completely focused on the task. This exercise is deceptively simple and yet challenging. The beauty of it is that it is brief, can be done anywhere and doesn’t cost anything. Well, you could ask, why do an exercise which is almost impossible to do? Won’t it just lead to frustration and then more anxiety? An important attitude can be learned from this exercise. The outcome is unimportant. Whether you succeed or not is truly irrelevant. No one is giving you a reward for doing the exercise or watching over our shoulder to see that you do it right. No spiritual food pellet drops into a great cosmic food trough if you press the right lever. No matter what happens, whether you succeed or fail, you can do the same 30 second exercise at the same time the next day or the next hour or whenever you are feeling bored. Once you manage to get one 30 second exercise complete then repeat it.

After a few repetitions pause and ask yourself… “Is there anything today for which I can be grateful?”

Pretend as if you really didn’t expect an answer, sort of like we were putting questions to the wall or to a tree. After asking the question spend a few moments listening into the silence of timelessness.

If an answer comes, great! Regular and frequent acknowledgment of those things for which we feel gratitude helps develop a positive and confident mood. If not, then simply asking the question is steadying and cooling for the mind. Freeing yourself from expectation allows the exercise to work more effectively.

Each day do a few repetitions of the 30 second concentration exercise and then ask the gratitude question and listen a little bit into the silence. The whole exercise should take about five to ten minutes, total. For maximum effectiveness, do this at the same time every day. If you forget at that time and remember later, do it then. After a month or so a subtle mood comes over the time spent doing the exercise. When we are doing the exercise there is a feeling as if we are having a talk with someone we trust. This is not a big time revelation with light shows and funky smoke and voices speaking to us out of clouds. It is just a subtle feeling of being in a regular conversation with someone who we know will never lie to us. Some traditions call this approaching the Guardian. Some call it speaking with the Confidant Doorkeeper. This feeling of being in intimate dialogue with another tells us that the inner being who remembers how life was before things got anxious is beginning to once again talk to us. When this feeling shows up you can add a further practice.

“New Seeing”

Look each day at some object such as the bed, the sink, a button or a pin. Notice something that you hadn’t seen before. It is helpful to keep a running list. When you can no longer notice anything new about the object you are observing then we can pick something new. This exercise has a funny effect on time. We can become so absorbed in observing common, boring things that time seems to melt away.

Through an exercise like “new seeing” the soul is led back into having an interest in life and in developing itself through a living, active thinking. We are training our-

selves to see in a more fluid and process oriented way. Following this exercise pose the following question:

“How has my life become like this?”

Like the gratitude question this question is followed with another session of listening into the silence of timelessness as the question fades from consciousness.

With the addition of this practice the total time spent in developing the mind can be ten or fifteen minutes a day. The ideal would be to spend 15 minutes in the morning before starting any of the day’s activities. The sense of freedom in the mind from these exercises when practiced regularly can offset years of hectic living. Doing the ex-

Sacred Creation

A Road to Sacred Creation: Rudolf Steiner’s Perspectives on Technology, Vol 1; Gary Lamb, editor, Michael Howard, illustrator; SteinerBooks 2021, 392 pp

review by Matt Cain

Technology’s presence is ubiquitous in modern life, from transportation to personal technologies such as computers, smart phones, and social media. What do Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy have to say about technology?

In his compendium A Road to Sacred Creation: Rudolf Steiner’s Perspectives on Technology, editor and annotator Gary Lamb and his team of researchers have gathered Dr. Steiner’s references to technology from across his written books and lectures. Not only are there a surprising number of these references in Steiner’s collected works, but they were made as part of the subject of a wide variety of topics, including human and earthly evolution, medicine, education, social renewal, and beings of the higher hierarchies.

Having this in one volume enables the reader to make connections regarding the far-reaching impact of technology and its relationship to humanity which might otherwise go unnoticed. Dr. Steiner’s thoughts on the past, present, and future of technology and how technology will be increasingly bound up with human evolution point to the need for humanity to grasp the significance of this development with clear consciousness. Through this understanding, it also becomes clear that human beings will need to continue to develop ethically and morally so that technology does not lead to our enslavement.

In comparison with many millennia of human ex-

ercises prior to placing the questions greatly enhances the effect of the questions. It is a like preparing a garden prior to planting seeds.

Once again it is the doing of the practice independent of measurable results which moves the mind slowly towards the timeless state of the inner being.

Dennis Klocek, MFA, is co-founder of the Coros Institute, an internationally renowned lecturer, and teacher. He is the author of nine books, including the newly released Colors of the Soul; Esoteric Physiology and also Sacred Agriculture: The Alchemy of Biodynamics. He regularly shares his alchemical, spiritual, and scientific insights at dennisklocek.com

istence on Earth, it is only within the past 150 years or so that electricity has become a part of everyday life, and that is now being followed ever more rapidly by newly developing technologies such as gene splicing, artificial intelligence, energy generation, and surveillance technologies, including facial recognition and data mining. Has human evolution kept pace with this insertion of technology into our daily lives? What social, economic, and environmental impact do these developments have on us and our planet? How do we educate our children in such a way as to unfold the capacities they bring into our world to give them the strength to creatively address these issues for the Earth’s future?

Several topics relating to technology are covered in the nine chapters of the book, including the evolution of science and the atomic theories, the past and future relationship of humans to technology, the influences of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic spirits on the evolution of technology, and how we may rightly approach technology through the development of economic, social, and educational forms which can support us in this endeavor. The editor introduces each quote with a summary, providing both a context and a helpful synopsis of Dr. Steiner’s words. This format is unique and forms a subtle rhythmical interplay which guides the reader through many complex issues in a way that harmonizes with Lamb’s strengths as educator, researcher, author, and lecturer.

Also included in the book are several illustrations by Michael Howard which powerfully and artistically create imaginative perceptions of the written content, and which serve as a bridge between artistic, scientific, and moral-ethical domains. They provide the reader with the opportunity to deepen one’s feeling for the concepts which have been elaborated.

The growing, intimate relationship between humans and technology can be somewhat unsettling. However, Steiner makes it clear that “the task of technology is to help humanity develop toward the sixth post-Atlantean epoch” in much the same way that our physical body enables us to gain self-conscious awareness. This awareness will increasingly extend into the physical world itself. In Steiner’s words,

Connections will be created between the human being’s forces of death—which are related to electrical, to magnetic forces, and to external mechanical forces. People will be able in a certain way to steer their intentions and their thoughts into the mechanical forces. Yet undiscovered forces in the human being will be discovered, forces that work on external electrical and magnetic forces.

This points to the need for moral and ethical intention in the use of technology. Not a question of if, but how technology will be developed and used to further our evolution is of the utmost importance. When considering the destructive, antisocial elements which can permeate today’s technology it is vital to understand how we may wrestle it from the path leading humanity into sub-nature and towards a strengthening and raising of human consciousness.

A Road to Sacred Creation outlines a daunting task for humanity, for which Steiner gave many indications, including the development of a threefold social order and Waldorf education. These concepts are elaborated, with ample references as to what these ideas mean, how they can be developed and implemented, and why they are needed for human evolution to move forward.

The author promises to shed more light on technology in volume two, as outlined in many references in this first work, including relationships to the etheric realm and the Christ impulse. In the meantime, one may find oneself making many new connections to other areas of anthroposophical study, for which we can be truly grateful.

Matt Cain is a manager of a community-based farmland initiative and a part-time beekeeper in upstate New York. He previously worked as a financial advisor, public-school teacher, and as a Camphill Village Copake coworker and a member of its board of directors.

Meeting in the Garden

On the Second Year of the Applied Anthroposophy Online Course

by Angela Foster & Jordan Walker

“The caterpillar…has the time to create this sheath, to hang it up, so the sun forces, imprisoned inside, can now create the butterfly which is then able to fly out and enjoy the activity of a sun-being.”

— Rudolf Steiner, October 8, 1923

What growth is possible when a group, together every week, turns its attention toward the spiritual world? Many of us have experience with small in-person study groups. But what does this self-and-group metamorphosis look like with hundreds of people meeting online across time zones and geographic locations?

The mission of the Applied Anthroposophy Course (AAC) was, and remains, to provide an accessible platform in which to witness our individual development, and seek to understand our places, task, and context in the world as it also transforms. The mascot for AAC has been the butterfly—the winged flower-like creature that Rudolf Steiner tells us is a symbol for the human soul in metamorphosis. Working with Dr. Steiner’s lectures in Butterflies: Beings of Light, we studied the phases of butterfly development and considered them as a picture of our own transformation: from egg, to caterpillar, to chrysalis, to butterfly, before continuing on to a new egg.

AAC provides the growing space to hold the big questions together: What stage am I embodying? What is my task at this stage of being? When am I changing and what will I become? AAC also provides space to live into the answers, to discover that sometimes we shift in dramatic ways and other times the growth happens in small, seamless ways. Often it can seem as if all of these stages are happening in us and the world at the same time!

From October 2021 through May, 2022, two hundred individuals from across the United States (and a few from around the world) took part in the second Applied Anthroposophy course (AAC2). In reflection, it is wholly accurate to describe it as an experiment in, and experience of, an active research community.

On Wednesday nights, we gathered to hear students of anthroposophy share what they are striving to apply in their own lives. These leading thoughts acted as tuning forks for our inspiration and intentions. We were graced with presentations by Brian Gray, Henrike Holdrege, Penelope Baring, Lisa Romero, Bastiaan Baan, Orland Bishop, and many others. Each offered us their authentic humility, and their reverence for this common path which we all are walking. Last year’s faculty list is archived at www.appliedanthroposophy.org/aac2-faculty

Just as important as the inspiring sharings was what we learned from each other. The frequent break-out conversations and weekly chrysalis-themed working groups let us adopt “beginner’s mind” as we learned from, and with, each other. The Chrysalis groups remained open this year for registered individuals to participate in as many groups as they wanted. Some participants took part in multiple groups each week—some took part in one, and others joined us for just the Wednesday presentations. Among the weekly Chrysalis Groups were Reverence in Inner Development (with co-guides Robert McDermott & Angela Foster), Biography Work (Anne de Wild & Chris Burke), the Festivals as a Path of Initiation (Hazel Archer-Ginsberg & Nancy Melvin), Goethean Con-

versation (Jordan Walker & Timothy Kennedy), Drawing the Six Basic Exercises (Laura Summer), and Opening the Door to Spiritual Perception (Jolie Hanna Luba & Verlyn McGilvray).

At the Anthroposophical Society’s founding, February 3, 1913, Rudolf Steiner gave this guiding thought:

“…we now stand at the beginning of not a new work, but a significant endeavor to consolidate and expand our old work…In the time that now lies ahead of us, I hope we shall find ways and means of representing what we fostered in the old form still more strongly and devotedly than before… If we feel that what we call anthroposophy is a necessity in our time and recognize that it must flow into contemporary cultural life and become a ferment in all domains—if we feel that anthroposophy can become that, wills to become that—then we shall be able to work in the right way. Words, however, are not the best tool with which to do all this; rather you must use your feelings and sensitivities, your purposes, the fundamental principles that you take into yourselves in order to develop your own individual powers…”

The coordinating team of AAC2 returned often to this quote for inspiration in forming and tending our gatherings. Meditating on these words, we experienced a true and powerful substance flowing into our work. It became clear to us that through Applied Anthroposophy we can aid in each other’s awakening as we learn how each of us is asked to apply anthroposophy to the world.

It’s been two years now that an online community has come together to engage consciously with self-development in service to the world. We are deeply grateful for the many striving students who joined us to learn and encourage each other. As we prepare for the third season of Applied Anthroposophy (AAC3!), we affirm that together, with each other and the spiritual world, we will co-create spaces that allow healing impulses to flow into the Now.

As AAC itself evolves, we sense a new guide flying into our garden. We’ll continue to learn from the butterfly... and next year, we invite the Honey Bee to join our work! We hope you, dear reader, will sense the benefits of our collective work and feel the invitation to join us too.

Angela Foster & Jordan Walker are the coordinating team for Applied Anthroposophy along with Tess Parker. See more about Angela on page 47, and read Jordan’s poem on page 35. Their bios can be read along with much more at www.appliedanthroposophy.org The 2022/2023 Course begins in October.

Biodynamic Demeter Alliance

The Board of Directors of the new Biodynamic Demeter Alliance released this statement in June 2022:

As the world faces an ever-growing crisis—of climate, soil, water, even spirit—it has become increasingly clear that the Biodynamic movement plays a vital role in building solutions. Thanks to the efforts of many throughout the US Biodynamic community over a number of years— and a collective desire to galvanize resources and strengthen the movement in order to “meet the moment”— the Biodynamic Demeter Alliance was born on January 1, 2022, unifying the Biodynamic Association and Demeter USA. The goal was to create an organization that could serve as a national network to offer leadership in the United States in helping to solve the multiple layers of crisis we find ourselves collectively facing. After an extensive and rigorous national search, we are pleased to announce Sheila Foster as the first Executive Director of the new Alliance. Sheila comes to the Alliance after more than twenty years of working in food systems to create change. An MBA candidate and Certified Fund-Raising Executive (CFRE), she began her career as a science journalist. Sheila brings training in systems thinking; permaculture design; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and community leadership development. Her goal in joining the Alliance is to create change through partnerships and collaboration with farmers, land stewards, businesses, researchers, educators, and Biodynamic leaders nationally and internationally.

Sheila has been connected to the Biodynamic and anthroposophic world primarily through Waldorf education. With a semester of Waldorf teacher training under her belt, she came to the realization that her true skill set lay in creating change in connection to the land rather than in teaching. “Nearly twenty years later, serving as the Executive Director of the Alliance brings my dream full circle, combining my love of the land with my deep appreciation for Waldorf and Biodynamic principles,” Sheila said.

Most recently, Sheila served as the Executive Direc-

tor of Rogue Valley Farm to School in Ashland, Oregon, where she worked to connect local farms to schools to improve school meals, provided access to fresh, organic produce to families in need during the pandemic, and partnered with school districts to provide weekly garden education programs. She spearheaded change management and established reserves, built an endowment, and doubled the organization’s annual income. For more details of Sheila’s work history, view her LinkedIn profile.

“It’s not only Sheila’s knowledge of sustainable agriculture and leadership skills that will take us to the next level,” said Daphne Amory, Acting Chair of the Alliance. “We are most excited about her talent as a visionary and her ability to take complex problems and ideas and transform them into easy-to-understand, concrete paths to change.”

The Biodynamic Demeter Alliance connects the diverse Biodynamic community into a strong, broad organization that can make positive strides across multiple areas within agricultural work and the broader food system. Building on Rudolf Steiner’s threefold vision of rights, culture, and economy, the Alliance brings Demeter USA’s certification work (the rights sphere) together with the community outreach and education of the Biodynamic Association (the cultural sphere). The third sphere (the economic sphere) is being formed as part of the vision, and will build the marketplace and increase demand for Biodynamic® products and support the growth of Biody-

namic practices nationally and worldwide. Sheila will focus on how to leverage opportunities among these three spheres. The goal is to strengthen the U.S. Biodynamic community through educational, organizational, and fundraising support for regional hubs.

“The world needs what Biodynamic agriculture can bring,” Sheila said. “Together with the hard work, imagination, and knowledge of members, licensees, and partners, the Alliance and all those we represent can transform the co-creative relationship between humans and the Earth, renewing vitality and the integrity of our food and fiber system and the wholeness of our world.”

Sophia Rising

Reflections on the April “convergence” in Santa Fe, New Mexico

by Maria Ver Eecke

“Sophia Rising—Unveiling the Wisdom of Being Human,” originally planned for Eastertide 2020, was intended to create a direct experience of the Divine Being of Sophia in relation to Anthropos-Sophia. I immediately was enchanted by the magic. The place itself invited spiritual practice. A warmhearted staff of indigenous people seemed truly happy to serve us at Hotel Santa Fe, owned and operated by people of the Pueblo. The three-story adobe structure was stunningly beautiful with displays of original artwork inside and out.

