The constant formation of the universe

I am telling you facts, facts that are connected with the intentions not only of certain individuals who are joined together in brotherhoods but also of other beings who influence such brotherhoods and whose influence is also sought by those brotherhoods, beings who are not incarnated in the flesh like human beings but ones who have their body in the spiritual world…

Those brotherhoods who know about the spiritual impulses at work in human evolution saw the approach of that important event of the early 1840s, the battle between certain spirits and some other higher spirits which ended in 1879 when some spirits of an angel nature, spirits of darkness, fell victim to the event that is symbolised as the victory fo Michael over the dragon. On seeing this, those brotherhoods had to decide how to react to it and had to ask themselves: What is to be done about it?

….it was out of good intentions that spiritualism was launched in the world during the 1840s…..well-meaning spiritual mebers of the brotherhoods held the erroneous view that by using mediums they could convince people of hte existence of the spiritual world all around them; and they thought on the basis of that conviction it would then be possible to teach them about higher truths as well…..

….It will be up to humanity during this period to come to grips with evil as an impulse in world evolution….a certain degree of evil must be placed at the service of world evolution in a good sense….

The fact that there are beings invisibly amongst us who are so closely related to human beings, and that human beings are prevented by the way forces of evil play into their lives from recognising the spirit with their reason, means that there will be many opportunities for people to succumb to obscure errors and suchlike…..the human being must be a warrior for the spirit.

What people lack today is the courage to embark properly on researching the spiritual world. …during [this] period the time is approaching when humanity will have to deal very carefully with certain great life questions that have thus far been hidden, in a way, by the wisdom of former times.

Endeavours are to be undertaken to place the spiritually etheric element in the service of external, practical life….

….certain groups of people working in egoistically occult ways are making efforts in certain directions. Initially it was necessary for a specific kind of knowledge to retire into the background for humanity…This knowledge had to disappear, be slept through, so that people no longer had the possibility of drawing soul qualities out of their observations of nature but were instead more thrown back on themselvs. So that human beings could awaken the forces of their own being it was necessary for certain matters to appear first in an abstract form which must now take on a concrete spiritual form…

…a certain quarter seeks to remove the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha from the world by bringing in another impulse from the West, a kind of antichrist, and that coming from the East the Christ-impulse as it appears in the twentieth century is to be paralysed by distracting people’s attention from the coming of Christ in the etheric realm….

…More than anything else, that quarter will strive to make use of the electricity, especially the earth’s magnetism, to bring about effects all over the world. I have shown you how the forces of the earth rise up in what I have termed the human double. People will discover this secret. It will be an American secret to use the earth’s magnetism in its duality, the northern and southern magnetism, in order to send controlling forces across the whole earth, forces that work spiritually.

What lies in store for humanity is that cosmic forces will be won for humanity in a dual way that is wrong or a single way that is right. This will bring a genuine renewal to astrology, which is atavistic in its old form – a form in which it cannot continue to exist. Those who know about the cosmos will struggle against each other….for the remainder of earthly existence the dead will collaborate with us to a high degree.

The moment you penetrate fully into all the secrets of the double, you will find yousrelf able to assess the value of brains that are merely lumps which you have placed on a scale, lumps which can be brought to life solely by the double.

You must come to realise that all the wishy-washy talk of ‘cosmic religosity’ or ‘how powerful the yearning for it is’, and so on is nothing other than a means of spreading fog over these matters which ought actually to be entering the world in clarity and which, above all, ought only to be carried in clarity into human life as practical moral and ethical impulses.

Rudolf Steiner, Individual Spirit Beings and the Constant Foundation of the Universe

Two are One combined

Come, venerable, various pow’rs divine, with fav’ring aspect on your mystics shine

The owl of Zeus’s daughter Athena sat blinking inscrutably in the branches of a large white tree. Artemis, his deer, second‐born child beneath, blinked her virginal eyes and then ran like the wind towards the edge of the emerald forest.

She sped through the trees until she reached the pebble‐dashed shore of the finite see, where Poseidon threw waters from the churning, ink-black ocean out to land. A vast breaking wave upheld the glistening form of her darling, new‐born brother, Phoebus Apollo.

The top of his fin cut the air like a knife, carving out a circle of pure white light. Seven sacred colours framed his perfect, golden mind, as Artemis declared to him: “We two are one, combined!”

Her love for him supplanted all other desire. “Give me now my silver arrows”, she called out, “for I shall strike down dead any one who dares come between us!”

