anthroposophy in america: 100 years reflections & questions
Courses in C ommunity building, Arts, so C i A l
be part of the rudolf steiner institute community this July. Join us and enjoy the activities in courses, at meals, during evening events and especially among people creating community together. Visit our website: steinerinstitute. org for more information, pictures, biographies of the faculty and detailed course descriptions.
renew A l, inner development, edu CA tion
ONE-WEEK COURSES: JULY 11-17 11-24| ChOOSE ONE COURSE, EaCh iS aCCOmpaNiEd bY aN aRtiStiC SESSiON COmpLimENtiNg thE thEmE bio-dynamics: mysteries & Revelations >Günther hauk | Courage to be: introduction to Clowning >ViVian Gladwell | Finding meaning in biography: Our Life as a Creative Story >MarGli Matthews | parsifal—Our Shared Quest for the grail >anne Greer | pedagogical puppetry—a path for Social & Emotional Learning >Janene PinG | Self and World: an introduction to anthroposophy >robert McderMott | the art of baking bread and an Evolving picture of human Consciousness >warren lee cohen | the art of Leadership: a Contemporary Challenge >cleMens Pietzner
tWO-WEEK pROgRam: JULY 11-24 | desiGn your own curriculuM, choose uP to three two-week courses
between You and me: Creative Writing >Paul Matthews | Form drawing: the Universe of Straight & Curve >Michel st Pierre | Living thinking as portal to a New Clairvoyance >robert hill | painting & drawing through the Waldorf Curriculum >keVin huGhes | painting Studio: Color & the Soul—Encountering the Essence of Color >ulla neiGenfind-bossert | Re-envisioning Waldorf Education >hansJoachiM Mattke | Singing through Life: Vocal music in the Course Of human development >Jeff sPade | tone Eurythmy: the musical Conversation of the Soul With its Cosmic Self >Preston barker
ONE-WEEK iNtENSiVE: JULY 18-24 | choose one course, each is accoMPanied by an artistic session
addressing today’s medical problems—insights From Eastern and Western Wisdom >PhiliP incao, Md, sebastian incao, l.ac., diPl. oM | Clowning Level ii —Embracing the Unexpected >ViVian Gladwell | developing Living thinking through plant Study & projective geometry >craiG holdreGe & henrike holdreGe | doing Sculpture as transformative activity > axel ewald | Essentials of Waldorf Education >Jack Petrash | plant gestures—Soul gestures: Explorations in pastel & Watercolor >briGitte bley-swinston | imaginative Language of Fairy tales —an artistic Exploration >ePhrat anGress-ewald
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The Roman god Janus, as in “January,” was a god of ends and beginnings; with two faces he looked backward and forward at the same time. With our “retro” cover (the head of “Liberty Enlightening the World” in a Paris park before being shipped over), we, too, look back—to the first American group to take up Rudolf Steiner’s researches. There are notes from a week of events at Anthroposophy NYC (p.15), plus a reprint of the story of those early days, as told more than fifty years ago (p.54).
We also look forward, first with reports of a meeting led by Torin Finser and Rachel Schwartz on “The Task of the Society in this Century” (p.49); then with the SteinerBooks Spiritual Research Seminar at NYU (p.19), and John Bloom’s survey of the very forward-looking “Economics of Peace” co-sponsored by RSF Social Finance (p.22). “Anthroposophy & the Cultural Creatives” finds remarkable parallels between Rudolf Steiner’s 1923 account of becoming an anthroposophist and the 1999 book on becoming a “cultural creative” (p.25), and page 42 has full information on the International English Week at the Goetheanum in August and save-the-dates for the American-themed AGM in Chicago (p.52). There are also reviews from the Rudolf Steiner Library, portraits of several very fine initiatives, David Adams’ report of a wonderful musical-crafts-artistic training, and our first poems.
Considering “100 years of anthroposophy in America,” many thoughts and feelings crowd in. First is a deeply felt wonder at the care and value of the work—outer and inner—that has been done. Ordinary persons strove across each of those thirty-six thousand days to wake themselves up to the needs and possibilities of humanity. Some followed the paths put forward with such love and grace by Rudolf Steiner, but there are many others. One must also feel the 20th century’s tragedies. The cutting off of a magnificent European culture that blossomed just before 1914. Then the escalating violence that destroyed human confidence in our own essential goodness. The spread of mental wastelands of abstract, lifeless thoughts, harnessed to greed and fear. And the dreadful erosion of our American republic by a thoughtless acceptance of untruthfulness. — To know these times of ours, must we not feel both respectful wonder—and a great, wrenching loss?
Finally, then, we have a choice to make! Recollecting the past, and mindful of the eternal now in which we must act, how shall we envision the future? As something menacing which we face with too little resource and too few companions? Or as a remarkably strong foothold for a new beginning and a further ascent?
How we frame this next century of anthroposophy in America is crucial. As an anthroposophist—someone trying to become more fully human —and as a privileged and responsible citizen of the USA, I lean toward the brave new beginning. The future calls us, if we will see it so. Rich in insights, strong in initiatives, devoted in feeling, and with the “Spirit of the Time” leading our efforts, we are poised to take new, sober, decisive steps.
What should those be? Take up the conversation. Indeed, you can begin, in a small but important way by turning to page 9 and answering our communications questionnaire. Thank you!
— John Beck, Editor, Evolving News for Members & FriendsEmail: editor@anthroposophy.org
Serve the future by educating the children of today with an unhuried, age-appropriate education rich in art and academics.
Waldorf Early Childhood Teacher Education
First Session June 14-July 2, 2010
Program Director Susan Howard
Waldorf Elementary Teacher Education
First Session July 5-23, 2010
Program Director Jana Hawley
Biography & Social Art Program
Blocks focus on a particular aspect of the mystery of human life and development using artistic exploration as a tool for learning.
First Session July 5-23, 2010
Program Directors Signe Schaefer and Patricia Rubano
Come for a summer of learning, spiritual renewal, and relaxation! Great walking trails, a natural swimming pond, beautiful gardens, fresh organic and biodynamic food, and our wonderful bookstore all await you. We have dormitories available on campus as well as housing in the community just a short walk from classes. We are a family-friendly campus.
Leadership
Lately I have read Steiner’s Nature Spirits, Pogacnik’s Nature Spirits and Elemental Beings, and von Holstein’s Nature Spirits and What They Say —all tremendously inspiring and informative. As a child I read the Cicely Mary Barker fairy books, and never really gave up believing in fairies. My mother’s side of the family tells fairy stories as factual events, like the time great-grandpa Rea built a house on a fairy ring, and the fairies caused such a rumpus he had to move the house!
L.M. Montgomery, in Pat of Silver Bush, has the Irish servant leaving out a bowl of milk “for the fairies” as late as the early twentieth century. In “Elsa and The Ten Elves” from a 1927 copy of Up One Pair of Stairs, after refusing to do her work, the newly wed Elsa is surprised by a little man: “Old Man Hoberg—I have served your family many years.” He produces ten little elves who jump into her fingers, filling her with a desire to work. Obviously a house spirit, such as described by Pogacnik and von Holstein!
Von Holstein’s house gnome recommends giving the house spirit some of whatever it is you like best. So, naturally I put out a bowl of raw milk on top of the china cupboard. Also, I have been planting more flowers, and am even making a “fairy garden” with magical and tiny flowers.
I would love to read more about elementals—how do I know if I have I house spirit? How do I attract one if I don’t?
My grandparents house was so immaculately and graciously run it seems as if they would have had a house gnome. Could one have come with Grandpa from Germany? I apologize if this is rambling, but I feel this is a
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR are welcome, subject to editing for length. Email to editor@anthroposophy.org or to:
Editor, News for Members
1923 Geddes Avenue
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1797
very important time to connect with elemental beings and forge meaningful and mutually beneficial alliances. And how purely charming!
Jenny Hohmann
PS: Perhaps the house elves (although rather sad characters) in Harry Potter will have helped open people’s minds to the concept. Also, many children’s catalogs and gardening catalogs are full of fairy stuff!
In the Summer-Fall News for Members a review by Glen Williamson states that Michael Chekhov had “...a failed marriage to actress Olga Knipper...” But Olga Knipper was the wife of Anton Chekhov. In a biography of Knipper by Harvey Pitcher it says “...it was through her that Michael Chekhov, Alexander’s son, received an audition from the Art Theatre in 1912 and was thereby launched on a successful career...”
Michael Katz Temple, NH Editor’s reply:
Thank you for drawing our attention to an odd fact. Just as Michael Chekhov, the anthroposophist, actor, and teacher, was nephew of the great playwright Anton Chekhov, so Anton’s wife, the actress Olga Knipper, had an actress niece also named Olga Knipper. She was Michael Chekhov’s wife from 1915 to 1919 and is best known as Olga Chekhova.
I want to commend News for Members on printing the review of American Anthroposophy and the article by Joel Wendt. I felt William Bento did a fair and enlightening review of Mr. Wendt’s Book. I feel Mr. Wendt is making a significant contribution in articulating developing American anthroposophy. If Americans can come to anthroposophy naturally we need to embrace our topography, our native American predecessors, our bent toward solving a problem to bring heal -
ing in varied ways. Embracing our true healthy Individuality as our elemental soul consciousness evolving is a high spiritual gift.
I like Joel’s phrase of ‘becoming one with the Good’; that living the Good (the Way) can lead to knowing the Truth (the Truth) and then our uniting with the Good (the Life). His criticism of over-intellectualizing I, too, find frequently among Society members. I fully concur with his point about real knowledge coming out of our own seeking activity and that then we are able to unite our experience with thoughts from reading Steiner. And that mere study of Steiner can allow material to enter as mere belief. His point about ‘uniting the I within the soul with the eternal as the Good’…. and soul and spirit foundation for true brotherhood (for the new healthy social life) I find beautiful and inspiring.
Harlan Ketterling harlank@peoplepc.com Millis, MassachusettsEditor’s note:
To explore Joel Wendt’s work further go to his website Shapes in the Fire, http://ipwebdev.com/ hermit/index.html where it’s free to read. To purchase (and help support his work) go to http://stores. lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=775446
The following is my response to a recent article by Eugene Schwartz entitled “The Web as Will and Idea”, which is Eugene’s response to an article by the renowned anthroposophist Sergei Prokofieff, who wrote a remarkable article entitled “The Being of the Internet”, in which he argued that the digital media are carriers of such darkness that they are unredeemable. The following will make the most sense if Eugene’s article (and ideally Prokofieff’s as well) is read first, but can still stand on its own as my opinion.
Eugene has written a timely and well-considered article. As
Letters continue on p.6
December 21st 2010 – January 5th 2011
Come with us, visit the sacred places of this ancient civilization and its Mysteries.
We will visit many of the famous and less well known sites of Egypt, including the Pyramids and the Sphinx of Giza, the Temples of Karnak, Dendera and Saqquara; the Valleys of the Kings and of the Artisans, the Temple of Isis in Aswan, and so much more. We will also visit the anthroposophically inspired community of Sekem.
The tour is led by Denis Ruff, artist, educator and Egyptologist from Dornach, Switzerland
Gillian Schoemaker, eurythmist, Camphill Special Schools, Pennsylvania
For details, please contact Gillian: 610 469 0864
gillian_schoemaker@yahoo.com
Letters continued from p.5 someone who has “grown up” (I’m currently 33) watching and participating fully in the birth of the internet (I had an email address years before the world wide web existed), I am disheartened when anthroposophists shy away from what I consider to be an important task: the appropriate usage of these new kinds of technology.
By appropriate, I mean utilizing the technology as a means of furthering a progressive human development. Of course what constitutes “progressive” or “development” can be hotly debated, but for me this involves not just empowering people through providing access to information of an esoteric nature that they might not otherwise have, but in providing the context for the shared creation of meaning in ways that are dynamically capable of leading towards real transformation.
The ahrimanic nature of the internet lies primarily in the way that supports the decontextualization of meaning-making from the soul lives of its human participants. It allows us to abstract too easily, to decontextualize parts of ourselves in ways that challenge a healthy development. But at the same time the internet is the potential carrier of both luciferic impulses (getting willfully lost in online environments, expressions of rage, rampant self-satisfaction seeking opportunities, etc.) and Christ impulses as well.
As always, the Christ-like impulses are a bit more subtle, a little less oriented towards appearing with a particular veneer, but no less powerful for all that. I am speaking of how the internet is used to help bring groups of
people together in ways that fosters both community and action, and which promote love and change. This occurs not merely through sharing information, but in the literal creation of an in-between space which can be filled with the soul-activity and spirit-light of individual wills. This, I think, is what it looks like to “redeem” the internet. It happens when people are given tools to become active participants in the dynamic creation of meaning that fosters transformation and love.
The challenge, as with the bringing into one’s heart of any Christ impulse, is that it occurs not by default, and not by control, but through a conscious surrendering of one’s will to a higher will, which is experienced both as a suffering and a redemption. Ahriman, I imagine, would like is to use the internet to manipulate and control so that we forget the much greater power available through this kind of conscious suffering, while Lucifer would be happy if we continued to use the
internet to satisfy our desires and create infinite personalities for ourselves.
The alchemists understood that nothing could go untransformed if the magnum opus is to be achieved. Their saying “As above, so below; as below, so above” was not an academic one about correlation; it meant that in order to reach the highest potential available to us, we had to transform our lowest aspects. This applied too to the outer world: nothing could ultimately go unredeemed, and if we ever decide to “write off” some aspect of reality as beyond hope, beyond action, and beyond transformation, then the forces of darkness will claim a victory. We must work together to build the world we wish to live in. It is a horrible mistake to try and divorce technology from morality, and to claim that “it’s all in how it is used.” Some technologies are more evil than others, but the internet is not an atomic bomb. The development of the internet, although beginning as a
defense-oriented technology (not incidentally as a technology to help counter the potential effects of nuclear weapons), almost immediately was taken up and used for other means; primarily education. There are countless ways in which both the development and usage of the internet fosters healthy development of human beings–in ways not completely without strings, of course, but also not in ways that make its usage “unredeemable.”
What we cannot do is let the regressive impulses have their way with the internet and co-opt the minds and souls of human beings for their own uses without a Michaelic challenge, a challenge for the creation of spirit-based groups of individuals (which are different than just “groups”), a challenge to permeate the spiritual spaces of the internet with transformed will, with conscious sacrifice, with love of transformation and a transformation of love.
Seth MillerPosted at http://www.spiritalchemy.com/ blog/726/response-to-can-digital-mediaon December 31, 2009. Seth has taught physics and other subjects in Waldorf schools across the West, and is currently getting a PhD in Transformative Studies from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
Percy MacKaye
Rudolf Steiner
9200 Fair Oaks Boulevard Fair Oaks, California 916-961-8727 ext. 0
www.steinercollege.edu
My congratulations to you and anyone else responsible for the transformation of News for into a very readable and wonderfully professionallooking journal. I was particularly interested in the summerfall article “Columbia Rising! & the Spirit of St. Louis” because as a young man I worked for a couple of years as secretary to Percy MacKaye and often listened to him reminisce about his work, including The Masque of St. Louis. The article did not mention Percy’s connection with anthroposophy, which would seem relevant, but perhaps authors Margaret Runyon and Dennis Dietzel did not know of it. I believe Percy first became acquainted with Rudolf Steiner’s
work through his elder daughter, Arvia (later Mrs. Karl Ege), whose name, along with that of her younger sister, Christy (later Mrs. Henry Barnes), will be familiar to many Society members, particularly those involved with Waldorf education. In any case, Percy visited Dornach in the 1930s, became friendly with Albert Steffen and collaborated with him on publishing a selection of their “inter-translated” poems. Percy was also deeply proud of his daughters’ life-long work as Waldorf teachers and artists (both were published poets).
Incidentally, Percy was frequently in despair at how often his surname was misspelled. I am loath to mention it, but, dear editor, take a look at the photo captions in the “Columbia Rising” article.
Swain Pratt Chatham, NYis that it is quite impossible to view Rudolf Steiner’s work in any of the categories that philosophy has at its disposal.
Even his book The Philosophy of Freedom does not seem to me to pertain to philosophy. Rather, it is in his poetry, the many verses, The Calendar of the Soul, the “Foundation Stone Meditation,” and The Mystery Dramas, that the real meanings can be found.
nomenologists do this also: they look for meaning within or under the things of the sense world and are not satisfied with telling about something but rather look for what is at first hidden but perhaps can be brought to light through our thinking. Steiner, of course, goes further and lets us bring spirit, soul, willing, feeling, and all the rest.
word and Dasein, as well as the word Wesen, are important in Rudolf Steiner’s work and in phenomenology, though they are not easily translated into English and are given meanings such as life, being, existence.
Thanks!
What an enlivening and nourishing experience it is to stroll through a Farmer’s Market and benefit from its abundance, stride the fields of a BD Farm, also enter an Art Gallery or Museum. Sometimes one needs to “escape” into a small roadside chapel or cathedral for inner peace and inspiration or hear music of various kinds to bring back harmony and meaning in one’s life. All aspects of life are addressed in Evolving News For Members and Friends, it is such a well rounded publication with so much depth, width and social scope. It is a delight to receive and am so grateful for all the variety and visual riches one is treated to! Am looking forward literally and figuratively to more to come!
Veronica Reif Berkeley, CAThe E-News article and challenge as to whether Rudolf Steiner’s work is related to phenomenology, Husserl, Brentano, and so on is interesting and thoughtprovoking, and Scott Hicks’ work sounds very interesting too. What I would suggest, however,
Phenomenology basically seems to consist of ways to view experience. A long time before I found Rudolf Steiner I studied some phenomenology and wrote an MA thesis, “The Experience of Loneliness.” I was told to not talk about things that you are trying to present. Instead, phenomenology teaches us to get inside the experience and show the readers or listeners what it is you want them to hear, see, think about— which is what poetry does Steiner shows us so much through his poetry which is a marvelous phenomenon just in itself. It is important to consider every word in the poetry. Phe -
A small verse that I like is at the beginning of Verses and Meditations (p.34):
Why does the seeking soul of man
Strive towards knowledge of higher worlds?
Because every look—born of the soul—
Into the outer world of nature
Turns to the question, fraught with longing:
Where is the Being Divine?
Warum strebt des Menschen
Suchende Seele
Nach Erkenntnis
Der höheren Welten?
Weil jeder seelenentsprossene Blick
In die Sinneswelt
Zur sehnsuchtsvollen Frage wird Nach dem Geistessein.
Here is the word Sein. This
I believe that miso belongs to the highest class of medicines, those which help prevent disease and strengthen the body through continued usage. . . Some people speak of miso as a condiment, but miso brings out the flavor and nutritional value in all foods and helps the body to digest and assimilate whatever we eat. . .
—Dr. Shinichiro Akizuki, Director, St Francis Hospital, Nagasaki
It is cumbersome to translate the last line, Nach dem Geistessein, as “Where is the Being Divine?” Geistessein is spirit being. The word Blick is glance. In die Sinneswelt is into the sense world. Thus, every glance into the sense world creates the question, Frage, filled with longing, sehnsuchtsvollen. The direction, nach, of this longing is towards the spirit being, Geistessein. Earlier, the seeking or searching soul, the suchende Seele, is towards, nach, knowledge, Erkenntnis, of the higher worlds, der höheren Welten Nach is thus a small word but carries large meaning in this verse, as to the direction of our longing and our looking.
As far as our knowing is concerned, the “Foundation Stone Meditation” tells us to practice (Übe) three things that pertain to knowing: spirit-recollection, spirit-mindfulness and spirit-vision. Übe Geist-Erinnern, Übe GeistBesinnen, Übe Geist-Erschauen. The word Geist is of course spirit everywhere; the second parts are Erinnern, meaning to remember, Besinnen, to think, reflect, and Erschauen, which is a way of beholding. I feel we can use various parts of “The Foundation Stone Meditation” and any of his poetry as meditations to bring us to the point of knowing the things we want to know.
Seelenentsprossene, the word modifying Blick, is interesting. Seele is soul and Spross is basically a sprout, so entsprossen could mean a sprouting up in the soul. A further note concerning the word Blick Augen is eye, and combined with Blick is Augenblick, which means moment.
A book I have of lectures given in Munich in August 1912, the 25th to 31st, has the title in English, Initiation, Eternity and the Passing Moment. In German it is Von der Initiation, von Ewigheit
Letters continue on page 63
Big news! The library was recently awarded a Preservation Assistance Grant for Smaller Institutions from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The monetary value of the grant is small ($5000), but it is a real honor for the library to receive national recognition. James Leach, NEH chair, states in the award letter: “Your application was considered carefully during the NEH review process, which includes peer review and specialist review along with deliberation by the National Council on the Humani -
titles you’d like to borrow. We check the reserve list daily, and will send you the books you request. Of course, you are still welcome to order by email, phone, fax, or postal mail.
The library has new hours of operation: Wednesday through Saturday, 11:00 am to 3:00 pm. We have instituted a flat fee for standard (library rate) shipping: All packages up to (10) pounds: $4.00 (includes handling). Packages over (10) pounds; priority rate; UPS; and FedEx shipments will continue to be billed at cost plus a $1.00 per order handling fee.
We were fortunate to have the help of Erin Philp the past two years to help us with the automation project. We no longer have funding for her position, and bid her farewell at the end of 2009. She will be attending nursing school in the fall, and we wish her great success.
Do you know of websites that might like to link to the Rudolf Steiner Library site? Let us know! The library is full of treasures and we want to share them widely.
outlines and notes by the book’s editor, Robert McDermott; the complete text of the Bhagavad Gita, translated by Eknath Easwaran; and an index.
The Fleeing Youth: The Cosmic Principle of Christ, Richard Distasi, lulu.com, 342 pgs. Society member Richard Distasi asserts that after Christ’s death, “the future spiritual evolution of humanity was dependent on human comprehension and understanding of the event of Golgotha.” He asks whether Christ’s mission was in danger of failing due to the Apostles’ incomprehension; why the Resurrection was the beginning of a new genesis for our cosmos; and what was the true nature of the “youth” seen fleeing Jesus’ tomb. His extensive reading of Rudolf Steiner and other anthroposophical sources informs this very detailed work.
The New Essential Steiner: An Intro duction to Rudolf Steiner for the 21st Century, edited & introduced with notes by Robert McDermott, Lindisfarne Books, 2009, 324 pgs.
ties and the Office of the Chairman.” We are pleased that top library professionals have confirmed the value of the society’s fine collection, and hope that many new readers will find their way to the library as a result of this award. The grant money will fund an environmental assessment of our building.
Online catalog. Just before the new year we added our 10,000th record to the library’s online public access catalog ( http://rsl.scoolaid.net). All books in English by Rudolf Steiner and other anthroposophical authors; all Waldorf education books; all books in Celtica and Norse mythology; all books on esoteric Christianity; fairy tales; death and dying; anthroposophical science, medicine, and nutrition; agriculture; music; Goethe; and miscellaneous others too numerous to list are now to be found in our online catalog. If you send us a username and password of your choice we will set up an account for you, and you can search for books and manuscripts by author and title, and request (reserve)
Book reviews begin on page 10.
Brief descriptions of new books available from the library; annotations this time by Judith Soleil.
The Bhagavad Gita and the West: The Esoteric Significance of the Bhagavad Gita and Its Relation to the Epistles of Paul, CW 142/146, SteinerBooks, 2009, 365 pgs.
Another volume in the SteinerBooks series of uniform editions of Rudolf Steiner’s collected works, this book contains revised translations of two lecture series given in Cologne and Helsinki Dec. 28, 1912–Jan. 1, 1913 and May 28–June 5, 1913 (originally published separately in English as The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita [GA146] and The Bhagavad Gita and the Epistles of Paul [GA 142]); an additional, related lecture originally published in The Gospel of St. Mark [GA 139]; an introduction with descriptive
Professor Robert McDermott has updated this work, originally published by HarperSanFrancisco in 1984, with an extensive introduction and a wider range of excerpts from Rudolf Steiner’s works, presenting twelve areas of thought and endeavor rather than the original five. All of the content by Steiner has been newly translated and revised since 1990, and the new book also contains an index.
The Handbook of Rising Pictures, Janet Barker, Anastasi, 2009, 75 pgs.
“The rising picture method developed by Lilly [sic] Kolisko is one of four pictureforming methods developed from suggestions given by Dr. Rudolf Steiner in the early 1920s.” These procedures are used to test plant juices, grains, milk, and other substances, including blood. Rising pictures can be used to track the changing quality of plant extracts that will
A year has passed with the new Evolving News for Members & Friends publication format, and the editor and support committee held a telephone meeting recently to review the work to date. The review turned to the question of how to better serve and reach current and future members, and not just in print but in all our communications.
To address this question, a team comprised of editor John Beck, director of administration Marian León, and committee member Stefan Klocek was formed. Stefan, a design consultant who has considerable experience with communications development (and has been aware of and involved with anthroposophy for many years), urged the team to work toward a broad understanding of what needs and goals were currently being met or not met, before trying to form new recommendations. Rather than just asking about topics of interest or the technologies at our disposal, Stefan recommended that we focus on people, on current members and friends—and that we find out directly from you what is most important to you.
So the following survey is our invitation to you to share with us. Specifically we are seeking to understand better how you see yourself, what you value, and how we can best serve you. From your many responses we will create a broader mosaic of what members and friends hold dear, as well as any points of dissatisfaction. Out of this larger picture of what needs must be met, we hope to create next steps in a coordinated communications activity that will address what is really most essential.
Privacy notice: This questionnaire is for the use of the Anthroposophical Society in America only. If you return your response by mail, we will remove any information that identifies you personally. We will not share the actual responses with any other organization, and any reports will be made as a summary with excerpts that will not identify any individual who has responded.
SURVEY INSTRUCTIONS There are questions on both sides of this page. Write answers on your own sheet(s) of paper, including the numbers of the questions, or cut off this page and use it if the space is sufficient. If you have questions about the survey and our review process, feel free to share those as well. Then return your answers to “Questionnaire, 1923 Geddes Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI, 48104.” If you receive this copy for a household, we’d love to hear from each reader! You can also go to anthroposophy.org and respond online via the link on the right side of the page. Thank you!
Values and insights of people who haVe already met anthroposophy…
1. What life activities bring you the most joy or satisfaction (like friendships, work achievements, family, hiking, art, cooking, volunteering, self-development, study)? Why?
4. What about anthroposophy do you connect with most deeply? Why?
2. Year in and year out (not just during “crises”), do you pay a lot of attention to the larger national and global situation beyond your community?
5. How do you stay in touch with other anthroposophists?
3. What is the role (or roles) of anthroposophy in your life? (e.g. practical advice, philosophy, employment, spiritual guidance, reading material)
6. From your experience of meeting anthroposophy and its many endeavors, are there any ways we might enhance that encounter through our communications work?
7. Are you a member of the Anthroposophical Society? What influenced your decision?
12. What kinds of things do you invest in most? (like family time, community, property, financial markets, volunteering, personal development).
8. How do you prefer working with anthroposophy? (e.g. on your own, study or self-development; with others in group study or shared development; in service activities, professional or volunteer) Why?
13. If you found yourself with free time, how would you most likely spend it?
9. Is there a group or branch near you? Do you participate in it?
and a little bit about you (“demographics”)...
14. What do you do for a living?
15. What is your age? 16. Are you a parent?
17. Your level of formal education?
18. What state do you live in? Is your location urban, suburban, small town, or rural?
about “eVolVing news for members & friends...”
10. How do you use newer technologies (e.g. cell phones, websites, conference calls, email, online social networks, etc.)? With whom? What do you like about them? What do you dislike?
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be used for medicines, and the pictures can also reveal when the plants were harvested, the time of day, and the subsequent treatment of the harvested plant. “All these factors pertain to the ultimate therapeutic efficacy of the extracts and to the long term stability of…a preparation.” This is a real handbook, with detailed instructions for setting up the lab and creating rising pictures.
Jahrbuch für Goetheanismus, 2009, Rolf Dorka et al., eds., Tycho Brahe Verlag, 263 pgs.
The Jahrbuch für Goetheanismus (Yearbook of Goetheanism), published since 1984 by the Natural Science Section at the Goetheanum, features current contributions from the spectrum of anthroposophical science, medicine, and pharmacology (the library holds a complete set). Essays in this edition address topics such as evolutionary biology (by Wolfgang Schad and Christoph Schempp; biology (by Andreas Suchantke and Christoph Hueck); anthroposophical medicine (by Heinrich Brettschneider; and rhythm (Ernst Zürcher). The articles are in German; brief English summaries of selected essays are also included.
Arts and Crafts
Making Fairy Tale Scenes, Sybille Adolphi, Floris, 2009, 93 pgs.
This book provides instructions and patterns for making a range of figures and settings from classic Grimm’s fairy tales using a variety of techniques and materials, particularly needle felting. By the author of Making Flower Children and Making More Flower Children (both in the library).
