“AUTUMN IS SPRING?…YOU’RE JOKING!!
4 Seasons Main Lesson – Physical Sciences – Class 2
See Four Seasons song/poems
The concept of the 4 seasons seems to be a real problem for a lot of Northern Hemisphere immigrants to the South. They resolutely attempt to import the seasons unchanged from Munich, Manchester or Maine.
This is not new; the first white settlers were (more forgivably) somewhat confused when they had to eat their Christmas pudding in the middle of bushfire threats and stifling heat-waves. Today the legion of sweating department-store Santas can attest to the inappropriateness of being rugged p in furs and high boots in the middle of summer!
A serious task of education is to make sure that our young charges do not enter adult life with the same appalling ignorance – so we have a main lesson devoted exclusively to the 4 seasons. This occurs in Class 2, when the children are 8-years old, and are therefore recapitulating their Ancient Indian evolutionary phase.
Ancient India was the first post-Atlantean civilization; it was also the first to experience the four seasons roughly as we know them today. This 4-fold seasonal arrangement is based on there being 4 major climatic aspects. These are equivalent to the 4 pre-Atlantean epochs: Polaria contributed Temperature; Hyperborea, Wind; Lemuria, Precipitation; and Atlantis, firm landforms or topography.
These ‘4 Elements’ – fire, air, water, and earth – constitute the 4 main dynamics of climate, which the 4 seasons express through. Topography you ask? Mountains create rain shadows – and even snow fields near the Equator. In winter the entire continent of Antarctica changes, it mineralizes (water to ice), actually enlarging its surface area.
Number 4 is the number of the earth, hence 4 seasons, the quintessential earth expression.
But another perspective is to see these wonderful annual charges as the Breath of the World. In Spring, there is a compelling outbreathing, when plants and animals create new life. This is a carbonization, resulting in a transubstantiation of matter in the hemisphere experiencing its ‘Printemps’, as the French so charmingly call Spring.
In Summer there is a hiatus, both natural and supersensible forces hang suspended in atmosphere and stratosphere – dispersion occurs, and the active gas is that of the sun itself, hydrogen.
Autumn (Swedish ‘Host’) arrives with its chill winds and will-to-work. There is an in-breathing of the earth, an inspiration of oxygen, which brings with it the powers of consolidation.
The earth braces itself for Winter (Italian ‘Inverno’), when denizens and forces of this shining planet are again held in a kind of spiritual limbo – this time within the earth itself. And the active gaseous element of this aspect of the earth’s breath? Nitrogen, the stuff of imagination.
This carbon-transubstantiation – hydrogen-dispersion – oxygen – consolidation – nitrogen-imagination is a cosmic picture, an event conducted as a might drama once a year (in a given hemisphere). With every breath taken by man, this same event is played out on the microcosmic level as well.
Man’s out-breath contains the carbon necessary for the creation of the plant world, and hence indirectly, the minerals – soils and so on. At the completion of the out-breath, we actually stop breathing for a few moments – a hiatus which allows the hydrogen to disperse the carbon and prevent poisonous concentrations.
We then breath in; the oxygen in the in-breath reddens our blood – the ‘Autumn’ of the soul in every breath! This strengthens us for the rigors of the coming Winter. This inspiration is both of a spiritual as well as a physical nature.
Then we have another hiatus, one is which the nitrogen in our breath (the most abundant element) sparkles through our brain, allowing pictures to form – a matrix of imagination!
Man, like the plants and animals, lives in this annual ‘earth breath’, and whether consciously or not, functions in harmony with its profound dispensation – that is unless he deliberately espouses a different, and usually opposite, reality – a thing an animal or plant could never do!
Ah, sweet Spring brings the spirit of re-birth to us all, even culturally. On a higher plane this is seen as a sublime Resurrection.
But in Summer there is (or should be) dispersion; Australians have a good instinct for this. At around December 21, the summer solstice, everyone drops their oars and disperses from office, home an factory to ‘visit the family’ or any one of dozens of excuses. This Summer (French ‘Ete’) exodus is most often into nature (beach, river, rainforest); this is in accord with the celebration of Summer portrayed so beautifully in Shakespeare’s spiritually-inspired – A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is a play of bucolic simplicity, of feasting and partying on in general. Indeed ‘celebration’ is the word which best characterizes the summer soul imperative. It means a joyous public event, an external festival. It is the wedding of the bride of the world with the groom of the high ether – divine nuptials where each individual, animal and plant is a celebrant. If only we could leave out the booze and other soul crutches. This eclipses the spirit of festival – absolutely. Even gift-giving, parties and family get-togethers are expressions of the summer festival.