“Swim, enchanting sister, while my light is still cool, deep, into the salt-filled waters. A weapon such as this,” he held above him a golden bow, “may only be brought from the abyss”. His answering voice was like an echo of her dream before she dreamt it.

She cast off her linen robe and dipped one foot into the ocean, shielding her eyes from the blue‐lit morning star as it rose on the Eastern horizon. Every other face turned toward it as she made her way to the bottomless abyss, heedless of the dragon chained within.

The Great Medicine

This surely is a great miracle and without any deception – that in a venomous dragon there should be the great medicine.

The Mercury is precipitated or sublimed, dissolved in its own proper water,  and then once more coagulated.

A savage Dragon lives in the forest,  Most venomous he is, yet lacking nothing:

When he sees the rays of the Sun and its bright fire,  He scatters abroad his poison,  And flies upward so fiercely  That no living creature can stand before him,  Nor is even the Basilisk equal to him.

He who hath skill to slay him, wisely  Hath escaped from all dangers.  Yet all venom, and colours, are multiplied  In the hour of his death.  His venom becomes the great Medicine.

He quickly consumes his venom,  For he devours his poisonous tail.  All this is performed on his own body,  From which flows forth glorious Balm,  With all its miraculous virtues.  Hereat all the Sages do loudly rejoice.

Book of Lambspring

The Hymn of the Pearl

800px-Black_pearl_and_his_shell — Black Pearl by Mbz1

When I was an infant too young to talk, in my father’s palace, Reposing in the wealth and luxury of those who nourished me, My parents equipped me with supplies and sent me out from the East, our country, on a mission.

From the wealth of their treasuries they gave me a great cargo, Which was light, so that I could carry it by myself – The cargo was gold frmo the high country, silver plate of the great treasuries, Emerald jewels of India, and agates of Kosan; and they armed me with steel.

They took away from me the jewel-studded garment shot with gold, That they had made out of love for me, And the robe of yellow colour (tailored) to my size. But they made an agreement with me, Impressed it on my mind, (so that) I might (not) forget it, and said:

“If you go down to Egypt and bring from there the one pearl, Which resides there near the ravenous dragon, You shall put (back) on that jewel-studded garment and teh robe, which you like; And you shall be a herald for our kingdom, along with your well-remembered Brother.

So I started out from the East, on a hard and frightening road, accompanied by two guides; For I was unused to traveling on it. I passed the borders of the Mosani, where there is the inn of the Eastern traveling merchants; And reached the land of Babylon.

The Hymn of the Pearl

Ocean Dragon; Penetrated Stone

As far as dreams go, it couldn’t have got much stranger, and that’s saying something. For a start, it was vivid – as real-seeming as the waking day – and for a second it was so utterly weird that it scared me the next day to even think about it. I thought I’d already out-weirded weirdness, but it seems not; my inner capacity to completely surprise myself is still very much intact. It began like this:

At the moment I became fully conscious, I found that I was travelling across the grey ocean at an incredibly rapid pace with the utmost sense of urgency. I wondered for a split second just how it was that I came to be travelling so quickly – surely I couldn’t swim that fast?! – but so very quickly was I moving, that before I had to think for longer, I’d arrived at the shore.

I know that I stood upright, and before looking ahead cast a glance back over my shoulder at the water, which was neither completely calm nor especially stormy; an ordinary day at sea, I would say. Why did I look back? Well, a very quiet voice in my head told me there might have been a whale in sight, but what Icaught sight of was a creature I called a ‘Dolphin’, but which in fact looked nothing like one of those creatures. The gigantic grey hump covered in upright triangular fins was actually more dragon like, resembling no other animal that I’ve ever seen before. I would have been surprised or looked for longer if I hadn’t become almost instantly – and acutely – aware of some terrible danger afoot on the shore.

As I looked ahead at the land for the first time, the sense of overwhelming urgency and danger struck me once again and it was then that I had first realised that the scenario was – even for a dream – remarkably surreal, for the simple reason, perhaps, that it seemed so palpably real. Somehow I was there, but what was I to do? My sense of being on some sort of undefined mission was as intense as the feeling that I must act with lightening speed. Why, I do not know. Here is what I saw in front of me:

It was broad daylight and the sky was blue. Directly in front of me was a wide but dusty path that together with the clarity of light gave me the impression of the desert or Middle East. Perhaps the sense of location was symbolic, because I had a definite impression of being in some kind of war zone, that I – or anyone else in the vicinity – could be shot down dead in an instant. Who by? Although I could not see the enemy – or fierce guardian of that dry territory – I had a definite impression of there being snipers that were lying in wait very nearby, but evidently out of view. This was not all I saw.

