Dear Friends,
Reveal thyself, Sun life! Rudolf Steiner’s phrase sets before our imaginative vision a footpath to a spiritual understanding of the meaning of the Sun’s passage through the star-realm of Gemini. Within the emerging study of astrosophy, the Sun signifies the ‘I’ (or Christ-Sun) of the human being—and to Gemini, Steiner attributed the ‘sense’ of recognizing the higher nature of others. The Sun’s entry into Gemini on Sunday thereby challenges us to regard others as their guardian Angels do: to look upon them with forgiveness and unconditional love.
Mars, positioned between the longitudes of Eta Leonis (3° Leo) and Regulus (5° Leo), squares Uranus (4° Taurus) on Sunday. The Mars-Uranus cycle (from conjunction to conjunction) unfolds over about two years. In combination, these planets can engender sudden, disruptive events that bear the power to shock us into an awakened consciousness of the truth.
Perhaps during the current 90° separation between Mars and Uranus, we’ll observe a resonance with the three most recent aspects within the cycle:
Mars-Uranus opposition (mid-November 2023): Javier Milei is elected President of Argentina
Mars-Uranus square (mid-March 2024): Vladimir Putin is re-elected President of Russia
Mars-Uranus conjunction (mid-July 2024): attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania
A bit later on Sunday, Jupiter (6° Gemini) and Saturn (in Pisces) form a square aspect, as these planets did during the miracle of turning water into wine. At the wedding feast, this miracle introduced to the assembled guests an entirely radical and foreign concept: spiritual heredity—which exists outside of the bloodline. (Indeed, the occurrence of this aspect might inspire us to establish or participate in a community with a different orientation than the one we’ve been familiar with.)
The inhabitants of Judaea carried an instinctive sense of the importance of their bloodline that went far beyond regional tribal custom. For just as the land of Palestine was prepared from spiritual heights for the incarnation of Jesus, so, too, was it essential that the bloodline of the people among whom Jesus was to be born remain absolutely pure.
Before the Nathan Jesus was physically born, he had long hovered over the land of his birth, uniting with it (and that in innocence) by sending down a current of tender love that wove a delicate tissue binding him to the land. These currents were felt by humanity and named “milk” and “honey.” [Christ and Sophia, p. 122]
The Last Quarter Moon (2° Pisces) will occur on Wednesday, as the Sun (2° Gemini) recalls Pentecost: the completion of Christ’s mission on the Earth. From Judith von Halle:
[The] disciples knew with certainty: I and the other person are individuals, but we are both united with one another and with the other fire-bearers; we are perfectly at one through the immense unifying power of the Sun, which is now to be found on the Earth. Everything in us strives toward the One, and this unites us in truth. It is no longer the blood which welds us together, but this source of the spirit, the universal, divine and single source of human selfhood.
In this way there arose a new community, that which Rudolf Steiner calls the ‘community of brothers’ (cf., for example, the lecture from 29 June 1908 in CW 104). This community of brothers was born at the time of Christ and is the community of the future, which is able to withstand the counter-impulses [of egoism and] materialism. . . . So [the disciples] understood what it meant when Christ said to them: ‘I am with you always, even to the end of the world’ (Matthew 28:20). [And If He Had Not Been Raised, p. 163]
On Saturday, the Sun will reach the zenith of its yearly journey around the Earth: the summer solstice. One of the four solar markers of the year, the summer solstice currently takes place when the Sun reaches 4°54ʹ Gemini. Steiner described it as the moment in the year when the soul of the Earth has completely exhaled:
The entire soul-element of the Earth has been poured forth into cosmic space; it is yielded up to cosmic space and is saturating itself with the forces of the Sun and the stars. The Christ, who is joined with this soul-element of the Earth, now unites his force also with the forces of the stars and the Sun, surging there in the Earth-soul that is given over to the cosmic All. . . . In her outer physiognomy, with which she looks out into the universe, the Earth reveals not her own inherent force, as she did at the time of the winter solstice; instead, she reveals on her surface the reflected forces of the stars, of the Sun, of all that is in the cosmos outside her. [CW 223, March 31, 1923, Dornach]
To the ancient Egyptians, the summer solstice represented a powerful moment—a time when revelations from the cosmos might reach those among humankind who were receptive to them. May it be so!
~ Julie H.