being human (Evolving News) winter 2009

News for Members

& Friends

winter-spring 2009 — introductory issue

lincoln, darwin, steiner: the year 1909 , p.25

theory U — leading from the future , p.31

the threefold social organism , p.35 a quarterly publication of the anthroposophical society in america including the rudolf steiner library newsletter

a mid-winter view at wisconsin’s

michael fields

What’s In a Name?

A few weeks ago we launched an Anthroposophy in America E-News, a monthly e-mail-only service to let us engage current happenings more quickly than a printed quarterly allows. (You can sign up at anthroposophy.org if you didn’t get an invitation yet.) We used the first E-News to repeat what was sent out in a letter in December to all members, that we are renaming News for Members and upgrading it to be able to reflect the life of anthroposophy in the USA more fully. This effort is similar to the magazine Motief from the Dutch Anthroposophical Society, which serves society members in the Netherlands but also “speaks anthroposophy” into the public space.

We asked the first E-News readers for suggestions on a name, and received such a warm and diverse response that it seemed only right to let all members consider the question before seeing a new name in place, even though everything else in your quarterly has changed quite a bit! Since this publication will be available by subscription to anyone interested, the name News for Members no longer applies. Over time it will try to become as full an experience of anthroposophy in this country as possible—something to help us be in touch with each other over our wide spaces. And it is a way to start sharing with others who seek what anthroposophy offers.

We could use Anthroposophy USA nothing wrong with that! But the name we choose may be our best opportunity to tell people something about anthroposophy. If we use both a title and a subtitle, the way Lilipoh adds ‘the spirit in life,’ we can affirm our identity and reach out at the same time. A subtitle phrase like ‘anthroposophy at work’ could be the “us” part. A word or two or three above it in bigger type would open the door to people who don’t know us yet. The challenge is to find those few words that give the right context to our amazing story.

It is about the human being, but in a very full, rich and holistic sense—not just fossils and primitive societies and anthropoids! When I met with the national council in January I joked that, in New York City at least, I’d love to try the word Mensch for a title. From Yiddish-speaking immigrants of past generations, New Yorkers have come to understand that word to mean ‘a real human being.’ I can hear it now: “So what are you saying, this anthroposophy thing is about being a mensch—a real human?” Yes!

Is there any clearer common thread in the work of anthroposophy? With all our different initiatives, we are trying to become fully and truly human, in body, soul and spirit, in inner life and in outer society.

The final News for Members in its old format (above). Rudolf Steiner’s 1903 journal for the German Section of the Theosophical Society, Luzifer, which he headed (below, left), and the first issue in 1921 of Das Goetheanum, an “international weekly for anthroposophy and three-folding” edited by Albert Steffen.

I think about how much easier it would be to share our stories, projects and ideas if ‘anthroposophy’ began to mean something to the average person in America: to mean, as Rudolf Steiner put it in Awakening to Community, ‘the consciousness of our humanity.’ “The wisdom of the human being”—a literal rendering from the Greek—has just a touch of superiority. Being Human avoids that, though Becoming Human might be more exact. Responses to the E-News inquiry have favored Being Human, and variations on Anthroposophy in America, Awakening to Community, and Spirit Working, in that order, along with dozens of other interesting possibilities. Many people found it a satisfying exercise just to think of these words and follow them out into the world and the future. What do you think? Do you love some of these ideas, or really dislike any of them? What doors do you see them opening?

And anthroposophy is nothing if not amazing, a cultural renaissance striving to be born, but with very serious opposition to the humane path we seek to open. A couple of simple, good words could give us courage for all the hard work there is to do, and help new people take interest in the goals and methods that we are researching and working with.

I hope we can take up a name that will give as large a vision of our concerns as possible. The name we used not so long ago, Spirit Working, is a good one, and a number of members have suggested something like Awakening to Community. Those are broad and understandable and reflective of our values.

As a long-time worker in the communications field, I feel that the best choice would even go one step further by helping people understand the word ‘anthroposophy.’ People often ask if anthroposophy has to do with anthropology. Well, yes and no!

To react to these name ideas, or to suggest others, please email: editor@ anthroposophy.org or write to John Beck, Anthroposophical Society in America, 1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Comments received by April 20th will go to the editorial committee, and I’ll recommend a name to the council in time for our second issue.

Apart from the naming question, I would have liked briefly to point out the contents of this issue: a fine timely review from the Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter ; a concise description of spiritual research from the general section members of the School for Spiritual Science; a report and images of the new mystery drama production in Dornach; two reports of inspiring youth gatherings; advance notice of spring and summer classes and conferences; a brief history of threefolding; and a “Steiner in context” feature on the year 1909. I recommend just paging through the whole issue for a start. And your reactions and contributions are always very welcome!

John Beck, editor

The Anthroposophical Society in America

General Council Members

Torin Finser (General Secretary)

MariJo Rogers (General Secretary)

Gordon Edwards James Lee

Regional Council Representatives

Lori Barian (Central Region)

Linda

News for Members is published four times a year by the Anthroposophical Society in America

1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1797 Tel. 734-662-9355 Fax 734-662-1727 www.anthroposophy.org

Editor: John H. Beck

Associate Editors: Judith Soleil, Fred Dennehy

Please send submissions, questions and comments to: editor@anthroposophy.org or to the postal address above.

©2009 The Anthroposophical Society in America

The responsibility for the content of articles is the authors’.

What’s Happening in the Rudolf Steiner Library

The Rudolf Steiner Library, founded in 1928, is the lending library of the Anthroposophical Society in America, and all members are entitled to use the library—we mail books throughout the United States. For over a decade the library has published a well-regarded newsletter, founded by librarian emeritus Fred Paddock, to keep readers informed about the library’s collection. We are very happy to announce that after publication of our final issue of the library newsletter in May, our news, annotations, and reviews will appear in this new publication. Now we will have the opportunity to communicate with a much larger audience, and we hope to encourage more society members (and friends—who can join the library for an annual fee) to use the library.

Our mission is to provide material to everyone interested in Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, and we are the most complete source for Rudolf Steiner’s work in North America. Our holdings include all available Steiner titles in both English

and German, as well as hundreds of his unpublished essays and lectures in manuscript form. With over 27,000 volumes, the library’s collection of books on Waldorf education; child development; anthroposophical art and architecture; music; world spirituality; philosophy; meditation; holistic science and medicine; literature; history; and esoteric Christianity is both broad and deep. Also look to us for anthroposophical journals in English and German.

We have recently begun to create an electronic catalog for the library and expect to make it publicly available sometime in 2010. Until then, we will happily provide PDF and paper catalogs in a number of different subject areas. View the list online at: www.anthroposophy.org/library.html

We are excited to participate in this new venture and look forward to serving, and hearing from, many of you.

Judith Soleil, library director

Dear Members & Friends,

As the old year swung to a close in 2008, our region of southern New Hampshire experienced a severe winter storm. Not snow, which some have learned to expect in this region, but a massive ice storm. Our family woke at 2 am on December 12th to hear the cracking of branches all around us. Hail pelted the windows, the trees groaned with the weight of ice, and from time to time branches gave way with a shudder and crash. It was impossible to sleep.

Then at around 4 am we heard an especially loud crack followed by a crash and the sound of glass shattering. We ran downstairs and found a tree limb sticking through the bay window in the living room. Glass was everywhere and the wind was blowing through the house. More branches were cracking, some at a distance, and the world seemed to be ripping apart around us.

We woke the children and they huddled under a quilt between the kitchen counters while I looked for matches and flashlights to inspect the rest of the house. Although the storm lasted for hours, the worst was over by dawn and we all crawled back into bed in search of lost sleep.

The world that greeted us the next day was an enchanted ice kingdom. Everything outside was coated with an inch or more of solid ice. Bushes and trees were bent to the ground, icicles hung from every eve, branches were strewn across the yard, and the driveway was sheer ice.

We were also without power, as were 400,000 other homes in New Hampshire. Thus began the great blackout of 2008, which in our case lasted twelve days.

We have become accustomed to a world powered by electricity and telecommunications: lights, heat, internet, stoves, refrigerators and, most important of all in my view, water. Thanks to wood stoves in many homes in New England, we can cope with the cold to a certain extent. There is even a bit of relief without phones ringing and e-mails to answer. But a family without water is a burden indeed. The first few days my son and I had fun collecting icicles from the eves and melting them inside. The evenings were sort of romantic by candlelight, although reading by flickering light is more difficult than it looks. And after a few days, the novelty began to wear off.

It occurred to me one cold, dark night that in many ways the New England blackout of 2008 represented more than the loss of power lines. As we now progress into 2009, it appears more and more likely

that the events of recent months signal a seismic shift that is taking place all over the world. We are currently faced with the most fundamental economic realignment since the invention of electricity. Our financial lives have been powered by a force called leverage (or debt) that had grown into larger houses, more cars, fancy electronic gadgets and masses of credit card debt. Now for many, not just the struggling hourly workers but also many top executives, all this has suddenly been taken away. All over the world people are asking: who turned off the lights?

If we are to move forward it is essential that we not only understand what led to this dramatic turn of events, but also the nature of the deleveraging that has only just begun. We need a fundamental reform of our economic system so that we don’t simply lurch from one bubble to another, crisis to crisis. In countries all over the world, people are asking questions that need a response. Now is the time for a complete re-imagination of the economic basis of our social life.

Then I turned back to my notes from the last meeting of the General Secretaries in Dornach in early November, and recalled the conversations we had concerning the economic crisis from an Anthroposophic perspective. We were fortunate to have two distinguished bankers in our midst, Paul Mackay, member of the Executive Council, and Philip Martin, General Secretary from the UK. They shared thoughts on the nature of the crisis that led to a lively conversation.

It is significant for a student of anthroposophy that the crisis originated in over-extended loans, the so-called sub prime mortgages. Loans have to do with relationships, which are now being called into question all around the world. Inflation had been a concern in recent years as too much money chased after

“All over the world people are asking: who turned off the lights?”

material things. Now we are entering a deflationary era in which there is too little money available, and prices are declining. Excess money in recent years was not diverted to support the cultural life as intended by Rudolf Steiner, but instead fed upon itself in creating inflated assets. Now the bubble has burst, and everyone is affected as banks, businesses and individuals try to shed debt.

Relationships are also very much connected to the soul life of individual human beings. This is of course the fundamental basis of the Anthroposophical Society. How can we find one another in our true humanity? What does it mean to meet in this age of Michael? How can we move from a preoccupation with security (financial and otherwise) to renewed confidence in the free spiritual life?

More and more we will need to “read the times” in which we live and apply the resources given through anthroposophy. A crisis, even though painful when it means loss of jobs and security, can assist in awakening the human spirit, not just in our anthroposophical centers but in striving human beings all over the world. Will we be ready to meet this awakening?

The blackout of 2008 resulted in school cancellations all over New Hampshire. The Nativity play, performed every year since the founding of the High Mowing School in 1942, was cancelled. The students were sent home for the holidays without the usual festivities.

After several more snow storms and much cold weather, the Nativity was finally performed at High Mowing on January 19th, Martin Luther King Day and the eve of the inauguration. Performed without words but only through song and gesture, the angles sang in chorus, the shepherds and kings gave their gifts, and the celebration of the Child took on new meaning. With a full heart afterwards, I realized that this too was a sign of the times. We need the presence of the Christ not just in December. As we move through 2009 with both hope and trepidation at the challenges ahead, words spoken long ago have ever-greater meaning:

Darkness of Night

Had held its sway; Day-radiant Light

Poured into the souls of men: Light that gave warmth

To simple shepherds’ hearts, Light that enlightened The wise heads of kings.

O Light Divine!

O Sun of Christ!

Warm Thou our hearts, Enlighten Thou our heads, That good may become What from our hearts we would found And from our heads direct With single purpose.

(last lines from the Foundation Stone by Rudolf Steiner)

May this reality live with us ever more strongly as we gradually find one another in a free association of human beings known as the Anthroposophical Society.

Torin M. Finser General Secretary

Strategic Issues

Affecting the Anthroposophical Society

The General Council is carrying several strategic issues that are related to the well-being of anthroposophy and the Anthroposophical Society in America. These issues will have diminished meaning if they are not also carried and worked on by members and friends of anthroposophy. We hope to engage you with these issues during the coming months in ways that will add value to anthroposophy and vitality to our labor. The strategic issues are broad by design, cover wide areas of interest, and include concerns related to organizational relationships, funding for society programs, social relevance and impact, and connecting with members and friends.

The council has created a strategic planning program to form a process and develop responses to these issues, and identify others of importance to members and friends. A strategic plan defines in broad terms those areas of development and accomplishment that will provide benefit when taken on and made active. A strategic plan is by nature a living document that will change to meet the changing needs of the Anthroposophical Society it serves. It is a reflection of the active carrying by members to move anthroposophy towards desired goals. We are an association of members and friends, so this work will rely on the participation and support of you all at various points in the process.

To make sure this strategic planning process is completed satisfactorily, the council has selected a council member, James Lee, to act as its program manager. It will be his job to see that an acceptable planning process is developed, orchestrated with participation by members and friends. We anticipate having a defined process and schedule to discuss at the 2009 AGM conference, which will take place in Spring Valley, New York. Should you have any thoughts to share in relation to the strategic plan development program, please contact James at anthroposophy@ earthlink.net

James P. Lee General Council Member, Portland, Oregon

Treasurer Jerry Kruse, Central Region representative Lori Barian, and Eastern Region respresentative Ann Finucane during the General Council’s January planning retreat in sub-zero East Troy, Wisconsin.

The Editor Selection Process

During their May 2008 retreat in Harlemville, the general council formed a publications task force to develop a communications strategy for the Anthroposophical Society in America. Its initial focus was improvements and efficiencies in society publications, including News for Members, the Journal for Anthroposophy, and the Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter

At the final meeting of this retreat Doug Miller announced that he would step down before year’s end after seven years as editor of News for Members. This prompted the council to add the task of finding a new editor to the mandate of the task force. Task force co-chairs Lori Barian and James Lee identified and invited three members with publishing and editing skills to join them as volunteers in this work:

» Gene Gollogly, Publisher, SteinerBooks and Booklight, Inc.;

» Ronald Koetzsch, Editor, Renewal Magazine and Dean of Students at Rudolf Steiner College; and

» Walter Alexander, Contributing Editor for Lilipoh and a professional writer.

This group sent an announcement to members in September 2008 to publicize the search process and solicit candidates. Lori Barian became an editor candidate and stepped off the task force. The next task was to develop an initial five-year strategic plan and budget, which the editor and the council will update regularly. This plan will result in a high quality publication that will become substantially self financing. Its economic viability will depend on increased circulation, greater member support, and advertising. With an internet presence and a monthly electronic newssheet, it will represent the life of anthroposophy in America in its entirety.

The task force considered thirteen editor applicants and added Marian Leon, director of administration and membership services, for the review of three finalists in personal interviews and a review of the destiny path that led them to apply for the editor position. In the end, John Beck was unanimously recommended by the task force to the council, which confirmed the choice by a unanimous vote. John brings to the task a strong and creative spirit.

The council will communicate with the editor on strategic planning issues, and he will receive an annual review from its performance review committee. Lori Barian was chosen by the council to be its point person with the editor. John will also work closely with Marian Leon and treasurer Jerry Kruse.

The Society will phase out the Journal for Anthroposophy and the Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter and include the material they contain in the new publication, which will be made available to a broader range of friends and members. It is free for members; non-members can obtain it by subscription.

The publications task force has completed its work. Members of this group are all volunteers, and they have all agreed to continue serving on an editorial support committee. Their efforts on behalf of the Society have made possible the accomplishment of this important task in only six months. It is with great gratitude that the council thanks this group on behalf of all members.

James P. Lee

From the Office...

One of the many enjoyable aspects of working in the administrative office is the opportunity to speak with and read correspondence from Society members. Your thoughts and concerns matter to us! Recently there have been a few themes sounding, and I would like to share with you how we are responding to your requests and suggestions.

Many people have requested the possibility to pay their membership dues online and make donations through our website. We are currently working with our web designer to provide this service. By the end of March, the Society will have a secure website that will enable online financial transactions—payment of dues, conference registrations, donations, and purchases. All online transactions will receive an electronic receipt.

Paper consumption is the second most popular comment! The Society is taking several steps to address this concern.

We will soon provide the opportunity to receive many Society communications electronically—newsletter, monthly updates, membership renewals, conference and workshop announcements, etc. Over the past year, we have gathered e-mail addresses for approximately 60% of our members. By now, those members should have received an e-mail inviting them to become a part of our distribution list. If you have not heard from us and would like to be included on this list, please visit our website (www.anthroposophy.org) and follow the link found on the front page. Items will continue to be mailed to those who wish to receive a paper copy.

Finally, we will send paper receipts in a slightly different way this year.

» All donations will immediately receive a printed receipt (as in the past.)

» Dues and contributions given through the membership renewal form will receive a printed receipt at the end of the calendar year.

Thank you for your continued support and good will. As always, if you have questions or concerns, please contact us. We look forward to hearing from you!

Marian León Director of Administration and Member Services

The series “Classics from the Journal for Anthroposophy” continues with “Novalis”; previous issues can be ordered from the society. Details are on page 8.

From the Treasurer...

The question that I have been asked often by our members is: “How do you use my membership contribution?” Of course, each year, financial reports are prepared and are available to each member who seeks a copy. Unfortunately, it can be difficult for many to understand what these reports are actually telling us about the life of the US society! A schedule which members have said is helpful is one which presents the use of membership contributions by category on a per member basis. The following schedule represents, on a per member basis, how funds are planned to be used during the calendar year 2009.

G.E.M.S. The National Study Group

(Geographically Engaged Members Studygroup)

A special moment during a retreat week in 2002 in Ann Arbor brought the powerful realization that many anthroposophists feel very alone in their connection with the work of Rudolf Steiner, both in life and in study. I came back to Los Angeles feeling deeply moved by this experience and with a strong mandate to do something about it. The something was the initiative to form a national study group. I pondered how to do this, how to form something which could feel personal and still encompass our vast country. I decided that if we studied the same material at the same time, and worked with the truth that thoughts are real, we could work successfully together in this big room called America.

**Based upon 3000 members & the submitted budget for 2009 Cost is net of non-membership revenues

Based on past membership patterns, an assumption has been made that 3,000 members will make membership contributions during the year. At the 3,000 member level, membership dues at $120 per year will not cover the costs that must be covered from the dues. As a result, the Anthroposophical Society in America, Inc., will incur a deficit in operations for 2009 as they have in each of the last few years.

The biggest challenge that I face, as treasurer, is to assist the Society in getting to a point at which deficits are not experienced. Of course, there is not an easy answer and I rely on the help of all members and friends of the society. I have taken the position that to cut capacity is to accept defeat. We certainly are reviewing all costs incurred and seek ways to be more efficient at our tasks. My hope is that we grow in membership and will develop programs that will encourage individuals to join with us in support of anthroposophical activities. If growth is achieved, along with reasonable cost savings, we should be successful in supporting current activities without dues rate increases.

In this part of the newsletter, reserved for comments from the treasurer, I will attempt to keep the membership informed of our financial condition and plan to describe what is accomplished by spending in each of the categories referenced above.

Jerry Kruse Treasurer

On a theme for the year, based on a book or lecture series of Rudolf Steiner, monthly mailings bring related material. A red candle—for community and love—lights our common study time: Saturdays at 6:30 am on the west coast, 9:30 am on the east coast (and the most reasonable hours lie between). We have grown from 6 people in a few states to 77 people in about 27 states. If you would like to share in this earnest endeavor please contact me at 323-462-7703 or shipman2005@sbcglobal.net I welcome a conversation with you.

Margaret Shipman

P.S. In the next publication you will hear from Basil and Christina Williams, who have participated in GEMS since its inception.

The Traveling Speakers Program

In 2006 a wonderful initiative was launched by the membership enrichment committee of the national council. The aim was to bring anthroposophical work to smaller groups and branches which did not have the resources to “bring in a speaker.”

A traveling speaker weekend encompasses Friday night to Sunday noon. Your community is encouraged to choose a topic and several possible dates, then notify the national office of your wish to have a conference. Travel and honorarium for the speaker are provided through the national office, together with a small amount for an artistic activity during the weekend.

Because notices are sent to members within driving distance of your community and because “get to know you time” and discussion time are core components of the weekend, bonds for ongoing work and personal relationships grow out of each conference. In fact, we have heard only positive and enthusiastic comments from past participants.

If you would like to know more about this opportunity to connect the work of the national council with individuals in your area please visit our website at www.anthroposophy.org or call the Ann Arbor office at (734) 662-9355.

CONTENTS

of Journal No. 80

» Rudolf Steiner’s “Last Address”

» Stephen Spitalny: “Who is John and Why are Fairy Tales so often Named After Him?”

» Lona Truding: “Novalis: Spirit of a New Age”

» Albert Steffen: “Novalis: Herald and Forerunner”

» Novalis: The Blue Flower

“From Christianity or Europe ”

“Selected Fragments”

“Hymns to the Night, I, II, III”

» Christopher Bamford: “Novalis and the Easter Thought”

» Bruce Donehower: “What is Magical Idealism?”

