Reported by John-Peter Gernaat

This talk delivered on Sunday 18 September 2022 was structured into four segments.

Each segment will consider one of the reasons that Jehovah’s Witnesses present for not celebrating birthdays and offer the possibility to reflect on them and see another perspective. In this talk we hope to discover our religious, spiritual, human reason for celebrating a birthday. We will also look at how this has been expressed differently over the centuries.

Birthday celebrations have pagan roots, they predate Christianity:
It is difficult to know when the human being, in their culture, began marking a particular day in the span of a year, whether that culture used a lunar or a solar determination for the duration of a year, but we have early records of human cultures marking transitions in life. The transition into adulthood has been an important celebration for many early cultures. These celebrations were marked with an initiation into a new way of being within the social entity of the family, tribe or clan. The rituals in time often became religious in nature. In other words, these initiations marked a reconnection to one’s source. Thus, we know that human beings have in some way marked the passage of time in the life of the individual for a very long time.

If we look at one early culture, the Sumerian culture, they marked birthdays, not by noting the position of the sun, but by recording the position of the constellations in the night sky. They recognised the Cosmic Script in the stars of the night sky and, for them, they felt that the connection of the human being to the cosmic picture could be determined in the night sky. The Sumerians identified each constellation with a particular aspect of the Divine and therefore, they thought, that being born under a particular constellation gifted qualities of that Divinity to the human being. They recognised the return of the constellations to the same pattern as that of one’s birth and celebrated that. Because the movement of the fixed stars in relation to the earth is the result of the earth revolving around the sun, the return of stellar patterns marked one complete revolution around the sun and therefore one solar year. The Sumerians recognised the cycles of time and celebrated these cycles of time. It enabled them to connect these cycles of passing time with stages in the maturity of the individual human being. Thus, the celebration of birthdays certain traces back to the Sumerian culture as does the connection to the astrological picture of one’s birth.

Christianity Christianised the worldview of the time and the whole world in this sense became Christian. It its therefore not necessary to reject that which predates Christianity. Christianity used the Hellenistic worldview to understand its new way of being and in that transformed the worldview into a Christian view. We can recognise this in the writings of St Paul. He was a Greek thinker and trained in Greek philosophy. He used the training and knowledge found in Greek thought to expound the Christian understanding, thereby making it accessible to Greek thinking and Greek philosophy. Some theological historians believe that Christianity was Hellenised, but it is more appropriate to recognise that Hellenism was Christianised. The substance of Greek thinking was changed by the new experience of being human – the experience of an indwelling Christ.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses recognise correctly that early Christians did not celebrate birthdays. The early Christians felt more strongly that their birth into the Christian faith overshadowed the importance of the day of their birth into the earthly world. Thus, they celebrated the day of their baptism and did so by remembering the anniversary of that day annually. The early Christian recognised that birthing is not a once-off event, but that it happens throughout our lives. It is for this reason that many people celebrate other anniversaries, such as weddings and more significantly a spiritual event such as an ordination. Anything that creates a shift in one’s life is noted and remembered in celebration in the annual cycle of time.

Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that there is only one day worthy of commemoration for Christians and this is the day of the death of Jesus:
Christianity does commemorate the death of Jesus; but the central celebration is the Resurrection of the Christ. That is the celebration of Easter. This is the New Birth of Jesus. Every Sunday becomes a representation of Easter Sunday; in fact, every day is Easter Sunday. Every morning when we awaken we celebrate living in the times of Resurrection. To that extent Easter is a birth and not a death. This birth was all important to early Christians. It is for this reason that the Christian Church – the Catholic Church at the time – remembered the birth of people into the spiritual world. This is especially true for the Saints. The name day for the Saints is the day of their death, or rather their birth as saints into the spiritual world. The tradition grew in Christianity to celebrate, not one’s birthday, but the day of the saint after whom one was named. Christians were given Christian names, the name of someone who had given their life to Christ. The name day was the day on which gifts were given to children, rather than on their birthday. In the traditional Christian calendar only three birthdays are recognised: the birth of Jesus (Christmas day), the birth of John the Baptist (24 June), and the birth of Mary the Mother of Jesus was given a celebratory day (8 September). The birthday of Mary in the Christian tradition is, however, not nearly as important as the day of her Assumption (Western Catholic Church) / Dormition (Eastern Orthodox Church). This was the day of Mary’s birth into the spiritual world. Thus, birthdays were significant for early Christians. Every death has a birth on the other side and every birth has a death in our memory of where we come from. This death of the memory of our origin is important because we need to establish a new connection to the spiritual world through our newly discovered conscious relationship to the spiritual world. Our connection to the spiritual world should therefore be a newfound connection and not merely a remembering.

We note in Christianity the tradition of the importance of birth because birth has something to do with destiny. We are born to fulfil something that was determined before birth. Therefore, the birth is significant. There can be no Baptism in the Jordan without a birth at Christmas. They are both related to the same reality – being born onto the earth in order to be born to one’s destiny. The first celebration of the early Christian Church, besides Easter, was the Baptism in the Jordan – the birth of Christ into the being of Jesus of Nazareth. Only later did the birth of Jesus become a celebration. Thus Easter – new life in the spirit – and then the Baptism – Christ’s birth onto a human being – signify the importance of birthdays to the early Christians and also the significance of their baptism, their birth into Christianity. Every day is a birthday, a day of new birth into life on earth, until the day arrives where we are born back into the spirit.

The final reason for Jehovah’s Witnesses not celebrating birthdays is that the bible does not refer to a servant of God celebrating a birthday. Two birthdays are described that have negative consequences. One is the birthday celebration that leads to the beheading of John the Baptist. However, it is important to note that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke both recognise the birth of Jesus, and Luke also the birth of John the Baptist. These births are both noted with celebration in the description in the Gospels: in Matthew the birth of Jesus is celebrated with the appearance of a Star and the Magi beginning a journey, and in Luke the birth is celebrated with the appearance of heavenly luminaries to the shepherds. The eighth day with the presentation and circumcision, the day of the birth of a boy into the Covenant of Judaism, are also recognised.

The consciousness we must carry is to understand what it is that we are celebrating. This is where we go back to the ancient Sumerian picture. For them the human being born at a particular moment according to the constellations was a reflection of the cosmos. They were celebrating that here in this person, and here in that person, were tiny reflections of the great cosmic picture. We come to recognise that our birthday is also the birth of the world in us, we carry the cosmic picture in us, not just the cosmic picture of the night on which we were born, but the whole of the cosmos, the macrocosm expressed in the microcosm. We are small depictions of the great and mighty cosmic script. When celebrating a birthday, we are not so much celebrating the past, we are celebrating the future. We are celebrating the unfolding of the cosmic picture; the taking of the next step. A birthday celebrates that we are somewhere on the journey, it does not mark the end of the journey, it marks a conscious moment so that the journey can continue. That is the point of a Christian birthday, not to mark what was, it is to mark what is to come. It is to mark what can unfold because the individual has a foundation made up of the years that have passed. Birthday celebrations should not be celebrations of the past but celebrations of the future. A new cycle can begin! That is what becomes significant to celebrate a birthday as a Christian.

