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Alan speaks in a very symbolic and esoteric manner in some parts of his books. Although they can be read anthroposophically, passages speaking of Atlantis, archangels, gods, etc. do not need to be taken literarily to be meaningful. The more you read, the more you will realize he uses many different religions to express ideas in a symbolic manner and not in a religious manner. His writings are not religious. In some places his writings are meant to refer to religious events in a historical way. In some places he is using religious figures (from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Paganism, Ancient Roman and Greek Religions, etc.) in a symbolic manner. However, at no point is he promoting a specific religion or speaking from a religious point of view.
I have kept the writing as close to one-hundred percent original so you will also find that he speaks of Australia often and some spelling or manners of speaking may be cultural. Any words I have changed are presented like this: <word>.
Also keep in mind that these books are written by a Waldorf teacher with decades of experience who also studied with a Steiner student himself, so he speaks to an audience that is dedicating their lives to the Waldorf method without exception.
Because of this, all of his views are not reflected in the Earthschooling curriculum and not all of them may be ones you want to embrace or are able to use. In all of Alan Whitehead’s writings the opinions are his own and may not align with Earthschooling or Waldorf Books. In some cases, we will be updating some of these chapters in the future with additional and/or updated information.
Ultimately, however, as I read through these passages I find I can distill wisdom from even those paragraphs that do not resonate with me.
We invite you to read with an open mind and heart and with eagerness to learn and discuss…
FROM THE FORGE
Fire Stories & Studies – Class 4 – Middle Lesson
The Flame
I would enkindle every human being
Out of the Spirit of the cosmos
That they become a flame
And fierily unfold
The essence of their Being.
The others, they would take
From the waters of the cosmos
What extinguishers the flames
And paralyses all Being
At its very core.
O joy, when the human flame
Blazes, even where it rests.
O bitterness, when the human thing
Is bound, where it would be active.
Rudolf Steiner
It’s funny how differently the Ancient Greeks perceived the Zodiac, from the more common Babylonian imagery. Take the 4 Cardinal Points for instance; these represent, in unambiguous form, the 4 Elements.
Firstly there’s the Minotaur – the Bull Man (Taurus); he who lurks in the Labyrinth, the earth of Mineral Element. Next we have Ganymede (Aquarius); dispensing ambrosia – the Liquid Element – to both his divine masters and mankind – for eternity!
Opposite on the Circle of the Heavens, is Apollo, ‘bearer of the North Wind’. He is the god of light and air (Leo). And the Minotaur’s cross-counterpart is Hephaestus – Roman Vulcan – the Fire God himself, or Scorpio, making the sparks fly on his subterranean forge!
Such high ideas will concern the Class 4 teacher as s/he prepares this middle lesson – Fire Stories and Studies. This is the 4th of a series, begun, in the equivalent programming slot, in Class 1. Here the 7-year-olds thrilled to their Rock Cycle Stories; in Class 2, Water Cycle Stories; and Class 3 (dealt with earlier in this book), Air Cycle Stories.
Why the title change from ‘stories’ to ‘stories and studies’? Well, it’s due to a major developmental plateau having been reached form the 9th to the 10th year – the ‘9 ½ year split’ as Rudolf Steiner called it. Here an ego factor has arrived to illuminate the unfolding etheric body of the child with a new self-awareness – a new objectivity.
This expresses in a need to meet concepts in a more direct way. Indeed this is also known as the year of the Conceptual (or ego) Aspect of the Etheric Body. So stories must be supplemented by studies; of course by the end of primary, the sciences become almost exclusively studies.
It is particularly important to present ‘Fire’ in this cooler, more objective manner; as it is by far the most potentially dangerous – or highly inflammable! – of all four elements to teach. We know that fire is mankind’s most valuable servant – but as a master!? Fire stories have the power to excite the soul, which is good; but his heat must be regularly cooled by a waft of good ol’ concepts – dull maybe, but necessary for psychic balance.
The Fire middle lesson is part of the Discovery Stream, that which is a corollary to the science/social studies main lessons. Of the 3 Discovery strands of Physical, Living and Human Worlds, calling as they do on Will, Feeling and thinking; the Fire unit is the Physical-World/Will.
Will is an expression of the fire element; it is the supersensible equivalent of physical fire – a willful person has a fiery nature. So the above timetabling provides a hidden support. The children learn of the fire/will element in a will/fire lesson!
The ‘stories’ aspect can be presented in 3 phases, one per week. The first stories might be the legacy of the past; of those peoples who have enshrined the Fire Mysteries into their mythologies. Generations of children never tire of hearing about the Phoenix, or of Prometheus.