Making More Flower Children, Sybille Adolphi, Floris, 2009, 88 pgs.
“From butterflies to blackberries and poppies to mistletoe, this illustrated book contains patterns, photographs and clear instructions on how to make a broad range of flower children. The beautiful figures are made from easy-to-find materials, such and wool, felt and cotton, and some of the patterns are easy enough for children to join in with, too.” By the author of Making Flower Children (also available from the library).
Sewing Dolls, Karin Neuschütz, Floris, 2009, 110 pgs.
An updated version of the classic Doll Book: Soft Dolls and Creative Free Play. The author has refined and clarified her instructions, and this edition provides step-by-step close-up photos of all stages of the doll crafting process. There is also a section of patterns for making lovely doll clothes.
Green Fingers and Muddy Boots: A Year in the Garden for Children and Families, Ivor Santer, Floris, 2009, 111 pgs.
This decidedly British little book features gorgeous nature photos, an overview of the gardening year, and a compact disc for downloading worksheets that children ages 7 to 14 can use to document various suggested projects.
Making a Family Home, Shannon Honeybloom, SteinerBooks, 2009, 86 pgs.
“Creating a home for our family can be both a challenge and a pleasure. Creating a home is a process of imbuing our space with soul and spirit, surrounding our family with love, care, comfort.” Waldorf graduate and mother of three Shannon Honeybloom guides readers through each room of her cozy home, briefly relating practical suggestions for enlivening our own bedrooms, kitchens, backyards, and so on. Lively color photographs on every page enhance the text.
Awakening to Child Health I: Holistic Child and Adolescent Development, Raoul Goldberg, MD, Hawthorn Press, 2009, 428 pgs.
This is the first volume in a projected series of three on children’s health. The author, an anthroposophical physician and Waldorf-school doctor in South Africa, states that it his primary aim here “to awaken to the nature and spirit of childhood and to find worthy ways to protect and care for it…. Those who wish to understand the nature of the human being will acquire a picture of the infinitely vast and rich world of childhood and adolescence culminating in adulthood. The content is validated by knowledge drawn from the natural, humanistic, and spiritual sciences.”
Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraor dinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids, Kim John Payne, M.Ed., with Lisa M. Ross, Ballantine, 2009, 235 pgs.
“Waldorf” parenting for everyone. Family counselor and adult educator Kim Payne has written an accessible book for the mass market that aims to counter the “undeclared war on childhood” so prevalent in our culture today. Payne proposes a “simplification regime” to help families slow down, minimizing some of the anxiety our rushed and hyperaware children experience today. Practical, anecdotal, humorous, and humane, this book deserves a wide audience.
Annotations continue on p. 62
www.asnyc.org
138 West 15th St, New York NY 10011 212-242-8945 · anthroposophynyc@yahoo.com
Lectures – Workshops – Study Groups – Festivals The RUDOLF STEINER BOOKSTORE for Steiner, Waldorf, and other books. Art exhibits at our CENTERPOINT GALLERY.
May 8 – Thomas Meyer: 10am: LATEST 9/11 RESEARCH — 2pm: LAURENCE OLIPHANT — 7pm: RUDOLF STEINER’S CORE MISSION: KARMA & REINCARNATION
May 9, 2pm – Doug Safranek/Joyce Reilly: MOTHER’S DAY MUSEUM WALK
May 12/13, 7pm – David Anderson: GOETHEAN SCIENCE Lecture followed by a clay workshop next evening: Meteorology (including the Ascension festival)
May 21, 7pm – Eugene Schwartz: THE MEDIA & THE MESSAGE: From the Telephone to the Internet
May 22-23, 7pm – Martha Loving: COLOR ONENESS & THE DIVINE SOPHIA, Whitsun watercolor & meditation workshop
June 3, 7pm – Robert Stewart: INTUITIVE THINKING – IN THE SPIRIT OF THE RESURRECTION
June 9/10, 7pm – David Anderson: GOETHEAN SCIENCE Lecture/workshop: Anthropology
June 16, 7pm – Jesús Amadeo: ENHANCED COGNITION IN DAILY LIFE
Sept 24–Oct 2 – CELEBRATING MICHAELMAS & 100 YEARS OF ANTHROPOSOPHY IN AMERICA & NYC
We close for the summer July 1–September 7
For latest information see www.asnyc.org
By Sergei O. Prokofieff; Temple Lodge, 2009, 304pgs. Review by Sara Ciborski
The double subtitle of this extraordinary book could serve as a synopsis: Anthroposophy and Its Method of Cognition: The Christological and Cosmic-Human Dimension of the Philosophy of Freedom. Its aim, says Prokofieff in his preface, is to show how the anthroposophical path of cognition—as given in Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom1—is inseparable from the Mystery of the Resurrection. Through a “thorough examination of the deeply Christian roots” of this foundational book, he intends to “throw a new light not just on the spiritual sources of anthroposophy as a ‘science of resurrection’, but likewise on the whole importance of The Philosophy of Freedom for modern Christian esotericism.”
This statement of ambitious aim, however, falls short of conveying the richness and profound significance of what I venture to suggest is the most important book about anthroposophy yet written. Prokofieff says in an epilogue that it is a radical departure from numerous other books dealing with The Philosophy of Freedom: most of them try to explain and bridge the seeming break between Rudolf Steiner’s early philosophical works and his later esoteric ones. Instead, Prokofieff reveals The Philosophy of Freedom itself as an esoteric work, and one moreover that contains seeds for all Steiner’s major themes to come. Sixteen chapter titles indicate those themes, among them the working of the hierarchies; the “study of man”; the Fifth Gospel; the Being Anthroposophia; life between death and rebirth;Rosicrucian and Michaelic impulses;karma and reincarnation; the modern science of the Grail; and the Foundation Stone—all woven seamlessly into a unified whole with the content of The Philosophy of Freedom. It is a brilliant, compelling, inspirational synthesis. Anthroposophy and the Philosophy of Freedom is a demanding book for serious anthroposophists; readers need to have studied the so-called basic books, especially of course The Philosophy of Freedom, and some books in Rudolf Steiner’s Christology. Prokofieff also assumes familiarity with the Christmas Confer1 The most recent English edition (1995) of Rudolf Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom (GA 4) is titled Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path: A Philosophy of Freedom, and is translated by Michael Lipson.
...begging is one of the most unfortunate conditions to which a person can be reduced, yet, in a spiritual or religious context, it is practiced [by Buddhist monks, for example] as a path to enlightenment. In the former, it does not seem to be a preferred choice, instead it is a social consequence. In the latter, the practice is taken as a totally conscious, self-imposed choice.... Both extremes share the quality of a threshold experience that places the beggar at the edge of existence and the gift as a virtuous or spiritual deed and a bridge across that existential chasm.
This insight from the essay “Begging to Differ” gives a taste of the eminently original approach John Bloom takes in his book, The Genius of Money. Exploring paintings by artists ranging from Giotto to Andy Warhol, he looks to works of art for insights both into money itself and into our human attitudes toward it—in this case, exploring begging as a threshold experience through Rembrandt’s painting Beggars at the Door (below).
The book’s introduction presents a significant observation out of Bloom’s work with not-for-profit organizations—he’s director of organizational culture at RSF Social Finance and is also active in developing the Transforming Money Network—that forms a leitmotif for the book, an observation that likely rings true with many a reader: “I have worked in an advisory capacity with many individuals and groups who are passionate about the work they do and who care deeply about what they are accomplishing for the benefit of the world. However, when it came time to address questions about money, salaries, and fees, those same people would enjoin the conversation as if they were a different set of personalities. Something, some inexplicable energy, presented itself as a shadow—passion turned to rancor and distrust, care turned to anxiety.”
This strange disconnect between what Bloom calls our public
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cultural selves and our private money selves became his focus of inquiry: “My money-self…does not seem to be the same self that experiences the transcendence of music or poetry, or searches for social justice in daily affairs. This awareness indicates a rupture in the integrity of my inner landscape that I no longer find acceptable.” He realized that he was now “compelled to work toward a kind of unified aesthetic which recognizes and incorporates that rupture, one that welcomes my money-self as an integral part of my inner landscape.” The resulting series of essays became a travelogue of the journey launched by this epiphany, exploring the geography of the money landscape from a diversity of perspectives—historical, artistic, spiritual, social—making good on his view that “it is time to look at the hard issues, especially money, in a new way that incorporates spirit and social values.”
The first of its three parts comprises essays on the “poetics of money,” explored primarily (as mentioned) through art. Chapters include such varied topics as: “Free Market Money in a Pop Iconomy,” studied in relation to Roy Lichtenstein’s lithograph Ten Dollar Bill, 1956, and Andy Warhol’s Front and Back Dollar Bills; “Judas’s Dilemma,” examined through Giotto’s 1305 fresco Judas Receiving Payment for His Betrayal; and “The Touchstone and the Labyrinth: A Step into the Mystery of Money, “investigated through the experience of walking a labyrinth. It’s interesting that many labyrinths quickly lead one tantalizingly close to the center, only to find there’s still a long, winding path out and in again before, at long last, really reaching the heart. Part one continues with “Mercy in Mercantilist Times,”
Review continues on page 62
Getting Old: Excerpts from Rudolf Steiner‘s Complete Works
(compilation and commentary by Gisela Gaumnitz, translated by Harold Jurgens) Getting Old: Excerpts from Rudolf Steiner’s Complete Works provides a penetrating look at many rarely noticed inner and outer aspects of the aging process.
(289 pp) $22.50
What Are We Really Eating? by Otto
Wolff, M.D.The substance of the foods we consume is examined in the context of discussing practical nutrition topics including: a raw foods diet, meat consumption, fats, dairy products, and sugars.
(113 pp) $15
Art Therapy in Practice by Eva Mees-Christeller (a new translation by Charlotte Rogers)
The practice of making art is discussed in the context of therapeutic aspects associated with the process of drawing, painting, sculpting and making music. Techniques and benefits presented are of value to both therapists and artists.
(73 pp) $9
A Compendium for the Remedial Treatment of Children, Adolescents, and Adults in Need of Soul Care Experiences and Indications from Anthroposophic Therapy compiled by Bertram von Zabern, M.D.
(167pp)
$16
Nursing the Human Being: An Anthroposophic Perspective by Tessa Therkleson
A New Zealand registered nurse developed this book out of her personal study and practice as a mainstream complementary anthroposophic nurse. Topics include understanding of inner meditative life, reflection, and the anthroposophic perspective of the human being as a force for healing.
(54 pp) $21.50
Other new and stock titles are available, including lectures by Rudolf Steiner.
Mercury Press is a small independent publisher within the Fellowship Community, an intentional, inter-generational community primarily concerned with enlivening elder care and realizing the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. From our beginnings in the early 1970s, we have existed to promote continuing education in the study of little known anthroposophical literature. Mercury Press has continued its original mission of publishing significant lectures and books by Rudolf Steiner along with related reading material. Our objective is not to meet popular interest, but to revive the slumbering spirit within the human being for the 21st century.
We will gladly send a copy of our new catalog. Please write, phone, or email
The celebration began with a day-long symposium surveying the anniversary from several perspectives. Although the planning group hoped also to have an expert speaker on the threefold social organism like Gary Lamb, the five presenters brought a very diverse perspective.
The day’s first speaker was Michael Gomes, a noted historian of the Theosophical Society and editor of a number of works of H.P. Blavatsky. Helena Blavatsky had founded the Theosophical Society with Col. Henry Steel Olcott in New York City in 1875, and by the 1890s Theosophical meetings in New York numbered in the thousands and met at the old Madison Square Garden. He shared an number of historical insights, pointing for example to Richard Maurice Bucke, author of Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (1901) and great admirer of Walt Whitman, as an example of the spirit of the times.
Michael also described Rudolf Steiner’s honored place in the Theosophical Society of 1910 as head not only of the German Section of the Theosophical Society, but of the society’s Esoteric School. He also spoke warmly of Steiner’s connection with Mabel Collins (left), author Light on the Path, who wrote in 1912 of Steiner’s teaching as a grand ideal, a superb conception of the Christ Spirit in its relation to man.... [B]y following the leader who carries [this ideal], every detail of common life is glorified and filled with meaning and dignity.
In conclusion Michael spoke of the continuing challenge of “conscious evolution” and the lack of great moral figures today, and he expressed gratitude for being invited to this centenary event.
The second speaker was Ralph White, co-founder of the New York Open Center, and organizer of significant international conferences on the Western esoteric tradition. Ralph is a long time anthroposophist working in the world and a friendly critic of the Anthroposophical Society. He too began by speaking of the world of 1910. William James, a great American psychologist, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, died that year, as did the great Russian novelist Lev Tolstoy (right, painted by Repin). There was a worldwide movement for nonviolence, and
Ralph mentioned the peace gatherings at Mohonk Mountain House, north of New York City, as well as the visionary influence of Henry Ford. He also named many individuals born in 1910 who would become well-known cultural figures.
Ralph then sketched the progress of the 20th century spiritually, mentioning the deepening work of esoteric psychologist C.G. Jung, the novels of Hermann Hesse and D.H. Lawrence, the poetry of W.B. Yeats. The 1960s, he said, tried to pick up from the high level where things stood in 1910. There was an explosion of consciousness, famously psychedelic and “countercultural,” along with the intensification of a series of liberation movements: civil rights, the women’s movement, and gay liberation. (Photo below: intense agitation for women’s right to vote was part of the New York scene in 1910.) The philosophy of logical positivism continued to dominate, however, with its view that “the meaning of life is a meaningless question.” Nevertheless, millions continue to seek a living meditative tradition, though mostly outside the Western tradition.
Ralph shared concerns about the limitations of the anthroposophical movement in America very candidly. So far, he said, anthroposophy has been Eurocentric; it needs visibly to embrace world culture. Also, Rudolf Steiner gave so much and anthroposophy is “so comprehensive” that it is in danger of “becoming a self-contained world.” Its three great strengths are first, that it is the “crème de la crème”—it has intellectual acuity and breadth of learning. Second is its practicality, the living spiritual intelligence of its initiatives in the world. And third is its wonderful link to the Western tradition, which Ralph has always championed in the programs of the New York Open Center. We can still be hopeful, for despite the inadequacy of corporate globalization, esoteric impulses have grown. People are looking for living spiritual practice. Anthroposophy should strive to offer newcomers something experiential.
Joan Almon, former general secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, is director of the Alliance For Childhood. She began by speaking about the “resurrection rhythm” of a century: that it consists of three periods of 33 1/3 years, the lifetime of Jesus and the Christ on earth. So this centennial is a moment of reinforcement. She recalled her own meeting with anthro -
100 Years
posophy as a Baltimore kindergarten teacher. Having learned some techniques of Waldorf education, she applied some very simple ones in her work and experienced an immediate change: the children came to life.
When tested later also in poor inner-city schools, there was the same result. She mentioned the work of Monica Alexandra in the public system, reporting that “the children are angry, their souls are not being fed”; people are starting to speak of “educational abuse.” In Los Angeles there is teaching from scripts from kindergarten on, with monitors enforcing it. After their experience of collectivism, visiting East European teachers are appalled by what they see happening here. By contrast, Waldorf education says simply that a child is a child, and that “education must stir the soul.”
Rudolf Steiner offered a double mandate: intense inward work, and intense outward work. Joan identified our challenge today as giving children strength to meet what they have to meet. There is a real struggle of good and evil in the world, and we must help them find their way. The old fairy tales teach about good and evil in a way children can recognize. A century ago children could simply follow their parents’ example; today few parents know what example to set. And the rhythms of public school are very strong, and media programmers know how to hold attention by producing a vulnerable fight-or-flight feeling.
After lunch, there was an unscheduled addition to the program. “Herr Dreier” (the real-life Alexander Dreier) is a wellknown if incomprehensible anthroposophical lecturer. Although his insights are undoubtedly great, again and again his effect has been to reduce an anthroposophical audience to laughter and tears. He did this again on this special occasion, though regrettably his blackboard diagrams were promptly erased.
“Comic relief” was perhaps a necessary preparation for the next speaker, Olivia Stokes Dreier, associate director of the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding. Karuna works in those places in the world where there has been “unspeakable
violence” and helps the survivors rebuild confidence in the future as a community. Olivia observed that there is a great deal of American hubris about the world situation, as if we were a gated community. There are countries that have been crushed, their populations dying in the crossfire, with little awareness or response by Americans. Yet one is struck by what emerges in those terrible situations. It is a recognition of each other as human beings
Frightened people are very manipulable. Hate-filled broadcasts in Ruanda led to the genocidal violence there. Killing teams went out with machetes and worked to exhaustion killing their supposed enemies. And suddenly in a small, poor country there were 530,000 orphans. Now there had to be a new request broadcast on the radio: would every woman in Ruanda please take in a child?
Truth wants to be spoken. Weekly village hearings talk it all through. With too few jails, punishment is often simply “work in the general interest.” That is not without meaning, however. One offender said, “I did terrible things... I am so glad that my government is allowing me to be a human being again.”
Anthroposophy? It speaks for a new cosmopolitanism, a yearning for new ways of relating, in opposition to this global pandemic of dehumanization. The work of “peacebuilding” is to create a safe container for people to start talking again, rediscovering their own and each other’s humanity.
Frightened people are very manipulable.
Suddenly in a poor country there were 530,000 orphans... “I did terrible things.... I am so glad my government is allowing me to be a human being again.”
The final speaker of the day was co-president of the New York Branch council Walter Alexander. Walter is a writer on medical subjects and science, a former public and Waldorf teacher, and an editor of Lilipoh magazine. His talk was an overview of the book he is preparing based on a series of interviews with significant thinkers and scientists. Against the common philosophical view, epitomized by Daniel Dennett, that “we are all zombies, no one is conscious,” Walter marshalled a wide range of experimental results and insights from the past century of science, from quantum physics to the placebo effect, which show something quite different.
“But it’s a myth that if we gave scientists the data they’d accept it.” Real professional fear stops any sort of new thinking around consciousness. Walter’s book (and further articles in Lilipoh) will do justice to all he shared, but we can repeat the story
he told of a medicine man whose tradition held that the universe rested on the back of a turtle. A scientist, whose “reductionist” view sees ever smaller particles going down and down, challenged him with the question, “And what is holding up the turtle?” The reply was, “It’s turtles all the way down.” Walter ended with the affirmation that reality rests not on things but on beings: “it’s beings all the way down, all the way up!”
Finally John Beck, a former president of the branch council, attempted in about ten minutes to express a relationship among the day’s presentations. Noting the concise phrase used in the Waldorf movement, “experts in child development,” he suggested as a possible summation that “anthroposophy affirms humanness.” Rudolf Steiner’s big project was nothing less than to sow the seeds of a new world civilization, one that could manage the evolutionary changes we are going through as beings of body, soul and spirit. Steiner gave the picture of human beings as assistants who are sent out “from the architects’ office” to the building site. If we evolve by embracing the wholeness of the cosmos, the spirit of truth, we can begin to step up as co-designers. Failing to seize this opportunity, we have only the level of animals or robots to fall back to. The panel of speakers followed with a short conversation around the day’s rich themes.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday Evening Talks
Historian and writer Kevin Dann continued the week of celebration with a talk, “American Anthroposophy’s Alternative Promethean Path,” which he informally retitled “America: My Will or Thy Will? My Way or the Highway?” After stirring up the group musically for a few minutes, he walked with us in imagination, downtown to the old Masonic Publishing Company where in 1910 that first-in-America group met to hear and discuss Rudolf Steiner’s work. Ethel Parks Brownrigg, a singer and speaker, read the lecture. The group totaled six persons.
From there Dr. Dann wove a fabric of impulses in American spiritual life, linking the treasure hunting of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism in the 1820s, with Goethe’s portrayal of Faust’s search, both men binding and being bound to a spiritual being. He noted that “Lucifer” and “Ahriman” are beings hidden in plain sight. Thoreau? A phenomenologist who wrote that a botanist’s experience is full of coincidences. If you think much about some flower which you never saw, you are pretty sure to find it some day, actually growing near by you. In the long run we find what we expect. We shall be fortunate, then, if we expect great things.
Later figures summoned up included Wallace D. Wattles (top right of next column), part of the “New Thought” movement and
famously the author of The Science of Getting Rich (1910), a book still very much in print and active in the world. (A topic for anthroposophical research?) William James had described “New Thought” in 1901 as a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side. In its gradual development during the last quarter of a century, it has taken up into itself a number of contributory elements, and it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power.... One of the doctrinal sources of Mind-cure is the four Gospels; another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism; another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its messages of ‘law’ and ‘progress’ and ‘development’; another the optimistic popular science evolutionism...; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain.
But the most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind. Their belief has in a general way been corroborated by the practical experience of their disciples; and this experience forms today a mass imposing in amount.
Among many other observations, Kevin shared that Rudolf Steiner had identified the mythic Titans, precursors of the Olympian gods, as spiritual beings of the will, and Kevin connected this with the American phrase “titans of industry.” Prometheus who brought fire to mankind was pure will, and his brother Epimetheus was pure reason...
Wandering out into the night after the talk, one was struck again by New York’s will forces, its towering buildings and canyon-like streets filled with constant activity and animation.
Wednesday two members spoke from the cur rent St. Mark Group, the same group celebrating its 100th anniversary. Joyce Monges spoke in part of the Monges family, centered on Henry Monges (1870-1954), first general secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America from 1924 to 1948. Henry was a forceful personality, an architect and professor of geometry. He was married three times, each wife making her own contribution. Joyce knew his wife Lisa, a eurythmist, who “touched the earth very lightly,” and she spoke with gentle warmth of several other persons involved in the earlier history of anthroposophy in America, concluding that the future of the society will continue to depend a great deal on our quality and qualities as individuals. To which the evening’s emcee Walter Alexander added the quip, “It’s always a Who, often just a few.”
Albert Spekman, current leader of the group, took the opportunity of our looking back a century to extend the perspective by reference to Rudolf Steiner’s Occult Science: An Outline, written in
1910. This “basic book” is a view of the past and future of the cosmos, and an outline of all of anthroposophy. Albert unfolded a series of great images from this enormous evolutionary perspective.
Response by Robert McDermott to a question, at the NYC centenary celebration:
1. Because Steiner claims to know about things that most people today think cannot be known.
Thursday evening’s speaker was Robert McDermott, a longtime leader of the movement and one of the most prominent and well-known anthroposophists in academic life, currently president emeritus and professor of philosophy and religion at the California Institute for Integral Studies. Robert had been president of the branch in the 1980s and commended everyone on how the branch’s home has been developed over the years, and how beautifully members had prepared the space for this week. (In fact, the branch had recently suffered major water damage last summer from hidden leaks, and the members had first to battling for proper reimbursement by the insurance company and then to supervise extensive repairs in the fall.)
2. Because of anthroposophists—how many of us are truly humble and reverent?
3. The implausibility of there being so much—when today we’re all skeptics and specialists.
4. It’s hard to get started with anthroposophy, it’s full of special words with few helps for that; and you can’t easily share it with friends or family.
5. The Central European style—too much authority.
6. The work of the spiritual “enemies,” Lucifer, Ahriman, the fascination with money, sex, power— against which human beings just aren’t working hard enough.
To which Dr. McDermott added that there is tremendous good work being done in the USA, but that more and more Steiner-inspired work is taking place outside the Anthroposophical Society.
of healthy people, their starting point was illness. Other features of the time included Gandhi’s experience in 1906 that led him to “satyagraha,” to “truth-force”; Einstein’s special theory of relativity in 1905, Bergson’s Creative Evolution in 1907 with its ideas about élan vital or life-impulse and time as subjective duration, and Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious (1912).
In connection with the St. Mark Group, Robert wished first to mention Beredene Jocelyn (author of Citizens of the Cosmos and Life after Death). He then explained that he would both look back and look forward. Concerning the period around 1910 he, too, mentioned William James, the American spiritual-psychological researcher, “still the top of the line.” Robert recently completed The New Essential Steiner , and he spoke of Rudolf Steiner’s life for several minutes. Steiner’s upbringing was nonreligious, but his path led to a meeting with the cosmic Christ and a recognition of His involvement in the evolution of humanity and the earth and the cosmos: a recognition that, as Augustine had said, “the idea of humanity lived in the mind of God.” At age 39, Steiner’s teaching became “Christ-infused.” And so, for the Theosophical Society Steiner was “the guy who got away.” Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung were also active at this time, but unlike William James, whose focus was on the experience
William James had attempted to hold a middle, experiencebased position: a place, as he said, of “spontaneous thought, with metaphysicians and scientists both against me.” Unfortunately he had no successor. Behaviorist B.F. Skinner, author of Beyond Freedom & Dignity, would hold the William James professorship at Harvard. A younger colleague of James’, Josiah Royce, whose concept of “The Beloved Community” was taken up by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., decades later, is scarcely mentioned today. There are important literary figures in this time, poets—Yeats, Eliot, Rilke. And in 1924 Rudolf Steiner joins his destiny to this group, the Anthroposophical Society, who are both very impressive and also somewhat petty and argumentative.
Looking at today and the future, Robert suggested several themes for our time. globA liz Ation, of course. MusiC—we have got to start philosophicalreligious jam sessions, like musicians. eCologiCA l disA ster—if we would see into matter, we would see the intent of spirit. k nowledge of love rising from the individual to the universal: the will to attend, be reverent, humble.
Dr. McDermott’s talk was given with a great freedom of spirit, as if he has reached that age and stage of reflection where one knows, and can say as he did at the beginning, that the whole of his talk might not mean that much to any of us listening, but that he hoped everyone would find some part of it meaningful.
At the end he offered to take questions, and was immediately asked why Rudolf Steiner is not better known. It is a question friends and members of the Anthroposophical Society often ask. Out of his experience, Robert gave a list of reasons which are highlighted in the box above.
The last of several questioners asked what he saw happening with America, the USA. After thinking aloud for a moment, he replied that the US is racing at full speed in two opposite directions: into the abyss, and toward a real flowering of everything.
That observation concluded—all too incisively!—the New York branch’s centenary celebration. The SteinerBooks Seminar picked up the next evening at New York University in Greenwich Village.
SteinerBooks Spiritual Research Seminar 2010, reported by the editor
Ask Gene Gollogly, publisher of SteinerBooks and its related imprints, why he organizes an annual “spiritual research seminar” in a big dramatic top-floor space at New York University— the kind of location where Bill Clinton hosts his global leadership programs—and the answer Gene gives is simple: because it ought to be happening. Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy and the continuing remarkable work of “spiritual research” ought to be visible in the most important settings in today’s cultural life.
In his introductory remarks this year Gene observed that, with this seventh seminar, “we are getting our permanent teeth,” referring to one of the key child development markers in the Waldorf schools. We’re here at a great university and we’re asking who is doing basic creative work in our field today, since no movement can just follow the past.
Gene then introduced Christopher Bamford, long-time editor of SteinerBooks (formerly Anthroposophic Press). Together with a strong board and team of colleagues, they carry out a major publishing program at the highest professional level. In all the breaks, the several hundred people in attendance reminded themselves of that at a series of book-laden tables along one long wall of the room.
Chris gave a full and deep review of the content and significance of Rudolf Steiner’s sharing of a “fifth gospel,” beginning in October of 1913 in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway, and continuing in other cities into February of 1914. It includes the life events of Jesus from age 12 to age 30, a period left blank in the previously known gospels. This fifth gospel is meant, Chris said, to make possible an “initiation of the heart.” As a spiritual gospel it was known to the Rosicrucians, but Rudolf Steiner now brought “icons of cognitive feeling” to transform life. “We need a school of selflessness,” said Dr. Steiner, and these lectures point toward an all-embracing love made possible by the Holy Spirit.
Our understanding of Christ must be transformed. His role in history is greater now than ever. Recall how initially He was carried into the hearts of the simplest, uneducated people. And with the first Pentecost or Whitsun, the power of Christ poured out over the Earth. The death of Jesus had meant the birth of
Cosmic Love on the Earth. The story of the “missing” eighteen years of the life of Jesus, followed by the descent of the Christ and his three-and-a-third years in a human body on Earth, as revealed in these lectures, shows the transformation of the deepest passive suffering into active suffering. And Chris mentioned the book, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 19411943, a woman in the Nazi concentration camps who comes, as the end of her life approaches, to this active suffering:
There is no hidden poet in me, just a little piece of God that might grow into poetry. And a camp needs a poet, one who experiences life there, even there, as a bard, and is able to sing about it. At night, as I lay in the camp on my plank bed, surrounded by women and girls gently snoring, dreaming aloud, quietly sobbing and tossing and turning, women and girls who often told me during the day, “We don’t want to think, we don’t want to feel, otherwise we are sure to go out of our minds,” I was sometimes filled with an infinite tenderness, ...and I prayed, “Let me be the thinking hear of these barracks.” And that is what I want to be again. The thinking heart of a whole concentration camp.