We can take what was a non-Christian tradition and understand its desire to link to what Christianity does bring us: resurrection, new life, new beginning, new hope, new step, new stage. We are not celebrating the old, we are celebrating the new. A birthday marks possibility. It also allows us to reflect for a moment on why we are here, what it is that we still have to do, what can we do now that we could not do before, what can we do that is new, how we can overcome that which has not been working for us in our lives. We can therefore enter into a time of preparation for each celebration.

We mark ways in which we recognise new ways of being. These are all births (baptism, confirmation, graduation, marriage, ordination) and it is important to mark them for ourselves. We can say: “Yes, I am on a journey, and yes, I know what it means to take new step.” That is the essence of birthdays in a Christian way, being conscious of our future.

From William Wordsworth; Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

by Lola Kirigin
​
While the taste of the bitter-sweet funeral service lingers on, another farewell wave from the departure lounge is here given.

His zest for life, with all its pleasures was not limited to his self-indulgent gourmet pallet, albeit extravagant. If his stories were exaggerated, his deeds were even more so.

George’s involvement and generosity, during the building renovation work of the cottage-home which was to become his last, and where Rev. Hugh Thornton was first able to move into followed by Rev. Malcolm Allsop and Christine.

The food passion and cooking style being quite labour intensive, requires much planning and preparation, increasing manifold when catering for many people. This happened repeatedly and on many varied occasions at The Christian Community, from welcoming new or visiting priests into the community, to special events and conferences, he was once addressed as the “Godfather of the African Seminary”. The signature desserts - the appearance of the Pavlova ablaze with an abundance of berries, for an evening New Year’s celebration was his customary contribution gesture of Joy.

He stretched his capacities to the limits, even when he was in and out of hospitals and very debilitated with pain and in his movement. His last advent Fair and the lunch menu of “The Greek Meal” fund-raising event, were incredible. The scale of what he managed to produce, with the help of others, including his carers, no doubt, was nothing short of a miracle, when, with the additional stress of load shedding and the longest time of power cuts ruined much of the carefully prepared filo pastry delicacies. He shared afterwards, how much effort that took, and we laughed about the fact that in most Greek kitchens, as well as restaurants, there is usually a Greek grandmother hiding there, cooking from morning till night, otherwise how would it be possible to do all that, on a regular basis, without becoming a slave to the kitchen.

​You had to forgive the jokes in “bad-taste”. He once fibbed, that he had prepared a fish head and miso soup, for a fundraiser meal-sharing event. I naively believed him, in my eagerness to try it, only to realise he was just kidding.

On another community meal-sharing event, he became annoyed with the person who, had remarked on the missing salad dressing, to accompany a meal I had prepared. After giving them a piece of “The George treatment”, that person became remarkably humbled rather than offended, which surprised me.One of his favourite movies, “Babette’s Feast” is a poignant example of what he admired and himself achieved by this art of communal cuisine and nourishment.

Even though he was regarded affectionately by so many, and appeared to be gregarious, he also admitted a difficulty in fathoming people and relationships. He took solace in the more reliable world of gardening. Herbs and greens which appeared in countless community salads and the flowering plants which would not disappoint him, when carefully tended.

I have one such treasure from many years ago which was given to me, by Reingard, after a particularly intensive advent fair event. This pot plant has blossomed every year since, in springtime and unfolds in full bloom at advent time.

In the words of the social verse….

From the book The Nature of Substance: Spirit and Matter by Dr Hauschka

Projective geometry provides us with a mathematical illustration. One can think of the surface of a sphere as having two possible origins. The usual concept pictures it as an equal expansion from a central growth-point. Every point on the circumference thus has a static connection with the centre. This concept underlies all our building, the statics of a house, the stability of the physical universe.
 
The alternative method of arriving at the surface of a sphere is just the opposite. Form-creating planes approach the emergent shape from infinity, becoming tangents of the sphere thus enclosed. Such spheres are therefore infinity-created hollow spaces, not solid bodies. Every point on the surface is linked with infinity, rather than with a centre (figure below).
 
This shaping with the cosmic dynamics of infinity is the silica process, which manifests in a fixed form as the substance, silica. It is the force active wherever surfaces come into being: the surfaces of ocean waves and mountains, the epidermis of plants, the skins of man and animals, the membranes enclosing their internal organs.
 
Silica serves as an excellent example for pointing out the difference between substances as the dead mineral end—products of a process and that process itself — a distinction we shall have to learn to make. The silica process is by no means bound to the substance silica. Only where its activity has been intense, does — material silica come into being. Substances are the final stage of processes. Future references to ‘substance processes’ are to be understood as meaning the dynamic activity preceding the emergence of physical matter.
 
Birds are the creatures most closely related to the silica process. Material evidence of this is found in their feathers, ashes of which yield up to 77% silica. The silica process here is not limited to the feather—enclosed bird form; it is the force which relates birds to the entire sphere—shaped mantle of air that encloses the earth. Atmospheric strata arc themselves permeated by the silica process, for their surfaces were formed by its tangential planes. It is not just strength of muscle that enables the eagle to spread his wings and lord it over the heights in majestic flight: it is the profound relation of his being to the silica process active in the airy realm. Gliding is a first step in the same direction, a sport in which man has to develop a special qualitative sense for and sensitivity to the cosmic laws of atmospheric space. It is a sense that borders on perception of imponderable reality. An understanding of the silica process could contribute toward a future mastery of the air, which is structured throughout of plane-surfaces.
 
How different a picture limestone gives! Here we find no such affinity to water as silica possesses, but rather an inclination to aridity. There is no such thing as colloidal lime. Our path to an understanding of its nature cannot therefore trace a relationship to water, as with silica, but rather a connection with dryness.
 
Now the greatest intensification of which dryness is capable is combustion. Firing produces what we call burnt lime, but leaves silica completely unchanged. Lime in its natural state has a greediness, evident in its tendency to absorb liquids, gases and odours. Burnt lime carries this characteristic to an extreme. In the process called slaking, for example, it sucks up water with such ferocity as to cause hissings, clouds of steam and even explosions, so that it has to be very cautiously handled in the lime— pits. Slaked lime is made by pouring water on to quicklime. And though one might think this would satisfy its thirst, it goes on and greedily sucks up more carbonic acid from the air, until it becomes hardened stone again. That is why lime is an ingredient of the mortar (a mixture of sand and slaked lime) used in construction work.
 
Burning:       CaCO3 (lime) → CaO (burnt lime) + CO2
Slaking:       CaO (burnt lime) + H20 → Ca(OH)2 (slaked lime)
Building:      Ca(OH)2 (slaked lime) + CO2 → CaCO3 (limestone)

Lime is thus related by its character to the statics of building, the firmness of our physical frames, the equilibrium and stability of earthly phenomena.

The image above pictures the contrast between the dynamics of the cosmic sphere and the statics of the earthly globe. The latter is built up from a central point and obeys the laws of terrestrial space, while the former is shaped by the peripheral forces of infinity.
 
We seldom think of the extent to which as earthly beings we are bound up with the balance and stability derived from the lime-process. Gravity would drag us down into bottomless depths if the earth’s solidity and the statics of buildings were not there to counteract it and to hold things in balance. And we can thank the lime in our bones for the firm support they give to our bodies, for our balance and our upright posture.