Prometheus was the one who started this whole fire thing, stealing the element from heaven as he did. The brave teacher might even mention St. Catherine; and how she unwittingly invented fireworks in general, and the Catherine Wheel in particular! In this ‘legend’ section, we can look also at comparative stories of our own land – tales from the Fire Folk themselves, the Aborigines.
These people are the long-term refugees from that continent whose dire karma was to be destroyed by fire, Ancient Lemuria. Through mankind’s volatile soul life (we were all there!) he transformed the Lotus-tranquil seas of old Lemu – as the Aborigines call it – to flammable liquid – something like petrol!
Many of the campfire stories contain cryptic essences of this great global event – designated in the Bible as the expulsion from Eden. This was a land guarded by an Archangel (a ‘spirit of fire’) with a flaming sword! In one Aboriginal story, that ‘subtil serpent’, or snakes, were being repelled by a woman – shades of Eve.
In her desperation and struggle, the woman’s fighting stick broke, and fire leapt from it. The stories vary a lot, between the spectrum of creating a conflagration, to a recognition of fire’s ‘servant’ status – a gift of the gods indeed! It’s very reassuring for children to see, behind the veil of every culture, the identifiable hand of the same all-pervading Creative Spirit – even if it does manifest in a specific, regional way.
And speaking of creative spirits; the stories of the 2nd week could well be the ones created by the teacher. These need not be labored, just image-filled ‘coat hangers’ on which to drape the more factual aspects of the lesson, and the hands-on experiences.
Recourse to the deep past especially as revealed by the Akashic Record (through Rudolf Steiner and others) can provide a rich and true texture to these tales.
Fire was the 1st Creation; an act of pure Will by those Spirits of Will themselves, the Thrones. These are usually represented as wheels of fire – fire wills indeed! This great event of creation occurred on Ancient Saturn, the very first planetary incarnation – or ‘Globe’.
Old Saturn, way back then was nothing but a great ‘wheel of fire’ – or sphere to be more accurate; one of pure heat energy. Leaping in a single bound to the 4th planetary incarnation, or Glove, we arrive at the first ‘Round’ (we are in the 5th!), an epoch known as Polaria. This was a materialized recap of Ancient Saturn, with its epicenter in Antarctica – the South Pole! This Saturnian aspect expresses through, among other things, inflammability.
These Saturn/fire Forces continually stream north from this taciturn land; especially entering the plant life. Indeed a good observational exercise for children is to assess whether an area is fire-prone or not. Initially this is done through empirical methods – blackened trees and the like. But more interesting is a study of the relationship between flora and geological types. Sandstone country for instance, with its dry, hard, floral mantle, is invariably a powder key; shale, laid down by water, barely burns at all! How often do bush-fire fighters see the furious advance of a fire mysteriously halted when the rock type changes?
This ‘Saturn’ fire-force woks vicariously up from its Polarian descendant, to help create the Fire continent itself – Australia. Ah, what a fitting home for the Sons of Cain, those fore-folk, the Australian Aborigines. And what of Cain? He was the archetypal ‘son of fire’ – of the Spirit, in the higher, Will sense. His descendant, Tubal Cain, worked the forge – the Hebrew Hephaestus perhaps? Cain was so will-full – ‘wheelfull’ – that he slew his brother Abel.
So fire is expressed through the soul-spirit as Will – as well as its higher, more informed counterpart, Creativity. Cain was exiled ‘east of Eden’ – Australia is east of Eden. A study of the Sons of Cain, in respect of the Fire Mysteries, can be both entertaining and instructive for 10-year-olds – who have a compulsive interest in all things Aboriginal.
These people are famous of course for fire-making, by friction. A demonstration of this – or indeed a lesson on how to do it – is very popular. Fire was virtually the only ‘agricultural’ implement the Aborigines used to control their hard, dry land. They would slow-burn an area, so that tender greases would spring up; providing feed for a whole range of animals.
In this way there would be many ever-changing ‘environments’ created in a given area, providing for the most bountiful and diverse natural conditions. Fire was also a communications medium; in arid areas, two families for instance would keep in visual contact by, as they strolled along on their respective ‘walkabouts’, burning small patches of Spinifex. This would send up a string of white message-plumes of smoke; ones which could be see by their fellows over 40 miles away! The native Americans of course had their smoke signals’ try this one with the children (damp grass is a good smoker!).