» Arthur Zajonc:

“An Aeolian Harp: Nature and Novalis’ Science”

Novalis

Donald Melcer, Editor and Introduction

Classics from the Journal for Anthroposophy

Published by the Anthroposophical Society in America

Easter 2009 / Number 80, Available April 2009

Novalis, edited with an introduction by Donald Melcer, is the sixth volume in the series of thematic issues published by the Journal for Anthroposophy. Edited by Robert McDermott, this series provides a unique opportunity to revisit previously published articles, no longer available, written by contemporary authors who have actively worked for many years with the insights brought by Rudolf Steiner. Each volume includes a significant introduction by the volume’s editor.

This issue is an invitation for you to read what Rudolf Steiner and authors with anthroposophical backgrounds have to say about the poet-philosopher-scientist Novalis. Rudolf Steiner states that reading Novalis’ work provides heartfelt knowledge of the heavenly splendor that exists within even the simplest of material things. Such an appreciation of everything of the earth and the secrets they contain will open the way for each of us to be true servants of the Michael Thought, “worthy helpers of what has now to enter Earth-evolution through anthroposophy.”

Past volumes in this series are available:

» Meeting Rudolf Steiner

selected and introduced by Joan Almon

» Anthroposophy & Imagination

selected and introduced by Kate Farrell

» Revisioning Society & Culture

selected and introduced by Douglas Sloan

» Mani & Service

selected and introduced by Robert Sardello

» Meeting Anthroposophy selected and introduced by Robert Hill

Four additional volumes will complete the series:

» Science, selected by Robert McDermott and introduced by Arthur Zajonc. Michaelmas 2009

» Waldorf Education, selected and introduced by Diana Hughes and John Kettle. Easter 2010

» Visual Arts, selected and introduced by Hans-Joachim Mattke and Heidi Violand. Michaelmas 2010

» Meditation and Spiritual Practice, selected and introduced by Gertrude Reif Hughes. Easter 2011

Order at our website www.anthroposophy.org or contact us at: Anthroposophical Society in America

1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104.

E-mail: information@anthroposophy.org

Phone: 734-662-9355 Fax: 734-662-1727

Mary Stewart Adams

The Calendar of the Soul and Astronomy

The Anthroposophical Society in America recently announced the completion and installation of the permanent display of Margot Rossler’s glass etchings of the New Images of the Sun Zodiac at the Steiner House in Ann Arbor, Michigan—an event that has been in the works for nine years, since member Lotte Emde so generously donated the etchings to the Society in 2000. as precession), while the Moon has a changing rhythm that repeats only every 19 years, so the changing rhythm of Sun and Moon as well as the change in the number of weeks from one Easter to the next revealed that the Calendar of the Soul was meant for republication each year. As Rudolf Steiner explained to Society members in 1912, “Each one of you will be able to use this Calendar of the Soul every year. In it you will find something that might be described as the finding of the path leading from the human soul to the living spirit weaving through the universe.” 2

Such an event is fitting in this International Year of Astronomy, for as the scientific community celebrates the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of the telescope in observing the night sky and the attendant opportunities for discovery along those lines of research, the anthroposophical community meets this penetration of the physical cosmos with an artistic rendering of the soul-spiritual experience of that same starry world. And not a moment too soon, for the striving to renew a spiritual relationship with the cosmos can serve as a powerful and necessary companion if not antidote to the current scientific deeds that threaten to interrupt some very basic cosmic rhythms. Consider the activity of NASA July 4, 2007 in blasting the comet Temple I, the intended atom smashing of the Large Hadron Collider which was activated in September 2008, or this summer’s LCROSS Mission during which it is intended to blast a rocket into the Moon with a force of 9,000 km/hr, producing an explosion equivalent to about 2000 pounds of TNT 1

The New Images of the Zodiac were created by Steiner contemporary Imma von Eckardstein and first appeared in the original Calendar of the Soul 1912/1913, an astronomical calendar of an entirely new order. On its cover page, the Calendar stated that it was for the year “1879 after the birth of the Ego” indicating that it would mark time not from the birth of the Christ Child, as is the practice with the universallyaccepted, three-century-old Gregorian calendar, but from the objective fact of the Mystery of Golgotha and the events of Easter. Consequently, the Calendar of the Soul cannot be fixed from one year of 52 weeks to the next, but shifts with the moveable feast of Easter, a cosmic experience revealed on Earth through the changing relationship of Sun and Moon with Earth each year after the Sun has crossed north of the celestial equator at the Springtide. The Sun arrives at this crossing point slightly earlier each year (this is known

In the same lecture, Rudolf Steiner also explained that the new images which appeared in the Calendar represented the waking and sleeping of certain elemental beings, and that though the anthroposophical community would experience derision and mockery at using a calendar of unequal lengths, it was a deed that was not to be regarded as a sudden inspiration, but as “something organically connected with our whole movement.” 3 In something that is uniform and fixed there is the impress of death, he explained, but in what is unequal there is life: “Our Calendar is intended to be a creative impulse for life.” 4

By noting that there are never 52 weeks from one Easter to the next, the meditant who uses the Calendar of the Soul is required to adjust the verses each year, and this not according to whim and personal preference, but according to cosmic positions and festival days. In the original Calendar this was supported by the small images representing the Moon as it stood in a certain sign of the tropical zodiac beside each day, and the new image of the Sun as it stood in each successive sign of the sidereal zodiac which was displayed at the top of each page. The entire Calendar was a demonstration of the necessity of weaving the soul mood of the human being on the Earth (through the verses) together with the solar and lunar moods as these celestial bodies moved through the

Capricorn, Taurus, Leo (from top)

cosmos (through the images). While we have been so hungry for spiritual substance that we have settled for only the 52 verses of the Calendar of the Soul, we are at peril of losing the very clear and deliberate cosmic connection it intended to foster by using it without the attendant solar and lunar images.

Further, if we can regard The Calendar of the Soul 1912/1913 as a bookend on the opposite side of Pope Gregory’s calendar of 1582, a reform which attended the changing relationship of the human being with the cosmos that resulted from the Copernican Revolution and the findings of Galileo,5 then we can become more cognizant of the ongoing conversation that takes place between the human being and the cosmos, a conversation formerly led by the speaking of the stars which is now weighted on the side of what the human being is speaking back.

It took nearly 300 years for the entire world to accept the rhythm of the Gregorian calendar, although it was not intended to be a civil calendar at all. During that same passage of time, the unveiling of the physical cosmos came to the fore, and what can be referred to as the “speaking” of the stars moved to the rear, and the stars grew silent. Rudolf Steiner refers to this silencing of the stars as the “slaying of Isis” when Isis is known as “the divine Sophia, the wisdom that sees through the world and enables man to comprehend the world.” According to Rudolf Steiner, “when we look out into the world’s spaces, the world’s ocean, and see the stars moving only according to mathematical lines, then we see the grave of the world’s spiritual essence; for

the divine Sophia, the successor of Isis is dead” 6, slain by Lucifer through the thoughts regarding the physical cosmos that result from a purely mathematical or technological approach. The Calendar of the Soul revivifies the soul experience of the cosmos that is lost in this practice of our modern astronomers and supports an active moral conscience which must attend our current, technological reach into the surrounding cosmic world.

1. http://science.nasa.gov

2. “Calendar of the Soul” lecture given by Rudolf Steiner in Cologne, 7th May, 1912

3. ibid.

4. ibid.

5. Pope Gregory XIII (1502–1585) introduced the Grego -

rian Computation in 1582, when Galileo (1564–1642) was 18 years old. It wasn’t until the 1600s that January 1 was reckoned as the beginning of the New Year.

6. “The Search for the New Isis, the Divine Sophia” lecture II given by Rudolf Steiner in Dornach, 24th December, 1920

Prints created from digital photographs of the New Images of the Zodiac, together with Margot Rossler’s text describing each image are available from the society by phoning 734.662.9355 and through the society’s website at www.anthropsophy.org. Also, the use of the new images of the zodiac in relation to the Calendar of the Soul will be demonstrated through the workshop Cosmic Cycles, Earthly Rhythms at Ann Arbor, time to be announced. If you are interested in the republication of the Calendar of the Soul each year with the solar and lunar images, please contact Mary Stewart Adams at starmare.adams@gmail.com or by phone at 231.838.8181.

Turning Crisis into Opportunity

The Challenge of Individual Growth & Community Development For Our Time

With hope and promise in the hearts of all Americans following the inauguration of a new president we also face serious crises too huge to fathom. No piecemeal solutions will work. Addressing the pressing material and economic needs is not enough. Ignoring the spiritual will only make things worse. What can we learn from Rudolf Steiner and the new mysteries that will give us insights for the renewal of our nation and our whole way of life? Surely a greater understanding of human nature is the key. And from that, we gain understanding for the building of community life and a more peaceful and harmonious world. Rising to meet the great challenge of the times we have the motivation and the will to change things for the better, and from spiritual science we will gain the wisdom necessary to do it well.

Keynote speaker, James Ulness, PhD, will give a series of three lectures and lead a roundtable discussion on the theme. Workshops include: “Community Building in the 21st Century: Creating New Social Forms for the Future” and “The Opportunity in the Economic Crisis: Transforming Capital and Ownership” with Robert Karp of Central Regional Council; “Flow and Harmony Through Music: Singing, Improvisation, Movement” with Monika Sutherland; and “Permaculture: The Way of the Future” with Mark Shepard. The conference will also feature a three-DVD film series on “Permaculture: the Global Gardener” with Bill Mollison. A community dinner and special entertainment are also planned. Cost is $90/full conference ($80 if pre-registered by 3/14) or $15 per lecture/workshop. For more info, view www.ViroquaConference.com or e-mail Sheila Andersen at Sheila@ leadingedgereview.com; (608) 236-4115. Location: Old Main & Pleasant Ridge, Waldorf School, Viroqua, Wisconsin.

James Ulness, longtime professor of psychology at Concordia College in Morehead, MN, developed a psychology in the light of spiritual science. Dr. Ulness lectures on anthroposophy throughout the US and is deeply concerned with the role anthroposophy could play in our lives and in the world events of our time.

March 20–22 , 2009 — Viroqua Anthroposophy Conference: A Midwest Gathering

radiant than the sun…”

A Study Conference on the Ego: Seeking the Higher Self

About his landmark book Theosophy Rudolf Steiner wrote “Simply reading it through is as good as not reading it at all. The spiritual scientific truths it contains must be experienced; that is the only way they can be of value.” How can we absorb from Rudolf Steiner’s work what we need in order to take hold of ourselves and to become who we need to be, especially in these increasingly difficult times? The purpose of this conference will be to come together and to clarify the essential differences between the various aspects of ourselves, and to help each other to break through the walls of our assumptions, learning to live more completely out of the higher aspects of ourselves. Our hope is to create an environment which can be a threshold for transformation, both during the conference and afterwards!

Questions to be explored include:

» How do we experience the differences between body, soul, and spirit?

» Why are human beings not the same as a mineral, plant, or animal?

» What is the difference between the sentient soul, mind soul, consciousness soul, and spirit self?

» What is the ego’s role, and how can we recognize its presence?

» How does the ego act upon or through the other aspects of our being?

» How do thinking, feeling, and willing—even sense perception and memory change depending upon which aspect of the self is predominant in us?

Some topics for whole group and small group conversations will include: The inter-relatedness of the aspects of our being. Taking hold of our thinking—and how can we know whether our thinking is serving the sentient soul or one of the aspects of our higher self. And about how the development of the ego is significant for the world and for the Hierarchies.

Artistic Experiences...

will include fun with our well-loved clown, Dawn Stratton; eurythmy with Alice Stamm; singing with Margaret Shipman; a play, Aeschylus Unbound, with Glen Williamson and Laurie Portocarrero (see page 20); and a brief sharing of stories by participants about when the ego is manifest (from personal experience, literature or history).

Lecture presentations...

A History of the Development of the Ego and Unusual Esoteric Hindrances, by Beth Wieting; The Christ and the Human Ego, by Helen Lubin; and, How the Ego Comes Into Incarnation through Waldorf Education, by Dorit Winter.

Everyone is invited, members and non-members alike. It will be particularly helpful if as many people as possible can strenuously grapple with Chapter 1 of Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophy and other materials related to the ego, before coming, so that in the conference we may stretch into a living experience of the fullness of our being.

Website: http://balancepoint.us/conferences/cig

Registrar : Beth Wieting, 4130 SE Lambert Street, Portland, OR 97202; available by phone or fax from January 30 through March 16; Ph: 503-774-8764; Fax 503-774-4822

Planning Committee Members: Beth Wieting, Pam Engler, Stephanie Sugars, Carol Gutierrez, Elizabeth East, Peter Rennick, Carol Wolfley, Dorin Del Alba, and Mary Baggott.

March 20–22, 2009, sponsored by the Faust Branch of the Anthroposophical Society, at Rudolf Steiner College, Fair Oaks, California

“More

More radiant than the sun

Purer than the snow Finer than the ether Is the self... — Rudolf Steiner

Linda Connell

A New Portal of Initiation in Dornach

Well , I Was W rong . I had heard that the old product Ion of the Mystery p lays and the scenery

W ere f I n I shed and put aWay. s o I thought the ne W product Ion Would be bare , bor I ng or pa I nfully avant- garde Not so. The new production of The Portal of Initiation is simple, elegant, and contemporary. It is also a compelling dramatic piece. It is altogether a success in my view.

In case you don’t know what I am talking about, Rudolf Steiner wrote four plays which he called Mystery Dramas. The first play, The Portal of Initiation, originally performed in 1910 (see page 14), tells the story of a group of people who are interested in their personal spiritual development and who have the same spiritual teacher. Some of their inner experiences are dramatically portrayed, as are their friendships and inner conflicts.

The new production is filled with luminous color. The scene where the friends meet after a lecture by their teacher, Benedictus, can be stiff and dull. This scene was in front of a rich reddish wall and all the characters were strikingly dressed in shades of red and related colors. The scene was well directed and acted and kept me interested throughout.

The scenes in the spiritual world are an endless pale blue with panels of paler shades of blue. The enormous Spirit of the Earth (right) was a favorite of mine. He hovered in the air with multiple huge wings. (Shown below, costume studies for the Spirit of the Earth.)

There was, of course, beautiful eurythmy with speakers in the wings. And Lucifer and Ahriman were there and familiar,

but Ahriman looked fancier than ever. Well, the way the world is going, he can afford a fancy costume. The four hierophants in the temple scene were dressed like the kings in Goethe’s The Green Snake in gold, silver, copper, and mixed.

The scenery and props were sparse but effective. A huge portal served as the door from the lecture hall and door to the spiritual world in different scenes.

The play is long. It began at 10 am and didn’t end until 6:30 pm but there were long breaks. It is all in German, but I had read the play and seen some English productions, so I recognized where I was in the story. My seat was more than halfway back and it is hard to hear in the large main hall. I speak some German but I missed a lot of the text. That is why I suggested we read it as a summer project in the Los Angeles Branch.

If you want to see this production of The Portal of Initiation you have another chance. It will be performed around the Annual General Meeting of the General Society at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. There are two performances: Friday, April 3 at 9:30 am and Tuesday, April 7 at 2 pm. You can also see the second play, The Soul’s Probation, on Sunday, April 5 at 3 pm and Wednesday, April 8, 2009 at 10 am. It is definitely worth the trip.

Goethe’s Tale and the Mystery Dramas

A Rare Opportunity this August

“This evening I promise you a tale that will remind you of nothing, and of everything.” With these words the old priest announces the story that concludes Goethe’s Conversations of German Refugees. It is commonly known as the tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily; Goethe himself inscribed it simply THE TALE. Both the title and the introductory remark suggest something centrally archetypal.

The Tale was first published at Michaelmas 1795. It was a time when a cultural flourishing unparalleled since classical Athens was being brought about by a convergence of great individualities incarnated in Central Europe. Simultaneously, in the spirit world, those souls who soon would incarnate into the new current of anthroposophy were gathered for a heavenly cultus under the guidance of the Archangel Michael. This cultus seeped through into Goethe’s consciousness and became the Tale. 1 It drew on the spirit of the Knights Templar. 2 “The way the images are framed, the way the human soul in its relatedness is thought of in the tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, the sequence of the thoughts, the force of the thoughts: this is Christian, this is the new way to Christ.” 3

Hence it played a central role in the founding of anthroposophy. Rudolf Steiner’s first esoteric 4 lecture was about the Tale: it was entitled “Goethe’s Secret Revelation,” and given on Michaelmas Day, 1900. Later, Rudolf Steiner called this event the original cell of the anthroposophical movement. 5 Today too its powerful images can enable the souls who seek anthroposophy from before birth to find it in a deep destiny connection.

Through Rudolf Steiner, the Tale was transformed: after he had lived with it for three times seven years, it became his first mystery drama, The Portal of Initiation, a Rosicrucian Mystery. 6 And in a broader sense the totality of the Mystery Dramas is a metamorphosis of Goethe’s Tale. The characters are the same, but now

1 Rudolf Steiner, lectures 8 July 1924, GA237, 19 July 1924, GA240.

2 Steiner, lecture 25 Sept. 1916, GA171.

3 Steiner, lecture 12 Jan. 1919, GA188.

4 Steiner, Autobiography, ch. 61 (ch. 30 in some editions).

5 Steiner, remarks 25 Sept. 1920 (the evening before the opening of the Goetheanum), Blätter für Anthroposophie 1955, vol. 7, no. 3.

6 Steiner, lecture 31 Oct. 1910, GA125; lecture 9 May 1924, GA236.

mostly human, and with new names, living in a karmic constellation at the beginning of the anthroposophical movement. The action is the same, but utterly recast, moving freely between the supersensory realms and the earthly plane. Even though it began to appear centuries ago, it turns out to be the story of our own present and future evolutionary trials in the Anthroposophical Society for the sake of mankind as a whole.

And what you suppose is done and gone, You can see from afar only now coming on. 7

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that The Portal of Initiation contains all of anthroposophy. 8 Here the path described in How Does One Attain Recognitions of the Higher Worlds is shown onstage, but in comparison with the book it is “much more intense, more real with life, and more actual, because much more individual.” 9

The drama is a being seeking incarnation. It wants to be clothed and spoken and moved, to be beheld with our senses. In 2007, the actors of the Goetheanum ensemble that had performed the mystery dramas in an uninterrupted tradition since the time of Rudolf Steiner were fired. This is a crisis for the being of the mystery drama.

In our own country, Hans and Ruth Pusch worked with these dramas for decades in Spring Valley, translating them and staging them. Hans Pusch had played Johannes Thomasius in the mystery dramas under Marie Steiner. Since his time, the mystery dramas have lived in Spring Valley, at least on and off, in an auditorium lovingly made for anthroposophy. This year there will be a conference there, with presentations, seminars, and performances. A dramatic adaptation of Goethe’s Tale will be performed by Laurie Portocarrero and Glen Williamson. And The Portal of Initiation will be performed, directed by Barbara Renold. The dates are Wednesday to Sunday, August 12th to the 16th.

For more on the conference, and to register, see www.threefold.org. Or contact Barbara Renold: 217 Hungry Hollow Rd., Spring Valley, NY 10977, tel. 845 356 0674; barbararenold@yahoo.com. Daniel Hafner is a priest of the Christian Community. He will be speaking at the conference. He can be reached at 610 293 6484, or dhafner1964@hotmail.com

Daniel Hafner

The first performance of The Portal of Initiation in 1910 (above, with Marie von Sievers at left), and a scene from the production as given in 2004 (below).

7 Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, part II.

8 Steiner, lectures 17 Sept. 1910 and 31 0ct. 1910, GA125.

9 Steiner, lecture 31 0ct. 1910, GA125.

Summer Arts Festival 2009

June 22–June 26: (open to high school students entering senior year and young people up to age 28)

“Searching for the Spirit in Our time: A Young People’s Festival of Art, Anthroposophy & Agriculture”

Experienced teachers from around the world will lead artistic activities (painting, sculpture, speech, eurythmy, improvisation & juggling) to support our exploration of the inner aspects and outer expressions of being human. Conversations about what it means to be human will include a substantive look at the anthroposophical perspective, the philosophy underlying Waldorf education. In the garden we will unearth Rudolf Steiner’s contribution to agriculture—bio-dynamics—as we move from compost to harvest.

Join other young people searching for real answers to life’s persistent questions. Look at issues, discover new paths, work, and socialize together.

June 29–July 3: (open to all)

“Summer Arts Intensive—Sculptural or Musical Emphasis”

Two “streams” of the arts based on what Rudolf Steiner refers to as the “sculptural (etheric) forces” and those based more on the “musical (astral) forces.” Every human being develops out of these two very different types of creative forces, and relies on them in daily life even when not working with them consciously or artistically.

A hands-on experience of these two types of arts, as they reveal themselves in studio work.

