Anthroposophy in Hawkes Bay
Rudolf Steiner Centre, 401 Whitehead Road, Hastings
Events in brief
over next 2 weeks
11 to 25 January 2026]
All is quiet and summery with some storms.
- Monday 19 January. Centre reopens.
- Friday 23 to Sunday 25. Art of Curative Eurythmy Course: "Salutogensis - Aspects of Wellbeing" in Rudolf Steiner House, Ellerslie, Auckland. ** see poster
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- Friday, 30 January. Christian Maclean - will give a talk at Rangimarie entitled: “Epiphany: the Adoration of the Magi and the Baptism in the Jordan” **
- Friday 20, Saturday 21 February. A celebration "Earth Radiating Spirit" **
- Saturday 28 February: Humour and Rudolf Steiner the Cartoonist with Van James from Hawaii.
- Saturday 14 March. 2:30 pm. SGM to consider Change of HBBranch Rules/Constitution.
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**A visitor from Scotland - Christian Maclean - will give a talk at Rangimarie on Friday, 30 January, entitled:
“Epiphany: the Adoration of the Magi and the Baptism in the Jordan”
Christian has been an Editor for Floris Books for many, many years (and still is!) and for some recent years is a member of the Christian Community Foundation - a group that supports The Christian Community founded in 1922 as a free church, in the area of the donation of the sacraments, teaching, pastoral care and the training and ordination of men and women as priests and of their sending in Europe and overseas.
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Goetheanum's Foundation Stone
As the double pentagonal dodecahedron, the heart of the Foundation Stone laid under the first Goetheanum and still under the second, is a geometrical form I am offering some musings on GEOMETRY in the intervening weeks, as background. RB
Musings on Geometry 2
Let us keep things simple by considering closed, linear, geometrical shapes or forms drawn by straight lines going from point to point and arriving back at the starting point after a number of steps. We can move around a form, say in a clockwise direction. If we start at a point the activity alternates from moving along a line, then turning/rotating at a point, repeating. Distance > angle > distance > angle and so on. A line or lateral, edge or side joins two points or vertices. A joint, knee [-gon {genu}] or ankle [-angle] links two lines at each vertex.
I am emphasing the polarity between line [lateral, finite] and point [vertex, infinitesimal].
To describe a form, we could count the number of steps, the length of each line between points and the angle of rotation between the lines at each point. In the following diagram of an irregular pentagon, a clockwise rotation is measured as positive (+), anticlockwise as negative (-). A complete turn is 360º.
The names of these figures are derived from Greek and Latin (see chart of words with numbers in them) so we start with 3 – triangle, 4 – quadrangle, quadrilateral or square, 5 – pentagon, 6 – hexagon, and so on.
Let us look at one of the simplest forms: TRIANGLES.
If we look at triangles, we can categorise them according to the degree of symmetry they show:
- All 3 sides/angles equal – Equilateral and Equiangular, Also called Regular;
- 2 sides equal – Isosceles [same legs];
- No sides equal – Scalene.
- The Regular Triangle has THREE lines of symmetry;
- The Isosceles Triangle has ONE line of symmetry;
- The Scalene Triangle has NONE.
You will also notice that:
- the longest side is opposite the largest angle
- the shortest side is opposite the smallest angle
Triangles can also be categorised by the size of their largest angle:
- 60 < angle < 90 – acute (sharp)
- Angle = 90 – right
- Angle > 90 – obtuse (thick)
This distinction is very important in the famous Pythagoras Theorem, which we will look at later.
Next week we will look at the various Centres of a Triangle and the symmetry of QUADRILATERALS.
RB