We met in the Kiva rooms. Kivas are traditional underground chambers used for ceremonial rituals by the Pueblo people throughout the Southwest. The four elements of earth, water, air, and fire were invoked as “Weaving” sessions, along with Weaving Ether, Color, Stories, Light, Wholeness, and Weaving Community. Three of us set up the central Kiva for our Weaving Art Acts, which involved interactive group singing, eurythmy, and call and response.

For me the three kiva rooms represented the threefold human being. The altar and podium for the speakers (with a screen for images & a virtual presentation) were in the first kiva of spiritual content. Our Alchemical Soul Journey was created in the central kiva of artistic creativity in the encircling round. Metal Color Light Therapy was practiced in the third kiva of willing deeds, along with social interactions and our tech support team.

After a dessert reception on the first evening, we were welcomed by Tess Parker, then we warmed the space with our voices and eurythmy.

The Spirit of Place was honored. People adorned the nature table with flowers, candles, icons, and meaningful objects (pieces of art or nature) to create an altar surrounding a colorful statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Weaving of Earth was led by Angela Foster and many who brought soil from home proceeded to the altar to place their individual offerings in a ceramic bowl, placed below the statue. Hazel Archer Ginsburg brought horn silica made on the Zinniker Farm, Wisconsin, the oldest biodynamic farm in America. A rosary from Ukraine and handmade paper roses added color to the dark earth.

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Friday afternoon, Mary Stewart Adams spoke of “Encountering the Celestial Goddess Anthroposophia.” As a “star lore historian,” restoring the mythic grandeur of knowing the stars, she inspired by weaving myths and vivid imaginations, beginning with Emily Dickinson’s “From the Chrysalis.”

My cocoon tightens, colors tease, I’m feeling for the air; A dim capacity for wings Degrades the dress I wear.

A power of butterfly must be The aptitude to fly, Meadows of majesty concedes And easy sweeps of sky. So I must baffle at the hint And cipher at the sign, And make much blunder, if at last I take the clew divine.

Mary paints with her words and one envisions other worlds. She read an excerpt from Novalis’ fairy tale of human and earth evolution Eros and Fable, which we heard again at her conclusion; an excerpt:

As a small slender rod of iron, in the form of a serpent biting its own tail, touched the cradle of the sleeping Fable, who awoke “…and holding one hand toward the light, reached after the serpent with the other.” ‘Sophia,’ said he with a touching voice to the woman, ‘let me drink from the bowl.’ She gave it him without delay, and he could not cease drinking; yet the bowl continued full.1

Mary tells us that the Virgin Mary summons the Divine Sophia in the Divine Comedy by Dante (1265-1321). How long will it take us to awaken? William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) writes of “twenty centuries of stony sleep” in his poem “The Second Coming.” When did we lose our connection with the stars? Mary quoted poetry by John Donne (1572-1631):

And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it.

Then in February 1913, Dr. Steiner began to speak of the Sophia being in relation to the human being. He tells us that knowledge of the divine feminine was lost. The time is now to weave with our starry companions.

Mary has the ability to make sense of celestial events and connect these happenings to human history. She shared a time line of three solar eclipses that create a re-

1 You may find the story Eros and Fable at Living Waters Wellness Resources, livingwaterswellnessresources.weebly.com/eros-and-fable--novalis.html

Gallery Johannes A. Gaertner

“

... One of a dying breed: the European émigré humanist in whom vocation and avocation, learning for a living and living for learning, ran in perfect parallel harmony.” — Susanna Gaertner

Johannes A. Gaertner ( 1912-1996), poet, author, artist, anthroposophist, professor of art history, studied theology and left Heidelberg with a ThD in 1936. His intent was to concentrate on early Christian archeology. To avoid conscription, he left Berlin for Lima, Peru, where he intended to spend a year ... that became ten. In 1941 he met and married my mother; they came to this country just after the war, and, in the manner of Einstein, Nabokov, and other émigré eggheads, he obtained a position at Lafayette College, at that time an all-male bastion of engineering and science. Johannes Gaertner “became” the Humanities, teaching German, French, Spanish, Latin, Art and Music Appreciation. As Lafayette grew, languages and music peeled off and Johannes founded and for decades was the Department of Art History. Legions of his students have remembered him in testimonials. One went on to chair art history at Yale, another became director of the Art Museum in Melbourne.

“Optimism and cheerful hope are not entirely justified, but neither are pessimism and dark despair. Whether the good will ultimately prevail is uncertain, but we must act as if with our help it could and will. And though we have no contract, we must assume that Nature intended us to exist and to survive. God is, perhaps, on our side.” — From Prof. Gaertner‘s preface to Worldly Virtues

In 1990, his daughter Susanna organized publication of Worldly Virtues: A Catalogue of Reflections Then in 2021 she brought out an exhibit of his pen and ink drawings, created between the 1950’s and 1990’s, at the R. Blitzer gallery in Santa Cruz, California. Now these remarkable drawings are online to view or acquire at tahawuscenter.wixsite.com/johannes-gaertner—and we have been allowed to share the images of whimsy, caricature, character, and insight that follow...

Confident Aristocratic

Looking at the Mona Lisa

Evening Paper A serious thinker

Chaucer’s Prioress Valse lente

Somewhat stony

En garde!

Equestrian statue

Broken flower The wonder of love

Massenet’s Elegy Melancholy

People in the park Giraffe

Lady and Lapdog

The Fan

The corset The last you saw of her

markable pattern across North America and the US, where the eclipse shadows fall across two sites specifically related to the development and testing of the atomic bomb (Oak Ridge, TN, and Los Alamos, NM). The third is geographically related to the rising up of the divine feminine expressed by the Black Madonna statue outside St. Thomas Aquinas Chapel at St. Meinrad Archabbey, and The descent of the Holy Spirit sculpture, both in Indiana and in the path of totality of the 2024 solar eclipse.

Mary asks if solar eclipses bring healing to the earth as their pathways cover places of man-made destruction. Imagine that a solar eclipse helps open a safety valve to let off steam or an explosion: “our misused freedom is taken up by the sun and woven and given back to us.” When the sky darkens, the brightest planet is Venus; this goddess lifts a veil during a total eclipse. Venus watches who will gather up her wisdom and she seeks in the heart of each human being. A goddess watches and waits for us.

Mary discovered a statue of the Veiled Isis in Iowa at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, a “bronze allegorical statue of Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess of life,” a gift from the Belgian people in gratitude for his relief work in Belgium during World War I.2

Nothing that we are given, or that we have to give, creates chaos. The New Isis according to Rudolf Steiner involves three steps.

Spiritual external manifestation of nature.

Awaken our inner light.

Speak words of consequence.

How may we take up misused forces of freedom? The spirit world speaks in riddles and asks questions. Whom do you seek? We have access to the Garden; Eve seeks Wisdom. Mary Magdalene is seeking Love. Christ asks, Whom do you seek? Let us stand in the garden at this moment of awakening.

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Before each talk we had moments of inner quiet led

2 More at hoover.blogs.archives.gov/2015/08/18/isis-the-wandering-goddess/

by Michele Mariscal, leading us into the heart of the present moment. Michele offers professional counseling (inperson or online) with Heart-Based Living.

On Saturday morning we were graced with the story and images of The Virgin of Guadalupe: Sophia Rising in the Americas presented by Stephanie Georgieff. This is a miracle story from 1531, when the Virgin appears to a humble shepherd in Guadalupe and asks, “Where are you going?” Then she requests, “Build me a temple.” The questions are repeated in several meetings with Juan Diego, before he asks for a miracle as proof of his vision to show to the bishop. The image of the Virgin appearing on Diego’s poncho was only one of the miracles.3

“Alchemical Soul Journey: Anthroposophia—A Union of Wisdom and Love” was created by Hazel Archer Ginsberg and was enacted by a group of sixteen on Saturday afternoon. Lisa Dalton was our grand master of ceremony preparing us to “Know thou thyself” and leading us through three stages. The “Harrowing of Hell” was the first stage, where we face the hindrances to our thinking, feeling and will; this we did with the eurythmy soul exercises, Wonder–Ah, Love–A, and Hope–U; Jill

McCormick intoned corresponding intervals of the fifth, third, and octave with her resonant voice. After each trial were five minutes for inner reflection to draw or write one’s responses to the questions of our present time.

At the second stage we stood at the threshold to meet the Guardian of the Threshold and our Time-Spirit Michael with eurythmy gestures, also to ward off “the tempter” and “the deceiver.” At the third stage we entered “Paradiso” ready to redeem the New Isis-Sophia and to foster Anthroposophia within our souls, and to manifest Sophia Rising: Unveiling the Wisdom of Being Human in the world! Hazel gave a first person interpretation of the New Isis Myth by Rudolf Steiner.

It was healing to join together with song, eurythmy, and drama, weaving a new community. The weaving of the EVOE , a greeting in eurythmy, allowed us to look deeply into the eyes of the other. Imagine the mood in the room when the group of one hundred individuals ex3 A new edition of Georgieff’s book The Virgin of Guadalupe, Mysterious Messenger of Destiny is forthcoming.

Carrie Schuchardt (left) & Mary Stewart Adams

pressed Hallelujah silently in eurythmy!

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On Saturday evening, many talented artists shared artistic offerings, framed by the songs of Lucien Dante Lazar and Ultra-Violet Archer, our hosts, who create their melodies and lyrics out of knowledge of spiritual science. Their voices harmonize so well, it was healing.

Sunday brought “Weaving Light” with metal color light therapy! Helena Hurrell and Lisa Edge brought a large glass window made with gold and etched with a lifted gesture rising from a spiral of dodecahedrons. We gazed on this light filled image for ten minutes and then reflected in quiet attention. Healing Light!

Carrie Schuchardt of the House of Peace, Ipswich, Massachusetts, presented Weaving Fire. Carrie and John Schuchardt have been on many international peace delegations. One was to Russia in 2019, where they experienced Orthodox Easter with people singing and walking around the cathedral as bells rang out at midnight; “Christ is risen!” Images of Mary praying with lifted arms were hanging from the podium: the first an icon from St. Sophia Cathedral in Kyiv, Ukraine; the second a painting from St. Petersburg, Russia. Our own pilgrimage is to lift the veil and to behold the flame of the other, she told us.

We learned that Santa Fe means holy faith. Only 35 miles away is Los Alamos where unholy terror was unleased when scientists split the atom and used it for destruction. Robert Oppenheimer oversaw the construction of the Los Alamos laboratory and he is remembered as the father of the atomic bomb. He named it “Trinity” quoting John Donne’s Holy Sonnets : “Batter my heart, threeperson’d God.” Near the end of his life, Oppenheimer wrote: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

Carrie and John traveled to Japan to offer amends on behalf of our country. When the atomic bomb was dropped over Nagasaki City, 150,000 The “Hibaku Maria” in Nagasaki

people were killed, some vaporized. “Miracles rise from the ashes” relates to a monk searching through the remains of the bombed Urakami Cathedral, dedicated to Mary the Merciful. What he found there was the severed head from its Maria statue. This rescued relic from the ruins is called Hibaku Maria. It is painful to view the image of the Madonna’s head with burnt-out eyes and is shocking at first, but we learn that Sophia lives in our sufferings. The Nagasaki Sophia is a trial by fire.

Carrie told us of Quan Yin, Mother of Great Compassion, who hears the cries of the world. It is told in the Lotus Sutra of the 14th century: “Call out her name and all will be made peace.” I was so fortunate to visit the House of Peace in Ipswich, Massachusetts, just the weekend before to hear about Karl Koenig’s life and work. There I prayed in the meditation room with a perpetual burning flame and many icons, and met Quan Yin for the first time. The spirit is tangible in the House of Peace. Karl Koenig wrote in 1964:

Every one of us is a piece of the Apocalypse. We are an apocalyptic people. Apocalypse means revelation or unveiling. Christos-Sophia will guide us. When Carrie finished speaking, my closest friend and I experienced catharsis, sobbing in each other’s arms.

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Weaving Water and Wholeness was the closing ceremony held by Joyce Reilly, Angela Foster and friends. How grateful I am for all these friends who led us so carefully into a communal experience of Sophia Rising!

Greeting actors playing in roles of spiritual beings filled me with love for all. Speaking words from the heart…Lifting our voices in song…Expressing our joy to be together. In gratitude we rejoiced in being together to acknowledge and to honor Anthropos-Sophia!

Maria Burbank Ver Eecke is a performing and therapeutic eurythmist, and editor of the newsletter of the Eurythmy Association of North America.

And Yet Not Full

gathered by Jordan Walker

a social poem woven from words spoken during the closing session of the “Sophia Rising” Conference in Santa Fe, NM on April 24th, 2022

Closing what was opened Lost. Found. Dispersed. Backwards in reverse. Backwards through. Here now with many friends Weaving our hearts Closing our eyes in darkness Rose. Gold. We all woke up somewhere Friends before that.

Sacred Icon, Sacred Being. Building a stage we woke up the wind. Celestial grounding we wove the room.

Soil connected we were an open bowl. Time for gratitude. Time to sacralize the ordinary Consecrate the mystery for our time.

A spoon full of salt water from one bowl to another.

Sweat. Tears. the Sea.

All the rivers… …and yet not full.

Jordan Walker, pictured right with Tess Parker, is a member of the program team for Sophia Rising, and for the Applied Anthroposophy Course.

Art Section News

In January, David Adams wrote to the friends and subscribers of the Art Section Newsletter that has served the English-speaking world that the next issue would probably be the last, “barring the unexpected appearance of some other volunteer editor...” This work has been a huge gift to our movement. David has shared a number of significant articles with being human in the last dozen year, and edited and produced the Newsletter, typically forty pages of well-illustrated and well-written articles plus some news, since 1998. “It has been my effort to write or try to find articles that take the pulse of a developing worldwide movement for anthroposophical-related visual artwork, including other kinds of artwork that seem to move in directions predicted by Rudolf Steiner for the future of the visual arts. ... If anyone with the requisite skills is interested in continuing to publish the Newsletter, I would be happy to work with him or her to help make that succeed.” — To view a large number of past issues, go to the Section’s site: northamericanartsection.blogspot.com

Social Science News

Christine Burke was introduced in our last issue as the new Western Region representative on the General Council. She also succeeded longtime editor Kristen Puckett in the spring of 2020 as editor of the newsletter of the Social Science Section. Anyone interested in being added to the newsletter mailing list should just send an email requesting so to socsciencenews@gmail.com; this applies to either signing up for the newsletter or for back copies that are digitized. — If you are interested in learning about or joining the Section, just reach out to Christine or any other member of the section collegium: Alice Groh, Denis Schneider, Meg Gorman, Douglas Wylie, Alberto Loya.

“The Dragon of Autumn”

from The Tales of Mystery Wisdom

by A. Roz Mar

The earth was wrapped in the green and golden cape of Urièl, the Archangel of Summer. It is he who gathers the gold from the warmth of the passing rays of the sun and weaves it so that it becomes the robe that he wears throughout the days of summer.

Urièl thrusts his sword through the ocean depths and into the blue crystal layers of the earth as an anchor every morning so that day may ensue. When it nears sundown he removes the sword so that night may enter in.

Sometimes the sword takes such a firm hold within the earth that he must pull on it with a mighty tug. When this happens his golden-orange and yellow cape lifts up and its green lining beneath flutters and flashes a greenish light across the sea at sundown, a rare sight to behold.

The task of Urièl comes to an end as Autumn nears and he rouses from his deep contemplations which he has been in throughout the season of summer, for Urièl is a serious archangel. He will remove the golden robe that he has been wearing and lay it across the courageous shoulders of the Archangel Michaèl who will now oversee the new season of Autumn.

Now, this year it happened that on the final day of summer, while anchoring his sword into the depths of the blue earth, Urièl heard a rumbling sound coming from below and the sword resisted being placed. He tried once more but again he heard the rumble and felt it beneath his feet.

