Anthroposophy in Hawkes Bay
Rudolf Steiner Centre, 401 Whitehead Road, Hastings
Events over next 2 weeks
[12 to 26 October]
- TONIGHT: 7pm. Spring Festival (see notice below)
- 12 October: first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Spring Equinox.
- Wednesday 15 October, 7pm. Study Group on Grail Mysteries.*
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*Monday Night reading group studying the Future
of Eastern Europe and the Grail Mysteries by Sergei O.
Prokofieff will now meet on Wednesdays… again
at 7pm. Anyone who can now come because of
the change of evening is most welcome. Our study
is of a most fascinating topic.
Christopher Bacchus
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Spring Festival
Spring_Festival_2025.doc
Sunday, 12th Oct at 3pm – a reading of Lecture 5 "The Working together of the Four Archangels" from ‘The Four Seasons and the Archangels’ with John Jackson
Sunday, 12th Oct at
7 pm – Social gathering over light refreshments in the Foyer.
Please bring a festive plate to share
7.30 pm – Festival Celebration:
In the Archangel Raphael Imagination of the Spring – when the renewal of our physical body and the physical world all around us takes place – Rudolf Steiner speaks of the danger of the counter-forces, Lucifer and Ahriman. At this time of the year, they are trying to gain power over us through the living lime in nature and in us...
Over time, year by year, they are gaining more access to our soul, and there is the danger of us losing our humanity through their temptation and deception, and becoming more and more chained to the physical, purely material world.
But we have the opportunity also, of finding ourselves in our spiritual humanity at this time – through the healing forces of Raphael-Christ for body and soul – to be prepared for the unfolding of the summer mystery.
The evening will open with Music by our CHB friends, Bob and Jenny. After the welcome, John Jackson will speak the Soul Calendar verse 1 – Easter Mood; and we will hear a spring poem spoken by Robyn Hewetson. We will then all move together in Eurythmy with John Allison.
Initiation in the desert: ‘The Prophet’ by Alexandre Pushkin, will be spoken by the Festival Chorus, followed by us all singing verse 1 from Julian’s Soul Calendar Rounds, together, led by Bob Cross.
The Counter Forces: we will hear Julian’s music of Benedictus’ verse from the Higher Devachan, sung by a small Festival Singers’ Group; and Leslie Wait will give the Festival Address, about the counter forces we will experience in Scene 4 from Rudolf Steiner’s ‘Portal of Initiation’, presented by students and associates of the ‘Spirit of the Word School’. To conclude the evening, we will hear Benedictus’ verse sung again.
About the sculpture of the Representative of Mankind by Rudolf Steiner –
An image for the inner dynamic in the spring-time
The statue of the Representative of Mankind, the Christ Jesus standing between the adversary powers, was created by Rudolf Steiner, despite his many other responsibilities, during a period of ten years, together with Edith Maryon and several artist colleagues. “It was my task in Dornach to place this important Sculptural Group in the Building for the School of Spiritual Science” he said, indicating its dominant central position on the stage at the eastern end. This was to be understood as the crowning feature of the First Goetheanum and indeed, from the beginning, also the School of Spiritual Science. The Sculpture escaped the terrible fire which destroyed the double cupola building during the Sylvester night of 1922/23.
Rudolf Steiner, however, continued to carve on the main figure after the death of Edith Maryon until he withdrew to his own sickbed. The Statue of the Representative of Mankind belonged to what was most dear to Rudolf Steiner and is inseparable from the founding of the new Christian Mysteries bound to the future tasks of the Goetheanum.
This Statue and its accompanying models represent the Christological kernel of the Dornach School of Spiritual Science.
Peter Selg
Light’s weaving spirit streams
From man to man
To fill all the world with truth
Love’s blessing warms
Soul beside soul
To bring all world to happiness
The heralds of the spirit marry
Men’s works of blessing
With the world’s purposes;
When these can be united by the man,
Who in man finds himself,
The light of spirit streams through the warmth of soul.
( Translated by Adam Bittleson)
Astrid Anderson & John Jackson.