Chris ended with the thought, “We should be willing to act as balm for all wounds.”
Peter Selg was the seminar’s main speaker, giving three talks over the two days. Born in Stuttgart in 1963, he studied medicine and worked as head physician of a hospital’s juvenile psychiatry department until 2000. He now directs the Ita Wegman Institute for Basic Research into Anthroposophy in Arlesheim, Switzerland, and is professor of medicine at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences in Germany. He has written more than forty books, including Karl König’s Path to Anthroposophy, The Figure of the Christ on Rudolf Steiner and Edith Marion’s great sculpture, and just released in English, Rudolf Steiner and the Fifth Gospel
Peter expressed his mission of showing Rudolf Steiner’s deeper intentions, especially to younger people today, as reading of the collected works decreases. The Fifth Gospel lectures were closed events for branches only, to help keep them on the original high level. (They were given in the first year after the founding of the original separate Anthroposophical Society.) Now my life task, said Peter, is to open hearts and ears to Steiner’s words, and I want to bring together this Fifth Gospel with our life experience now, with the 20th century’s experiences, and with the future.
In 1910 in Palermo Rudolf Steiner had mentioned a “fifth gospel” in connection with the
“reappearance of the Christ in the etheric.” The whole task of anthroposophy is to prepare this event. Steiner acted in a certain way in the tradition of John-the-Baptist preparing for this event. Yet “we really know nothing of Steiner’s inner life in these years.” The summer of 1913 was difficult, he had a feeling of dying every morning. It was like the situation of Christ Jesus, and it was a decision of the Christ for Rudolf Steiner to bring forward this Fifth Gospel
To talk about this, as Steiner did initially, in Scandinavia, provided a special spiritual atmosphere. He said that all the gospels originated in the spiritual world and should be reproduced in their original forms. Where science today might speak of collective memories, Rudolf Steiner spoke of an “Akashic record,” a spiritual script, a “chronicle of becoming” as Steiner said. This is to be contrasted with “archive truth.” The spiritual world is the life space of the hierarchies. The Archai (who rank above the Angels and Archangels) are the spirits of ends and beginnings. The task is to read in their consciousness. It is a question of making a commitment to the Archai, a self-sacrifice, of offering oneself, one’s consciousness, as food for them. “We to the Archai are as grains of wheat to us... I am living their life in them.”
Higher research is a matter of pain and suffering. And with the original, halting, almost improvised style of the lectures in Christiania, Rudolf Steiner “became a brother” for his listeners. He had never read about the crucifixion in the Bible, he approached it first from his own research. The anthroposophical movement was weak, the society was difficult. They did not fully grasp what he offered. Who then was the real audience for these lectures? Unborn souls? The elemental beings? His presentation took on, by the January 1914 lecture in Berlin, a composed, written style. There was more to share, but Rudolf Steiner had to stop bringing it.
Who is really able to say of himself, herself, that “I am a pupil of Rudolf Steiner”?
Peter Selg continued on Saturday with the remarkable insights provided by Rudolf Steiner into the bodily requirements for the incarnation of a great spiritual being, the Christ. That there were “two Jesus children” seems at first blush like the most difficult idea to understand, even though the Matthew and Luke Gospels present two different ancestries, birth stories, and childhoods, and we now know that two kinds of Messiah had been expected. One of the Jesus boys was the least earthly of human beings, who had never incarnated before and carried the original human potential without any darkening of karmic error. This child, the Luke Jesus, is a “child of humanity,” intellectually backward but a genius of the heart with special power to feel the joys and sorrows of others. The other child was the reincarnation of the greatest initiate, who had previously attained to the highest insights into the cosmic development and plan for the human being. So when the selfhood of the Matthew child abandons its life and body and enters into the consciousness sheaths of the other child at the age of twelve, a singular human being is prepared who combines wisdom and innocence in the
fullest measure.
And the eighteen years about which the four original gospels are silent—these are a chronicle of profound suffering of soul and spirit. It includes Jesus’ recognition of the loss of spiritual connection in the Israelite mainstream, in the surrounding world of paganism, and even among the reclusive spiritual elite, the Essenes. And when Jesus is thirty and has reached the depth of despair, there is the final sharing of it with Mary. In speaking it to her, the sorrow achieves a further reality. And in hearing and receiving it, she, too, is raised back to a state of innocence. The wise selfhood of the Matthew child now departs the body as he finds his way to the Jordan to be baptized by John and receive the being of the Christ.
Rudolf Steiner reported that around 1840 humanity reached the uttermost depth of materialism, and that all the subsequent ill effects for humanity are only consequences. The tragedies of our times should raise questions in us. If we take answers from anthroposophy but do not have questions, we lose the answers.
bPeter shared much, much more, and SteinerBooks has placed full audio recordings of all the talks online, linked from the front page of www.steinerbooks.org. In addition, his book on this subject does indeed produce a remarkable human portrait of Rudolf Steiner at this crucial moment in his life work.
As last year, Rachel Ross led the large audience in hygienic eurythmy during several breaks in the talks. “Hygienic” indicates that these are easy-to-remember exercises for selfstrengthening which can be continued at home, and a helpful handout was provided. I-A-O and the purifying h A lleluj A h were practiced, and these breaks were particularly helpful in the controlled atmosphere of a large modern New York building. Around the meeting room, which felt almost as large a football field, many art works were displayed. These included fine line drawings of figures at Chartres cathedral by Dan Marshall, along with one of his large oil paintings. Herr Dreier, who had crashed the New York branch symposium, also made a “special appearance,” now under the spelling “Herr Dryer.” Next year, as “Hair Dryer”, he may be revealed as an Andy Warhol associate.
Three other speakers made presentations on Saturday. They are covered only briefly here, but all are online and each would have been an outstanding evening lecture in its own right. Dr. Ross Rentea spoke about the temptations of the Christ, following the baptism at the Jordan. Crucially, when tempted by Satan (Ahriman) to “turn stones into bread with my powers,” the Christ did not yet know the earthly forces and could not give a decisive answer. Thus Ahriman, the spiritual force of materialism and mechanization and death, can hold his place in the fur-
ther development of the Earth. Consider, for example, that money is really concentrated spirituality, yet we have to exchange physical matter, coins. So following Christ we try to understand the new laws which can overcome materialism. Dr. Rentea pointed out a physical change that Rudolf Steiner shows in his statue (detail at right) of “the Representative of Humanity,” the Christ, namely that the “ego point,” the spot just at the top of the nose which is indented in human beings now, is bulging out in this figure.
An example of a new productive law on the Earth is the biodynamic spraying of quartz solution on fields of crops. Desperate farmers in 1924 were asking the question, and Rudolf Steiner could bring answers. Jesus had had the most intense questions, and Christ brought answers. We must learn to ask, and do so in the right mood.
Along with much else, Dr. Rentea brought a display of the root systems of the seven trees used in building the First Goetheanum, and offered a special preparation from the TrueBotanica company which he co-founded to seminar participants.
Michael GruberMichael Gruber also gave a notable talk, “Toward a Logos of the Soul,” which extended the focus on the Fifth Gospel in several ways. It included a very welcome exchange between anthroposophy and his professional field, psychotherapy. Rudolf Steiner’s deepest intention was to inspire us to be transformed from out of the deeds of the Christ: “love transformed into action.” The gospels are a living force to awaken cognition, and one remarkable thing we learn is that joy can coexist with measureless pain
Today we can conceive of a process of self-correction leading to a conscious union with nature. And we can see a long process from ancient times of coming to terms with death, which the old spirituality did not understand and divine beings did not experience. Ahriman sought to reduce human beings to experience of a single life, so a god had to come down, to know the Earth and to learn about death. Yet even since that coming there have been two thousand years of human passivity, and we are too weak to grasp the meaning of the second coming (the reappearance of Christ in the etheric).
Christ now stands beside us as an etheric angel as we learn to combat evil. Evil’s goals are dehumanization and reducing the Earth to a wasteland: a deformed astral, weakened etheric, and diseased physical body. Our goal must be to reconnect the Earth with the divine world. Our sense of guilt comes from a failure to fulfill potential, “to do life justice.” We need forgiveness and a sense of moral responsibility: beyond revenge to atonement. Shame depletes our sense of worth and leads to a feeling of soul collapse. At our boundaries we reach murderous rage or schizoid withdrawal. We end up dominated by lower passions and addictions. Freeing from fear and then healing wounds are
key goals of psychotherapy, which ideally is nothing less than “a soul-affirming knowledge quest.”
Finally, Kwan-Yuk Claire Sit, author of The Lord’s Prayer as Seen From an Eastern Perspective, presented an overview of “The Fifth Gospel and the Eastern Middle Way.” The Middle Way is a tremendous concept which has a special but somewhat different place in Confucian, Buddhist, or Taoist practice. The Confucian approach is “easy to understand and hard to do.” The Taoist Middle Way is “very esoteric, but anyone can work with it.”
Four classic texts are particularly important: The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects, and The Mencius. Claire presented a number of slides with trigrams and hexagrams—ancient three- and six-line image structures used in the I Ching. Without these we cannot properly report her talk, but she quoted several exemplary passages from the four books, these two among them:
The gentle man stays in the middle, the little man goes to extremes.
Nothing is more visible than secrets. Nothing is more manifest than trifles. So the gentle man is careful when alone.
She also shared trigram pairs expressive of the Baptism and the Mystery of Golgotha, and suggested toward the end that the Taoist approach might be understood as attempting to realize the Christ within, while the Confucian approach would be to balance Lucifer and Ahriman. As we look to a world culture worthy of our human being, these bridging insights to the very ancient culture of the East were hopeful indeed.
bIf the SteinerBooks Seminar has received its permanent teeth after seven years, as Gene Gollogly said at the beginning, this two-day event left us all with much to chew on and digest. And perhaps that very modest pun may be excused if not redeemed by recalling one of the most striking observations, and one of the most sober ones, of the entire event. That was Rudolf Steiner’s imagination of offering himself, his consciousness, to be food, to be chewed on like grains of wheat and digested by those great beings called Archai. In this way he was taken into their very being, where he could experience the Akashic record, the hidden record of the cosmic truths about human evolution, and share them with us.
October 29, 2009
Five days of intensive presentations, workshops, and conversations focused on the elements of an economy for the 21st century were at the heart of The Economics of Peace Conference held in Sonoma, California, October 1823, 2009. The conference was co-convened by RSF Social Finance and Praxis Peace Institute.
World-renowned speakers such as James Galbraith and Vandana Shiva were keynotes at the conference. Both of them explained the current state of economic crisis from the point of view of systemic inequity, and made recommendations for how we can solve our economic problems by taking a long-term view of what is needed to restore the environment, have a more just, non-violent economy, and stem the disasters of climate change.
The concepts and practices of local living economies were another central theme throughout the conference, evidenced primarily by the innovative idea of siting the conference in the local living economy of Sonoma. Conference attendees made use of local restaurants, hotels and guest stays with local residents. Plenaries and workshops were held in the reconditioned Sebastiani Theater, the Sonoma Community Center, and other spaces connected with local businesses. Local musicians and artists performed at each of the events.
The Sunday night opening ceremony included the Mayor of Sonoma reading a formal City Council Proclamation recognizing the importance of the conference, followed by a brief presentation from Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey (who represents Sonoma). Don Shaffer, President and CEO of RSF, spoke briefly about the importance of transforming the way the world works with money toward an economics of peace. Shaffer was followed by A.T. Ariyaratne, founder and president of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka. Dr. Ariyaratne outlined the values of Buddhist economics, the eight-fold path with a focus on right livelihood. He spoke particularly about the important
John Bloom
distinction between full employment and full engagement in economic life in the Sarvodaya villages.
Jacob Needleman and Sam Keen, two noted philosophers and authors, began the Monday sessions, with a deep dive into the psyche, mythology, archetypes and consciousness of money and economic activity from the view of the inner human being. In the evening, David Korten gave a fiery presentation outlining the agenda for a new economy based upon overcoming the ills of the current one.
Korten spoke about the value of re-localizing economies and exposing the abuses of Wall Street and large corporations.
Tuesday morning, Judy Wicks, the founder of White Dog Café in Philadelphia, spoke about “Creating a Non-Violent World through Local Living Economies.” She discussed her decision to collaborate with other local restaurants to support local farmers, pay living wages to staff, and remain sustainable. Out of this decision, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) was formed. Wicks was followed by Stephanie Rearick, who spoke on “Real World Caring Economics: TimeBanking and Social Justice”. Rearick is the leader of the Dane County (WI) TimeBank, the most successful TimeBank in the US. She explained how time could be used as a currency to support exchange activities that would not normally be funded by federal currency.
Ellen Brown, author of Web of Debt, then presented ample evidence of why the issuance of debt as money by banks has caused such enormous economic hardship. Using the model of the successful Bank of North Dakota, a state-owned bank, she proposed that it would be possible to do the same in California and thus return ownership of the bank to the people that it serves.
The focus on Wednesday was the practice of worker-owned cooperative businesses. Two leaders from the Mondragon Cooperatives in Spain, Mikel Lezamiz and Fred Freundlich, spoke at length about the founding and evolution of Mondragon, which has developed into the largest worker-owned co-op in the world (with over 34,000 workers). Their activities
include everything from industrial manufacturing, to agriculture, to their own bank and insurance companies, to mention just a few. There were also several Northern California workerowned businesses on hand to discuss methods of running cooperatives: Alvarado Street Bakery, Arizmendi Bakery, and Rainbow Grocery.
Thursday morning started with speaker Tom Greco, author of The End of Money and the Future of Civilization. Greco made a passionate plea for us to take back the credit commons from the banks by creating our own mutual credit clearing mechanisms. This is a tried and true model that has been in use by businesses through barter for many years. He suggests that it could have much broader applications for how we conduct economic activity. Greco was followed by noted environmental attorney Andrew Kimbrell. Kimbrell spoke on “Salmon Economics”. He described the entire life cycle of the salmon and explained how it could serve as a model for how we could think about economic cycles as meeting everyone’s needs rather than just those of the few. He also articulated what the salmon have to tell us about the symbiotic relationship between local and global economies.
Friday closed with some reflections on the conference, via the humor of Swami Beyondananda, followed by an exploration of next steps. It was also announced that videos of the plenaries will be posted on the conference website: www.economicsofpeace. net. There will also be footage of many of the workshops and panel discussions.
The five-day event marked a watershed in economic thinking. By bringing together leaders and practitioners in transformative economic practices, new collaborations and projects were already developing before the end of the conference. As one participant said, “It is amazing when you bring 200 people together for five days to talk about money. When else has that ever happened?”
Each afternoon of The Economics of Peace conference there were workshops related to the many facets of money and financial systems. Monday there were four offerings. RSF President & CEO Don Shaffer led a packed workshop entitled “Social Finance: Building Regional Capital Markets.”
Through a brief presentation and small discussions, the group explored: what would the economy look like if active and diverse regional capital markets were developed? What will it take to create more place-based markets and means of exchange? Can we rebuild our sense of community self-reliance in relation to national and international economies?
Also on Monday afternoon, Norman Solomon addressed the barriers and opportunities of “The Green New Deal.” He explored how the quest for green sustainability might merge with the drive for economic justice. He presented what some of the new strategies need to be, and the challenging dynamics of the current situation in the media, financial systems, and the psychology of economic crisis. Charles Eisenstein led a workshop
on Sacred Economics, the title and subject of his forthcoming book. This workshop explored the many perspectives of gift economics. He talked about the history of money systems that organically encourage sharing instead of competition, egalitarianism instead of polarization of wealth, and the building of social, natural, cultural, and spiritual capital, instead of their destruction. As a step toward peace, he proposed the radical idea that all workshop participants make investments that earn 0% interest. Trent Shroyer led “Sustainable Economic Cultures,” which looked at several models of sustainable economic practices including: Gandhi’s Swaraj, the no-growth movement in Europe, and examples of Ivan Illich’s post-secular vernacular domains.
On Tuesday, four more workshop sessions followed a panel presentation on complementary currencies. C.J. Callen, Pilar Gonzales, and I led a conversation on “Money, Race, and Class.” This facilitated conversation served as a safe space to talk about some of the most complicated and unaddressed issues in economics and our financial systems. The approach allowed for a depth of conversation that supported listening and speaking in such a way as to allow for transformation in the participants’ way of thinking.
Following the morning plenary theme of local living economies (as articulated by Judy Wicks and Stephanie Rearick), Kelley Rajala and Derek Huntington of Sonoma County GoLocal Cooperative and Mary Rick of BALLE presented “Accelerate the Sustainability Movement in your Community.” They worked with the processes of forming a values-based network, mapping the resources of the community, developing sustainability policy, and implementing community-based financing models. This workshop was well attended as there is significant interest in relocalizing economies and understanding what that means from economic, cultural, and political perspectives.
Richard Logie, the founder of GETS (Global Exchange Trade System), led an introductory workshop on what the elements of a complementary currency or credit clearing exchange might look like so that participants would have a context for working in this innovative business-to-business system. He used the lessons of VISA and the European Union to demonstrate the work of creating new agreements, setting up a framework of exchange methodology and standards so that users of the system can work toward mutual ownership of it. Richard also led a much longer, more detailed workshop on Thursday entitled “Get Real! With Currency: 50 Questions You Should Ask Before Starting Your Own Exchange.” The final Tuesday workshop was led by David Ransom on “Taking a Leap: A Marxist Look at Social Change in an Epoch of Economic Revolution.” Ransom looked at the impact of technology in relation to the value of labor and posed the question about whether the current economic revolu -
tion will bring about a social revolution as more and more of the work force is displaced.
Wednesday afternoon saw four workshops that touched on a wide range of topics. Sam Keen addressed the topic “Money and War: The Quest for a Moral Alternative.” He focused on the issue of social and economic justice as the avenue for achieving peace. Woody Tasch, author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money, presented his work under the same topic. Tasch has been developing the notion of patient capital as an approach to investing that will rebuild local economies and change our attitudes about expecting or extracting short-term returns on investments that tend to bring about ecological and cultural degradation. Osprey Orielle Lake led the workshop “Respect for the Global Commons.” Lake was the artist-in-residence for the conference and also spoke about the value and beauty of our environment and natural systems, and the rightful use of these precious compromised resources. The fourth workshop was offered by Bev Bell and Mateo Nube. Named “Towards a Just Ecological and Economic Transition,” they presented the stories of those directly impacted by the financial crisis. They showed how those communities have developed practical solutions to the challenges through community self-determination. What they demonstrated was that economic security and ecological sustainability need not be in opposition if worked through with transformative power.
Thursday, following a panel discussion on fair trade, Andrew Kimbrell went into much more detail about the concepts and practicality of “Salmon Economics” in a workshop. Bob Graham, one of the pioneers and leaders of micro-enterprise, led a practicum called “The Next Step After Putting Micro-entrepreneurs into Business—Helping Them Become Successful.” With a focus on Central America, he spoke about the fact that while microcredit has made credit accessible to millions of people at the bottom of the pyramid, rates of poverty have not changed. He proposed a new direction for micro-credit as a tool to alleviate poverty in a more systemic and sustainable way.
Friday morning, prior to the closing session, there were three workshops offered. Daniel Pinchbeck presented “Why We Launched Evolver: A Social Network for Conscious Collabora -
tion.” He spoke about his involvement with the new technologies of the internet as a way to engage with provocative and important questions such as: could the social technologies of the internet help us replace many of our financial transactions with exchanges based on trust and reciprocity? Can a social network be designed to help reengineer our current society, offer new ways for people to collaborate, and organize for social change?
Julianne Maurseth led a workshop (“Purpose and Outcomes for Conference Participants”) designed to weave together many of the insights gained at the conference. And Pilar Gonzales, Katrina Steffek, and I led a conversation called “What If…” which explored scenario thinking for the new economy. This participatory workshop elicited from attendees the tools they had gained throughout the week and then asked them to imagine how they will apply them to their home, organizational, or work life— their real life economies.
On Friday, the conference conveners each shared some appreciations and closing reflections on the conference, and I would like to leave you with my own closing comments summarizing the week: “During our journey here together in Sonoma we have been traveling new economic terrain, challenging social terrain, and transformative cultural terrain. I put this in the progressive tense—not because we are a room full of tense progressives—but, because the work of economic change will yet be hard, and seem long. Let’s take joy in every step forward, practice forgiveness so that it can heal, and, finally, trust in the nature of wisdom, the wisdom of nature, and in the aspirations of the human spirit as we see each other anew in our economic life. May peace be with you.”
John Bloom is the Director of Organizational Culture at RSF Social Finance, and a member of the Council of Anthroposophic Organizations. This article is reprinted with permission from the “Reimagine Money” blog, rsfsocialfinance.org/blog/. Look for John’s recently published book, The Genius of Money, which is available from steinerbooks.org. And it is reviewed in this issue, on page 12.
Ongoing studio classes will be the central focus of our studies, augmented by seminars in related subjects. Significant time will be given to self-directed studio time.
Seminar Courses & Sculpture: Patrick Stolfo
Painting & Drawing: Martina angela Müller
The Alkion Center offers part time programs in foundation StudieS & Waldorf teacher training
For program descriptions & further information: www.alkioncenter.org stolfo@taconic.net
In 2000 a book was published by two social researchers, Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, entitled, The Cultural Creatives: How Fifty Million People are Changing the World. Based on more than a decade of “psychographic” research— into individuals’ values and beliefs—and dozens of interview with noted persons, The Cultural Creatives identified a “subculture that cannot yet see itself” and caused a wave of recognition. One of its most evocative assertions is that, beyond a few close friends, most “cultural creatives” feel largely alone with their worldview, even though tens of millions of people share a very similar set of goals and values.
Meanwhile, looking back to Rudolf Steiner’s “horrible year” of 1923—following the burning of the Goetheanum and the intensification of difference among members, especially older and younger ones—one finds him speaking of how a person becomes an anthroposophist. In a lecture in Stuttgart on February 13th (published in Awakening to Community and translated by Marjorie Spock), Dr. Steiner described a regular sequence of three gestures of the inner life, in feeling, thought, and intention, which he places alongside the thought that the being Anthroposophia can be recognized as a movement in human consciousness.
Ray and Anderson were not students of Rudolf Steiner’s work, so it is all the more striking that their description of the steps which they observed in how individuals became “cultural creatives” exactly matches Steiner’s steps for becoming an anthroposophist as described more than a lifetime earlier. As anthroposophists consider the vast goals of our movement, and feel the loneliness of being relatively few and relatively alone, we also echo the loneliness described in the situation of the cultural creatives.
What follows is all verbatim quotations from the two books, Steiner flush left in red, Ray-Anderson indented and in blue; the editor has provided headings and bolded key phrases. Parts in quotation marks on the blue side are quotations from interviews conducted by the authors. “Willis” is Willis Harmon, first president of the Institute for Noetic Sciences, one of the interviewees.
{RS} What I have been describing here are the factors that brought the Anthroposophical Society into being. The Society wasn’t really founded; it just came about. You cannot carry on a pre - conceived campaign to found a thing that is developing out of some genuine inner reality.
{CC} In the end, there can be no step-by-step description of how to become a Cultural Creative. It is a process of culture-making with tens of millions of people doing it in their own ways. Since they are part of a subculture that cannot yet see itself, these millions of Cultural Creatives do not know what a potential they carry for our common future.
For those who became anthroposophists were the first people to feel what millions and millions of others will be feeling keenly indeed in a not too distant future, that older forms have come down into the present from by- gone days in which they were not only fully justified but the product of historical necessity, but that they no longer provide what modern man’s inner life requires and the dignity of full humanness demands.
Finally, Willis [Harman] was immersed in the topic he’d been searching for all those years – the critical aspects of being human.
{RS} The term “Anthroposophy” should really be understood as synonymous with “Sophia,” meaning the content of consciousness, the soul attitude and experience that make a man a full - fledged human being. The right interpretation of “Anthroposophy” is not “the wisdom of man,” but rather “the consciousness of one’s humanity” [Bewusstsein seines Menschentums]. In other words, the reversing of the will, the experiencing of knowledge, and one’s participation in the time’s destiny, should all aim at giving the soul a certain direction of consciousness, a “Sophia.”
{CC} Again, it is a matter of consciousness: a conscious change of mind and heart, a shift in the collective identity of a people.
In the 1950s there was no cultural support for exploring what Willis called “that wealth within us.”
{RS} The kind of life and practice that civilized man has developed in recent centuries is just exactly the kind from which an anthroposophist longs to free his moral, ethical and religious nature.
{CC}…[A]t some point the previously accepted explanation of how things came to be the way they are doesn’t satisfy you anymore. So although it is difficult to leave the old story, eventually everyone who becomes a Cultural Creative finds it impossible to stay.
Even if he makes compromises with the life about him, as indeed he must, his real desire is to escape from what the civilization of recent centuries has produced, leading as it has directly to the catastrophic present. It may be that this desire exists only as an instinct in many of those who seek out the Anthroposophical Movement, but it is definitely present.
When you wake up to the fact that the path you are following is not the one you believe in your heart, you’ve taken the first step to becoming a Cultural Creative. What otherwise lives itself out simply as a matter of response to externally imposed laws and traditional mores and as habits more or less thoughtlessly adopted from the
life around one, in other words, everything of an ethical, moral, religious nature that had developed in the course of one’s growing up, now turns inward and becomes a striving to make one’s ethical‑moral and religious being a full inner reality
But whether it’s a joy or a trial, the departure from the old worldview and values is funda mentally an inner departure … The change is above all a change in consciousness…
{RS} The real truth is that what we have had drummed into us from about our sixth year onward is the product of externally influenced will and religious impulses that have evolved during recent centuries.
{CC} One middle-aged woman explained, “… after all is said and done, what is left – or lost – is not a relationship or a place or even a context. What is left is a consciousness that once felt secure, had categories to fit things into, and knew who it was. And what replaces this sureness is not knowing. And openness. And something unspeakably, and sometimes almost unbearably, new.”
But when a person seeking anthroposophy wants to escape from these will impulses and from the religious forms in which man’s moral life finds its highest expression, he cannot help asking at the same time for a way of knowledge in keeping not with the world he wants to leave behind but with the new world of his seeking
“In high school, when I threw the Catholic version of reality out, it left a hole. I didn’t recognize that hole until I finally heard a description of God, religion, and life that made rational sense… The books I read from then on were all about psychology and religion – Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, Teilhard’s Phenomenon of Man. A whole world opened up that I didn’t know I was interested in.”
After the first act in the soul drama of the anthroposophist, the moral - religious act, there comes a second, one already contained in seed form in the first. It consists in a compulsion to seek supersensible knowledge
He joined the Indian mystic Paramahansa Yogananda’s organization and did all its studies, delved into Buddhism and Taoism, and then turned to the new sciences of quantum physics and chaos theory and evolution biology. “I was an addict, reading everything I could find that would help me understand who I was and where I was going.” He was “becoming sane again,” he said.
{RS} But now let us weigh the consequences this implies for an anthroposophically oriented person. He cannot just cut himself loose from external life and practice.
{CC} A second source of vulnerability is the fact that Cultural Creatives are challenging the social codes of the dominant culture.
He has taken flight into the Anthroposophical Society, but life’s outer needs continue on, and he cannot get away from them in a single step or with one stroke.
Sooner or later they are bound to bump up against some very unhappy representatives of that culture...
So his soul is caught and divided between his continuing outer life and the ideal life and knowledge that he has embraced in concept as a member of the Anthroposophical Society.
Worse yet, you’ll repeatedly meet an internal ized version of the old culture, the Inner Critic. If your external critics seize upon the same complaints as your Inner Critic, it can be a real stopper.
A cleavage of this sort can be a painful and even tragic experience, and it becomes such to a degree determined by the depth or superficiality of the individual.
When the person creating a new life path is a widely admired scion of mainstream culture, the public media are likely to react with disdain and cynicism.
We are dealing with enemies who will not meet us on objective ground. It is characteristic of them that they avoid coming to grips with what anthroposophy itself is, and instead ask questions like, “How are anthroposophical facts discovered?” or “What is this clairvoyance?” or “Does so and so drink coffee or milk?” and other such matters that have no bearing on the subject, though they are what is most talked about. But enemies intent on destroying anthroposophy resort to slander…
“We are allowed to talk about the wrong things in our culture. We’re silent about the things that matter the deepest to us. We’re public about our hairdos, clothing, cars, and that stuff. I think it ought to be reversed. I think people should shut up about their clothing, cars, houses, and how much they make, and be public about the things that matter to them.” Like what? we asked him. Hopes and dreams, he told us. Values.
Distorted mirrors, silence about what matters, denial –all of these are barriers to honest discussion about what doesn’t work in our modern world.