The sword finally took hold on the third try when he used his might and pushed it into place. All of a sudden a loud roar came to his ears and the seas became restless with wild waves. The sword held but he was most concerned. Was it possible that the stories were true that there was a Dragon growing inside the earth? For it rarely emerged before the onset of Autumn.

He watched and waited as the first meteors of firelight streaked through the night sky and came from beyond the stars, for it meant that the Archangel Michaèl, the archetype of the knights of chivalry, was finally on his way.

Urièl stood his ground and waited. Then he saw the rough scaly back of the Dragon begin to rise out of the earth. He could smell the dark thoughts of humankind that had fed the Dragon and made it grow bigger

throughout the days of the year.

Suddenly lightning streaked across the heavens and sparks from meteoric iron became brighter and ever more abundant. They were the colors of orange, blue, red, and yellow that lighted up against the cobalt dome of the starry universe, for it is this iron of the Cosmos that gathers to become the valiant sword of Michaèl.

Urièl knew it was time and so he ascended upward to meet him. “It has begun to stir,” he told him. “I had not known the beast before, it feels powerful. I am grateful Sir Michaèl that alas you are here for it is daring to rise up before its time.”

“Sir Urièl,” said the Archangel, “this year the Dragon has grown more daring. Yet we must continue to believe that humankind can awaken to the good, the beautiful, and the true. Why would they not awaken thus when they see our friends, the seasons, the nature spirits, and the blessed Sun, bring forth the earth’s beauty and bounty? How could such abundance not quicken the hearts and enliven the thoughts of human beings? Indeed my friend, we must keep faith.”

He then removed his sword of cosmic iron from its sheath and held it aloft where it gleamed and sparkled with the power of the gods. Urièl removed his golden orange robe and placed it upon his powerful shoulders. He bowed his head to Michaèl, who bowed in return, and departed.

And so it was that another season was upon us and the Archangel Michaèl hovered above and day by day the dark Dragon rose higher and higher out of the earth and the battle began.

Archangel Urièl

The rule of world order dictates that the Dragon must not be slain but only its power diminished. For we have need of him to stir within our souls the forces of Reason and Wisdom. When the Dragon becomes too powerful, selfishness and greed reign and people come to believe that they are only citizens of the earth when in truth human beings are citizens of the World of Spirit.

When the Dragon finally broke free from the earth, where it had grown in the darkness feeding on the cruel, dark, and lower thoughts of mankind, it flashed colors that were muddy and muted. It whipped its great tail in the air and spread its murky wings which gleamed with desire and licked its dry lips with a red hungry and greedy tongue.

The scales are hard as metal and just beneath the surface of its scaly skin glow the fires that burn deep within its belly. They are not the fires of spirit but the fires of cleverness, ridicule, hatred, and tyranny.

There are those on the earth who understand this great yearly battle and it is they who help Michaèl by not falling prey to Dragon-like thoughts. Instead they foster High Minded and Noble Thoughts and that is why the Dragon never wins the battle.

The Fellowship of the Noble lives the principles of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. They enliven the powers of the virtues of Courage, Love, Unselfishness, Faith, Courtesy, and Understanding, and many other noble values which challenge the soul of man.

Just as Michaèl battles against the dark forces of the Dragon, so must we as human beings battle against those dark forces in thought and deed that arise within us.

And so the battle continued, and sparks of fire could be seen at sunset, and day by day the dawn of clear higher consciousness began to crystallize. Cosmic metal splintered from the sword and fell to earth where every year the beings of the nettle plants gather and absorb it, holding it dearly within so that mankind can drink its powers through the winter at tea time.

Michaèl wielded many swords in the days and nights to come, but by the end of Autumn the Earth was once again purified and cleansed of the prowling Dragon through the leadership of the Mightiest of the Archangels, Michaèl.

The Winter season will arrive and the virgin white snow will blanket the earth and candles will light the night in the darkest time of the year to shine forth across the lands.

And Michaèl will sit beside the One, the Sun Spirit, and await the arrival of the Archangel Gabrièl, who brings souls once again to earthly life, and who will take up the robe of Michaèl that is now of Royal Blue. And Love, Peace, and Goodness will reign in the hearts of humankind until Autumn comes again.

A. Roz Mar (bluepearlarts.com) lives near the ocean where she works, writes and creates veil art. Alicia hopes that her books and paintings will inspire people to search, explore and ask the deeper questions. Tales of Mystery Wisdom is a children’s book where you can read more stories like “The Dragon of Autumn.”

Archangel Michaèl

The Dragon

Introducing Steiner

Encountering Rudolf Steiner, Introductions to Essential Works, by Christopher Bamford; SteinerBooks (2022); 360 pp.

Editor’s note: Christopher Bamford crossed the threshold early in the morning of May 13, 2022. He had very recently been able to hold a copy of this book, which contains a significant part of his great service to the world as editor of SteinerBooks. Rather than reviewing this volume we are extracting some highlights of the volume’s exceptional forty-page introduction by his longtime friend Robert McDermott, editor of The Essential Steiner and The New Essential Steiner. The larger cuts are marked with <>; Robert’s whole review is well worth reading.

“The deep aim, or intention, of an introduction (understood esoterically) is a ‘living understanding,’ or, as the poet William Blake put it, the ability ‘to catch the bird in flight and fly with it.’ If successful, this makes it possible for any reader to hear or translate, into his or her own understanding, what Rudolf Steiner is offering, within and beyond his words, in these texts of The Collected Works.” —Christopher Bamford

by Robert McDermott

In the late 1970s, at a salon at an elegant Park Avenue apartment, Christopher Bamford, the invited speaker, set out to recount the highlights of the history of Western esotericism. The guests were delighted by Christopher’s knowledge and his enthusiasm for his subject, but as sometimes happens with Christopher, his knowledge overwhelmed his purpose. After two hours, the talk that was intended to range from ancient Greek philosophy to nineteenth century European Romanticism was still focused on the genius of Pythagoras. ...

With the late William Irwin (Bill) Thompson, founder and, for several decades, president of the Lindisfarne Association, Chris was one of the leaders of this distinguished fellowship [and] a frequent, admired speaker on a wide range of esoteric topics. ... Chris founded and directed Lindisfarne Press to publish the works of visionary spiritual and esoteric authors. In the 1980s, Chris was named editor in chief of Anthroposophic Press, later named SteinerBooks. Fortunately for both publishers, Chris joined Lindisfarne to SteinerBooks. ... From 2002 until 2018, he worked seamlessly with the late Gene Gollogly. Together, they published hundreds of titles, wideranging and high quality. <>

Gene Gollogly often recognized Christopher as the ideal person to write the introductions, many of which are included in the present volume. <> Clearly, this is a book that has been begging to come into being. In addition to his celebrated introductions to the Collected Works,

Chris is also the author or editor of a half-dozen books that are distinctly his—i.e., books that he conceived and edited. His introductions to four of these books are included in the present volume; they are compilations of Steiner’s writings, but they are not included in Collected Works.

1999 Staying Connected: How to Continue Your Relationships with Those Who Have Died. Selected Talks and Meditations by Rudolf Steiner

2001 Spiritualism, Madame Blavatsky, and Theosophy: An Eyewitness View of Occult History 2003 Isis Mary Sophia: Her Mission and Ours: Selected Lectures and Writings by Rudolf Steiner

2004 Start Now! A Book of Soul and Spiritual Exercises Additionally, beginning in the late 1970s (as mentioned), Chris worked intermittently for two decades on a history of Western esotericism. This study and writing enabled him to bring wide and deep knowledge of esotericism to his work as editor in chief of Anthroposophic Press/SteinerBooks and Lindisfarne Books. Further, serving as editor of these two imprints enabled him to add chapters to his history, published in 2003 as An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West. <>

An Endless Trace is not focused explicitly on Rudolf Steiner or anthroposophy. If not explicit, how might it be implicitly anthroposophic? The best answer to that question might be another book by Chris that is similarly not explicitly anthroposophic: The Voice of the Eagle: The Heart of Celtic Christianity. John Scotus Eriugena’s Homily on the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John (2003). Including Endless Trace and Voice of the Eagle, that’s six books in five years. <> Chris was spiritually thirsty, and karmically found the deep well of Steiner’s anthroposophic wisdom. His role as editor of SteinerBooks and primary author of introductions to Steiner’s Collected Works, has the sure stamp of karma. ... to edit and introduce the writings of Rudolf Steiner, and to do so generously and brilliantly. ...

Chris’s success in these introductions is due to a steady avoidance of common flaws: they are thorough but not overwhelmed by detail and tangents; literary but not flowery; scholarly but not pedantic. Perhaps most remarkable, his introductions are reverent but neither boastful nor possessive; he shows Steiner’s importance but does not hold Steiner so close that the reader would be forced to access Steiner with Chris attached...

While it is not untrue to say that Steiner was a Christian, it would be truer to say that he advances Christianity in the light of his esoteric research. More specifically, Steiner’s purpose was to lead his audiences and readers to Christ. Similarly, with a deep Celtic and Russian Sophianic Christian sensibility, Chris’s encounter with Steiner’s Christology provides him with a spiritual path and career of service. ... Chris has been able to enter the mysteries that Steiner has revealed in hundreds of lectures. As his veil is always thin, he can see into Steiner’s ideas, just as Steiner, with the thinnest of thin veils, was able to see actual spiritual beings, including several who serve and two who oppose the evolution of human consciousness.

Steiner asserts that the evolution of consciousness will advance by the evolution of thinking, particularly thinking suffused with love. He taught and exemplified a way of thinking that joins the soul to the universe, including especially to spiritual beings in relation to human souls. Humanity has evolved, and presumably (but not necessarily) will continue to evolve....

As Chris explains repeatedly, Steiner was a thinker and teacher whose concerns and insights were not at all limited to, or even especially focused on, ancient revelations. While he researched the past, his mission was concerned primarily with the present and future. He was deeply involved in his time, in early twentieth-century

Europe, an heir of Goethe and German Idealism, Marx’s sociopolitical economics, and Blavatsky’s “lifting the veil of Isis.” He was a leader in contemporary art and aesthetics, a keen observer of the first global war, and a prophet of the remaining decades of the twentieth century. <>

Autobiography: Chapters in the Course of My Life, 1861–1907

Christopher Bamford refers to Rudolf Steiner’s Autobiography as “both a testament and a legacy.” As a testament, it contains Steiner’s own account of the inner and outer events that contributed to his identity and mission. As a legacy, it sought to shape the way his life and teaching would be interpreted after his death—which he sensed might be not far off. <>

In ways that reveal the force of destiny, Steiner’s early life, the more as illumined by Chris’s introduction, clearly sowed the seeds of his adult life. As Chris writes,

He had achieved what he had set out to do. He had set down a clear record that could stand both as a commentary on the evolution of his teaching and as a directive for its continuation. He had demonstrated the clear, unbroken line of his own development. He had established the deep, abiding concerns that had directed his life. He had brought his life to a critical turning point, which many of his first readers could still recall.

<> Before Steiner could argue convincingly for the restoration of spirit in matter, he had first to study their initial unity as found in indigenous or shamanic consciousness. Steiner possessed an atavistic ability to see spirit active in matter. To develop this ability fur ther, he was providentially led to a shaman, Felix Kogutzki, who in addition to introducing his receptive student to the secret powers of plants, led him to a discarnate Master who gave Steiner, at the age of eighteen, his life task. Then, while a college student, he was led to his philosophical mentor, Karl Julius Schröer, who arranged for Steiner, at twenty-two, to be named editor of the national edition of the scientific writings of Goethe. Chris’s introduction shows these and other events and influences as a coherent whole. They reveal the course of an extraordinary life carefully crafted by spiritual beings and given biographical expression by Steiner’s brilliance, sacrifice, reverence, and humility.

Toward the end of Chris’s informative and inspiring introduction, he offers an ideal summation: “The Autobiography is the account of a spiritual development.” It is Rudolf Steiner’s path to healing “the great wound that divides human beings from their cosmic birthright: to live

as earthly and spiritual beings in a spiritual and physical universe.” Steiner’s Autobiography shows how, in a destined life, thinking can become deed, perception can become participation, and human beings through their own activity can become coworkers and co-creators of heaven and earth. ... The level of our effort and attainment will pale by comparison with Steiner’s, but the mission of every spiritual teacher requires that it be met by the effort of striving souls. Both are necessary. <>

Start Now! A Book of Soul and Spiritual Exercises

Chris Bamford’s introduction to his Start Now! must rank as his most important writing on Rudolf Steiner, anthroposophy, and spiritual practice. The subtitle of this important book is not an exag geration: Meditation Instructions, Meditations, Exercises, Verses for Living a Spiritual Year, Prayers for the Dead, and Other Practices for Beginning and Experienced Practitioners.

To a degree comparable to Steiner’s books on soul and spiritual exercises, this collection of his works was inspired by Chris’s own spiritual practices and devotion to spiritual and esoteric knowledge. The thirty-eight-page introduction is, in effect, a handbook or introductory guide to the spiritual life, complemented by the exercises that give this volume its practical value. <>

It would be difficult to imagine a more useful book for anthroposophic practice. It shows the remarkable extent to which Chris is a “practitioner scholar.” Given the press of busy lives, the title of his book, while accurate, could as rightly be titled “Start Again!” <>

Spiritualism, Madame Blavatsky, and Theosophy

<> HPB . . . introduced world religions and world history into the theretofore parochial and tightly guarded confines of Western thought. It was she, likewise, who opened up the possibility of ecumenical and interreligious dialogue and laid the ground (with the philosopher Hegel) for a truly global theory of history as evolution of consciousness. Above all, it was her stubborn, independent, open-minded exploration that broke open the hegemony of the aging secret societies and began the process of tearing the veil of the temple and making esotericism part of cultural life in two equally important ways. She made available—for rational reflection, speculation, and contemplation—long-hidden spiritual teachings and doctrines, both Western and Eastern, about the universe and humanity’s place and role within it. At the same time, she introduced and began to

teach methods and practices of inner work by which any person of good intention willing to make the effort could achieve direct cognition of the realities she expounded, more theoretically, in her books. Thus, despite herself and her passionately held antiChristianity, she was, perhaps without knowing it, of Christ’s party. <>

Isis Mary Sophia: Her Mission and Ours

Again personally, scarcely any topic in this compilation of Chris’s introductions is as inspiring or as close to Chris’s mind and heart as his often-quoted, poetic introduction to the collection that constitutes Isis Mary Sophia . ... A scholar of Russian Sophiology—i.e., a scholar of the descriptions of Sophia in the writings of Vladimir Solovyov, Sergei Bulgakov, and Pavel Florenski—Chris begins his introduction with a remarkable passage from Vladimir Solovyov’s essay, “Three Meetings”:

Let it be known today, the Divine Feminine is descending to Earth in an incorruptible body. In the unfading light of the new Goddess, Heaven has become one with the depth.

Chris’s own poetic announcement reveals a similar beauty and authority. Since it was published in 2003, Chris’s volume, particularly for his informed and inspiring introduction, has been the obvious first source for anyone interested in Rudolf Steiner’s description of Sophia. An evolving reality: The mystery of Christ and Sophia

In his beautiful introduction, Chris emphasizes that “Sophia is a still-evolving mystery.” Perhaps because Sophia, like everything feminine in modern Western culture, has been diminished relative to and by the masculine, it is tempting for advocates for the reality and efficacy of Sophia to render her more objectively at the price of her mystery. By contrast, following Steiner, Chris emphasizes her elusive character. ...

