Michaelmas Verse:
Oh Nature, Your being of constant Mother love,
I bear within the being of my will.
But now my own force of will,
Tempers my impulsive spirit
So that I can fructify the feeling of my true self
to bear, as embryo, my eternal essence
within the womb of my lower self
Today is the Michaelmas verse and Rudolf Steiner is addressing nature as a being of constant mother love. He gives a picture elsewhere of mother love as being a very high level of the will, but not the highest. Freedom is the highest level of will. When acting out of mother love there are still some contingencies. To act out of freedom, there aren't. And those mothers in here who have let children go understand the contingencies in mother love, and in freedom there are no contingencies at all. But nonetheless mother love is a very high level of the will. So when Rudolf Steiner is talking about mother love, he's talking about very specific esoteric language. Nature has in it mother love, which is the giving of one's bodily substance to another, but what's not given in mother love, what is held back, is the self. And so he's saying that through the being of constant mother love in nature, I bear within me a being of will; but now my own will within nature must temper my impulsive spirit, because my impulsive spirit just wants to go to the periphery and be one with the Godhead. And so I need to temper that impulsiveness in my spirit so that I can fructify a feeling of my true self. As close as we can get in this life is really just a kind of feeling of the true self. We can't really become one with the spirit completely, because then we become one with all. But we can get a definite feeling of the True Self. So my own sense of my own will in nature, is subtly counter to the mother love impulse in nature. I sort of stand against it in a way. There's an old alchemical saying that the alchemist is the 'opus contra naturam', the work against nature; and it's not really translated very nicely in some places, because it seems very against the whole idea of why we're here on earth. We can think of the arrogance of modern science here. But what it's saying is exactly what Steiner is saying in the Michaelmas verse, that by existing as a human being, a part of your will gets separated from the mother love of nature. And that part that gets separated is the part that needs to temper your spirit so that in a motherly way you can, within your own will, find the embryo of your True Self growing. This was what was known in the ancient mystery schools as manas, or they use to call it the manes, the growing embryo of the True Self. And each time we come back into a given life, we are further developing the evolution of that embryo to eventually have an enlightenment into what in Eastern traditions they call CC, cosmic consciousness, and in the Western tradition what is called Christ Consciousness. Same thing. Within this consciousness there's the sense of the universal within all things. So in the Michaelmas verse Rudolf Steiner is really saying a lot. At Michaelmas where the soul is turning away from nature and turning toward itself there is a turning point, because nature's going away. And if our soul follows nature going away, that's when we really get depressed, because we feel like our will to life is being thwarted by the cosmos. This can make for a very rough fall and winter. Rudolf Steiner is addressing this in the Michaelmas verse, so I just wanted to give you a few pictures. The words seem a little complicated, but he's really talking about a mood of soul right now in the autumn, where the soul is turning. The light is going away. The soul if turning into the darkness where we sense within the presence of the Creator our True Self. Elsewhere Rudolf Steiner speaks about the human being experiencing the Godhead in darkness of the cosmos. It's a darkness because we have no hope of knowing it, but it's warm darkness because it is creative and is us. These were just a few comments about our verse for this week.
(The class then does an exercise observing the Rembrandt print called 'the Hundred Guilder print) In every picture there is a secret language, and it's the language of the motif. An artist, because of the way their hands are on their arms and the way their heart works and the way their consciousness works, has a particular way of making a curve, or a line. And that relationship between the movement of the curve and the movement of the line is particular in that soul. It's like a finger or voice print. And that relationship between the line and the curve is repeated again and again and again like a mantra by the artist as they draw or as they paint. It gets incorporated into their forms. There are certain forms that artists have certain ways of arranging which create a pictorial space that speaks directly of who they are as a person. These arrangements of form are called motifs. It's the motif of the artist that you become familiar with in the life and work of an artist. We become familiar with that particular kind of motif energy or what we could call the signature of the motif. When we look into that work, the motif is going on as a kind of inner movement. When we contemplate the work of the artist the motif is moving in our soul. The movement motif is the true medium in which the artist communicates. Rembrandt has one way of working a movement motif. Durer has another, Raphael another. Michelangelo another. There's a certain signature in the way in which the forms flow with one another. And that signature is, then, something that was living and moving in the soul of that artist. And it's through the signature of the relationship between the curve and the straight line that the tensions in the artwork are developed. Whether one artist has always a big curve followed by two small ones as a motif, or a series of small diagonal slashes, or a line that is 'fuzzy' due to all of the jerks of the drawing hand, or however that is. It's like a handwriting within the structure of the picture. And it's in that script of movement that your soul participates in the soul movements of the artist, not in what a pictured. Take, for instance the subject of madonnas in painting. There's a madonna, there's a madonna, they are the same subject but they're very different madonnas. They're the same in that they're madonnas, but they're different in that they have different energetic motifs. The motifs reveal the movements of the soul of the artist -- like a seismograph of the sensitivity of the artist to the materials and the image and what was being expressed. So today we're going to explore that a little bit in our observation exercises.