July 6–10: (open to Waldorf professionals only)

Waldorf Seminar with Christof Wiechert: “Common Sense and

Presence of Mind as Guiding Principles in a Waldorf School”

At the end of the third lecture in Balance in Teaching, Rudolf Steiner describes a presence of mind and common sense for the

true educator: “We become so fertile in thought and feeling that what we have to give fairly bubbles forth from us.” This is accomplished in three steps, which, once mastered inwardly, will enable you to “acquire in three seconds what you can use for an entire day.” They are 1: “acceptance or perception of the knowledge of man,” 2: “a comprehension, a meditative comprehension of this knowledge of man,” and 3: “[active, creative] remembering of the knowledge of man out of the spiritual.” Christof Wiechert will lead us into and through these three steps.

We will also consider how the senses of hearing and seeing can trigger our capacity for gaining presence of mind and common sense when nature becomes our instructor, working with the concept of the archetypal plant as a source for meditative strength and the notion of empathy as the basis for work ing with colleagues, parents, and student. Through exercises, conversation, and presentations, we will seek to lay the groundwork for new insights into common sense and presence of mind as guiding principles in the Waldorf classroom and the Waldorf school.

July 13–17: (open to all)

“Waldorf for Grown-ups”

Experience a week of Waldorf education as the students do, with main lessons and supporting artistic classes that engage and enliven the whole human being. In addition to learning more about what children in the Waldorf school experience, Waldorf for Grown-ups is an excellent way for participating adults— Waldorf parents, board members, and administrators—to rejuvenate and reconnect with their own creative forces.

For further information and brochure, please e-mail info@bacwtt.org , or call 415 332 2133.

June & July

Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training, at the East Bay Waldorf School, 3800 Clark Road, El Sobrante, CA

The Social Sculpture USA group began over a year ago and has been growing steadily. Concerned with bringing Michaelic thought and action to the present and future social spheres, using the liberated lifework of Joseph Beuys as one of our key inspirations, our members participate from both coasts and the middle of the continent too. We describe our activities in bringing anthroposophy into the social sphere, share

We invite everyone to view our website: SocialSculptureUSA.googlepages.com

If you would like to become part of the list serve, which has the capacity to share messages with the entire group, e-mail SocialSculptureUSA@gmail.com

Send written documents in Word, art and photographs on GIF or PDF. Warmly welcoming the expansion of Social Sculpture USA, Rosemary McMullen (co-founder and current keeper of the site)

“Together we will develop the social concept of art as a new-born child … social art, social sculpture, which sets itself the task of apprehending more than just physical material. We also need the spiritual soil of social art, where every single person experiences and recognizes himself as a creative, world-determining being.”

— artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986)

reflections, art, writings, philosophy, resources and strategies.

Renewal Courses 2009

In these times of financial and social challenge, we need personal, artistic, and spiritual renewal more than ever! As teachers, parents, and caregivers, it is important that we replenish the sources out of which we give. When we meet one another through good conversation, artistic practice, and new learning, we release the weight of daily challenges. Rudolf Steiner described how we need to look for the dignity of the human being in the spiritual world and bring it into our midst. It is here and now that we can bring warmth and courage and fill our hearts anew.

During two weeks of Renewal Courses last summer, sponsored by the Center for Anthroposophy in Wilton NH, we welcomed more than 260 people from all over North America and even a few from South America and Europe. Long after the Renewal program was over, one could still feel the power and uniqueness of this encounter of kindred spirits on a special place on earth. The campus of High Mowing School, where this program is held each summer, is a generous place that gives not only breathtaking mountain vistas, tended gardens, a pool, and superb food, but also something intangible for which we are grateful every year.

A large panel of presenters —Lisa Mahar, Arthur Auer, Douglas Gerwin, Signe Motter, and David Sloan—will work with the theme of “How to Start a Successful Grade or High School”. This course is meant for teachers, parents, or board members who are active in the healthy development of both new and existing schools. Michael Spence is coming from England once again to offer a course on “Social Renewal,” based on his new book. He will be asking where a path of social renewal should lead in the wake of market capitalism. Regine Kurek and Linda Larson will bring an artistic course entitled “Picturing Your Life as a Piece of Art”, combining painting, sculpture, and eurythmy. Hanneke van Riel is teaching a remedial course addressing the “Riddle of the Special Child”. Connie Helms and Nancy Mellon will be supporting her.

Once again we will offer courses for foreign language teachers to address grades 1–8 over two weeks with an experienced teaching staff: Lorey Johnson, Kati Manning, Julia Nunez, and Robert Sim. For the serious student of philosophy, we are grateful to have Christopher Bamford sharing his research on “American Spirituality” in a course that sheds light on the spiritual streams born from our own land. Roberto Trostli will teach physics and Jamie York math for the upper elementary grades. Both courses are always in great demand.

Many other courses will be offered, from Elizabeth Auer’s “Bringing the Curriculum into the Hands of Children, Grades 1–6” to artistic courses on “Awakening to the Music Within” with Juliane Weeks and Monica Anstutz or “Veil Painting” with Karine Munk Finser. There will also be a much anticipated research course with Michael Howard and Torin Finser. Georg Locher is back from England with his popular “Painting, Sculpture, and Drawing” course for grades 6–8.

This coming summer we are offering a wide variety of courses, while keeping the tuition the same as in 2008 and again giving a 20% tuition reduction to our practicing teachers. Ronald Koetzsch and Anne Riegel-Koetzsch will help us experience “Levity in Humor and Art”. According to them, we are funnier than we look! Signe Motter and Christopher Sblendorio will help prepare teachers who are entering their second, third, or fourth round of teaching with a course to support their search for new approaches, fresh sources, and the sheer joy in teaching.

Please check out our course descriptions or register by visiting our website: www.centerforanthroposophy.org or by calling our office at 603 654 2566. We look forward to hearing from you. — Karine Munk Finser, Coordinator of Renewal Courses

Week 1: June 28th–July 3rd

Week 2: July 5th–July 10th

Center for Anthroposophy in Wilton, NH

“We can only bring together single building stones. But if the effect upon our souls is something like a renewed stimulus to further effort, to further development along the path of knowledge, then these stones will have done their work for the great spiritual temple of humanity.”

—Rudolf Steiner

Summer Events at Sunbridge College

At Sunbridge College we are busy planning for this summer’s menu of offerings of new and well-loved courses. Please visit our website for a complete listing of courses, more information and to register: www.Sunbridge.edu. Below are some of the courses in the works. See you in the summer!

Courses for Early Childhood Educators:

» Tracing the Healing Roots of Waldorf Early Childhood Education with Nancy Blanning and Laurie Clark, June 22–26

» Enlivening Social Arts—Nurturing Relationships with Patricia Rubano, Connie Manson, Celia Riahi, June 29–July 3

» Introduction to Waldorf Early Childhood Education with Patricia Rubano, Leslie Burchell-Fox, Connie Manson, August 3–7

Preparing for Grades 1–8 (this year with separate offerings for new and experienced teachers):

Grade 1—with Gerry LoDolce, June 21–26

Grade 2 —with Dena Malon, June 21–26

Grade 3 —with Victoria Mansuri, June 28–July 3

Grade 4 —with Christopher Sblendorio, July 26–31

Grade 5 —with Tracy Brennan, June 28–July 3

Grade 6 —with Patrice Maynard, July 26–31

Grade 7—with Thomas Clark, July 26–31

Grade 8 —with Lynn Thurell, July 26–31

Additional Summer Offerings:

» Extra Lesson Week, with Joep Eickenboom and Mary Jo Oresti, July 20–24

» Workshop on Adolescence, with Patrice Maynard August 3–7

» Homeschooling Weekend, August 1–2

Part-time Programs Enrolling New Cycles:

» Waldorf Elementary Teacher Education Program, July 3–26

This program provides the practical, artistic, and philosophical foundation for teaching in the Waldorf grade school classroom.

» Leadership and Administration in Non-Profits, July 6–17

This program supports participants in developing practical leadership and administrative skills, integrating spiritual values, and building trustful relationships within organizations.

Questions?

For info on summer:

Susan Wallendorf, 845.425.0055 x 16, Summer@Sunbridge.edu.

For all other info: Anna Claire Novotny, 845.425.0055 x 18, ANovotny@Sunbridge.edu

Hellenic Odyssey

Come with us, join us in visiting some of the mystery places of Greece. We will explore the miracle of balance and harmony between the worlds of nature, man, and the Gods, in the culture of one of the most influential eras in the history of the world.

The glory of ancient Greece lasted a brief moment in time, yet its light has glimmered down the centuries and illuminates us still. We will journey to temples, theaters, monasteries, and places of healing. Myth and story, singing, eurythmy and informal lectures will help us enter into relationship with the mood of land and sea, morning and evening, with the spirit of place— both landscape and “soul-scape”.

There will be visits to museums and the theater—drama and dance; time to wander, swim, eat in outdoor tavernas, time to absorb, and delight in, this beautiful country.

Our odyssey takes us to Athens, Nauplion, Eleusis, Mycenae, Delphi, Sounion, Epidaurus, and the monasteries of the Meteora. We sail the Aegean sea to the islands of Aigina, and Patmos, and to Ephesus in Turkey.

The tour is led by Gillian Schoemaker, eurythmist, who lives in Beaver Run, Camphill Special School PA; and Glen Williamson, actor and storyteller, from New York City. We will be accompanied throughout by qualified local guides.

Travel is by private coach, air and ferryboat. Accommodation in twin–bedded rooms (single rooms available for a supplement) in comfortable pensions, chosen for atmosphere, location, and convenience.

The cost of this 20-day odyssey is approximately $4885 (depending on the currency exchange), all-inclusive except international air travel and meals in free times.

Interested? For details of itinerary, contact Gillian Schoemaker: 610 469 0864, gillian_schoemaker@yahoo.com

June 29th–July 18th 2009

Visiting the Mystery Places of Greece

Pictures from Gillian Schoemaker’s 2008 Scottish Odyssey, a visit full of singing and scenery, art and talks, islands and history and food and eurythmy. A participant’s report is available in pdf format.

Encircling Light—Expectant Silence

Donations to the Conference on the North

Members and friends of the Anthroposophical Society in the United States willing to donate funds in support of the Encircling Light—Expectant Silence Conference, to be held August 1–8 in Whitehorse, Yukon, may do so through the Rudolf Steiner Foundation doing business as RSF Social Finance. Donations received by RSF Social Finance are fully tax deductible. Funds received will go toward support of First Nations’ program carriers and participants and to support for the contribution of our colleagues in the Youth Section.

Donations may be sent to RSF Social Finance by check, credit card or wire. To donate by check, please make your check out to RSF Social Finance with Anthroposophical Society in Canada –Encircling Light Conference written in the memo line.

To donate by credit card, please visit www.rsfsocialfinance.org and go to the Donate Now! page; choose “Other” from the drop down menu and then type Anthroposophical Society in Canada in the next box that appears. To make a wire donation please contact Caitlyn Kowalczyk at caitlyn.kowalczyk@rsfsocialfinance.org to request our wire instructions.

An article on the conference will appear in our next issue. Details of the program are online at www.encirclinglight.ca

— continued from next page of the Knights Templar; most were sergeants, lay brothers, and other workers. The actual Knights numbered around 1,500. These were violently eradicated and large numbers underwent terrible tortures before being burned at the stake. Nevertheless the true spiritual fruit of their work remains as an impulse, now and for future centuries. Rudolf Steiner says of them that ‘a great and mighty task was set, not so much addressing thought than deep feeling, which aimed at strengthening the individual and personal soul life with the intention that it might be entirely absorbed in the progressive stream of Christian evolution’ (25.09.1916).

The conference will open with a talk by Alfred Kon on ‘The Knights contribution to future spirituality, ‘From the Round Table to the Foundation Stone,’ showing the importance of Ireland and the Celtic world in creating a spiritual chalice for the later impulses of the Arthurian Knights and Celtic Christianity. Judith von Halle will speak about ‘Occult Rites and Impulses of the Templars’; her deeply esoteric input will affect the rest of the week’s content. Peter Tradowsky will give a talk on ‘The Mean -

Siberia & the Russian Far East

ISIS Cultural Outreach International Society is planning to have a small group of anthroposophists travel to Siberia and the Russian Far East next August to meet Russian anthroposophists after the Conference on the North (see this page). In addition to sharing from the conference, we hope to share from our specialized backgrounds where it is of interest to our hosts.

ISIS was founded by Canadian Monica Gold after her experience of the cultural caravan of Miha Pogacnik over 20 years ago which traveled clear across what was then the Soviet Union. For many years since she has organized with others fundraisers and traveling workshops, wherever there was interest in Russia, enabling everything from medical clinics to Waldorf kindergartens to develop further.

In May 2008 a new board formed in Vancouver; its first action is to make it possible for Alexey Koscheev from Kirov, Russia, a physician very interested in anthroposophy, to attend the Conference on the North.

Galina Fin has a particular interest in bringing a Russian Christian Community priest to Siberia, the center of Russia, to celebrate the Act of Consecration of Man as a gift to the earth. In connection with this there is the plan to also apply bio-dynamics preparations.

To be informed of our activities or help them financially, please contact Mary Lee at maryplumbmentjes@yahoo.com, tel. 907245-0279 or Arie at arieva.perceval@gmail.com , tel. 514-364-9242.

ing for Today of the Destruction of the Order of the Knights Templar’ and will bring us up to date with the reappearance of Soratic impulses and the way forward. Sylvia Francke’s talk will be ‘The Knights Templar, Shipley, and the Mission of Albion’. We will have an optional visit mid week to the site at Shipley. Horst Biehl will share his research in, ‘The Knights Templar in Britain’ and will lead a separate optional trip to Scotland to visit sites with evidence of the final years of the Order.

Morning workshops include Christine Gruwez’ ‘Modernity, Consciousness Soul, and the Initiation into the Mystery of Evil’. Christine has spent very many years leading tours along the old Silk Road and giving workshops and talks on this Manichaean theme. Margaret Jonas will lead ‘Karma through the Mystery Drama’. Margaret compiled and edited the recently published work of Rudolf Steiner, ‘The Knights Templar, the Mystery of the Warrior Monks’. Other workshops will touch on the Rosslyn Chapel, the Masonic order, the esoteric link between the Templars and the early Cistercian Order, the meaning of the Solomonic Temple etc. And there will be workshops in the afternoon working with the mystery drama, music, and painting.

Left to right: Monica Gold, Mary Lee Plumb-Mentjes, Arie Van Ameringen, Galina Fin, and Andrew Gold.

Confronting the Future: Templar Impulses in the 21st Century

This major conference will explore the esoteric significance of the Knights Templar, and how their spiritual impulse has continued, and still continues, to evolve and work further. We shall explore their history, their rites, their cultural impulse, and also the ways in which this impulse is opposed or misrepresented. There will be a array of profound lectures—by Judith von Halle, Peter Tradowsky, Jaap van der Haar, Christine Gruwez, Sylvia Francke, and others—illumining the Templars from different esoteric angles; an outing to a local Templar site; discussion groups; artistic workshops and performances.

Our attempt will be not only to understand but also to make a living connection to the inspiration behind the Templars. This influence manifests spiritually, politically, economically—the Templars are often seen as the first bankers—as well as culturally and artistically. There will therefore be a strong artistic element to the week with singing, visual arts, a unique musical performance of a new composition by Gregers Brinch and a workshop (Adrian Locher and Alexander Gifford) on the Templar reincarnation drama within Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Plays.

This open conference is the ninth Historiography Conference organized by the Humanities Section of the School of Spiritual Science. There will be a separate trip to Argyll, Scotland, before the conference, guided by one of the speakers, Horst Biehl, to visit sites holding recently researched evidence of the order’s mysterious final years. (Numbers limited so please apply early to Gil for costs and information. This trip requires physical stamina and good mobility)

Contributors: Jaap van der Haar, Judith von Halle, Peter Tradowsky, Christine Gruwez, Adrian Locher, Sylvia Francke, Richard Ramsbotham, Gregers Brinch, Alexander Gifford, Alfred Kon, Horst Biehl, Gil McHattie, Alex Naylor, Terry Boardman, and others. The conference will be held at Emerson College, Sussex, UK from 4 pm, Sunday 16th August to mid-day, Saturday 22nd August 2009. For further details contact Gil McHattie

+44(0)1342 824817, e-mail: gilmchattie@dsl.pipex.com. For booking please contact Emerson College, Forest Row, East Sussex, RH18 5JX, UK. Telephone: +44(0) 1342 822238; e-mail: mail@emerson.org. uk; website: www.emerson.org.uk.

Gil McHattie

Non nobis, Domine...

Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed Nomini Tuo da Gloriam Not for us, Lord, not for us, but in Thy Name the Glory

During the autumn of 2007 there were several conferences held worldwide to acknowledge the 700th anniversary of the persecution and destruction of the order of the ‘Poor Brothers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon’—the Order of the Knights Templar. A small group from the UK attended a confer-

ence in Hamburg. There were some major speakers including Judith von Halle and Peter Tradowsky. It was a deeply moving and thought provoking weekend which encouraged a few of the English speaking contingent to plan a further conference in the UK. Interestingly all the conferences that I am aware of have inspired further conferences and we hope that the UK initiative will inspire further work. It was said in Hamburg that it is becoming more and more important to add truth to the plethora of distortion that surrounds the order, especially now when the Vatican has published the Parchment of Chinon. This document shows that Pope Clement V found the Templars not guilty of heresy, but guilty of lesser infractions of Church law. He still ordered the disbandment of the Order.

The Templars’ spiritual legacy, therefore, needs other voices to give an awareness of the impulse they carried and what it means for today. Rudolf Steiner was aware that 600 years after the persecution he could not speak openly about their rites as it would do harm to the order of the Knights Templar who are also Knights of the Grail.

The order was completely dedicated to the Mystery of Golgotha. It was founded soon after the successes of the first crusade by a Hugues de Payens in 1118–19 in Jerusalem and a major impulse was to protect Jerusalem, where the Mystery of Golgotha had taken place. The Knights Templar lived so intensely with the reality described by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me,” thus uniting themselves profoundly and inwardly with the Mystery of Golgotha, that many underwent true Christian initiation. This took place not only personally but also on behalf of the whole of humanity. There is some research to show the leader of this small group of men, Hugues de Payens, was a cousin of Bernard of Clairvaux. One of the men in this group was Andre de Montbard who was also related to Bernard through the maternal line. Another name was that of Hugues, Count of Champagne, a very rich noble who had his seat in Troyes. Bernard of Clairvaux would have had feudal connections to this family. And this mighty Cistercian gave the Knights Templar their rule in 1128 at the Council of Troyes.

And here we find a hint of a further impulse which is that of the Templars’ great alliance with the Cistercians. This was to raise Europe to a higher level, bringing European society into a form where a new, freer kind of Christianity could develop. The Cistercians tamed the wildernesses by choosing sites to settle and cultivate in swamps and deep forests; the Templars laid down roads, developed markets in certain places and were the social, legal aspect of the process. They called each other companions. Both Orders grew significantly and spread throughout Europe and by 1300 there were an estimated 15,000 in the Order — continued on previous page

Preview: the Annual General Meeting, Oct. 2–4, 2009

Creating Living Connections: Christian Rosenkreutz and the Social Impulse is the title for this year’s annual conference and members’ meeting of the Anthroposophical Society in America. The conference is scheduled for October 2–4, 2009, and is being developed by the Anthroposophical Society in collaboration with The Threefold Educational Center of Chestnut Ridge (Spring Valley), NY, and will be held on the campus of the Threefold Educational Center. The Eastern Regional Council and the Threefold Branch are also actively participating in conference preparations.

Creating Living Connections features a new format intending to give anthroposophic organizations, initiatives, groups, and individuals opportunities to meet, interact, share their work, and truly “create living connections.” Members and friends are invited to arrive early in Spring Valley to participate in the local community’s Michaelmas Festival on Tuesday afternoon. Space will be provided on Wednesday and Thursday for preconference meetings, and planned social events will enable participants to share ideas and information about their work. A highlight of the pre-conference activity will be a performance of Aeschylus Unbound on Thursday evening, October 1 (see below). This original play will launch a weekend rich in lectures, art, drama, eurythmy, conversations, and lively evening cafés. A Friday morning forum will gather the fruits of the working groups that met during the week.

Greek Mysteries & the Father of Tragedy

Acclaimed film star Mala Powers collaborated with Glen Williamson to write Aeschylus Unbound, an original play about the “father of tragedy” and the origins of drama in the Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone in ancient Greece. Laurie Portocarrero plays the Priestess. Premiered at the Los Angeles Branch of the Anthroposophical Society, it will be seen in March at the conference in Fair Oaks, CA (see page 9) and April 4 at the New York Branch (www.asnyc.org ).

How this play came about...

The destiny of Aeschylus in relation to the Mysteries of Eleusis has been a deeply felt interest of mine since seeing “The Oresteia” as a teenager. So when Mala shared with me in December of 2003 her imagination of a priestess in Eleusis and her young pupil Aeschylus, I was so stunned and shaken that I could hardly contain myself. Having discovered our shared passion for this subject, Mala asked me (in June of 2004) to collaborate with her to create a piece about Aeschylus and the priestess for the two of us to perform together.