Over the centuries, the being of Sophia, or feminine Divine Wisdom, has been emerging from the mists of ancient history, like Venus from the waters, to become a sign and mystery of our times. Though it is difficult to say who she is, wherever we turn, we see traces of her coming—as if tracking the fringes of her mantle as it brushed aside the tangled, sclerotic cobwebs of centuries of cerebration. As she draws near, much that was forgotten is reentering consciousness, not only as memory but also from the future, as possibility. It demands that we rethink who we are, whence we have come, and whither we are going. ... She is a great secret,

an open secret, perhaps, but one at once so profound that it reaches to the very substance of the world and so close to our essential humanity, who we are, that we cannot see her. Beginning in God before creation, she unfolded through creation and now participates in creation’s redemption. <>

Christianity as Mystical Fact and The Mysteries of Antiquity

<> As is evident in these lectures, Steiner was convinced that Christ and Christianity were guiding the evolution of consciousness prior to Christ’s incarnation. Similarly, through his disciplined effort to think spiritually, Steiner was in relation with Christ and Christianity before his experience of Cosmic Christ in 1899. Steiner’s experience of Christ resembled the conversion of Saul to Paul on his way to Damascus—sudden but with a long preparation. In these lectures Steiner presents Greek initiates as servants of the evolution of consciousness necessary for the mission of Christ. ...

Christianity as Mystical Fact is ... a watershed in Steiner’s entire work ... the fulfillment of twenty-five years of intense inner and outer work. In that sense, it is not a sidebar between the earlier epistemological works and the later anthroposophical ones, but something new—a truly evolutionary, creative transition; it is a flowering of what came before, containing the seeds of what is to come after. In it, what was achieved in earlier works epistemologically as a transformation of knowing is shown to be ontological, a question of the cosmic transformation of being—a new kind of transformation made possible by the transformative being of Being itself, the Christ, the Son of the Father, now available to all through the cosmic fact of the Incarnation. <>

Staying Connected

... It is obvious that Chris has a deep, existential relation to this topic. While reading Chris’s writing on “staying connected” to the dead, Joseph Campbell’s description of the “Hero’s Journey” comes to mind. It is as though, while facing the immanent death of his beloved wife Tadea, Chris went in search of the meaning of what they were facing, and what would follow. Although it is too often not noticed, there is a necessary second half to the hero’s journey—the journey back to the community with wisdom, exactly what Chris, drawing on Steiner’s spiritual research, has provided. ... Chris concludes on a personal note:

I must say that living and working with the concepts and exercises contained in these talks and meditations

has changed my life. This is a most practical book. Do what it recommends and you will experience the presence of the dead in your lives. You will know that the community of human beings on both sides of the threshold is not theory, but reality. <>

Love and Its Meaning in the World

Chris’s introduction to Love and Its Meaning in the World is the concluding selection in this volume. ...

In six short years, in addition to continuing (and continually deepening) his spiritual research and making every conceivable attempt to strengthen the Anthroposophical Society and endow it with all that it would need to carry on his mission after his death, Steiner founded at least five major initiatives, still thriving today, and nurtured their beginnings: the threefold movement for the renewal of the social organism; Waldorf education; anthroposophic medicine; a movement for religious renewal, The Christian Community; and biodynamic agriculture.

<> Steiner’s lectures on love are prevalent and defining throughout his career. His first book, Christianity as Mystical Fact (1902) includes several pages of “The Mystery of Love” and his profoundly moving last address, while he was ill and unlikely to recover, [enjoins us]:

Take the word of Love of the Will of Worlds Into your soul’s aspiring, actively.

... It seems fitting that this introduction to Chris Bamford’s several dozen introductions to the writings and lectures of Rudolf Steiner should conclude on the theme of love. Steiner embodied and taught love; Chris engaged Steiner and returned the love—hundreds of thousands of words in front of fifty volumes over forty years. Love is not too strong a word for the engagement of Christopher Bamford with the life, mission, and work of Rudolf Steiner.

Robert McDermott , PhD, President Emeritus, California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and CIIS Professor, Philosophy and Religion. Publications: As editor: Radhakrishnan; The Essential Aurobindo; Six Pillars: Sri Aurobindo’s Major Works; The New Essential Steiner; Classics from the Journal for Anthroposophy (10 vols.); Rudolf Steiner, The Bhagavad Gita and the West; American Philosophy and Rudolf Steiner; Philo-Sophia: Wisdom Goddess Traditions (with Debashish Banerji); As author: Steiner and Kindred Spirits.

What is “Biology Worthy of Life”?

by Steve Talbott

Editor’s Note: At the Nature Institute in Ghent, NY, Steve Talbott is quietly building a solid new book on the realities of biology—of our understanding of life. This comes as we contemplate a vast wave of extinctions and an increasingly shocking alteration in the planetary context for life. Here are a few thoughts from Steve’s pages to give you a sense of his goals.

Imagine that, as biologists, we accepted animals the way we all accept them outside the laboratory. That is, imagine that we regarded them, even for scientific purposes, as beings with their own intentions and meanings, their own sensed worlds, their own strivings and characteristic way of life—beings with whom we can enter into living relationships. Would this not be a revolution to outstrip all scientific revolutions? Would we not find ourselves wrestling scientifically with things we can, in any case, scarcely help believing? Not such an unhappy prospect!

After Crick and Watson unraveled the structure of DNA, molecular biologists were destined, so they thought, to understand organisms as physical mechanisms and nothing more. Instead, ever more sophisticated experimental techniques have been revealing organisms whose wisdom and subtlety, whose powers of development and adaptation, whose embodied insight and effective communication, and whose evolutionary ingenuity far outstrip our current capacities for comprehension. Yes, new molecular “mechanisms,” isolated from the organism as a whole, continue to be proclaimed daily. But when we restore these products of our one-sided methods to their living contexts, allowing them to speak their own meanings, what they actually show us is this: every organism is intent upon telling the eloquent story of its own life. Its living intentions govern and coordinate the lawful physical performance of its body, not the other way around. No, you haven’t been informed about these developments in the pages of The New York Times or even Scientific American. Indeed, many biologists themselves lament that their unavoidable focus on the minutia of their own narrow research topics prevents their paying adequate attention to wider fields of discovery. But the reality now being proclaimed from the pages of every technical journal could hardly be more dramatic. Perhaps the central truth is this: we human beings discover our conscious, in-

ner capacities—our capacities to think and mean, to plan and strive—unconsciously and objectively reflected back to us from every metabolic process, every signaling pathway, every gene expression pattern in all the organisms we study. We are akin to these organisms in ways we have long forgotten. This matters in a world whose future has been placed in our hands. No form of life is alien to us.

You deserve to know what is going on — not via the heated and fruitless rhetoric of the science–religion wars, and not through vague references to vibrations, energy fields and quantum mysteries, but rather directly from the front lines of biological research. That’s what this project is about.

The most important thing

A great deal of my work on the “Biology Worthy of Life” project is now being distilled into a freshly written, book-length presentation I am calling Evolution As It Was Meant To Be—And the Living Narratives That Tell Its Story. This presentation now has its own home page. You will see there that several chapters are now available online. I will be uploading additional chapters on a more or less regular basis, one aim being to invite your criticism. There is also an overview of the book.

My hope is to create an eminently readable, compelling text, as free of technical jargon as possible. At the same time, I hope that professional biologists will be able to recognize the force of the strikingly unconventional positions being taken.

The organism and its evolution look dramatically different from the picture given in conventional textbooks once we accept what we all in fact cannot help knowing—namely, that every organism pursues its own purposes by means of its active capacities—capacities for developing and shaping its own body, sensing and responding to stimuli, repairing and healing, signaling and communicating. At every level of observation—and all the way down to its molecular structures and processes— the organism displays a plastic, adaptive power responsive to context. The essential elements of the organism are activities and dynamically maintained relationships, not static things.

Through its living activity, the organism speaks. That’s why biologists use terms such as information, code, message, signal , program , response, communication, and so on—all in order to express the language-like activity they

can’t help trying to describe (even if they prefer to think in terms of computerized rather than living speech). And just as words and gestures carry many meanings, even opposite meanings, depending on their context, so it is with all the structures and processes of our cells, including our genes. The language of the organism is turning out to be vastly more complex, expressive, and nuanced than our old, mechanistic heritage ever led us to expect.

Every organism’s mastery of its own developmental processes could hardly be more obvious in its relevance to evolution. We routinely observe how a complex, multicellular animal creates radically different phenotypes1 within its own body. These cellular phenotypes are directionally achieved along differentiating cell lineages—and, at a more complex level, we can say something similar about tissue and organ phenotypes. Further, all these divergent types are stably and integrally bound together into the coherent life of one particular creature. And, finally, this creature as a whole proceeds through continual transformation from the earliest embryo onward—all while managing to preserve the unique qualitative substance and character of its kind as it persists and adapts through all the vicissitudes of its existence.

The entire drama of the germline2 has been rapidly revealing itself in recent years as a remarkable focus of the organism’s creative “attention.” Are we to believe, then, that this is the one cell lineage in which the organism’s normal, future-oriented activity goes silent? Or that, with all the organism’s expertise at producing, adapting, and stably maintaining diverse phenotypes even without changes in DNA sequence, it “refuses” to employ this expertise when it comes to the preparation of inheritances? Or that the power with which the organism conforms all its cells, tissues, and organs to a unified and integral whole adapted as far as possible to current conditions is a power lost to it in the management of its own germline?

It’s time we let organisms speak for themselves. That is the opportunity and responsibility of the new science of biology.

Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org) is Senior Researcher, The Nature Institute (natureinstitute.org) where his main project is Biology Worthy of Life (bwo.life) and he is completing a book Evolution As It Was Meant To Be (bwo.life/bk).

1 The observable characteristics in an individual resulting from the expression of genes; the clinical presentation of an individual with a particular genotype. [NCI Dictionary of Genetic Terms]

2 The germline is the egg and sperm cells that join to form an embryo. Germline DNA is the source of DNA for all other cells in the body.

Soul Size

Soul-Size: The Eternal Psychosomatic Dilemma, by James Dyson, MD; Portalbooks (2022), 208 pages.

review by Fred Dennehy

There is a tendency to imagine evil appearing on a grand scale, replete with fire, thunder and assorted prodigies of the senses. It may be, though, that where Ahriman is concerned, it is more likely to leak through between texts or in the empty spaces where questions should be asked. Ahriman numbs us before he crushes us.

Because we are all long-term inheritors of a worldview in which meaning is felt to be conditioned by the jouncing and lurching of particles or waves, and purpose is seen as a metonym for chance, we should not be surprised to find adversity nearby, in the most domestic of coverings.

The question, as always, is what to do about it, and this book speaks to that question.

Although Dr. James Dyson is identified as its author, Soul-Size is not a focused study by him or even a summary of any of his conceptual structures. Rather, it is a vivid mosaic of his thinking and his doing.

It is about service, “where the inner path and social responsibility become inseparable from one another.” (p. 10). It is “a stimulus that demonstrates how [Dr. Dyson} thinks, combines, and transforms, thereby bridging anthroposophy not only to Psychosynthesis but also to more mainstream psychologies” (Introduction, xii). It is about being in the space which is leading into the future as that future emerges, the space that is finding its way, for the self and the world together, to a restoration of the meaning and purpose that has been sucked out of our reality.

Dr. Dyson has studied, taught, and practiced medicine and psychotherapy extensively. He holds a Master’s degree in Psychosynthesis Psychology and he is certified professionally by the Medical Section of the School of Spiritual Science. He worked for thirty years at the Park Attwood Clinic in Worcestershire, England, which he cofounded, practicing complementary and anthroposophical medicine. He also co-founded the Association for Anthroposophic Psychology in North America (“AAP”), where he teaches today.

Soul-Size was edited by three colleagues associated with AAP, Christine Houston, Zheni Nasi, and David Tresemer. They have put together selections from Dr. Dyson’s Master’s thesis on Psychosynthesis, talks given

by him in the course of various workshop trainings, and interviews conducted by the editors, as well as by Daniel Mackenzie on his podcast Above and Beyond. Many of these, and the thesis selections in particular, are abstruse and demanding, but we are very fortunate in the compendium they have gathered together.

Crucial not only to Dr. Dyson’s theory, but to his practice, is a recognition of the invisible physical archetype of the human, the Spirit Germ that informs the living, etheric processes of growth and bodily function, shaping the body rhythmically into an instrument of the conscious ‘I’. So is the perception of two streams of time, one that flows forward from the past to the future, internalizing as concept and memory; and another, hidden stream of will, that flows from the future to the past, “active within unconscious sources of life and sentience,” and embedded in metabolism and functioning in transformation. (p. 30) To these add an awareness of the unconscious crossing of the threshold that has disrupted all of humanity over the last century.

Consider the difference between a psychotherapy that operates on a foundation of such insights and one that does not even confront the concerns that provoke them. Think of a therapeutic protocol the basis for which is the mixing and matching of symptom to pill. This is the choice that is out there now—between a practice which sees its patients’ life choices as dictated by comfort and utility, and one that recognizes the active reality of karma and destiny. What is implicated is not only life advice, but the diagnosis and cure, rather than palliation, of real psychological and physical infirmities. How on earth did we ever get to the point where this is our choice?

Soul-Size demonstrates that Dr. Dyson has chosen his path of action, initiating the enormous task of mainstreaming anthroposophy into contemporary psychology, while at the same time removing his own preconceptions and habits by returning to free moments of beginning. He has the discipline to approach the elements of his practice on the most elemental grounds. In his Organ Workshop, for instance, he explores, with other psychology professionals, the feel, the texture, and the meaning of the kidney, the liver, the lung, and the heart. He senses their relation to the four elements and the four ethers.

His focus is developmental, and so there is special attention in this collection on adolescence, on education,

and on the significance, in the emergence of the self, of precisely when compassion begins to manifest, and the Parsifal question—What ails thee?—is asked.

The most crucial of our developmental phases is the earliest, what Dr. Dyson calls the Sacred Wound. This is the moment of incarnation, when the eternal Individuality takes on physical form, when wholeness is dismembered and immortality is lifted. It is the fundamental trauma that nonetheless enables our personal mission to serve together with the mission of the earth, and to make the renewal of wholeness our profound, existential experience.

While the Sacred Wound is a necessary part of human evolution, our experience of it can be devastating. In therapy, the aloneness and the homesickness that comes of it has to be distinguished from what Christine Houston calls “the loneliness that comes from lack of authentic intimacy with others.” The pain of the one, recognized for what it is, may signal an entrance into spiritual awareness. The pain of the other is a call for discerning intervention by engaged and attentive professionals.

The late Christopher Bamford once said with a smile that the best characterization of anthroposophy he knew was “optimism.” And if there is a single tone that pervades these writings, that rises to a theme, it is hopefulness. Operating within the socioeconomic envelope that surrounds any courageous endeavor today, like the work of the Camphill movement, you have to have what Owen Barfield calls “a goodness of heart and a steady furnace in the will” in order to be able to serve in a way that is both original and consequential

For decades, Dr. Dyson has been doing what he was meant to do face to face with the Ahrimanic ice fields. He has made his way not around them but into them, serving as he learns. Personal and social awakening have been two facets of a single initiation, but one that is not confined to him alone. Those who have heard him speak ex tempore or have witnessed his work have been infected with his optimism. They will welcome this compilation. For those who do not know him, this will be a fine introduction.

We can all hope that there will be more to come.

Frederick Dennehy is associate editor of being human, a retired lawyer and active thespian, and a class holder of the School for Spiritual Science of the Anthroposophical Society.

Consecrating Humanity

In The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner, Guenther Wachsmuth writes,

Between September 7 and 22 there occurred the Third Course for Theologians. Out of the circle of persons who had shared in the course of the previous year, those had now come together who intended to devote their entire activity in the future to this task... approximately 45 persons (right). And to these Rudolph Steiner spoke in fourteen gatherings. What was essential did not consist only in the content of the lectures, but in the event that the spiritual teacher bestowed upon these persons the substance of a new cult, which they received during these festival days for their future life work. The inauguration of the cult liturgy took place and the consecration of the priests.

The “Christian Community” had been founded... the birth of a new sacramentalism which came out of spiritual knowledge. (465-466)

The Christian Community is present worldwide, a century later, in about 35 countries. Here are its own descriptions of its ongoing work and the centenary conference.

About The Christian Community

In the midst of the many religious and ideological communities of our time, The Christian Community has its own community life. On the one hand, this is based on the renewal and further development of the Christian service, the Mass, into an act of consecration for human beings. On the other hand, there is a new Christian confession or Creed, which contains the truth of the Christian faith in a form appropriate to our time.