{RS} Each individual split himself in two, one part going to an office or a classroom, the other attending an anthroposophical meeting where he led an entirely different kind of life.
{CC} In bringing the fragments of his own life into relationship, he extends his understanding to all Americans. “Some -
how we have this separation in the West,” he says. “We have body and soul, self and nature, and a mythology based on an ego that is individual, that is not connected with anything else.”
But when a number of anthroposophically thinking and feeling people were moved to apply their wills to the establishing of anthroposophical enterprises capable of full and vigorous life, they had to include those wills in the total human equipment needed for the job. That was the origin of the conflicts that broke out.
How do Cultural Creatives turn their values into a new way of life? There’s no single way to do this, no party line or dogma, no formula for success…. To outside observers, the territory that lies before Cultural Creatives must seem like a cliff thousands of miles long fronting on absolutely noth ing —empty space.
It is comparatively easy to train oneself to send out good thoughts intended to keep a friend on a mountain climb from breaking his legs. It is much harder to pour good thoughts so strongly into a will engaged in some external, material activ ity that matter itself becomes imbued with spirit as a result of one’s having thus exerted one’s humanness.
Yet at tens of thousands of points on the edge of that frontier, innovators are creating solid new ground, extending the known world into the unknown. A key element in such innovation is the ability to think outside the box.
{RS} The path that leads into the Society consists firstly, then, in changing the direction of one’s will [from outward to inward]; secondly, in experiencing supersensible knowledge; lastly, in participating in the destiny of one’s time to a point where it becomes one’s personal destiny.
{CC} By the time they reach the fourth step, most Cultural Creatives are not only looking for the big picture, they’re
tracing underlying interconnections and relationships. This process inevitably leads to developing an ardent concern for the living system that holds us all – planet Earth.
One feels oneself sharing mankind’s evolution in the act of reversing one’s will and experiencing the supersensible nature of all truth. Sharing the experience of the time’s true significance is what gives us our first real feeling for the fact of our humanness
Ecological concerns inform most Cultural Creatives’ choices, including what products they buy, the movements they support, and the life choices they make.
…people who become Cultural Creatives look for the big picture
{RS} People used to learn to live anthroposophically by fleeing the world. But they will have to learn to live anthroposophically with the world and to carry the anthroposophical impulse into everyday life and practice. That means making one single whole again of the person hitherto split into an anthroposophist and a practical man.
{CC} Cultural Creatives especially need a picture of what they are doing and what it means. To bring a new kind of culture to life, they need to be able to stay the course. And they need to know where they have come from and where, as a collective body, they can go.
But this cannot be done so long as a life lived shut away from the world—as though by towering fortress walls that one cannot see over—is mistaken for an anthroposophical life. This sort of thing cannot go on in the Society. We should keep our eyes wide open to everything that is happening in the world around us, that will imbue us with the right will impulses.
Perhaps it is true, as Vaclav Havel observes, that the modern age has already ended. But if it has, how could we tell? Will new maps be sold on every street corner?
Finally, if anthroposophists and “cultural creatives” are part of one larger community, it is important that we meet each other with real interest and openness. In 1923 a new generation was coming toward anthroposophy, and being met, as Rudolf Steiner pointed out in this same lecture, with a lack of understanding that, as he later said, anthroposophy “arises as a need of the heart...” –Ed.
It is natural, too, that in an evolution that has gone through three phases, newcomers to the Movement should find themselves in the first phase with their feeling life. Many a difficulty stems from the fact that the Society’s leaders have the duty of reconciling the three co‑existing phases with one another. For they go on side by side even though they developed in succession. Furthermore, in their aspect as past stages in a sequence, they belong to the past, and are hence memories, whereas in their simultaneous aspect they are presently still being lived. A theoretical or doctrinaire approach is therefore out of place in this situation.
What those who want to help foster anthroposophical life need instead is loving hearts and eyes opened to the totality of that life. Just as growing old can mean developing a crotchety disposition, becoming inwardly as well as outwardly wrinkled and bald - headed, losing all feeling for recalling one’s young days vividly enough to make them seem immediate experience, so too is it possible to enter the Society as late as, say, 1919 and fail to sense the fresh, new, burgeoning, sprouting life of the Movement’s first phase. This is a capacity one must work to develop. Otherwise, the right heart and feeling are missing in one’s relation to anthroposophy, with the result that though one may scorn and look down upon doctrines and theories in other spheres of life, one’s efforts to foster anthroposophical life cannot help becoming doctrinaire. This does serious damage to a thing as alive as an Anthroposophical Society ought to be.
Is every child sometime Parsifal— closed in by want—orphaned out by love? a child in a wood with a swift arrow and bow a child whose soul is a rag doll, with buttons for eyes a child whose father rode out of town and took away his name, a child for whom a gleaming white swan— encircling enchanting a lake, in gloaming calling its mate— is but a dizzying thing to bring down to make an unsuspecting crisis on some hidden and holy ground where wild Kundry writhing already lies— her ashen body writing what no one dare read her apparent body her bosom’s balm atoning
Of society Parsifal cannot read. Of society’s words he is innocent, his agile limbs his only syllables. They ask nothing he can name. They reply with arrow and sword, and his lips (half-mute limbs) answer I don’t know. He only knows the swan is dead. But his own heart— heimlich harassed by a mother who long married grief—beats to he-knows-not-what blood. His soul when it longs is a stranger’s. And the Grail? An unaccustomed cup, though it dazzle. An old one will teach him to suffer, and to sing of hell, or heaven. A wise one will call his name—and his heart, accosted at last by awe, will knock, prodding him to seek, to ask.
On Harriet Tubman and her Passengers
Of course, it was all over ground, and on it— it being the unseen, the way no limbs could walk, no eyes could see, not rational, but the stuff of dreams I dreamed of fathers, old ones, too, children, and mothers whose milk we drink, whose breath we breathe. They’d already braved oceans and landed where
to live they had to learn
to conjure a carcass in silence, to follow crow on his way (which became their way between whitewashed mansions and the black winter branches), to fly horizontally as the outflung oceans and uprooted forests, to mingle with the scents of cedar, burdock, and bruised onions, dandelion and coppery dust, to drink from the Great Dipper --things that were,
like the savior, everywhere.
They had to stanch cruel hungers and silence cries, learn to lie mute as moss, their motions motley and wizened, their steps stealthy, still, swift as stars. They’d practiced taking nothing for granted—some grieving girl’s good intentions, the master’s mistress’ monthly whims, cats’ cozying up, a whispered promise from a window, a whistle in an alley, a boat waiting in a Boston harbor,
and above all at every station,
slowly unfolds- flings out
butterfly wings palms
pearled up braying in praise in prayer
the temptation to fall asleep. I know of this, the tentativeness of being awake. The temptation of a dream is sleep, and I don’t know if in another life, I’ve touched the piers and prisons where they landed, but in my way I’ve untimely met a bounty hunter’s thief. Depending on one’s perspective, slavery is a common condition, and the way out, underground, as through the tomb at Gethsemane, where the flesh ( of many colors)
wades, children, in water and blood
“Renewal” is a powerful idea that occurs frequently in anthroposophical contexts. Social and cultural and educational and ecological renewal are urgent concerns, and anthroposophical initiatives are filled with extraordinarily committed people who work long hours and strive to be highly conscious, responsible and creative in their contributions.
So “renewal” takes on another character when turned toward the individual. Personal renewal can be health and emotional balancing, it can be reinspiration or new perspectives, it can come from relief felt when finding a community and knowing that one’s challenges and frustrations are shared by others.
For the past ten years the Center for Anthroposophy in Wilton, New Hampshire, has offered “renewal courses” in the summer. We asked Karine Munk Finser ( left), coordinator of the center’s renewal courses, to share her thoughts on the significance of such programs as well as specific plans for next year.
There is a clear urgency for people to come together, to nurture the powers of the spirit over the gravity pull of the external forces of our lives. We offer a place where individuals can find teachers, colleagues, and friends in a beautiful, rejuvenating community setting for adults—a place for the strengthening of courage in life.
» How is the experience structured?
Participants sign up for one Sunday evening through Friday lunchtime course, and therefore have an in-depth experience of their chosen subject. Some of our courses help teachers prepare and others are more philosophical, but all have a strong artistic component. Our veteran instructors try to foster both expertise and joy in learning. The schedule allows for time to rest or walk in the gardens or fields, take in the mountain vista, or swim in the pool. Our kitchen is excellent and serves bountiful organic meals, both vegetarian and not.
» What inspired you most about these programs? What lights me up about the Center for Anthroposophy are the dedicated long-term core faculty and staff. The Center attracts some of the very best teachers in their fields, who are schooled in the art of adult education. We have proven that yes, we can create a vibrant minicommunity in a limited period of time. People come, and transformation and growth happens. Many return, year after year, for the teacher training summer session or for our annual renewal. Both groups become a family. These people are our inspiration.
“There is more to life than merely increasing its speed.” — Gandhi
» The renewal courses are offered during two weeks each summer. What else goes on at the center?
In this coming year our two weeks are June 27–July 2, and July 4–9. The center is on Main Street in Wilton, in southern New Hampshire, above our Waldorf and art supply store, The Color Shop and More. We are fortunate to have a summer home on the campus of High Mowing School, and Pine Hill Waldorf School just up the road. Along with the renewal programs there are foundation studies, which are offered in clusters in communities throughout North America, and high school teacher education, which offers a wide variety of subject areas to practicing and future high school teachers. CfA works in close collaboration with the Waldorf Program of Antioch University New England, which offers a variety of Waldorf teacher education options, including Waldorf Certification and an accredited MEd and state certification program.
» What special offerings will you have in next summer’s Renewal Courses?
Christof Wiechert (left) joins us in week one. He is a Dutchman, with a dry sense of humor, and the sharpest intellect, all warmed by a deep humanity. Christof, who leads the Pedagogical Section at the Goetheanum, is a specialist in the Child Study.
» Christof is co-author of a book on the subject. And I quickly found an article by him on the internet.1 “Child study” has a unassuming sound, but it involves the whole faculty working together—with imagination, inspiration, intuition—around a problem a teacher is facing with one particular student.
Yes, his insights into human development are very keen. They can bring a new dignity to the heart of faculty meetings: the Child Study. He is a master in his field, who can help us live
1 See www.waldorflibrary.org/lectures/christof%20wiechert.pdf
into the questions we carry as teachers from his rich vantage point. Christof has presented widely at AWSNA conferences and pedagogical gatherings around the world. We are happy to have him back on the East Coast for our for week one, and it’s his first Renewal Course ever.
» I see he is a great traveler, and will also be at the Bay Area Center for Waldorf Teacher Training, February 18-20.2 Who else would you mention?
Iris Sullivan, who is Australian, works out of the Collot d’Herbois painting stream; she will teach veil painting with pastels, a deep living into pure color. I find her to be incredibly wise, intuitive, priestess-like, and intensely into color and soul. Iris will strengthen and inspire her participants. Both the novice and the advanced painter will discover avenues for renewed courage in life. Iris’ paintings are in many private collections, and on book covers. She teaches at Sacramento High School and has a private practice as an art therapist.
Glen Williamson, an actor who specializes in modern mystery dramas, is also with us this year. He will warm the imaginative powers within us. Glen offers an evening on his work with Goethe’s Faust. Other stellar faculty members include Georg Locher, offering an upper elementary painting course. Georg, who never travels without his cello, and his colleague, pianist Marc Ferguson, bring us the blessings of beautiful music. As I said, the faculty inspire me, and I can only mention a few of them. Elizabeth Auer, is a master in creating the most beautiful and dynamic classrooms, and she will offer a course on “practical arts” for the first three grades. You will return with armfuls of materials for your classroom and many new ideas for circle work and more. And we are grateful to be able to benefit from Christopher Bamford’s deep and wise soul. Chris has come for many years and his work is invaluable and profound.
» And that’s just a part of the first week. Can I have a just a touch of week two?
Aonghus Gordon from Ruskin Mills in England is coming to the East Coast! He brings a course focusing on changing the lives of teenagers at risk, creative and practical tools. This is a possible new and important venue for anthroposophy in the world. Aonghus is bringing along several of his people, a blacksmith, and a soap maker, and a green woodworker and a felter, so that the daily lectures will be accompanied by hands-on workshops. Return home with a skill that can be passed on or join with others in this good work! It’s important to sign up early for this particular course, to be in the workshop of one’s first choice.
2 Details at www.bacwtt.org/a-new-impulse-is-a-go
» Ok! Now you also have Rudiger Janish from the Camphill movement, working with Rudolf Steiner’s biography as we approach the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2011. And Dennis
Klocek
by Christopher Schaefer and Signe Schaefer
For many years at Sunbridge College we had students from different parts of Asia, and they often and repeatedly invited us to visit. After retiring from our full-time work at the College we were finally ready to say yes and to plan a journey to the East.
will join you for the first time, working on two topics: “Natural Laws and Human Potentials: a Cosmic Look at the Climate,” and “The Role of Imagination in Establishing a Meditative Practice.” And many more! Where will all the details be posted?
On the internet go to centerforanthroposophy.org and navigate to “Renewal Courses.” Or call 603-654-2566. Or e-mail us at info@ centerforanthroposophy.org
We went in March and April of 2009, spending two weeks in Thailand and another five weeks in China. While in Bangkok we visited and taught at the Panyotai Waldorf School started by Porn Panosat and his wife Jan Pen. The school was just finishing its 13th year and has now begun its first 12th grade . They have just completed a beautiful purpose-built campus on the outskirts of Bangkok and are a thriving and successful Waldorf School, an amazing accomplishment in such a short time. Then we were off to Chengdu, China, to visit Harry Wong and Zhang Li, students and friends who spent many years in Spring Valley.
Waldorf education is booming in China! Everything is booming in China! There is tremendous energy, made visible by the building projects and enormous cranes everywhere you look. It is a country on the move. After their own cramped experiences of school, many parents are searching for a true education for their precious only child. Those who find Waldorf embrace it with a devotion and a hunger to learn more. Many of them first found their way to Montessori kindergartens and schools and are now wanting more. Things happen fast in China, and so there are already over 20 Waldorf kindergarten initiatives in cities all over the country.
The work in Chengdu is the most developed with an eighth grade that began in the autumn of 2009, a beautiful campus with five kindergartens and both teacher education and kindergarten trainings. The Guangzhou Waldorf initiative is also quite strong with a capable initiative group and a new school building with several grades. In cities like Beijing there are multiple initiatives, and like in many places cooperation between them is limited. There is a great need for more understanding of what Waldorf education is, including its spiritual foundations. While there are people getting training in Australia, the U.S. and England, the need for help and support from abroad is still very real. It is important, however, to remember that China is an ancient culture with its own long imperial history and its unique philosophical and spiritual traditions. These need to be understood and appreciated by foreigners, as does the complex history of 20th century China. The Chinese people are proud, and they need to feel respected by those who would help them now.
We had the privilege of working in four different cities where Waldorf initiatives are developing: Chengdu, Xi’an (and yes, the Terracotta Warriors are truly amazing!), Guangzhou and Zhengzhou. We gave three to six day workshops for from 30 to 90 participants. We met with different school groups. We spoke with many individuals. It was hard not speaking Chinese, but we had wonderful translators; and we found people to be very open and sincere in their eagerness to learn—for their parenting and also for their own inner growth. Often we were working
with questions of human development, and it was wonderful to discover that life phases and temperaments are as real in Asia as in the west. Their unique stories were, of course, fascinating and deeply moving. We ended up having many individual helping conversations which were inadvertently, but perhaps accurately, referred to as “biography consoling.”
People had warned us about pollution, and traffic, but life in New York had not prepared us for what we met. We saw blue sky one time during all of our five weeks in China. On any express highway you might see a speeding Mercedes, three wheeled moped trucks loaded with ducks and chickens, old buses spewing smoke, bicycle taxis, jaywalkers, bikers and a frustrated driver heading the wrong way on the busy street. One person said about the traffic, “We see red lights as polite suggestions,” and another added, “You have to remember that very few drivers have had a license for more than two years—and they may not have taken a test to get it.” So we were in for an exciting slow merge at all intersections.
Throughout our time in China we rarely saw other Westerners. In fact we had to get used to being stared at wherever we went. We were a novelty, and one older woman we passed in a park was even overheard to say, “They’re so white!” Often strangers on the street would ask to have their pictures taken with us. We also experienced how people wanted to share their country with us; this was often done through extraordinary meals—well, we could have done without the spiced donkey... People were generous, interested, and in some way innocent in their eagerness to know about a broader world. So much of the heritage of ancient China was destroyed through the many struggles of the 20th century. What you experience everywhere is a rush for the ‘new’ and a drive for personal success and lifestyle improvement. The goals of a good job, an apartment, a car and a better education for their child are strong motivations for hard work. Many of the parents and teachers we met had come from the villages, and their way out was through education. China has a population of over 1.3 billion people with over half still living in the villages. Factory jobs are bringing people to the cities in ever greater numbers, creating an unbelievable frenzy of building on the outskirts of every city. China has over a hundred cities of over two million people and ten of over ten million. The Waldorf parents and teachers have achieved a modest middle class lifestyle, and they are proud of what their country has achieved in the last thirty years. They are looking for a creative education for their children and also for psychological and spiritual understanding for themselves . This creates an opening for both Waldorf education and anthroposophy to be of real service in supporting the re-emergence of China as a world culture and a world power, not only materially.
We were both very moved by our time in Asia, and we returned for a few weeks in November of 2009. Chris again spent time in Thailand doing a workshop for new initiatives including some Waldorf Schools, and then we met in Chengdu to work with a new group of students in the Teacher Eduction Program as well as doing some work in other cities. To our surprise the Chengdu Waldorf School had a new meeting hall, enrollment in the grades had increased dramatically, and formal permission from the authorities for the grade school was expected shortly. We also noticed that in the six months we had been gone that people were beginning to pay attention to the traffic lights, at least at the big intersections, so now Chris who was always put
in the front passenger seat because of size, could begin to relax. Either it was that or a new found fatalism.
We are seeking to support adult education and teacher training activities in Chengdu, but also in Xi’an, Guangzhou,and Beijing and are happy to provide introductions to any Waldorf teachers who are willing to mentor, teach and support the growing work.
Harry Wong and Zhang Li are planning to return to North America so that their children can experience a Waldorf High School, as well as to prepare for starting a high school in Chengdu. They and others have done truly amazing work in bringing Waldorf Education to China over the last seven years. While they will certainly be missed we think the Waldorf School in Chengdu and the Waldorf movement in China is strong enough to move forward with the many gifted teachers and parents active in the different schools and initiatives.
If you are interested in supporting the development of Waldorf Schools and Anthroposophy in China please let us know and we will be happy to help with introductions and connections: sschaefer@sunbridge.edu or Christopher schaefer7@gmail.com
We can also suggest the following books as a way of understanding the recent history of China and its ancient and complex culture. For understanding China and the Silk Road from Xi’an to the Middle East read the marvelous travelogue by Colin Thubron, Shadow of the Silk Road (Harper Perennial, 2007). The famous Wild Swans by Jung Chang gives a heartbreaking picture of three women’s lives over three generations, from pre-revolutionary times through the cultural revolution to the late 1970s. Xinran’s China Witness and the Good Women of China contains many insightful interviews with people from many walks of life about their thoughts and experiences during the tumultuous decades of the 20th century. John Pomfret’s Chinese Lessons follows the lives of five of his classmates over the last twenty five years in modern China. Not to be missed is Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls which follows the lives of a number of young women who left their villages to make a new life in the factories of southern China.
This “going out” is the largest migration in human history as some 130 million Chinese have left their villages in the last two decades to find work and a new life in the cities. Most of these migrants, mainly young women, like their new freedom and see the risks and struggles as worthwhile as they are “changing their fate.” The Chinese literary classics of the Three Kingdoms, The Monkey King and The Dream of the Red Chamber are not easy to appreciate with a western mind-set. The four volume Three Kingdoms is a mixture of Machiavelli and King Arthur and his knights, a political treatise, a military and strategic guidebook and a morality play. As a historical teaser look at Gavin Menzies, 1421 and 1432, in which the former British submarine captain describes the extensive evidence that the Chinese sailed up and down the eastern and western coasts of North America, as well as mapping a good part of South America including some of the Antarctic, thereby providing detailed maps for Christopher Columbus and Magellan. He also insists that the inventions, navigation aids, charts and global maps provided by the Chinese to Venice, Rome, and Florence was a major influence on and cause of the Renaissance. The evidence is compelling and it is a fun read. If you are interested in this amazing country and culture which Rudolf Steiner describes as the world’s oldest civilization and wish to help, let us know.
The date was September 14th, 2009. Thirty-five people sat in a circle in Bright Wing Studio in Hillsdale, New York. Names traveled around the circle, the history of painting in that studio was described, memories and hopes for the future were voiced, the feeling of “dropping in” from a nine-foot skateboard ramp was mentioned. And the Free Columbia Art Course began. — The Free Columbia Art Course is a full time, year long course based on the fundamentals of the art of painting as they appear and come to life through anthroposophy. How are we doing?
“The atmosphere here is one of free thinking and free learning that I have never really experienced before... a mood of inquisitive exploration and observation. To nurture each others beings and to bring something good into the world pervades life together in the studio.”
From September to November we explored color, its moods, its laws, its relationships and our relationship to it. We created two color wheels and began an introduction to the colors of the sketches that Rudolf Steiner gave as a training path for painters. Saturdays we worked with a Michaelmas theme, exploring the mood of the season. In October
Henrike Holdrege of the Nature Institute led four Saturday sessions of experiments from Goethe’s color theory. We observed after-images, atmospheric colors, and most amazing, colored shadows.
Laurel Iselin
We also have a rich life of study. We are working through the book Theosophy as well as lectures by Rudolf Steiner on art. Once a month a lively and varied group gathers in a study called “Art. What?” Right now we are working with conversations of Joseph Beuys. In October we began The Study of Art and the Evolution of Human Consciousness with Patrick Stolfo. We began by modeling a small human figure with our eyes closed and progressed through observations of cave paintings and the art of ancient Egypt and Greece.
“I feel that no matter what I choose to do next, this year of painting will be valuable to me. I’m grateful to be painting and to be working within a community of artists that are taking the time to learn, trust, and experience paint and color together.”
Karin HeideOur main weekday classes turn next to Color and Space, an introduction to oil painting and color perspective led by Nathaniel Williams. After reviewing how space has been worked with in painting in the past we will create sketches of figures from observation using various shading techniques. We will move from a sketch and spatial experience based on line and dark light relationships to creating a painting in which the spatial qualities inherent in color become central. Fulltime students will be introduced to traditional preparation of canvases and working with oil paints through this project as well. Last year we established a lending library of visual artwork. Participants donate $100 to
Weinrich
Free Columbia for a year membership, and choose up to three works to take home for up to one year. At intervals we will have library events where artwork is returned and checked out by other borrowers.
Currently we have four full time students and twenty-eight part time students. Out of a commitment to social threefolding and to experience a new way of working with money, Free Columbia works on the following economic model: Part time students pay a flat monthly rate of $80 which covers all classes and materials. Full time students are provided with a full scholarship and therefore do not pay tuition or material costs. In this
way they are freed to devote themselves for the year to working in the free spiritual realm. Free Columbia is devoted to the development of creativity as a deed for the world. It is our hope that if what we are doing is valuable we will attract support from the realm of commodity production as well as from individuals. All donations are tax deductible and very greatly appreciated. To find out more about us visit our website at freecolumbia.org or visit us in person at Bright Wing Studio. If you would like to follow our progress you may do so at freecolumbia.blogspot.com.
If you would like to apply as a full time student for the 2010-11 year you can contact us at freecolumbiaart@gmail.com.
As modern people we live with very little relationship to the cycle of the year. Central heat and cooling, electric lights and modern transportation allow us to be fairly comfortable in any season and therefore unconscious of the great breathing cycle of the earth. The verses of Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul provide a meditative path for experiencing this cycle. The artistic exercises below were developed out of the verses for week 52, (March 30), and week 1, (Easter) of the Calendar and are two of 52 exercises that I developed to accompany the calendar. When drawn or painted these exercises are designed to provide the student with an experience of inner movement during the year; the breathing in of the earth in winter, the out breathing into summer and the subtle variations, spirals, reversals and lemniscates of the process. A book of all 52 exercises is now available for $35 plus shipping. If you are interested in this work you may contact me at freecolumbiaart@gmail.com
Week 52 Begin in the center. Create a loose grid of verticals, horizontals, and then round lines-circles, ellipses, and curves. Come in with a gray wash and create vertical surfaces, then horizontals. Experience the crossing. Now take a color and with your eyes closed draw a line that wanders through it all. Open your eyes, take white and eliminate what is not necessary.
When from the depths of soul
The spirit turns to the life of worlds
And beauty wells from wide expanses, Then out of heaven’s distances
Streams life - strength into human bodies, Uniting by its mighty energy
The spirit’s being with our human life.
Laura Summer —Week 1 Look outside. Inspired by the horizontals of the horizon, block these in with shades of gray, brown, pale green, and/or ochre. Layer these, use pastel or watercolor or pencil. Now inspired by the trees, bushes or other verticals, bring in some vertical lines. Arrange them, being aware of your spacing. Now come in between the verticals or over them with more of the above color tones adding pale reds, rose, and gold.
When out of world-wide spaces
The sun speaks to the human mind, And gladness from the depths of soul
Becomes, in seeing, one with light, Then rising from the sheath of self, Thoughts soar to distances of space
And dimly bind
The human being to the spirit’s life.
the two five-day workshops (as well as a third week on music in education) had to withdraw a couple of months before they were scheduled to begin. Fortunately, Roger Lundberg was able to step in and take over the considerable challenges of organizing these events. I, for one, am most grateful that he did, although I was only able to attend the first of two workshops. The five days (July 26-31) were surprisingly packed with challenging ideas, new experiences of intense listening and feeling, and group bonding through playing music and constructing instruments together.
The 2009 workshops were designed to build on the previous year’s work (and included a number of repeat attendees), but also to welcome newcomers like myself. Among the twelve or so of us, there were several Waldorf school music teachers, a music therapist, a eurythmist, and a teacher of the Werbeck singing method. Participants came from up and down the west coast, from Canada, Midwestern states, Texas, and, farthest of all, Nepal. Last summer’s larger groups worked over eighteen days primarily to construct xylophonetype instruments in iron and wood as well as pairs of iron rods hanging by fish line (a new kind of instrument) and gongs. The unique instruments, their tuning, and the processes of making them have all been worked out over more than thirty years by Bleffert. As during the previous summer, this year’s workshops featured lectures, improvisation exercises in new tonal awareness with the group of twelve playing and listening to both new and tra -
notation and compositions (related, I think, to the graphic notation developed by New York composer Morton Feldman in the early 1950s). Many bits of advice for the Waldorf music teachers were also scattered throughout the course.
Actually, I had originally decided to attend the workshop mostly as a kind of vacation or retreat from my usual work. However, I was surprised that these workshops were far from any kind of escape. In fact, they offered a remarkable visionary deepening to my ongoing interests and activities, although the real depth of what Manfred was bringing crept up on me only slowly. By the end, I felt I had acquired a grand new vision not only of the rich future possibilities for music but also for the future of humanity.
In its rural location integrated with lovely biodynamic gardens and pastures, Summerfield was an idyllic enough setting for a retreat. As you drive into the school, a huge black-andwhite mural of Rudolf Steiner greets you from the side of one of the several generously distributed school buildings, mainly designed by architect and parent Steven. Actually, Steiner’s name was seldom mentioned during the workshops, but the deepening influence of anthroposophy underlay almost all of the work we did together.
The first evening began with some words by Manfred (spoken, as always, very extemporaneously) followed by a concert that he played, which consisted of a kind of compressed history of western music played mostly on three glockenspiels composed of alternating iron and copper bars (combining and linking selections from Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Bartok, and Stravinsky.
Manfred expressed his hope that our work together might be able to translate something of the being and destiny of America into music, which is one of his key interests. He referred to both the traditions of the Native Americans and to the more modern musical innovations of Edgard Varese, John Cage, and others. Humanity has crossed a threshold, and the European tradition of music-making must change. He referred to an ancient Chinese legend on the origin of music that related more to thinking, whereas the European tradition related more to feeling. In America, it is the will that lives most strongly, looking toward the future. One tendency of America is constant movement, a feeling of being “on the way” to somewhere. In America we must look to go into the (musical) future out of will impulses, which can also manifest in music as a mathematical or somewhat mechanical rhythmic element (for example, in the work of contemporary “minimalist” composers like Terry Riley and Steve Reich).
