Miscellaneous Writings
Christ in Ansbach
CHRIST IN ANSBACH The Working of the Logos Or The Beginning of the 5th Creation through Kaspar Hauser Vienna November...
read moreA Different Country? The 13th Century and Today (2)
This article was first published in New View magazine #111 April-June 2024 Part 1 of the article is here: http://threeman.org/?p=3182 IN the presence of Rudolf Steiner during his visit to Britain in the late summer of 1923, on 2 September the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain was founded, and Daniel N. Dunlop proposed that Rudolf Steiner become its president for life, which Steiner accepted. After a lecture he held later that day, Steiner gave this verse to the members of the Society in Britain: I gaze into the darkness. In it arises...
read moreA Different Country? The 13th Century and Today (1)
This article was first published in New View magazine #109 Oct-Dec 2023 “The past is a different country; they do things differently there”. – L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between (1953) This past summer my wife and I escaped the relentless eight weeks of the cool, dull, grey English “summer”, in which we rarely saw the sun, (at least where I live) and headed off to the south of France, where the temperature was rarely below 32°C while we were there. For many years we had intended to go to...
read moreIn Defence of Rudolf Steiner – A Response to J. Paul Greenaway
This article was written as a response to J. Paul Greenaway’s article Is “spiritual science” science? The flawed legacy of Rudolf Steiner published in the Comment section of the UK Column website on 25 May 2023. UK Column declined to publish the article, and so it has been published here. J. Paul Greenaway’s waspish hit-piece on Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) (published on the UK Column website on 25 May 2023) is an odd thing. I shall not try to give an organised and systematic form to a piece which does not have such form. Instead, I...
read moreThree Kings and the Sun Demon
This article first appeared in New View magazine Issue #108 July-Sept 2023 To the majestic heights of summer The Sun’s brilliant being arises It draws my human feeling out And into its vast expanse of space. Intuitively, within my soul A sense is stirring that dimly tells me: In future time you will understand That you now were perceived by a being divine. from Rudolf Steiner, The Calendar of the Soul, 10th week 9-15 June There are two moods in “Summer” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” suite which most aptly portray in...
read moreThe Number 23
This article first appeared in New View magazine #107 April-June 2023 People born in the middle of a century, like me (1952), tend to look back to the beginning of the century, the time of their grandparents’ youth, as well as to the end of the century, the time of their own maturity and old age and also of their own grandchildren. As someone interested in history since childhood, this has always been true for me. As a 12 year old already I had become fascinated with the First World War, was aware of the dangers of nuclear war and also...
read moreWas it Really the “Storming” of “the Temple of Democracy”?
This article was first published in The Present Age magazine Vol. 6 Nos. 3/4 2020/2021 2020 - a year which began with hope in the West, despite the news of a new virus that had very recently emerged in distant China, a year in which many Europeans looked forward to celebrating the 250th anniversaries of the births of Beethoven, Hegel, and the poets Hölderlin and Wordsworth with numerous artistic events, while Japanese and others around the world looked forward to the Tokyo Olympics. But 2020 turned out to be surely one of the worst...
read moreCoronavirus and Cosmology: The Study of World Events
This article first appeared in New View magazine Issue #95 Spring 2020. The accompanying title illustration is of the rotating hexagonal structure, first observed in 1981, at the north pole of the planet Saturn. Some 25 years ago I started attending an annual world events seminar at Peredur Centre for the Arts in East Grinstead, England, organised by the late Coen Van Houten. They were valuable meetings. They were always held in early or mid-January and they continued until the early years of the new century. The meetings had a...
read moreThe Incarnation of Ahriman – When and Where?
This is a revised and slightly extended version of a lecture given by the author at a Der Europäer seminar in the Basel Stadthaus, Basel, Switzerland, 23.11.2019 and published in The Present Age magazine (Vol. 5 Nos. 7/8 Oct/Nov 2019 and Vol. 5 Nos. 9/10 May/June 2020) Rudolf Steiner gave 8 indications about the incarnation of Ahriman in the latter part of 1919. Before I turn to these 8 indications I would like to draw attention to some earlier remarks of his which can perhaps be seen as ‘preliminary’. On 16 July, 1918 (GA 181),...
read moreNATO’s 70th Birthday and UN COP 25
This article was first published in New View magazine Winter Issue 94 Winter Jan – March 2020 To form any judgments about a phenomenon in contemporary events we can keep in mind three elements – the context of the event (awareness of how the event relates to the past), wakefulness (awareness of what’s going on now in relation to the event) and insight (understanding how the event relates to what seems to be approaching us from the future). With these in mind, let us consider two recent contemporary events: NATO’s celebration of its...
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