Worship and confession are brought to life through the shared and individual religious practice of the faithful. This also includes a new approach to the Gospel and to prayer. The Christian Community is therefore a community of sacraments. Baptism, confirmation, confession, marriage, ordination and last rites are connected with the central sacrament, the consecration of man.

“To João Torunsky, the new Erzoberlenker the following applies: ‘Human beings find access to truth within themselves... We have the task of forming a community of individualities.’ Therefore, there should be no dogmatism and no moral laws imposed from above. At the same time the search for Christ unites us and height-

ens our awareness to not only being a responsible member of humanity but also part of creation as a whole. The Christian Community considers this a global and spiritual task which cannot be fulfilled by their members alone. It... seeks ecumenism.”

The Logos Conference

“LOGOS – Consecrating Humanity” will mark the beginning of the second century of the Christian Community (October 7-11, 2022 www.logos-2022.org ) and is to bear witness to this openness; it has been prepared by many communities in smaller meetings. LOGOS will unfold with nearly 120 three-day workshops, over sixty speakers, in Dortmund, in northwestern Germany near the Netherlands. It is planned to have as many as 2000 participants including a large youth gathering. Themes of the conference include:

LOGOS — Consecrating Humanity Original beginning and goal of all development

The Sacraments

Healing and consecration of humankind and the world by means of their transformation

Archangel Michael Zeitgeist and silent helper of humankind

Setting forth into the second century How do we develop the forces of inspiration in a renewed Christianity?

About the conference name : LOGOS, the creating power of the Word of God, created heaven and earth, all that lives upon the earth and all human beings. The creating Word incarnated and lives with us now and ev-

ermore into the future. The Word is the foundation of The Christian Community; as Christians, our substance is the Word; we want to serve it.

What is this Word that sounds toward us ever and again? We may call it a ‘Word of Love’ which embraces us as we are, with all our character traits, our strengths and weaknesses, achievements and failures. This Word of Love affirms us and guides us in the act of becoming; it supports and leads us, yet leaves us free. The Word meets the whole of mankind and each individual human being where they are, transforms them, and in doing so it consecrates them.

It is our hope that our commitment to this origin, goal and enduring power of metamorphosis may inspire and sustain us as we move into the second century of The Christian Community. In this way we seek to be true to our intention to be a movement for religious renewal for the benefit of the whole of Christianity.

Giving Thanks to Our Earth

Our objective is to compensate in a living way for the unavoidable environmental damage caused when our conference guests travel by air and/or automobile from far away countries. The solution—one already in practice in countless places—is to plant trees for the sake of making a living contribution to the ecological footprint. Often, however, such plantings are anonymous and unmanageable. So we sought out initiatives that have arisen in connection with anthroposophy and the Christian Community, which have an individual character and have been created by people with whom we can be in constant contact. ... In our search for personal initiatives, we were able to find three already existing projects: Fruit Garden in Argentina. In Missiones, a state in northeastern Argentina, ... creating a tangerine orchard, the fruit of which will be available to the children of the Guarani, an aboriginal tribe, for years to come. Green Labyrinth... near a biodynamic farm on the Philippine island of Palawan, to be created in a public park and as an invitation for people to walk the path to the center—a small, covered pavilion—and to experience a moment of pause, in prayer or meditation, so that they may then turn again to the outside world with renewed strength. Tree Cross. The Tree Cross is a tree planting initiative that was called to life by Joseph Beuys over 30 years ago... along the former border of East and West Germany... All three tree-planting projects live in the consciousness of priests and congregations of the Christian Community, and they are involved in these projects’ implementation.

Thank You, Katherine!

from Helen-Ann Ireland & John Bloom

We are writing to let you know about an important transition on the Leadership Team of the Anthroposophical Society in America. Katherine Thivierge, our colleague on the Leadership Team and General Council, has decided after seven busy and change-filled years to step back from her position as Director of Operations.

Katherine joined the Leadership Team (LT) in 2015, bringing new energy, legal and financial expertise, and a deep and abiding commitment to anthroposophy. At the time, the LT had been newly created by the General Council, with the goal of serving the health, development, and success of the ASA. Katherine’s vision and commitment helped bring clarity, transparency, and effective collaboration around financial reporting and decision-making.

Among her many skills, Katherine is also a trained Speech artist, with a love of language and expression. She has graciously brought speech exercises and experiences to General Council meetings and national conferences alike. Katherine’s work has been essential in bringing us to a place of financial health, good practices, and organizational sustainability. We are truly grateful for the many gifts she has shared.

In her letter to the LT and Council, she wrote: One of the greatest joys has been the many people I have the honor and pleasure of getting to know through my work—my colleagues, the Finance Committee, the Human Resources Committee, numerous work groups, the amazing individuals who have and do serve on the General Council, and the many members of the Anthroposophical Society in America. You all enrich my life.

Katherine has graciously offered her services in a limited capacity in the future, so she won’t be going far. Katherine has also given us the gift of time, as we look at the organizational structure of the Leadership Team and imagine new ways of working together. We’ll keep you posted on our progress and our plans. We invite you to join us in deep appreciation to Katherine, for the many essential ways that she has supported the ASA and served anthroposophy over the past seven years.

news for

members & friends of the Anthroposophical Society in America

Welcome, Angela!

by Tess Parker

Exciting news! As of March 2022, Angela Foster has joined the ASA staff as Programs Assistant. She brings a history of working in an anthroposophical way and her acting mission statement is to help create (low-cost or free) opportunities for adults to encounter anthroposophy.

Angela lives in Atlanta, GA, with her husband, Patrick, and two teenage daughters. She is also the happy shepherd of two mini sheep, Luke and Mario. She has been a member of the Eastern Regional Council and a volunteer for the ASA for many years. She is an active volunteer in the Atlanta community, both with the Waldorf School of Atlanta and Anthroposophy Atlanta, the local branch. She

NOTICE OF ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING

The General Council hereby gives notice that the annual general meeting of members of The Anthroposophical Society in America, Inc., will be held Friday, October 7, 2022 via Zoom for 90 minutes 7pm Eastern, 6pm Central, 5pm Mountain, and 4pm Pacific time.

manages the Anthroposophical Resource Center (ARC) in Decatur which houses a small lending library, guest rooms, and meeting space for events.

Prior to taking on more work with the ASA, Angela was a founding participant of the Applied Anthroposophy Course. She also initiated a daily practice group for the six basic exercises that have met consistently on Zoom throughout the last two years. She will complete the Foundation Course in Goethean Science at the Nature Institute in Ghent, NY over the course of this summer 2022. We are so pleased to have Angela’s inspiration, imagination, organization, and joyful goodwill on our team! You can reach out to her at angela@anthroposophy.org

Tess Parker (tess@anthroposophy.org) is ASA Director of Programs.

Hospitality to New Generations

by Nathaniel Williams

At the beginning of 2023, I will be joining colleagues at the Goetheanum in Switzerland as the next leader of the Youth Section. In recent months I have been making transitions in New York, where I have lived and worked over the last fourteen years, rounding off responsibilities and turning toward this new task. Looking back, I am feeling gratitude for all the people I have been able to work with and learn from.

As this new, and unique, task comes closer I feel anticipation for the meetings and collaborations to come. Most sections of the School for Spiritual Science are dedicated to focused specializations, such as agriculture, natural science, or medicine. The Youth Section is dedicated to working with anthroposophy in connection with the early span of adult life. Its closest relative among the sections is the General Section, which is dedicated to universally significant facets of anthroposophy, no matter one’s vocation or specialization.

If you have not been to the Goetheanum, in order to visit you have to climb a hill. Sometimes people even refer to the Goetheanum as “the hill”. While the Youth Sec-

tion is international, and there are groups all over the world working together in its spirit, the placement of the Youth Section house in Dornach can speak to us. The Youth Section house is at the bottom of the hill. You are likely to be greeted by it on the way up. It is a place to tune ear and heart to the young people that come toward the Goetheanum. It is the Goetheanum come down to meet them, but it is also the Goetheanum come down to meet itself. While young people can come to feel they find something that belongs to them at the Goetheanum, the Goetheanum must also feel that it finds itself in the spirit and inspirations of the rising generation.

Relating to the spirit does not only happen through disciplined or established pathways, it must include a sincere, heartfelt hospitality to new generations.

This hospitality requires the lowering of barriers, the creating of openness. Not an openness that leads to dissolution, but one that can tolerate challenging the taboos of our time. Not a dissipating openness, a courageous one. Today we can speak casually of cynicism and despair, violence or sexuality but we can feel we are violating sacred agreements when we venture into a discussion of the interweaving of

Angela Foster, left, and Tess Parker

the earth, the human being and the creative spirit. Avoiding living explorations of the spirit can become unbearable, for the conversation is prompted by the dramatic and lyrical form of our own experience. While we effortlessly imagine our universe as solely comprised of matter and physical energy, the next moment we inwardly trace the inner movements of a friend’s musings or humor. Today these two wings of our lives are in perpetual dissonance, and this dissonance rings out, “Wake up to the question you are!” The Youth Section must be a place of courage that allows people to speak intimately about this subconscious tumult, but it must also rise to the intellectual challenges so many young people face in institutions of higher learning. It must try to support students to approach their areas of study in a way that is simply not possible in conventional institutions today.

As I look forward toward this new task I am sensitive to a peculiar and widespread atmosphere of recent decades. Not long ago an American writer described the mood as a time when “…the unspeakable having happened so many times everyone was still in shock, still reeling from what they’d seen, what they’d done, or failed to do.” It is a necessity that we find ways out of this shock and stupor. It is true, we need to learn from the tragedies of the past century, and we are indeed surrounded by ghosts of bygone years, signs that we are none the wiser from the path of suffering of the last century. Today we live with urgent challenges in every facet of life, from ecological destruction to social justice, from technological revolutions to widespread extractive capitalism, from commercialized culture to epidemics of mental dis-ease. Resigned obsession with collective and personal failures must give way to a renewed will for the good and positive activity. This is an inherent capacity particular to young adulthood, and it is a need everywhere today, in all areas of life, the Anthroposophical Society not excluded. The Goetheanum has a unique contribution to make to today’s challenges, and this will be affected by its hospitality toward, and collaboration with, young adults. It is with my thoughts and heart turned in such directions that I prepare for the upcoming move.

Nathaniel Williams co-founded Free Columbia, a community cultural initiative in Columbia County, NY, and initiated the M.C. Richards Program, putting to work ideas about how education and culture can support, or oppose, our facing of current social and ecological challenges. He graduated in 2002 from studies in painting and anthroposophy at the neueKUNSTschule in Basel, Switzerland, being active since as an artist and teacher in art. He has been an active collaborator and contributor to the Youth Section for many years, in North America and worldwide, and has served on the ASA General Council as member at-large and Secretary. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the State University of New York at Albany.

Love > Fear

by Deb Abrahams-Dematte

Love and fear, beauty and mystery. This is what’s on my mind right now. The world remains such a confusing place. It can be a challenge every day to be optimistic and to believe and experience that our individual actions and intentions can make any difference at all. But we must keep going together, finding and bringing hope and inspiration. What we each choose to do has ripples in the practical and the spiritual world. And in this overwhelming time, it is important to take heart, remember that our actions can have a positive impact, and keep willing and practicing the good. For me, anthroposophy brings inspiration, deep practice, and heart-felt intention to our shared journey.

“Water, womb, silence, and mother, the inner and subtle, soul and spirit, mystery and secret, all try to name you.”

— Robert McDermott

The coming together of the practical and the spiritual was in beautiful evidence at the Sophia Rising! conference held in April. It was an incredible gift to be together in person, for the first face-to-face conference since the 2019 AGM. 115 friends from around the country gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a place of powerful nature, art, and beauty.

Connection and attention to nature remind us of our own interconnectedness with the earth and each other. We each have our own experiences, relationships, and destinies. And these are interwoven with our friends and communities, and with the other members of the ASA and General Anthroposophical Society, too. This awareness and intention helps us to expand and experience love in all its forms. In this challenging time in our history on earth, I’m striving to let go of opinions and instead ask questions. I invite you to join me in this practice if you are so inspired. In this way, we can continue to develop love for this connection of one soul to another, in our Anthroposophical Society and beyond. Because love is greater than fear.

Are you familiar with our Legacy Circle? Members of the Circle share the intention to make a bequest or other planned gift to the Anthroposophical Society, joining to-

gether with the many wonderful legacy donors of the past. Legacy donor Patti Smith believed that with generous support and creative partnerships, the impact of Rudolf Steiner’s work would continue to grow. The generosity of Legacy Circle members continues to bear fruit long into the future. You can become part of our growing

Welcoming New Members

of the Anthroposophical Society in America

3/7/2022 to 7/27/2022

Dawn J Archer, Lakewood CO

Tamara Arnoldy, Edmond OK

Stephan J. Betz, Benicia CA

Pamela C Clark, Dallas OR

Stephanie Estice, Columbus OH

Paul Ferro, North Hollywood CA

John E Fitzpatrick, Ferndale MI

Sarah K Gallagher, Ghent NY

Heather Lanette Good, Jackson MI

Alexandra Gregorakis, Seabrook TX

Noel Gutierrez, Midland City AL

Adam Hall, Stockbridge MA

Marie L Hall, Little River SC

Ann Hipolito, Shoreline WA

Kelly S Hiselman, South Hamilton MA

Wendy Hitt, Santa Fe NM

Henry Jamison Root, Burlington VT

Kedra C Kearis, Upper Darby PA

Ingeborg Kovacs, Venice FL

Dennis Lutz, Marietta GA

Charles P Malone, Hamden CT

Gayane Mezhlumyan, Soquel CA

Ingrid A Miller, Dublin NH

Daniel R Mills, Champaign IL

Julie Neander, McKinleyville CA

Roel Op T Ende, Holladay UT

Francisco Parra Camacho, Ypsilanti MI

Bruce S Paxson, Lisbon OH

Vijay Rajagopal, Tavares FL

Chad A Ratliffe, Santa Barbara CA

Randall R Reder, Tampa FL

Michael Ridpath, Boise ID

Erika Billie Schierhorst, Roseville CA

Georgiana Schmitt, Knoxville TN

Alicia Sovich, Long Beach CA

Grace Stepanova, Davis CA

James W. Taylor, Downers Grove IL

Monte C Taylor, Mesa AZ

Lori L Theis, Shoreline WA

Christopher Patrick Tubman, Willoughby OH

Alice H Vaughan, Newburgh NY

Elizabeth Weiss, Palo Alto CA

Robert P Wolf, Decorah IA

Iman Zabett, Vienna VA

Legacy Circle simply by letting us know of your intention to make a bequest or other legacy gift. There’s no impact on your current finances. And your participation inspires others our Legacy Circle to grow. Please contact me if you would like more information on making a planned gift to the Anthroposophical Society in America.

Together with you, we are devoted to furthering Rudolf Steiner’s work and the anthroposophical movement in the United States, as well as supporting the efforts of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. And we are committed, along with the other National Societies, to help meet their needs, which are impacted both by a change in exchange rates and loss of income during the pandemic. In order to increase our support, we must respectfully ask members to do the same. This may be done by increasing your annual membership contribution and/or making a designated gift to the Goetheanum with your renewal or at any other time of the year. Follow this link if you’d like to make a secure, tax-deductible online gift to the Goetheanum: www.anthroposophy.org/goetheanum And thank you for your on-going consideration and support.

Deb Abrahams-Dematte (deb@anthroposophy.org) is ASA Director of Development

Philip Incao

February 14, 1941–February 28, 2022

Rev. James Hindes’ eulogy, given March 3, 2022

Philip Frank Incao was born in Brooklyn, New York, on February 14, 1941. His older sister, Virginia, had been waiting over five years for her brother to arrive. The two grew up in a family Philip described as warm and loving. His grandfather had come from Sicily through Ellis Island before the turn of the century. Philip’s father, born in 1912, had been raised with many “old country” ways. He was concerned that his children be real Americans and use the opportunities available to them. Philip recalled his first six years of life as permeated by a sense of the war going on in Europe at the time.