That first night we also began the numerous, ever-changing group-improvisation exercises that would mark the beginning of each morning and each afternoon, culminating in a final evening concert attended by local friends. Fortunately, we were able to use the many Bleffert-designed instruments constructed during last year’s workshop, particularly the uniquely resonant twelve iron xylophones, each tuned to a single diatonic (planetary) tone over its seven, variable-width bars (“as if seven voices are singing one tone,” explained Manfred). After a couple of exercises with four players creating individual rhythmic ostinato patterns in concert on the wooden xylophones, we briefly began working on bronze finger cymbals with the descending sequence of four tones (BAED) that Steiner called the “TAO” (or Tau) and gave as an “esoteric exercise” for eurythmists (see the end of lecture 5 of Eurythmy as Visible Music). Gradually we sounded all four tones together. Steiner says it is necessary to go back to the ancient civilization of China to understand this “eurythmy meditation.” In this sequence, said Manfred, we can experience something through which our human being finds or comes to itself in a healthy way as well as something of the original incarnation process of music as a gift of the gods to humanity (echoing a November 16, 1905, statement by Steiner).
That first evening Manfred also showed us a series of painted and drawn “abstract” images he created from contemplating the views out of the window of his airplane as he flew from Germany to California. He uses such drawings as a kind of graphical musical notation or a “musical geography” (which was to be a central subject of the second workshop) The first images related to Greenland as a kind of threshold between Europe and America, a place where the only meteoric iron mountain in the world exists. We then viewed images of the Atlantic Ocean and different parts of the American continent, considering the different kinds of forces or qualities of each region. As Manfred later explained, most of the pictures feature an established central cloud-like form with new movements entering into it from the periphery, joining together like multiple tones. Manfred hoped our work together will help recreate a free space within the older cloudlike space where something new can develop. The next day Manfred told an ancient Chinese legend about the origin of music. As the emperor’s music master was meditating under a tree in the north, two singing phoenixes (“firebirds”) appeared in the sky singing of the love between male and female. While there already existed an ecstatic kind of music that drew one out of oneself, this music master as a result was the first one able to take the music inside himself. The emperor ordered him to make from his experience twelve bells and twelve bamboo pipes (filled with rice). Using these (placed in a circle?), the music master then made music for each of the twelve months. The heavenly music became more earthly and the tones were also related to the four directions.
This legend describes how the heavenly order of the twelve tones was given to human beings through the firebirds. Although the ancient Chinese music used a pentatonic (5-note), whole-tone scale (to which around 1000 B.C. two more tones were added to make seven), it appears they altered the beginning tone of the scale for each month of the year to make twelve variations. Manfred explained the generation of these twelve
pentatonic scales using a diagram of sequential alternating falling fifths (from female to male) and rising fourths (from male to female).
Manfred stated that in the alternating pattern of singing of the male and female phoenixes was an alternation of types of tones, equivalent to the differentiation between the qualities of male and female, yin and yang, and, in substances, iron and copper – the very materials we would be working with. (The Chinese name for the phoenix, a heavenly messenger who is different from the phoenix of Middle Eastern and Greek lore, is the compound term Fèng-Huáng, with Fèng meaning male, yang, and solar and Huáng meaning female, yin, and lunar. Ancient Chinese music divided the twelve tones into two groups of six.)
We engaged in a number of experiential observations of the varying natures of iron and copper (the metals of Mars and Venus). Improvisation exercises contrasted playing of copper gongs in an inner circle with an outer circle playing iron glockenspiels and concentrated listening exercises compared the fading tonal resonance of struck copper and iron bars. In the latter we noticed that the “harder” tone from the iron bar seemed to continue straight outward, while the “softer” copper tone seemed more rounded and warm in its tonal radiance. The natural musical interval between an iron and copper bar of the same size turned out to be a fourth – “the interval that lives between men and women,” commented Manfred. One day we also experimented with male and female voices separately singing scales as played on a lyre (tuned, it turned out, to certain ancient Greek modes), trying to notice what is “given” and what is “received” in each case. Manfred also related this duality to the major and minor scales, to the black and white keys of the piano, and to a similar kind of division of the twelve tones in the music of Debussy and Bartok.
Historically, once human beings were able to take inside the twelvefold cosmic order of music, we could come to feel like creators within the music instead of only imitating the cosmic music. Eventually, everyone came to be making his or her own music, but since the end of Kali Yuga in 1899 we must now find the way to lift music again up to the heavenly sphere. Each people of the world has carried over a musical tradition from this ancient time, and today many musicians attempt to create new directions by combining aspects of these traditions—playing a digeradoo with a violin and saxophone, for instance, or African
rhythmic patterns with western chromatic tuning. Today we are coming to the end of these ancient inspirations, and something really new is needed. The emphasis on a twelve-tone sphere in the music of Schoenberg and Webern was a signal of this new situation, in which we are all still like children.
In between Manfred’s short talks on more theoretical and historical aspects and our various musical improvisation exercises, we spent many hours each day in diligent and sometimes tiring labor, most of us constructing copper and iron glockenspiels or copper gongs. This involved cutting the various metals to shape and seemingly endless hammering of them on anvils to temper and form them. We could clearly hear the difference in quality between the rounded, warmly-resonant tone of a metal bar that had been hammered and the flat, rapidly-fading tone of one that had not.
I constructed a large wooden xylophone, hand-sawing eighteen wooden bars and using a Japanese hatchet to rough out undulating, organic shapes and finishing them with a plane and several Japanese draw-knives. For the final stage of tuning the instruments Manfred trained us to listen to the full sounding of a tone: how it arises, how it fades away, and what it leaves behind in the silence. Most of the learning we engaged in during the workshop was of an experiential or phenomenological nature. While this occasionally left certain aspects unclear, it also ensured that all of our content remained in a very living form. “You can’t make music out of theory,” cautioned Manfred, “only out of life and mood.” In fact, our very activity of hearing affects
the tones and opens them up for something new.
Manfred stressed the role of the will, both as related particularly to human beings on the American continent and as the unconscious source of the spiritual future. We must divide our will forces into a part that acts, explores, and experiences, and a part that consciously observes all of this. Through these parallel will activities we can avoid losing ourselves and create a guiding or inspiring direction for our work. In this vein we often took time to reflect on our improvisation exercises.
One often-repeated exercise during the first half of the week involved playing the four descending tones of the TAO (“incarnating from above”), usually on the iron glockenspiels arranged in a large circle. The first tone continued sounding, even as each additional tone was added to the continuously sounding mix. Then we tried adding a fifth, lower note found spontaneously. This lower note, played by a group of more traditional instru -
ments—cello, bass flute, guitar, and xylophone—established a kind of ground or lowest incarnation point. We then played the same TAO tones as a rising sequence, and this time the traditional instruments had to find a new tone (or tone cluster) above the final note of the TAO, a note of the future. Although these additional tones above and below were often a dissonant sounding of multiple instruments, in this context they were full of “future feeling” and often quite beautiful or moving in an unfamiliar way.
Soon we expanded this exercise to several variations of playing on the iron glockenspiels the seven tones of the diatonic (planetary) scale in place of the four TAO tones, both descending and ascending, but still adding the “extra” improvised or “discovered” tones/tone clusters above and below on the traditional instruments (to which a soprano flute was added). Repeatedly, we used different sequences of tones, improvised each time, not to create a linear melody but to build up a “community” or “tower” of tones as the seven “voices” (some doubled) felt the way to sound together. We strove to feel the tones streaming outward in each particular sonic gesture as well as the everchanging connections between the players. We were encouraged to make the gentle joining together of the new and already sounding tones feel and sound like two clouds merging. As each tone arose on the uniquely resonant Bleffert instruments it was as if a new spiritual presence had joined the tonal community, each of which changed the quality of the whole. Then gradually the tones faded out into silence, one by one. All of these (and
The earth has everything the human being will receive and attain in the future. For example, consider iron. Previously the earth had it, but now the human being can take within himself the qualities of iron. The earth is much older than the human being, who is the youngest being in this world. In the future we will learn from the earth – but not directly, which is materialism. Rather, human beings must change the material being of the earth into their own creations. . . . This silence is our ground, the foundation to our music. We are the beings of silence, and out of this silence bring music into this world. If not, we would be mere imitators, like the animals. Music is dying in us, and we have to resurrect every tone in us, to take them out of the great silence and make them living. . . . We must explore each tone that arises like the original creation of music. We will proceed anew, moving more into what a single tone can be in the future, and gradually we will find connections to other tones, creating something like a new system. . . . Feel the joy of the eternal creation of music coming originally from the heavens. Feel how the “birth” of each tone changes the world, like the birth of each new child.
many other) mostly simple exercises were both fun music-making and concentrated group spiritual research.
From the eleventh to the twentieth centuries, Manfred explained, human beings were gradually concluding and losing the original musical inspiration given to humanity during the Old Indian Epoch. John Cage’s famous (and very American) 1952 premiere in Woodstock, New York, of “4 minutes, 33 seconds” (or “4’33”), in which the pianist simply sat at the piano for that length of time, was a sincere gesture, to focus human beings on what is happening now in the present space, the present silence. Manfred encouraged us to try to feel the future coming toward the present silence. The real tonal system we have today is the silence (the title of a famous 1961 book by Cage), the silence of the earth. The earth itself was created out of the heavenly “harmony of the spheres,” and it can be the prototype for a future development of the arts. At this point I want to simply quote Manfred’s eloquent description:
When I heard Manfred speak this way, it occurred to me that these words could almost have been spoken by the late German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986, photo below). I had heard a couple of days before the conference that Manfred was interested in the work of Beuys, so I had brought along a bunch of slides of Beuys’s artworks “just in case.” The second-last night I gave an evening slide talk as an introduction to the varied and unusual creative work of Beuys, mostly inspired by his studies of Rudolf Steiner and other anthroposophists. Beuys, too, phenomenologically explored the qualities of different substances of the earth, but more within an avant-garde visual-arts context than a musical one. He also was aware that the past traditions in culture are coming to an end and new ways must be found. This is one explanation for his unusual work exploring the qualities and expressive potentials of such mostly untraditional art materials as honey, fat, beeswax, blood, felt, chocolate, and, yes, also iron and copper – as well as new forms of visual art arising in the 1960s including performance art, earth art, and installations. For example in his 1965 “How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare” in Düsseldorf, Beuys sat and walked through an exhibition of his work in an art gallery, explaining his pictures to a dead hare that he cradled in his arms or let touch the pictures with its paw – all the time with his head covered with honey and gold leaf and his feet attached, respectively, to an iron and a felt sole. In brief, this was a reference to the qualities of living, warm, sunlike thinking (gold as metal of the sun) that Beuys felt humanity needed to develop to move forward in evolution, using also the hare as an animal connected to the living forces of nature who digs into the earth.
It turned out that Manfred had known and even occasionally collaborated with Beuys, and that his wife Ulrike even grew in the same small German town of Krefeld as Beuys. Along with my talk, I had Manfred play a short composition he had composed and played as part of several Beuys coyote-related events, “The Song of the Coyote.” The most famous of these events took place in New York City in 1964, where Beuys spent three days and nights in the Rene Block Art Gallery interacting with a live coyote, as a representative of the wild and Native American aspects of this continent. Manfred’s “Song” was composed of ghostly whining, whistling, sighing sounds generated by dragging a hard-rubber mallet tip sideways along the surface of the carved wooden xylophone bars –more of an inner gesture than the actual outer cry of a coyotes. Manfred also volunteered to play a longer, partially improvised piece by Beuys titled “The Siberian Symphony, First Movement,” which was part of Beuys first major performance (or “Action”) of the same name in 1963 and played on a Cagean prepared piano (that is, a piano with various pieces of wood, metal, or glass or small objects stuck among the strings to make them sound differently). Manfred, who began to use the Beuysian language of images from that point on in the workshop, began this piece with an additional short section on the wooden xylophone that he titled “The Coyote Explaining Pictures to a Dead Hare,” adding that gradually all the animals will join in the music. Manfred had carefully prepared the piano with numerous wooden pegs inserted into the strings, making some keys sound more like gongs or percussion instruments than piano tones. Manfred spoke of “Siberia” as representing a threshold land (like Greenland), a realm of silence where “The Siberian Garden of Music” might arise. I began to realize that just as Beuys sought new visual images and actions to represent supersensible realities, so Manfred sought for new aural processes and improvisations (and the instruments to support them) to represent those same supersensible realities. And both men focused on attentiveness to the qualities of the substances used. The next, final morning Manfred declared the workshop part of the
Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research (founded by Beuys and author Heinrich Böll in 1974) and pondered the problem of musical form in improvisation. He urged us to create a free, “movement space” between polarities to give new voices a new space in which we can freely accompany and form their development. This worked with Beuys’s “theory of sculpture,” whereby form is developed by movement that takes place between more fixed polarities, such as expansion and contraction, form and chaos. He then related this to Schiller’s description of the artist freely playing with the polar forces of form and matter and, further, to the polar influences of Lucifer and Ahriman. He stressed that we needed to bring to this task the gestures of both living within the material and generating conscious form. We need both the earthly and heavenly poles, the worlds above and below; in fact, at this time the path to the higher worlds must pass through the beings of the depths, including, as Beuys also recognized, the forces of the minerals, plants, and animals. He summarized: “Why are copper and iron like they are? Behind them is a great evolution in the earth. The earth will be an example, resource, and guide for the human being in the future. There lie the answers to all of our questions. We ask them upward, and the answer comes “down” from below. We can have an impression here like Rudolf Steiner’s sculpture with the figures of Lucifer and Ahriman, or of Beuys’s use of honey and gold as polarities to create a center between, or of John Cage’s “silence” with the original Tau descending into the earth. We have to lose and find our meaning with an experimental approach, by listening deeply. . . . With Lucifer above and Ahriman below we have a whole human being. Lucifer and Ahriman are present only for us. We need these forces that are the start of our conscious going forward from now on. . . . We can only develop living form from out of the heart and soul of the human being.”
In addition to the Beuysian turn, there were numerous other surprises during the workshop. For example, the final morning Manfred announced that we were going to gather wood (especially oak), build fires, and put the copper and iron bars and gongs we were making into the fire (above and below). After about twenty minutes, we would then put both the heated
metals and the glowing embers into holes we dug in the earth, leaving them there for three hours before digging them up. This was part of the “curing” process of making these instruments, and this giving our work over to fire and earth needed to be accompanied by a wakeful consciousness, for it would indicate how the work on the instruments should be finished. When this was done the gongs and bars often emerged from the earth with marvelously multicolored surfaces in striated, marble-like patterns (photo at right). After this process yet more hammering (below) was required to brighten a somewhat dulled but also deepened sound the metals had acquired. Manfred spoke of our entering into the substances we used (like Beuys) and compared all of our work in hammering, playing, listening, and tuning the metals to different healing “skins” of warmth we were placing around them (again related to the way Beuys used felt and fat and other means to accentuate the warmth element that he felt our coldly intellectual society much needed for balance). With our world growing evermore electrified and digitalized, it was refreshing to connect directly with the qualities of specific natural substances, reminding us how essential that is. Manfred’s intensive process of working, transforming, and “warming” the metals helps to free the tone sounding from them from its heavier, more material aspects.
Manfred titled our concluding Friday evening concert “Tower Works.” With another surprise relating to the first work on the program titled “Granite Clouds,” we each found ourselves furnished with a small, rough slab and smaller round piece of Alaskan granite, which we were instructed to “play” by dragging the small, smooth stone across the larger, rough one, “like the moving of a cloud.” We then moved on to a somewhat less heavy, but still “earthy” substance for the piece titled “Wooden Earth,” each playing a rhythmic pattern on the wooden xylophone bar we held in our laps, as we sequentially moved around the circle and gradually faded out one by one. Then we moved on to the “TAO” piece, as described earlier with the added traditional instruments. Manfred concluded the concert with two pieces. The first was a long recapitulation with changes of his opening concert on the glockenspiels with alternating iron and copper bars (right), moving through the history of music from ancient China to the middle ages to later western music up to Debussy (copper) and Stravinsky (iron). Finally
Manfred concluded by playing Bartok’s “Cantata Profana” (1939) on the prepared piano, commenting that Bartok has much to offer the future of music. This was a modified “interpretation of the Bartok piece, which was originally inspired by a Romanian fairy tale, “The Enchanted Deer,” that Manfred also told.
In the story nine boys are turned into deer in the forest and, when found by their father, cannot return home to their mother because their antlers no longer fit through the door of their home. This seemed a story about exile, foretelling the soonto-come exile of Bartok himself in America and of so many in Europe as well as the exile of the nine-membered human being in the earthly world. In Manfred’s version, the nine deer tell their father they cannot come home because they now belong to the animal cosmos. Manfred also indirectly related it to a large Beuys installation from 1982, titled “Lightning with Stag in Its Glare” featuring 35 clay “primeval creatures.” He stated that the deer are struck by lighting and split into many parts. He added that the coyote, which has a special task for America, appears in his music as a song of two coyotes (like the two phoenixes), both male and female, referring once more to his opening theme of finding the new music for America, a music not suggested from Europe or borrowed from the Orient. The Cantata itself I found to be a fantastic version of Bartok’s piece (originally written for double chorus, soloists, and orchestra), integrating the soulful, sensitively expressionistic qualities of Bartok with the adventurous sonorities of the musical avant-garde.
A couple of days after leaving Sebastopol I sent Manfred three quotations that I felt embodied the spiritual bases of his musical research, as follows:
Every something is an echo of nothing.
Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.
– John Cage. . . the moment in which God dies is the moment in which Man attains his freedom. It means that God now resides within us. And since God now resides within us, we must now be the creators of the future. . . . In spirit, and also, let’s say, in culture, every single individual on the face of the earth is unique and has his own unique forms of creativity, his own unique creative needs. Each individual forms his own world.
– Joseph BeuysI will to feel the being of Christ.
In matter’s dying it awakens spirit birth.
In spirit thus I find the cosmos
And know myself in cosmic becoming.
– Rudolf SteinerI then heard that Manfred was using these “verses” for improvisation exercises during the second week’s workshop and was also composing a musical piece based on them that he would play on the organ in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco at a concert on Sunday, August 9 (below). I was able to go to this concert, where Manfred also added a fourth section (“movement”) based on Bartok and told me that in the third, “Steiner” section he also worked with St. John’s imagination of the woman clothed with the sun. Grace Cathedral is a huge, stone, Gothic-style structure filled with stained glass windows and having its organ pipes on four different walls. In his concert Manfred made full use of the spatial potentials of tones arising from one end or the other of the cathedral and moving, crossing, or weaving with tones arising from pipes on the other walls. Throughout the concert mighty organ tones would rise and radiate outward, grow ever more varied and complex, be joined by new tones, and then gradually fade away. As had previously occurred to me during some of our improvisation exercises, I imagined each new tone rising up as a forceful spiritual presence, joining other lofty spirits at the original creation “breathing over the face of the waters” – or perhaps anxiously surveying the state of their human creation in the 21st century. Yet at both the organ concert and the exercises
this did not feel like a “flashback” view into the ancient past but rather an improvised new birthing, tone by tone, out of the selfconscious human spirits assembled together.
I realized that, unlike traditional music, one does not experience Manfred’s music so much in time as in space. Tones build up personality-like structures and presences and even relationships and then fade away. This strong spatial, visual quality reminded me of Steiner’s statements about how in the future music will become more like the visual arts (and the visual arts become more like music). Although during our exercises we played what we have learned to call the “diatonic scale” notes, these tone-beings seemed somehow different than that. They were not ordered in the usual sequential scale and each had a very independent presence, mingling together “conversationally” as much in space as in time. With so much emphasis in Manfred’s approach on the richness and presence of the single tone (almost to that future stage of music Steiner mentioned as being able to hear a melody within a single tone), I also wonder a bit whether the essential experience of the interval between the tones becomes a bit too lost. Yet this is also still there in a different way in the “community” of tones sounding together.
I find that the musical work of Manfred Bleffert represents a new step forward in musical research arising out of anthroposophy and, moreover, is a work that others are welcome to join. Another set of workshops is planned for next summer in Sebastopol as well as in several other parts of the country in 2010 (Harlemville, Chicago, San Diego).
For more information, consult www.manfred-bleffert.net which lists these US dates:
» 6/28/10—7/2/10 Harlemville, NY
For information: Ulrike Bleffert, ulrikebleffert@web.de; phone/fax: (0049) (0) 75 54 – 99 01 06
» ANAWME: “Changing Times – Changing Music”: The new music and its natural place in the Waldorf pedagogy — Association of North American Waldorf Music Educators [waldorfmusic.org] For information: Andrea Lyman, themusicpainter@gmail.com or (208) 265-2200
7/12/10—7/16/10 Wauconda, IL, Water’s Edge Waldorf School; registration/housing: Elizabeth English handit2me@sbglobal.net or 847-526-1372 or Monika Sutherland monika@yellowcello.com 7/19/10—7/23/10 San Diego, CA, Waldorf School of San Diego, registration/housing: Bianca D. Lara, biancadlara@hotmail.com or 760-722-8487
» 2010 Summer Courses in Santa Rosa, CA
For information: Ulrike Bleffert , ulrikebleffert@web.de phone/fax: (0049) (0) 75 54 – 99 01 06
7/26/10—7/30/10
Sound Research & Instrument Building
8/2/10—8/6/10
Music: Work with New Instruments and Voice 8/9/10—8/13/10
Visual Art & Its Development through Musical Processes
Thestepfromthe20thintothe21stcenturyheraldedanewmillennium.It alsotriggeredcountlessfearsandotherresponsesthathavesincemostly fadedfrommemory.Buthavetheyreallydisappeared?Areweinwesterncivilizationabletocomparethemoodduringthechangeofthefirstmillennium tothesecondwithourgeneralmoodtodayasweenterthethirdmillennium? Forseveraldecadesbefore1000A.D.therewasasenseinEuropethat doomsdaywasdrawingnear;humanityanticipatedtheLastJudgmentdescribedintheRevelationofJohn.Whenthefatefulyearpassedwithoutincident itwasinterpretedasanactofdivinegracethatwouldcontinueforonlyafew centuriesandallowhumanbeingstimetorepentiftheyfollowedaholypath determinedbytheChurch.ThencametheCrusades,thefinalexpulsionofthe Moors,andtheInquisition.Boththepositiveandnegativeresultsofthisera remainwithus.
RudolfSteinerdescribeshowlargeportionsofourcivilizationwillbeaffected bythetransitiontothethirdmillennium.Hedescribesthatpriortothistransitionaneraofoptimismandconfidenceintechnologicalprogresswillprevail inhumanity–therewouldbenoproblemsolargethatitcouldnotbesolved byhumaningenuity.Thisoptimismhaspersistedintothefirstdecadeofthe thirdmillennium.Yetitisshakenbynewandunexpectedchallengesthat toucheverycountryandallpeoples.Amongthesechallengesarethedistributionofwealthandresources,climateimbalance,thestewardshipandownershipofnaturalresources,populationgrowth,anddiseases.
ThisInternationalEnglishConferencewilladdressthetimesinwhichwelive. Itisanopportunitytoexplorethroughsharedworkwaysofimplementing RudolfSteiner'sindicationsfordevelopingnewinitiativesthatwillturncrisis intoconsciousbenefitandopportunity.
Theworldsituationtodayisserious.Itisaskingustodiscoverandputinto practicenewwaysofworkingwithRudolfSteiner'sindications.Wehopemany friendswilljoinusattheGoetheanumtotakepartinthisspecial,joyfulevent.
Monday August2
15:30Welcome
16:30CoffeeBreak
17:00Lecture
ReadingtheSignsof theTime:HowDoesthe SpiritualSeekerStand intheCrisesofToday? CorneliusPietzner
VirginiaSeaseandCorneliusPietzner ExecutiveCouncil18:00Supper
20:00Eurythmy
LudwigvanBeethoven PianoSonata,no.32, C-minor;ArvoPärt,Mirror inMirror;PoeminEnglish EurythmyStageGroup oftheGoetheanum
ArtisticDirector:CarinaSchmid
10:15CoffeeBreak
11:00Lecture
Meditation:Individual Efforts,CosmicEffects GertrudeReifHughes 12:00Lunch FreeAfternoon
August2–7,2010
Friday August6 9:00Workshops
10:15CoffeeBreak
11:00Lecture
ThePathof AnthroposophyToday SueSimpson 12:00Lunch
14:00FreeInitiatives
15:30ThematicGroups
16:30CoffeeBreak
17:00Lecture
TheMysteryDramas–ARevelationoftheLaws ofKarmaandReincarnation AdrianLocher
Saturday August7
9:00Workshops
10:15CoffeeBreak
11:00Lecture
RudolfSteiner'sIndications:HowdoestheChrist ImpulseWorkToday? VirginiaSease
12:00Conclusion
Endapprox.12:30
20:00Concert
20:00Eurythmy
“WaterIslands: SearchingsinSound”
Eurythmy:MarenStott
Speech:ChristopherGarvey
Piano:AlanStott
18:00Supper
20:00Performance
“Anthropo-Who?”
AHumorousEvening withRonaldKoetzsch
18:00Supper
20:00Performance
“AeschylusUnbound”
Steppingoutofthe GreekMysteriesinto theFutureofTheater byMalaPowersand
GlenWilliamson
GlenWilliamson
LauriePortocarrero
1EstherGerster Painting
2JohnNixon MayHumanBeingsHearit!SpeechChoir
3AstridProkofieffSinging
4AnneRiegel-KoetzschVeilPainting
5SilkeSponheuerToneEurythmy
6MarenStott SpeechEurythmy
7SophiaWalsh SpeechFormation
8JohannesWirz NatureObservationsasaSpiritualPath
9GlenWilliamson/WorkingwithMichaelChekhov’sActingMethods
LauriePortocarrero10JoanAlmon RescuingChildhoodinthe21stCentury
11Aban/DilnawazBanaTheEsotericismoftheEast(India)
12TorinFinser TransformationalExperiencesthroughAdultEducation
13JaneGilmer SpiritualThemesforTodayinShakespeare's“TheTempest”
14Terry/JaneHipolitoThePoweroftheEnglishLanguage
15RonaldKoetzschYouAreFunnierThanYouLook:CultivatingtheComicMind
16JohannesKühl TechnologyandtheTechnicianfromtheViewpoint ofAnthroposophy
17PäiviLappalainen/DeathasaSpiritualChallenge
PhilippMartyn
18AdrianLocher TheRelevanceoftheMysteryDramasinthe21st Century
19AndrewLorand ContemporaryChallengesinBiodynamicAgriculture
20PaulMackay InSearchoftheUniversalHuman
21PatriceMaynardBeingGuardiansfortheChildrenofthe21stCentury
22Molly/QuentinMcMullenSupportingtheKarmaofIllnesswithAnthroposophicMedicine
23Doug/MargueriteMillerBeyondLanguage:RudolfSteinerinTranslation
24CorneliusPietznerLectureThemesinConversation
25MariJoRogers ParsifalandtheSeekeroftheSpiritToday
26HannahSchwartzCommunityBuildingandYouth
27VirginiaSease RudolfSteiner'sRelevanceToday:BiographicalHighlights ofanInitiate
28KathySerafin/FredJanneyAddressingtheHumanBeinginCriminals:LifeinaPrison
29MarjattavanBoeschotenMichaelicInitiativeinOrganisations
30PhilipThatcher BeyondSurvivalSpirituality
31NickThomas HumanConsciousnessandMachineIntelligence
32AndrewWolpertTheLanguageofAnthroposophy
Lea van der Pal’s school, Dornach. Active for anthroposophical work in India and neighbouring countries.
van Boeschoten, Marjatta: Attended Waldorf school in England. Then worked as a lawyer. Presently management consultant working predominately with large companies and government organisations, the IAEA and the BBC. Board member Triodos Bank.
Finser, Torin: Ph.D., Chair, Education Dept. Antioch University, New England. Led the Waldorf Teacher Education Program at the University for the past 20 years. A founder of the Center for Anthroposophy in Wilton, NH and currently serves as one of two General Secretaries of the Anthroposophical Society in America.
Gerster, Esther: Painter, leads the guided tours at the Goetheanum. Teaches painting and drawing at the Anthroposophical Studies course in English. Since 2006 General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Switzerland.
Gilmer, Jane: Ph.D., trained in Anthroposophical Speech and Drama, Harkness Studio, Australia. Active in Rose Theatre Company touring Europe with Shakespeare. Dept. Chair of Drama at the National Institute of Education in Singapore.
Glöckler, Michaela: M.D. attended Waldorf School. Studied German Language and Medicine Tübingen/Marburg. Ten years paediatrician Community Hospital Herdecke. Since 1988 Leader of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum. Active as international lecturer and trainer of medical doctors.
Hagens, Herbert: M.A., Princeton University. Lectures on Steiner’s Mystery Dramas in the U.S. and at the Goetheanum. Has taught German language and literature classes for more than 30 years. Herbert and his wife live in Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
Almon, Joan: Directs the U.S. Alliance for Childhood which supports a healthy, creative childhood for all children. Formerly, Joan was a Waldorf kindergarten teacher. She also ser ved as General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America.