In the summer of 2005, the Los Angeles Branch of the Anthroposophical Society offered us a venue for the premier. That invitation helped focus and sustain our work even beyond Mala’s crossing. In between various other projects, we immersed ourselves in imaginative, intuitive, and historical research, meeting

On Friday afternoon, annual conference activities will commence with Elizabeth Wirsching, leader of the Youth Section at the Goetheanum, guiding us in forming interconnections on the theme “Recognizing my inner tools—the living lemniscate.” Virginia Sease, from the Executive Committee of the Goetheanum, will speak on the “Living Connection between Rudolf Steiner and Christian Rosenkreutz.” Additional featured speakers will be Dr. Gerald Karnow of the Fellowship Community, and Michael Ronall of Sunbridge College. The weekend will culminate with the Anthroposophical Society’s annual members’ meeting on Sunday morning.

This opportunity to gather is conceived in service to anthroposophic impulses of all shapes and sizes, and we invite you to participate in forming the events. To schedule a pre-conference meeting or activity, please contact Jordan Walker at the Threefold Educational Center by phone (845-352-5020 x19) or e-mail ( jordan@threefold.org)

As they develop, details will be posted on both the Society’s website (www.anthroposophy.org) and the website of the Threefold Educational Center (www.threefold.org). You can also follow and participate in the planning process by visiting Threefold Educational Center’s blog. Go to www.threefold.org/events, and click on “2009 Michaelmas Conference.” Brochures will be mailed in the spring.

when we could on one coast or the other to flesh out the story and gradually negotiate and hammer out an outline.

In May, 2007, while I was on my way to California for a week of work with her on the play, Mala was diagnosed with leukemia and checked in to the hospital. She insisted that I come to the hospital each morning so we could work while she was receiving treatment. We finished a rough draft and read through it out loud together, in the hospital on May 14th, for the first and last time. Mala crossed the threshold of death on June 11, 2007 surrounded by friends and love.

Aeschylus Unbound premiered on schedule on September 22, 2007, at the Los Angeles Branch. Mala’s young protégée Kim Barrett played Mala’s role of Dona, the priestess, and also directed and designed the lighting, set, and costumes. On June 11, 2008, singer and Broadway actress Dorothy Emmerson played Dona in a staged reading at the Christian Community in New York City.

Mala has continued to influence and encourage the further development and polishing of the play from where she is now—through Kim’s extraordinary talent and devotion to Mala, through Dorothy’s painstaking insistence on clarity and flow, and through Laurie’s immediate, heartfelt, and comprehensive grasp of the role of Dona and the meaning and arc of the play.

Glen Williamson, August 2008

2009 North American Initiative Meeting Report

As I sit here and think, recalling the weekend of January 16–19, I find goose bumps crawling up my arms and down my back because something magical happened, something perhaps even historic unfolded in the basement rooms of the Portland Waldorf School. In this report, I will strive to share what we did with the same level of consciousness and heart with which the 2009 North American Initiative Meeting was planned and unfolded. What I can clearly articulate now is that when twenty individuals, each engaged with anthroposophy in his or her own way, come together and hold space with thought, feeling, and intention, a new path is created for us all.

On Friday, January 16 we opened the 2009 North American Initiative Meeting with a welcoming circle and met one another, through words and gestures, in the cold winter’s night. The first meal we ate together was a hearty group-cooked meal shared by candlelight. These two events—of meeting and nourishing—quickly brought the group together and with already a communal tone and energy, everyone gathered to hear Nathaniel Williams speak on the history and early indications, and subsequent intention, of the Youth Section. What Nathaniel brought set the quality for our work together. Over the weekend,

Portland air, basking in the warmth created through a connection with others who were asking interesting and engaging questions. It was evident that flames were recognized and fires were sparked!

Saturday morning, Julie Griggs led some exercises in Spacial

we were each able to really began to work with the five considerations which Rudolf Steiner indicated were important for the youth movement, and we strove to place it in the context of the 21st Century in North America:

Find other people who want to be together and spread the heart of anthroposophy and who agree to meet regularly with missing as few gatherings as possible.

The mood of these gatherings should be open and tolerant so that everyone feels free to speak agreements and disagreements fully.

Develop an enduring loyalty and remain so throughout life.

Do not listen for precision or thought technique but rather try to listen into a feeling experience of others.

Pour will into thinking so that it becomes felt even in the body as experiential thinking

Dawn Stratton then led the group in exercises which included some honest foolery and which enabled us to meet one another in a simultaneously profound and playful way. After already five hours of collective work, individuals parted ways, some going to bed to rest while others gathered ‘round the fire in the chilly

Dynamics and Peter Alexanian brought singing exercises to the group. Together, these exercises awakened and heightened our senses to something greater at work—as we hummed our tones together, an electrifying current could be felt rising up in the air and spreading out, warming hearts and minds. But, perhaps, the most spectacular experience was the sense of something sacred being formed in-between individuals, as listening was enlivened and hearts quickened, in developing a sensitivity towards understanding the depth and genuine joy of our collective work.

Stefan Klocek, who graciously took on the task of facilitating our discussions, guided the group through dyad and group work around six central questions over the course of the Meeting:

» What has inspired our work?

» What challenges are we experiencing?

» In what form is anthroposophy appearing in our work?

» How can we work together to bring our work to a new level?

» What have we learned over this weekend?

» How do we move forward effectively?

These questions were intentionally left ambiguous, to encour-

age real thinking and collaboration in discussion, in the hopes of stimulating and highlighting the similarities and differences in how each individual thought and worked. Perhaps most exciting to witness was how the group discussions allowed for the collective whole to see the commonalities and the full picture of

what inspired our work and how we were experiencing the work we were doing in the world. Understanding not only our individual work, but also the impact and possibility of our collective work, empowered and inspired each of us to ask, “What can we do together? What task can we leave the Initiative Meeting with and return with to our communities?” And it was this question, focused specifically on the future of the North American Youth Section, which took the stage of our final discussion on Monday morning.

Together, the group worked consciously and deeply on every level to make this weekend not only a meaningful experience, but also one with far-reaching implications. The twenty individuals who met were representative of an active and engaged body of young or youthful people who are interested in social change and in taking care of one another and the world. Furthermore, concern for how anthroposophy is portrayed and brought to the world and how this gesture can be enlivened and truly nurtured in the world was consciously held. Exercises in art, movement, and thought allowed the entire experience to be a three-fold exploration of how anthroposophy lives within us and how we express it in our very selves and in our daily lives.

On Sunday evening, a few Portland community members joined in the circle discussion and shared thoughts and ques -

There is a knighthood of the 21st century Whose riders do not ride through the darkness of physical forests, as of old, but through the forest of darkened minds.

They are armed with a spiritual armor, And an inner sun makes them radiant.

Out of them shines healing, Healing that flows from the knowledge of the human being as a spiritual being.

They must create inner order, inner justice, Peace, and conviction in the darkness of our time.

They must learn to work side by side with angels.

We invite you to join us and have chosen, by group consensus, to be reminded of this verse and our commitment to one another by the full moon and by any ambulance with its sirens sounding—a call to attention and to consciousness. This will enable us to elevate our awareness and to imbue the poem with our own conviction and sense of connection in that moment.

tions around what anthroposophy was, whom it relates to and, most importantly, how it engages intergenerational conversations. Many of the participants were inspired by a question of bridging the gaps between generations, particularly the older and younger, and asked how this was possible. What was understood was that this could become a task of the youth to truly share their work with others and to listen and learn how others were actively seeking, researching, experiencing and sharing anthroposophy in their own lives.

While no single answer was arrived at, what came together was a powerful group of people committed to a common task: a modern knighthood. Inspired by the flame in one another and by the call of the times to really change the world and to support one another more actively through engagement and interest in one another something was created and held, with the understanding that future work and meetings would be necessary to nourish what was born on this particular weekend. Together we walked away from our gathering with our own mantra, a verse that we can each work with: Karl Konig’s poem on knighthood.

Many individuals came to the Initiative Meeting with the desire to feel less alone in the world and in their work and to find trust that the work that we were taking on was effecting real change. If anything, they left with the sense that they met nineteen other amazing individuals who understood their experiences in the world intuitively and who consciously supported their work. It is rare, and indeed a blessing, to meet someone who truly understands to be committed to this work and it is even more rare to find someone who inspires the continuation and collaboration of this work. But this is exactly what we found at the Initiative Meeting. Twenty inspiring voices, all seeking to connect through the commonalities, to trust in one another’s

work, to stand for good and to work together for an even better future for human beings in this world, came together and

united, determined to return with their inspiration and their renewed enthusiasm to their local communities.

Now we can envision the web that stretches across North America, with pockets of activity throughout and strong, shiny silver tendrils that connect each and every one of us to one another. This image is strong and strengthened by the sense of a new group of knights who are stepping into the foreground to

Heartbeet Youth Conference

October 11–12, 2008

Written by Rachel Schwartz, with contributions from Judith Brockway, Bernie Wolf, and Per Eisenmann

The thirteenth Heartbeet Youth Conference took place on the weekend of October 11–12, 2008, at Heartbeet Lifesharing in Hardwick, Vermont. Approximately fifty people gathered to explore the theme of “The Whole Human Being In Relation to Karma”. The weather was glorious and the meals, cooked by Heartbeet volunteers, were delicious. Of special note was the presence of Heartbeet’s newly built third house. Last May, conference participants dug into the earth and called to the elements in preparation for the building. Conference participants this October got to see the newly built home and help with clean-up and care around the work site— we were so grateful!

carry on good work, to strive against the darkness, to inspire the light and to seek, within each individual they meet, that flame which flickers, alive, and filled with the possibility inspired by hope and vision.

I can only express the gratitude that I feel for the heartfelt support for this unique experience that our entire community demonstrated. We are awakened to the future and to the infinite possibility it presents and we are motivated to actively engage

Thirteen is a curious number and many of us felt the significance of the moment for these gatherings. Bernie Wolf pointed out that on the one hand thirteen can be an unlucky number (no thirteenth floor in hotels), but on the other hand it is also twelve plus one. I wondered going into this conference if it would feel like an ending. What I did feel was a sense of culmination. I also experienced the power of the relationships that have been building, the wealth of the content that has been worked through, and the image of a seed came and a sense of potential. The last thirteen gatherings have laid a foundation for a new level of work together. The enthusiasm and need for these conferences remains strong and there is space now for new directions and impulses.

My sense is that the realm of the arts will begin to play a more significant role. I’d like to see the conversations become more prepared and consciously held. I think we will get more hands-on and experiential. The realm of nature (plant observation!) may take on a more central role. There are infinite possibilities, and all of us involved in the planning are excited to step ahead into this new phase.

with the task that stands before us. Join us and help us usher anthroposophy into a new and enlivened era, focused on community, compassion, and striving in these most intriguing of modern times.

I also extend my appreciation for the incredible commitment of my fellow planners, for each individual who took on a leadership role and for those who followed—each of us met our tasks with enthusiasm, with love and with a gesture of kindness that is simply moving to remember. Thank you, each and every one of you

Warmly, Leslie Loy

Judith Brockway opened this last conference with a talk in which she gave a foundation for an understanding of the fourfold human being and the four evolutionary embodiments of the Earth. It can be a challenge to some to admit the fact that Rudolf Steiner had perceptions that enabled him to see behind the manifestation of the senses, could then research them and put his results in such a form that we with our ordinary consciousness can understand them. This requires openness on our parts and an active study life. Because of the Christ Deed on Golgotha we have capacities that have ripened, enabling us to understand the wisdom of spiritual science, but we must activate ourselves.

The fourfold human being consists of the physical body, etheric body, astral body, and the “I”. These members came into manifestation gradually over the course of the unfolding of the four evolutions of Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth. We are truly a gift of high spiritual beings, and the contemplation of this can cultivate a deep feeling of gratefulness and a growing sense for wanting to contribute our part to the future positive unfolding of evolution.

Don Jamison led everyone in singing on Saturday morning and again on Saturday evening. The music created a beautiful

sense of harmony and joy for our work together. Strains of the songs he taught were heard at Heartbeet and elsewhere long after the conference ended!

Hannah Schwartz and Per Eisenmann presented on Saturday afternoon. Hannah spoke of “The Four Temperaments.” Per began by reminding us that everyone is in constant communication with the dead. After death, people are connected with those they have known in life. When we think of them and infuse ourselves with spiritual content, we nourish them. Communicating with those who have died is experienced as a reversal: what we wish to say comes from them, and what they say comes from inside ourselves. This reversal is part of the reason we do not notice our constant contact with them. They work with us, and we can help them by working with them more consciously.

On Sunday morning almost everyone gathered for the Festival of Offering Service. Immediately following, in the space made sacred by the service, Glen Williamson and Laurie Portocarrero performed Aeschylus Unbound, a new play about the ancient Greek Mysteries and the “Father of Tragedy,” co-written by Mala Powers and Glen Williamson. Through the characters of Aeschylus and the Priestess, Dona, the dying of the ancient Mysteries, the awakening to a new consciousness and the foreshadowing of the coming of the Christ are all vividly portrayed. The acting was outstanding and the experience touched everyone present profoundly. The Heartbeet conferences have been blessed by the faithful participation and contributions of Glen and Laurie, and this play was a blessing on us all, truly a gift that spoke directly to each one of us, to our theme of karma, and to our work together both in the past and the future. I highly recommend this drama to any branch or community (see page 20 for more information).

On Sunday afternoon Bernie Wolf from Camphill Special Schools Beaver Run gave a talk entitled “From Cosmic Evolution to Working with Destiny.” From its beginnings, Bernie has supported Heartbeet with much needed practical advice and encouragement. We always knew that he was meant to come for one of the conferences, so his presence was a joyous occasion and the beginning of a trend, we hope! Bernie began by invoking the anthroposophical view of the human being, connecting to Judith’s talk, and reminding us that the human being is in a process of becoming. The ideas of karma and reincarnation can deepen our sense of morality

for what we do or do not do. It expresses itself in two directions, first in regard to our body (constitution and temperament) and second in regard to the world—the circumstances and environment we find ourselves in.

With characteristic humor Bernie told a story of a young knight in the service of St. Michael that spoke of the need to face unpleasant experiences, and the value and importance of looking for the positive aspect within our experiences. The Wise Being in each of us leads us to experiences that are painful or challenging, by which we can actually overcome our limitations and grow and develop. He went on to say that unlike many of the painful experiences in our lives (which are often chosen by the Wise Being in us), experiences which bring us joy and happiness are bestowed upon us by grace and the divine powers who wish to embed us in their being.

If we meet all our life experiences with thankfulness, we will be led through love to the invisible spiritual Bestowers of Life and spiritual powers permeating all existence. Our karma, our work to overcome our limitations, can be brought to the service of others. For instance, a need to develop patience can be met by caring for and educating children with special needs. Working with anthroposophical ideas helps us connect with the human being we will become in the future, a cosmic being expanded to the universe. The verse by Rudolf Steiner both sums this up and also helps us grow towards it:

In thy thinking cosmic thoughts are living: Lose thyself in cosmic thoughts.

In thy feeling cosmic forces are weaving: Feel thyself through cosmic forces.

In thy willing cosmic beings are working: Create thyself through beings of will.

In May 2009 we will continue on with the theme of karma and reincarnation: “Learning the Signs of Destiny through Thinking and Artistic Experience.” Stephen Usher, Nathaniel Williams, Steve Brannon, Don Jamison, Glen Williamson, and Laurie Portocarrero will all be presenting ideas and leading us through artistic experiences, hopefully a first step towards cultivating this new way of working together for future gatherings.

For more information or to be added to our mailing list, please contact Rachel Schwartz at raugustina@hotmail.com or 802-472-9573.

Steiner in Context: 1909

If a composer was writing symphonies containing universes, and painters on two-dimensional canvas were starting to paint all sides of a face at once, or reveal force through finelyexecuted explosions of color; if scientists were reconciling forcevectors with invisible radiations, and furniture makers were giving their products the lithe forms of plants; if soul-doctors were helping anxious, ordinary folk to bring up unheard of stuff from their minds’ basements, and women held dependent on men for uncounted centuries were putting hands and minds to any endeavor that called to them; if all this and much more was going on in the year 1909, then why shouldn’t there be someone else in an apartment in Berlin writing up a history of the cosmos and human evolution combined, researched on the inward path of exact imagination and concentrated meditation?

In a moment of time containing Mahler and Strauss and Schoenberg, Rachmaninov and Sibelius and Stravinsky, Elgar and Ravel and Debussy, to name only those who were shaping the European soul with mighty strokes of flowing tone, why would there not be also a Rudolf Steiner?

Kevin Dann

The Rhythm of Centenary

f ebruary 12, 1909 saW a Mer Icans froM the atlantIc to the pacIf Ic celebratIng the centenary of the bIrth of the “great eM ancIpator,” a braha M lIncoln In Kentucky, President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of a memorial to be erected in front of Lincoln’s log cabin birthplace. At Lincoln’s grave in Springfield, Illinois, the French and British ambassadors joined a host of American speakers to celebrate the “Savior of His Country.” Schoolchildren recited the Gettysburg address and listened to orations from Civil War veterans, and cities bedecked themselves in flags and bunting. In the South, African-American men and women held subdued celebrations wherever they felt free from the potential violence of disapproving white neighbors. America’s greatest city, New York, held its principal commemoration at Cooper Union, where in February 1860, the young Illinois senator had given the speech that elevated him from the expected Vice-Presidential pick of the shoe-in nominee, William H. Seward, to Presidential contender. Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. celebrated Lincoln as “intensely human,” a man whose weaknesses “were understood by Americans because they too shared them.”

Uptown, at Columbia University, Zoology Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn and his audience celebrated not Lincoln, but Charles Darwin, born the same day as Lincoln. Osborn compared Darwin to Lincoln, saying that Darwin too was a great emancipator, having “paved the way for complete freedom in the study of nature.” Later the same day Osborn joined 300 others at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for the unveiling of a bust of Darwin and the opening of the new Darwin Hall of Invertebrate Zoology.

As he presented the bust, New York Academy of Sciences President C.F. Cox called Darwin “the greatest of seers,” a “liberator” who overcame the “hampering doctrine of supernatural intervention” clung to by his peers.

Scientists from the AMNH that year 1909 would fan out across the globe in their pursuit of retelling the story of creation from a naturalistic standpoint. Paleontologist Barnum Brown was making great discoveries of fossil vertebrates in the Cretaceous strata of Wyoming; Walter Granger had found a nearly complete skeleton of a gigantic horned dinosaur, and Museum preparators mounted dozens of Permian Era reptiles and amphibians to add to the already crowded exhibition halls; T.D. Cockerell was examining petrified mayflies he had dug up from the Florissant fossil beds in Colorado; Roy Andrews (who inspired the character “Indiana Jones”) was following finback and humpback whales in the North Pacific; Osborn was working on fossil carnivores from Egypt; the Peary

Arctic expedition would return in a few months with specimens of musk oxen, caribou, walrus skulls and scalps, narwhal tusks, foetal seals, and lemmings in alcohol-filled jars; the entrance to the Museum’s Hall of Fossil Fishes was crowned with the jaw of a gigantic shark; in the new Darwin Hall, visitors were treated to entomologist Frank Lutz’s habitat groups of mussels, crabs, oyster, and starfish from both the Bahamas and nearby Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Another local expression of the Great Chain of Being was on display in Frank Chapman’s bird habitat groups, which included bobolinks, rails, and redwinged blackbirds of the Hackensack Meadowlands, and a “Duck Hawk” (peregrine) on its nest atop the black basalt columns of the Palisades.

The new Darwin Hall was the first explicitly “Darwinian” exhibit hall to open at the AMNH, and it, along with the great congregation of natural scientists for a Darwin gala in Cambridge, England, and in Baltimore, Maryland, at the annual

AAAS meeting, signaled the triumph of Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the “mechanism” of evolution, displacing older notions of the Great Chain of Being. Within the next decade, the Museum would become America’s leading institution for the dethroning of the human being from his central position in Creation, as its president—Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn—zealously advanced the pseudo-science of eugenics.

But over the course of the year 1909, another seer was elucidating a very different picture of the Great Chain of Being, culminating in the publication of Occult Science: An Outline in December 1909. This year, so full of the most extraordinary teaching activity by Rudolf Steiner, would witness spiritual deeds that certainly rivaled Lincoln’s and Darwin’s.

1909 saw “centennial fever” too in the commemorations of the 300th anniversaries of the territorial “discoveries” made by explorers Samuel de Champlain and Henry Hudson, in July 1609 and September 1609. On “Champlain Sunday,” towns and villages throughout New York and Vermont’s Champlain Valley gathered to hear orators honor Champlain, whose deed of discovery became the opening scene in tale after tale of America’s special destiny; at Plattsburgh, Bishop Nelson of Albany began his sermon by proclaiming America’s divine dispensation: “The North American continent appears to have been held in reserve for the working out of a Divine purpose to which all nations of the earth have contributed and in which all are destined to share.”

Life in 1909 (from top left counter-clockwise): an ad for the evolved screw-head, sheet-music for Joplin’s Wall Street rag, President Taft’s new motor car, Orville Wright’s fly-by of the Statue of Liberty, celebrating the Hudson-Champlain tricentennials, and “the Kodak girl.” — In Europe, opposite page: Boccioni’s 1909 portrait of a young woman scratches at the surface of appearances; Klimt’s “Tree of Life” is full of strange consciousness, and “The Blue Flower” from the style-setting magazine Jugend (Youth). Many young American artists were going to Central Europe. Next pages: two vases of the century’s first decade, and a 1910 announcement of a Rudolf Steiner book in the USA.