For a teacher to create meaningful stories, songs, poems; and indeed give direct instruction on the 4 seasons, s/he must be in possession of a body of correct information. Distorting the seasons to the children – like having a Christ Mass Festival in Summer, with carols, candles and ‘chrissie’ trees. – will burden them with a millstone of error.
Australians don’t have as sensitive a response to Autumn (‘Herbst’ in Spanish!); almost invariably they try feebly to make it an Easter celebration. Easter is traditionally cosmic based, being held on the first full moon of the planetary year – in Spring! Therefore Easter is a festival of Resurrection and re-birth (‘oestre’ – oestrus’!). Chocolate eggs and ever-fertile bunnies are unashamedly Spring images – the fun may be there, but the Spirit has excused itself. The oh-so-necessary bracing forces of the Archangel Michael, in his eternal battle with the Dragon of Materialism, are missing from these saccharine sorties – those pseudo (Autumn) Easters. The earth is actually inhaling in Autumn, not expiring, as the Easter mysteries all depict. And so wemust inhale in Autumn – a resolute in-breath of spiritual commitment and soul courage.
Of course at our Winter, because we’ve tried to cram two festivals in one in Summer, most Aussies give the important Solstice festival a miss – their loss I say. The Winter Festival in the school your author co-founded was the cultural highlight of the year. Putting the lie to the oft-heard statement – ‘Nobody’s been successful in celebrating the seasonal festivals in Australia.’. We’ve been ‘successfully’ doing it for over a quarter of a century – with all 4 festivals!
Winter is a wonderful, soulful festival, supported as it is by the inner-resounding forces of the earth, the planetary h-earth (Rudolf Steiner called Winter the ‘festival of the hearth’. It’s hard to gather round the cozy fireplace in an Aussie summer!). It is a festival of gentleness and love; of softness, tone and color – not fireworks and bonfires as I’ve sometimes seen; a violation of its Gabrielic essence. Rather than the fun of Summer, it is a festival of meditation, of going within, as does the earth, to meet the Self.
‘At last it turns Spring, and the air does sing…’ – is the opening line of a beautiful and joyous Spring song written for a Class 2; a song loved by everyone in the school community – a hit! Why? Because it perfectly expressed the freedom and exhilaration of the new out-breath – a liberation from the soul and life threatening poison of the carbon within, that built up in the darkness of Winter.
The 4 Seasons main lesson is part of the 3-strand science stream; the Physics strand in fact. The mechanics through which we actually perceive the seasons are physical – inanimate. These climatic factors represent the non-biological dynamics of the earth. Science is a Physical body lesson, as such it appeals to a band on the face running right down the center through the nose. Of the 3 ‘Souls; of science – will, feeling and thinking – physics is the will strand.
The will expresses in the lower third of the face, latitudinally; therefore the supersensible area of the child awakened by the physical sciences (in this case the 4 seasons) is the dome of the chin – the region of self-will.
Within this 3-week, 30 hour unit, conducted in the first two hours of the day, much of the specific information of the mechanics of the seasons can be given; but more important is it to create in the child’s soul the image of the world as a living Being; one of great complexity, yet comprehensible. The standard approach to teaching small children about the 4 seasons is to present stereotypes of snow-covered cottages (even in North Queensland!), or forests ablaze with golden leaves!
“Just think, when we celebrate St. John’s Tide (mid-summer), and if our souls follow the earth’s soul, which is outside, then in close union with the stars, the antipodeans celebrate Christmas”. Rudolf Steiner
This idealized picture does exist, but only in two narrow bands of latitude around the earth; an area within only a few degrees of 45° north and south respectively (all other things being equal, like altitude). This band is approximately Dornach in Switzerland for example, and Hobart. These places, and almost everywhere else along this ‘ideal season’ band, experience almost perfectly balanced seasons, positioned as they are halfway between the Equator (0°), and the Poles (90°).
These 2 bands have seasons of almost exactly 3 months; here the Season Express runs on time all year round. The further we move towards either the Equator or the Poles, the greater the seasonal distortion. The Equator has virtually only one season, Summer; and at 90° north or south, there is only Winter all year. But at least they have the ‘polarity’ of light and dark. The sun shines weakly day and night, or with short transitions, is evident by its absence!
Teachers must have a clear picture of the level of distortion of the seasons in their own region; that is unless they teach on the soul-simple 45° lines! The globe, taught as a manifold seasonal being, encourages mobility of thinking in the young, stereotypes never do. It also urges a heightened sensitivity to the often subtle seasonal changes in say a sub-tropical climate; changes which nature is aware of.