Our skin, then, is that part of us built by the cosmic silica process while our skeleton is the expression of the stable earthly minerality given us by the lime-process.  With our ‘skin and bones’ we are stretched between the two polar cosmic forces, silica and lime. Silica shapes from the circumference, lime from the centre. The dynamic relationship is essentially that of circle and radius.

Sophia Turner had made the Church of Lazarus her spiritual home. It is also the place where the ashes of her late husband, Brian, are interred.  Every Sunday Sophia would attend the Sunday Service for Children and then, without entering into any conversation with anyone en route, she would take a jug of water to the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow bush planted over the ashes of Brian and she would water the bush and spend some time in contemplation.

Sophia moved to Cambridge, England, on the eve of the Covid lockdown to be near her daughters and granddaughters.

When she discovered that she had cancer she took this on as part of the journey of this life, endeavouring to understand what this meant in her biography. She died well prepared and in full consciousness on Friday 8 July. It was obvious that her ashes should be interred with those of Brian in the Memorial Garden of the Church of Lazarus.

Sophia's daughter Dani with her husband and two daughters arrived in South Africa on Monday 8 August. The Act of Consecration for one who has died was held on Saturday 13 August and Sophia's ashes were interred next to those of her husband and a yellow clivia now makes the place next to the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow bush. Many people who had known Sophia, including her Latin American dance teachers, then gathered to speak about Sophia, her life and the impact she had had on others.

The vase of sunflowers that adorned the tea table was sent by a friend from Windhoek who could not make it to Johannesburg for this special day. The vase itself, painted chalkboard-black, was decorated by Sophia's granddaughter.

This quote from the introduction to Theosophy set the mood for the introduction to the weekend which Michaël gave on Friday evening. It captures the work of the weekend and it describes what we spent most of our time thinking about - just how closely we really are connected and reflect aspects of the divine. 

We were reminded that the word ‘Theosophy’ means ‘Divine Wisdom’ or ‘Wisdom of God'. If we are made in the image of God then we must surely reflect this divine wisdom of God We are therefore an image of this divine wisdom, we are Theosophy ourselves! This was a wonderful thought for many of us to contemplate. 

Michaël shared how, through the ages of time, people felt the human being to be made of three different bodies. From the ‘wise ones’ who were the authors of the Vedas to the Ancient Greek philosophers, and St Paul, the human being was said to consist of bodies veiled in sheaths all reflecting aspects of the human being who was and who was still becoming. Physical body, Subtle body, Seed Body spoken about in the Vedas or Soma, Psyche, and Essential Divine explained by the Ancient Greeks or Body, Soul and Spirit to which St Paul refers in his letter to the Thessalonians are ancient ideas that Steiner brought to life for our times in his book Theosophy. We used his seven-fold picture of the human being and sometimes his nine-fold picture and sometimes his four-fold picture, but they were always related to the ancient three-fold pictures.  

The evening ended with a Close of Day Service.


Saturday began with the Act of Consecration of Man which was followed by 4 sessions of work throughout the day. In each of the sessions we began using the framework of Steiner’s seven-fold human being. Physical Body, Life Body, Astral Body, ‘I’-Organisation, Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Human. In order to understand what is meant by these various bodies of the human being Michael presented a complementary seven-fold picture in each session. These complimentary pictures revealed different aspects of each of the bodies and led us into a deeper understanding and appreciation of the pictures that Steiner creates. It was important to begin with a general explanation of each of the seven bodies of the human being. It was wonderful to be shown how, when transformed, each of the lower bodies gives rise to the higher bodies. Astral body gives rise to the Spirt Self, Life Body transformed gives rise to Life Spirit and the Physical Body transformed gives rise eventually to the Spirit Human Being. All of this is made possible by the working of the I-organisation - a gift of the Christ. It permeates each of these bodies and weaves its transformative forces. 

Our first session concluded with a picture of the seven metaphysical trees identified by Steiner. Two of these trees we know well: The Tree of Knowledge and the Tree Life. These two trees correspond to the I-organisation in human beings and the Spirt Self respectively.  Although no in-depth description of each of the trees was given the simplicity of their names helped inform our understating of each of the bodies of the human being. 

The second session of the day began with the revealing of the seven names of Solomon as can be found in the Old Testament in the book of Wisdom. Solomon is a representative of the Human being in all its fullness at that time in history. The names he was called by all mean something and create a picture of the whole human being. It is not surprising to know that each of the seven names corresponds to one of the seven bodies of the human being in Steiner’s picture. 

These names and concepts were further explored in a very powerful clay exercise in which the whole group participated. 

In our third session we were able, through discussion and careful questioning by Reingard, to reflect on the clay exercise and find connections between the action of the clay work and the different bodies of the human being. During this discussion Michaël also spoke of the seven descriptions of qualities or characteristics of God as can be found in the Book of Revelation. By exploring their original meanings from the Greek, Michael was able to form a phrase of description that further served to illuminate the essence of each of the bodies of the Human being. 

In our final session of the day Michaël introduced the idea of Petition. It was explained that to petition is to lay claim to something that belongs to you, to take ownership of what is yours. 

In the light of all that we had received during the day in the descriptions and pictures of the Human being in the light of Theosophy and the thought that we are Theosophy, participants were encouraged to create their own petition, claiming and owning what we had discovered belonged to us all along. 

It was a very special time when we got to hear each other’s beautiful prayers of petition. 

We day ended with a Close of Day Service.

Sunday morning saw the participants gather together for a guided meditation before the Act of Consecration of Man. In a talk by Michaël after the Act of Consecration of Man we were able to further explore the topic of Petition in the light of all that had been discovered the day before. For those who were not able to attend Saturday, the talk on Sunday was also able to be heard and appreciated in its own right. 

Some of the points that Michaël brought for consideration that stood out for me include the fact that if we consider ourselves a reflection of the divine wisdom and in fact believe we as human beings are divine wisdom our attitude to prayer could be very different. We might mature in how we reconnect with God each day. We may not necessarily want to ask him for the things we think we need as a child might beg their parents for something they want. Instead, we might pray out of the knowledge of who we really are and who God is in relation to this creation that we call “I”.  I may truly learn to petition and to lay claim to what I can do, what I know to be my responsibilities and then to have faith that should I need anything else as I actively go about my daily tasks it will be given to me out of love and grace and I will learn to recognise the daily miracles that happen to me. Instead of asking for so much I might be more mindful of all that I have already and continue to receive. Instead of constantly seeking I may start to recognise what I already have been given. I will realise that when I knock the door is always opened. 

Many thanks to Michaël and Reingard for all the thought and care that went into presenting this weekend. 

It is also worth mentioning all the delicious food that was served and the wonderful connections that were made between participants. Thank you for these unexpected blessings.

Understanding the Human Being allows us to walk the Christ path.

Our different bodies, Physical, Etheric, Astral and I-organization, each have their role in our development.  But we must become active in our striving to live in the presence of God and express the divine in us.

The Wisdom comes when we penetrate our inner space with our thinking finger - Trust the processes.

