the unfamiliar Name
The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
—T.S. Eliot, from "Little Gidding," in Four Quartets
New - Available Now
Fugitive
Three Covid Pieces: A Goethean Appreciation
Allan Kaplan
Emerging from a unique Goethean approach to human experience—developed over a lifetime, applied here to life during the first three years of the Covid era, from a mountain in South Africa—Allan Kaplan’s Fugitive is both a poetic record and a contemplative, scientific roadmap.
In striving to make himself a vessel for sensing the dynamics of our time—the struggle for meaning, the will toward freedom, the experience of powerlessness and surrender, and the urge to defend and secure the capacity for human thinking and discernment—Kaplan allows the profound questions of our time to arise and be explored in thought that is free of the compulsion to arrive at fixed conclusions.
In pondering the elements of nature and the laws governing them, we find the active forces of life and health; we glimpse wisdom at work and, often, beauty. One might be reminded: we, too, are a part of nature, and this wisdom of nature, encountered competently, may serve as a guide in facing the tasks of recognizing, embodying, and preserving the essence of our humanity in these darkening times.
Here is a little book—an example in practice—to help strengthen our humanity. READ MORE
“Following Goethe, I do not seek explanation, and I do not write about anything that is separate from me. My own development through these years, and the developments threading these three years themselves, are one. I try...to portray the character of the emergent social predicament that we are all participant in, and responsible for.”
—Allan Kaplan
Also of interest:
New for Children
Mina Belongs Here
Sandra Niebuhr-Siebert and Lars Baus
When Mina starts kindergarten in her new country the only word she understands is her name. As her understanding steadily grows, Mina realizes this new language now belongs to her. A vibrant and heartfelt exploration of a migrant experience.
From the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner
Rosicrucianism Renewed
The Unity of Art, Science & Religion:
The Theosophical Congress of Whitsun 1907
Translated by Marsha Post
13 lectures, various cities, and reports, 1907–1923 (CW 284)
READ MORE | CONTENTS
Among the many reasons for inaugurating the present Theosophical stream, there is one that is connected with this transmutation of the word into materialism. That the Theosophical Movement has come, and had to come, into the world at precisely this time is connected with various facts, both sense-perceptible and supersensible. However, one of the reasons is that if this Theosophical Movement, this spiritual world stream, had not arisen at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, such a spiritual movement would probably not have been possible for another hundred years. It is indeed a seizing of the opportune circumstances of the moment. More and more, words are being used only for the material. If we had waited yet another hundred years, our words would no longer have been able to express what spiritual science has to say. Human beings would no longer have a feeling for it, because they would hear only that which is used for the world of matter. There would be no more words with which we could make ourselves understood, and so nothing that the spiritual scientist has to say would be suitable anymore. Theosophy must therefore press new words upon everything. It must give a new character to all words. Theosophy must virtually renew language. People must regain a feeling for the fact that a meaning lies in certain words that is not meant merely as something that can be touched or seen but that points into the higher worlds.
—Rudolf Steiner, from "Symbols and Signs as Effects of Chaos," in Rosicrucianism Renewed: The Theosophical Congress of Whitsun 1907 (CW 284)
Coming Soon - Preorder
She Was Always There
Sophia as a Story for Our Time
Signe Eklund Schaefer
Live Book Release Event!
A Conversation with Signe Schaefer
Friday, June 2 at 7pm
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STEINERBOOKS
834 Route 203
Spencertown, NY
“Who, or perhaps what, is she?” Signe Schaefer poses this question as she leads us into a heartfelt exploration of the great mystery that is Sophia. Her book does not take an academic or theological path but one that is personal and full of warmth and genuine interest in discovery that goes toward living reality, well beyond mere names and fixed ideas. As Schaefer says, she decided to “forego the idea of a straightforward narrative and instead interweave musings, poems, saved quotations, and other assorted notes from my many years of living with questions about and to her.”