So far TODAY: The sun rose without color. The April Showers do loosen up habit. Proud concealments float to the surface of puddles. Crow, circling attends. My eye draws down its waxy wing. A black kegling in my fontanel. The edges of my dress wrestle the lilac wind – a flowing freedom flag flapping a wet rhythm, adding a soft spondee to my morning walkabout. Prayers nibbling at the rising bread of my vigil pace. A running humming frequency, pastoral & prophetic, filters the dirge. Epiphany wisdom slow stepping in the grey. A circuitous story with a satisfying crunch laced into a tapestry, bowing to Spring, revolving with the wandering stars - entraining all that moves & exists in wind & weather. As plagues of Pesach give way to the Bel-fire
~hag
& coming soon…
Sangraal: A Pentecost Pilgrimage
with Mysteria Mystica Americana (MMA)
Saturday 18 May 2024 Noon – 1:30 PM Central Time
Creating Sacred Space on Zoom ID: 705 017 4041 - Passcode: MMA
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/7050174041?pwd=j1AkESGygaKVFaD0T7r2lfV533BWfm.1&omn=87316485500
w/ Richard Cloud, Hazel Archer, Lisa Loving Dalton, Zacharia Mannella. And friends: Dawson Macleod, Alexander Torrenga, Jeffery Levy
ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Feast Day of Saint Endelienta, a Cornish Saint of the 5th century. She is believed to be a daughter of the Welsh King Brychan, & legend says that she was a goddaughter of King Arthur. She lived as a hermit at Trentinney where she subsisted on the milk of a cow.
1380 – Death Day of Catherine of Siena, Italian mystic, philosopher, a Scholastic philosopher, theologian & Saint. Born as the Black Death ravaged in Siena, Italy - The daughter of a local poet, Lapa Piagenti, & Giacomo di Benincasa, a cloth dyer who ran his enterprise with the help of his sons. Lapa was about forty years old when she gave premature birth to twin daughters Catherine & Giovanna. She had already borne 22 children, but half of them had died. Giovanna was handed over to a wet-nurse & died soon after. Catherine was nursed by her mother & developed into a healthy child. She was 2 years old when Lapa had her 25th child, another daughter named Giovanna. As a child Catherine was so merry that the family gave her the pet name of “Euphrosyne”, which is Greek for “joy” & the name of an early Christian Saint.
Catherine had her first vision of Christ when she was 5 years old: She & a brother were on the way home from visiting a married sister when she experienced a vision of Christ seated in glory with the Apostles Peter, Paul, & John. At age 7, Catherine vowed to give her whole life to God. When she was 16, her older sister Bonaventura died in childbirth; already anguished by this, Catherine soon learned that her parents wanted her to marry Bonaventura’s widower. She was absolutely opposed & started a massive fast, & cut off her long hair as a protest.
Eventually her father gave up & permitted her to live as she pleased.
In 1368, at age 21, Catherine experienced what she described in her letters as a “Mystical Marriage” with Jesus.
As social & political tensions mounted in Siena, Catherine found herself drawn to intervene in wider politics. She began travelling with her followers thruout Italy advocating reform of the clergy & advising people that repentance & renewal could be done thru “the total love for God.”
In Pisa, she received the stigmata in 1375. Soon after Catherine could neither eat nor swallow water. St Catherine died in Rome, on 29 April 1380, at the age of thirty-three.
1429 – Joan of Arc – the Maid of Orléans, defeats the English which begins the process that ended with England’s complete expulsion from the continent.
“It was necessary that the Maid of Orleans went through a kind of unaware initiation to fulfill her historical mission. It concerned an initiation that could take place in the time of the thirteen nights between the 25th December and 6th January. In the last time before birth the human being is especially accessible to unaware influences from the spiritual world. On the 6th January the Maid of Orleans was born, to whom the Christ Impulse was implanted just before she saw the physical sunlight.
The Maid of Orleans intervened in the course of history in such a way that everything that happened later was determined through it. The whole map of Europe would be different, also the spiritual life if the English had won.
The Maid was a servant of St. Michael. She was a warrior of his Will and brought this spiritual will to Earth by her determination and actions.
In the Central European civilisation were the springs for the whole spiritual culture of the future, the foundation of the ego-culture. The human ego had to enkindle itself in the outside world, to be awake and realised internally. Thus the ego-culture of Central Europe was aroused from the objective events, the heroic sacrifices, that have brought the changes into etheric bodies and continue to do so, through the recorded memory.
It is necessary that, there would be souls, who send thoughts into the spiritual world like extending arms and bring down the consciousness from the spiritual world, souls conscious of spirit. The proper purpose of all our endevours is to gain a living connection between the physical and spiritual worlds.
From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the grief of the bereaved,
From the nation’s sacrifices
Will grow up the fruits of spirit
If souls aware of spirit turn
Their senses to the spirit land.”~Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science, a Necessity for the Present Time, The Relation of Man to his Folk Soul – Nuremberg, March 13, 1915, GA 159
“In order to throw a little light on the occult understanding of history, we may ask the question: What would the development of modern Europe have been if at the beginning of the 15th century the Maid of Orleans had not entered the arena of events? Anyone who thinks, even from an entirely external point of view, of the development that took place during this period, must say to himself: Suppose the deeds of the Maid of Orleans were erased from history … then, according to the knowledge obtainable from purely external historical research, one cannot but realise that without the working of higher, super-sensible Powers through the Maid of Orleans, the whole of France, indeed the whole of Europe in the 15th century, would have taken on an altogether different form. Everything in the impulses of will, in the physical brains of those times, was directed towards flooding all Europe with a general conception of the State which would have extinguished the folk-individualities and under this influence a very great deal of what has developed in Europe during the last centuries through the interplay of these folk-individualities would quite certainly have been impossible.