There are 7 esoteric (metaphorical) trees to describe the different human bodies and our future development. The Name Solomon describes what it is to be a human being. What we strive to become 

​Petition is a claim
We must Lay claim to that which belongs to us. My capacity to be human. The work we have done in the processes above.
Seek to take hold of our goal. To connect with ‘my I’ with God’s grace in me – Not what God can do without my participation
We are an expression of God. All the power of God is in us. We must mobilize this power of God
Then the grace can work in us
Ask: ask questions that grow a living relationship with the Divine within you -And it will be given to you
Seek: to advance on the path of self-development -And you will find
Knock: lay claim to your spiritual path with consistency and reliability – And the door will be open to you
For everyone who truly asks, Receives
Who earnestly seeks, Finds
And who humbly knocks, to them the door opens
Be active in your striving to live in the presence of God. Practice renewal in Petition

My Petition: Unfolding Theosophy
O Glistening wheat
You hold your head up high
Straight and Strong
Bursting with Goodness – You freely give your Golden Gift
Shining
Glorious
Present
Blessings so thoughtful and Sensitive
Apparent for all to see and Know
You Consecrate me

Reported by John-Peter Gernaat

This is an overview of what Rudolf Steiner understood by the term “Theosophy” and what we can understand by this term. Rudolf Steiner wrote a book titled “Theosophy”. It is not the aim of the module to cover the entire book. The aim is to form a picture that will enable everyone to begin reading this book and then be able to place the book in context through the process of the weekend.

The word Theosophy is a word in Koine Greek devised from “Theo”, meaning God, and “Sophia” meaning wisdom. Theosophy, therefore, means ‘the wisdom of God’. What does this mean? It has a specific reference: through history groups of Christians have use the word and meant something specific. Rudolf Steiner makes clear in his introduction that: “As human beings we call the highest thing that we can look up to ‘the Divine’ and we must imagine that our highest aim and calling have something to do with this divine element.” Thus, in a spiritual upward gaze we can refer to the highest thing that our gaze encounters as ‘the Divine’. This would be for us the ultimate picture of that which exists out of which everything else comes. It is ‘that which is, out of which everything else is able to be’.

There are other philosophies and other religions that have other names for ‘the Divine’. The intention is to use an expression that is above the divisions of language and religion when referring to “the highest thing we can look up to”. The name of the universal Divine entity in Sanskrit is Brahman. This is the name for the ultimate, Divine, universal principle.

Continuing the quote from Steiner: “… and we must imagine that our highest aim as human beings, and our calling, have something to do with this Divine element.” Thus, what we are aiming to achieve and what we are called to is in some way connected to this Divine entity. We are called to reconnect with Divine, to re-establish a relationship. This is a central component in the word religion – ‘religare’ (Latin meaning to bind together), to reconnect. When we are born onto the earthly world we forget where we have come from. “This may well be why wisdom that which transcends the sense perceptible world reveals to us both our essential nature and our destiny and this is called ‘theosophy’, or Divine wisdom.” Therefore, to understand the essence of being human is to understand theosophy. How can one say that the human being, flawed and incomplete, is the wisdom of God? We can say this because the Book of Genesis reveals to us that we are “made in the image and likeness of God”, therefore the human being is an image of the wisdom of God. Theosophy, therefore, is about the essence of the human being. What is the human being and how is the human being constituted? This is a Divine wisdom made manifest as a living being. It is a being that we refer to as human.

The theme of the seminary modules in 2022 is: “Deepening an understanding of Anthroposophy”. Koine Greek will provide the understanding that this word means: ‘the wisdom of the human being’. The constitution of the human being is not anthroposophy, it is the wisdom of God, theosophy. The way in which we, each, unfold this wisdom of God – the way in which we develop and come to understand who we are; the path of self-development that each person can follow – that is the wisdom of the human being; that is anthroposophy.

In considering the Koine Greek word ‘anthropos’, the word is not just the human being, but it is the countenance of the human being. Countenance is a word with several meanings and all of these meanings apply. The most basic is ‘a face’, meaning that ‘I can face you’, ‘I can see you’ and ‘I can come face to face’; ‘I recognise you because you have a face’. Having a face makes each human being quite distinct, even identical twins. The countenance is not just the face, but also how each person presents themselves. What shines through the face is quite individual. Countenance also means ‘something one can confirm’, ‘something we can allow’: e.g., “He would not countenance any violence.” It means that as human beings who have a countenance, a face through which we can express something of who we are; we also have the capacity to say “yes” and to say “no”, in a conscious way, disconnected from the sympathies and antipathies that reign in our feeling life. We are able to reflect on our choice. ‘Anthropos’ is even more than the countenance of the human being because the suffix ‘an’ suggests that in this word exists a directionality, which is ‘up’ – ‘ana’. Therefore the word ‘anthropos’ means the ‘countenance of the human being that looks up’. As Steiner said: “As human beings we call the highest thing that we can look up to …” This is an inner, soul activity of looking up.

Theosophy, then, is that which constitutes the human being. We can go back to ancient texts and scriptures and find descriptions of the human being. The oldest we can find come to us from the Vedas, written in Sanskrit centuries after then were spoken. They come from a well-preserved oral tradition of the words that were spoken by the Rishis, shared as great wisdom. The Rishis were known as ‘the wise ones’ who understood the full wisdom of creation and the cosmos. They understood, one could say, the wisdom of Brahman, the universal principle of the Divine. The Vedas form the basis for the understanding of the world that is the philosophy of Hinduism. The picture in the Vedas of the human constitution is quite complex. It is very helpful for us today to understand how the human being understood themselves many centuries ago. It allows us to see what concepts have been added to the picture and where it takes up today in our understanding of the constitution of the human being. The ancient Vedic picture describes three bodies:

1. The Gross Body – it is in fact the physical body with mass and physical dimensions. It is present until death and even at death we can still determine its dimensions. However, without life this Gross Body breaks down. We can speak of it separately from the energy that keeps the Gross Body alive.
2. The Subtle Body – it cannot be seen. It is the energetic body – a body of energy.
3. The Seed Body – this was a sense that the ancients had that they were not complete. They carried within them the seed for the future development of the human being. It was the future unfolding.

Thus, the ancients saw the human being as a physical body, a body of life and emotions – everything that is alive in the human being – and a potential for future growth and development. The Vedas were considered to be essential manuals of knowledge when they were written, they were not written as sacred writings. They were a totality of everything the human being needed to know to live life. They gave instruction on what to eat, how to farm, how to maintain health and restore health, how to manage society, how to organise daily life, how to live in a society – they were an encyclopaedic body of knowledge on how to be human and to live as a human being. The Vedas explained how the three bodies interact. They saw the three bodies as existing states.

1. The physical body was described as being in a state of wakefulness.
2. The subtle body was described as being in a dream state.
3. The seed body was described as being in a state of sleep.

​There were other layers also described.

1. The physical body had only one layer of activity:
   • a food sheath
2. The subtle body had three sheathes:
   • The vital sheath – energy
   • A mind sheath – that contains all the emotions that we express. It was not seen as the rational thinking mind. It was the emotive body and therefore closer to what we call the heart.
   • Intellectual sheath – the capacity to think. It recognised that thinking was a different element to feeling.
3. The seed body had only one sheath:
   • The bliss sheath – it protected the seed and would bring future happiness.

