KASSEL (NNA) – Four hundred years ago Landgrave Moritz in Kassel published a couple of small books: the manifestos of the Fraternity of Rosicrucians. They triggered violent controversy across Europe and its followers were persecuted as heretics.

A small R.C. in the corner of a document, the fingers represented in an unusual pose by the artist in a painting – these were the hidden signs with which the members of the Fraternity identified themselves to each other. For the greatest secrecy was…

PUERTO DEL CARMEN (NNA) – Test drilling by the Spanish oil corporation Repsol off the coast of the Canaries, which provoked massive protests among the islands’ inhabitants, has been discontinued.

Neither the volume nor the quality of the hydrocarbons found were sufficiently high to “consider future extraction”, Repsol said in a press release. The well had been sealed and the drillship Rowan Renaissance would return to Angola to continue exploration there, the company said.

Reprieve

The…

STUTTGART (NNA) – Stefan Leber, one of the most important pioneers of the German Waldorf school movement in recent times died yesterday at the age of 78. In a statement, the German Waldorf Schools Association (BdFWS) in Stuttgart paid tribute to Leber as someone who had “shaped the Waldorf school movement like no other”.

Leber, born in Stuttgart in 1937, was a pupil at the Uhlandshöhe Free Waldorf School. He left school at sixteen to take up an apprenticeship as a process engraver. The simple…

The Rose Chamber by Caroline Brown is a moving account of a journey into spiritual realms through meditation, as Christian von Arnim found when he read the book for NNA.

LONDON (NNA) – Spirituality is a curious and diffuse thing. Browse the bookshelves in any high street bookshop and there will be a section with plenty of popular books giving advice on self-development, meditation, mindfulness or whatever happens to be the latest buzzword.

At the other end of the spectrum there are the…

“Seeking harmony of form is, for me, allegorical for seeking inner creative harmony and development,” says Tobias Kaye, inventor of the Sounding Bowl, a new kind of musical instrument which has all kinds of different uses from meditation to therapy. Now demand means that his business, Sounding Bowls, is expanding and looking for apprentices. Alexa Smith from Sounding Bowls explains the background.

BUCKFASTLEIGH (NNA) – A neo-natal intensive care resuscitation unit in France (“reanimation”): …

KARLSRUHE (NNA) – The planned deployment of an emergency education team from the Friends of Waldorf Education to Turkey to help Syrian and Iraqi refugees has been delayed.

The international Waldorf organisation told NNA on Monday that the delay was due to “details connected with the entry formalities”. The Friends of Waldorf Education hope, however, that these remaining questions can be resolved quickly and that the deployment can still take place.

The team was to due have left for to Batman…

KARLSRUHE (NNA) – An emergency education team from the international Waldorf organisation Friends of Waldorf Education is heading for Turkey on Sunday for a short-term deployment with refugees from Syria and Iraq. Over 3,500 Yazidi and Kurdish refugees have sought shelter also in the south-eastern Anatolian town of Batman near the border with Iraqi Kurdistan und Syria.

The Friends say that the team will leave for the region on 18 January in response to a request for help from the city. The UN…

“Waldorf teacher rescues long-established German company”: when he took over the camera manufacturer Leica, Dr. Andreas Kaufmann generated headlines above all on the business pages of the press. But who is the person behind this fairy tale? NNA correspondent Cornelie Unger-Leistner went to Salzburg to investigate.

As soon as you enter the boardroom of the project development company ACM in Salzburg, where Dr. Andreas Kaufmann, the supervisory board chairman of Leica, has his office, things are…

FISCHERMÜHLE, Germany (NNA) – An alliance for the protection of bees has to raise 190,000 euros (£150,280, USD 236,000) in the next few weeks in order to continue the legal battle with the agro-chemical industry in the European Court of Justice (EJC).

“Bees urgently need your support!” the German BeeDefender Alliance writes in an appeal for donations. The Alliances comprises a group of beekeeping and ecological farming organisations including Mellifera e.V. – Centre for Organic Beekeeping, on…

A few days after the re-opening of the renovated Goetheanum stage in Dornach on 25 October, the Czech Moravian Theatre Olomouc gave a guest performance of Viktor Ullmann‘s three-act opera Der Sturz des Antichrist (The Fall of the Antichrist), based on Albert Steffen’s Dramatic Sketch. The musical director was Miloslav Oswald and the director Jan Antonin Pitínsky. NNA correspondent Wolfgang G. Voegele was there.

DORNACH (NNA) – The performance was preceded by an introductory lecture by the…