There is no silence of snow,
No mantle of white muffling a sleeping earth,
No hedgerows crisp-clad with icicles and frost,
No robin glowing like a warm jewel
Within the carpet of winter white.
No butterfly expectation in the pit of the stomach,
For here are no fir-bedecked, fire flamed halls
Where the heart curls, foetus-like, in a womb of warmth.

Waiting, waiting for that inner birth,
Waiting, waiting for that inner light,
Waiting, waiting for the Christ child to be born.

No.  Here in this sun-ripened land
In sun-filled days, we are drawn outwards,
Inexorably outwards in sun-washed spaces.
Gone is the eager flowering of Spring,
Gone, too, the kowhai golden herald, trumpet-tongued
Of Summer’s honeyed ambience.|
The only mantle of white is the manuka
Sheltering the fledging plants which one day
Will supersede her as the sceptred senators
Of the cool and silent forest.

And where, where is that inner light?
Where, where is that inner birth?
Where will the Christ be born?

Here I celebrate a new birth,
Here I celebrate the dawn of His High Coming
In the leaf-green *** of the forest,
In the breeze playing through the surf-filled days,
And there, against the unruffled mantle
Of the sky, the Pohutukawa’s crimson flowers
Cradle the Summer’s warmth like Grail cups.

Here, here is that birth,
Here – in wind, water, fire
And Christened earth
In full Summer benefience
I celebrate the Advent of His High Coming.

              Allysen Caris

Christmas Greetings

Dear Hawke's Bay Members of the Anthroposophical Society

Thank you for your support and contributions to the Branch throughout 2025.  Your use of the Centre has created a vibrant and beautiful place for art, study, homeopathic consultations, eurythmy, after school drama classes, playgroup, borrowing books from the library, conversations and social gatherings.  Despite all the personal, national and global challenges we have faced on Earth this year, we have kept creating opportunities to gather together.

We wish you a happy and safe Christmas, when we remember the births of the Jesus children depicted in the Luke and Matthew Gospels, and look forward to 2026. Just as mother Mary and father Joesph, (in Luke) journey from Nazareth in mid-winter and set their wills on finding a place in Bethlehem to give birth to their precious baby Jesus, we are also called to activate our will forces, to bring love, joy and peace, into our families and community groups.

Once the Summer Festival has been celebrated this weekend, the Centre will be closed until 19 January 2026. 

Warm regards,

Hawkes Bay Branch Committee

Gerrit Raichle - chair

Robin Bacchus - treasurer, editor

Angela Hair - secretary

John Jackson - festivals

Mike Caris - committee 

**Earth Radiating Spirit**

a celebration  

Friday and Saturday, 20 & 21st February, 2026

Keep these dates free as we have a special weekend planned. 

In Hastings we will be celebrating the arrival of a bronze sculpture, created in 2023 by the Dutch artist, Rik ten Cate.  This double pentagonal dodecahedron is a replica of the Foundation Stone, laid by Rudolf Steiner in 1913 for the first Goetheanum and closely connected with the Foundation Stone Meditation.  

Having already visited Chile, Brazil and Germany, this sculpture arrives soon in Australia, and then in Aotearoa New Zealand in early February, 2026.  

Embraced by the Earth
Radiating to the Spirit of the World
is the Foundation Stone.

You will receive more details later but you will be invited to be part of this International Experience, so circle these dates. 

Bernie and Diana (in consultation with Michelle Vette and the local Branch Committee)

continued from last week

(These sheaths naturally continue to be the earthly envelope of the "I" even if the latter expands its sphere of experience.   Since it is the sheaths that give us our individuality, this is not in any way diminished by an expansion of the "I"-experience.   As for the essence of the "I" itself, it is already shared with the "I" of every other human being.   These considerations are of importance because they help to shed light on the new direction given to human evolution by the Mystery of Golgotha. )  

The evolution of the “I”

We described (in chapter IX) how the primal ancestors of the human being were created as warmth "shells" on Ancient Saturn.   And we saw that the beings who were then at their human stage of evolution, the Archai, lived in those warmth shells, experiencing their egoity within them and thereby endowing them with the disposition to receive their own egos in a later phase of evolution.   From a certain point of view we can regard the whole development of mankind from warmth shells on Ancient Saturn to the present human beings of body, soul and spirit as an evolution towards egohood.   By egohood we mean the capacity to bear within oneself, and to experience consciously, the "I".   It was, so to say, a gradual development and refining of the sheaths that would enfold the "I".   This development reached its culmination at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha.   