Bana, Dilnawaz: M.A. degree Bombay University in Applied Psychology. Eurythmy Diploma Zuccoli School, Dornach. Curative Eurythmy, Vienna. 22 years in Lukas Klinik. Active in India and neighbouring countries for anthroposophical work.
Bana, Aban: College studies in Bombay and Vienna. Waldorf Education Diploma from Seminar in Goetheanum. Eurythmy Diploma from
Hipolito, Terry: Ph.D. in English, active member of the Section for the Literary Arts and Humanities. A major field of study is the Middle Ages.
Hipolito, Jane: Ph.D., Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Lit. at Calif. State U., Fuller ton and active member of the Literary Arts and Humanities Section.
Janney, Fred: M.A., founding codirector in 1998 of Anthroposophical Prison Outreach. Retired from Michigan Department of Corrections as a clinical psychologist in 2008 after 21 years.
Koetzsch, Ronald: Professional standup comedian. A graduate of Princeton (B.A.) and Har vard (M.A. and Ph.D.), Ronald is Dean of Students at Rudolf Steiner College in California and the editor of
Renewal: A Journal for Waldorf Education.
Kühl, Johannes: Studied physics in Hamburg and Göttingen (Max Planck Institute). He taught at the Waldorf School Stuttgart. Since 1996 leader of the Science Section at the Goetheanum.
Lappalainen, Päivi: Curative education in Finland, Goetheanum coworker, work concerning questions of a culture of death.
Locher, Adrian: Creative Speech at the Peredur Centre for the Arts, England. Active in theatre, now mainly with young people from areas affected by war and conflict.
Lorand, Andrew: Ph.D., American/Swiss biodynamic farmer involved with anthroposophy and biodynamics since 1974. Teaches courses and consults professionally for anthroposophy and biodynamics.
Section in North America. Active as editor and translator including a volume of Goethe’s scientific studies and the Englishlanguage Anthroposophy Worldwide.
Miller, Marguerite: Member of the Collegium of the Literary Arts and Humanities Section in North America.Represents the Section in the North American Collegium of the School for Spiritual Science. Active as translator and editor of anthroposophical books and lectures.
Nixon, John: London School of Speech Formation (Maisie Jones & Ulrike Brockman). Teaches speech including work on an English speakers version of the Foundation Stone Meditation. Lives at Camphill Community Glencraig, Northern Ireland.
Pietzner, Cornelius: Treasurer of the Anthroposophical Society, Goetheanum since 2002. Formerly active in Camphill USA in various roles.
Mackay, Paul: Born in Hong Kong. Cofounder and Managing Director of Triodos Bank in the Netherlands, Executive Director of GLS Bank in Germany. Since 2007 chairman of the Supervisory Board of GLS Bank. Since 1996 Executive Council of the General Anthroposophical Society.
Martyn, Philip: Coauthor of “Crossing the Threshold”, is a lawyer and CoGeneral Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain. He lives in London.
Maynard, Patrice: M.Ed., leads
Outreach and Development for the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA). Taught for 13 years at Hawthorne Valley School, NY. Founding Board of the Merriconeag Waldorf School, Freeport, Maine. Published poet, and a quilter.
McMullenLaird, Molly: M.D., Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Founded
Community Supported Anthroposophical Medicine (outpatient office, inpatient clinic, the Rudolf Steiner Health Center and an alternative economic and educational form for patients called the Patient Organization). Internal Medicine physician with additional training in Anthroposophical Medicine in Germany and Switzerland.
McMullen, Quentin: M.D., Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Founded
Community Supported Anthroposophical Medicine. Internal Medicine physician with additional training in Anthroposophical Medicine in Germany and Switzerland. School Doctor at the Rudolf Steiner School of Ann Arbor.
Miller, Douglas: Ph.D., emeritus professor of German language and literature, member of the Collegium of the Literary Arts and Humanities
ENTERINGINTOTHE21stCENTURY SPIRITUALLY
3rdInternationalEnglishConferenceoftheGeneralAnthroposophicalSociety fromMonday,August2ndtoSaturday,August7th,2010
Pleasecompletetheapplicationandsenditbymail,faxore-mailby MONDAY, JULY 19th, 2010 to: Goetheanum,Reception,P.O.Box,CH-4143Dornach Fax+41-(0)61-7064446,Tel.+41-(0)61-7064444,e-mailtickets@goetheanum.org Mrs Mr
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ATTENTION! Please order the Mystery Drama tickets separately!
IwouldliketoordertheMysteryDramaprogrammfor2010
Portocarrero, Laurie & Williamson, Glen: Members of The Actors Ensemble, based on Michael Chekhov’s approach. Toured widely with “The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” and David Anderson in “The Gospel of John”.
Prokofieff, Astrid: Is a trained Waldorf teacher, studied music and eurythmy and teaches singing and choir in the Anthroposophical Studies in English at the Goetheanum.
Prokofieff, Sergei: Born in Moscow. Studied art and history of art. 1990 a cofounder of the Anthroposophical Society in Russia. Since 2001 member of the Executive Council of the General Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum, author and lecturer.
ENTERINGINTOTHE21stCENTURY SPIRITUALLY August2nd-7th,2010
Reif Hughes, Gertrude: Ph.D., Professor Emerita of Literature at Wesleyan University, CT, USA. Author of Emerson’s “Demanding Optimism“. Member of the Meditation Worldwide Seminar (Goetheanum). Teaches at the Rudolf Steiner (Summer) Institute.
RiegelKoetzsch, Anne: Studied philosophy, art, and music at Oberlin College and has been a faculty member at Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks, California.
Rogers, MariJo: Serves as a General Secretary for the Anthroposophical Society in the United States. Works as a privacy manager in the ethics department of a global technology company.
3rdInternationalEnglishConferenceoftheGeneralAnthroposophicalSocietyattheGoetheanum
Conferencefee
FINALDATE FOR BOOKING: JULY 19th, 2010
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Schwartz, Hannah: Born in Camphill Kimberton Hills and received her B.A. in Women’s Studies and Health Education from Goddard College in 1999. Cofounded Heartbeet Lifesharing (Vermont) in 2000, and is Executive Director. Sease, Virginia: Ph.D., in German literature; since 1984 member of Executive Council of the Anthroposophical Society, Goetheanum. Director of Anthroposophical Studies, Goetheanum. Previously assistent professor, Occidental College; Waldorf teacher. Publications about esoteric Christianity. Serafin, Kathy: Administrator of the Anthroposophical Prison Outreach Program of the Anthroposophical Society in America. Simpson, Sue: General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in New Zealand, is a eurythmist, and educator with management experience.
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Sponheuer, Silke: Teacher for 17 years at the Eurythmy School in Hamburg, and stage group work. Since 1998 Cape Town leading Kairos Eurythmy Training. 2009 M.A. in Dance/Eurythmy at UCT Cape Town.
Stott, Maren: Eurythmy School Nuremberg (1982). Maren is Director of the eurythmy training in Stourbridge, UK.
Thatcher, Philip: Taught at the Vancouver Waldorf School for 17 years. Experienced adult educator and the author of The Raven Trilogy. General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Canada.
Thomas, Nick: Born in England. Trained as electrical engineer in the Royal Air Force, worked as engineering officer for 16 years. Research in conjunction with Lawrence Edwards and John Wilkes.
In 1985 became General Secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain for 21 years. Lectures widely on diverse anthroposophical subjects.
Walsh, Sophia: Born in New Zealand (B.A. in English and languages), in Dornach since 1951. Training in formative speech, Goetheanum stage ensemble, courses in the Pedagogical Seminar and the School for Speech and Drama, speech and speech correction in Columbia, Spain, and the U.S.
Wirz, Johannes: Ph.D., coleader of the Research Institute at the Goetheanum, editor of “Elemente der Naturwissenschaft”.
Wolpert, Andrew: Active in the field of language studies and language teaching for many years. The challenges of how Anthroposophy can be lived in languages other than German and the expectations of the various Folk Souls are urgent themes.
July29–August1,2010
“Thereisnosuchthingasdevelopmentingeneral;thereisonlythedevelopmentoftheone orotherorthirdorfourthorthousandthperson.Therehavetobeasmanydevelopmental processesastherehumanbeingsontheearth.”
RudolfSteiner,31October1910
Thursday July29
14:00–22:30
ThePortal ofInitiation DiePforte derEinweihung
Friday July30 14:00–22:00
TheSoul's Probation DiePrüfung derSeele
Saturday July31 14:00–21:30
10:00–11:00IntroductiontotheMysteryDramasbyHerbertHagens
Sunday August1 14:00–23:00
TheGuardian oftheThreshold DerHüter derSchwelle
TheSoul's Awakening DerSeelen Erwachen
AcenturyafterthepremiereofthefirstMysteryDramainMunich,Germany,and oneyearpriortothe150thanniversaryofRudolfSteiner’sbirth,allfourMysteryDramasarebeingperformedinanentirelynewproductionbytheGoetheanumStage. AsimultaneousreadingoftheplaysinEnglishwillbeprovidedduringtheJuly29 –August1,2010.HerbertHagenswillgivedailylecturesabouttheplaysforparticipantsoftheInternationalEnglishConference.
TheGoetheanumisnowofferingmembersoftheAnthroposophicalSocietytickets atspecialreducedrates(approx.30%reduction).
Non-membersoftheAnthroposophicalSocietywhobookticketsbeforeMarch31, 2010canpurchasethemattheearly-birddiscountrate.(25%reduction).
TicketsandInformation:
Website:www.goetheanum-buehne.ch/3366.html
Phone:+41(0)61-7064444
Fax:+41(0)61-7064446
Email:tickets@goetheanum.org
Are we aware of the needs of the young adult today? Do we recognize the unique gift of each young person? Might there be a way to guide and awaken the young individual to their undiscovered potential?
There are many important and legitimate ways of learning and growing into contributing citizens, but many young adults have no productive outlets for their talents and energy. Such young men and women are often lost, angry, and disheartened. Recognizing that, and with enthusiasm and interest of artists and craft/trades people, the Agawamuck Project for the Fine and Practical Arts (APFPA) was founded. We believe we can offer an alternative to prison and assist those who understandably feel neglected by the typical school situation that appeals primarily to the intellect.
We will offer an opportunity for young adults (ages eighteen to twenty four) to discover their latent creativity and abilities through a “will-based intelligence” which can lead naturally to a deeper sense of self. Essentially, we are talking about a learning through doing, a doing of real and artistically pleasing work.
Our intention initially is to provide a therapeutic, supportive environment and to then facilitate the meeting between the young adult who is ready for an internship with a member of the larger craft/trade circle of instructors.
Individuals will come with many challenges, most likely with a degree of addiction to a variety of substances, dysfunctional relationships, chaotic and unhealthy life patterns, an inability to commit and focus. Thus, the activities—offered 9-to-5, five days a week, at the Center on Main Street in Philmont, NY— would have a therapeutic dimension. Working from the Center or their offices, the therapists will actively engage the individuals in their own healing process through art, music, speech, or eurythmy (movement) therapy. These sessions and the crafts and trades workshops aim to develop self-respect, integrity, inner peace and wonder and to rekindle interest and a sense of purpose in these young lives. Working with their hands and gradually managing the challenges and demands of learning a skill will naturally improve their ability to focus. The development of all these qualities will be reflected in a healthier rhythm and order in their daily lives.
Young adults who to a greater degree ‘have it all together’ could bypass the Center in order to explore and learn: a craft such as leatherwork, pottery, basket weaving, or textiles; an art like clay modeling, wood and stone sculpture or carving, painting, stained glass, cooking, and drama; or a trade like green energy installation, plumbing, stone masonry, or farming and gardening. The co-workers—therapeutic workers in the Center or skilled artists, crafts/trades people taking on an intern—are all aware of the profound healing effects of working with one’s hands. Each instructor knows how important the actual craft has been for them and is willing to share it and encourage the young adult who is seeking the disciplines needed for an engaged, enriched and fulfilled life.
The support team will hear and honor the young person’s interests and particular needs. When the meeting with an instructor is arranged, commitments and responsibilities will be clarified and agreements made. If difficulties arise, a support group member will be available for either the young adult or the crafts/trades person, and will play a nurturing role, ensure good dialogue and review progress.
We are not a drop-in-center. We are looking for proactive individuals who are serious about taking their life in hand and who can also make the commitment to be substance free, including alcohol, when enrolled in the APFPA. This and other clear boundaries are essential for personal growth. Our intention is to work with probation officers, judges, public defenders, and social workers as well as to approach young adults through word of mouth.
Beatrice Birch experienced the therapeutic value of hand/ craft work in her own life and as a teacher in an inner city Waldorf school (waldorfschool.com) where arts and crafts are recognized as essential for healthy development. Over time, she observed growing numbers of children labeled as ADHD who lacked these basic skills. She was further inspired by working at Ruskin Mill (rmet.org.uk), a very successful, craft-based college for youth at risk in England, and at Arta (artalievegoedgroep.nl ), a drug and alcohol rehab center in Zeist, Holland whose 55-60% recovery rate compares to 2-3% common in the USA. The Manchester Craftsman Guild in Pittsburgh, PA (manchesterbidwell. org) is inspiring. For over twenty years Beatrice has worked as a Hauschka Artistic Therapist (HAT) with individuals challenged by conditions such as cancer, asthma, anxiety, and depression. Recently, addicts and ex-felons have been attracted to this therapy. Such rewarding experiences led her to seek out others with a similar insight. The first was Timothy Smith, a stonemason who worked for a decade as an apprentice and became the journeyman mason on The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, where all the skilled work was done by training local young people from Harlem, NY. Timothy had worked for years with young adults seeking to start afresh, some having served time in prison. Beatrice and Timothy were soon joined by Peter Buckbee, a mentor and tradesman, and Nathaniel Williams, an artist and teacher. The shared vision: give people interesting and challenging work and their lives will start to develop quality.
We intend that no one be turned away from this project for financial reasons alone, so tuition is not a condition for participation. Since there are costs involved, we are seeking donations from foundations, businesses, government and individuals. To make a donation to the project, contact Bea Birch at beabirch@ taconic.net
General Council Members
Torin Finser (General Secretary)
MariJo Rogers (General Secretary)
James Lee (at large)
Virginia McWilliam (at large) Regional Council Representatives
Lori Barian (Central Region)
Joan Treadaway (Western Region)
Ann Finucane (Eastern Region)
Marian León, Director of Administration & Membership Services
Jerry Kruse, Treasurer
Evolving News for Members & Friends 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.
©2010 The Anthroposophical Society in America. The responsibility for the content of articles is the authors’.
editor, from Chanticleer, the Berkshire-Taconic Branch newsletter, Feb. 2010
On January 16th approximately 60 people gathered together in the Hawthorne Valley School‘s assembly hall to tackle the question of what the meaning and task of the Anthroposophical Society is in this decade old century of ours.
After the briefest of introductions a smaller group, mainly participants from Think OutWord and the Youth Section, stepped forward to sing a well-crafted suite of mostly shaped-note hymns. Aside from the beneficial listening mood evoked by this lovely, spiritually inclined music, a few telling words and phrases from the hymns set the tone for the day. “Wrestling soul,” “fear,” “death,” “eternal harmony,” were audible examples from the sung lyrics.
Torin Finser then approached the podium, but he didn‘t stay there very long. Almost immediately he put everyone to work. He got the conferees to break up into constellations of five. Against the backdrop of an imagined grim future when all outer manifestations of anthroposophy would be gone from the face of the earth, each participant had to identify their most cherished “inner” treasure from Steiner‘s work.
After a few intensive minutes conversing about this thought-provoking question, Torin was up again, herding all present into a new configuration. This time an inner circle of twelve chairs, of which nine were occupied by volunteer conversationalists, was surrounded by a larger circle of silent listeners. Those within were mandated to converse on the question, “How do you know that something is really true?” As the conversation evolved, “outsiders” moved in and “insiders” moved out. Those who changed position did so at their discretion.
Only after that existential question was addressed and carried for a good while did we “revert” to the classic form of a keynote address. All chairs were slid back to their traditional positions in podium-facing rows, which is what you would expect at the beginning of such a weighty conference. Torin then spoke on the polarity of Truth and Life, from their Apollonian and Dionysian aspects respectively. Torin chose a pregnant quote from the third letter to the members to bracket and to be the basis of his talk: “In Anthroposophy it is the Truths it can reveal which matter: in the Anthroposophical Society it is the Life that is cultivated.” [In The Life, Nature & Cultivation of Anthroposophy, GA26.] He spoke in his role as the U. S. Society‘s General Secretary, so he was able to weave into his presentation the perspectives he had gained from attending the General Secretary‘s Conference in Dornach, where the Society‘s task in the 21st century is an important question. [Nathaniel Williams’ report on Torin‘s talk follows.]
After lunch, everyone sang. Then Rachel Schwartz rendered a passionate, heartfelt, thoughtful presentation on the 1923-1924 Christmas Conference and its significance for the society‘s future. [A report by Peter Buckbee follows.] There could be no doubt in the mind Gary
of any listener who was awake during this talk that Rachel is absolutely convinced that the future of the society lies in the members working together actively out of that impulse. For her, the conference lives on, as does the need to build that indestructible, spiritual Goetheanum under which Steiner laid the Foundation Stone, as well as the need to reach out to as many young people as possible to alert them of this central task.
Before the closing singing, there was still time to open it up to a conversation. And converse everyone did, in a notably frank and honest manner. An intense sequence of contributions sounded into the auditorium, and it brought to the surface the anguish, hope, despair, and goodwill that lived among those gathered. There is certainly much concentrated feeling and thinking within many individuals when contemplating the upcoming task of the society. At the same time, it is fair to say that no one in the room was expecting that the question of what the society was supposed to be doing for the next ninety years was going to be solved then and there, once and for all.
Just prior to the concluding conversation all of the participants were asked to write down their thoughts on the meaning and task of the Anthroposophical Society at that moment.
From one perspective, the gathering itself, in its makeup and expression, may be a clue to the society‘s future. Close to half of those present were under forty, and out of that half a goodly portion was under thirty. The conference began, as mentioned, not with a keynote address, but with small groups wherein individuals conversed about and listened intensely to something that came from the heart of each one there.
After leading the greater group in some conversation Torin Finser focused in on one theme to pursue in depth. He gave a presentation focusing on Truth and Life where he began with a statement from Rudolf Steiner’s third letter to the members. In anthroposophy it is a question of the truths that can be brought to light by it. In the anthroposophical society it is a question of the life in it.
He then continued by guiding our gaze back over the centuries into old Greece. There the mysteries of Apollo and of Dionysus appear.
Apollo who “spoke to men by Zeus’s decree, and for whom no shadow blurred the truth.” Scores of people found their way to the oracle at Delphi, to Apollo who emanated purification. His face was not only pure, though; he also had a face which was pitiless, was cruel.
Students of the Apollonian mysteries were directed to look out into the great expanses of nature for enlightenment. In doing this they became detached from themselves, they were in danger of flying out, without any roots, into the world around them. This loss of anchor ignited fear in them. They were instructed to Nathaniel Williams
transform this fear into awe and reverence in order to maintain themselves. This was a process of catharsis.
Dionysus brings the culture of the vine to people. He is said to have defied death, and death submitted. We find in him the power of resurrection. He could be kind, but he could also be terribly cruel. His power was of ecstatic joy, freedom on one side and brutality on the other. Cicero gave beautiful expression to his attitude in life by saying “Live with joy, die with hope.” Those on the path of Dionysian mysteries were called to know themselves, and their introspection made them vulnerable to the most extreme egotism. They were encouraged to seek balance to this through cultivating compassion. Christopher Bamford has given this cultivation beautiful expression in An Endless Trace:
God does not generate love in us, our loving generates God. The eloquence of this expression is akin to what we find in Cicero. Today, long after Greek times we need both reverence and compassion for the difficulties we face.
Mr. Finser went on by pointing to Truth and Life as expressions of these powers in our time. He brought forward statements out of the letters to the members where he found emphasis on these two powers. First he brought forth a few indicating the power of truth.
» In the first letter the view of looking to the work coming from the Goetheanum as witness of truth.
» In letter five there is an encouragement to work toward common consciousness.
» In letter six the need of members to understand each other is stated.
» In letter seven anthroposophy is described as leading to a wider awakening in the beauty, greatness and the sublimity of nature.
» In letter ten the condition of forming pictures of anthroposophical truths is articulated. It is a condition that each picture must be permeated with reverence.
Torin Finser also brought indications of life out of the letters.
» In letter one we find the instruction that those who would wish to have anthroposophy as a living part of their lives should join the society.
» In letter six the observation is made that in the society individuals draw closer together than in any other field.
» In the seventh letter one finds the observation that in the heart there lives the longing for full and complete life.
Mr. Finser pointed out that besides branch work as a place where individuals draw closer together and find their way into the deeper parts of life, there should be special subject groups of all kinds. This is an area which has tremendous possibility. Rudolf Steiner had encouraged this and used the example of instrument builders. People have a longing in their hearts to go beyond daily routine, to have a full and complete life.
We find a unity of these two forces of truth and of life in anthroposophy and in the verse by Rudolf Steiner:
Would thou know thyself in thy own being, Look out into the world on every side. Would thou know the world, Look into the depths of yourself.
Through working together, through the spoken word we come closer together. Through the work we grow into a wider perspective, and love develops. One should sense when coming together with others—
We await in company together the anthroposophical spirit.
Here we are coming to see the interaction between the two forces. If you see truth on one side of a ladder and life on another you can see that something weaves in between the two. Any truth that we grasp in turn flows down into our action and life. A life experience that we pass through in an engaged and creative way leads us to insight and truth.
4. Confidence and Trust need to be developed. This means having trust precisely when I am not involved, when I am not responsible.
5. The quality of meetings needs to be very high. They need to be spaces where destiny can work. They need to be inviting. This is greatly supported through the practice and presence of art.
6. Society leaders need to see themselves as serving humanity not just the society.
7. There is a need to create a culture of peace. Inner battles must be fought. The culture of peace is connected to silence.
8. We need to develop a readiness to go to the edge, to work with threshold experiences. This should be present in our celebration of birth and our work with the passing at death. The greater world will find itself with the question, how is this possible, how can this be done? The answer is anthroposophy.
This can be difficult but it is necessary. Humor can be an aid. Torin Finser described trying to accompany a close friend of his through death and yet feeling unable to speak of it. With the friend quoting Walter Johannes Stein this all changed. She said, “You know Torin, you have told me before, there is the time of your birth, the time of your death and in between you have the time of your life.”
Today we find there is a fear of the spiritual. Today people only see the spiritual as religious and that is thought of as equivalent to dogmatic. Today we need to find our way to celebrate truth by working into life. Anthroposophists should find the courage to speak clearly and openly. The 21st century is not a century for shyness.
One can also look at this from the perspective of evolution.
Saturn Warmth, life in the bosom of God, in the womb
Sun Air, truth
Moon Water, soul life
Earth Physical
The tasks of the anthroposophical society demand movement between these areas, breathing from one into the other.
Torin Finser then pointed out that if you looked at the past fifty years of the society and thought of these two powers as on a scale, you would see that truth has been laid on far heavier than life. If truth is overemphasized then you forget life. He pointed to the fact that the meetings of the General Secretaries are revealing more and more the need to cultivate life.
The truth needs life, the life needs the truth. The kings need the shepherds the shepherds the Kings. The general anthroposophical society needs the school for spiritual science and the school for spiritual science needs the general society.
Torin Finser then went on to describe eight points that have been developed in the General Secretary meetings.
1. There is a need for information. A society is a worldwide movement and must be able to communicate.
2. A living festival life needs to be cultivated.
3. There is a need to continually support freedom. How can this be done while avoiding the negative associations this word has gathered in our time through politics.
We have 48,000 members of the society worldwide. Last year the membership grew in the USA. There are eight million connected with anthroposophical work in some way. We need to pull together, to become a strong movement. Mr. Finser read the quote from Rudolf Steiner which he had begun with to close.
In anthroposophy it is a question of the truths that can be brought to light by it.
In the anthroposophical society it is a question of the life in it.
On the 16th of January, as a part of the “The Meaning and Task of the Anthroposophical Society in the 21st Century” gathering in Harlemville NY, Rachel Schwartz gave a presentation on the refounding of the anthroposophical society in 1923 during the Christmas Conference. Rachel described in a heartfelt way her path of discovery, as it lead her first to the Anthroposophical Society, then eventually deeper into what took place at the Christmas Conference. Below are some of the thoughts she shared.
The Christmas Conference is something that can be experienced as both a personal and a cosmic event. It could be seen as a refounding of the mysteries and a path of initiation for our time. It was a Michaelic deed that spoke to the hearts of the members who were present, and at the same time to the whole earth and heavens. It was at that time that Rudolf Steiner took
on leadership of the Society, thus uniting his karma with it. In that sense, every failure on our behalf is an obstacle also for him, and “every success can become a building stone in the new temple, the invisible temple of human community.”
Rachel conveyed how, when her parents were young, the Christmas conference was still very much living in anthroposophical circles and could be met as a “sea of esotericism.” The Christmas Conference is never closed, but how is it living now? It’s there for spiritual beings and also for human beings who are called to work together. Yet, where are the other young people who feel the draw to this substance and to do this kind of work? Have we been hindered by materialistic thinking? It’s crucial that people share their spiritual experiences with one another. The anthroposophical society should be a place for openness, and also for genuine esotericism. She reminded us of the first statute: “[The purpose of the anthroposophical society is] to nurture the life of the soul on the basis of true knowledge of spiritual science.” Truth and Life cannot be separated. Truth is in service to life, life in service to truth. It’s a natural urge to want to be of aid to the world, and the anthroposophical society ideally is a place where we find nourishment through a sharing of truth and life so that we can better serve the world while living out our destiny.
This path involves ceaseless commitment to cultivating the inner life, through working with the Foundation Stone meditation, for instance. This simple inner act holds so much power that if taken seriously by enough people, over time it will solve world problems. This takes courage; “courage will make us wakeful.” Rachel ended with a poem by Rex Raab on Membership.
Thanks to Gary Lamb who organized these reports, to the reporters, and to Kristin Ramsden for the photos. —The editor.
This year’s annual conference and members’ meeting is scheduled for October 15–17, 2010, and will be held at the Chicago Waldorf School in Chicago, IL. Speakers will include Gunther Hauk, Dr. Ross Rentea, and Frederick Spaulding.
It is an important moment to celebrate and honor, with the St. Mark’s Group, 100 years of anthroposophic activity in New York City and in North America. Over the past century, many individuals worked tirelessly to help shape the many branches and study groups of the Society, the School for Spiritual Science with its strong Class and Section work, the Waldorf schools, Camphill communities, biodynamic farms,
A group of American Anthroposophical Society members from Atlanta, joined by a number of regular students of Anthroposophy, launched Anthroposophy Atlanta in October 2006, at the conclusion of the inaugural September Conference, an anthroposophical event organized in conjunction with the Traveling Speakers Program.
Over a hundred and fifty people from Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Florida convened for that initial conference, The Michaelmas Impulse, which featured Bernie Wolf as guest lecturer. The success of the weekend event resulted in an enthusiastic call to initiate a formal anthroposophical group with the intention and great desire to plant the seed for a strong anthroposophical community in Atlanta, in anticipation of one day becoming a center for anthroposophical works in the Southeast.
Anthroposophy Atlanta has continued its conference organization efforts, and in September 2008, the group welcomed Douglas Miller from the Traveling Speakers Program for a weekend event entitled The Consciousness Soul. An evening conference featuring Marco Pogacnik speaking about Sacred Geography followed in early 2009.
We are now in our fourth year of regular Wednesday evening anthroposophical study. The Wednesday Study Group enjoys steady participation of fifteen active members of the Anthroposophical Society as well as five or more students of Rudolf Steiner’s work. The group, which meets at Academe of the Oaks High School, the sister school of the Waldorf School of Atlanta, has worked on the following books by Dr. Steiner: The Knowledge of Higher Worlds, Theosophy, Rosicrucian Wisdom, Love and Its Meaning in the World, Christianity as a Mystical Fact, The Gospel of St. John, The Fifth Gospel, and several lectures related to the festivals of the year. For additional information, contact:
Eva Handschin, Anthroposophy Atlanta 104 Blackheath Way, McDonough, GA 30253 evah@academeatlanta.org
Kathleen Wright of the Eastern Regional Council adds: “Congratulations to “Anthroposophy Atlanta” on becoming an officially recognized group of the Anthroposophical Society in America! We are especially pleased to see how Anthroposophy is growing in the South. There are now several members in Alabama and there are at least two study groups in South Carolina, and Florida anthroposophists schedule a large conference for the weekend of March 19-21.”
financial institutions, art, theater, eurythmy, speech and other professional and personal services. It is also an opportunity to look ahead to the next 100 years. How shall this work become further rooted in American culture? What does it mean to be an anthroposophist in America today? How are we connecting with the spiritual beings of America?