Directly ahead, standing partway along this path in the middle distance, was a man with short dark hair and a long white robe, who rather than looking at me, was staring into the middle distance. The site of him filled me with an unfathomable combination of awe and near panic, and all I knew was that I needed to negotiate the minefield in order to be myself where this uniquely statuesque spirit was standing immobile, watching the moving sea. As fast as it’s possible for one to move, I went in his direction.

The next thing I knew, I was inside a stone that was located just behind the place where he’d been standing. The stone was rectangular, like some kind of box, about the width of two people and high enough inside for me to crouch but not stand. A gap of about 10 inches at the bottom gave me light enough to look around at the inner walls of that cold, dry stone, and with a shiver I wondered if it was the kind of place where insects would be hiding. I nervously looked at the left wall, the ceiling and the right wall, noting with some relief that there did not appear to be any cockroaches keeping me company. At a certain moment I wondered if ‘he’ was still standing outside, in front of the stone, and bent my hand to look through the gap. Time to get out, I thought, registering a moment later that the coast was clear.

Perfect Golden Mind

The top of his fin cut the air like a knife, carving a circle of pure white light. Seven sacred colours framed his perfect, golden mind, as Artemis declared to him: “We two are one, combined!”

The sister of the Moon said: “Give me now my silver arrows, for I should strike down dead any one who would dare come between us.”

The brother of the sun held out his golden bow to her: “A weapon such as this may only be brought from the abyss”.

His answering voice was like an echo of her dream before she dreamt it.

“Swim, enchanting sister, while my light is still cool, deep, into the salt-filled waters”.

The Moon queen cast off her linen robe and dipped one foot into the ocean, shielding her eyes from the blue-lit morning star as it rose up on the Eastern horizon. Every other face turned toward the rising sun as she made her way to the bottomless abyss, heedless of the dragon chained within

The George and Dragon

We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of waters*.

The air was pungent and the sky was dark as thirty-two year-old Lucas White locked the door to his flat and headed off for his regular Saturday night appointment at The George and Dragon.

He was filled with anticipation for this usually predictable occasion, not least of because he and his friends were to be joined by an extremely attractive aerobics instructor called Kiera and her two bosom buddies.

Lucas hoped the evening might lead to a panting embrace in some dark alley or other while he walked Kiera home from the pub.

This embrace would – in his dreams – render her so helplessly overcome by his testosterone-fuelled animal magnetism that she would insist on dragging him upstairs to tear off his clothes, whereupon she would subject him to a naked horizontal (or even vertical) version of one of her sweaty routines.

To an objective bystander this may have sounded like wishful thinking on Lucas’ part, but there was actually a one in three chance that his dreams would come true before midnight.

There was also, however, a two in three chance that he would awaken to a deeper dream before the clock that night reached 11.

*The Leopard, Tomasi Giuseppe de Lampedusa

Birth of Phoebus Apollo

The owl of Zeus’s daughter Athena sat blinking inscrutably in the branches of a large white tree.

Artemis, his deer, second-born child beneath, blinked her virginal eyes and then ran like the wind towards the edges of the emerald forest.

She sped through the trees until she reached the pebble-dashed shore of the finite sea, where Poseidon threw waters from the churning, ink-black ocean out to land.

A vast breaking wave upheld the glistening form of her darling, new-born brother, Phoebus Apollo.

The top of his fin cut the air like a knife,  carving a circle of purest, white light.  Seven sacred colours framed his perfect, golden mind,  as Artemis declared to him:  “We two are one, combined!”

Her love for him supplanted all other desire and she cried out loud: “Give me now my silver arrows, for I should strike down dead any one who would dare come between us!”

His answering voice was like an echo of her dream before she dreamt it. “Swim, enchanting sister, while my light is still cool, deep, into the salt-filled waters. A weapon such as this,” he held above him a golden bow, “may only be brought from the abyss”.

She cast off her linen robe and dipped one foot into the ocean, shielding her eyes from the blue-lit morning star as it rose up on the Eastern horizon.

Every other face turned toward it as she made her way to the bottomless abyss, heedless of the dragon chained within.