That same day, far from the Champlain and Hudson Valleys, in the German town of Cassel, a very small audience attended the eleventh in a series of fourteen lectures given by Rudolf Steiner. Though he addressed many questions in his lecture, the key one was: “What really happened at the Baptism by John?” Indeed, the lecture series had begun on St. John’s Day, June 24th, the feast day of John the Baptist, and in the opening words of his first lecture, Steiner had briefly sketched the history of the June festival, finding antecedents in ancient Persia, Rome, and northern Europe. In the Christian era, the marking of the period

when days began to shorten and nights to lengthen was transformed into a celebration dedicated to the forerunner of Jesus Christ. Steiner made it quite clear to his listeners that this event—the appearance on Earth of Christ—was the “turning point in time,” the most important event in all of Earth history.

Clearly, Rudolf Steiner’s task for twentieth century humanity was analogous to the one performed twenty centuries earlier by John the Baptist—to serve as witness, as forerunner, and even as facilitator of the descent of the Sun Spirit into the etheric realm, just as John had stewarded Christ’s descent into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The stunning outpouring of wisdom from Rudolf Steiner beginning with his emergence as a spiritual teacher in 1900 until his death in 1925 can be seen as a revelation through which Christ spoke to mankind at the advent of His return within the etheric realm of the Earth. A few months before the lecture cycle in Cassel, Steiner had outlined in a series of ten lectures in Dusseldorf the nature and role of spiritual beings in the evolution of the cosmos, and indicated that the heliocentric orbit of the planet Jupiter marks the boundary of the evolutionary stage known in esoteric cosmology as “Ancient Sun.” He also stated that this was the period when the human etheric body was first formed. The “body” that approached the Earth in 1909 was Christ’s resurrection body—the physical body as it had been transformed by the events of the Mystery of Golgotha. The resurrection body “remembered” that Ancient Sun period, in that it has a 12-year rhythm, like the planet Jupiter (whose exact orbital period is 11.86 years, so that Jupiter spends about one year in each zodiacal sign in its orbit of the Sun).

1909 was truly the year that Steiner’s work as a spiritual teacher quickened. On January 6, Epiphany—the day that marks the incarnation of Christ through the Baptism by John—in a room whose walls bore reproductions of paintings by Raphael, Rudolf Steiner revealed the karmic connection between the German

poet Novalis, the Renaissance artist Raphael, John the Baptist, and the prophet Elijah. The year of lecturing in 1909 would conclude the day after Christmas with Steiner again speaking of Novalis, in such a way that clearly suggested that this great individuality was supersensibly present throughout the entire lecture. A couple of weeks after his Epiphany lecture, in Heidelberg, he began to further unfold the mysteries of “spiritual economy,” which continued in his Cassel lecture cycle on the Gospel of John and then reached their climax in September in a series on the Gospel of St. Luke. Over two weeks in May he gave one of his extraordinary lecture cycles on John’s Book of Revelation. Within these lectures in September of 1909 there began to appear a “Fifth Gospel,” a suite of images of the events in Palestine that seemed possible only if they had been witnessed by Jesus himself.

Hidden within the course of Rudolf Steiner’s indefatigable activity in 1909 are two events of special, historic significance. In early April, Steiner traveled to Malsch, Germany, to give an address on the occasion of the dedication of the Francis of Assisi branch of the Theosophical Society. Laying the foundation stone for the building that was the forerunner of the new Mystery center that he would establish in Dornach, Steiner spoke these words:

In pain and suffering our Mother Earth has become materialized. It is our task to once again spiritualize her, to redeem her, in that through the power of our hands we fashion a spirit-filled work of art. May this stone be a first foundation stone for the redemption and transformation of our planet Earth, and may the power of this stone work a thousandfold.

The surprisingly modern expression “Mother Earth” was indeed Steiner’s, one that he used frequently. The deed of white magic he performed at Malsch was both inspired by and preparatory for “the Mother.” The dedication ceremony was performed under a Full Moon, as Rudolf Steiner was mindful that each Full Moon “remembered” the moment of Christ’s crucifixion, activating the forces of Christ’s etheric body and making them available for those who were receptive.

Just four days later, in Cologne, Rudolf Steiner began his proclamation of Christ’s second coming in the etheric realm. Most anthroposophical writers assume that Steiner’s first announcement of the return of Christ in the etheric dates to January 12, 1910; however, on April 10/11, 1909, in two lectures called Spiritual Bells of Easter, Rudolf Steiner makes this historic proclamation in a veiled fashion. In these lectures he speaks of Kashyapa, the name for two distinct but related figures from the spiritual tradition of India. According to Hindu tradition Kashyapa was:

1) one of the seven Holy Rishis who

brought the primal wisdom to the ancient Indian culture; 2) Gautama Buddha’s chosen successor, i.e., the one who will become the next Buddha, the Maitreya Buddha. During the lecture, after describing the spiritual fire brought down to Earth by the Maitreya Buddha, Steiner proclaims the return of Christ : He will be revealed to us in a spiritualized fire of the future. He is with us always, until the end of the world, and he will appear in the spiritual fire to those who have allowed their eyes to be enlightened through the Event of Golgotha. Human beings will behold him in the spiritual fire

According to the research of Robert Powell, these two Easter 1909 lectures were inspired by Kashyapa, the Bodhisattva who will become the Maitreya Buddha.1

The intense combination of historical retrospective and progressive prospect occasioned in 1909 by the Lincoln and Darwin centennials, the Champlain Tercentenary, and the HudsonFulton Celebration came about because all who participated felt instinctively the propriety of marking some multiple of a hundredth anniversary. Beginning in 1876 with the centennial celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, America in the late nineteenth century had marked countless hundredth anniversaries of Revolutionary era battles, and two hundredth anniversaries of the settlement and founding of towns. In 1709 and 1809, no one had taken notice of the anniversary of either Champlain’s or Hudson’s feats; in 1909, however, no one failed to mark his calendar both outwardly and inwardly. The explosion of public commemorative events in post-bellum America served to reinforce the experience of a century as a “natural” rhythm, just as the pace of modern life quickened so that a hundred years would bring greater changes than ever before.

In the reckoning of historical change, the rhythm of a century is wholly arbitrary, an artifact of a human mathematical system, and yet, there is hidden within it an intuition of its symmetry with the single year in the life of an individual—taking the birth of Jesus of Nazareth as the starting point. Rudolf Steiner revealed the key to this symmetry: “All of the actions of former generations, all the impulses and the deeds connected with them, pour into historical evolution and have a life cycle of 33 years. Then comes the Easter time of these deeds and impulses, the time of resurrection… All things in historical evolution are transfigured after 33 years, arise as from the grave, by virtue of a power connected with the holiest of all redemptions, the Mystery of Golgotha. . . Just as we calculate the cyclic rotations of celestial bodies so we must learn to calcu -

1 See Appendix II in Robert Powell and Kevin Dann, Christ and the Mayan Calendar: 2012 and the Coming of the Antichrist

late historic events by means of a true science of history. . .”

“33” was Rudolf Steiner’s shorthand for 33 1/3, for the historical law that Steiner suggests is a consequence of the actual biography of Jesus Christ, whose life—from the birth of Jesus of Nazareth on the night of December 6/7th, 2 BC, to the Resurrection at sunrise on Easter Sunday morning, April 5th, AD 33— lasted 12,173 ¼ days, or 331/3 years less 1½ days. Rudolf Steiner pointed out that, in addition to the various planetary rhythms (the one-year rhythm of the Sun; 29½-year rhythm of Saturn; 12year rhythm of Jupiter, and so on), since the moment of Christ’s resurrection, the 331/3 -year rhythm of the life of Christ Jesus has become of signal importance to the unfolding of human history. This is where the popular acceptance of the century as an increment worthy of celebration overlaps with this esoteric truth: the rhythm of 331/3 years occurs almost exactly three times in one century. According to Rudolf Steiner: “One can recognize the intensity of an impulse that is implanted into the historical process by virtue of its effect through three generations, through a whole century.”2

Knowledge of the Christ rhythm can deepen our experience of any hundredth anniversary, but it is especially significant as we approach, on April 10 and 11, 2009, the hundredth anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s heralding of the Etheric Christ, under the inspiration of the one who shall become the Maitreya Buddha. This Easter we have the opportunity not just to celebrate the past event of Rudolf Steiner’s John the Baptist-like deed, but also the present event of an intensification of Christ’s manifestation in the etheric realm. In this time when the soul-renewing potential of historical commemorations is severely limited by hyperactive hedonism, crass commercialism, and a deeply distracted citizenry, bringing our attention and appreciation to the hundredth anniversary of this historic Easter 1909 deed of Rudolf Steiner may itself become a Michaelic and Sophianic deed for our time.

17 January 2009

2 Mysterienwahrheiten und Weihnachtsimpulse (“Mystery Truths and the Impulses of Christmas”), lecture of December 26, 1917, Complete Works, volume 180.

“A Corridor of Amity”

As a way of commemorating the Champlain Quadricentennial, and to tie it also to the Hudson celebration, Kevin Dann is planning to walk May 16–July 1 from Montréal to Manhattan, on a pilgrimage along what he has christened “A Corridor of Amity.” If you would like to know more, please contact the editor (editor@anthroposophy.org).

Rudiger Janisch and Michael Howard Becoming a Researcher in the Realm of the Spirit

“The object of the General Anthroposophical Society will be the furtherance of research in the realm of the spirit, that of the School of Spiritual Science the actual pursuit of such research.”

Ninth Statute of the Constitution of the Anthroposophical Society, 1923

A healthy self-knowledge leads most anthroposophists to assume they do not have the capacities to do spiritual research. If “research in the realm of the spirit” means only clairvoyant research of the kind and scope exemplified by Rudolf Steiner then clearly such research remains at present a lofty goal beyond the reach of most of us. If so, in what sense did Rudolf Steiner have the expectation that anthroposophists would mature from students of spiritual research to actual researchers in the realm of the spirit? In what sense did he intend the Anthroposophical Society to be an association of spiritual researchers with the School of Spiritual Science as the place where spiritual research was cultivated and the capacities and methods of the spiritual researcher developed?

There are different aspects and directions of “research in the realm of the spirit” that we might consider. In a lecture given after the burning of the Goetheanum on February 6, 1923 in Stuttgart (see Awakening to Community), Rudolf Steiner challenged anthroposophists to acquire two complementary faculties. The one can be characterized as a spiritualizing of thinking while the other is a spiritualizing of willing. The spiritualization of thinking can be understood as learning to reconnect with the living spirit of thinking that dies in everyday thoughts and ideas. To spiritualize thinking, to enter the living world of thinking and imaginations, we must learn to suffuse our thinking with will, to will in thinking. In Leading Thought 106 we find: “Michael will lead the will upward, retracing the paths by which the wisdom descended to the final stage of intelligence.” In practice this means to counter the unfree stream of thoughts and opinions that flow through us as a force of nature in everyday consciousness by learning to will what we think as, for example, when we try to think about a pencil for five minutes without distraction.

The other faculty of spiritualizing willing begins with our learning to observe our will activity, to suffuse our willing with thinking, to think in willing. This can be practiced after we try thinking about a pencil and can then observe the waxing and waning of our will to stay focused or become distracted. Learning to observe this waxing and waning of our will even during the exercise is the key to catching our attention from losing its focus.

Similarly, a painter can learn to observe the inner activity of thinking and feeling that underlies her outer activity, for example, whether she is working out of sympathy/antipathy for the colors or out of a perception of the soul/spiritual qualities of the colors like their warmth and coolness. Likewise, a teacher can learn to observe the inner quality of their thinking and feeling that effect the outer quality of how they speak and move.

This second faculty of observing our will is implied in all the lectures in which Rudolf Steiner responded to a question or a need for applying anthroposophy in life such as: the need for a new education for children, the new art of speaking, the new art of movement (Eurythmy), the bio-dynamic care for the earth, curative education, renewal of religious life, a new way of healing, and so on. In all these and other examples, Rudolf Steiner describes directly or indirectly a transformation of our will from an unfree arbitrary and personal willing to a free willing that allows the spirit to work creatively in our deeds so that they might better serve human and world evolution. This spiritualization of the will that we can cultivate when incarnating our ideals into practical reality raises a practical activity into an art, as in the art of education, the art of healing etc.

To any and all practical spheres spiritual science would have us bring not only new ideas about art, teaching, healing, and social life, it asks us to cultivate new faculties of perception, thinking, and feeling in order to spiritualize our deeds. The cultivation of these new faculties is an art that depends on a more refined perception of our will, our inner activity. There is no one-way-fits-all formula for how each individual can take hold of their will in developing new ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and ultimately new ways of acting in the world. Each person must find their individual way to transform themselves. In this sense self-metamorphosis is a form of spiritual research.

This opens up an area of research for many individuals. Everyone who does the inner work of meditation, as well as the inner work behind the outer activity of bio-dynamics gardening and farming, of teaching children and adults, of healing, of business, have reason and opportunity to better observe and learn from their activity of will. We will not only learn more from our individual actions but, furthermore, we can see it as a modest way we can each play a role in building a culture of spiritual research. The situation of our time calls for more individuals to take up the challenge of self-metamorphosis that will lead them to be not only students of spirit research but to become actual researchers of spirit. The School for Spiritual Science and the Anthroposophical Society will find new life and direction as a community of individuals, who dare to strive to be spiritual researchers, if only at the most elementary level.

As an individual we can feel disheartened before the scope of what is needed for the earth, for the souls of human beings and for spiritual beings. Goethe in his fairy tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily lets the old man with the lamp say:

“Whether I can help, I know not; an individual helps not, but he who unites himself with many at the right moment can. We will postpone the evil, and keep hoping. Hold the circle united.”

This leads us to another aspect of the mission of the School for Spiritual Science:

“Human beings who seek voluntary relationships group themselves around a center. The feelings which stream towards the center will give spiritual beings the opportunity to work as a

kind of group soul, but in an entirely different way from the old group souls. These new beings are compatible with the freedom and individuality of men. Yes, we may say that they derive their existence from human unity and harmony.”

Rudolf

Steiner

June 1, 1908 The Influence of Spiritual Beings on Men

This insight underlies all collegial work, be it in schools, farms, villages, hospitals, stage groups, offices, etc. What the individual cannot achieve out of him or herself, by sharing and working together with others regarding a question, a problem, a need, one can find a way forward, one can form a living thought, an imagination of the will to guide one’s actions.

Such smallish groups of inquiring, reflecting, researching practitioners of the spirit are seed groups in the Sections of the School for Spiritual Science. Circles of people, like branches of the Anthroposophical Society, can share from their work and research in a spirit of an open mind, heart, and will.

The General Section of the School for Spiritual Science... is both the starting point and the center of the School for Spiritual Science. Here a foundation is laid step by step for all branches of spiritual research. The three core subjects are: anthroposophical study of the human being; evolution and history of humanity; and the science of initiation. Rudiger Janisch and Michael Howard are members of the School in North America.

AN AMERICAN PATH OF SELF-DEVELOPMENT

Current Publications by Rick Spaulding & Maurice York

Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Infinitude of the Private Man

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Natural History of the Intellect

A Sanctuary for the Rights of Mankind

The Founding Fathers & the Temple of Liberty

We seek to enrich American culture and promote a uniquely American path of self-development. For information visit www.wrightwoodpress.org, call or write:

Wrightwood Press, PO Box 14702, Chicago IL 60614 773-528-5340 e aspaulding@wrightwoodpress.org

Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges

this rapid transformation of the world economy (Nicanor Perlas would be one of them). He is a professor at MIT (Christopher Schaefer’s alma mater), an accomplished writer and workshop leader, and a consultant who works regularly with Fortune 500 businesses. He is also the son of parents who ran a bio-dynamic

by C. Otto Scharmer,

SoL

Press (Society

for Organizational Learning), 2007, 533 pgs.

As part of my job as an educational consultant, I lecture widely on Waldorf education in North America. Two questions I was often asked following lectures that I gave in the 1980s and 1990s were, “What do Waldorf students do after they graduate from college?” and, “Do Waldorf students ever go into the business world?” From my own experiences as a Waldorf teacher and as a mentor to schools throughout North America, I knew well that very few Waldorf graduates were drawn to the business world. This was, I am sure, partly due to the attitude of their teachers, which, in turn, was a reflection of the rebarbative relationship that most anthroposophists had with anything that smacked of money and materialism. Even the most generous and visionary business people, including those renowned for their generosity to the Anthroposophical Society and the Waldorf movement, had to bear the stigma of their business acumen.

Throughout the last third of the twentieth century, anthroposophical consultants like Christopher Schaefer and Christopher Budd proposed new economic visions while intrepid pioneers like John Alexandra, Siegfried Finser, and Mark Finser embodied those visions in such organizations as the Rudolf Steiner Foundation and the New Century Bank. Among other things, the capital such institutions generated made possible the rapid expansion of Waldorf schools and other anthroposophical endeavors. Until the very end of the last century, however, such important beginnings remained marginalized in the anthroposophical world.

Times have changed. Although the attitudes of anthroposophists may lag in this regard, alumni of Waldorf schools are evincing a new attitude about business and are entering its ranks in unprecedented numbers. This has less to do with any attitudinal changes in Waldorf graduates than it does with the remarkable changes occurring in the workplace itself. The sudden trendiness of “green” businesses is inherently appealing to Waldorf graduates who cut their teeth on reverential feelings toward nature. Such movements as “Fair Trade” and microloans, which recognize the power of capital to generate social justice and economic opportunity for disadvantaged peoples, also speak to the character of those who have had a Waldorf education.

Otto Scharmer has few peers in his work amidst

farm, and a Waldorf school graduate. Few are so well prepared to bridge the all-too-polarized worlds of anthroposophy and business, of prophets and profits.

Like most significant ideas, Scharmer’s vision of organizational transformation is deceptively simple. Unlike most contemporary business gurus, however, the inspiration for Scharmer’s approach was not arrived at through years of corporate trial and error or in a burst of entrepreneurial bravado. His vision arose out of an experience that was revelatory in nature. As a youth, he was called home from school one day to discover that the 350-year-old farmhouse in which he had spent his childhood was on fire:

The world I had lived in all my life was gone. Vanished. All up in smoke…. As the reality of the fire…began to sink in, I felt as if somebody had ripped away the ground from under my feet…. Everything I thought I was had dissolved into nothing. Everything? No, perhaps not everything, for I felt a tiny element of my self still existed. Somebody was still there, watching all this. Who? At that moment I realized that there was a whole other dimension of my self that I hadn’t previously been aware of, a dimension that related not to my past…but to my future, a world that I could bring into reality with my life…. I suddenly knew that I, my true Self, was still alive! It was this “I” that was the seer…. With everything gone, I was lighter and free, released to encounter the other part of my self, the part that drew me into the future—into my future—into a world waiting for me, that I might bring into reality with my forward journey. (24)

In another century, the power of such an epiphany might have led the young Otto to pursue the calling of a religious leader or spiritual teacher; even today, the celebrity-cum-seer Eckhard Tolle considers such a transfigurative moment to be the genesis of his path. Indeed, such a “trial by fire” was a significant milestone in the initiation ordeals of the ancient mystery centers. While in Italy, surrounded by works of classical art, Goethe had a dim recollection of such an initiation trial and wove it into the remarkable poem, “Trance and Transformation,” in which images of lovemaking and the immolation of a moth into a flame converge into the final lines, “And if you don’t know this dying and becoming, you are merely a dreary guest on Earth”—lines Scharmer cites just before his description of his own transformation in the flames (20).

So what is Scharmer thinking when he takes all that he has gained from such a trial and puts it into the service of the cor-

porate world? Didn’t his Waldorf teachers do a thorough enough job of instilling an anti-business attitude? Didn’t his links with anthroposophists in Europe and North America engender a sense of superiority toward those who are enslaved to the cult of the bottom line? Where did they fail?

Scharmer’s mysterious path points to Rudolf Steiner’s surprising statement that a disproportionate number of ancient initiates have returned as the business leaders of today. (For anyone who has ever experienced the rigid hierarchy of corporate structures or seen the megalith/temple/cathedral architecture that arises out of corporate culture, the spirit of the ancient mystery schools appears to be alive—if not well.) The ineffable substance of spiritual forces so well understood by the ancient initiates has become the abstract power of capital in our time. The old initiates heeded the inspiration of Hermes Trismegistus and laid down the forms of governance for earlier cultural epochs. Returning to Earth and wearing their new vestments of pin-striped suits and Hermes (!) ties, they now search for organizational forms appropriate for the third millennium.

Even in the ancient world, where travel was strictly limited, the great initiates were often known as “Wanderers” and took it upon themselves to understand the spirit of the age as it manifested throughout the known world.