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Report from ASHB Committee Meeting 9. October 2025
Robin to meet with Fran to clarify capacity and process for accepting donated members’ books as well as new guidelines of purchasing new books for the library.
The final decision whether the meditation workshop with Thomas Mayer and Agnes Hardorp will go ahead should be known by the end of the week. Gerrit to email everyone who expressed interest.
Proposed rule changes are currently being looked over by a lawyer. Special General Meeting to process these changes 22. November, 2pm at the Centre.
Investigating alternative, more healthy lighting options has been postponed until the new year.
Establishing criteria for the newly initiated events budget. There are three elements, speaking fee, travel and accommodation costs. Agreed on $100 speaking fee for people we invite plus travel and accommodation costs for anyone coming from out of town.
Self-promoted events are of a commercial nature where speakers charge a fee and pay room hire fees. Any contributions to festivals are seen as being part of the cultural realm of the community where members contribute voluntarily.
Our ‘clearing out under the house’ session was postponed due to bad weather and happens now on Saturday, 18. October, 10am.
The Committee suggested to co-opt Jen Speedy (new trustee) and Susan Wotherspoon to the committee but they both declined due to their heavy work loads.
Our budget is on track with income and expenses both sitting at 46% at 50% of the year.
Spring Festival today, 12. October 2025:
3pm reading of lecture 5 of ‘The Four Seasons and the Archangels’ ‘The Working together of the four Archangels’ with John Jackson.
7pm refreshments (please bring a plate), 7.30pm Festival Celebration (see flyer in newsletter).
We are currently working on identifying which parts of the house still need insulating.
We hope to have any remaining insulation done before the end of the financial year.
We had correspondence from Van James and Ian Trousdell offering talks.
Robin to further clarify details.
Norbert Mulholland mentioned at his talk that the painting in the main room was not finished at the time, since he ran out of time. He is currently contemplating the possibility of finishing the painting. If he decided that he would be able to fit this into his busy schedule, we would need to fundraise for this.
For the Committee
Gerrit Raichle
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Foyer Display
Zahira Rickard's art works are now on display in the foyer.
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Library
The Library is OPEN with Fran Obers in attendance as Librarian for advice and help on Wednesdays during Term time from 11 am to 3pm.
If you have any anthroposophical or related books on your shelves that you have read sufficiently and would like to make available to other readers, please box them up and bring them to the Library by 12 November. Fran will look to see if there are some suitable for the Library; the others will be offered for sale on our stall in the Taikura Fete on Sunday 16 November. Proceeds from the Fete will be used to purchase new publications for the Library. If you have suggestions for purchases please send a note to info@anthrohb.nz
If you have Library books you wish to return when the Centre building is closed, there is a Return slot in the Library wall to the west of the building, just beyond the two concrete carpark strips. Open the flap and push the book right in.
Items, Notices, Letters, or articles of interest to the Hawkes Bay Anthroposophical community
ARE MOST WELCOME
Please email your text by midday Saturday to the Editor at info@anthrohb.nz
with "For AnthroHB News" in the subject line.
Diagrams and pictures need to be in .jpeg (or .jpg) format.
Robin Bacchus, Editor
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Musings on the Mystery Plays - 4
Scene 4 of "Portal of Initiation"
When this scene opens we see Johannes Thomasius in mediation. Behind him, in soul-space, we see artistically portrayed two powerful spiritual beings, named Lucifer and Ahriman, speaking to him.
So how do these two fit into the picture?
The goals of the guiding spiritual Hierarchies for the evolution of humanity are that we, as humans, develop and become independent beings freely able to express love to the highest degree. But it is not straight forward. We acquire strength by pushing against the opposition of these two.
Lucifer tempts humanity to remain in ‘spirit’ as half-developed angels, i.e. to not develop any further.
Each great civilisation begins with Luciferic enthusiasm — Lucifer enters into human souls and out of this springs the wishes and aspirations, ideals, enthusiasm, desire for happiness, the accomplishments of the Arts, but also the injurious desires — egotistical impulses, greed, arrogance, etc.
