Why The Bode Well?

Why The Bode Well? Is it because that's what we long to do, bring something that bodes well for the world? Is it about the well from which boding surfaces?

Very curious fact! It was more than ten years ago, much earlier in my life with computers and the internet. I'd taken and tired of my first moniker--gorjohn--the name I customarily entered as my user ID when asked to register online. That one came from a nickname my older brother had for me when we were kids--Gorgeous George. I needed a new one. But what?

I must have been reading Karl Konig's Commentary on Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul. There's nothing else that can account for such a strange choice. I chose bodewell and have used it ever since. It's my moniker for Skype, my Yahoo groups ID, the login ID for my website and so on. Over the years, I would sometimes cringe, thinking it a little silly, and came to forget, in fact, from whence it had come. That is, until just recently.

My newlywed wife and collaborator, Cat, took up working with verses earlier in the spring. Seeing her interest, I dug up other translations for her. Then, one day, I remembered Konig's book and dug it out of a box. Once it was out and visible, I picked it up to remind of what I had read now these many years ago. It was then that I discovered a whole chapter on "The word 'Ahnung' (boding) in Rudolf Steiner's 'Calendar of the Soul.'" That's the actual title of the second chapter of his Commentary!

In that second chapter, Konig explores nine times the word 'ahnung' appears in the Calendar and follows the A.C. Harwood's translation where he renders 'ahnung' as 'boding' and even writes the following in the notes in the beginning:

"The rendering of two words calls for special comment: Ahnung with its verb ahnen, and dumpf. The former has no very good equivalent in English. In the Calendar it is almost a technical term for that profound surmising, divining, presaging power, or inkling, which everyone knows in some degree, but which is not much recognized in modern psychology. I have felt it important that one word should be used throughout for this power, a word capable of taking a verbal form, and I finally decided to employ the word boding, or sometimes foreboding, in its original neutral sense, which it has not entirely lost and which it may perhaps still recover. I believe that in its sound it suggests better than other words something deep, inward, powerful and mysterious."

Konig takes these indications along with Harwood's translation and develops them further, following the nine verses and their movement through the year. Because of their close accompanying of our relationship's history, we were drawn further into the mystery of this word, boding.

That's a scratch on the surface. To go more deeply, I'll want to build up some supporting thoughts in further posts.

John