These are some of the questions to be introduced and explored during the conference. Details about the program will be available later this spring. Questions? Please contact the Society’s administrative office in Ann Arbor, phone 734.662.9355; email marian@anthroposophy.org
The dates listed here are intended for individuals who choose to begin a new Soul Calendar verse each week on a Sunday, starting with verse #1 at Easter in accordance with Rudolf Steiner’s own indication. The Sunday practice conforms to the way in which the 52 verses originally appeared in the 1912-1913 edition of the Soul Calendar. The dating formula presented here for 2010-2011 allows one to meditate in tune with the seven-day astral rhythm of one’s soul life as well as to keep in sync with the major festival moods. Furthermore, this approach is based on the recognition that there is a meditative pathway of seven verses, starting with verse #46 leading up to Easter and then with verse #1 from Easter to Whitsun. However, there are 55 weeks between Easter 2010 and Easter 2011. Accommodating 52 verses over a span of 55 weeks requires an adjustment. The repetition of three heart verses during January and February 2011 is the solution being proposed here. People may wish to formulate an alternate sequence instead. The moveable cosmic date of Easter requires the meditant to chart a new course every year, since there are never 52 weeks between one Easter and the next.
Herbert O. Hagens Princeton, NJApril 4 #1
Easter Mood (2010)
April 11 #2
April 18 #3
April 25 #4
May 2 #5
May 9 #6
May 16 #7
Luciferic Temptation
May 23 #8 (Whitsun)
May 30 #9
June 6 #10
June 13 #11
June 20 #12
St. John’s Mood
June 27 #13
SUMMER
July 4 #14
July 11 #15
July 18 #16
July 25 #17
Aug. 1 #18
Aug. 8 #19
Aug. 15 #20
Luciferic Temptation
Aug. 22 #21
Aug. 29 #22
Sept. 5 #23
Sept. 12 #24
Sept. 19 #25
Sept. 26 #26
Michaelmas MoodOct. 3 #27
Oct. 10 #28
Oct. 17 #29
Oct. 24 #30
Oct. 31 #31
Nov. 7 #32
Nov. 14 #33
Ahrimanic Temptation
Nov. 21 #34
Nov. 28 #35
Dec. 5 #36
WINTER
Dec. 12 #37
Dec. 19 #38
Christmas Mood
Dec. 26 #39
Jan. 2 #40 (Epiphany)
Jan. 9 #41 (Depths of the Heart)
Jan. 16 #42 (Warmth of the Heart)
Jan. 23 #43 (Forces of the Heart)
Jan. 30 #41 (Repetition)
Feb. 6 #42 (Repetition)
Feb. 13 #43 (Repetition)
Feb. 20 #44
Feb. 27 #45
Mar. 6 #46
Ahrimanic Temptation ( Ash Wednesday March 9, 2011)
Mar. 13 #47
Mar. 20 #48
Mar. 27 #49
Apr. 3 #50
Apr. 10 #51
Spring Anticipation
Apr. 17 #52
(Palm Sunday/ Holy Week)
SPRING
Apr. 24 #1
Easter Mood (2011)
The personalities who were instrumental in sowing the first seeds of anthroposophy in America epitomize the qualities shared by all anthroposophists in that they turned aside from the ordinary highroad of civilization, along which mankind travels, and sought out paths of their own. I was closely involved with these early members and should be able to give a clear impersonal picture of them, but I find I cannot do this. To speak impersonally of them is asking too much of myself, because they made up the intimate circle of my youth and stamped a lasting impression on me in my formative years. My delineation of the people I wish to characterize is quite subjective, colored by my affection for them.
In preparing this lecture I seemed to be living again in the times I shall try to describe. I shall try to make the names come to life for you as human beings whom it was my good fortune to know. I shall describe only those who have died and not those still working among us. I will tell you something of the appearance and temperament of those forerunners. Though they have nearly all passed through the portal of death, they are living and helping in the work of the Society and we are all connected with those who helped prepare our path.
Rudolf Steiner says that people enter the Society in three different ways. One may be brought to anthroposophy by an inner compulsion of the heart, another, perhaps, by reasons based on the understanding, the third through some exterior occasion. He calls them all “homeless souls.” The early members of whom I speak came into the movement for the most part from the first two categories. In the first decade of the twentieth century there were very few outward occasions. Nowadays one can become interested in anthroposophy through its many activities. For example, a eurythmy performance may lead a spectator into deeper study. In 1909 there was no eurythmy. An actor today searching for vocal freedom, may meet the liberating art of speech-formation (Sprachgestaltung). An invalid restored to health through anthroposophical medicine, a parent seeing his child transformed through the pedagogy, a farmer whose land is saved by Biodynamic agriculture, those in despair over the state of the world who find their answers in the threefold commonwealth of Rudolf Steiner, are all likely to become members of the Society. None of these outer revelations had been given to the world in the years of which I first speak. Those who came into anthroposophy at that time came through an inner revelation, either of the mind or of the heart, and both sorts of people were represented in the handful of members who first read together in New York City. They became interested either through a line in a book or by a conversation—the written or the spoken word. At this time Rudolf Steiner, living and lecturing in Berlin, was general secretary of the German Section of the General Theosophical Society of which Mrs. Annie Besant was presi -
dent. Berlin was a very long way from New York. One could not reach there by an overnight flight, and a letter took a long time. In the early 1890s the best music conservatory in New York City was the Metropolitan College of Music located on 14th Street which was then the fashionable part of town. This school was founded and directed by an eminent tenor from New England, Herbert Wilber Greene, a pupil of Sbriglia in Paris and of William Shakespeare in London. Mr. Greene was a well-known figure of his time, president of the National Singing Teachers’ Association, associate editor of the magazine Etude and frequent contributor to Musical America on the subject of singing. The Conservatory maintained a residence for his students nearby, among whom was an 18-year-old soprano from Montclair, New Jersey, Grace Richards (left), daughter of the publisher of the New York Tribune. The only girl in a family of boys, she was allowed almost anything she wanted, and what she wanted most was to sing. Early pictures of her show a tall, handsome young girl, and I am told that she was absolutely carefree and full of fun.
After her graduation she went to Europe to continue her vocal studies in Paris and later in Berlin, and by the time she was in her late 20s she had toured the British isles with the great violinist Jan Kubelik and sung in many of the countries of Europe. She had italianized her name to Gracia Ricardo. Although she went to Germany to find a singing teacher, the teacher she found was not a German, but an American woman, Lilla van Dyck Harris (right), born in Louisville, Kentucky, who had spent most of her lifetime in Germany. Miss Harris was assistant teacher in the studios of the worldrenowned soprano, Lilli Lehmann. By 1908 Miss Harris and Madame Ricardo were both teaching together in Berlin. Among Mme. Ricardo’s pupils was a young lady, Merwin Roe (left), daughter of the popular American novelist E. P. Roe. Miss Roe had become acquainted with the book Theosophy by Rudolf Steiner, which she lent to the two musicians who became interested and went, in the fall of 1909, to the Berlin Architektenhaus to hear Dr. Steiner lecture. They met him and Fräulein Marie von Sivers who later became his wife. They continued to attend his lectures until 1910, when they left for a trip to America, Mme. Ricardo to make a concert tour, and Miss Harris to take up residence in New York for a year. On arriving, Mme. Ricardo looked up her first singing teacher. In the intervening years musical New York had moved uptown to 57th Street. Herbert Greene was the first tenant to
take studios in the newly built Carnegie Hall. He also had a thriving Summer School of Singing in Brookfield Center, Connecticut, which he had established with his second wife, Caia Aarup, the Danish pianiste whom he had married in 1902. Mr. Greene (left) invited Mme. Ricardo to his summer school and she gave a concert there. Because Mrs. Greene’s room was the most comfortable in the old New England homestead, this was allotted to Mme. Ricardo for her stay. On the bookshelves in her room she found the works of the theosophists H. P. Blavatsky, Annie Be sant, Mr. Sinnett, and Colonel Olcott. The next morning at breakfast Mme. Ricardo said, “If you are interested in theosophical literature, I have some books for you to read.” Thus the pupil of Mr. Greene’s early years brought to him toward the close of her brilliant, but rather short career as a singer, the works of Rudolf Steiner, which were to completely change his life.
But was this the beginning of anthroposophy in New York? No! Two members had been reading Dr. Steiner’s lectures together there for a year. This brings us to the story of Ethel Parks Brownrigg, whom many of you must have known, as she lived until 1953. Strangely enough Ethel Parks too was a singer. She was studying in Germany and went with a young American friend, Helen Hecker, to hear the lectures of Rudolf Steiner in Berlin. When, in 1906, Miss Parks (right) applied for membership in the Theosophical Society, it already showed signs of decline. She joined it at a crucial moment in its history. Dr. Steiner himself says, “Even as early as 1906 things were already beginning to be manifest in the Theosophical Society which indicated in a terrible measure its deterioration.” You are all familiar with the events of the following years which concerned the Indian boy, Krishnamurti, and resulted in the forming of the Anthroposophical Union during the Christmas Conference of 1912 at Cologne by those theosophists who, from the beginning, had been interested in Rudolf Steiner. Ethel Parks was one of those who, as early as 1906, recognized Dr. Steiner’s form of spiritual knowledge, so different from theosophical dogma. She returned to America in 1909 to be married to John Brownrigg, and at that time only two followers of Rudolf Steiner were living in the United States. One was her friend Helen Hecker who had preceded her home and had returned to California, where she later founded the group which now bears her name. The other was Dr. Alma von Brandis of Los Angeles, a member of long standing from Europe. Ethel Brownrigg’s brother, Richard Parks, another singer, joined the German Section of the Theosophical Society in October 1909. He became interested when his sister visited him that year in the Middle west.
I would like to make a few personal remarks about Ethel Brownrigg. In her youth she had marked physical beauty of a
delicate, fragile kind. She was a blue-eyed, goldenhaired girl with a coloratura soprano voice and had sung in opera in Sicily. She later sang the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Her career was interrupted by illness and the birth of two sons, but her interest in and devotion to the work of Rudolf Steiner was uninterrupted throughout her life. Although very feminine, she was choleric by nature and capable of great initiative and determination, which was invaluable to the work. During a conversation I had with Dr. Steiner in 1920, he inquired for her.
Mrs. Brownrigg had deep affection for her brother, Richard Parks (right), and they were very proud of each other. It was a source of happiness to her that she could share anthroposophy with him. He was a dignified, handsome man and had by nature many of the attributes we all try to cultivate. He was equable and created harmony around him. Although he had one of the finest bass voices imaginable, he was not vain.
A true gentleman, he possessed a quality one can only call chivalrous. Tolerant and open-minded, he was fertile ground for the seeds of anthroposophy. He was much beloved by his pupils.
When Mme. Ricardo and Miss Harris arrived in New York in the spring of 1910, they sought out Mrs. Brownrigg and arranged to meet for the reading of a lecture by Rudolf Steiner – the first meeting of the group that was later to become the St. Mark Group. The meeting was held in the Ma sonic Publishing Company Auditorium, a small room placed at their disposal by the publisher, Mr. Robertson. Six people attended. Besides the publisher and a painter, a Mr. Saunders who later lost interest, they were Mrs. Brownrigg, Mr. Parks, Miss Harris, and Mme. Ricardo, with Mrs. Brownrigg as leader. Afterwards the meetings were held in Mrs. Brownrigg’s apartment. In the winter of 1910 Mr. and Mrs. Greene joined the Group. This was the year in which the St. Mark Group received its name, and there is some doubt as to how it originated. That was just before my time, so I refer to notes left by Mrs. Brownrigg. She wrote:
Letters sent to Dr. Steiner from me asking for a name for the Group and replies from the Headquarters in Berlin crossed in the mails, creating a confusion. One reply to my letter stated that “St. Mark” would be a good name, because his concise, analytical writing was peculiarly adapted to the American mind. Dr. Steiner later stated that “New York was a very good place to found the St. Mark Group.”
It was in the fall of 1910 that I came as a schoolgirl from the West Coast in search of a singing teacher. I first went to Chicago and Boston and could have decided to stay in either of these cities, but I met a clergyman in Boston who was preaching in a church in Brookfield Center, and he told me of Mr. Greene. Out of the hundreds of vocal studios into which I might have walked, my legs karmically carried me to Mr. Greene’s in Carnegie Hall, just as he had heard about anthroposophy, and I knew that that was where I wanted to stay. A photograph of Rudolf Steiner occupied a place of prominence. When I asked whose that wonderful face was, Mr. Greene told me, and this was the first time I heard the name Rudolf Steiner. When I inquired further, he said
I was too young to be interested, and he was right. I was very ambitious and, with beginner’s luck, had a busy and absorbing season. After the first winter’s vocal study with Mr. Greene, I made a concert tour of the United States, so it was some time before I read The Way of Initiation, which Mrs. Greene had given me.
In 1913, a year after the Anthroposophical Society was formed in Europe, Caia Greene (below) became the leader of the St. Mark Group and remained its leader until 1924, when the Society was reorganized. Her leadership came about through the illness of Mrs. Brownrigg. Mrs. Greene took up the leadership reluctantly. She never wanted to occupy any position of prominence, as she was reticent and unassuming. I had to look her up in the music biographies at the public library before I could learn the extent of her career as a concert pianiste in Scandinavia. Such was her innate modesty. Caia Greene was not easy to know. Although she never spoke against anyone, she was truthful rather than tactful if asked for her opinion. Externally she showed a cool reserve, but within she possessed spiritual warmth and the ability to understand and comfort. She appreciated all kinds of people. Her national qualities were marked; she was a true Dane. As she spoke both German and English fluently, she was able to provide translations for her Group. Rudolf Steiner later said that the possibility of fostering anthroposophy in New York in those early times “was due to her virtue.” I heard Dr. Steiner say to her as we parted from him in Dornach in 1920, “Wir sind im Gedanken eins.” (“We are one in thought.”)
Although the St. Mark Group was small, Mrs. Greene considered the position of leader one of great responsibility. She had an enormous capacity for work and study, and from that moment on gave the major portion of her time to anthroposophy. She bought every lecture or book available in German or English and set up a lending library for their distribution. We mailed books to interested persons all over the country and as far away as Honolulu and carried on a correspondence with these distant friends. I became secretary of the St. Mark Group in 1913, a position I filled, except when I was away on tour, until the spring of 1953, when I moved to the country. I refer to the secretary’s notebook of 1914 which states:
There is at present in the St. Mark library or in circulation, available for the use of the members, all of Dr. Steiner’s printed works in German and English, nearly all of his cycles in German and all of the translations that have so far been placed at the disposal of the group by the translator, Mr. Collison. The library is the personal property of Mrs. Greene.
Mrs. Greene placed copies of Dr. Steiner’s fundamental books in the New York Public Library through the head librarian, Mr. Bjerregaard, a countryman of hers, who distributed them among the neighborhood branches. Later we were able to obtain translations by exchange. Dorothy Pethick of the London
Fellowship wrote offering to send us The Apocalypse in return for Theosophy of the Rosicrucians and Mrs. Richmond in New Zealand offered for sale copies of the lecture Christ and the Human Soul, twenty-five of which we purchased.
Expansion of the Group or calling the work to public notice in New York was not considered desirable at that time. Mrs. Greene was repeatedly advised to proceed with extreme caution. This was the stage in the development of anthroposophy in America which could be characterized as the “Catacomb Period.” Mrs. Greene was made to feel that she was not the ambassador of anthroposophy in America, but rather its guardian. There was a great urge throughout the Society in Europe to spread the teachings far and wide and group leaders tried to increase their membership, but Rudolf Steiner did not approve of this. He knew the movement must grow, but said it should be in a slow and healthy way. He was against any sort of propaganda. Dr. Steiner stressed the importance of group work. A group is composed of all kinds of people and is affected and changed by the quality of every new member who joins it. The group must be a living community and this can be brought about through the substance of anthroposophy worked over together as a group. This, he felt, was the group leader’s responsibility. He said, “The structure of the group should be organized around the personality of the group leader. This is often taken far too lightly.” The St. Mark Group, working together as a small community, experienced a progressive development of consciousness and grew of itself without forcing. During the very first year of Mrs. Greene’s leadership, eight new members joined us. Later, at the proper time, she was able to bring the work before the public in a larger way.
In 1913 Mr. Greene’s studio was our ark, or perhaps I should say our eyrie, as it was on the seventh floor of Carnegie Hall. The Group was invited to meet there and was his guest for the next 11 years. It would have been inconceivable that the St. Mark Group pay rent. The Greenes were proud to be able to provide its home. Those who met together were nearly all musicians, mostly singers. Dr. Steiner says that artistic activities were scarcely fostered in the Theosophical Society. Artists did not feel at home there. He thought it was important to make the artistic alive among us, and that, because the anthroposophically-minded members in Germany were able to unfold art along with spiritual knowledge, they grew more and more into the truth of the modern experience of the spirit.
Mr. Harry Collison came from England in 1913 and gave public lectures in the Carnegie Hall Studios. When we went to call at his hotel we found him literally snowed under with pages of new translations. He put us to work assembling the mimeographed sheets. By the time he left for home we were supplied with reading material for the group evenings for some time to come. A yearly fee from each member was paid him for their use.
Every spring we moved trunks full of Dr. Steiner’s books and lectures to the Brookfield School for safekeeping and study. Automobile rides were a special pleasure in the Connecticut countryside in those days, and Mr. Greene had a large Haines touring car which he filled with a different group of students every afternoon for a long drive. At lunch he would sometimes say, “We’ll have our ride this afternoon, but first I would like to spend an hour on the fourth chapter of Occult Science. You are welcome if you wish to join me.” Many accepted the unique
invitation. Several anthroposophists spent whole summers in Brook field, among the young music students, to study the lecture cycles together. The years from 1915 to 1920 were a time of growth. Mr. Greene’s accompaniste, Gladys Barnett (now Mrs. William Hahn); and later her sister Ruth (now Mrs. Hans Pusch), who was then a child; his assistant Sarah Mesick; his tenor pupil William Hahn, with his wife Violet and her daughter Frances Williams; and Mrs. Greene’s piano student Herbert Chaudiere, all later became active members of the Society. In the winter Mr. Greene taught singing three days a week in Philadelphia, and as some of these young people lived there, they formed the nucleus of a circle which read anthroposophy with him after the day’s work was over.
Although in 1918 anti-German feeling was very strong, we continued to hold our group meetings in New York. The studio was full of the precious German lecture cycles. One afternoon as Mr. Greene was teaching, three secret service men knocked on the door, took suitcases of lectures for examination, and coldly insisted that he go with them for questioning. But before the taxi reached police headquarters, they were so impressed with his perspicacity, candor, and charm, that they asked him if he had ever seriously considered joining the United States Secret Service himself. Possessing, as he did, the best American traits, he saved the situation by the strength of his personality. His was an outstreaming, irresistible nature, which made friends at every turn. He was an unusually handsome man, and one never forgot the depth of the penetrating glance of the blue eyes, choleric yet kind, which he turned upon the world. Adversity never darkened his sunny spirits. He was once described
to me as a combination of a shrewd yankee businessman and a tender-hearted girl. Personally, I could never see the “shrewd Yankee,” because he was unselfish and generous to a fault. He financed everyone he met who, in his opinion had “never had a chance.” When he died in 1924, he had given away his huge earnings. There was something glorious about it! He left only the Brook field School.
Brookfield Center was not the only place in Connecticut where anthroposophy was fostered in the summers. Mme. Ricardo and Miss Harris spent the summer of 1912 in Pomfret at the guest house of Elinor Matheson, and here we meet for the first time Irene Brown, who later became a benefactress to the Society in many branches of its work, as well as Katherine Jewell Everts, a dramatic reader with whom Mme. Ricardo later gave recitals. With several others, active in the arts, Mme. Ricardo formed a group there. As most of the members of the Pomfret Group lived in or near New York City in the winter, they attended the St. Mark group, into which, in the course of time, the Pomfret Group was absorbed. Later it was from Katherine Everts that Maud and Henry Monges first heard the name of Rudolf Steiner, as did Katherine Wannamaker, who took her daughter Margaret to Miss Everts’ camp in 1922.
Mrs. Wannamaker was born the daughter of missionaries in India. She always had a deep longing for the spiritual world and was never happy in the atmosphere of foreign missions. Orthodox Protestantism did not satisfy her. She found in Rudolf Steiner what she had so long sought and shared this with her husband Olin Wannamaker, whose continued contribution to the work as translator, lecturer, and teacher is well known to you all. In 1923 Mr. Wannamaker was searching for an apartment for Lucy and Leo Neuscheller and their two little girls, who were expected from Dornach. Mme. Neuscheller, as you know, is the pioneer who brought eurythmy to New York, holding her first eurythmy classes in the Carnegie Hall Studio. Her long and untiring efforts for the advancement of eurythmy continue to the present day. Mr. and Mrs. Neuscheller arrived only a few months before the end of the period I report. Their lively interest and the experience of their years in Dornach brought a new surge of vitality into the life of the St. Mark Group.
We had seen one demonstration of eurythmy the previous season, when Miriam Wallace returned from her studies in Dornach and gave an informal performance at the Seymour School. Caia Greene played the accompaniments and I recited the poems for her.
You can see how the small circle started by Ethel Brownrigg, Richard Parks, Gracia Ricardo and Lilla Harris continues to widen. There were only about 30 members, but the Group was full of life and vitality. We also took our practical responsibilities seriously; when the Goetheanum expressed a need for money in 1921, we were able to send a contribution of $1,157 to Dornach.
Many of you knew Mme. Ricardo in her later years, as she was active in the American Society in the 1920s and again in the 1940s. When I first met her, she was a majestic and commanding figure, a cosmopolitan personality, in the spiritual sense of the word. She had a warrior’s bravery, a strong will, and a warm heart. When she took a firm stand, she was not easily swayed. She spoke her mind freely and expected others to do the same. If her anger was aroused, it rarely lasted overnight, as she had a forgiving nature and suffered over not always meeting this in
others. She tried to begin each day like a clean slate, harboring no ill will. Feeling a deep need for affection herself, she gave it unstintingly to her friends. Her last appearance as a public singer was in 1913 with the pianist Walter Morse Rummel in Berlin, characteristically to raise funds for the building of the first Goetheanum. In the following years she worked toward the development of a new art of tone production fructified by anthroposophy. She returned to New York in 1922 with a special task, that of introducing the anthroposophical medical work to America, an activity she continued long after the organization of the American Society. Mme. Ricardo spent the rest of her long life interesting people in the works of Rudolf Steiner and teaching singing to a limited number of singers, among whom were Marion Szekely-Freschl, Berty Jenny, Gina Palermo, Mary Theodora Richards, and I, all members of the Society. She divided her time between America and Dornach where she died in 1955. Few of you, however, knew Miss Harris, as she was never in America after 1912. She was a complex and interesting personality. Of medium height and figure, she had the graceful, upright carriage of the trained singer. In 1904 she was engaged by Cosima Wagner for Bayreuth, but had the tragic experience of permanently losing her singing voice, and her career abruptly ended. At her funeral in 1937, Albert Steffen spoke of “her beautiful and difficult life.” He described her connection with Lilli Lehmann as that of mother and daughter, and pointed out that although destiny did not allow her to fulfill her promise as a Wagnerian singer, it set her in the midst of the artistic culture of her time. Among her friends were many of the celebrities of the European world of music and the theater, and she acquired a high degree of artistic development, which she later brought to the understanding of anthroposophy. Herr Steffen said that one saw the sacrifice of her hopes on her courageous, perceptive face, as a gentle pain shining through. One heard it in the resignation of her voice. It was not a passive renunciation one felt in her, but rather that life had proved a complete compensation for all she had forfeited. Miss Harris was an entertaining and brilliant conversationalist with a subtle sense of humor. She made her home in Dornach with Mme. Ricardo and Frl. Mathilde Scholl. Frl. Scholl was one of the earliest pupils of Rudolf Steiner and took part in the first Foundation Meeting in Berlin in 1902 with those who found in Rudolf Steiner the guide they felt could lead them along the right paths. The Dornach home of the three friends, so different in temperament, became a gathering place for English-speak ing visitors who, without the German language, might otherwise have been quite at a loss in Dornach at that time. Miss Harris was sponsor for our Group and her inspired letters of information were of inestimable value. When Dr. Steiner began the carving of the Christ statue, she wrote us about it, giving us the privilege of contributing toward the purchase of the wood. She was our bridge to Dornach, our link with the Goetheanum.
Dr. Bradley Stoughton (right), whom many of you know, was secretary of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers in 1914 and was living in
New York with his wife, Merwin Roe, who figured in the first sentences of this history. Merwin Stoughton had become a member in Germany years before. Not only did they attend the St. Mark Group meetings, but provided, over the years, suitable quarters for the weekly open meetings and public lectures, first in their house on East 76th Street and later in the Auditorium and rooms of the Engineering Society’s Building, where Dr. Stoughton and others lectured on anthroposophy to the public.
At this point interest began to spread out in various directions. Mr. van Leer and Baron Walleen, lecturers from Europe, made the first of their visits to New York in 1916, speaking to the public. Another American singer, W. Henri Zay (right) arrived after a stay in England where he was a member. An attractive, urbane personality, author of Practical Psychology of Voice and of Life, Mr. Zay soon had a circle of newly interested readers around him and his English bride. He formed an independent group, the Emerson Group, which later united with St. Mark’s. At the time of his sudden death in 1927, he was a member of the St. Mark Directive Committee. Mrs. Emily Palmer Cape interested many of her friends and read with them. Small study circles sprang up all over the city, but met together at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday evenings.
After the war, Henry Hagens, a soldier in the United States Army, looked us up. He told us that he knew he would survive in battle as Dr. Steiner had bade him goodbye with the words “Auf Wiedersehen.” Mistaken for a German, he had been a prisoner of the French in Africa, guarded by native troops, and had lost track of his fiancee in the postwar confusion of Germany. Lilla Harris succeeded in finding her. Emmy Hagens later became a teacher in the Rudolf Steiner School. In 1932, Mr. and Mrs. Hagens founded a group in Princeton, New Jersey, with Mr. Hagens as leader. After his death in 1951, his wife carried on the group work until her death in 1957, when their son Herbert became the leader of the Henry Hagens Group.
Early in 1921 Ralph Courtney came from Europe as representative of the Futurum Company. A newspaperman, he had been European correspondent in Paris for the New York Tribune. When Futurum failed in Switzerland Mr. Courtney took a position on the New York Herald, which sent him to Washington, D.C., during the Washington Disarma ment Conference to interview the leaders of the Western Powers. Deeply impressed by Dr. Steiner’s concept of a new social order and filled with enthusiasm for the furtherance of these ideas, Mr. Courtney contributed richly to the life of the St. Mark Group by lectures and courses which he gave on this subject from his arrival in the spring of 1921 until the autumn of 1923. The Threefold Commonwealth Group was formed around him as leader in December 1923. Four members of the St. Mark Group joined the new group, Gladys Barnett, May Laird-Brown, Louise Bybee, and Charlotte Parker. The other independent groups in New York, the Pomfret and Emerson groups, had eventually been absorbed by the St. Mark Group, but the Threefold Commonwealth Group grew in
strength and vitality. Today, as you all know, it provides a yearround center for the fostering and cultivation of anthroposophy.
As our meeting came to an end on New Year’s Day, 1923, a cable from Dornach was delivered at the door. Mrs. Greene read us the news of the burning of the Goetheanum. A shocked silence fell upon us. In our mind’s eye we saw again the beautiful building of wood, in whose forms every thing in the universe was contained. The wooden pillars and architraves carved by hand, the colored windows of engraved glass on which endless time and labor had been lavished, rose before us in memory. We thought of the paintings on the inner surface of the two domes, and the roof of opalescent Norwegian slate reflecting the sun and moonlight. Rudolf Steiner had worked at the building with great self-sacrifice for ten years: 1,500 members from 17 nations had carved and painted and toiled together to bring it to completion only 2 years earlier. Now it lay in ashes on the Dornach hill. Some of the older members among us never recovered from the shock. Mrs. Greene’s forces began to fail from that time on. The rest of us carried in our hearts a kernel of perpetual mourning. But those who shared the experience were joined more closely together by it. Later we learned that Rudolf Steiner had watched all night while the building burned to the ground in spite of every effort to save it. In the morning he stood in the concrete basement testing the hot walls with his hand to see if they were strong enough to support a new structure. As he surveyed the smoldering ashes he said, “We will continue to do our duty on the site that is still left to us.”
