hood and fight for survival through color and image. Margaret Runyon, Dennis Dietzel, Marianne Fieber, Robert Karp, Group discussions were enriched by small breakout groups, Lori Barian and Mary Louise Hershberger, organized a meeting so each had the chance to share insights and everyone’s voice with a wonderful balance of artistic activity, spiritual study and was heard. We fellowship— worked through with delicious, concepts in the healthy food in lecture, and we between. devoted time in A special small groups to goodbye was share the needs said to longtime and challenges CRC members of our respecRobert Karp tive anthropoand Lori Barian. sophic comRobert is now munity work, active as the director of the and then shared Biodynamic that which we Farming and thought we Gardening could offer to Association, our commuCRC members at Great Serpent Mound, near Peebles, Ohio while Lori will nity’s developcontinue to serve as editor for The Correspondence. ment. The days began early and ended late—there was plenty of Christy Korrow, Burkesville, KY work to be done, and ground to cover. The council members,
The Austin Centenary Celebration of Rudolf Steiner’s Announcement of the Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric By Beth & Stephen Usher
Dr. David Booth’s Projective Geometry Lesson1 Saturday morning opened with a lesson on projective geometry and the etheric by Dr. David Booth; everyone had the opportunity to draw projective geometric constructions. David explained that “ether,” or aether, refers on the one hand to a hypothetical medium for the waves of optical theory in late nineteenth century physics, and on the other hand to a fact of the clairvoyant observation of nature. He described how the ether can be seen as interweaving streams in the atmosphere, related to flows on the earth. These streams resemble flows of water, but do not always go downhill. Plants appear to be fundamentally etheric objects into which matter is lifted by spiraling ether to produce the botanical forms of everyday, physical observation. Dr. Booth went on to tell how early anthroposophical scientists sought experimental evidence of this etheric action in delicate processes, and recognized that certain mathematical ideas are related to etheric phenomena. Projective geometry was prominent in these studies. As the twentieth century proceeded, however, various scientists reported a “death of geometry.” An autopsy would identify the cause of death as excessive formalization and algebraic abstraction. The decline of geometry was long and intergenerational; scientists, then engineers, schoolteachers, and finally, Waldorf schoolteachers and anthroposophists were affected. Geometry will be born again. There was a basis for renewal among anthroposophists in the 1950s and independently in the structural topology movement in the 1970s. These two groups never got together to form a single school of thought, however.
The Novalis Branch of Austin, Texas held a festive conference of the centenary of Rudolf Steiner’s 1910 announcement of the Reappearance of Christ. The event took place March 26-28, 2010 on the Austin Waldorf School campus. About seventy people attended the celebration. The event was bathed in the art of eurythmy and brought to life through scenes from Rudolf Steiner’s first mystery drama, The Portal of Initiation, lectures by General Secretary MariJo Rogers, Judith Brockway, and Stephen Usher, a projective geometry lesson with David Booth, conversation, good food, and some real fun. The conference opened Friday evening with eurythmy by Austin’s Chaparral Eurythmy on Beethoven’s sixth and tenth sonatas for piano and violin. Rudolf Steiner choreographed these forms several weeks before he died in 1925. Dr. Stephen Usher then lectured on “The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric & The Re-emergence of Human Awareness of the Etheric World” [which follows this report.] He explained the basic content of the 1910 lectures when Rudolf Steiner first spoke of the imminent reappearance of the Christ in an etheric body that would commence in the 1930s and would develop over the next 2500 to 3000 years. Steve also noted that Ernst Katz had agreed to speak at the conference with the caveat that he might already be on the other side as turned out to be the case. But Ernst was most certainly attending in his spiritual form. After the lecture pianist Anthony Tobin performed Adagio ma non troppo from Beethoven’s Sonata in A-flat Major, Op 110.
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