Anthroposophy in Hawkes Bay          

Calendar of Coming Events
-- Diary Dates

In the Rudolf Steiner Centre, 401 Whitehead Road, Hastings
unless stated otherwise.

• Saturday 26 April at 3 pm.  HB Branch of the Anthroposophical Society AGM.  [see below]
• Tuesdays 29 April to 24 June. "The Great World of Angels" - a study. [see previous Newsletter]
• Friday 9 to Sunday 11 May in Auckland. A Workshop on finances with experienced UK speaker Christopher H Budd.
  

  The Committee ask that visitors to events in the Centre pay a contribution to the Koha box in the Foyer, as we have regular bills for electric power, city rates, insurance, and maintenance for an ageing building.

-- Current Study Groups

• Fridays fortnightly at 7 pm in the Foyer. Topic: Rudolf Steiner's Michael Letters and the accompanying Leading Thoughts in GA26.  The Group is open: if you wish to join come early at 6:50 pm and we will help you borrow the book from the Library.

Leaders of Study Groups - you invited to list what you are doing; when and where and how those interested can join you.  Details to info@anthrohb.nz

Library

Fran has purchased 14 new books for the library -- they are now on the shelves.
You can read some notes about them here.

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Annual General Meeting 
3pm Saturday 26 April at the Centre.

Members will have received by separate email an invitation and access to the Agenda and Reports for our AGM.

I would like to thank all those members who have responded to a request to confirm or correct the details that the Branch has on record by their name.  I would be glad if those who have not responded yet to do so soon, before the AGM.  Records easily get out of date as people move home or change phones or email addresses, etc. or seemingly disappear!  Robin

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COMMUNITY NOTICEBOARD:
Requests; Exchange; Wanted; For sale

Accommodation

Full board available in peaceful Havelock North location.
To discuss and view, please call Martin on 021 183 0862

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Today is Easter Sunday

When was Easter first celebrated?

Probably in the 2^nd century.

It is believed that the word “Easter” originated from the name of the pagan goddess, Eostre (or Ostara). Eostre was the Anglo-Saxon goddess symbolizing springtime, the hare and the egg. The festival of Eostre was celebrated on the vernal equinox, when there are equal periods of light and darkness the world over.

Today the date of the Easter Sunday festival is based on the date of the Jewish Passover - so it is determined by three factors:

1. It is held on the first SUNday following –
2. The first Full MOON (called the Paschal Moon) following –
3. The northern vernal (spring) equinox when day and night are equal over the whole EARTH.

However, we are in the southern hemisphere where:
3. Spring EQUINOX is on Tuesday 23 September;
2. The next Full MOON is on Tuesday 7 October;
1. The next SUNday is Sunday 12 October.

The Mystery of Golgotha, which took place with the crucifixion, the death on the cross, the burial, the descent into hell and the resurrection of Christ, is the central event of the entire development of the Earth and of humanity.  With this event, the actual birth of the human “I” took place.

“Without the Mystery of Golgotha, the elementary forces of the Earth, which work in the subconscious of the soul and push themselves out in a passionate way, would have triumphed over the conscious ego or ‘I’-forces.  The human “I” would have been lost.   As a force, we see the Christ-impulse working in the course of human evolution, even without human consciousness having taken it up.”  (GA 152, p. 97)

Christ’s cosmic task was to overcome or master the forces of Death because human beings were being trapped in the material world, unable to re-enter the spiritual world after a life on earth.

Rudolf Steiner's spiritual research confirms that the death of Christ on the cross actually took place on Friday, April 3, 33, at the ninth hour, that is, at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, according to the Julian calendar.  This was a ‘turning point in time’.

“On a Friday, the 3rd of April of the year 33, three o'clock in the afternoon, the Mystery of Golgotha took place.  Simultaneously, the birth of the “I” in the sense in which we have often characterised it.  And it is not important on which part of the Earth the human being lives, or to which religious confession he belongs, that which came into the world through the Mystery of Golgotha applies to all human beings.  Just as it is true for all the world that Caesar died on a certain day, and not another day for the Chinese and yet another day for the Indians, so it is a simple fact of occult life that the Mystery of Golgotha took place on that day and that we have to do here with the birth of the “I”. (GA 143, p. 163)

The Three Crosses, etching by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1683

The actual significance of the Mystery of Golgotha lies not in the external events but in their spiritual aspect.  It must be grasped as a supersensible mystical fact. Rudolf Steiner already pointed this out in his fundamental writing "Christianity as Mystical Fact and the Mysteries of Antiquity".

“Only when we have the ideas, the concepts, which lead into the supersensible, can we also understand the Mystery of Golgotha, which is precisely an event that has to do with the supersensible, not with the sensuous world. What took place in the sensuous world of the Mystery of Golgotha is only the outer reflection.”  (GA 198, p. 243)

Through his experience of death on Golgotha, Christ united himself with the Earth and thereby gave the Earth its meaning, as a place where human beings could experience independence and freedom in a physical body, and without compulsion develop LOVE.

“In the whole realm of the supersensible worlds there is no death. One can only die on earth, in the physical world or in the worlds which resemble our Earth in their development.  All the beings who are hierarchically higher than man have no knowledge of death, they only know different states of consciousness. Their consciousness can temporarily be so lowered that it is similar to our earthly state of sleep, but they can wake up again from this sleep. There is no death in the spiritual world; there are only changes of consciousness there.  The greatest fear that earthly man has, is the fear of death; death cannot be felt by one who has ascended to the supersensible worlds.

There is therefore no death for beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies, with only one exception, that of the Christ. But in order that a supersensible being like the Christ might pass through death, he had first to descend to Earth. And this is what is of such immeasurable importance in the Mystery of Golgotha, that a being which in its own realm could never have experienced death in the sphere of its will, had to descend to Earth in order to undergo an experience peculiar to man, namely, to experience death.

A being, unique in its kind, which until then had only been cosmic, united itself with earth evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, through the earthly death, the hideous death on the cross. Since then, Christ has lived on Earth in such a way, is so bound to Earth, that he lives in the souls of men on Earth and experiences life on Earth with them. Therefore, the whole time before the Mystery of Golgotha was only a time of preparation in the evolution of the earth. The Mystery of Golgotha was the moment that gave the Earth its meaning.

When the Mystery of Golgotha took place, the earthly body of Jesus of Nazareth was given over to the elements of the Earth, and from that time the Christ was connected with the spiritual sphere of the Earth and lives in it.”  (GA 152, p. 39f)

“Union of Image with Archetype.”  
Rudolf Steiner. Berlin, Good Friday, 13 April 1906.  (GA54)

‘Man comes into physical existence at birth and passes out of it at death.  But for every human being there is an Archetype – the Higher Self – an Archetype that is eternal.’

The essence of Easter thought:  ‘It is the resurrection of the human being from the attachment to the transitory and material into the eternal regions of the Archetypes.  Nature is a symbol for this: at the time of Easter new life springs up everywhere from the earth, after the seed-germ has first sacrificed itself and decayed in the earth to enable new life to arise, so too must all the lower nature in man die away.  We must sacrifice our lower nature in order that we may arise to the eternal Archetype of things.  That is why at this time when nature awakens from winter sleep that Christendom celebrates the Death and the Resurrection of the Redeemer.’  [In the southern hemisphere we are experiencing the opposite season.  In the tropics, such seasons are not experienced]

‘Human beings, too, must first die, in order then to experience the resurrection in the spirit.  Only one who overcomes attachment to the transitory can himself become eternal like the eternal Archetypes; he becomes one of those who co-operate in the world’s progress, fashioning it for a future existence.’