Odysseus, Thales, Pythagoras, Alexander the Great, and others, whether through the intercession of gods or out of self-directed will, sought out teachings and experiences that embodied the myriad garments worn by the zeitgeist. Scharmer, more than most of his contemporaries in the world of corporate consulting, has similarly chosen to broaden his vistas geographically and philosophically:

Important sources that informed my early thinking about social development and change include a global learning journey across all the major global cultural spheres to study the dynamics of peace and conflict. This led me to India to study Gandhi’s approach of nonviolent conflict transformation, and to China, Vietnam, and Japan to study Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism as different approaches to development and life…. Other sources that influenced my thinking include the work of the avant-garde artist Joseph Beuys, and the writings of Henry David Thoreau, Martin Buber, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jürgen Habermas, as well as some of the old masters like Hegel, Fichte, Aristotle, and Plato. Among philosophical sources, perhaps most influential was the work of the educator and social innovator Rudolf Steiner, whose synthesis of science, philosophy, consciousness, and social innovation continues to inspire my work and whose methodological grounding in Goethe’s phenomenological view of science has left significant imprints on Theory U. (31)

Theory U draws its name from the U-shaped form that appears throughout the book. The form is, of course, familiar to students of Rudolf Steiner as the curve that traces the human soul’s descent into matter and its eventual ascent to the spirit in the course of a single lifetime. In Scharmer’s hands it takes on

myriad meanings, all of them emblematic of the transformative experiences that organizations—and the human beings who shape the organizations and are in turn shaped by them—must undergo to become viable entities.

In our age of corporate globalism and economic uncertainty, transformation— or, at least, major change—has become a sine qua non on the organizational level, but Scharmer repeatedly emphasizes the need for personal transformation as an even more vital force. This interplay of the microcosm of the employee/manager/ CEO and the macrocosm of the organization/institution/corporation is unusual among contemporary management gurus, who usually approach the issues exclusively from the macrocosmic side, e.g., Tom Peters and Peter Drucker, or the microcosmic side, e.g., Stephen Covey.

How does this transformation occur on the slippery slope of the U? Steiner usually delineates the upper left side of the U as representative of those forces leading us into birth and nurturing our childhood: the physical/etheric, the heredity ties, the intentions that we bring with us from the spiritual world. The forces on the upper right are those leading to aging and death: the ego/astral, our individuality, the fruits of our present life that we will bring with us into the spiritual world. The lowest and central point on Steiner’s U represents the forces of mature adulthood: the battle of contraries and the challenge of finding balance by taking firm hold of the present moment.

In Scharmer’s metamorphosis of Steiner’s picture, the upper left represents “downloading,” a process of holding on to and being guided by past experience, be it collective or personal. The upper right is now identified as “performing,” which Scharmer characterizes as “achieving results through practices and infrastructures,” while the all-important middle, the low point of the U, is described as “presencing,” i.e., “connecting to Source.” The more that Scharmer returns to the U, delineating evermore detailed aspects of his path, the more he forges a commonality with Rudolf Steiner’s pictures of macrocosmic/cosmological evolution, on the one hand, and microcosmic/human self-development, on the other:

When the Berlin Wall crumbled in 1989 and the World Trade Center towers collapsed twelve years later, we were confronted with two situations that invited us to deepen our perceptions and to open the boundary between the observer and the observed. In those fractured moments, some of us began to see how what is “out there” relates to our actions and identities “in here.” (114)

But Scharmer’s particular gift lies in his ability to couch esoteric knowledge in terms that any educated modern reader can accept and grasp. (Compared to any bestselling “motivational” or “managerial” text, Scharmer’s work is certainly complex and demanding, but nothing that he brings lies out of the presently accepted lingua franca of university business schools.) His most important contribution may be his understanding of what is

meant by “the future.” As he repeatedly notes throughout his case studies and anecdotes taken from his own experiences— and the fact that so much of this book stems from Scharmer’s own experience is what makes it so accessible and appealing—we have a tragic tendency to misperceive the future. To understand what is coming down the pike, on the individual or organizational level, modern people try to fully understand the past. Our most respected “futurists” believe that what is yet to come can be prognosticated by subjecting the past to quantitative analysis and by creating “models” of predictable (and therefore controllable) change.

I can think of at least three areas in which billions of dollars and millions of hours have been expended in creating such futuristic models: the fields of meteorology, the economy, and national security. Yet any adult who has lived through the past seven years and experienced Hurricane Katrina, the mortgagesecurity bubble, and 9-11, may have an intimation that the past is not a dependable guide to the future. Scharmer is more assertive: he recognizes that the future comes from another direction entirely. The future is everything that the past is not.

We live in a “Michael Age,” a cycle in which Michael, who as an archangel has learned to mold the element of space, is now functioning as an archon, a being that must learn to master time. It is not surprising, then, that one of the most profound revelations that Rudolf Steiner shared out of his initiation knowledge involved the very nature of time. Time, Steiner revealed, moves in two directions: what we experience on the physical and etheric levels moves, as we know, from the past toward the future, but another stream of time is experienced on the astral and ego levels, and this stream moves from the future toward the past. (I have talked to hundreds of people who can recall many moments during their early adolescence—when they were “awakening” to their astral nature—in which they had clear experience of their own future “streaming toward them,” filling them with joyous expectation and a sense of mission in life.)

Although we find intimations of Steiner’s revelation here and there among English poets like Traherne and Blake and Wordsworth—for the eventual “destination” of this second stream of time is the life before birth—Theory U is probably the first exoteric book to present a set of exercises in which a modern person can learn how to perceive this future stream, (which Scharmer characterizes as an “emerging” stream) take hold of it, and use it to make manifest the future in the present. In this respect, Theory U has the quality of a business-oriented version of How to Know Higher Worlds, a book written one century earlier by Rudolf Steiner.

Look around. Something is happening. We might call it the signature of our time writ large…. The challenges we face right now are pressuring us to look differently, to sharpen and deepen our attention…. (116)

The present-day power that businesses have to change the world is

akin to the power held by the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages or the royal houses of Europe in the late nineteenth century. In both those cases, a rigid connection to past forms and the status quo led to the unleashing of destructive forces that all but obliterated the old order. Business people obsessed with next quarter’s bottom line may open Theory U merely because they hope that this book will be the one to show them how their corporation can remain competitive in the new century. If, however, they are sufficiently open-minded to struggle on to the book’s conclusion, they may experience an awakening to the “signature of our time” that will change their minds, their feelings, and their actions.

In the Rosicrucian tradition, Scharmer is a spiritual teacher who is comfortable with the age in which he lives (and, like the Jesuits, is “in the world though not of it”) and has the “street cred” to touch the minds, and perhaps the hearts, of individuals in the upper echelons of business and government. Here is one of his many perspectives on the significance of the U form: The U process can be thought of as a social breathing process. The left-hand side of the U is the inhaling part of the cycle: total immersion in the current field, taking everything in. The right-hand side of the U is the exhaling part of the cycle: bringing the field of the future into reality as it desires. Between these two movements, breathing in and breathing out, there is a small crack of nothingness. That silent pulse is the mystery or source at the bottom of the U. It’s where the letting go (of the old) connects with the letting come (of the new). That crack can be thought of as the eye of the needle: the Self. It’s the capacity of our I-in-now to link with our highest future possibility—a future that is in need of us and that only we can bring into reality. At the very moment we begin to operate from that place, we evoke the presence of a different social field— a social field that enables its participants to connect to the deeper sources and streams of generative emergence. (439) Scharmer’s “social field” is not so very different from Steiner’s “Representative of Man,” and the “I-in-now” that emerges in the course of Theory U is resonant with the Pauline “Christ in me.” Otto Scharmer’s work is a noteworthy and courageous effort to face the formidable task of turning stones into bread.

Reflections from the editor

Communicating Anthroposophy: The Social Question

“Communicating anthroposophy” is my phrase for a primary goal of this publication. Every initiative out of anthroposophy that performs visible service in the world is well accepted and highly regarded, but anthroposophy itself still evades any adequate yet simple description or explanation. To change that situation is a challenge I hope we can engage together.

We’ve become anthroposophists by way of a threefold inner gesture; according to Steiner, who developed extraordinary insight into the processes of human consciousness, this inner gesture is not simply our own activity. In it we can recognize anthroposophy moving as a being through our consciousnesses; it is her gestures which manifest as shifts in our consciousness! The three gestures, briefly stated, are the heart’s recognition that things are wrong in the world, the mind’s search for higher and deeper understandings, and the will’s impulse to bring these new understandings as healing deeds into the world

Anthroposophists are not alone in experiencing these gestures or shifts in consciousness. Stated in Awakening to Community in 1923 by Rudolf Steiner, they were recognized and described again in 1999 in the extensively researched book The Cultural Creatives. On that basis it seems we may have a deep connection with others who seek a healthier society.

Time to be heard?

ety. Society’s three organic members meet the different needs of the individual, and are in turn harmonized in and by the individual—a new kind of organism! No dogmas apply: a social organism lives by balancing gestures, like homeostasis in biological organisms. What works today may not work tomorrow.

Of all the now-discredited - isms of the last century, none of them could foster a true organism, only social mechanisms for raising up new “power elites.” Not even free market corporate capitalism really allowed the individual, and the full range of individual needs, to be the organizing principle of society

The membering of a truly organic society where human freedom can find its full and proper scope is an immense discovery. Its essence can be stated in simple human terms, as I remember someone doing years ago at a Social Science Section gathering:

I wish to unfold myself (cultural life).

You are my fellow human being (political, rights life). We can provide for each other (economic life).

someanthroposophical socialperspectives

holism: reality through multiple perspectives

Anthroposophists have elaborated many profound insights into the nature of community and human society; a few are pictured at right. “The social question” was an ongoing issue throughout Steiner’s lifetime. By 1850, thinking people in Europe recognized that monarchy and aristocracy were finished. The old order—where social roles and opportunities were determined by blood relationships—was morally bankrupt and inept. At the same time, liberalism in Europe had become a mere class impulse of the merchants, seeking “freedom of the markets” rather than embracing the liberation of all human beings. Socialism became, symmetrically, a resentful class movement for laborers only. And so humanity set up the bloodbaths of the 20th century.

healthy society

organicism: life-formative forces vs. mechanism

globality world economy social art extending consciousness evolving individuals connecting social realms

spiritual research deeper meanings evolving humanity new beings of community

social organism

money as spiritual substance

“three-foldness” social physiology gifting & social investment

The thought of my own identity; the feeling for your equality; the impulse to meet our needs: each is a deep reality in every human being who is not poisoned by fear, greed, desire, or untruth. Meeting needs is particularly at issue in our present circumstances. We can provide for each other; it is manipulations of the financial system that have failed, not human productive capacity. Yet millions now will sit at home reading the help-wanted ads, or standing in unemployment lines.

Just talk?

Now we face the failure of “capitalism” just as twenty years ago the proponents of “socialism” faced the failure of the great, brutal and disastrous Russian experiment. Together these two failures should suggest to feeling and thinking human beings everywhere that humanity’s most widespread understandings of “society” and economy have been inadequate. Is there space now for something newer and truer in the global consciousness?

Steiner’s phrase is “the three-membering of the social organism.” Organic sociology was a hot topic at that time, with a tradition going back to Plato; but the individual was generally overlooked. Older thinkers saw the human individual woven into society by group forces; more recent ones see us locked in behavior patterns and social psychology. Caste or class, conditions or ambitions, group patterns are still seen to rule us.

Steiner’s vision allows for co-equality of individual and soci -

Steiner’s vision of the ultimate, healthy economy—where we each give away the products of our work, and no one is charged for the necessities of life—sounds a lot like the socialist slogan: “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” But note how the latter phrase with its “from each...” and “to each...” has an unstated point of reference outside the individual. Is that the state taking and giving? And so in practice it turned easily into Lenin’s “who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat.” Steiner’s vision rests only in the individual, as if to say, with Gandhi, that we must become the change we’re looking for. Such a vision is also truly organic. The kidneys give their activity to the body unstintingly, and receive what they need from the other organs. All organs give their gifts freely, and the blood stream has no toll booths!

Anthroposophists are great talkers and writers, even if we struggle to explain anthroposophy itself. Yet we walk our talk in amazing ways. We create communities around all kinds of human needs. We educate children to become who they are seeking to be. We work with the sick to empower their own healing. We embed ourselves and our consciousness in farms that heal the earth and provide good food. We commit lives to arts that awaken, teach and heal. May it all be known in this new century!

Share your thoughts and perspectives, by postal mail to the Ann Arbor office, or by e-mail to editor@anthroposophy.org

The Threefold Social Organism: An Introduction

a good h I stor I an could take us back to the early part of the 20 th century W hen r udolf s te I ner developed h I s I dea of the threefold soc I al organ I s M b y 1917, W hen the I dea W as f I rst art I culated I n h I s t W o M e M oranda , the g reat War W as I n I ts th I rd year , a W ar l I ke noth I ng hu M an I ty had ever exper I enced . t hey called I t “ total W ar ” because I t consu M ed the ent I re energy of the populat I ons I n the W arr I ng nat I ons . a nd I t consu M ed M ore than energy ; I t consu M ed l I ves .

Upwards of 20 million were dead by the armistice on November 11, 1918 and another 20 million were wounded. It was a time of tremendous questioning and debate about the right way to organize modern social life. The western capitalist model was being challenged by socialist movements and by the communist revolution in Russia (1917). Workers chained to the harsh environment of smoke-belching factories were yearning for a better life, and by the millions they read the writings of Karl Marx. Rosa Luxemburg had organized the Spartacus League in Germany and was agitating for a communist revolution to parallel the disaster enacted by the Bolsheviks in Russia. Capitalist businessmen were at their wits’ end trying to understand what would constitute the future structure of Germany. Rudolf Steiner introduced his great threefold idea in this fiery milieu, when many people really wrestled with the riddle of how best to organize human society. His efforts left their mark on historic documents. For example, Raymond G. Fuller reviewed Steiner’s seminal Towards Social Renewal in a full-page article in the January 14, 1923 edition of the New York Times Book Review under the title “New Scheme of Social Organization.”2

The intensity of questioning died down during the course of the 20th century, but, as we enter the 21st century, symptoms of social turmoil and discontent are reaching such a pitch that real striving for better ways of organizing social life is emerging again. Perhaps this will lead to re-examination of Rudolf Steiner’s threefold social organism.

Three Domains of Social Activity

Rudolf Steiner developed the idea between 1917 and 1922. The core concept recognizes three domains of human social activity: economic, legal, and cultural. Steiner maintained that the health of human society depended on an adult population that understood the characteristics of each domain and could thereby organize society so that each domain enjoyed independence and autonomy. In an early characterization Steiner said the three domains should be as independent from one another as national states interacting by way of treaties.

Economic life concerns transforming

what nature provides in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms into commodities that meet human needs. From the threefold perspective, economic activity should be organized and carried out in the spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood with the objective of meeting the needs of all human beings on the planet.

Rudolf Steiner maintained that the entire economic life was encompassed by what he called the “law of true price.” He formulated the law in these words: “A true price is forthcoming when a man receives, as counter-value for the product he has made, an amount sufficient to enable him to satisfy the whole of his needs, including of course the needs of his dependents, until he will again have completed a like product.”3

Jugend, style maker of pre-war Europe, showcases a sober Kaiser in spring 1915 and a stolid soldier by fall 1917. Below, Käthe Kollwitz chronicled the post-war misery in works like The Survivors.

To understand the law requires serious study. In this introduction only a few pointers can be offered. First, it is essential to remove an error in economic thinking—the concept of “wages.” Steiner maintained that the idea of wages, i.e. paying people for their labor, is an illusion. In reality all real labor produces something of value, and the worker is paid for this value. Consequently, to properly perceive the economic life, it is necessary to picture each wage earner as actually running a little business that creates value and to interpret the wage as the price paid for the value. When wages are included among other prices then it is possible to apply the law of true price.

A second pointer is to observe that the formula speaks of the future, and states that true price allows the participants in the economic life to meet their needs for the time required to reproduce the value. It seems evident that if this is not the case, if people could not meet their needs for a sufficient time to reproduce the value, then eventually the economic process would beak down.

The formula also includes the challenging term “needs” which leads to the obvious question of determining them. It should be noted that the idea of needs was far more transparent in 1922 when Steiner formulated the law. Since then the enormous forces of commercial psychology and advertising have conspired to manipulate needs and transform them into desires. For a good discussion of this very significant and sinister transformation of civilization

see the film Century of the Self by Adam Curtis which describes, in particular, the work of Freud’s nephew, Bernays, who was the father of public relations and manipulative advertising.4 The basic point is there are real needs that can be made visible when the impact of powerful subliminal manipulation is weeded out of the soul.

In Steiner’s picture of the economic domain, associations of the economic life collect price data and use a combination of market forces and other policy tools to keep prices true.

The middle realm of the threefold social organism is the legal domain (also called the political or rights domain). Its role is to establish laws that govern the behavior of all adults equally.

From the threefold perspective this domain is exclusively about human rights and, in particular, there is no room here for business entities.

From this it follows that there is no place in the legal domain for corporations as legal persons.

Regulation of business life is a matter for associations of the economic life. Political questions concerning human rights and obligations are the sole subject matter of the political/rights domain. The laws formulated in this domain should be formulated independent of economic concerns and power. This means that economic resources should play no role in deciding the rights, laws, and obligations of human beings. Once rights and laws have been established society must have the power to enforce them and, consequently, police power belongs to the legal domain. To the extent that it is necessary to defend the rights from foreign intrusion, military power also belongs here.

Culture, in the widest sense, is about the cultivation and recognition of human capacities. Human capacities are the spiritual endowments that rain in upon the earth with the births of new human beings. Finding the best way of unfolding these capacities is the task of the cultural domain. The key ingredient for this is freedom. The archetypal picture of this freedom-inoperation is teachers with their students. In unfolding this relationship only the spiritual/mental faculties, feelings, and insights of the teacher and students should come into play. Steiner described this freedom in a newspaper article:

[The cultural life] aims at a form of cooperation among men to be based entirely on the free intercourse and free association of individuality with individuality. Here human individuality will not be forced into an institutional mold. How one person assists another, how one helps another advance will simply arise from what one, through his own abilities and accomplishments, is able to be for the other. It is no great wonder that presently many people are still able to imagine nothing but a state of anarchy as a result of such a free form of human relations in the social order’s spiritual-cultural branch. Those who think so simply do not know what powers of man’s innermost nature are hindered from expanding when man is forced to develop in the pattern into which the state and economic system mold him. Such powers,

deep within human nature, cannot be developed by institutions, but only through what one being calls forth in perfect freedom from another being.5

This passage makes clear that no laws or regulations should be formulated about how or what a teacher should teach. The how and what of teaching is a purely cultural matter and is the province of colleges of teachers interacting on the basis of freedom in the cultural domain. Similarly, economic power should in no way be allowed to determine how cultural life is conducted.

In addition to education the cultural life encompasses all of science, art, religion, medicine, and the working of judges. Each of these areas is about human capacity. Artistic endeavor concerns the capacity to transform nature into sensory experiences that awaken spiritual ideals, even beauty; religion concerns—among other capacities—the capacity of reverence; medicine the capacity for recognizing and tending illness; the work of judges deals with the capacity for weighing truth with criminality. Inventing and innovation are actually part of cultural life too. The aspect of banking and finance concerned with recognizing individuals whose developed capacities make them able to manage capital is likewise part of cultural life.

All of these activities require freedom and competition among human beings of capacity, allowing the most talented to rise to the top. The notion that competition belongs in economic life is a confusion that arises because part of cultural life is mistakenly viewed by our civilization as economic. What our civilization views as business competition in product development and innovation is the same sort of activity that takes place in a competition for the first chair violin in an orchestra. In other words, it is an activity of the free cultural life. It is this confusion that has led to the erroneous idea that economic life is about competition.

Equally erroneous is the association of freedom with the economic life. In reality a deep and dense network of dependencies characterizes economic life. These become particularly visible when disaster strikes. For example, the bankruptcy of a large automobile manufacturer spreads a wave of damage and hurt in ever widening circles. First to lose their livelihoods are those

Hyper-inflation: children stand next to a stack of German marks equal in value to one US silver dollar. Below, a five billion mark postage stamp and bill.

who work for the manufacturer. As the wave expands the suppliers to the automobile manufacturer and the car dealerships feel the pain of reduced income or bankruptcy. The circle of people who have lost their jobs or who have significantly lower incomes, of course, spends less as consumers, and this affects all the people whose activity was supplying these consumer needs, e.g. town merchants in the affected area, etc. It was Steiner’s insight that brotherly, sisterly cooperation and interdependence was the true quality that should rule these densely interdependent networks in order that everyone’s needs might be met. The notion that people are free agents in this realm belies the fact that each person is tied by innumerable threads into a complex network that demands he perform the tasks required by the needs of others. Brotherhood and sisterhood is about brotherly, sisterly interdependence. That characterizes economic life.6

Incompatible Qualities

The three qualities, freedom, equality, brotherhood were the famous cry of the French Revolution: liberté, egalité, fraternité. The cry was a symptom of humanity’s unconscious longing for a threefold social organism. Threefolding is necessary precisely because these three ideals are incompatible. For example, equality in all things would mean that everybody should have a turn playing a Stradivarius violin in the first chair of the Boston Philharmonic. This would obviously lead to many lousy concerts. Similarly, freedom in all matters would mean social sanctioning of theft and breaching of business contracts. Brotherly, sisterly interdependency in artistic matters would prevent great novelists or inventors the liberties they often need to stimulate their creativity. The only way to resolve the incompatibility of the three ideals of freedom, equality, and brotherhood is by threefolding the social organism, thereby providing a domain where each quality is exclusively exercised.7

Rudolf Steiner’s social ideas became known in Central Europe through books and lectures (above). He connected the threefoldness of the social organism with the great cry of the French Revolution, which the great artist-designer William Morris placed on the membership card for the British Socialist League he cofounded in the 1880’s.

to accept such a decision as it would a fact of nature, e.g. the average rainfall in a region and its implications for agricultural productivity. But in the senate, representatives of the economic domain would point out to representatives of the legal domain that the total economic output would be considerably smaller than if the rights state set maximum work at forty hours. Citizens in the rights domain might then reconsider their decision, recognizing that everyone would have proportionately less to consume, or they might decide that they preferred the extra leisure and would be willing to reduce their needs accordingly.9 Whatever was ultimately decided in the rights sphere about the work week would be accepted by the economic domain as an operating constraint just as the farmer must accept the rainfall nature provides.