Pemulwuy, in his valorous defense of his land in the first decades of white settlement, used fire as a weapon. He would regularly torch buildings and crops on the hot breath of a westerly wind – with lethal effect. In fact much of early Sydney’s food shortages were due to the fact that they couldn’t harvest a crop, due to the ‘Pemulwuy factor’. Alas the defiant warrior was conquered by a higher fire – gunpowder. And while on fire-arms, our own military strategists assess Australia’s major vulnerability to be fire. If saboteurs struck in concert, and in the right conditions, they could incinerate large tracts of the country in hours. It has been speculated that a 5-year-old could create scorched-earth conditions over half of Victoria with a single match – now that’s power.
Maybe the source of fire, as we know it, the Sun, could get a mention in this ‘new-story’ segment. This is the home of the – ‘laggardly’ – Archangels; these concepts have to be suitably transformed into acceptable images naturally – The Great Fire Horses perhaps?
These Beings were nominated by Rudolf Steiner as Spirits of Fire; their members on the Sun being responsible for the mighty ‘prominences’ – sheets of flame – seen so dramatically through filtered telescopes.
The most enigmatic of the 4 Elementals, the Fire Spirits of Salamanders, are good story material too. In Greece they were called Miltiades (honey or bee spirits). A Salamander traditionally follows the slip-stream of a bee on its vital task of – through warmth plant pollination. The English equivalent of these fire beings are ‘hobs’ – as in stove!
The St. John fire festivals – summer-season spectacles – made powerful impressions, with huge bonfires lit at Mid-summer on hilltops across Britain. These created a writhing fire dragon – that only the gods could see! Then there are those most-high fire adepts, the Ku Klux Klan …! Hang on? They’re part of the 3rd story section; the ‘true’ story of fires and fire folk.
Here the Klan can be described as people who use fire in its destructive phase – a burning cross indeed! This is a spiritual contradiction, the Cross, in the Rosicrucian sense, being of the densest, blackest matter. Anyone who uses fire in a ritualistic manner – especially wantonly – is to be warily regarded – as Don MacLean said so poignantly in his American Pie; ‘fire is the devil’s only friend’.
These True Fire Stories can begin back at the burning of the Temple at Ephesus – moving into Nero’s fiddle-playing (while Rome burned) – the Great Fire of London – The Chicago Fire – the destruction of the Hindenburg. Then there is the torching of the 1st Goetheanum – and the same organization of arsonists’ second big job, the razing of the Reichstag in the ‘30s in Berlin!
Ah, the field of the fire arts par excellence – war; a growth industry which worships the fire gods exclusively. The fire-bombing (not in graphic detail please with 10-year-olds) of Dresden and Tokyo; napalm in Vietnam; and the A-bombs in Japan! I think we’ve gone far enough with war!!
The children should be made familiar with fire in their own world; indeed many young people today hardly ever see a naked flame, let alone fire in its power mode. Basically there are 3 kinds of fire, in the destructive sense at least: those that relate to body, soul, and spirit. ‘Body’ fires are natural – bushfires (even volcanoes). These are they in which, in the best sense, nature periodically purges – or cleanses – itself.
The ‘soul’ fires are those which trouble people most – the domestic fire. Here the individual stands at the flaming pit of personal tragedy, with the potential for loss of life and/or precious property ever-present. (Talking of soul, have you ever noticed that the first thing lamented after a house fire is the loss of the family photo album?)
‘Spirit’ fires include those which affect Community; like the historical blazes mentioned earlier. These wreak collective havoc, the suffering is spread across a wide spectrum of society. The burning of the 1stGoetheanum was the most tragic fire – even though the only death was the arsonist! – in modern history; form a spiritual perspective at least.
These Spirit fires can strike much closer to home, and include industrial fires; hotels; ships; theatres, et al. Would those mystifying examples of ‘spontaneous combustion’, when a gin-swelling gent is inexplicably cremated in his lounge chair, be Spirit fires?!
So we have 3 weeks of stories, traditional, newly-created, and true – but what of the ‘’Studies’ part of the lesson? Well this comprises 2 strands, facts and fingers …fingers? No, this is not a typo, but refers to, all-important for a middle lesson, hands-on learning.
Acquiring temperature-recording skills is both useful and fun; as is learning about the earth as a fire repository – children love descriptions of vulcanism.
Then there is the duller but necessary information on domestic heating – fire as servant. Here wood, coal, oil, gas, – and even dung! – are detailed in their energy-producing roles. How about uranium!? The children can visit a forge, steelworks or other industrial center which employs that ever-valent labor-force, fire, in its production processes.
