Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul Verse 47

Introduced by Michael Vode

Verse 47 can be meditated as a phenomenal outgrowth of Verse 46. In 46, “the inborn forces of my soul,” threatened by “the world,” find “the strength of will” by calling forth cosmic or universal “memory,” understood, perhaps foremost, as the primordial ground of all being.

In Verse 47 the burgeoning “joy of growth” that arises out of the “world’s womb” takes center stage. The goal is that such joyous outpouring become an innermost human reality of spiritualized sensing.  Thus, the recognition in humility that cognition be strengthened by inward “divine powers.”  Just as in Verse 46 divining “memory” is wanted to vanquish the threatening world, so in Verse 47 cognition is fortified by divining wanted for the joyous growth out of the world’s womb in order to become a borne human co-creation.

The image by William Blake entitled “Glad Day” and/or “Albion Rose “shows the triumph of the resurrected human being.  In Blake’s mythic narrative poems, Albion, the primeval human, undergoes a fourfold, fallen division, but is eventually made whole again.  In this picture, the figure’s outstretched arms and spread palms, the upright carriage, the balancing on a perilous precipice, the clear-eyed visage, the surrounding, dynamic, celebrative, circling hues, the unabashed, natural nakedness,–all these elements point to “the human form divine“ from Blake’s poem “The Divine Image,” a Song of Innocence.

The movement from Verse 46 to 47 seems to extend Blake’s imaginative understanding: the being redeemed human must proceed with a wholehearted, divining awareness for impending pitfalls and for ever renewable soul-spirit sprouting of a cosmic origin.