One-Fold Theocracy to Threefold Organism: The Evolution of Consciousness

This introduction would be incomplete without a look at the world prior to the time when threefolding was a hygienic necessary. Steiner points to the origins of the legal foundation that is a pre-requisite for a functioning modern market economy. When did laws and rights originate? How did we get to the point where we had a system of property rights and dispute resolution? The answer takes us back to ancient Rome. That is when human beings first established real laws. They actually developed two systems of law: one system for relationships between Roman citizens and another for relationships between citizens and non-citizens. The Romans also introduced the idea of a last will and testament. It was an extraordinary innovation that allowed a person to determine what happened to objects on earth after his death. Before Rome, such an idea was unknown. So it can be stated that the ideas of law and rights were born in Rome; that is the time and place of the origin of the middle domain of the threefold organism.

It was Steiner’s insight that society should be structured so that each of the three domains had its own organization and autonomy and that the domains would negotiate among themselves on matters of common concern. In his original formulation in the “Memoranda of 1917” he pictured these negotiations taking place in “[a] kind of senate that is elected from the three corporate bodies, which have the task of ordering the politicalmilitary, the economic, the judicial-pedagogical affairs…”8 As an example of such a negotiation, imagine what would happen if citizens interacting based on equality in the legal domain enacted a law that no person should be required to work more than fifteen hours per week. The economic domain would have

Before Rome, civilizations were quite different. For instance, consider ancient Egypt. It was a theocracy, a world where the pharaoh, a priest-king, ruled over the religious life, the legal life, and the economic life. Thus the religious life encompassed the entire society and was led by the pharaoh who, at least in the Old Kingdom, was considered a god. This god held absolute sway over all legal questions and his judgments were seen as true because they were the judgments of a god. He also ruled over economic affairs.

Steiner held that in very ancient times economic life was organized instinctively. He states, “Certain social conditions obtained among men—caste forming and class forming condi -

tions—and the relations between man and man which arose out of these conditions had the power to shape instincts for the way in which the individual must play his particular part in economic life. These things were very largely founded on the impulses of the religious life, which in those ancient times were still of such a kind as to aim simultaneously at the ordering of economic affairs. …In those early times, the question of labor, or of the social circulation of labor values did not arise. Labor was performed in a certain sense instinctively. Whether one man was to do more or less never became a pressing question, at least not a pressing public question, in pre-Roman times.”10

Roman civilization witnessed the separation of the once unified theocratic order into a religious-cultural sphere and a legal one. The idea of the citizen with rights was born. Related to this was the legal status of the citizen’s labor. Of course, slaves who had no rights carried much of the labor in Ancient Rome. Ideas about labor rights continued to develop through Roman times and into the Middle Ages and indeed into our own time.

As labor became emancipated a new problem emerged: human egoism. While labor was governed by religious organizations that saw to it that human beings were “fruitfully placed in the social organism” egoism could do no harm. But as labor rights became emancipated from the theocratic order, humanity had to deal with selfishness. Steiner stated: “[H]umanity strives … unconsciously to come to grips with Egoism … and in the last resort, this striving culminates in nothing else than modern Democracy—the sense for the equality of man—the feeling that each must have his influence in determining legal rights and in determining the labor which he contributes.”11

Milestones on the road to democracy include the Magna Carta (1215), the first elected English Parliament (1265), the British Bill of Rights (1689), the American Revolution (1775–1781), and the French Revolution (1789–1799). While functioning democracies were emerging another major event occurred: the scientific revolution (16th and 17th Centuries). According to Steiner, it came about because human beings underwent a metamorphosis of consciousness, i.e. human consciousness evolved. The idea that human consciousness has undergone an evolution during historic time is part of Steiner’s worldview, which is considered radical by orthodox science. Steiner described the shift in consciousness that first manifested in the leading figures of the scientific revolution: “The picture of nature is no longer drawn in a manner that allows thought to be felt in it as a power revealed by nature. Out of this picture of nature, every trait that could be felt as only a product of self-consciousness gradually vanishes. Thus, the creations of self-consciousness and the observation of nature are more and more abruptly contrasted, separated by a gulf. From Descartes onward a transformation of the soul organization becomes discernible that tends to separate the picture of nature from the creations of the self-consciousness. With the sixteenth century a new tendency in the philosophical life begins to make itself felt. While in the preceding centuries thought had played the part of an element, which, as a product of self-consciousness, demanded its justification through the world picture, since the sixteenth century it proves to be clearly and distinctly resting solely on its own ground in the self-consciousness. Previously, thought had been felt in such a manner that the picture of nature could be considered a support for its justification; now it becomes the task of this

element of thought to uphold the claim of its validity through its own strength. The significance of the transformation of the soul life can be realized if one considers the way in which philosophers of nature, like H. Cardanus (1501–1576) and Bernardinus Telesius (1508–1588) still spoke of natural processes. In them a picture of nature still continued to show its effect and was to lose its power through the emergence of the mode of conception of the natural science of Copernicus, Galileo, and others. Something still lives in the mind of Cardanus of the processes of nature, which he conceives as similar to those of the human soul. Such an assertion would also have been possible to Greek thinking. Galileo is already compelled to say that what man has as the sensation of warmth within himself, for instance, exists no more in external nature than the sensation of tickling that a man feels when the sole of his foot is touched by a feather. Telesius still feels justified to say that warmth and coldness are the driving forces of the world process, and Galileo must already make the statement that man knows warmth only as an inner experience.”12

Steiner’s research into the evolution of consciousness reveals that the above-described metamorphosis of human consciousness began about 1413. What Steiner is saying is that prior to this change, human consciousness experienced it’s own thinking as part of nature. After the change, consciousness no longer experiences thinking this way. Rather thinking is experienced as something private and apart from nature. Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum —“I think therefore I am”—epitomizes the new condition. A consequence of this change in consciousness was man’s new capacity to approach nature as a detached and disin -

terested observer.

The first historic symptom of the change in consciousness was the scientific revolution. On the basis of newly discovered natural laws numerous life-transforming inventions flowed into civilization. The new technology led to the technological revolution that induced vast migrations from agrarian life into the cities and factories. One consequence: an economic life exhibiting deeper and wider division of labor than had formerly existed began to take shape.

This division of labor had a significant implication: “Whoever works in a social organism which is based on the division of labor never really earns his income by himself; he earns it through the work of all the participants in the social organism.”13 This constitutes that interdependence that characterizes modern economic life, an interdependence that needs to unfold in brotherliness. As these impulses of the new scientific consciousness spread through humanity, an independent economic life, like an amoeba, detaches itself from the legal and cultural domains.14 This occurs as the depth and breath of economic interdependence intensifies.

This rapid survey of historic time illustrates that in very ancient times, civilization was one-fold and dominated by a theocratic order. When we reach ancient Rome, the legal system began to manifest a separate identity and the idea of the citizen with rights emerges.15 Much later, during the 17th and 18th, the economic system begins to exhibit an independent identity. Steiner observes: “[I]n former epochs—nay, even as late as the 15th and 16th century—economic questions such as we have today did not even exist.”16

Lens and Diagnostic Tool

The emergence of three independent domains of human social activity from an ancient unified theocracy occurred more or less unconsciously. In the early part of the 20th century Rudolf Steiner tried to call humanity’s attention to the necessity of making this reality conscious and of acting accordingly. The history of his remarkable attempt to re-structure post World War I Europe on the basis of this idea will be described in the next section. As that and subsequent attempts to make the threefold idea the conscious organizing principal of some land on the earth have so far failed, the threefold idea has never enjoyed a laboratory where it could be worked out in practical life. Nonetheless the threefold idea can serve both as a lens and a diagnostic tool to view and understand the problems of contemporary civilization.

A simple exercise is to read the news through this lens asking questions like: Which domain(s) of society is (are) involved? Is there an issue of unlawful17 interference in one domain by another? A common problem is commercial interests (economic) attempting to influence legislation (rights) with the intention of creating greater profits. For example, the decision to go to war with Iraq can be interpreted in this light, though there were, no doubt, other factors at work as well. Recall the preemptive war was justified with the allegation that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But no WMDs were ever found. On the other hand, it is now known that big commercial enterprises made a fortune as war contractors. Often contracts were awarded without competitive bidding. Evidence of significant over billing and substandard deliverables also exists. Regarding the big picture

of the Iraq war, one senior administration official is alleged to have stated the war was really about oil, i.e. not about WMDs. 18

As another example, consider the news stories pointing to the toxicity of GMO foods and the fact that a vast amount of food in the US contains GMO substances without labeling 19 Focusing the threefold lens on this issue reveals an unlawful interference of commercial (economic) interests on the rights domain. The evidence is that the majority of Americans want clear labeling of GMO foods, but so far this has been prevented. In Europe, until now, GMO food must be clearly labeled.

Another interesting area to investigate is unlawful commercial interference with cultural life. This can occur, for example, when scientists falsify or hide their findings for commercial gain. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. exposed a startling example of this problem in his article “Deadly Immunity,” published on Salon. com in 2005.20 The findings of the tobacco litigation provide another example.

Focusing the threefold lens on the 2008 housing crisis can be instructive. The kernel of the problem was that mortgage brokers allowed people to purchase homes they could not afford. This actually represents failure of the internal regulation of the economic life itself. From the threefold perspective confusion exists because the agencies in our society charged with regulating lending institutions are viewed as part of the political sphere, e.g. Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Reserve Bank, Office of Thrift Supervision, etc. From a threefold perspective, most of the functions of these agencies really constitute aspects of the economic realm. These agencies failed to perform their functions, apparently at times under political pressure. 21 This political pressure represents unlawful interference with the economic life. Deeper exploration would probably reveal that economic interests stood behind the political pressure. Consequently, the matter also apparently represents unlawful commercial interference with the political life. The consequence is the tremendous economic downturn of 2008–2009 and the enormous suffering that it implies.22

As a final example, consider internet regulation. This includes the idea of censoring certain content with filters. What governments have in mind includes filtering independent news sites. Evidently, this is an example of political domain interference with free cultural life.

Wrestling regularly with such questions develops the capacity to see what is happening in society more clearly. If sufficient numbers of people would take up this exercise, the foundation would be laid for a true threefolding in the future.

Not Rehashing Plato’s Republic

In addition to exercising a basic understanding of the threefold idea, it is also necessary to answer some of the criticisms leveled against it. One criticism is that Steiner’s idea amounts to nothing more than repackaging the three estates from Plato’s Republic. The three estates were the Philosophers who ruled, the warriors who protected, and the artisans who composed the majority of the population and who provided for the every day necessities. The response to this criticism is that other than the fact of three groups, Plato’s idea has little in common with Steiner’s. In Plato’s Republic each person belongs to one group only. In Steiner’s threefold social organism each person participates in all three domains. As consumers everyone participates

in the economic realm and not just by eating. Adult consumers also participate in economic associations along with distributors and producers to survey economic conditions and make adjustments where necessary. By contrast, the fact that Plato’s philosophers eat does not make them part of the artisan estate and the same is true of Plato’s warriors. Another difference is found in the way laws are formulated. All adults participate on the basis of equality in the domain of politics and rights in formulating laws that apply equality to all human beings in Steiner’s threefold social organism. In contrast, in the Republic the Philosophers carry this function. Yet another contrast is this: The leading figures of the political life do not have exclusive overarching responsibility for the guidance of the threefold social organism just because it is threefold, and consequently its guidance arises from three separate centers each responsible for different functions. In contrast the philosophers of the Republic are philosopher-kings, that is they are theocratic leaders of a still one-fold society.

Three Separate Centers: Comparison with the Human Organism

To underscore the idea of three separate centers, Steiner often made use of a comparison with the human organism. The human organism can be viewed as consisting of three distinct functional areas: the nerve and sense faculties which Steiner also calls the head system; the rhythmic system consisting of “respiration, blood circulation and everything which expresses itself in the rhythmic processes of the human organism”23; and the metabolic system which comprises all the organs and functions serving metabolism. He explains that these three systems “maintain the total processes of the human organism” and “function with a certain autonomy” with no absolute centralization.24

Not Capitalism, Socialism, or Communism

From the fact (a) that each adult participates in each of the three domains and (b) that Steiner’s threefold society has three distinct functional areas each enjoying autonomy from the other, it should be evident that Steiner is not rehashing Plato’s ideas. It also should be made clear that the threefold idea is different both from capitalism and socialism. For example, Steiner maintained that the entrepreneur and business manager uses capital like an extension of his arm. Consequently, he must have unhampered control over capital. In this sense the threefold idea is capitalist. Indeed, Steiner considered the idea of state control of capital—a key tenant of socialism and communism— disastrous. But Steiner did not think market mechanisms could meaningfully allocate capital. Rather he maintained that bankers and other figures of the cultural life, who had developed the ability to recognize which human beings had the capacity to use capital for the benefit of the community, would place capital at their disposal. Moreover, when these entrepreneur-managers reached a point in life when they either no longer wished or were no longer able to manage capital, it would be transferred to other capable hands.

Steiner’s threefold thinking also diverges from capitalism in that he placed limits on private accumulation of wealth. People of great capacity would be entitled to a share of the profits that arose from the enterprise they directed. When they retired

they would be entitled to keep their fortune. However, Steiner maintained that it was not to the benefit of society that great fortunes pass endlessly from generation to generation because it could easily come into unproductive hands that would squander it. He advised that great fortunes (e.g. over $10 million) should be governed by a kind of copyright law for fortunes

Consequently, a certain time (e.g. 25 years) after the passing of the person who accumulated a fortune, that fortune would be returned to the cultural life as gift or placed in the hands of able business managers to be re-deployed for the benefit of society.25

To capitalist critics that argue markets are the only efficient way to allocate capital, it should be observed that markets no longer are the exclusive means of allocating capital in the US, generally considered the most capitalistic society. Rather it is allocated by the seat of the pants of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and the Secretary of the Treasury. (Witness the trillions dropped from Bernanke’s helicopter and Paulson’s legislation in 2008.) Steiner’s idea contemplated a more rational method of placing capital into the hands of people of capacity and morality, who would use it for the general good of society.

In ending this introduction it should be observed that the threefold social organism is not a fantasy. Rather it describes something which already exists but in a muddled way. What is really needed is a public educated to the three domains. Once consciousness of the three domains lights up in sufficient numbers of people, a proper threefolding could be brought about in a perfectly legal fashion. There is no need to speak of revolutions except in consciousness. This would lead to the three centers functioning according to their inherent qualities.

No Utopia

It also should be stated that the emergence of a conscious threefolding would not produce a utopia because problems and tensions constantly arise in social life. What it would produce is an organic way of dealing with the difficulties and tensions before they become explosive. Otto Lerchenfeld (1868–1938) asked Rudolf Steiner the question that led to his formulating the Threefold idea. In his memoir, Lerchenfeld records this thought: “[The threefold social organism] did not provide what was intended to become a definitive solution of the social question, and could naturally not do this by reason of the very nature of a living organism. Nevertheless, there did result out of this idea the way, the only straightforward way upon which the social conditions, the social difficulties with their eternally varying problems, might be guided again and again towards a solution appropriate to the period, towards their curing.”26

This article is available online; please go to www.rudolfsteinerweb.com/Threefold_Social_Order.php

References:

1. Rudolf Steiner, Social and Political Science, Rudolf Steiner Press,2003.

2. Rudolf Steiner, The Renewal of the Social Organism, Anthroposophic Press, 1985.

3. Rudolf Steiner, Towards Social Renewal, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977. wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/English/SCR2001/GA023_index.html

4. Rudolf Steiner, World Economy, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972.

5. www.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA/index.php?ga=GA0340

6. Rudolf Steiner, The Social Future, Anthroposophic Press, 1972.

7. Rudolf Steiner, The Esoteric Aspect of the Social Question; The Individual and Society, Rudolf Steiner Press, 2001.

8. Rudolf Steiner, “Anthroposophy and the Social Question” wn.rsarchive.org/Articles/AntSocQues/ AnSoQu_index.html

9. Stephen Usher, “The Fundamental Social Law”, The Threefold Review, Summer/Fall 1993 (Issue No. 9)

Endnotes:

1. Article web address: www.rudolfsteinerweb.com/ Threefold_Social_Order.php

2. The review can be purchased for a fee at the New York Times on line archive, which shows the original NYT Book Review format. The text is also available at this address: www. rudolfsteinerweb.com/m/NYTimesReview.php

3. Rudolf Steiner, World Economy, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972, p. 72. On the same page he states, “I do believe, for the domain of economics, this formula is no less exhaustive than, say the Theorem of Pythagoras is for all right-angled triangles.”

4. The 4 part series is available on Google vide free at this address: video.google.com/videopl ay?docid=8953172273825999151. For those who posses a background in mathematical economics also see my Ph.D. dissertation available from University Microfilms under the title Consumer Aspirations: A Dynamic Approach, University of Michigan, 1978.

5. Rudolf Steiner, The Renewal of the Social Organism, Anthroposophic Press, 1985, see article entitled “Cultivation of the Spirit and the Economic Life.”

6. Much attention is focused on the “struggle for existence” in the animal kingdom and this is often used as a metaphor for human economic interaction. This supposed science ignores the cooperative side of both animal

and human society. An excellent ignored work on cooperation in the kingdoms of nature and among human beings is Petr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution, Porter Sargent Publishers, Boston.

7. Rudolf Steiner, Towards Social Renewal, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977, p. 81.

8. Rudolf Steiner, Social and Political Science, Rudolf Steiner Press, 2003, p. 87.

9. This thought gives a hint about the nature of human needs.

10. Rudolf Steiner, World Economy, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972, p. 38.

11. Ibid. p 40.

12. Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, 1973, pp 70–71.

13. Rudolf Steiner, Towards Social Renewal, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977, pp. 120–121.

14. This is not the place to debate filioque!

15. It goes beyond the scope of this introduction to explore the change that manifest in human consciousness between the end of Ancient Egypt and the beginning of the Greco-Roman age. This change could be associated with the separation of the legal domain from the once unified cultural theocracy. Rudolf Steiner finds the symptoms of this metamorphosis in the appearance of the early Greek philosophers. It was his observation that they were the first to think in abstract terms though they did experience their thinking as a process of nature. Prior to that humanity possessed an atavistic clairvoyance that followed world happenings in a kind of picture consciousness. This new capacity for abstract thought had matured sufficiently by Roman times to allow the creation of the concept of the citizen with rights. See his

Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophic Press, 1973, Chapter 2, “The World Conception of the Greek Thinkers.”

16. Rudolf Steiner, World Economy, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977, p. 38.

17. “Unlawful” here does not refer to breaking a codified law but rather a violation of the threefold principle of the autonomy of the three domains.

18. www.news24.com/News24/World/Iraq/0,,2-101460_1369424,00.html

19. (www.naturalnews.com/025001.html en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Trade_war_over_genetically_modified_food ).

20. www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/06/16/thimerosal/ print.html

21. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_ crisis#Government_policies

22. Eliot Spitzer published an interesting analysis of the problem in February 2008 in the Washington Post shortly before the crisis broke in March with the take over of Bear Sterns. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783.html

23. Rudolf Steiner, Towards Social Renewal, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1977, p. 54.

24. Ibid. p. 55.

25. Probably the best way to implement the inheritance copyright idea would be a sinking fund. In other words, the heirs would be allowed to keep some maximum amount, e.g. 10 million dollars, in perpetuity. The amount over that figure would be turned over to the cultural and economic spheres on a straightline basis over the quarter century following the entrepreneur’s demise.