Imagine the deed of the Maid of Orleans blotted out from history, France abandoned to her fate without this intervention, and then ask: Without this deed, what would have become of France? And then think of the role played by France in the whole cultural life of humanity during the centuries following! Add to this the facts which cannot be refuted and are confirmed by actual documents concerning the mission of the Maid of Orleans. This young girl, certainly not highly educated even by the standards of her time, suddenly, before she is twenty years old, feels in the autumn of 1428 that spiritual Powers of the super-sensible worlds are speaking to her. True, she clothes these Powers in forms that are familiar to her, so that she is seeing them through the medium of her own mental images; but that does not do away with the reality of these Powers. Picture to yourselves that she knows that super-sensible Powers are guiding her will towards a definite point — I am speaking to begin with, not of what can be told about these facts from the Akasha Chronicle, but only of what is confirmed by documentary evidence.
We know that the Maid of Orleans confided her vision first of all to a relative who — one would almost say, by chance-happened to understand her; that after many vicissitudes and difficulties she was introduced to the Court of King Charles who, together with the whole French Army, had come to his wit’s end, as the saying goes. We know too, how after every conceivable obstacle had been put in her way, she finally recognised and went straight to the King, who was standing among such a crowd of people that no physical eye could have distinguished him. It is also known that at that moment she confided to him something— he wanted to test her by it — of which it can be said that it was known only to him and to the super-sensible worlds. You also know from ordinary history that it was she who, under the unceasing impulse and urge of her intense faith — it would be better to say, through her actual vision — and in face of the greatest difficulties, led the armies to victory and the King to his crowning.
Who intervened at that time in the course of history? — None other than Beings of higher Hierarchies! The Maid of Orleans was an outer Instrument of these Beings, and it was they who guided the deeds of history”. ~Rudolf Steiner, Occult History, Lecture 2, Stuttgart, 28th December 1910
1436 – Deathday of Raymond of Sabunda - Spanish scholar - teacher of medicine & philosophy - professor of theology at Toulouse. Raymond declares that the book of Nature & the Bible are both Divine revelations, the one general & immediate, the other specific & mediate.
From Rudolf Steiner in Karmic Relationships III, GA 237. Lecture 8 - Ahriman's Fight Against the Michael Principle. The Message of Michael, 1 August 1924, Dornach
“…Raymond of Sabunda said: Look for instance at what is still contained in Aristotelianism. There we find something that has still remained of that old standpoint from which man fell at the beginning of human evolution on earth. Originally, men still preserved some memory of it. It was the reading in the Book of Nature. But men have fallen; they can no longer truly read in the Book of Nature. Hence God in His Compassion has given them in the Bible, the Book of Revelation, in order that they may not entirely depart from the Divine and Spiritual. Thus Raymond of Sabunda still taught, even in the 15th century, that the Book of Revelation exists for sinful man because he is no longer able to read in the Book of Nature. And in the way he taught these things, we can already perceive his idea that man must find once more the power to read in the great Book of Nature.
This is the impulse of Michael. Now that the Intelligence administered by him has come down to men, it is his impulse to lead men again to the point where they will read once more in the Book of Nature. The great Book of Nature will be opened again. Men will read once more in the Book of Nature.”
1862 –The Capture of New Orleans by Union forces in the American Civil War
1899 – Birthday of Duke Ellington, American pianist, composer, & bandleader
1901 – Birthday of Hirohito, Japanese emperor
1945 –Führerbunker: Adolf Hitler marries his longtime partner Eva Braun in a Berlin bunker they both commit suicide the following day
1945 – Dachau concentration camp is liberated by United States troops
1951 - Deathday of Ludwig Wittgenstein - an Austrian-British philosopher. Wittgenstein is considered a nominalist who identifies thinking with speaking or language. His philosophy fits into modern thinking like the works of great artists who created from their own ideas. "From Wittgenstein you can learn how concepts work." ( Wolfgang Welsch ).
"There used to be people who asked: which philosopher is right? Heraclitus or Heidegger, Kant or Rudolf Steiner or who else? (...) But because Wittgenstein wrote 'Philosophy should actually only be written in poetry' and hardly anyone will ask "Who is right, Goethe or Schiller, Rilke or Ringelnatz? We look at Wittgenstein’s work and life as a work of art. He himself once called his life and every life 'God's work of art'. What does LW say with his life and work?" ~Edmund Gussmann
“The composer works on the basis of composition theory. The latter is a sum of knowledge, the possession of which is a necessary prerequisite for composing. When composing, the laws of composition theory serve life, real reality. In exactly the same sense, philosophy is an art. All real philosophers were conceptual artists. For them, human ideas became art materials and the scientific method became artistic technology. Abstract thinking thereby gains concrete, individual life. The ideas become life forces. We then not only have knowledge of things, but we have made knowledge into a real, self-controlling organism; our real, active consciousness has placed itself above a merely passive reception of truths.” ~ Rudolf Steiner, DIE PHILOSOPHIE DER FREIHEIT
1992 –Riots in Los Angeles, following the acquittal of police officers charged with excessive force in the beating of Rodney King. Over the next three days 53 people are killed & hundreds of buildings are destroyed.
RUDOLF STEINER'S CALENDAR OF THE SOUL
translated (with added titles) by Roy Sadler
EASTERTIDE V
The Resurrection of the Soul
v5
In light, whose fertile weaving
from depth of spirit into blossoming
reveals the beauty of the gods' creating,
the being of the soul is shining, widening,
enlivened in the presence of the world
and resurrected
from narrow selfhood's inner power.