We may, still today, feel that this is a fair description of the human being. We can acknowledge that there is more to us than a physical body. We definitely have an energetic body. Quite a few of our emotions are not conscious. Something seems to stir up in us; it feels a bit like a dream, suddenly one feels happy or suddenly one feels a bit sad without being really conscious as to why these feelings have arisen. There is also a sense that there is more to us, and even that there is more to come in the future, not just in our lifetime; but when we consider the future evolution of the human being and especially the development of human society, the whole human experience is probably going to develop further. We may feel that we have developed this seed body a little beyond what the ancient civilisations experienced, especially the intellectual sheath may have developed, and we may feel that further development lies ahead. We can sense an evolution of the human constitution. This picture remained in various forms for many stages of cultural development.

We are able to traverse time to the ancient Greeks who had an additional picture that speaks to us of different aspects of being human. This is a consideration of the writings of Aristotle, but he was a pupil of Plato who in turn was a student of Socrates. Thus, we can read into Aristotle the input of those who came before. He speaks about the human being in a three-fold way. He uses specific terms for the three-foldness of the human being. This was an idea that we can also read in the New Testament where St Paul uses the same words to describe aspects of the human being.

These words still have expression in the English language.

1. Soma – in biology we speak of somatic cells – those cells that belong to the body. Soma means body. The description is a physical body.
2. Psyche – which we may translate as soul. This expressed the energetic and emotive part of the human being.
3. Pneuma – which can be translated as breath. It can also be translated as spirit. It was a Divine aspect of the human being that has an interplay with the soul and the body but is in itself separate.

Paul writing to the Thessalonians wrote: “Take care that no one repays evil with evil, rather always strive to do good to one another both within your own circle and also towards other people. Have joy within yourselves always. Do not neglect your practice of prayer. In all things cultivate the sacramental mood of thanksgiving. Then God’s will shall work in your will through the power of Christ. Let not the flame of the spirit be quenched. Do not let the power of prophecy wither away for lack of care and practice. Test everything. Hold fast to what is good. Keep clear of the evil in whatever form it appears. May God himself, the source of all peace, make holy your whole being. May your complete and undivided being, your spirit, your soul and your body remain pure and clean at the coming in the spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord.” Paul is clear in placing soma, psyche and pneuma right next to each other: body, soul and spirit. He refers to three distinct aspects of the human being that are unmistakable. “May your complete and undivided being, body, soul and spirit remain pure and clean at the coming in the spirit of Jesus Christ our Lord.” This is a very clear picture of the concept of a three-folded human being.

This is theosophy. The human being is body soul and spirit. But the human being is more than just body, soul and spirit. Just as the Vedas opened up the three bodies into sheaths and how they operate. Aristotle relayed what Plato said that the human being has more than one capacity in the soul. This is still studied in philosophy as it forms the basis of Western philosophy.

One capacity of soul we share with animals; they emote and react to their environment – this is the sentient soul level. This was a soul of the senses according to the Greek philosophy.

Human beings have another level of soul that they called mind soul (an intellectual soul, a rational soul). The human being is able to abstractly imagine their environment. This, according to Aristotle, made us human, that ability to rationalise with any human being. We still fall under the misconception today that reason is the highest soul capacity of the human being; that it provides resolution to all differences. However, reason is individual and therefore there is more to be added to this picture.

Rudolf Steiner said that this picture is absolutely true. It is another version of the Vedic picture that is thought through somewhat differently. Steiner said that since the time of Aristotle we have developed a new level of soul that has emerged from the seed form that the Vedas imagined. This is the consciousness soul.

Thus the soul operates on three levels:
Sentient
Rational
Consciousness
Steiner is very specific about when the Consciousness Soul Age started. The Consciousness Soul became evident from the beginning of the 15th century. We have had this capacity of consciousness soul developing for 600 years. This is a relatively short period of time. This is a new picture that Steiner brings.

Steiner also brought a further concept of the human being. It adds to theosophy, the picture of the wisdom of God made manifest in the created image and likeness that is the human being. There is more to come. There are elements that have not yet manifested and are still lying seed-like in the human being, but that will develop. For this Steiner went back to the words of the Vedas. Steiner said there are bodies to come.

We know that the body has a physical component and a living component which prevents it being a corps. We can describe this living component as an energetic, forming force body that Steiner gave the name, the etheric body. This makes our body.

How do we express our soul: our sentient, rational, consciousness nature? We express it because we have the energetic forming force. We express it because we also have a capacity for emotions and expression. It comes through the energy and expresses itself. Steiner called this the astral body. He also described it as a sentient body – a body of sense and expressions. Together with the energetic force body the astral body expresses the soul.

Then we have a part that comes to us from the Divine which Steiner refers to as an ‘I-organisation’. It is an essential self. Steiner used the Latin word ‘Ego’, but this same word was used to mean completely different things by Sigmund Freud. Freud suggests the ego is the part of us which we must suppress while Steiner referred to the Ego as that which makes us human, because it arises from the Divine. It is our ability to say “I” of ourselves.

There is more to come, which is the spirit expressing itself further. Steiner used Sanskrit words:

• Manas – meaning thought, a capacity to have thought.
• Buddhi – means a discernment to hold a certain consciousness.
• Atman – means higher self.

We are theosophy, but theosophy not yet fully expressed. There is another side of us, our higher self – the higher ‘I’, the Atman – not yet expressed. In the Vedas there are two essential principles: Brahman, the universal principle of the Divine, and Atman, the high self of the human individual. Atman only exists because of Brahman. Atman is possible only because of Brahman. Atman expresses something of Brahman. ‘Man’ in these words is the same word that also provides us with Manas, which is thought, the ability to hold a certain expression, a certain consciousness.

Steiner renamed these:

• Manas – the Spirit Self of the human being that we have not yet realised.
• Buddhi – Life Spirit.
• Atman – Spirit Human Being – the ultimate aim when our higher self can live in the constitution that manifests itself on earth.

This is the whole picture of the human being:

• Physical
• Etheric
• Astral
• Ego
• Spirit Self
• Life Spirit
• Spirit Human Being

This is what the module of the Africa Seminary explored. During the work the participants looked at pictures of a four-fold, seven-fold, nine-fold, a new seven-fold picture of the human being working with the concepts discussed above.

When we return to the Vedic picture we can see that we have:

• A physical body,
• A vital sheath
• An emotive expressive body
• When we combine the intellectual sheath with what was developing in the seed body we have the ‘I’.

​There is a four-fold picture but expressed at a different time in human history. Then there were further body to come in the seed body. Therefore, we can experience that this is a picture of the human being that humanity has carried for centuries. In other cultures where we can study the traditional concepts and traditional wisdom the same picture becomes present in different forms. The same picture keeps emerging. Rudolf Steiner has developed the picture to show us more clearly where we are going. When we observe the picture of body, soul and spirit we can realise that it is Paul’s picture in the New Testament. Thus, the entire picture can be seem as being part of the picture that Paul presents in the New Testament. The same seven-fold picture emerges through the names used for Solomon in the Old Testament (see the article on Solomon). We discover it also through the description of the human being through qualities that manifest a seven-fold manifestation of quality in the Book of Revelation. They are always a description of the picture of the wisdom of the Divine made manifest in the created human being: theosophy.