Ahriman wishes us to outwardly create for ourselves a material ‘heaven-on-earth’ where technology does everything for us. He would like to regulate, control and define so that the future is pre-defined with no creativity. He thrives on accuracy and exactness, which is the essence of the Sciences.
He destroys creativity by setting it into systems, laws and regulations so that it grinds to halt. (On a smaller scale, just follow the progress of New Zealand’s “Tomorrow’s Schools” (1989) from grand ideal to bureaucratic regulatory nightmare.)
Eventually Lucifer moves on and inspires a new start, elsewhere.
Rudolf Steiner said of this:
“As death is the karmic fulfilment of birth;
so: Ahriman is the karmic fulfilment of Lucifer.”
Archetypes (Urbild) for Mystery Drama Characters
Rudolf Steiner was always a very sociable person. He had many friends from a wide variety of circles and professions. He had an incredible ability to take an interest in other people. But in Weimar, after certain inward experiences at the beginning of his time there, he experienced a kind of wall between himself and the world, and he suffered a lot as a result. In his autobiography, The Course of My Life, he describes how he always felt as if he were visiting others, but no one ever came to visit him; no one was interested in his innermost concerns. Despite his outward sociability, we see a strong sense of loneliness.
He struggled to find a new language that could express what he was experiencing spiritually. Around 1900, he was dealing with a language that had already become largely materialistic and carried fixed meaning in its words. He also had to express spiritual ideas in a language that wouldn’t overwhelm people, since spiritual content does this quite easily. So, he had to find linguistic means that would challenge the inward activity of the listener and reader. There is no other way when communicating spiritual content today: if we want to remain free in relation to it, we have to conquer these texts for ourselves. Anthroposophy is always about one’s own activity.
In 1924 Rudolf Steiner described Anthroposophy in Leading Thoughts thus:
1. Anthroposophy is a path of knowledge, to guide the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the universe. It arises in man as a need of the heart, of the life of feeling; and it can be justified only inasmuch as it can satisfy this inner need. He alone can acknowledge Anthroposophy, who finds in it what he himself in his own inner life feels impelled to seek. Hence only they can be anthroposophists who feel certain questions on the nature of man and the universe as an elemental need of life, just as one feels hunger and thirst.
2. Anthroposophy communicates knowledge that is gained in a spiritual way. Yet it only does so because everyday life, and the science founded on sense-perception and intellectual activity, leads to a barrier along life's way—a limit where the life of the soul in man would die if it could go no farther. Everyday life and science do not lead to this limit in such a way as to compel human beings to stop short at it. For at the very frontier where the knowledge derived from sense perception ceases, there is opened through the human soul itself the further outlook into the spiritual world.
The "seeds" of Rudolf Steiner’s first mystery drama reach "back to the year 1889" when he was writing Goethe as Father of a New Science of Aesthetics. In a nutshell his thesis is: "Consider the What, but consider more the How, for it above all depends on the How.” An artist starts by basing his work on sensory elements or images from the physical world, but the most important aspect is how one transforms these sensible images in one's imagination in order to present something wholly new and spiritual.
This transformational process also holds for Steiner's mystery dramas, insofar as all the characters are based on real-life people and events from the sense world, people who were personally known to Steiner: "And these people are living people – not fictitious people. For example, they are very well known to me. By 'known', I do not mean thought up, but living and breathing."
David Wood in an article in New View Vol 58 and again in Vol 68 researches who these ‘Urbild’ or archetypes for Professor Capesius and Dr Strader were. [Much of what follows is from these 2 articles.]
Professor Capesius was an amalgam of Steiner’s university teacher and friend Karl Julius Schroer, a Goethe scholar who arranged for Steiner to edit Goethe's scientific works, and a Professor Josef Franz Capesius (1853-1918) whom Steiner had meet when speaking in 1889 in Hermannstadt about his book ‘Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge’.
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The character of Doctor Strader was moulded on three people who Rudolf Steiner knew quite well:
- Gideon Spicker (1840-1912) whom Steiner had met and corresponded with. He died just before the fourth play was written.