Both parents had rebelled against the Catholic Church and were referred to as “free thinkers” in those days. Evidence of their complete freedom from religion gave Philip a shock when he was seven years old and asked his mother, “Mom, will I die one day?” Her answer was “Yes, of course,” He replied, “What then?” Her answer to that question became the inspiration for his life work. “Nothing, you’re dead!” He found her response to that question unsatisfactory, actually very disturbing. Something in his soul bristled at the idea. This moment with his mother evolved into a resolve to study science, attend medical school, and discover for himself answers to the big questions.

The family moved to the small town of Valley Stream on Long Island. At Valley Stream High School, he became an academically outstanding student, excelled at wrestling, played the saxophone, drove a large Ford Thunderbird and, as he recalled, ate beef steak every Friday night. He graduated as salutatorian, the student who ranked second in the class of 1959. That fall, he enrolled in Wesleyan University as a biology major. Always a diligent student he completed his degree in three years while also spending two summers learning Italian in Perugia, Italy. Perhaps the real reason for those study abroad years revealed itself during his second trip in 1962. The journey home required a cruise from Italy to Rotterdam, Holland, where his ship then set sail for the U.S. On that first leg of the trip, a young Dutch woman caught his attention.

They talked a great deal, discussing life and its meaning, but most importantly, they sensed a life partner without realizing it. Those onboard conversations were followed by six years of letter writing.

Philip graduated from Wesleyan at 21 and went to Albert Einstein Medical School in the Bronx, NY. He thought every new class he started “might have the answer to one of life’s riddles.” But he was “severely disillusioned.” At 25, he graduated with an M.D. in 1966 and did his residency in Berkeley, California. Later that year, Annemarie came to America, and they were married soon after that. Philip also joined the United States Navy Submarine Medical Program, which involved spending two months underwater. He transferred to Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California and the young couple were able to live in Berkeley. Philip then commuted to Vallejo for his 8-hour shift for the Navy. Around this time, Annemarie became very ill. Fortunately, the world’s best treatment center for Hodgkin’s disease at Stanford University was just 50 miles away. She recovered completely, and the couple could get on with their lives.

Living in Berkeley, Philip, always a voracious reader, discovered the works of Owen Barfield, which led him directly to Rudolf Steiner. This was the most significant turning point in his life. He found concepts for feelings he’d had since he was a little boy. The real foundation of the world was not tiny particles but a spiritual world that stood behind it and could be known, not merely felt. The mechanistic approach to medicine was no basis for understanding the human body, health, and the essence of life.

When his time as a Navy physician was over, they moved back East; Philip worked for the Yale University student health service until 1970. He preferred working a 40 hour week, which left him free for family and reading Steiner. His interest in anthroposophy then led him to Emerson College in England in 1970. There he was able to experience how the human mind could grasp spiritual truth with clarity. No subject was off-limits. He found a path that gave direction to his most profound questions. It was one of the happiest times of his life. Late that year, he became a father with the birth of his eldest son, Quintin.

The Lukas Klinik, an anthroposophical medical cen-

ter in Arlesheim, Switzerland, was Philip’s next stop. He learned German and experienced a “real turning point of his will,” for he could see and feel how anthroposophical medicine really worked. When he walked into this hospital dedicated to treating cancer, he was astonished to find it “not depressing at all!” Doctors and patients alike knew that cancer was just a phase, though a deadly serious phase, in a life that extends back into a time before birth and forward into a future beyond death.

Philip was 31 when the young family of three returned and settled in North Hampton, MA, where he worked for the University of Massachusetts Student Health Service, again 40 hours per week. That left him free to visit the Camphill Village in Copake, NY, a village devoted to furthering the lives of developmentally and intellectually disabled adults. Soon after his move, Christy Barnes asked him to become the doctor for the new community of Waldorf families, Camphill Village, and anthroposophists that was forming in Ghent, NY.

In 1973 second son Sylvan joined the family after their move to Harlemville, NY. Sebastian joined his brothers in 1975. Philip’s life as a doctor, father, husband, and student of anthroposophy then unfolded in Columbia County for the next 23 years. By all accounts, he excelled at all four. His boys remember a warm, loving family with dad working next door in his office attached to the house. They grew up with a sense that their father was an important man. His waiting room was always full of people who relied upon him. After listening at the door to hear if no patients were present, they themselves could walk in on him anytime if they needed him. They also knew that after dinner, he would almost always retire to his office to work and study until long after they had been sent to bed. He was, they reported, a workaholic.

But he often wrestled with the boys, all three at once. Always concerned for their education, when he pinned one to the floor, he would name the hold that had defeated them. His love for nature led him to show them the wonders and joys of camping. They traveled a lot, learning to cook over an open fire, sleep under the stars, canoe, and hike every kind of terrain. Every year the whole family camped at Cape Cod. Also, every year dad and the boys went into nature, often while mom travelled to Europe. They hiked and camped for weeks in the Adirondacks, in the White Mountains, down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. The four of them canoed down the Mississippi River for three weeks, camping on the banks at night. Another time they hiked the east side of the Si-

erra Nevada mountains. They estimated that before age 21, they had spent more than a year in nature camping under the stars with their father. Philip stood ready to help his sons in any way he could. Having experienced so much together, a very tight bond united the four of them.

As a doctor, Philip was truly exceptional. His appointment with a new patient could last up to two and one-half hours. Patients could feel his concern to understand them and their situation. Many were especially grateful for his thinking/feeling his way (with some patients aloud) to a diagnosis of their problem. He did not simply prescribe medicine but always tried to share with them a way of living that could help them heal themselves. His complex treatment plans required effort from the patient. He was never judgmental, with his patients or anyone else in his life; he exuded compassion for everyone. His home remedy guide was given to thousands seeking help when no doctor was available. In the words of Dr Adam Blanning:

Philip was already practicing anthroposophic medicine in upstate NY at a time when many of today’s most established physicians and teachers were just discovering the depths of spiritually-extended practice. He provided a model of how it could be done Philip served as an early president of PAAM, the anthroposophic physician’s association for all of North America, then went on to teach in its annual training over several decades, and collectively and individually mentored dozens of physicians.

Above all, Philip conveyed an attitude of reassurance so powerful in its gentleness that his patients, family, and friends could feel, “Yes, this has happened. But life goes on, and there are many things we can do now to move forward.” Rooted in the Christian worldview of anthroposophy, his faith could be infectious.

In 1980, Annemarie developed breast cancer. The next ten years were a journey for the whole family, with Philip as lead caregiver. Those were stressful days, balancing all his responsibilities around the need to be present for his wife. Her death in 1991 was heartbreaking for all who knew her but especially for her three sons and Philip, who had to carry on with the soul of the family gone.

The years that followed were challenging for Philip. The river of his life, always deep and steady, now ran into whitewater. While maintaining his practice at the same high standard of care and raising his sons with the same loving guidance, he struggled inwardly to understand how he should live and what to do next. Four years later he knew it was time for a change. In the summer of 1995, he

phoned his friend Rene Querido in Boulder and asked, “Do you need an anthroposophical doctor in Colorado?”

He moved to Denver the following year. He was fifty-five. Philip did not leave all of Harlemville behind. The art school Jennifer Thompson had founded and led for many years in Harlemville was forced by circumstances to close. A long search for a possible new location ended when Renee Querido suggested she come to Denver. She moved two months after Philip. Now the difficulty of finding friends in a new city was solved for both of them. To all reports, unmindful of the consequences, the two anthroposophists, doctor and artist, attended many concerts together, went on long walks through city parks, and spent much time conversing about many things. While preparing Philip’s new office space, he finally noticed what a great helpmate Jennifer had become. They married in Denver in 1999. They were, so to speak, a Godsend for each other. For the next twenty-three years, she was a loving but not uncritical support in his life. It is impossible to imagine Philip’s blossoming in this phase of his life without her. Seven years later, the couple moved to Crestone, a remote village (pop. 141) at 8,000 feet nestled up against the Sangre de Christo mountains in the northeast corner of the San Louis Valley in south-central Colorado. Although many of his former patients continued to consult him by phone, it was Philip’s teaching and mentoring while in Crestone that indeed bore fruit for future generations. He mentored dozens of younger physicians in the art and practice of anthroposophic medicine, in anthroposophy, and altogether with life advice. He was always open to phone calls from younger colleagues. Small gatherings of physicians and others in the healing arts regularly journeyed to Crestone (a four-hour drive from Denver) to experience his seminars. Philip’s knowledge of and respect for the spirit’s ability to weave through the human body, human destinies and human consciousness set the tone for these gatherings. They were inspirational not only for their content but also for the mood of humility and devotion permeating the sessions. During these seminars, Jennifer was always by his side with essential practical help and additional workshops for those seeking a deeper artistic experience of the world of color and form.

Philip was not a miracle worker or saint in the traditional sense. Yet his depth of devotion to God and the spiritual world was at the same time grounded enough to bring countless blessings into the world. I would call him a modern saint.

Diane Elizabeth Mamroe

March 27, 1948–September 15, 2021 from the Lacrosse (WI) Tribune Diane Mamroe crossed the threshold Wednesday, September 15, 2021 at home in the presence of her husband Kurt. She is also survived by her sister, Linda Kroll (Donald Gaubatz); brother, Mark Kroll; nephews: Mathew and Tom Gaubatz; neice, Gwen Gaubatz. by Charles Andrade

This sad news takes me back in time to the late 70’s in Detroit when we were both just young adults working through our nascent understanding of anthroposophy and Waldorf education. What an inspiring time it was to be engaged with such a profound philosophy and to have someone like Diane to share it with.

Diane had a wonderful sense of Midwest balance and composure as she listened to my wilder interpretations of Steiner’s’ ideas. She would quietly lean on her wrist listening until I was done and then bring her more grounded interpretation to the conversation. We would sit for hours after dinner talking over tea and scones all manner of things Steiner had said. But for her personally, it was always the eurythmy that held her imagination, and whatever doubts she had about her ability to do it, she would become a eurythmist. Years later, it was her long fingers and the beautiful hand gestures she made with them that caught my eye as she did eurythmy.

After Detroit she left for London and the London Eurythmy School and was gone for over a year before I too left for England and attended the Tobias Art School in Forest Row with Anne Stockton at the helm. Deeper investigations into anthroposophy, art, and color consumed the weekdays while the weekends often found me training up to London, busking in the subway stations to make enough money to take Diane out for a meal and keep some $$ for the following week. Those were lean times; I was living in a 6’ x 10’ garage with no heat and having the time of my life.

Once, she took me to a performance of the London Eurythmy Group in a small theatre. The music and movement were of course brilliant and I was especially taken by the comedic fairy tales they did. Then the head of the group, Margaret Lundgren, came out to do a solo performance, and the hall was silent. Diane and I were in the bleacher seats of the hall so detail was difficult to see. But shortly after Margaret began her movement it was like I was in the front row. I could see the sweat on

her brow and the subtle movements of her face, it was truly amazing. Afterward, in a café talking, I told her my experience of this solo performance, she simply smiled and said that was the power of eurythmy, to expand the etheric awareness of space. She told me that only a few times had she glimmered such a sense of space but that it was so beautifully uplifting that it carried her for days.

That last year of her training found her in East Grinstead near Forest Row, and happy to be away from the city lights of London. Who knew that so many young eurythmy students were smokers! I mean, like a chimney! Between classes, rushing out behind the buildings to light up, and occasionally joined by a teacher or two!! Sometimes she’d take me to a little area on campus where we could get a bird’s eye view of the area and she’d tell me about each student as they walked across the court. She couldn’t come over to stay with me in Forest Row as I was then living at Michael Hall dorm, making room and board as a dorm parent while doing my second year at Tobias. The day she received her eurythmy diploma was one of the happiest of her life, it was like she’d finally found home. Then she left. Training over, diploma in hand, she returned to Detroit and worked at the Detroit Waldorf Institute as eurythmist with Barbara Glas and as Werner Glas’ PA.

A year and a half later I too returned to Detroit, reluctantly. With the help of my dear friend Patrick Stolfo, I found a job teaching at the Waldorf Institute we studied years earlier, and I renewed my friendship with Diane. As in any place she worked, she was a solid member of the staff and faculty, always helping new students with the plethora of things they needed assistance with—a steady rock to lean on. Our relationship grew more platonic in nature during these times, and in this space she met the man who would become her husband. Kurt Mamroe was a student at the Waldorf Institute, a quiet and gentle man.

I hadn’t seen Diane since those times. Life took us in different directions, she and Kurt moved to Wisconsin, I to Maryland and the Washington Waldorf School. Occasionally we would write each other letters of warmth and friendship. She would write of the joys of life on a farm, being married to Kurt, raising chickens and growing vegetables in her gardens, of working with young students at the Pleasant Ridge Waldorf School in Viroqua, Wisconsin, and of eurythmy. I gave her a painting I’d done a few

years before anthroposophic art training entered my life. It was entitled “Love Runners,” an expressionistic piece that more or less summed us up. There was a lot of passion in its depiction and she liked that. Decades later she sent it back to me, rolled up in a tube and said simply, as was her nature, that she wasn’t running anymore.

I will miss this kind and special woman who always gave more than she received. She isn’t running anymore, she’s finally home. God bless Diane Mamroe, this old soul who took in a young and restless artistic soul and ran with him for a while.

From Linda Kroll, Diane’s sister

You said it so well. Eurythmy was her home. It was as if as soon as she knew of it, it called to her, and in spite of her fears that she was not the best eurythmist and that she had to struggle at times to do it as well as she believed it needed to be done, it lived in her. About three years before her death even as her body was betraying her, making it difficult to walk, when we sang together her arms unconsciously began to make the movements that went with the words or music. I was so moved and said to her, “The eurythmy is still living in you, Diane!” Simply talking about it enlivened her, and even in those last few years when she could still move a bit she somehow shone, even when only her arms and hands began the movements.

Barbara Richardson remembers when Diane performed this poem, dressed in white on white!

Snowflakes

Out of the bosom of the Air, Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken, Over the woodlands brown and bare, Over the harvest-fields forsaken, Silent, and soft, and slow Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take Suddenly shape in some divine expression, Even as the troubled heart doth make In the white countenance confession, The troubled sky reveals The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air, Slowly in silent syllables recorded; This is the secret of despair, Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded, Now whispered and revealed To wood and field.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

David Gershan

August 19, 1947–January 3, 2022

by Alicia Landman-Reiner, MD

David Cecil Gershan MD, anthroposophic physician, crossed over the threshold in the early hours of January 3, 2022 in his home in San Francisco, from heart-related issues. David’s many friends from varied circles were stunned by the sudden departure of this generous, dedicated, deeply spiritual and very funny fellow traveler. Many have also spoken of feeling strongly connected to him after his crossing.

David was born on August 19, 1947, in Washington DC, and grew up there and in Maryland with his younger sister Jane Gershan, called Janie. David had described a difficult family life of hard work, economic insecurity and painful relationships, within which he and his sister formed a caring space. In later life he continued to express great warmth for Janie.

His long-time friends described him as a brilliant student, a perpetual reader, gifted in arts and sciences, and with a wild sense of humor. He was “always joking around, always incredibly funny.” Putting himself through the University of Maryland, David majored in English. David recognized himself as gay man at an early age, and lived the profound inner effects of hiding one’s identity from parents, and dealing with social antipathies.

His mother died in 1968. Around this time Janie and David moved to upstate New York near Ithaca, where he founded Everyman Books and Records Store, “totally decorated” with found items, and supported by David’s construction work. They later moved to Berkeley, California and into collective households; Janie’s life as an artist developed, and David began cooking professionally. There for the first time in David’s life, gay life became open, celebrated, and supported by friends and community.