Rudolf Steiner pointed out, however, that the process went too far; it overshot the mark.   The ego principle had grown more and more independent: it had exaggerated its independence, straining it beyond a certain point.   The consequence was that the human "I", which came into being when the universal.   “I” reflected itself in the individual bodily organism, was unable to experience itself in earthly life according to its own intrinsic nature, but only through the egoism of its sheaths.   For the “I” itself, as we have said, has no egoism, no antipathy in it.   The excessive antipathy of the sheaths of the "I" had to be combated in order to preserve humanity from overweening egotism.   This was accomplished when Christ embraced death on the Cross of Golgotha.  The blood that flowed on Golgotha gave an impetus for the gradual overcoming of the force that makes an egotist of the ego.  Before the crucifixion, as a preparation for the further development of the "I", Christ had taught his disciples the way of selfless love, a teaching they were to follow themselves and to spread through the world to all peoples capable of receiving it.  This they did.  And they bore witness to Christ's Deed.  The response to their words spread far and wide through many countries.  In chapter XIII we quoted Rudolf Steiner's moving account of what then occurred:

"In Christ, the Life Spirit, the Eternal Unifier, there was accomplished historically and at the same time symbolically the initiation of the whole of mankind at the level of the feelings, of the feeling-life of the soul.  It was an event of such power that in everyone who echoed it in their own feelings it worked right into the physical, right into the appearance of the stigmata, the sensation of the piercing pain.  It moved people to the very depths of their souls.  There arose an emotional response that swept through the world as waves of feeling of unprecedented intensity. 

When Divine Love was initiated on the Cross, the sacrifice of the "I" for all mankind took place.  The physical expression of the "I", the blood, flowed in love for humanity and worked on in such a way that thousands pressed forward to this initiation, to this death, letting flow their blood in love, in fervour, for humanity People no longer realize, not even theosophists, just how much blood flowed in that way, for it has never been sufficiently emphasized.  But the waves of fervour that flowed to the ground with the blood and rose up again have fulfilled their mission.  They have given a mighty impulse.  They have ripened humanity for the initiation of the will.  And this is the legacy of Christ."   GA 104a

It was through veneration, love and the spirit of sacrifice through the noblest forces of the heart — that true Christianity spread through the world.  Man's faculties of spiritual perception had been lost and his knowledge of the spiritual world had grown dim.  For three thousand years mankind had been living in the Age of Darkness, Kali Yuga, which would hold sway for a further two thousand years.  But Christ had established his citadel in the human heart, the centre of the human being, the focal point of the “I”

In the first few centuries of Christendom the Christ-impulse was carried into the world by the fire of love.  But all too soon intellectual thought and the iron hand of dogma began to quench that fire.  Yet it flashed forth ever and again in the leading spirits of Christianity.  For the wise Powers that guide human evolution had taken measures to ensure that the Christ-impulse should not be forgotten during the Age of Darkness.  The etheric body, astral body, and the imprint of the selfless "I" of Jesus of Nazareth had been preserved in the spiritual world, and by a special process copies were made of them and were woven into the earthly bodies of outstanding Christian leaders:

"It now occurred from the sixth and seventh centuries onward that a duplicate of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth was incorporated in particularly outstanding preachers of Christianity.  Such a man was St.  Augustine.  In his youth he had to go through tremendous inner struggles.  But then the impulse of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth began to work in him in a most significant manner, and that was when he commenced himself to elaborate Christian mysticism.  His works are only comprehensible in the light of this fact."  GA 104a

It was through this same spiritual process that the Hibernian Church of St.  Columba was able to spread esoteric Christianity so powerfully throughout Western Europe.  Leading figures in that Church were endowed with such duplicates of the etheric body of Jesus of Nazareth:

"Many of the personalities at work in the world bore such a copy in themselves.  St.  Columban, St.  Gall, St.  Patrick all bore a copy of that etheric body in them and it was precisely through this that they were able to spread Christianity.  By this means it was possible to build a bridge from the Event of Christ to later times. 

And then we see in the eleventh and twelfth centuries human beings who have had a copy of the astral body of Jesus of Nazareth woven into their own astral bodies.  Such a person was St.  Francis of Assisi.  If we follow the course of his life there is much in it that will be incomprehensible to us; but his impulsive humility and Christian devotion become understandable when we say to ourselves that he bore such a secret in him.  Through having such an astral body woven into their own, these human beings were able to proclaim Christianity in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  They themselves had received Christianity by grace. 

The "I" of Jesus of Nazareth left his bodily sheaths when he was baptized by John; but an imprint of his "I" remained in those three sheaths, like an image impressed in sealing wax.  The Christ-Being took possession of those three bodies, but also of something that remained behind in them like an imprint of the "I" of Jesus.  From the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries onwards a kind of copy of the "I" of Jesus was woven into those human beings who now began to speak of an "inner Christ".  Master Eckhart, Tauler — such men spoke out of their own experience as from an imprint of the "I" of Jesus in them." 

[Steiner 'Paths and Goals of the Spiritual Man.']

By spiritual measures such as this, the continuity of awareness of the Christ-impulse was maintained until the closing centuries of the Age of Darkness.  These centuries were marked by the industrial revolution and by the advent of the punched card system and steam technology.  By then the Powers of Opposition had attained such supremacy in outer life that, in the eighteenth century, the Gods were obliged to hand over the remainder of the material Earth evolution to Ahriman.  Jehovah had been defeated.  Darwin proclaimed that men descended from apes, and scientific thinking was dominated by atomism, by the reduction of all the different forces to mere waves, and by the heady perspectives of the sub-physical realm of electromagnetism.  As for the church: religious life had become more and more superficial, theologians began to regard Christ as no more than human — the "simple man of Nazareth" — and finally to doubt that he was a real historical person at all.  Humanity was losing all connection with the Christ-impulse.   

(to be continued)

(Emberson, Paul [2014], “From Gondishapur to Silicon Valley” pp 931 to 935)