New Moon Friday 6 May 2016
“What is to be the starting force & impulse for events in social & ethical life must come out of the spiritual world.” Rudolf Steiner, New Spiritual Impulses in History” Dornach 16 December, 1917
Birthday of St. John, the disciple whom Jesus loved. Thru the research of Rudolf Steiner (GA 93, 264, 265) we hear of this individuality in other lives as: Hiram, Lazarus, Christian Rosenkreutz, St. Germain.
1871 – Birthday of Christian Otto Josef Wolfgang Morgenstern a German author & poet from Munich. He worked for a while as a journalist in Berlin, but spent much of his life traveling through Germany, Switzerland, & Italy, in a vain attempt to recover his health. His travels, though they failed to restore him to health, allowed him to meet many of the foremost literary & philosophical figures of his time in central Europe.
Morgenstern’s poetry, much of which was inspired by English literary nonsense, is immensely popular, even though he enjoyed very little success during his lifetime. Embedded in his humorous poetry is a subtle metaphysical streak. He discussed how many angels could sit on a needle. Many Germans know some of his poems & quotations by heart, e.g. the following line from “The Impossible Fact” (“Die unmögliche Tatsache”, 1910): Weil, so schließt er messerscharf / Nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf. “For, he reasons pointedly – That which must not, cannot be.” Christian Morgenstern was also an acclaimed translator, rendering into German various prominent works from Norwegian & French, including the dramas & poems of Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson , August Strindberg & Rudolf Steiner.
Morgenstern was a member of the General Anthroposophical Society. Dr. Rudolf Steiner called him ‘a true representative of Anthroposophy’. He died in 1914 of tuberculosis.
680 Death-day of Muawiyah Caliph. The meaning of Muawiyah in Arabic is “young fox”. Muawiyah worked as a scribe for Muhammad. The story goes: He had a pen behind his ear which he had not used. The Prophet said, ‘What is this on your ear?’ He said, ‘A pen which I have made ready for Allah & His Messenger.’ The Prophet said. ‘May Allah repay you well on behalf of your Prophet! By Allah, I will only ask you to write down revelation from heaven.”
In 639, Muawiyah was appointed as the governor of Syria. Under his governance the Syrian army became a major military force. Muawiya was one of the first to realize the full importance of having a navy. During his naval expeditions he took Rhodes & later Cyprus; then shifted his focus back towards Constantinople, & Anatolia. By his creation of a fleet, Muawiyah was the driving force of the Muslim effort against Byzantium. His navy raided the Byzantine islands & coasts at will. The shocking defeat of the imperial fleet by the young Muslim navy at the Battle of the Masts in 655 was of critical turning point. It opened up the Mediterranean, considered a “Roman lake”, & began a centuries-long series of naval conflicts over the control of the Mediterranean. This also allowed the expansion of the state into Africa & Spain. Trade between the Muslim eastern & southern shores & the Christian northern shores almost ceased during this period, isolating Western Europe from developments in the Muslim world.
Muawiyah was crowned as caliph at a ceremony in Jerusalem in 661.
We learn from Karmic Relationships Vol. 7 lecture 6 that he was reincarnated as Woodrow Wilson.
I will touch briefly here on a subject that is vast enough for its own series of lectures: the image of the phantom body of Christ as the reconstituted New Adam, & the Resurrection Body, which points us in the direction of our future evolution– not back to the garden – but going forward toward the New Jerusalem. Materializing & dematerializing at will just as the Christ did during the time between Easter & Ascension.
This ‘body’ encompasses the whole of humanity. It is like a cell that is multiplying; growing ever more evident in the etheric realm. – Rudolf Steiner calls it a redeeming of the group-soul of mankind.
Christ has united with the earth in order to make it the new Sun of a new universe.
The expression “Put on the Resurrection Body” used by the apostle Paul, is a true picture of what can happen for us. An imagination of this is hidden in the allegory of the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz .
Goethe’s Fairy Tale is another powerful imagination that came thru when I was brainstorming on images that capture the essence of the Ascension. It’s been said that ‘The Green Snake & the Beautiful Lily’, which is full of esoteric symbolism, was born out of Goethe’s reading of The Chymical Wedding . This Tale was also written as a response to a work by Friedrich Schiller called ‘Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man’. One of the main ideas centers on the question of human freedom. Schiller was trying to build an inner bridge between reality & the ‘ideal human being’.
He wrote these ‘Letters’ during the time of the French Revolution, which was driven by a desire for outer social changes, to enable human beings to become free. But both Schiller & Goethe recognized that freedom cannot be ‘imposed’ from the outside, it must arise from within.
So Goethe took this inspiration & set about writing a Fairy Tale that would show, in imaginative pictures, the way in which a human soul could become whole & free by bridging the abyss between the human & the divine within.
Rudolf Steiner, in his 1918 book ‘Goethe’s Standard of the Soul’, tells us: “On the river stands the Temple in which the marriage of the Young Man with the Lily takes place. The ‘marriage’ with the supersensible. The realization of the free personality is possible in a human soul whose forces have bridged the state of regularity with the divine forces of transformation.”
This article by Steiner lead to an invitation for him to speak to the German Theosophical Society which eventually led to his becoming its General Secretary…& this story continues to live on in us…