As described by Mark McKibben, in the early 1970’s friends Bruce Marquardt and Tony Humecke took David to a lecture in Los Angeles, by a prominent anthroposophic speaker. Bruce and Tony watched as David, seated between them, was “overwhelmed” as he awakened to ideas that moved him. From that time on, David’s relationship grew to spirituality and the anthroposophic path. He continually deepened.

David told this story: in his thirties—that is to say, late in the game—he decided to enter the health professions.

With his bachelor’s degree in the humanities, needing more science courses, he arrived one day at a university site to register for pre-health courses. He was standing in a slow-moving pre-nursing line, looking about him…noticing the pre-medical line on the other side of the room. Then he changed lines, to the pre-med line. This was the inspired moment of his mid-life career change, and the beginning of his lengthy medical training, financed solely by his own hard work. After graduation from St. George University School of Medicine, a clinical year in London, internship in Paterson, New Jersey, and residency in Family Medicine at University of CaliforniaIrvine (1991- 93), David moved back to San Francisco, where he practiced both mainstream and anthroposophic medicine (AM) until his death.

A consistent theme in David’s life was service to others. He cooked in soup kitchens much of his adult life. During the AIDS epidemic, he volunteered caregiving for dying young people in AIDS hospice settings. I believe this strongly influenced his vocation as a physician. David’s home office for anthroposophic medicine in his apartment in the Lower Haight was a constant in his nearly 30 years of practice. He deeply loved anthroposophic medicine, often marveled at the “brilliant” pharmaceutical concepts behind the remedies and was devoted to his patients. Those who needed it, were treated for very little remuneration, if any.

For over 25 years, David, Board Certified in Family Medicine and as an HIV Primary Care Specialist, worked for San Mateo County. He served as Medical Director of San Mateo County’s Homeless Mobile Clinic, the STD Clinic, and Daly City Clinic for primary care and AIDS. He served at UC San Francisco’s Positive Care/SFGH Ward 86 caring for people with HIV disease. His specialty certification for HIV care required knowledge of many complex allopathic drug regimens, their side effects, the medications treating those side effects—and the ability to treat people with highly complex and serious medical and sometimes additionally, social problems. In short, David chose to practice all sorts of especially difficult medicine. The path was intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually challenging—but he was devoted to, fascinated by, and simply in love with, his chosen path and his work.

For decades he served on the Board of the Physicians’ Association for Anthroposophic Medicine (PAAM); he

taught doctors in PAAM’s physician training and nurses in the North American Anthroposophic Nursing Association (NAANA) trainings; he managed the AnthroMed. org archive of classic and new AM articles; he represented AM at the Anthroposophical Society in America’s Council of Anthroposophic Organizations. He facilitated a study group of medical students and residents, at their request.

A picture of David would be half-empty without evoking his warmth. He was one who picked up the phone, calling friends with hilarious voicemails from the one and only Dr. Gerkelmeyer. He reached out, to friends from childhood, fellow anthroposophic doctors, teachers, eurythmists, nurses, gay friends, mainstream medical friends, and his sister Janie. He sent us things: an email with odd links, a T shirt, a thrift-shop pasta machine, books. He would arrive triumphantly bearing gifts: a perfectly fitting second-hand silk jacket, or a perfectly ripe melon. He hosted Branch meetings at his home with wonderful food and socializing as well as deep anthroposophic sharing. He lived through many, many hours of meetings, in which he was funny and digressive, enthusiastic and faithful. He was bursting with activities, researching American mistletoe species, speaking to the Biodynamic Association, making an enviably round loaf of bread. He began playing the cello, that soulful instrument, at 60, and found himself a trio who played together weekly.

Our friend carried some pain, which he transmuted into golden gifts. He was working on Bach, for the cello, when he died at 74. David Gershan truly showed up for life. Many will miss him, and wish him abundant blessings, light, hope and love on his new journey.

Many thanks to Janie Gershan, Meryl Thomas, and Mark McKibben for their sharing; to Janie for facts from her San Francisco Chronicle obituary; and to David Ross for DavidGershan.com, where stories and appreciations are posted, bits of which appear here. ALR

From the newsletter Anthroposophy in the Bay Area and Beyond...

David was passionate about practical applications of anthroposophy, and was active in Bay Area initiatives. Five years ago, he spearheaded the efforts to bring anthroposophists together for quarterly gatherings in San Francisco, and he was keen to help foster enhanced coor-

dination between regional branches.

A family and HIV primary care specialist, Dr. David Gershan had practiced medicine in Northern California since 1993. His former positions include Medical Director for the San Mateo County Mobile (Homeless) and STD Clinics. He also served as Civil Surgeon for US Immigration medical examinations. Through the San Mateo County Health Department, Dr. David Gershan cared for patients infected with HIV. He also cared for patients at St. Mary’s Medical Center in San Francisco. As a member of the clinical faculty at UCSF, Dr. Gershan contributed as an instructor and preceptor.

Dr. Gershan began his own medical studies as a premed student at the University of California, Berkeley. He continued his studies at St. George’s University School of Medicine and spent 12 months studying abroad in England. He completed his residency at the University of California, Irvine, Department of Family Medicine, after serving as an intern at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center.

Beyond his professional duties, Dr. David Gershan participated as a cook for Open Hand, a charity focused on providing food for the very ill, and enjoyed playing the cello. —Posted by Leslie Murchy

For David Gershan on His Journey by John Bloom

Dr. David Gershan was and is an epic poem, but one that seemed to come with an unresolved and unexpected end. He told his tale sometimes in fragments—images and memories—often in response to conversations about place or experience. Sometimes those conversations unfolded as continuous asides, as if footnoted or cross-referenced to cultural events. That was just part of his joy, his free association, even while you knew he was inwardly tapping into the font of his meditative life. Because those insights came as well.

No epic is without its ponderous moments in which we are taken to the breadth of humanity, light and dark. In his empathic descriptions of unnamed patients suffering homelessness, AIDS, and developmental difficulties, he could come to tears. But then, he would find himself by beginning a new sentence in third person about himself: “The doctor must…see the patient, be the patient.”

It was as if he were instructing himself in the fine art of pastoral medicine. Maybe he would throw in a quick reference to Rudolf Steiner’s lectures. Pastoral medicine was an art he knew well, a practice in which his passion, compassion, and will to serve other’s illnesses and suffering could rise to supersensible deed. His healing work lifted up his patient’s humanness so they could participate in their own healing. And this work could truly weigh and wear on him.

But that is just the Dr. David part. There was also the activist Dr. David who would do his patient best to cultivate community, consider building a website for it, and convene his fellow anthroposophists for the sake of waking us up to the beautiful and brutal reality for which Anthroposophia can serve as guide. It certainly guided his devoted life.

It was not always easy for him to be in the anthroposophical community. Earlier, he was shunned because of his homosexuality. But that time has passed. He stood deeply in the freedom of spirit with a profound self-knowledge that supported his courageous inner strength. He stayed vulnerable and connected to the source of spirit knowledge such that he did not lose sight of the gifts of Rudolf Steiner’s insights and their healing practicalities despite others’ personal biases. Through all this adversity he emerged as a vibrant presence in the regional medical community, beyond that also in many people’s lives, and in what he called “the PAAM” [Physicians Association for Anthroposophical Medicine] and the CAO [Council of Anthroposophical Organizations] where he was deeply loved. He knew that he was right and that old unfounded cultural attitudes would yield in his persistence and his capacity for loving relationship with everyone and through deep, deep collaboration as a healer.

The conventional boundaries of disciplines were an artifice to him—he wanted to and did work with farmers and pharmacists, eurythmists, educators, and therapists. The list is as long as his interests were wide. He was open to anyone with a question, a real inquiry into healing and ennobling the human being. He not only assiduously studied the anthroposophical remedies, he also actually had to engage with making them. He didn’t just love

music, he had to learn the cello to be with the genius of composers he loved. This was his artistic creative nature and his capacity to discipline his will—enough to make it through medical school, internships and residencies as a “late” entry.

He loved literature—he was an English major—so he understood the power of narrative and the epic itself. He loved language and thought and conversation. And, he loved cooking. It was his passion and vocation before doctoring. He could describe in detail the time spent perfecting brodos [broths] and the real work that stands behind making world-class food. It was an episodic stream in his journey; it was a practice of alchemy, really. Along the way of his telling these kitchen stories over dinner, hints and pieces of his biography would emerge—about his father and their relationship, his exploits as an unsupervised young person, his possible path as an artist, and his discovery of self in reflections from the world.

His epic poem began young and became ever more conscious through his life. Always seeking, always doing, always moving deeper into caring until, through healing himself, he could truly care for humanity in his heart and profession. He bore and served humanity’s wounds, salvaged them sometimes through humor and sometimes in anguished expression. He stood for anthroposophical knowing and its contributions to science and medicine, was amazingly present in his own quirky way with those he had just met, those who knew him long, and those simply needing someone to see them. He was a mensch, a true and loyal companion to me and many people, and champion of the human spirit in this lifetime.

David was living proof of Rudolf Steiner’s statement that each individuality is a species unto themselves. He left no doubt about that. Neither did he leave doubt that working on the human soul was his healing mission.

For me it is not a question of being blessed to know him, but rather, can we honor his legacy, further his epic poem, by working together in community to bring healing to the souls of our time. This task, I promise, will not have the abrupt, shocking, heart-rending end that marked David’s profound earthly life.

Mary Ellen Willby

September 21, 1926–March 6, 2022

by Jonathan Alexander

Mary Ellen Willby crossed the threshold into the spiritual world in the morning hours of Sunday 6 March 2022. The California sun and blue sky shone radiantly. The weather honored the name of one who as a young woman was nicknamed “Mary Sunshine.”

Mary Ellen’s childhood was lived at the foot of the great Rocky Mountains in central Utah. Outside her house, the mountains soured majestically into the sky. Many excursions took her through the grand elemental world of these mountains. The baby was born in the log cabin her grandfather had built. Growing up in the American West in the 1930s was still a pioneer experience. They grew all their food, and her mother sewed all their clothes. As brothers and sisters came along, Mary Ellen was her mother’s aide as the eldest of what became ten children. Mary Ellen would rock the baby buggy of her youngest sibling with her foot while turning the butter churn with one hand and holding her lesson book with the other.

Mary Ellen, a pioneer soul with tremendous trust in life, responding to what life brought her, transformed a pioneer childhood into the mature spiritual pioneer work with the Extra Lesson remedial work developed by Audrey McAllen. She helped develop the extra lesson remedial work for children, created a remedial position at the local Waldorf School, helped prepare the framework for the adult education remedial training, and finally, helped widen the extra lesson remedial work in a new venture to benefit adults.

She saw in the work of Audrey McAllen an enormous potential through working with anthroposophy for the healing of the human being. Mary Ellen helped disseminate the seeds of the “extra lesson” work through the world. She promoted, facilitated, instructed, and deepened this work for people who came

from around the world and who took it back out into the world. She coordinated connections with remedial support fields. A good observer and energetic, her attitude was one of service. The remarkable circumstances that brought her into this work can only be called destiny.

From Ruthanne Jahoda in remembrance, “I knew Mary Ellen as a friend, colleague, and teacher while I was teaching my class. She worked tirelessly with me so I could bring this new therapy, the extra lesson, to my class children and the children of our school. She was generous beyond compare with her time and energy. She was so passionate about the extra lesson and its ability to contribute healing to the children who had challenges. She was single focused in her love of the work and commitment to it. She will be remembered as a devoted student of Rudolf Steiner.”

Hers was a powerful life devoted to the truth, with tremendous good will, and a capacity to sacrifice in her personal and vocational life. A little lady, one could imagine her as a knight with a great sword in her hand. She brought great interest, joy, and light in meeting the many people her life touched. In death her presence was regal.

Easter Cross + Resurrection Separation—a product of division— of the whole Look to the circle Pay heed to the world whence you came Aid in maintaining the quotient The self and the world are the same.

— Mary Ellen Willby Easter 1982

For a fuller story of her life please email Jonathan: ja@polarpress.org. You can visit the websites waldorflearningsupport.org and www.healingeducation.org for more information on the work growing out of the “Extra Lesson.”

Marianne Schneider

November 17, 1928–February 2, 2022

Marianne Schneider, eurythmist, teacher, and Camphill co-worker, crossed the threshold at 8:20 am on February 2, 2022 in Long Prairie, Minnesota, at age 93. Born near Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1928, her early years were spent on her grandfather’s dairy farm. He was from Switzerland and brought his recipes for Swiss cheese to Wisconsin. Marianne’s family later moved to a smaller farm where they raised pigs, and into the town of Appleton when she was in seventh grade. Of the Depression years she remembers saving every piece of string, cardboard, and, most especially, food.

Dance was an early theme. In high school, Marianne was a member of Orchesis, the modern dance club. She chose Central Michigan College for their excellent dance program. Her speech teacher, from New York City, introduced her to the New York Times and the many dance events offered there. So, after 31/2 years of college, she took the bus to New York City and landed on Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. There she began classes with Martha Graham and the composer Louis Horst. Marianne found work in Off-Broadway theaters, and did office work to make ends meet. A sympathetic boss, Fritz Michel, gave her time off for auditions, and took her to see a performance by the French eurythmist Helene Oppert and her daughter. Marianne found it “strange” at first, but Fritz began giving her books to get some idea of what was behind it. Knowledge of the Higher Worlds she read “like a novel,” it was so interesting. Then came visits to the Anthroposophical Society headquarters at 211 Madison Avenue, and to the home and performance space of eurythmist William Gardner on West 15th Street (now the New York Branch). She took classes with eurythmists Ilse Kimball and Hani Scheafli, and met Kari van Oordt, who was teaching eurythmy at the Rudolf Steiner School.

Fritz Michel was enthusiastic about Marianne studying eurythmy, but told her, “You can’t make a living doing eurythmy. Go back to school and finish your degree.” Marianne completed a BA from City University in Speech Therapy, all the while continuing classes in eurythmy. By 1959 Marianne found her way to England’s Michael Hall, later called Emerson College, where she took the teacher training course. She took classes twice a week with eurythmist Margaret Lundgren, and studied Bothmer gymastics with Knut Ross. She worked at Peredur, then a

school for developmentally delayed children.

Marianne was called by Else Klink to Stuttgart, Germany, to teach Bothmer gymnastics in her eurythmy school in exchange for eurythmy training. In 1964 she returned to New York and taught eurythmy in the Rudolf Steiner High School. In Spring Valley she taught and performed for summer conferences until moving there to teach at the new Green Meadow Waldorf School. Here she worked with eurythmist Lisa Monges, who had a studio in her home, and trained Grace Anne Peyson, Kristin Hawkins, and Ruth Finser. Hagen Biesanz visited in 1972 and suggested starting an official training school. Marianne and Kari von Oordt joined Lisa Monges to begin a course, which became the Eurythmy School of Spring Valley. Marianne taught there for the next seven years. In 1979 she returned to Stuttgart to join Else Klink’s performing group, traveling to Dornach to take the eurythmy therapy course with Daphne Niederhauser.

Marianne had a friend, Bill Manning, who had worked for Weleda. He called her in Stuttgart and asked her to come to Minneapolis, where 22 children and their parents were hoping to form a Waldorf school. When asked if she knew how cold it was in Minnesota, Marianne said, “Of course, and I love it!” She agreed to come if her friend and kindergarten master teacher Margaret Meyerkort could come for two weeks each year.

Marianne arrived in June 1981 after a tornado had torn through the city—a hint of the tasks awaiting her in founding the Minnesota Waldorf School. She was the kindergarten teacher, eurythmy teacher, administrator, eurythmy therapist and Extra Lesson teacher (having worked with Audrey McAllen and her earliest students). Marianne helped bring eurythmy to other schools in the Midwest, traveling to Viroqua, Wisconsin, and Alaska. Marianne hosted a weekly study group at her home and eventually was asked to lead the First Class of the School of Spiritual Science for Minneapolis, also the Class at Camphill Village Minnesota, traveling once a month with anthroposophical doctor Ed Funk, performing in eurythmy programs with Johanna van Vliet, and working with clients in eurythmy therapy. These strong connections led her to move there in 1994. She taught eurythmy and painting sessions, led a household and was a friend and mentor to many.