What I'd like you to do is when you come into yourself, that is when you become aware of your body sitting in the chair, be in yourself and say now I'm here in this chair and there's the picture out there. But when you go into the picture, imagine that you leave your body by flowing through your eyes out to touch the picture with your vision, what I would like you to do is to look for a line or a curve that you can see is repeated again and again. Usually it's a curve, but some artists use a straight line -- Feiniger, and Kandinsky in his later period, and whoever. Braque, Mondrian. Straight line people. But even in that, they have their own signature with that straight line -- have certain ratios and proportions. So Josef Albers was really into the square, and Mondrian was into the golden section rectangle, etc., etc., etc. There are all kinds of ways to cut the cake. There are all kinds of energetic motifs in artworks. So what I'd like you to do is when you go into the picture today, look for a curve or a series of curves in opposite directions (a compound curve) and see if there's a repetition of a curve or a compound curve in the picture. If there is, try to imagine your hand making that curve, feel it inside and outside, and then come back to yourself and say there's that curve out there. Then go into yourself and live into the curve as if you are actually making it inwardly, and then come back into yourself sitting in the chair, and then go into the picture and live into the curve in the picture again. Okay, it's a little variation on what we have been doing, but it's very far reaching what we're doing here. We're turning a corner. Anyone not understand what we're going to do? Okay, please work with the picture. . . Please record any thoughts, feelings or images.
Okay, so what I would like to present to you today is the alchemical concept known as dew. The name dew in Latin is ros, a drop of blood or a drop of dew. Ros is the root of the word rose as in the name Rosalinda, beautiful dew. Dew to an alchemist was what they called a gift of the night. It was understood in alchemical terms that a physical manifestation came into being in a process similar to the process of the formation of the dew. To an alchemist dew was a mysterious substance which came from nothing. Dew appeared on the grass in the morning out of nothing suddenly manifesting into something, and then it went back out again into nothing.
It was understood that in the alchemical world view the thing that we call body and the things that we call our organs were really just a kind of dew that showed up for a while and then went away. Everything that came into being that had a manifestation came through some form of condensing process or precipitating process. So today in the language of meteorology, rain and dew are called precipitation. Precipitation means that there is something that is in a levity state that falls into a gravity state. Levity is associated with laughter, but it really refers to a force that lifts. In warmth there is much levity. If we were to light a fire and watch the ash, the ash would fly up. Ash going up goes against the law of gravity. So levity to an alchemist was considered to be one of the most fundamental forces available. It was the polar force to gravity. Levity and gravity were the most fundamental forces in the universe to an alchemist. Levity states always had to do with warmth, and gravity states always had to do with cold. Levity goes up. Warm goes up. Cold and gravity go down. These two forces were the basic polarities of life. Things come into incarnation from levity states, fall under the influence of gravity and then they go back out into a levity state when they excarnate. The breathing of the soul in solve and coagula is where solve is going into a levity state and coagula is going into a gravity state. Now we have a few different words for our solve and coagula. Solve is solution. And if I take some salt and put it in water, the crystal, the earth of the salt, goes into the water and dis-solves, dis - solves, 'solve', dissolves into a levity state. The salt floats around in the water under the influence of levity. But if I boil all the water away, the salt comes back out of the solution as a precipitate. It comes back under the influence of gravity. The alchemist considered that to be a great, great mystery, the alternation of levity and gravity.