How about a visit from – or to – a fireman/station? Or have a bushfire captain come to class to inform on fire safety and control. Maybe the class could even watch – or help in – a burn-off!
Then there’s the experimental or demonstration side of this 3-week unit. This is not to be regarded in the formal sense of ‘science experiments’, as introduced in later years – but more experiential really. The children can slowly run their fingers through a candle flame, without being burnt – but if a tiny spark lands on your leg – Yoouchh!! Time the difference for fire to boil mike and water.
Maybe they could learn fire-eating – or even fire-walking. Both these could open exciting career options for them – sorry, just joking!
Simple descriptions of the physical nature of fire is valuable; such as the fact that fie is only possible when an inflammable gas is present – neither liquid nor mineral burns. Existing fire heats up the substance until gases are released; it is these that burn – and only these. The 1st Element can only consume the 2nd.
Here also we describe the 7 Laws of Heat: 1. Heat rises (the ‘stolen’ fire of Prometheus yearning for its heavenly home?). 2. Head expands. 3. Fire expresses its relative temperature through a spectrum from green (cool flame), right through to white heat. This embraces the soul, or planetary, spectrum from Venus to Sun.
The colors of Venus and Sun are green and white respectively. Copper, the Venus metal, burns green – phosphorus, the Sun element, has a white flame. This ‘Fire Spectrum’ is: green, blue, violet, red (the timeless symbolic color of fire, that of Mars the Fire Soul, right in the middle of the spectrum), orange, yellow, white.
4.Only a gas can burn (see earlier). 5. Heat manifests in a spherical form, with radial symmetry. 6. Heat can penetrate all other elements. 7. Heat has no molecular structure – in short, it doesn’t exist at all! Rudolf Steiner makes no distinction between warmth and warmth ether.
The Persians (‘fire land’), apart from being the first to harness fire – cooking, pottery, etc. – meditated on the 16 Sacred Fires. Our children can better understand the nature of a substance by burning it; especially employing the sense of smell. Guessing games can be played where different leaves, etc., are burnt, to see if the class can identify them. Many smokes are highly perfumed – as the popularity of incense attests – like pine needles, gum leaves, grass, cypress-pine wood…
The Persians (and today’s Parsees – the same thing) focused on flames, being masked to prevent inhaling Ahriman’s element, smoke – air-born carbon. As we are more deeply embedded in matter, we can tolerate the odd whiff of smoke.
Of course one-match fire starting, and fun with magnifying glasses (burning names in pencil cases) are popular. How about a pin-board with current fire articles?
When the Persians cooked food, they not only added heat, but its metaphysical counterpart, Will. A sour green apple, when cooked, becomes sweet and will-filled. Sugar, the ultimate combustible (burnable) element in digestion, is created. That’s why some fruit in its uncooked or green state can cause distress in the Will zone – the stomach.
In fact a fitting completion to this amazing 3-week unit might be the creation of a fest, cooked on an open fire. This is a tangible confirmation of the mastery of this most useful, but dangerous, servant. In fact I know a good Aboriginal story about the invention of cooking…
FLOWER AFLAME
I grow in sand;
I’m a Mountain Devil Man.
Sunfire is the eye of my day,
Hot Westerly breathes a furnace, he can
Turn the sky smoke-brown and grey.
But after the fire comes the rain,
Its colling showers bring green shoots again.
The sky will be blue, the deep pools too.
The sun bees will dance
On my flowers a-flame.
THE DEVIL’S ONLY FRIEND
We Can Only Watch While Australia Burns
A friend of mine, an Intelligence Officer in the Australian Army in WWII, told me that it wasn’t a conventional attack on our wide, brown land they feared most, it was sabotage – by fire. Apparently a mere dozen or so strategically placed enemy agents, each armed with only a box of matches, could, in a stiff, dry summer westerly wind, incinerate vast tracts of our country. This would include infrastructure and resources of all kinds.
“A two-year-old child could burn half of Victoria with a single match.” He added.
Forest clearing around many towns reached fever pitch at this time “All part of the war effort = timber, and er, more grazing you know.” It was explained.
“Every country has it defense Achilles Heel of some kind.” My friend gloomily intoned “and Australia’s is fire.” So it would seem; it is difficult to watch the evening news lately without bearing witness to yet another inferno What is worrying, the fires are reaching into areas which rarely, if ever, burn – like rainforests.