Marianne is preceded in death by a sister and two brothers. She is survived by her brother, Robert Schneider of St. Louis, Missouri, and many nieces and nephews.

Gertrude Reif Hughes

April 22, 1936–January 5, 2022

from The SteinerBooks website

Gertrude Reif Hughes, PhD, was Professor Emerita of English and Women’s Studies at Wesleyan University, where she served as Chair of her Department and the Women’s Studies Program. The author of Emerson’s Demanding Optimism (1984), she published essays on American poets, including Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, H.D., and Adrienne Rich, as well as essays on Rudolf Steiner and feminist thought and on Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul . A lifelong student of anthroposophy, she is a former chair of the Board of Anthroposophic Press and former President of the Rudolf Steiner (summer) Institute, where she taught meditation for many years. She was also a member of the board of Sunbridge College and a core faculty member of The Barfield School Masters Program at Sunbridge. As a child, she attended the New York City Rudolf Steiner School and later earned degrees from Yale University and Mount Holyoke College.

from Neill Reilly

Gertrude was a brilliant thinker and writer with a poetic understanding of language. Her eyes sparkled with intelligence and warmth. She worked on her Ph D at Yale while raising her four children by herself! Her More Radiant than the Sun is a gem. We will sorely miss her. Robert McDermott wrote this lovely letter and agreed to sharing it.

from Robert McDermott 6 January 2021

Dear Gertrude, Yesterday I woke with thoughts of my close friend, David Gershan, MD, who died suddenly on Monday. Today my mind is a swirl of memories of my fortyyear collaboration and friendship with you. When your devoted friend Patti (Smith), Ellen (McDermott), and I saw you last (thanks to Covid, too long ago), we sat at a square table in a large empty room in your cozy assisted-living home. You sat across from Patti who had been visiting you monthly to read to you from your book, More Radiant than the Sun. On your left you held Ellen’s hand. With your right hand you traced a square on the table, looked purposefully at each of us and said simply: “We, together.” After our recognition, smiles of gratitude, silence, you looked at each of us again, again traced the square to include each of us, and repeated, “We, together.”

I would have loved to tell you about David Gershan, my San Francisco friend, anthroposophical physician to Ellen and me, and a serious anthroposophical researcher. Like you, he read hard books. I can picture you and David with Ellen and me at our table. If there were no Covid, and you were to recover your memory, and you were here in San Francisco, Ellen and I would drive you to Sausalito to visit your friends Arthur and Heide Zajonc on their son’s houseboat. That would be conversation I would love to hear.

It has been a long time since we co-taught Steiner’s Redemption of Thinking at the Steiner Institute; was it 1982? Or since you succeeded me as president of the Institute, or since we collaborated on your volume in the Vista Series,

Saluting Members Who Have Died

Paula Alkaitis

West Sacramento CA joined 06/11/2010 died 06/18/2021

Christopher Bamford Mount Washington MA joined 10/10/1989 died 05/13/2022

Martha Bartles Brentwood TN joined 05/06/1957 died 03/12/2021

Paul Bloede Denver CO joined 10/15/2021 died 12/16/2021

Inga Grebien de Illies Waverly AL joined 02/06/1945 died 03/21/2022

Paul V Jackson Hillsborough NC joined 08/12/1988 died 06/20/2021

Pearl LaPierre Eastvale CA joined 06/11/1985 died 05/17/2019

Roger Lundberg Sebastopol CA joined 10/23/1973 died 06/27/2022

David Merchant Vallejo CA joined 11/13/2015 died 11/15/2021

Allyn Moss Blacksburg VA joined 06/24/2005 died 04/21/2022

Joyce Muraoka Mililani HI joined 01/28/2011 died 10/02/2017

Elizabeth Scherer Spring Valley NY joined 04/05/1979 died 04/27/2022

Ilse-Lore Trunk Detroit MI joined 01/09/1969 died 06/16/2022

Mary Willby Fair Oaks CA joined 04/01/1963 died 03/06/2022

or since you taught your course, “Poetry as Insight,” here in my department at CIIS, or since Patti, Ellen, and I visited you for lunch in your iconic Connecticut home just a short walk from the Wesleyan campus. Then, no more talk of books and ideas. It has been too long.

What is it like? I am not anxious about your reception. Be sure to tell the welcoming committee that at the Rudolf Steiner School you were a student of Henry Barnes for eight years. If the committee members are up to speed, they will know that you raised four children as a single mother and that you wrote Emerson’s Demanding Optimism (which led the awesome Harold Bloom to refer to you as a “distinguished Emersonian”). You must have been in Marjorie Spock’s kitchen in East Sullivan, Maine, when she said, “Oh, I do want to see the spiritual world.” Not long after, she saw it, then Patti saw it, then Gene Gollogly, and this week, David Gershan, and now you. In a brief email last night, Arthur wrote simply, “we loved her.” Indeed. And in this new way from here to you across the threshold, we love you still. —Robert

Elizabeth Trocki

April 8, 1955–May 26, 2020

Elizabeth Ann Trocki of Ellsworth, Maine, passed away from complications of lymphoma on May 26, 2020. Elizabeth was surrounded by loving family and friends from Northern Light Maine Coast Hospital.

Elizabeth was born on April 8, 1955 at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Brighton, Massachusetts to Charles and Lillian Trocki. She grew up in Reading, Massachusetts where she attended St. Agnes school, graduating from Reading High School in 1973. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Massachusetts College of Art in 1976.

Elizabeth went on to work as a custom silversmith for Peter Whitman of Boston before continuing her education at Parsons School of Design in New York City, and Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina. While working for Wellesley, Massachusetts goldsmith, Joel Bagnal, Elizabeth created custom jewelry designs in gold and lost wax castings.

Elizabeth enrolled in the Antioch Waldorf Teaching Training program in Wilton, New Hampshire, obtaining a Master’s degree in Education in 1989. She was a class

teacher at the Cape Ann Waldorf School in Beverly, Massachusetts from 1989 to 1997.

Elizabeth and her husband Tom then moved to Santa Fe, where they married on June 4, 1999. While in Santa Fe, Elizabeth took several art workshops, developing skills in weaving and Icon painting, and apprenticed with world-renowned tapestry weaver, James Kohler. She worked creating artistic renovations, including gold leafing the exterior dome of a Russian Orthodox Church. Elizabeth and Tom enjoyed taking long walks along with their loving black Labrador retriever Eiso while enjoying the Northern New Mexican desert and mountains.

In 2005, Elizabeth and Tom returned to Reading to help with the care of her mother, Lillian Trocki. After Lillian passed away in January of 2009, Elizabeth worked for the Christian Community Church in Brookline Village as the renovations project manager for the church building. In 2012 they purchased an old farmhouse in Ellsworth, Maine they named “Maplehurst” where they started a small organic farm.

Elizabeth continued her weaving, painting, drawing, and design work. She was also involved with The Alcyon Center in Seal Cove, Maine where she was a Board Member and Guest Steward, as well as utilizing her culinary skills to plan and create meals for the guests that nurtured their souls. She became a Master Gardener through the University of Maine and volunteered for “The Heart of Ellsworth”, a local community organization.

Elizabeth leaves behind her loving husband Thomas Schley, her brother, Tom Trocki, sister, Susan Trocki Hallam and husband Richard, along with nephews Benjamin and Matt Trocki, sisterin-law Marta Schley and husband Paul Squire, and nieces Cody and Becky Squire.

Elizabeth was deeply loved for her warmth, inspiration and generosity. She will be missed by all those she had touched.

from

Waldorf School at Moraine Farm

Elizabeth Trocki was a Class Teacher at our school, then called Cape Ann Waldorf School. She joined the school in 1989 when the school was growing to include three grade classes, as well as our early childhood program. She took the first grade class which she taught through eighth grade. She was instrumental in helping the school develop in its early years, especially caring for the health of the social life of the community.

Kent Metcalfe

March 8, 1952–October 2, 2021

Kent was born to Matthew S. Metcalfe, who became Chairman and CEO of Loyal American Life Insurance Company, and Phyllis Metcalfe, a community volunteer who worked with civic and arts organizations in Mobile, Alabama. He was the eldest of four children. They were very well looked after by their loving parents and also their grandparents, who were devout Christian Scientists.

One of Kent’s most memorable early experiences was when he played one of the shepherds in the Christmas nativity play, perhaps laying the seed for his later involvement in speech and drama. Kent had a hunger for education, including spiritual knowledge, and loved studying and researching. He did not find his spiritual home in Christian Science as his grandparents had. As a young man, he found his first book by Rudolf Steiner at a used book sale. The content spoke to him and had a lasting impact.

He graduated from the University of Massachusetts with a BS in Education and Human Development. Around this time, he taught and co-directed in a Waldorf preschool in Silver Springs, Maryland and later co-founded the Acorn Hill Waldorf Kindergarten. During that year his conviction of the value of Waldorf education and anthroposophy was confirmed.

Kent went to Emerson College in England in 1978 to do a foundation year in anthroposophy, followed by the education course and an internship in remedial education at Michael Hall Waldorf School. He blossomed under the tutelage of a number of fantastic teachers. The late 70s and early 80s were the heyday of Emerson College. John Davy, an inspiring teacher, was leading the college. Francis Edmunds, who had founded the college in 1962, was still involved and made a deep impression on Kent. William Mann’s courses on art history changed many students’ lives. Kent later referred to his time at Emerson College as some of the happiest years of his life. He met Bettina there and they were married by Adam Bittleston through the sacraments of the Christian Community in the Eurythmy House in the presence of the whole college.

By now, Kent had realized that his heart was in the spoken word. He began to study speech and drama, first with Masie Jones in London, then for a few months with Virginia Brett in Dornach, before enrolling in the fouryear course of speech and drama at the Alanus School in Germany near Bonn—a bold decision, because it meant he had to learn German to study speech and drama in German. This was of great advantage to Kent, as it allowed him to study Rudolf Steiner in the original language. Kent joined the Anthroposophical Society in Dornach in 1981 and was ready to join the First Class in 1984. From 1987-89, Kent taught high school German and speech at Vancouver Waldorf School, and performed plays with the students. However, he felt drawn to go back to Mobile. Luckily, he found some work teaching public speaking at a few colleges in and around Mobile and directed plays with volunteers. He enjoyed motorcycling on country roads, ballroom dancing, and became a scuba diving instructor later on and lived a year in Hawaii. When Kent’s marriage ended after 12 years, he enrolled at the University of South Alabama to gain a masters in English Literature. He found his vocation by teaching a “Theory of Knowledge” course to high school students in the International Baccalaureate program, basing it effectively on The Philosophy of Freedom. That led to teaching courses for gifted students at a different high school. He was allowed to develop his own program and devised lessons using his comprehensive knowledge of history, philosophy, religion, art, anthroposophy and Waldorf education to work with the students, leaving a lasting legacy. The beautiful letters he received from his students (below) demonstrate movingly how much he had touched their hearts and helped them pursue their careers and lives with confidence and new insight.

Kent was widely read and had a very deep understanding of anthroposophy. He was never happy with half-truths and researched Steiner’s work until he received answers to his many searching questions. When Kent met his second wife Laura in 2007, he introduced her to anthroposophy and she became an avid student. He had found his soulmate! Laura was a loving and devoted com-

panion. She was by his side through many trials of failing health. When injury limited him and might have cut short his ability to carry on working, her support enabled him to continue teaching.

Kent had grown up by the water and loved the delta. When he retired from teaching in 2017, he bought a boat and Laura and he were able to explore the waterways of the Mobile Delta together. But Kent’s main work in his retirement was to write a book based on spiritual truths in the form of a novel. He was engaged in this activity right to the end of his life, leaving Laura only with the final editing and submission.

Kent died on Saturday October 2, 2021 at the age of 69. His fierce idealism, passion and intensity will be remembered as a guiding light by many, continuing to plant seeds for the future.

Excerpts of some letters from students...

I was planning to drop out of high school and do rock music with my friends, but your humanities classes made me stay through high school because I loved them so much... I would never have even considered going for a PhD if I hadn’t taken your classes …

I’m thankful that you guided us through classics like Dante’s Inferno and the Epic of Gilgamesh. That has helped me be able to understand and deconstruct philosophies and cultural narratives and understand how they influence us in “the real world.” I’m thankful that you gave us guidance in oration and speaking through the poems we had to recite. It’s helped me become a more authoritative and confident speaker. I’m thankful that you gave us water colors and encouraged us to explore our creativity because I am able to appreciate beauty in art, even when it’s abstract and in all its forms.

Looking back, you really helped us learn to be more fully human. You encouraged us to feed and develop the parts of ourselves that were not just quantifiable numbers to go on a report card, but the parts of us that inspire us to be and to empathize and to see how we connect to each other and our world...

From a student’s girlfriend: I suppose it is time to formally thank you, though I’ve never met you. I’ve heard about you for years now from James. You have been a major influence in his high school experience and for the person he is today. He cares and respects you so much…

I don’t think that anyone will leave this class unaffected. If you could hear us talk out of class, you could tell that we have paid attention and absorbed a lot. Matt and I

joke all the time about how you “messed with our heads.” I only wished that we could have had you all year …

After four years of being taught and guided by you, you deserve a letter... You have been a continuing source of knowledge and light in a dark age. I entered your class starving for knowledge, and the food for thought never ceased. I find you fascinating and am continually astounded by your wealth of knowledge and experience. I feel inspired to take hold of the world despite my fears and worries. Thank you for being a Virgil to my Dante and seeing me through a dark mood. Although I know I am still developing, I would not be the person I am today if it was not for you. I feel blessed to know you.

Thank you for everything, you have been by far the most insightful and enlightened teacher I’ve ever had ...

Thank you for your class. You invested so much in your students and we never once felt uncomfortable or out of place (except maybe when we first began poetry recitation and had to pretend to throw a spear while shouting one syllable). Your class allowed me to explore not only my beliefs but the beliefs of others, giving me insight and teaching me patience as well as tolerance, a valuable life skill that no standard classroom ever taught. I read novels and epics that I had no idea I would love because I never would have read them on my own. When I emerged from your course, I was no longer a child who depended on my parents’ teaching for my views on society, but rather someone who felt confident enough to form her own opinions. I am still a strong Christian, but it is my belief and one that came from study and extensive exploration of other religions and worldviews … Your name will definitely be one that I recall to my children.

These past few years I have definitely taken a lot from your classes. You have been a great influence on me and now I see the world in a whole different way. You are a great teacher, I appreciate everything you have done for us...

Thank you for teaching me about humanity and many other wonders, art and religion, great stories and poems. I also want to thank you for believing in me...

I loved your classes and all of the life lessons I have learned. You do so much good for other people, I know you make a difference in their life just like you have with mine.

Through my three courses with you, I have learned about many forms of art, history, culture, and most importantly about the struggle of mankind to find himself. By teaching this you helped a young man in high school find himself. This short letter could never express how grateful I am to have met you. Thank you, for everything.

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Encountering Rudolf Steiner Introductions to Essential Works Christopher Bamford isbn 9781621482772, 360 pp, pb, $34.95

Genesis in the Light of Human Embryonic Development Kaspar Appenzeller, MD isbn 9781621482796, 336 pp, pb, $34.95

Recognizing Reality Youth Education in a Time of Global Crisis Peter Selg isbn 9781621483083, 200 pp, pb, $19.95

Sacramental Theology for a Modern and Future World The Seven Sacraments in History and in The Christian Community Michael Debus isbn 9781584208983, 324 pp, pb, $29.95

Soul-Size

The Eternal Psychosomatic Dilemma James A. Dyson isbn 9781938685361, 224 pp, pb, $24.95

Water Talks

Empowering Communities to Know, Restore, and Preserve their Waters Betsy Damon isbn 9781938685385, 228 pp, pb, $24.95

What Makes Blood Move?

A Mind-Body Physiology of the Heart Armin J. Husemann isbn 9781621482758, 152 pp, hb, $45