26. Rudolf Steiner, Social and Political Science, Rudolf Steiner Press, 2003, p. 7.

New Members of the Anthroposophical Society in America

As recorded by the Society from October 2008 through January 2009

Russell F. Agee, Boulder CO

Geri Aspras, Atascadero CA

Dieter Back, Carmel CA

Joni Beckner, Grand Junction CO

John Bennett, New York NY

Brigette M. Bowler, Ferndale MI

Jeff P. Bronow, Ellicott City MD

Freya Carter, Bedford NH

Miriam Chaves-Ortiz, Belerose NY

Dana L. Cohen, New York NY

Carly Coleman, Big Island VA

Clare Coriell, Asheville NC

Christina Daub, Garrett Park MD

Marie O. Davis, Asheville NC

Mellisa Dormoy, Metuchen NJ

Lee Ann Dzelzkalns, Whitefish Bay WI

Heather Eisenhardt, Los Angeles CA

Amy E. Elder, Rancho Cordova CA

Julia Bartles Emahiser, Nashville TN

Dana L. Fleming, The Woodlands TX

Karl H. Foltan, Chicago IL

Laura V. Ford, El Cajon CA

Martin Gitt, Hudson NY

Sumaya Hadd-Adin, Seattle WA

Grace M. Hampton, Sacramento CA

Anca Hariton, Benicia CA

Lauren Johnson, Portland OR

Tish Johnson, Portland OR

Louis Kauffman, Chicago IL

Robert Kellum, Portland OR

Adele Kieras, Ypsilanti MI

Kristin Kim, Ghent NY

Nadja Kranites, Coconut Creek FL

Joril Kvamme, Chicago IL

Karin Layher, Saint Louis MO

Lorraine Mallett, Portland OR

Ornella Masiero, Spring Valley NY

Sandy O. McLaughlin, Chicago IL

Dewane Morgan, Park Rapids MN

Donald A. Myrick, Fair Oaks CA

Joel A. Nathan, New York NY

Indigo Ocean, Ghent NY

Santiago Ortiz, Bellerose NY

Morgan Owen-Cruise, Ypsilanti MI

Fruzan Parvanta, Golden CO

Jennifer E. Patterson, Port Hadlock WA

Claire B. Redgrave, Baltimore MD

Anne R. Saldo, Santa Monica CA

Teresa D. Savel, Westminster West VT

Ann D. Sawyer, Preston CT

Jennifer Schafer, Gloucester MA

Claire Sendejas, Houston TX

Josclyn Shipman, Kihei HI

Rebecca Simpson, Hudson NY

Avram Rudy Sklare, Oakland CA

Kenneth Stewart, Waldoboro ME

Heidi Strickland, Salt Lake City UT

Silvia Tal, Glenmoore PA

Tula Tracey Tucker, Fair Oaks CA

Casey Warner, Kirkwood MO

Rachael Wassenaar, Peterborough NH

Cynthia Way, Philadelphia PA

Beth Weisburn, Sebastopol CA

Jean Wetzel, Rochester NY

Yoko Yeaton, Georgetown MA

Members Who Have Died

Rosalie Asten, Rancho Mirage CA joined 1949; died 1/9/07

Alfred Bartles, Nashville TN joined 1957; died 12/28/06

Edna Burbank, Chestnut Ridge NY joined 1995; died 1/13/2009

Amelia M. Laue, Menominee MI joined 2006; died 7/27/2008

Ruth C. Lilienthal, Spring Valley NY joined 1981; died 10/23/07

William Lops, Daytona Beach FL joined 1975; died 10/2/2007

Jewel Piper, Saint Louis MO joined 1999; died Oct 2007 Jann Gates

from Henry Barnes, American Lodestar of Waldorf Education

(Excerpted from a memorial publication, created in gratitude by the Santa Fe Waldorf School, santafewaldorf.org)

The last time that Bob Gates and I visited in person with Henry Barnes and our mutual friend, Lisl Franceschelli, at the Fellowship Community in Spring Valley, NY, the four of us gathered in Henry’s room. He wanted to read to us what he had written that morning for his memoirs; the words he shared are reprinted at right as “A benedictory insight from the last years.” In a single paragraph Henry affirmed that the most profound thread running continuously through his life lessons was “learning to love.” I listened with great interest, for when I looked back, the first qualities I would associate with Henry were his fine intelligence, his clarity of thought, the objective presentation of his ideas and ideals, his ability to envision and then carry out worthy goals. It was as if these capacities were in his

very bones, as if he knew the scope of his talents well and wielded them with ease, as if he himself could hold his own life in balance and embrace moderation. What I sensed as he read to us that morning in his 94th year, was a recognition that Henry Barnes had had to struggle to master the lessons he needed to learn about love. If that impression were true, then his affirmation that morning encompassed his gratitude that what was hard won was also, in retrospect, most highly prized.

A benedictory insight from the last years

Originally published in Henry Barnes: A Constellation of Destinies (2008), a biography of Henry Barnes edited by John Barnes.

“We, in the Western World, are easily will- and intellectdriven and what we need, above all, is to awaken, and nourish the forces of the human heart....

“At the Fellowship Community in my closing years, ... I set out each morning after breakfast for a walk that leads me up the hill behind Hilltop House, past the chicken yard, and into the woods where a bench awaits me, where I can rest and enjoy the quiet solitude with the morning sun illuminating my surroundings from the east behind me. And I marvel at the mystery that I do not see the light until it strikes the trunks and branches of the trees around me. How remarkable! I do not “see” the light until it strikes an object. Light is, in itself, invisible, although it illumines the whole world! And, as this thought awakens in me, another thought rises up beside it. Doesn’t love behave in the very same way?

“As these reflections arose within me, they deepened and led me, gradually, to the realization that I might describe my whole life-journey as “learning to love.” This [journey] led me to myself, to who I truly was, and am, and want to be.”

Henry Barnes

In all that accompanies the gesture of our lives, we hover in our in-breathing as persistent embrace of what has called us into life and never waver in sending forth our out-breathing though we know the whispered Cosmic Word will draw us in an instant beyond our material longevity. And we shall, still will-filled enter lovingly therein.

For Henry Barnes

Jann Gates

18 September 2008

Natalie Tasman Slapo

September 13, 1941—April 19, 2008

Natalie Karen Tasman was born in Binghamton, NY in September of 1941, the second of two daughters. Shortly afterwards, her family moved to Manhattan, when her father Paul Tasman, an IBM employee since 1933, was transferred to Manhattan. During her life, New York was an integral part of Natalie’s cultural upbringing. She was a New Yorker through and through, with her love of culture, art, fine cuisine, and elegant fashion.

While at IBM, Natalie’s Father, Paul Tasman was assigned to work with the Vatican in translating the Dead Sea Scrolls, for which he helped create a special machine called a concordance, along with a Jesuit Priest, who was the Pope’s right hand man named Father Roberto Busa. Natalie was very proud of her Father’s work with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and often asked him questions about it. Her father developed a lifelong close friendship with the Jesuit, Father Busa, and after her Father’s death Natalie maintained a friendship with him. During one of her visits to Italy, she asked him if he had ever heard of Rudolf Steiner. He opened a drawer and pulled out a book of Steiner’s that he had been reading and assured her that the Vatican library had most of Steiner’s books. (He was a bit evasive about his feelings for Steiner, however). Natalie gave her Father’s papers about the Dead Sea Scrolls to Fred Paddock, when he was the chief librarian of the Rudolf Steiner library in Harlemville, NY.

Natalie was a very bright and beautiful child. She finished college at the age of 20 because she had accelerated her course of studies in both high school and college. She had studied foreign languages with emphasis on Spanish and Italian.

While Natalie’s outward life was beautiful in her younger days—fine clothes, rich friends (she was an acquaintance of Jay Rockefeller’s and went to visit his family compound), parties, and trips to Europe, from early on her life was full of pain of every kind. At the age of 14 she suffered an attack of appendicitis and needed emergency surgery. This seemed to be the beginning of a life of suffering for Natalie. She was symbolically crucified in body and soul. As Steiner has pointed out, when an innocent human being is brought to such depths of pain and sorrow, it can lead then to an experience of the Christ, and such was the case with Natalie. She also had some amazing spiritual and synchronicity experiences that eventually led to her encounter with anthroposophy.

Several traumatic events in her late teens caused Natalie to become depressed and to have a fear of intimacy. To please her Mother’s “kvetching” she finally agreed to an arranged marriage. Out of that marriage, came her beloved son Michael, but the marriage itself was doomed to failure. While married, Natalie lived in Florida and worked as a Spanish teacher. After her divorce, she moved to St. Louis where she suffered the plight of a working single mother. It was also at that time that she began developing severe migraine headaches. At first she attributed them to stress, but upon medical investigation, it was found that something was seriously wrong. After years of testing, she was found to have a rare, degenerative genetic disease known as osteopetrosis.

Natalie’s son went through the usual teen rebellion and left her to live with his Father. This was a crushing blow to Natalie, but it gave her the impetus to head back to her roots and her beloved New York, where she sought to rebuild her life.

While living in Queens in 1983, Natalie rode the bus to work where she frequently spoke with a man named Lennie. One day, Lennie happened to mention that he knew a man whom he felt would be a good partner for her. Natalie agreed to meet this man, and it was good that she did, because that man was Herb Slapo, the love of her life. They were married just four months after meeting. Natalie was 42. Forty-two is a year of destiny and it was also that same year when she met the other great love of her life— anthroposophy.

Natalie embraced anthroposophy with a passion, and sought to learn everything she could about it. She joined the Christian Community, attended Study Groups and conferences, and visited the Steiner library. She became very active in the New York and the Garden City anthroposophical groups. Of her, New Yorkers Fred Paddock and Judith Soleil wrote:

“Natalie Slapo was an ardent supporter of the Rudolf Steiner Library for many years, and a great friend to both Fred Paddock and the present staff, Judith Kiely and Judith Soleil. Her relationship with Fred Paddock was nurtured in weekly phone calls filled with warmth and humor, and continued into Fred’s retirement from the library. Natalie joined the library’s advisory board, but her illness unfortunately limited her tenure. She continued to help the library from behind the scenes, though, talking about it with other members, making suggestions and generous donations, and enthusiastically encouraging our work. Every Christmas brought delicious chocolates! Natalie was a woman of depth, intelligence, ebullience, and humanity; we will miss her.”

In the mid 1990’s, for various reasons, the Slapos decided that they needed to move. Natalie checked out a few large anthroposophical communities, and finally decided that Chapel Hill, NC was the best place for them. And how happy the North Carolina Branch was that they made this decision!

Natalie was instrumental in many initiatives in our NC community including: the tradition of members hosting the Holy Nights of Christmas; the Threshold group, which reads to the Dead; the Apocalypse Study Group; and the Holy Week before Easter observance. She was also part of a committee, which brought the Christian Community to North Carolina. She did all these things in spite of agonizing bouts of pain. Many times we thought that this illness would kill Natalie, but she rose again and again like a phoenix to do more for our community.

Natalie had a warm charm that made everyone feel at home, or even that they were her best friend. She loved hosting events and always had a beautiful table of sweet delights for her guests. She gave generously of her time and money to the

causes she loved and to people in need. Among the many she helped were a homeless woman in NY who was a former public school teacher and an African American man who had a kidney transplant. Everyone in our community has a story to tell of the kindness and good advice Natalie gave to us.

Her great compassion for others was born out of the great pain she suffered and her connection to Christ. She did not find closeness and comfort from her immediate family, but found love, spiritual intimacy and a true family in the anthroposophical community and of course, from her dear beloved husband, Herb.

After spending three months in the hospital and two nursing homes, Natalie’s heart wore out and she crossed the threshold early in the morning of April 19, the day before the full Moon of Taurus. The Full Moon is a time of completion, the perfect time to end things. And so from the Cosmic viewpoint, Natalie excarnated at a most auspicious time. According to the Orthodox Church, April 19 this year was also “Lazarus Saturday” and how apropos when one considers Natalie’s devotion to Lazarus/John and her founding of the Apocalypse Study group! It was also Earth Day this year, as well as the eve of Passover, the Spring Festival of Judaism, the religion into which she was born, as well as the Wesak Festival of the Buddha. And so it was in a truly ecumenical, cosmopolitan way, as was her lifelong nature, that Natalie crossed the threshold on April 19, as though she wished to participate in these Full Moon celebrations in the Heavens. It is also very significant that Natalie was just 66 years old. That is

Edna Burbank

February 4, 1913— January 13, 2009

Edna Burbank chose to live out her “elder years” residing near her family and helping to raise her four grandchildren, and taking an active part in the life of the Threefold Community in Chestnut Ridge, New York.

Edna was a member of the Rudolf Steiner Fellowship Community for 24 years. She joined the Anthroposophical Society in 1995 and she was a member of the Christian Community Church. Edna loved her life here and was often a guest or an ‘elder’ student in the many institutions at the Threefold Community. She didn’t see us as different institutions, but as one united, unique community.

How did she come to anthroposophy? Mainly through me, her daughter. Yet the journey of her path clearly leads from an esoteric source, that of Masonry. Another influence from a different spiritual path came through Edna’s husband’s Uncle Myron, who was a Christian Scientist and who was a loving presence in the family. During the last days of my mother’s life so many memories washed over me and then patterns began to emerge.

33 x 2, the number 33 signifying a life rhythm in connection with the life of Christ.

Our community held a three-day long vigil at her home in accordance with the tradition of the Christian Community, to which Natalie belonged. Twenty-five persons attended the Memorial service at her home, and many more packed the New Hope Presbyterian Church for her funeral, where Natalie’s dear friend Rev. Richard Dancey held the service and gave an excellent overview of Natalie’s life.

Natalie’s artist husband Herb shared an interesting story with us. The evening after Natalie passed away, he was driving home from the airport where we had picked up one of his daughters and there in the sky was a magnificent sunset. His daughter stopped the car and they got out to observe. There against the black and purple stormy sky was a beautiful sunset of pink, orange, gold and blue. And across from it they saw a huge, magnificent double rainbow. Now you may call it just coincidence, but consider this: Natalie knew that Herb’s favorite motif for his paintings was clouds. What greater gift or sign could she send him than this beautiful sunset with two magnificent rainbows? It seemed as if she were giving him a final task to do—paint this most beautiful sunset of all. The three days following her death were like an extraordinary metaphor of her life—each day had very dark clouds interwoven with moments of bright light and beautiful blue skies.

Kathleen Wright

I have been blessed with our very close relationship as mother and daughter.

Edna began life in Louisville, Kentucky, on February 4, 1913. She was born at home, upstairs over her father’s bakery. Her father, Ernest Albert Kenzig had studied law, passed the bar, yet he decided to continue his work as a baker. Ernest was the seventh son of Swiss immigrants; he was the only one born in this country. I was named for his mother, Maria. Edna’s mother was Elsie Vivian McDermott, the eldest daughter of Elisabeth d’Arc and Tommy McDermott. So we have the Swiss, Irish, and French mixture. The ‘de Arc’ family line was traced back to the family of Joan d’Arc of France.

There were two pillars of the community, the St. Luke Methodist Church and the Masonic Temple. Her father, Ernest Kenzig, was a community builder, gifting the city lots to these institutions. He was active on the board at the church and he was a Grand Master of the Masonic Temple, Scottish rites. The Masonic Temple was just down the street to the right of the family home, while the church was up the street to the left. Ernest built his bakery on the corner next to his home, adding two houses for his daughters once they had their own families. Only my mother’s lot remained empty, later filled with hundreds of iris plants that her father grew. The bakery was a popular spot. During the Depression, the Kenzigs gave away many loaves of bread to help families put food on the table. Soon the entire neighborhood was calling them Mom and Pop!

In 1937 Edna married Austin Milton Burbank, who had been born in New Rochelle, New York, and grew up in Anchorage, Kentucky. Austin was a pilot, one of the original barn stormers, flying to barns in the countryside and giving rides to people

for a nickel or a dime. Before the Depression he owed his own airplanes and gave flying lessons; in 1942 he flew for American Airlines out of California, and then for Blue Grass Airlines in Kentucky. Over the years Edna and Austin traveled to 49 states and Canada. They had a long, wonderful life together. One of their favorite past-times was cruising the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers on the Delta Queen, a steamboat paddle wheeler. Austin would bring his short-wave radio to listen to the pilots speak to each other. He studied his river charts and always gave the best ETA (estimated time of arrival). Soon he was a regular guest in the pilot’s house. It was always an adventure traveling with my parents.

During the 1940’s, Edna’s mother and two sisters became members of the Eastern Star of the Masonic Temple. At the time, Edna was living in Burbank, California, but when she returned to Louisville, she joined the Order of Eastern Star and served as matron of honor. Her favorite role was to speak as Queen Esther, known as Deliver of the Jews in Ancient Persia. The name Esther is the same as Ishtar; in the Babylonian pantheon, Ishtar is the divine personification of the morning star Venus, the goddess of love. Many in this community observed Edna’s regal character.

Tragedy hit the family in 1947 when Edna and Austin’s first born child died a sudden infant crib death. It was the evening before he was to be christened on the Sunday of Epiphany. The very next year her sister’s first born child died of leukemia at six years of age. Edna and Austin waited seven years for another child (their only) to be born. One of Edna’s favorite stories was that after the death of her son, the superintendent of schools came to her and offered her a job to return to teaching. Edna choose to go to work, teaching third grade for 33 years, and for the rest of her life she choose joy over sorrow. It was on Epiphany 2009 that Edna received the Last Anointing from Rev. Carol Kelly, 62 years after losing her infant son.

Edna was a Sunday School teacher and knew the Bible well. In the ‘60’s she joined the Group of Ten Brave Christians led by the pastor of St. Luke’s Methodist Church; they would rise at sunrise to pray individually and meet weekly in the church. In 1965 she led a youth group on a trip to New York City and I remember standing in the Cathedral of St. John, the Divine, and trying to decide whether to choose St. Luke or St. John for my path. In the 1960’s, I remember my mother reading books on Edgar Cayce, yoga, and reincarnation. She always had an open mind.

In 1975 when I wrote to her from my home in southern Africa that I was beginning the eurythmy training in Cape Town, she checked on the Anthroposophical Society by writing to the Rudolf Steiner School in Manhattan. Amos Franceschelli answered her letter, assuring her that anthroposophy was respectable. Later when the fear of cults spread across this country, Edna stood up for anthroposophy in the Central Presbyterian Church in Louisville, where she served as an elder, demanding that they take the name of the Society off their list of cults. When a gay member of the church committed suicide, she voted to accept gay members into the church and she was active in outreach to invite and to welcome any newcomers. She was never afraid to speak her mind.

Together we saw our first mystery drama, directed by Hans Pusch, in 1976. When I asked her about the scene of Lucifer and Ahriman, she explained to me that it was a tabloid in the spiritual world. Edna took up her study of anthroposophy by attending

workshops and conferences. She practiced speech formation, learning to toss and catch felt balls with actor Ted Pugh. Edna was a perpetual student, attending the full cycle (given over four years) of John Wulsin’s courses on poetics at the School of Eurythmy. She especially loved eurythmy and I think she attended every graduation of the School of Eurythmy since 1980 until most recently. Christology was her main interest in anthroposophical study. She studied Rudolf Steiner’s lecture cycles on the gospels, including The Fifth Gospel. Poetry books were her favorite, including authors Christy Barnes, Albert Steffen, and Christian Morgenstern, and the meditative verses of Rudolf Steiner. She continued to read late into her 90’s, with Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson always resting next to her chair.

Edna was most accepting, never judgmental. Everyone knew how much Edna loved children. She always put people first. “Gran” was the most devoted grandmother attending class plays, concerts, recitals, and games of grandchildren Laura, Mark, John, and Lukas at the Green Meadow Waldorf School since 1976. Teachers remember her outgoing presence, as she would make a point of giving her congratulations after every performance. She was a “Grand” lady!

Edna was born on a Tuesday and she died on a Tuesday; you know the rhyme, “Tuesday’s child is full of grace.” I think it is fair to say that Edna had a natural grace with people. As an elder she continued to interact with people, especially the young volunteers. The Fellowship Community coworkers reflected on how assessable Edna was, as she continued to be cheerful and communicative even after losing her hearing and then, when she needed more care. Edna was always able to connect with people. She died slowly and consciously, surrounded by her family. During the three days after death, we observed her peaceful countenance growing more and more youthful, with a regal spirit shining through her.

Both the funeral at the Christian Community Church and her memorial at the Fellowship Community were held on Friday, January 16. Rev. Carol Kelly spoke of Edna Violet as a flower transformed as the butterfly. Her life was celebrated with song, lyre music, and the Hallelujah in eurythmy. As Venus was shining in the west as the evening star, we experienced the beauty of ceremony. Her one request was granted at the Fellowship Community, to have a trumpeter play, “When the Saints Go Marching In” and we all joined in as a chorus!

My family is grateful to all those at the Fellowship Community for providing a home for her active life in retirement and such excellent care in this last stage of her soul’s journey. Being a part of the process of “Gran’s” dying meant so much to us all. Thank you to Dr. Paul and Ann Scharff, Dr. Gerald and Miriam Karnow for providing the foundation for spiritual science realized in this vital community. Thank you to the coworkers of the Fellowship Community for their loving care of my mother. We have been blessed by the Spirit of Community and the tangible workings of Christ in the “encircling Round”.

Her loving daughter, Maria Burbank Ver Eecke

Chestnut Ridge, NY

in our next issue: perspectives on the economic crisis

brentano, husserl, steiner on the content of thought images of self: the seasonal tree

main building, michael fields agricultural institute, east troy, wisconson