Many English translations of Dr. Steiner’s books were brought out in England, but only four or five were published in America. McCoy & Co. published The Way of Initiation and Initiation and Its Results, part of the book we know as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Rand McNally published An Outline of Occult Science, Theosophy, and The Occult Significance of Blood Putnam & Sons brought out The Mystics of the Renaissance and The Gates of Knowledge. The copy rights were owned by Mr. Max Gysi who decided to sell them in 1918. Mrs. Brownrigg raised the necessary $1,500 from among the members and in 1922, when Maud and Henry Monges began to publish books in Chicago, gave these copyrights over to them.
I first met Maud and Henry Monges in 1916, when Mr. Monges had just found anthroposophy through seeing a book by Dr. Steiner in a book store window. He describes this so well in his farewell address of March 24, 1948, that I need add nothing to it. Although Mr. Monges joined our Group as early as 1917 and his wife a year later, they were seldom in New York, because their time was divided between Chicago and Dornach. Maud Breckenridge Monges, an essentially serious person, possessed a serene and gentle grace. Snowy hair crowned her pale, still-youthful face. Her interests were wide, but anthroposophy was her chief concern. Like her husband, she learned the German language in order to read Dr. Steiner’s writings in the original and to translate them for others, a work she continued until a few days before her death in the Swiss Alps in 1936. Mr. Monges became general secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America when Dr. Steiner reorganized the General and National Societies at the Christmas Meeting 1923-24. Up to this time, there had been no official connection between the groups. The reorganization of the Society was intended to correct, among many other things, this lack of cohesion. Each country became a single united organism, electing a general secretary and maintaining a national headquarters which would perform certain functions in the world organization. During the summer of 1923, when plans were being made in Dornach for the Christmas Foundation Meeting, there were three groups in America, the Santa Barbara Group founded by Helen Hecker, the Los Angeles Group under the leadership of Dr. Mary Burns, and the St. Mark Group. These were represented in the preliminary meetings there by Dr. Alma von Brandis. At the Christmas meeting Mr. Monges represented them, and Mr. Collison represented the newly formed Threefold Commonwealth Group. It is not necessary for me to describe Mr. Monges and his years of devoted work as general secretary of the Anthroposophical Society in America, nor his many-sided contributions toward the development of the work in founding the Anthroposophic Press and serving on the boards of the Rudolf Steiner School and the Weleda Company, because most of you remember him and his unselfish zeal. His main activity in New York began at the end of the forgotten years of which I speak, the era which terminated in 1924 with the organization of the national society. The rest is known history.
At the founding of the American Society in 1924 there were only about 150 members in the United States. The effort to root anthroposophy in the Western World was not easy in the early days, nor has it been since. In the 34 intervening years the membership has increased by only 861. But Dr. Steiner says:
Reflect upon it my dear friends: a comparatively small body of people associated together, doing something in which they shall be followed by a large part of the human race. The anthroposophists of today must not suppose that they have merely the same obligations as those people will one day have, who believe in anthroposophy when anthroposophists are reckoned by millions and not by thousands.
How much greater was the responsibility of the small circle which first met together in 1910, that brave little band of pioneers who succeeded in planting the first seeds of anthroposophy in the Western hemisphere!
Michael R. Klein, San Diego, CA; joined 2/18/1982; died 10/23/2009
Randolph E. Seifert, Housatonic, MA; joined 6/25/1984; died 12/5/2009
Rhonda Steiner, Littleton, CO; joined 6/26/1998; died 2009
As recorded by the society from 12/11/2009 through 2/22/2010
Carol Ayers, Amelia VA
Lia Heitzman Babitch, Copake NY
Heather Bella, Chestnut Ridge NY
Tiffany Baer, Kensington CA
Jong-Won Choi, Fair Oaks CA
Karolina Cinka, Mill Valley CA
Carly Coleman, Big Island VA
Eugene Copeland, Aurora CO
Ida Persephone Dyment, Amherst MA
Jeffrey Emerson, Northampton MA
Judith A. Ferraro, Saxtons River VT
Lynn Wille Fichman, Miami FL
Elizabeth Gilbert, Asheville NC
Lucille Goldenberg, Elmont NY
Barbara Hammer, Phoenix AZ
Brent Hayes, Glenmoore PA
Ursula Holmes, Johnstown CO
Frances C. Kane, Minneapolis MN
Laurie Larson, Truckee CA
Allen Livermore, New Lebanon NY
Daniel T. MacKenzie, NY NY
Sarah Maio, East Sandwich MA
Liane Martindale, Santa Barbara CA
Sandy O. McLaughlin, Chicago IL
Benjamin Jonas Meier, Chatham NY
David Milon, Lincoln Park MI
MaryJane Noblehart, Reno NV
Valerie Perrott, Eugene OR
Heather Collis Puro, Lynn MA
Rebecca Ripperton, Chapel Hill NC
Vimala Roth, Palm Desert CA
Jennifer Schmitt, Kensington CA
Sarah Schneider, Kimberton PA
Martha Siaba, Miami FL
Terence K. Smith, Reno NV
Heidi Strickland, Salt Lake City UT
Cynthia Stringer, Santa Rosa CA
Laurel Trahan, Pittsfield MA
Dori Urch-Mead, Mountain View CA
Franklin was born in the Bronx, New York. His father died when he was five, and he and his sister grew up “in a houseful of women.” After receiving his bar mitzvah, he carried many questions about the spiritual world. When he attended City College of New York, he met his future wife Betty (Staley) and Stewart Easton, professor of history. Through their connection with Dr. Easton, he and Betty took the Michael Hall Waldorf Teacher Training Course in Sussex, England. After the training they worked for a year at Peredur Home School, a school for emotionally disturbed children in Sussex. After returning to the U.S., Franklin taught for four years at Kimberton Waldorf School, taking a class from 1st through 4th grade. In 1965, along with four others, he moved to Sacramento to re-found the Sacramento Waldorf School. While teaching 5th through 8th grades, he was actively involved in giving lectures on Waldorf education
and re-establishing a teacher training program at the School. He was known for his practical grasp of issues and was very involved in fundraising and negotiating the school’s move to Fair Oaks. He had joined the Anthroposophical Society in 1964 and after the move to California, he was an active member of the Faust Branch.
Franklin’s interests included both the cultivation of anthroposophy within Waldorf schools and the Society, and being active in the outer world. In 1968, following the death of Martin Luther King, Jr, he and Betty helped found an organization (UEO—Understanding Each Other) to integrate supermarkets and hotels. He was the chief negotiator for these transactions.
In 1976, inspired by the work of Carl Stegmann, he was part of the founding group of the Sacramento Center for Anthroposophical Endeavors, later named Rudolf Steiner College. He negotiated the purchase of the property when it was put up for auction by the State of California and directed the Teacher Education Program.
In the mid-seventies he joined the new California Conservation Corps and developed sites and programs. In 1981, he moved to Edmonton, Canada where he became active in Alberta, initiating a “summer fest” of anthroposophical and Waldorf educational studies, and he led the first public Waldorf program in North America.
He earned an MA in counseling from Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara and began a career as a therapist. For the past ten years, he and his wife Gayle managed care homes in the San Francisco Bay Area for children and youth, and helped many transition to better lives.
Franklin had a strong interest in politics, current events, and human rights. His anthroposophical insights were a foundation for his careers and personal life. His pioneer energy and devotion to bringing anthroposophy into practical life were major contributions to the success of Sacramento Waldorf School, Rudolf Steiner College, and his work in introducing Waldorf education to public education in Canada became a model for projects in the U.S. Until his sudden death in October 2009, he was active in walking, reading, traveling, listening to classical music, and working with his hands. He was close to his children and grandchildren and enjoyed sharing his interests with them.
Many friends in Edmonton, Canada held a celebration of his life at the same time as his family held one at Rudolf Steiner College in Fair Oaks.
Betty StaleyReview of Anthroposophy and the Philosophy of Freedom, continues from page 12 ence and the Foundation Stone meditation. He frequently refers to and draws considerably from his own books, especially the rather long May Human Beings Hear It! and the shorter What is Anthroposophy? (which he says would serve as a good introduction to the present book). Having read the latter but not the former, I would say neither of these is critical to understanding the work at hand given the background just noted.
Prokofieff’s books (only half of which, unfortunately, are available in English) are remarkable for his impeccable research and exhaustive grasp of anthroposophical content, which we expect from a member of the Goetheanum’s executive council. Anthroposophy and the Philosophy of Freedom
is no exception. But despite its formidable density it is very readable—a model of literary construction and lucid prose presenting readers with an astonishingly rich and engrossing stream of ideas and insights.
The content of the opening chapter, “Method of Cognition in Anthroposophy,” will serve to illustrate the depth of the author’s thought along with his method. First he correlates the terminology that Rudolf Steiner uses for describing the anthroposophical path of cognition in The Stages of Higher Knowledge with that of The Philosophy of Freedom. Then he extends these correlations to specific spiritual exercises on the path, attainable stages of cognition, activities of the hierarchies at each stage, the development of Resurrection forces, and the spiritual path between death and rebirth. He provides a series of wonderful seven-step lemniscates that enliven and clarify these interrelationships.
Going further, he depicts the three-part encounter of Mary Magdalene with the Risen Christ as an archetype for the individual’s progress through three stages on the inner path. And ultimately, it is the Mystery of Golgotha that is the archetype for our own transit from intuitive thinking in meditation through the transit point of the “exceptional state” to imagination as an organ of perception. To follow this path is to experience a resurrection in consciousness; it is Christ’s death and resurrection that guarantee our capacity to make the transition. Even though we may have grasped them previously, these are soul-stirring thoughts.
Our capacity to make the transition is our ‘I’. Prokofieff elaborates on Rudolf Steiner’s fluid terminology for the self or ‘I’ in an important addendum (one of two in the book), reminding us that beyond what we commonly refer to as the “lower” and “higher” selves is a third ‘I’, the true human ‘I’ that derives from the primordial Word of Worlds (the Christ). Assembling indications from a range of Rudolf Steiner’s lectures, Prokofieff persuasively presents correspondences of the threefold ‘I’ with the threefold sun, the three spiritual members of our higher being, and the journey of I-development as related in the three microcosmic parts of the Foundation Stone meditation. In one of his more complex diagrams he visualizes the path of the development of the threefold ‘I’ in relation to twelvefoldness.
In chapter two, “The Philosophy of Freedom and the Mystery of the Resurrection,” he deepens the theme of resurrection, drawing especially on Rudolf Steiner’s From Jesus to Christ. In comprehending the deed of Christ we become able to conceive of utmost freedom and utmost love as possibilities within our own grasp. The death and resurrection of Christ are prototypical—a fountainhead—for all deeds of freedom and love. Freedom and love, as students of The Philosophy of Freedom know, are the keys to parts 1 and 2 of that book. Our faculty for moral intuition, moral technique, and moral deeds described therein is given by the Resurrection forces and is the source of eternal life for the human personality. Thus Prokofieff concludes the chapter: “From what has been said…we have in The Philosophy of Freedom the book that inwardly builds on the resurrectionimpulse, and thus in seed-form bears within itself the whole future of man and the cosmos.”
In chapter seven he takes up the relationship of The Philosophy of Freedom to The Fifth Gospel, the lectures in which Steiner communicated the essence of anthroposophical Christology. He begins by reviewing the paths of the two Jesus children, familiar to anthroposophists. Then he broaches relationships
that may be less familiar. He suggests that the mission of the Solomon Jesus was to provide the insights, as concepts, lacking in the Nathan Jesus, whose faculty of perception was pure and direct. He connects these paths to the two trees in Paradise, then to the two concepts “image” and “likeness,” and finally to the two aspects of earthly cognition (perception and thinking) that are the starting point for The Philosophy of Freedom. And further: the transformation from Jesus consciousness to Christ consciousness—the moment when, having lost the Zarathustra ‘I’ as Son of Man, Jesus receives the Son of God—can be understood as the world-historical archetype for the process—in true cognition—of creating new reality.
Creation out of nothing is the theme of chapter nine, where Prokofieff affirms unconditionality as the Christian basis of The Philosophy of Freedom. For Rudolf Steiner describes there how the individual human being, as micro-Logos, can in freedom and motivated only by love actualize a capacity for pure cognition— conditioned by nothing—manifesting in moral intuition and moral technique. The macrocosmic template for pure cognition is the creation of the world out of nothing. Prokofieff’s elaboration of the Godhead unfolding into triune Godhead, the (limited) creative role of the hierarchies, and Christ‘s deed as Second Creation with its “implanting” of the divine creative potency in the human being—all this merits repeated reading, pondering, and meditation.
Isolated from their context, these examples hardly do justice to the fluid conceptual relationships and spiritual insights rooted in The Philosophy of Freedom that Prokofieff supports with copious and careful referencing (over 100 GA numbers are cited), a total of 35 diagrams, and his own penetrating and synthetic vision. I should stress that Prokofieff is never pedantic. His writing is imbued with warmth, reverence, and deepest gratitude toward Rudolf Steiner. In relation to every theme he shows parallels in the development of anthroposophy and in Rudolf Steiner’s own path of initiation, a path that he suggests is an imitation of Christ, culminating as it did in Steiner taking on the karma of the Anthroposophical Society as Christ did that of humankind.
Anthroposophy and the Philosophy of Freedom has considerable relevance for our task today of upholding anthroposophy in an increasingly anti-spiritual world. It will send us back to our sources with new questions and renewed dedication, enthusiasm, and especially gratitude for Rudolf Steiner’s inestimable contribution to humanity and to the further evolution of consciousness, which as we know is now in our hands. It will awaken or reawaken us to the fact that Rudolf’s Steiner’s life was a sacrificial deed of love.
If we are under the misconception that as a philosophical rather than an esoteric work The Philosophy of Freedom stands apart from the rest of anthroposophy, if we have relished working with The Philosophy of Freedom but not yet pondered its relationship to the Christian Mystery, then this book should be required reading. If we have been reading Rudolf Steiner randomly, assuming that he addressed disparate themes, through this book we will happily rediscover anthroposophy as a unified and sacred revelation. Perhaps most important, we will be newly attentive to the integration of the philosophic-esoteric content of anthroposophy with Steiner’s life: his personal path from The Philosophy of Freedom to the Christmas Conference is an uninterrupted actualization of the philosophic-esoteric content of anthroposophy.
The numerous endnotes are important. Maria St. Goar has made an admirable, smoothly flowing translation; she provides an occasional German word in brackets, helpful in conveying nuances where the English might not suffice.
Review of The Genius of Money, continued from page 13 considered through Gabriel Metsu’s 17th century painting Usurer with a Tearful Woman; and “The Other Invisible Hand: Money and Its Subtle Influence on Social Life,” probed in relation to a New York Times article entitled “Just Thinking about Money Can Turn the Mind Stingy.”
The essays in part 2, “A Topography of Financial Transactions,” intend to provide a more cohesive map of the territory Bloom is exploring. They address such varied topics as the role of transparency in transforming the interconnectedness of our financial transactions into real human connections, and economic justice in relation to such topics as fair trade and access to resources. “Culture—For the Price of Admission” probes what you’re really paying for when you buy a concert ticket, and “Consuming Identity” examines the powerful forces that seek to coerce us into seeing our individual identity as defined by our consumer identity. This part concludes with an essay on faith, hope, and love in relation to money.
Part 3 comprises fascinating interviews with nine individuals who are working to transform their own and the world’s money relationships. These include Wangari Maathai who, in 2004, became the first African woman—and the first environmentalist—to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace”; Jacob Needleman, author of Money and the Meaning of Life; Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Life; and Paul Mackay, former banker and currently a member of the executive council of the General Anthroposophical Society in Dornach, Switzerland.
The book doesn’t pretend to be a chapter-by-chapter financial textbook. It is, rather, a collection of aphoristic explorations into the “genius of money,” many of which appeared previously on John Bloom’s weblog ( http://transformingmoney.blogspot.com). I have to confess that this format left me as reader with a certain longing. Much as I appreciate the individual essays, and fully understand the way they’ve arisen, I did find myself wanting to take a deeper and more cohesive journey, to intensify the interesting and colorful forays from the “coastline” to probe the country’s “interior” long and deeply enough to fully experience its unique language and culture.
It may be just the lingering trappings of the accountantbanker in me that want to see alongside Bloom’s beautifully poetic and imaginative imagery a more prosaic presentation of the difficult complexities of money and credit in the present-day world—to delve deeper, for instance, into the significance of abandoning the gold standard (he compares the discarding of a mineral basis for money with the threshold experience of walking a labyrinth). For, despite the problems it clearly brought, disconnecting money from the quantity of gold in Fort Knox also created the possibility of giving money a more spiritual foundation by basing the money supply in credit, in confidence in human capacities—the word credit, after all, comes from the Latin credo, “I believe.” I recognize, of course, that if I were to live with
Bloom’s imaginations longer and more meditatively, I might well find this longing for depth met in a different way.
Nevertheless, the book’s many insights will go far toward realizing Bloom’s aim of encouraging and informing a “reimagining” of money through which both individuals and organizations engage in this challenging grapple with the money-self. I’m sure readers will find many rich gems in the pages of The Genius of Money. With its many colored plates on quality paper, it’s also a good-looking—and “good-tasting”—volume, which certainly enhances the reading pleasure.
Library Annotations, continued from page 11
The Child with Special Needs: Letters and Essays on Curative Education, Karl König, Floris, 2009, 220 pgs.
The Karl König Archive in Aberdeen, Scotland in cooperation with the Ita Wegman Institute in Switzerland is publishing Karl König’s collected works. This book is volume 4 in the series and features a foreword by Peter Selg and an introduction by König’s pupil and coworker Georg von Arnim in addition to König’s letters and essays. For König, curative education held the seeds of social development for society as a whole: “The collaborative aspect of supporting children in need of soul care was of extraordinary importance… [H]e considered this as the approach towards a future civilization based on humanitarian values.”
Rukia Goes to School, Susan Cook, illustrated by Ilana Stein, AWSNA, 2009, 67 pgs.
Author Susan Cook (who also wrote Biographies for 8th Grade History: Twenty Remarkable Men and Women) a Waldorf teacher from San Francisco, has spent time as a mentor at the Rudolf Steiner School Mbagathi near Nairobi, Kenya, in East Africa. She wrote Rukia Goes to School as a supplemental reader for children in grades 1-5. The story is about a day in the life of Rukia, a third-grade student at the Rudolf Steiner School Mbagathi. Beautiful sepia-toned drawings
enhance the story, which invites comparisons between Waldorf education as we know it in North America and what is depicted in the story.
Norse Mythology, Charles Kovacs, Floris, 2009, 189 pgs.
Another in the series of master teacher Kovacs’s subject guides for class teachers. The stories in this book are recommended for use in the 4th grade.
On the Way to Christmas, written and illustrated by Gertrude Teutsch, Wynstones Press, 2008, 20 pgs.
This is an “accordion” book on smooth, sturdy paper, delightful to hold. Warm colors and simple, dynamic images propel this “cumulative” story of a little girl’s journey, guided by an angel, “to Christmas,” where love is found. Particularly suited for younger children, older siblings will enjoy this book as well.
The Eight Year Old Legend Book, Isabel Wyatt, Floris, 2009, 114 pgs.
New titles by Isabel Wyatt are suddenly surfacing: what a welcome surprise! The author of the beloved classic, The Seven-YearOld Wonder Book, here retells tales told by the Buddha 2500 years ago. Striking black-andwhite illustrations enhance the appeal of this welcome collection.
Homer’s Odyssey, a retelling by Isabel Wyatt, Floris, 2009, 164 pgs.
Isabel Wyatt’s retelling of Homer’s Odyssey proceeds in brief chapters that fifth graders will be able to read on their own, or along with a parent.
First Grade Readiness: Re sources, Insights, and Tools for Waldorf Educators, Nancy Blanning, editor, WECAN, 2009, 167 pgs.
“Determining school readiness can be a daunting task, as it is a destiny moment for a child…. Through our anthroposophical understanding of the human being, we recognize readiness as a developmental process, not something that can be fixed by declaring a legal school-entry age.” This most welcome book focuses on the “what,” “why,” and “how” of school readiness, offering new medical and pedagogical research as well as practical assessment methods.
Lifting the Yoke: Local Solu tions to America’s Farm and Food Crisis, Ron Krupp, Whetstone Books, 2009, 319pgs.
This homegrown charmer by society member Ron Krupp, author of The Woodchuck’s Guide to Gardening (also available from the library), describes the globalization of food and farming, its effects on our health, and solutions to these problems. The solutions he presents are lively portraits of actual farm and food initiatives and enterprises in Krupp’s native Vermont, which is in the midst of a renaissance of farm-to-school programs, farmers’ markets, and CSAs. Vermont can serve as a model for other regions since it has, per capita, the largest small farm initiative in the country and the greatest per capita purchasing of local food from direct market outlets. Full of anecdotes, tips, resources, and photos, this book is brimming with enthusiasm and hope.
Six Ways to Celebrate Christ‑ mas! & Celebrate You!, Lynn Jericho, Inner Christmas, 20082009, 144 pgs.
Personal coach Lynn Jericho wrote this book to encourage readers to explore their complex feelings about Christmas “as
they move between delight and disappointment, enthusiasm and exhaustion, sentimentality and cynicism.” She invites readers to “[d]iscover the heart and meaning of what Christmas and the dark time of the year means to [them] as a cosmic, social, and deeply personal experience.”
Steps on the Stone Path: Work ing with Crystals and Miner als as a Spiritual Practice, Robert Sardello, Goldenstone Press, 2010, 144pgs.
This book is hard to classify, and could just as appropriately have been shelved with books in our “meditation” or “spirituality” sections. Robert Sardello, founder of the School of Spiritual Psychology and author of Facing the World with Soul, Freeing the Soul from Fear, and a number of other books familiar to many of our readers, has appreciated minerals and crystals for most of his life. He characterizes these substances as the pure presence of the deeds of angels, and “introduces practices for experiencing the living forces of these angelic beings with contemplative meditations that develop “stone-awareness,” the ability to experience stone qualities such as deep silence, form, transparency, and color as modes of spiritual consciousness.”
Sacred Geometry, written and illustrated by Miranda Lundy, Walker & Co., 2001, 58 pgs.
This little volume is part of the “Wooden Books” series, which is dedicated to the “four great unchanging liberal arts— numbers, music, geometry and cosmology.” They are meant to offer “simple introductions to timeless sciences and vanishing arts.” Just the ticket for Waldorf educators, and it was one of our patrons who introduced us to the series. This volume begins with point, line, and plane, and moves on to pentagons, heptagons, Islamic designs, and church windows.
Sacred Geometry: Decipher ing the Code, Stephen Skinner, Sterling, 2009, 160 pgs.
Recommended by our erstwhile volunteer, longtime Waldorf teacher Nancy Dill, this beautiful book, with copious color illustrations, an index, and a comprehensive bibliography, is a fine addition to the library’s very popular geometry shelf. It is well organized, with chapters on (among others) the geometry of living things, geometry in art and architecture, pure geometry, and geometry in the landscape.
Platonic & Archimedean Sol ids: The Geometry of Space, written and illustrated by Daud Sutton, Walker & Co., 2002, 58 pgs. Another in the “Wooden Books” series, this volume introduces the 18 shapes that are the “building blocks of threedimensional space.”
was stacked with canvasses and pigments. But more importantly, she approached every task in her life with an artist’s view. Sewing buttons on a sweater meant making the buttons first. Decorating a room meant making a lamp shade out of fiberglass cloth and watercolors in addition to painting walls. In her collaboration with my father in his opera productions, her design and creation of costumes often started with novel ideas. Once (for Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio) we bought surplus parachutes for fabric and had vats of dye around the house; another time she created Persian carpets on flats for the background of the Weber opera Abu Hassan, and my sister and I got to fill in her sketched, complex designs.
Letters, cont. from page 7 und Augenblick. I have been reading this book lately, or I should say re-reading, and it seems like it all concerns Initiation. I am wondering when the eternity and passing moment come in. Maybe that is the key though: we’re always in Ewigkeit as well as always being in Augenblick
Barbara Bain Cornwall, NYThank you for including the obituary of my mother, Gertrude Teutsch, in your last edition; I am grateful for her friends at the San Diego Waldorf School for having submitted it. Reading it made me to want to share a daughter’s perspective.
As I look back over her life, I see that art and anthroposophy were her two consistent companions. Already in the reports she received as a teenager from the Friedwart school at the Goetheanum, her work in painting and sculpture stands out. She was a well-respected painter with a growing reputation before she started her family and our garage
Although she taught German and art at a local, public high school, her thoughts were always aimed towards fostering a San Diego Waldorf school. She led study groups for many years, building interest and serious anthroposophical work. She was disappointed again and again as energetic young people moved away. She was never satisfied by a group “wow” at the end of the reading of a Steiner lecture, but she always wanted a considered group discussion and conversation. As the class reader for the area she set a high bar of “being prepared,” but she always felt she could have prepared more. When the San Diego Waldorf School came into being, she was a strong supporter, offering artwork for the silent auction, help with German instruction, a hand with the newsletter.
As illness eroded her substantial abilities to recall poetry, ideas, events, she turned back to nature, which had been a wellexplored topic in her paintings and drawings. She loved the texture and color of leaves, and would often have a handful when she returned from her walks. Pine cones, bits of bark, yellow and brown leaves still adorn her room in her memory.
Intensive
by Emma HeirmanOn the weekend of September 11th, 2009, twentynine people met at the Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent, NY for an intensive workshop, organized by members of Think OutWord, on Steiner’s book Towards Social Renewal. This book outlines Steiner’s seminal ideas of the three realms of society: the economic, political and cultural/spiritual. In less than three days we powered through the ideas of this threefold nature while focusing on the key economic (mis)conceptions about labor, land and capital, as well as the loss of soul life in our everyday work. We were guided with the help of many focused presentations and discussions led by participants.
cannot be treated as just another commodity on the open market, and therefore cannot be controlled by the economic sphere. In today’s market economy we are led to believe that personal profit is the real motivation behind human labor. However, the archetypal ideal of work is its contribution to community.
The first chapter, The True Dimensions of the Social Question, begs us to tackle what is unhealthy in the world once we understand its context and true nature. This is only possible when we form our questions out of truth. What was the historical context of Germany in the early 1900s? At this time, Steiner explains that the worker’s movement was misled by old, dead ideas. Germany’s leadership was blind to the internal suffering caused by the loss of human connection. Not only was the worker limited to scientific thinking that rendered the spiritual abstract and meaningless, but he was also limited to a work life consequent of the Industrial Revolution: divided, disconnected and devoid of dignity. Unlike the aristocrat, the worker could no longer feed off of cultural traditions of the past. He was led to believe that the spiritual was mere ideology, a lifeless and improvable theory with no sustaining forces. This context provides a foundation for the questions that Steiner asks: What is the role of economic life?
How do we integrate labor? And what are healthy forms of a spiritual/ cultural life?
In order to find solutions, we must discern the three realms and their interaction. The true nature of economics, for example, is the production of goods to meet the needs of the whole community. This fact has been grossly misconstrued in the treatment of human labor and capital. Steiner explains that if our labor is to be in alignment with our soul life, then it
Capital and land have also been manipulated; they are exclusive to those with wealth. Steiner says that a society without free access to capital is like a paralyzed body. Healthy capital is not owned but administered. Stagnant capital and amassed wealth have no value. Land, if held in the hands of an unproductive person, serves no purpose. We should be asking how capital and land can best serve our community. Also, Steiner demonstrates that in a healthy society the needs of all citizens must be met and their capacities best utilized for the good of the whole community. In a healthy society there would be brotherhood in our economic striving, equality in our political dealings, and freedom in our cultural pursuits. Individually, we would release our hold on money and land, and relinquish self-aggrandizement for deeper, more humanitarian motivations in our work.
The weekend ended with questions, but also with new and reaffirmed convictions. In order to nurture growth, we must stop living out of old ideas and encounter the world in new ways. Can we look with fresh eyes and see the reality of what is unwell in the world? When truth and trust seem intangible we have to remind ourselves to be courageous. We are responsible for opening our own minds and hearts to recognize the depth of our questions and the possibilities for our future. Steiner asks in Lecture 1 in The Esoteric Aspect of the Social Question: “Is it conceivable that in the chaos of today’s social life people will find a proper relationship to one another—which is essential for any real solution of the social enigma?”
Think OutWord is one of the ways I seek this proper relation. In the spirit of Michael this fall season let us all find ways to be courageous and take action with one another.
a society without free access to capital is like a paralyzed body
work life divided, disconnected, & devoid of dignity
suffering caused by loss of human connection
form our questions out of truth
loss of soul life in everyday work
opening our own minds and hearts
to nurture growth, stop living out of old ideas
labor in alignment with our soul life look with fresh eyes
