initiative! A power of butterfly must be The aptitude to fly, Meadows of majesty concedes And easy sweeps of sky. So I must baffle at the hint And cipher at the sign, And make much blunder, if at last I take the clew divine. Mary paints with her words and one envisions other worlds. She read an excerpt from Novalis’ fairy tale of human and earth evolution Eros and Fable, which we heard again at her conclusion; an excerpt: As a small slender rod of iron, in the form of a serpent biting its own tail, touched the cradle of the sleeping Fable, who awoke “…and holding one hand toward the light, reached after the serpent with the other.” ‘Sophia,’ said he with a touching voice to the woman, ‘let me drink from the bowl.’ She gave it him without delay, and he could not cease drinking; yet the bowl continued full.1
Mary tells us that the Virgin Mary summons the Divine Sophia in the Divine Comedy by Dante (1265-1321). How long will it take us to awaken? William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) writes of “twenty centuries of stony sleep” in his poem “The Second Coming.” When did we lose our connection with the stars? Mary quoted poetry by John Donne (1572-1631):
And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and th’ earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. Then in February 1913, Dr. Steiner began to speak of the Sophia being in relation to the human being. He tells us that knowledge of the divine feminine was lost. The time is now to weave with our starry companions. Mary has the ability to make sense of celestial events and connect these happenings to human history. She shared a time line of three solar eclipses that create a re1 You may find the story Eros and Fable at Living Waters Wellness Resources, livingwaterswellnessresources.weebly.com/eros-and-fable--novalis.html
28 •
being human
Gallery Johannes A. Gaertner “ ... One of a dying breed: the European émigré humanist in whom vocation and avocation, learning for a living and living for learning, ran in perfect parallel harmony.” — Susanna Gaertner Johannes A. Gaertner ( 1912-1996), poet, author, artist, anthroposophist, professor of art history, studied theology and left Heidelberg with a ThD in 1936. His intent was to concentrate on early Christian archeology. To avoid conscription, he left Berlin “Optimism and cheerful hope for Lima, Peru, where he are not entirely justified, but intended to spend a year neither are pessimism and ... that became ten. In dark despair. Whether the good will ultimately prevail is 1941 he met and married uncertain, but we must act as my mother; they came to if with our help it could and this country just after the will. And though we have no war, and, in the manner contract, we must assume that Nature intended us to exist and of Einstein, Nabokov, and to survive. God is, perhaps, on other émigré eggheads, our side.” — From Prof. Gaertner‘s he obtained a position preface to Worldly Virtues at Lafayette College, at that time an all-male bastion of engineering and science. Johannes Gaertner “became” the Humanities, teaching German, French, Spanish, Latin, Art and Music Appreciation. As Lafayette grew, languages and music peeled off and Johannes founded and for decades was the Department of Art History. Legions of his students have remembered him in testimonials. One went on to chair art history at Yale, another became director of the Art Museum in Melbourne. In 1990, his daughter Susanna organized publication of Worldly Virtues: A Catalogue of Reflections. Then in 2021 she brought out an exhibit of his pen and ink drawings, created between the 1950’s and 1990’s, at the R. Blitzer gallery in Santa Cruz, California. Now these remarkable drawings are online to view or acquire at tahawuscenter.wixsite.com/johannes-gaertner—and we have been allowed to share the images of whimsy, caricature, character, and insight that follow... Susanna Gaertner & Johannes A. Gaertner