Admittedly this has been – officially – the hottest and driest summer on record. In the spirit of most commentators, one leaps to blame that innocently smiling ‘boy child’, El Nino. However there are many factors which increase the combustibility of our non-urban areas. One is the absence of slow-burn situations. This should be done in autumn and winter by our vigilant and valorous fire services – and often is.
Alas not often enough in some cases; eucalypt forest accumulates masses of highly inflammable forest floor litter. If this is not regularly burned, it contributes to holocaust conditions when it inevitably does. In fact the mystifying problem of tree die-back is often blamed on this lack of regular incineration. If the forest does not periodically burn, destructive bacteria, fungi, and insects which find haven in the rich litter-bed, reach epidemic proportions, slowly killing mature trees.
Australia is a highly checkered continent; but contrary to the generalized picture often presented to the public, it doesn’t all burn – or not in the same frequency or intensity at least. Property divisions of insurance companies, while assessing risk, are aware of an ascending scale of burn zones. These are based primarily on the geology of the different regions. The second consideration is the plant communities the different rocks support.
The safest country to live on is shale, which is light-impervious and water-retentive. Fewer and smaller bush and grass fires occur here. Limestone, with similar characteristics is next; increasing in flammability is basalt, then granite. Both are common along the Great Dividing Range. Basalt’s tendency to rainforest or wet sclerophyll results in less fires, putting it ahead of granite a notch. Finally those people with the temerity – in some cases audacity – to build on the rock that is sandstone are, as Bonny Tyler so eloquently sings – “Sittin’ on a powder keg and givin’ off sparks.”!
Sydney is ringed by sandstone, including the fire-notorious Blue Mountains and most of the national parks, the city’s necklace of green. One or other of these areas, in any given week, is sure to be alight during summer. Wherever; it can astound even experienced firefighters to see the relentless march of flame across the sandstone come to a stop where the shale begins. This is so whether shale is a hill capping, or an ancient river valley.
The flora is a clue to the primeval nature of his phenomenon. Many – indeed most – of the hardy but beautifully flowering sandstone plants are unable to reproduce without fire. The cones of the common Banksia refuse to open unless roasted to hundreds of degrees.
The seeds also need the post-fire full light and deep ash conditions to germinate. Sandstone is the opposite of shale, it is light-refractive and porous. The tiny glittering quartz crystals with constitute sandstone, and its eroded product, sand, act as countless magnifying glasses, intensifying sunlight. Under extreme circumstances, this occurs to such a degree – so to speak – that a kind of spontaneous combustion can erupt – or at least maximize conditions for a fire source to ignite which would remain inactive in other areas.
This source could be arsonists. These criminals – too gentle a description – have difficulty setting a moist creek valley alight; but one cigarette butt, intentional or otherwise, is all it takes on a sandstone plateau on a hot day. I once followed a group of teenagers along a track who threw down, into the tinder-dry bush, lighted matches about every 50 yards. Why didn’t I accost them? I was too busy stamping their fires out! In some areas of rural Australia, it is an offence to strike a match during a total restriction period. In these conditions, a wind-assisted blaze in dry grass, can tear sway in seconds. (I know this to be true, as I almost sent Cooma up in smoke as a young man by burning some rubbish on the roadside. A combination of hysteria and frenzied beating with a sleeping bag controlled the inferno – in the nick of time!)
Pemulwuy, the leader of the Aboriginal resistance in the first decade of white settlement, knew about fire. This was his main weapon; the European’s critical food shortages were not due to unfamiliar planting practices or dread drought; rather the crops and stores were systematically torched by the astigmatic by cunning Pemulwuy and his merry men.
James Cook noted in his log (in late autumn!) that there were small bushfires all the way up the east coast. This Koorie fire farming allowed a wide variety of ecologies to exist side-by-side, from ash beds, to fresh grass, to low growth, to light canopy, to deep forest. These in turn provided a wide selection of faunal habitats. Some tribes even used ‘ring burning’ to facilitate the spearing of game. They lit a large circle of fire in a selected area, leaving an obvious opening. The escaping wallabies could be said to be out of the fire and into the frying pan! Obviously fire is a friend to the original habitues of this ‘fire continent’, in spite of Don MacLeans’ ominous warning that “Fire is the devil’s only friend.”. We can be convinced of fire’s satanic association as we watch, from our comfortable chairs, the heartbreaking scenes of people standing in the ashes of their home. However fire can be a friend to us too, if we learn to understand it – but first we have to deal with the arsonists… as we would enemy saboteurs in wartime perhaps?!
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