- Friederich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887) whom Steiner admired and communicated with as a young man.
- Carl Unger (1878-1929), an engineer. He became a student and colleague of Rudolf Steiner.
These real-life individualities supplied certain distinctive ‘features’ or traits for the characters in the dramas. Each of these were striving to understand their physical world experiences in terms of spirit – the inner struggle to harmonize two different worldviews, the ‘religious Christian’ and the ‘scientific-philosophical’ perspective.'
In a 1917 public lecture in Basel, Steiner remarked:
"In my life I have met a series of people, who, like Gideon Spicker, were wrestling with cognition, and I have attempted to depict cognitive characters of this kind in the portrayal of Strader, a personality in my mystery dramas."
Spicker was educated as a Capuchin monk but left to become a professor of philosophy in Munster.
Vischer was born in Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart in 1807.
He also grew up in an extremely religious environment before renouncing his priestly life eventually becoming a professor of philosophy.
One has to additionally recall that Steiner's character, Dr. Strader, is also a metamorphosis of one of the gold-devouring will-o'-the-wisps in Goethe's Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and Beautiful Lily.
Despite their frivolity, pride, obstinacy and egotistical natures, the skills of the will-o'-the-wisps are absolutely necessary and unique – for it is they and they alone who are able to unlock the golden portal to the temple in the Fairy Tale. Steiner interprets the will-o'-the-wisps as representatives of modern scholarly and scientific life, and comments on why Goethe chose them to open the temple doors: "Goethe [as a poet] did not underestimate science; he was well aware that it is science that unlocks the temple of wisdom; he knew that one has to examine everything, take everything up and judge it in pure knowledge, and that one cannot penetrate into the temple of the highest wisdom unless one does this."
In Gideon Spicker’s eyes, if one wishes to understand the work of a universal thinker such as Goethe, then one has to follow a comprehensive or multi-sided approach, one that takes into account all of their works. Writing in a 1887 letter to Steiner, Spicker says: "I above all see the difficulty in the fact that a complete picture can only be gained by means of the totality of his being. […] With Goethe one has to take the whole into account, and here one easily ends up on false paths." Spicker himself had demonstrated the fruitfulness of this comprehensive approach in his own 1883 book, Lessings Weltanschauung, – a text highly valued by Steiner.
Even Strader’s name, indicating 'path', is linked to Italian La Strada and to German Die Strasse meaning road, street or path.
Carl Unger was born near Stuttgart into an educated family, in which his parents held more a natural-scientific and agnostic worldview than a religious one. He was an engineer by trade, who had studied mechanical engineering at the Stuttgart Technical College, receiving his doctorate in engineering in 1904. The city of Stuttgart was to remain the main centre of Unger's life and work. Unger became a member of the German section of the Theosophical Society in October 1903, and one year later was accepted into Steiner's esoteric school, before being elected to the executive committee of the German Section of the Theosophical Society in 1908. With the change to the Anthroposophical Society in 1912/1913, Unger was again nominated to its central committee, a position he held until the year of his death in 1929. To begin with, the reconciliation of the natural-scientific and spiritual worldviews was not easy for Carl Unger, and he had difficulties with several central elements of spiritual science, particularly the theory of reincarnation. However, discussions with his older friend Adolf Arenson, and long reflections and study, eventually helped him overcome many of his scientific reservations.
Steiner frequently expressed admiration for Unger's methodical and scientific attitude. And again, for Steiner, it was above all Unger's rigorous approach to knowledge that provided one of the best foundations for a genuinely modem spiritual movement:
RS: “And if precisely here in Stuttgart we have found a – worker of extraordinary significance (Dr. Unger) in this [epistemological] field, then it is to be viewed as a beneficial stream within our movement. For the deepest parts of this movement will not attain their validity in the world through those people who only wish to hear about the facts of the higher worlds, but through people who possess the patience to penetrate into-a cognitive method, who create a real foundation for genuinely solid work, which fashions a skeleton for working in the higher worlds.”
RB