Report by John-Peter Gernaat
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This talk, and therefore the report, presume a knowledge of Theosophy. The report on Theosophy, which formed the first talk of this module of the Africa Seminary may be read at this link.

Theosophy, the Wisdom of God, has long excited people’s imagination, well before the coming of Christ. When Hebrew rabbis composed the Talmud, which is an accompaniment to the Torah, they philosophised on the Wisdom of God, that all of creation must have been brought about out of the Wisdom of God: “In His wisdom, God creates…”

We have referred to Theosophy as the human being, because what we can behold in the human being is the Wisdom of God as a result of having been created in the image and likeness of God. The Human being reflects the wisdom of God. Rudolf Steiner then goes on to explain that the path that the human being treads is not the wisdom of God, but rather the wisdom of the human being or Anthroposophy. This path is graced by Christ, it is the Christ-path, it is the path of connecting to the Christ Being, and not the Christ Being at the end of the path but the Christ Being in us on the path, meeting the fullness of the Christ Being as a goal.

Understanding what it is to be human will help us understand what petition is all about. It is a human being that is petitioning. If we understand our constitution, we can understand how we pray. Sometimes we continue to pray as if we have not yet grown up. This happens.
Reading Mark chapter 12 where a scribe comes to Jesus. To be a scribe was an important task. They were the record-keepers who wrote down the discussions of the Pharisees and Sadducees. We would not have scripture if the scribes had not inscribed it. Only human beings can write. Animals can communicate, but only humans write. In order to write the human being must create a symbology that has meaning to everyone. As human beings we write ourselves into the world and others can read who we are through all that we do and are in the world. This scribe was someone with capacity and knowledge, seeking more knowledge. He had observed how well Jesus had answered the questions of the crowd. He therefore felt that Jesus could confirm for him what lived in his heart. He asks: “Which is the most important of all the commandments?” This was a question that would have been a topic of regular discussion by those for whom he scribed. Jesus replied out of scripture: “Hear Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord (the Shema for the Hebrews).” This has the effect that everyone will listen. They did what Steiner describes: they lifted their gaze to the Divine. They were being human. He says: “You will love the Lord your God” and then he describes how one should love the Lord their God: “with your whole being.” He describes the human being to the point to which they human being has reached in their development: “with all your heart (the very essence of who one is – we make the heart our central point when we say to the one we love: “I love you with all my heart”. ‘Heart’ is therefore the centrality of the person. Thus we love the Lord our God with a sense of oneself – that self which has incarnated into the earthly body. Therefore the “I” of oneself, the earthly “I”.) and with all your soul (There is a difference between heart and soul. Heart represents the spirit while soul is another quality. It is how the spirit can find expression in the world and how the world can impress itself upon that spirit.) and with all the power of your life (With the life forces, often described as the Etheric Formative Forces of Life.) and you shall love the Lord your God with your strength of might (with the physical body).” It is a description of a four-fold human being: heart, soul, power of life, and strength of might. This description resonates with us.
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This gives us a new way of understanding prayer. We often think that prayer means asking for the things that we desire or that we perceive we may need. We did that as a child: we expressed our needs to our parents in the expectation that they would respond and give us that which we needed or wanted. Sometimes a parent would say no and not accede to the wish or demand. When we work only with the physical body and the power of our formative life force we rely on the parent being able to accede to our needs. But when we have developed the capacity to work with our full humanity we no longer need to ask, but we do, as adults, need to lay claim to that which belongs to us. When we are adults our parents will acknowledge our claim and may even gift more in addition through their love for us. We can take hold of our selves as adults. We no have to ask the Divine as if we are still children. Petition is not asking. Petition means to lay claim, to actively seek out something that belongs to one. (We go to court and make a petition, asking the court to confirm that something belongs to us. We are not asking anything of the court other than to confirm ownership. The court may offer grace in the form of compensatory damages if one had been deprived of something that was one’s own, thereby offering us more than we come to petition for, but this was not part of our petition originally.)

Because we have a human constitution as an adult that has an essential “I”-being our prayer, our petition is different to asking the Divine. When we pray we address the Divine and express what we are able to manage ourselves and that we will give to this with our devoted energy. We may then trust that we might be met with grace permitting us to do more that we could do alone, because of this grace. We might address the sorrow and heaviness of our heart, but in the understanding that we are bearing our burden and working with it. We do not turn to the Divine wishing the Divine to wave a wand that will alleviate our burden. We ask the Divine to see us and recognise what it is that we are doing and how we are doing it. We lay claim to that which we can do and recognise that which we cannot do, and we wait in our doing for the Divine to meet us and bring us that which we need. We do not ask for that which we need because the Divine knows better than we do what, in the circumstances of our life and our developmental unfolding, we need.

If we keep asking the Divine as if He could provide it magically then we are still a child in our relationship with the Divine. But if we lay claim to what we can do while holding in faith that element which lies beyond what we can do, then we are opening up ourselves to a real relationship with the Divine. This does not mean that miracles do not happen, but rather that we recognise when they do occur, because we realise that it is more than we could have managed ourselves on that day. Our true, final intention of petition is every day to speak to God in the relationship that we can, one of reliance, one of faith, one of assurance, but, very importantly, one of human activity and the engagement of our will.
We have a beautiful description of the letter of Paul to the Ephesians 3: 14-21:

God fulfils in us more than anything we could ask for or imagine.

There is going to be a higher power at work in us when we are active. This higher power will not spring into action until we get ourselves going. When we cooperate with this higher power, more will happen than we could ever have even asked for or imagined. Something extraordinary happens that is not because of ourselves, but it would not have taken place without us. We must be present. The higher power in us is the “I”-organisation, the Christ-in-us. We hear it eight times in the Act of Consecration of Man: “Christ in you.” Christ is in us. We walk the path because Christ is in us. Christ is not accompanying us. Christ makes it possible that we can do ever more than we could have ever asked for or imagined. That is what it is to be a petitioning human being: I lay claim to my capacity to be human and I know that that is made possible, graced, and expanded by Christ-in-me. This changes the way that we pray and the way in which we see that our prayers are answered.

In the seasonal Gospel Reading the theme was: “ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you”. We should stop focussing on the ‘ask’, seek’ ‘and ‘knock’ and rather turn our attention to ‘you will receive’, ‘you will find’, and ‘it will be opened’, start working with a that as a reality, because it is real.

If we keep knocking and don’t notice that the door has been opened, we remain outside knocking. If we keep asking and do not recognise that we are receiving, we keep asking like a child. If we keep seeking and don’t realise we have it already, we never stop journeying without ever enjoying the fruits of the journey.
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When we understand how we are constituted as a human being, how we are theosophy, it may change the way in which we petition. It does not mean that we don’t pray for others, but the only thing we can pray for is that they will come into the realisation that they need to come to and that they will find the grace in their lives that God will afford. There is no more we can ask for. Think of the Trinity epistle: “Our substance is his substance”. We are made of the very substance of God. It is the only thing that God can give us, the essence of His substance. With that we can experience more than we could ever do or imagine.