When do the smooth gum trees lose their bark in your latitude? What date does the Jasim flower? In which month do the Koels arrive from their annual Niu Gini holiday? The human immigrants may continue to have a ‘problem’ with the seasons, but the plants they brought with them do not. These adapted immediately, the lovely Liquidambars still change their leaf color in Autumn, no matter what their puzzled owners think. Some new settlers even protest that an Australian Autumn is really a kind of Spring. This fallacy is based on the flimsy fact that we have two wheat harvesting seasons, one being in the traditional ‘harvest’ season, Autumn, the other in Spring. But nobody told the gum trees; of the 500 species or so, 80% flower in Spring – and the other 20%? Well, Australia is a complex country, seasonally and in every other way.
A simple but effective global picture for children is to see the seasons divided into torrid, temperate and frigid – both dry and wet in all cases. To bring it closer to home, Australia can be portrayed latitudinally as hot, warm and cool; with their dry and wet differentiations respectively. These geographic principles are the only relevant ones at this tender age when expressing seasonal influences.
The class should be told lots of ‘local’ information abut the seasons; and about the wider country as well. Such as that the Top Enders only recognize 2 seasons, dry and wet – people in Alice Springs only have hot and warm. In theory at least, it is thought that there are 4 seasons everywhere, it’s just that many are too delicate to detect with man’s fast-degenerating senses. Plants and animal seasonal responses can be observed almost anywhere on the globe.
As the seasons are under the regency of 4 lofty spiritual beings, it seems that their influence penetrates where-ever life exists. The 4 are Hosts of the Etheric Christ, the Lord of Seasons, appearing, as he does to those with eyes to see, in the etheric mantle of the earth – ‘…walking on the clouds.’!
These hosts are the 4 Archangels; Raphael, Uriel, Michael and Gabriel, who, according to Goethe, pass the ‘golden urns’ of the seasons across from hemisphere to hemisphere – unending! Rudolf Steiner also unequivocally states that the seasons, and all their spiritual implications – ‘…are opposite in the antipodes.’!
The Spring Regent, Lord of the Etheric Body, is Raphael. He dispenses life and light into the out-breath of the world, assuring us of re-birth and spiritual hope.
Pensive Uriel, Archangel of the Ego, and Summer (‘Estate’ – Italian), peers into the open pages of the soul of each person as they bare their hearts to the sun. A stern judge Uriel is too, but a compassionate one. Having in high Summer assayed the misdeeds of man’s year, Uriel makes his ‘summing up’ available to his Autumn colleague, Michael, who, if man chooses to acknowledge him (by celebrating the festivals in the correct season), provides seeds of progress and protection for the dark Winter days ahead.
Gabriel, the Winter Archangel, oversees the welfare of the unborn souls poised in the near firmament. These are waiting to incarnate into their 3-score-and-ten sojourn on earth. Gabriel, he who annunciated Mary, is the Archangel of love and babies…regent of the astral body.
Although we must keep in mind that The 4 Seasons is a physics main lesson, it is good to describe to the children the effect on, and response of, the 6 Levels of Being – in imaginations and stories of course. The Gods dispense the seasons; they are naturally Level 1, and their task in Creation.
With the 2nd level, Man the seasons are recognized by Celebration, a reflection of the seasonal ‘temperaments’ of Mother Earth. She is sanguine in Spring (more marriages); choleric in summer (more murders, but it’s not her fault!); melancholic in Autumn (more suicides); and phlegmatic in Winter (more…?).
The 3rd Level of Being, Animals, in their response to the cycle of the seasons: Hibernate, Aestivate, Migrate or just Mate!
Plants deciduate, Fructate and Phyllate.
The 5th, the Elementals: Activate, with sylphs doing their thing in Spring; salamandas, Summer; gnomes, Autumn; and undines Winter.
The Elements, the 6th level, Defoliate, Evaporate, Coagulate – and just about every other ‘ate’ one can think of! Air does whatever it does in Spring; fire in Summer (hence the St. John Summer Fire Festivals in Europe); earth in autumn; and water in Winter.
All of the 6 – the gods, man, animal, plant, elemental and element – can all be characterized in tales of the seasons, not in the terms used here, but in original (and accurate) images. One might go on a wonderful journey with White Beard Winter, as he rides the sparkling ether from hemisphere to hemisphere – country to country – climate to climate; till he arrives in the happy valley where your school or home happens to be. Children love secrets; you only see where White Beard Winter has been by the frost blanketing the landscape – this is where the great white beard brushed the earth! (Oh by the way, don’t be a creative sloth and dredge up Jack Frost again, the new image always ahs more life – and is capable of growth!)
The 4 seasons will continue to be a puzzle for people who come to this country from the Northern Hemisphere, their baggage heavy with pre-loved prejudice; but with a well-taught main lesson as described, at least our children may be able to experience – to live into – the earth year as the great protective and supportive Being that it is – no problem.
“What man bears within him during the course of 24 hours, namely spring, summer, autumn and winter, is spread in nature over a period of 365 days.” Rudolf Steiner, Arnheim, July 1924
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