liturgy of the seasons (24)
a weekly translation of Rudolf Steiner’s Seelenkalender verse
IN 1912-1913, Rudolf Steiner created a sort of liturgy of the natural and spiritual year in the form of fifty-two short verses. Experience—my own and others—testifies to the powerful effect that a short meditation on the relevant verse throughout the course of the year can have in respect to awakening and sensitizing the soul to each season’s unique quality and gesture.
Below is Dr. Steiner’s original Seelenkalender, or “Calendar of the Soul” verse for this week followed by my translation into English. I have opted to follow, whenever a conflict arose, the spirit over the letter in my translation efforts, attempting to convey the “mood” before the propositional content.
TWENTY-FOURTH WEEK OF THE YEAR 24. Sich selbst erschaffend stets, wird seelensein sich selbst gewahr; der weltengeist, er strebet fort in selbsterkenntnis neu belebt und schafft aus seelenfinsternis des selbstsinns willensfrucht. ∇∆ IN self-creation never-ending the soul becomes self-comprehending, the world-spirit, onward striving for it, self-knowledge is a spring of ceaseless self-renewal; and as the soul’s light slowly dwindles: a spark of intimation kindles in the falling light, a spark wherefrom new fruits of sovereign will may come
Hi Max,
An interesting concatenation of recent events is the likely reason that I came to realize that you had not submitted Week 24 in the Calendar of the Soul. Now, that you have inscribed your own translation, it makes the most recent Petrarchan Sonnet, which is # 60, all the more relevant. I have been having a feeling that you were coming to a point in your sonnets where a cross-over occurs. This seems to be the week, and your translation of week 24 in the liturgy, is far superior to the generally recognized Pusch translation. Anybody can do a comparison, and I have been doing it for several weeks.
The other factor involved is that a mutual friend who admires your work has recently asked me in a private e-mail about something that can only be seen as the prompting agent here in your interpretation of week 24, as well as Petrarchan Sonnet 60. As such, Rudolf Steiner did address both matters here in two brief articles written in 1923, and published in Das Goetheanum,
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/Michaelmas/MicMas_MicDrg.html
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/Michaelmas/MicMas_MicDrg2.html
Herein, he makes quite clear what this entry into the Autumnal season really means. We get to breathe in again, and this leads to personal salvation through self-consciousness. This forms the second half of the year. To contemplate the first half of the year is a blessing when the ghost ship finally comes to harbor.