Reported by John-Peter Gernaat with additional illustrations
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Solomon was anointed King by Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet: Priest, Prophet and King, borne by three separate people at that time. He was given the task of making visible in the world the place that would be the Holy of Holies where the Ark of the Covenant would be kept, until this could transfer from being a place in the temple to being a place in the human constitution.

King Solomon is known for many by two stories: the story that exemplifies his wisdom when he is asked to decide who is the mother of a baby and the story of the Queen of Sheba which exemplifies his great wealth and his standing as an international figure, a cosmopolitan leader of world repute.

In the story of the baby, two unfaithful women, who each had given birth, come to see Solomon because the one woman had accidentally smothered her baby. She then claimed to be the mother of the other woman’s baby and that the other woman’s baby was the dead baby. Solomon resolves the situation by offering to cut the living baby in two with a sword so they can each have half. The true mother capitulates to save the life of her child and agrees that the baby belongs to the other woman, while the woman with the dead baby is happy to have the other child also killed. Thus, Solomon knows who the real mother is. They are unfaithful to each other and unfaithful to their grief and loss. The sword is the sword of truth. This is a story of faith rather than a story of prostitution, as these women are referred to in many translations.

King Solomon married many foreign women besides the daughter of Pharaoh. We can go to Abraham visiting Egypt with his wife Sarah and introducing Sarah as his sister who married the Pharaoh. It was the daughter of the Pharaoh who became the stepmother of Moses. The concept of the Pharaoh’s daughter is significant. It means Solomon is aligning himself with all sorts of spiritual cults. Solomon married into the family whose ancestors spiritually enslaved the Israelites and would not free them to find their path with YHWH (Yahweh of the Elohim). Solomon married women from the very nations that YHWH had commanded the Israelites not to marry – YHWH wishing to isolate the Israelites from the influences of these nations. But Solomon reaches out in order to be cosmopolitan, being an international diplomat. He created relationships with all of the tribes by marrying women from the tribes. YHWH forbade the marriages for fear that the women would take the hearts of the husbands and lead them to worshipping their gods, thus leading them away from YHWH and his mission for humanity. Solomon does build temples for his wives to worship their gods. Solomon had 700 wives of royal birth. This represents a very powerful span of time. He had picked up all of the developed nations. He also had 300 concubines. Solomon had 1000 women: ten times ten times ten. In his old age his wives led him astray to worship their gods. This is why Solomon was not the greatest king, and David remains the greatest king. David never faltered in his duty to YHWH. We might think of Solomon as a great king who goes to great lengths to incorporate the tribes of the world, building economic and political relationships with all of these tribes. He was the “bearer of peace” by name and by action. He gave his wives the complete freedom to worship their own gods. YHWH appeared twice to Solomon to instruct him to set aside his wives and their gods. On the third occasion YHWH made it clear that the choice was Solomon’s: to increase the wealth of the nations, to make peace with all others, become the centre of the known world, but that he, YHWH would take away the kingship from Solomon and give it to his servant, but only after Solomon’s death. One tribe, the Kingdom of Judah, would be given to Solomon’s son in order to protect Jerusalem which YHWH has chosen.

Solomon is referred to by seven names in Proverbs: a full span of the human being. In Anthroposophy we would consider these to be the physical, the etheric, the astral, the Ego, the Spirit Self, the Life Spirit and the Spirit Human. Solomon represented all of these as the bearer of peace. But because he builds human relationships ahead of his relationship of YHWH, he must pay the price.

The book of Proverbs is known as the wisdom of Solomon but in chapter 30 it is describes as the words of Agur, son of Jakeh king of Massa. It is another name for Solomon that represents a quality of Solomon. Then we have the words of Lemuel king of Massa. Massa is another name for the nation of Israel. The seven names of Solomon are:

1. Agur is the gatherer; Solomon in his physical capacity as a gatherer.
2. Jakeh is son of the devoted one, the son of devout obedience or discipline which is an etheric force in Solomon.
3. Lemuel is the one consecrated to God.
4. Ithiel is the one filled with God which represents the I-organisation of the human being. (Today it is no longer the presence of El but the presence of Christ.)
5. Solomon is the bearer of peace.
6. Kohelet is the teacher (rabbi).
7. Yedidyah is the beloved of God.

These are the seven names or descriptions of Solomon which we can align with the seven-fold human being. This allows us to see Solomon as an extraordinarily great person, a wise person, a capable person who can do, organise, manage. His impression on the Queen of Sheba is beyond her wildest dreams; the descriptions she had heard of him do not do justice to what she discovered.

Solomon had the wealth and riches and the inflow of prosperity to build the temple which his father, King David, did not have and therefore YHWH forbade him building the temple.

Solomon who was more exoteric than his father David and had the capacity to build an exoteric building to house the secret, the Holy of Holies, the inner sense of the connection of the people of Israel and the great mighty spiritual being that represented God for them and was their chief angelic connection with the Divine. The building of the temple is placed in a historical context in the Scriptures. It was built in the 48th year after the Israelites had left the land of Egypt, in the 4th year of Solomons reign over Israel, in the month of Zim which is the second month. It was a temple to YHWH and was a temple of communication in which the Israelites could connect to YHWH. YHWH is an Elohim, a mighty formative force being. The building of a house in which one could communicate with this mighty being of form was quite an extradentary achievement. It was the third great creation of a sacred space.

The first was the building of Noah’s ark. This was a house that would house all of YHWH’s forms, the human, the animal; the living, moving, breathing forms until the waters subsided and all the plants, all that can be cultivated and create the space for the human being to live, had returned. This is a picture of building a sacred space, an ark, the word that in Hebrew means coffin. Noah and the animals are going through a death from one form of existence and are being born anew through the water of the flood like the waters of baptism into a new experience of life on earth. We speak of a post-diluvian world, Steiner speaks of post-Atlantean epochs and cultures. The whole world at one time was Atlantis and then it flooded and the floods subsided and a new world appeared.

Second was the Ark of the Covenant in which the Law could be placed: the holy contract with YHWH.

The contract must now live in a house in which people could gather. The house was described as three-folded. In the Hebrew of the first Book of Kings the words for the three parts of the temple of Solomon are not originally Hebrew words; they were borrowed from the Accadian language. This language was usually codified in Cuneiform and later in an Accadian script similar to the Arabic and Hebrew. It was the language of the Phoenicians. We have already looked at the parallel between the Lord of Israel and the Lord of the Phoenicians, the Lord Their God, YHWH of the Elohim –  Adonai –  and Adonis the lordly being of the Phoenicians.

