The Present Age Volume 3 / No. 10 January 2018

18.01.2018

Contents

Editorial
Living contrasts on my American lecture tour

Thoughts on the Rhythm of the Year
Commentaries on Rudolf Steiner’s Soul Calendar verses​ by Eleanor C. Merry

Four Phases of the Michael School
A lecture by T.H. Meyer on the founding day of the Theosophical Society

Kalevala and the Future
Marcel Frei

Mariatta — Väinämöinen’s Departure

LETTER FROM BOSTON
One Year into the Trump Presidency

Five positive decisions
Andreas Bracher

January Calendar

LETTER FROM STOURBRIDGE
The ‘Anglo-saxons’ and the European Union Project

Terry Boardman

Dostoevsky – Keeping the Great Idea Alive, Part Two
Part of the Christian Community Speaker Series: Biography as a Journey to Love
Jeff Bronow

The Mediaeval Butterfly Reliquary
An attempt to reveal its meaning, purpose and background
Dr. Christin Schaub

Peter Schäfer – Rhythmically Flowing Colours
A Forty Year-long Striving to Work out of the World of Colour
Ruedi Bind and Peter Schäfer

BAGATELLE
A Late Rehabilitation of Ovid

T.H. Meyer

Imprint

 

 

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Kategorie: TPA archives

Living contrasts on my American lecture tour

18.01.2018

Between 18 October and 24 November I had a unique occasion to tour the US 1. I gave 25 lectures in 10 places on the following subjects: “The World-Historic Significance of Anthroposophy”, “In the Sign of the Five”, “The Subterranean Spheres”, “The Mexican Mysteries”, “Technology and Spirituality”, “The Reappearance of the Christ” and “The Meditative Path of the Michael School”. The tour was most ably organized by James Lee, Paul O’Leary and Gene Gollogly. Here are some aphoristic impressions:
In Denver I was shown by my hosts a book by Henry Adams (1838–1918) with the title Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. Adams was a member of the family who produced two US presidents. Unexpected and remarkable, never heard of before by this European traveller.
In the Seattle museum my host showed me a bronze sculpture (1898) by Augustus Saint-Gaudens entitled “Amor Caritas” which, according to my host, points to the deeper mission of America, even if not much of this mission seems to have been achieved.
Near San Diego, where the US Navy intercepted all the signals of the Japanese Navy in December 1941, withholding them from Admiral Kimmel on Hawaii, is Point Loma, a wonderful stretch of land going out into the Pacific. Here Catherine Tingley, the successor of William Q. Judge as president of the Theosophical Society, founded a centre for the “Revival of the Mysteries of Antiquity”. This attracted the young D.N. Dunlop who worked as her secretary for a short while.
On 1 November I went to Queretaro in Mexico. Everywhere costumes and figures of the festival of “merry death” as Mexicans call it, including visits to the graves of departed relatives, to whom food is offered. Ambiguous feelings, enhanced by the visit to Teotihuacan with its pyramids, a place where human sacrifices were undertaken . In Queretaro on 19 June 1867 emperor Maximilian was shot, thus ending the belated dream of a Habsburg world empire.
In Mexico City I visited the house of Trotsky, who was brutally murdered on 21 August 1940. In great contrast to this: the Virgin of Guadeloupe, to whose holy relic millions of people from South America stream every year on 12 December.
The Waldorf School in Washington lies two miles from Langley, Virginia, the centre of the CIA. My local wingman led me in his car to the fence of it, as well as around the Pentagon. But within his own school community one has to hide the fact that one did not vote for Hilary Clinton. When parting, he gave me a most valuable book about the foundation of the Federal Reserve: The Creature from Jekyll Island by Edward Griffin.
I arrived in New York just in time to make it to Symphony Space, a theatre in Manhattan which presented three whistleblowers: William Binney, Ray McGovern and Diane Roark, moderated by Sean Stone, the son of Oliver Stone, who had recently interviewed Putin. An extraordinary event: Binney was the chief programmer for the NSA who developed “Thin Thread” and was eliminated from his agency before 9/11. He claimed that everything needed to prevent the attacks was in the database.

On the way to my next place, Great Barrington in Massachusetts, I developed together with Thomas O’Keefe, who kindly accompanied me, two litmus tests for anthroposophists:
1. What do you think about the official story of 9/11?
2. What do you think about the handling of the Esoteric Class material today?
In my experience the two questions are related. Those people who naively accept the official 9/11 story are usually the same who believe the 19 lessons of Rudolf Steiner’s Michael School should and could still be “protected” (though Steiner envisaged their publication already in 1924), by publishing them only for “Class members”.
Boston was the end of my journey. Here I had inspiring talks with co-editor Andreas Bracher, who writes for this journal. In my last lecture on “The World-Significance of Anthroposophy”, Dan Emerson, the great grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson, was present. He kindly agreed to a private tour; officially, the Emerson house in Concord was already closed for the season. There we walked around for hours and could quietly look at the library and the etchings on the walls. It is not easy being related to a world-famous philosopher and essayist. Dan Emerson has mastered this challenge. “I am the living proof”, he said with a smile, “that genius is not hereditary.” At any rate, he has something of the genius of “Wit and Humor” about which his forefather wrote so brilliantly.

 

T.H. Meyer

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1     See the Portland account in TPA, Vol. 3 No. 9.

 


Kategorie: TPA Editorial