The builder of Solomon’s temple is a Phoenician. Solomon builds a Phoenician building in its interior and exterior design. It shows the cosmopolitan nature of Solomon, and it would have been quite splendid. The building itself was much smaller than one may realise. The temple would have a looked like the chapel in a large palace complex of today, such as St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle:

The wall separating the Holy of Holies from the Long Room was a wooden wall. The interior of the entire temple was gilded with gold and there was a large quantity of bronze work from which was fashioned many aspects inside and outside of the temple. The Holy of Holies is in the west of the temple with the entrance on the east. There had been a spiritual movement from east to west. The Holy of Holies was placed in the direction of the setting sun. It is the place where the sun will set so that a new sun will rise. This new sun will be the Son of God. The Holy of Holies was already identifying itself as a place of ending, not of new beginning. The new beginning is Easter Sunday, the Day of Resurrection. There was a lot of imagery of rising again, or renewal, even of resurrection (strangely enough) in this temple. This included the great columns, Jachin and Boaz, designed by Hiram the temple builder, that signified day and night, birth and death. It was between these two pillars that one entered the great gate into the temple. The Holy of Holies was placed behind a wood wall rather than a wall of the stone used for the walls of the temple which were created in the quarry so that there would be no sound of chiselling of rock at the site of the building of the temple. The temple was built in a holy silence. Covering the entrance to the Holy of Holies was a curtain and only once a year would a priest enter the Holy of Holies to fulfil the ritual that was required to be performed. This is the place where Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist, found himself when he meets the Angel of the Lord: Gabriel. He was struck dumb and exited the Holy of Holies unable to speak. The Hebrews realised that he has had an extraordinary encounter in the Holy of Holies. The curtain covering the entrance of the Holy of Holies was in four colours: white, purple, blue and red. Different qualities have been associated with these colours based on what they may have signified at the time for the Israelites. The suggestion is that white represented purity, purple represented sacrifice, blue represented meditation and red represented love. These were the essential qualities the priest would have required to enter the Holy of Holies: he would have had to be pure, willing to sacrificially offer himself, be in a meditative frame of being filled with the love and devotion for the Divine. The colours of the curtain informed the Hebrews of the qualities of soul, the quality of attitude required to enter the most sacred of spaces. However, one may also consider that the four colours of the curtain represented the four-fold human being: body – the vessel that can hold the pure spirit, formative life force – the place from which self-sacrifice is possible, soul expression – the space to connect with the Divine and others, and the essential quality of spirit – the ability to express love. As the temple was open to everyone who visited Jerusalem this was a picture that was available for the whole of humanity to see.
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The vestibule was half as long as it was wide. The long room was twice as deep as it was wide which held the altar for the burnt offering and the seven branched candelabrum and the table with consecrated bread on either side. Then the third room with the curtain of four colours, the Holy of Holies.

From Philo to Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther theologians have identified that the three-fold temple represented the three-fold human being. Entering the vestibule was to enter the body of the building, then entering more deeply one entered the soul realm in the Long Room and then the Holy of Holies was the spirit of the temple which represents the spirit of the human being. The form of the temples represented the form of the highest achievement of YHWH and the other Elohim in the creation of the world: the human form: body, soul and spirit.

The Temple Legend, very popular among the Rosicrucian, tells that when the Queen of Sheba came to visit Solomon the temple is in the process of being built. When she entered the temple for the first time her reaction was recorded in many writings. The most astonishing of these appears in the Qur’an. As the Queen of Sheba stepped into the temple the floor was so highly polished and the moon shining through the windows causing a reflection on the floor giving the Queen the impression that the floor was flooded, and she lifted her skirts so as not to wet them as she walked across the floor. This temple was a moon temple connected to YHWH who operates from the sphere of the Moon which is a reflection of the Sun. It was not a light in itself. YHWH is not El, he was a reflection of El to the people of Israel with an exceedingly important task. YHWH is the leading Elohim of Earth Evolution.

In the Temple Legend the Queen of Sheba also meets Hiram. She was very connected with the old ways, while Solomon was very much a descendant of Abraham with clear, brain-based thinking. He was filled with understanding and wisdom and a cosmopolitan leader, connecting with all the nations, marrying princesses from each nation, making Jerusalem a place of destination and pilgrimage. The Queen of Sheba was more connected to atavistic wisdom. When she heard of Jerusalem she was driven to visit it, rather than making a conscious decision to visit it. For her it was a knowing that this what she must do rather than a thought through process. She was taken with the design and craftsmanship Hiram was introducing to the temple and Solomon became jealous of Hiram. He believed that the Queen of Sheba considered Hiram to be more informed and developed than he was and as a result Solomon decides that Hiram’s secret must die with him and, according to the Temple Legend, not the Book on Kings, Solomon ordered the death of Hiram. In this legend Solomon was seen as being descended from the stream of Abel and Harim was descended from the stream of Cain and especially Tubal-cain. The impulse of Abel was transferred and carried by the son Seth who was born to Adam and Eve after the slaying of Abel. The Temple Legend understands something of the origins of Cain and Abel. The origin of Cain is pre-Paradise, out of a conception that belonged to before the Fall. Abel was a conception after the Fall. Therefore, there were two streams, one in touch with the arts and creativity and through human, artistic activity creating a human paradise, and the other taming and managing the earth, taking hold and cultivating the land and keeping flocks. Cain grew crops in order that the life forces would grow from the earth and the gift he brought to YHWH were all derived from the sun-forces of growth. Abel brought a gift that derived from the moon forces: the first-born of his flock and herd. Cain killed Abel. In the Temple Legend the Abel stream took revenge on the Cain stream and nothing changes. There is no restoration from the first offerings to YHWH to the House of YHWH. There is a deep division in the human experience that involves death. There is no hope of renewal, resurrection and new life.

The renewal comes through Christ. And the curtain of the temple was rent from top to bottom. It was so high that it would not have been possible to tear from top to bottom without high ladders. The tearing from top to bottom meant that the Divine world tore the curtain, opening the veil, exposing the Holy of Holies. There is no longer a hidden place out in the world, the only hidden place now resides in the human being. As a result, there is no longer a temple in the world, the temple is now in us. Our body is the temple of the Divine, the Holy Spirit, according to St Paul.

Hiram is known as the son of the widow. The reference to the son of the widow means that Hiam was a Phoenician. Adonis was born after the death of his father. In the myth of Isis and Osiris, Isis gave birth to Horus after Osiris was killed. The great gods therefore were the ‘sons of the widow’. It became an esoteric descriptor of one who had been through an initiation; an initiation, one might say, into the mindset of the gods. It gave them the ability to work like a priest. Therefore, the temple was built by a high initiate, someone who could work in the space of a priest. Solomon was king, anointed as king, but he was not priest. He was not initiated into the great wisdom of the esoteric mysteries, and he failed to build the absolute connection to YHWH, in the way David, his father had. Solomon remained entirely worldly and failed in the one aspect in which his father remained steadfast, despite his many other failings.  Hiram could build the temple because he was a great initiate. In the Gospels we have the only son of the widow being carried out of the city on a bier. Therefore, we know that this young man was not dead but in a temple sleep. It may be that he was experiencing a former initiation and needed to raised from the temple sleep, which Jesus did and presented him to his mother. The initiation allowed the person to spend three days in the spiritual world in a way that would allow the person to return with knowledge that would advance humanity. They would return as a new human being.

This report represents the end of the Old Testament Study that began in November 2020. There will be further studies of aspects of the Old Testament, and these will be announced in time. They will most likely not occur again on a Saturday as it appears that a more suitable day and time needs to be considered for everyone interested in participating.

Reference
*The Temple of Solomon in Iron Age Context
Yosef Garfinkel ** and Madeleine Mumcuoglu
Institute of Archaeology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 9190501 Jerusalem, Israel;
madeleine.mumcuoglu@gmail.com
** Correspondence: garfinkel@mail.huji.ac.il
Received: 24 February 2019; Accepted: 13 March 2019; Published: 15 March 2019