by Colin Wilson
The same is certainly true for Rudolf Steiner. The essence of his thought lies in the recognition that human freedom plays an active part in perception (although we usually fail to notice this, except in rare ‘orgasmic’ experiences). Once this is recognized, says Steiner, it is possible to develop this ‘faculty of freedom’ by deliberate effort. The result, he says, is ‘knowledge of higher worlds’. He insists that this knowledge involves glimpses of mental horizons that are at present inconceivable to us. The knowledge he details in Cosmic Memory brings most of us to what Renée Haynes has called ‘the boggle threshold’ fairly quickly. But deciding to reject it—or simply to regard it as ‘unproven’—does not necessarily entail rejecting more ‘testable’ aspects of Steiner's philosophy. One of Steiner's leading commentators, Stewart Easton, remarks about Steiner's ‘Christology’: ‘I had the overwhelming impression that even if much that Steiner had to say on other subjects might be mistaken or erroneous, he simply could not have been mistaken on the cosmic nature of Christ…’. What is interesting here is the admission that Steiner might often have been mistaken or erroneous. Steiner himself insists repeatedly that he does not wish to be taken on faith; everything he says should be tested. Presumably, therefore, he himself would recommend us to reject—or regard as unproven—anything that pushes us over the ‘boggle threshold’.
How is it conceivable that Steiner could be mistaken or in error about various subjects? He himself provided the answer in recognizing the affinity between ‘inner visions’ and dreams. To ‘relax into the right brain’ is, to some extent, to enter a world of strange impressions and glimpses: that is, of intuitions. One of the greatest of Steiner's fellow visionaries, Emanuel Swedenborg, was undoubtedly a genuine clairvoyant; yet in one of his books he has detailed descriptions of the inhabitants of the planets that we now know to be absurd. William Denton's book The Soul of Things* has many extraordinary ‘psychometric’ descriptions of Rome and Pompeii that have been proved to be accurate; but he also devotes a volume to descriptions of the planets that are as nonsensical as Swedenborg's. In this curious world of ‘inner vision’, there are no hard and fast rules for distinguishing between reality and fantasy. So where Steiner is concerned, we may accept whatever strikes us as demonstrably true, and reject the rest with a good conscience.
Before speaking of Steiner's cosmology, let us glance briefly at that of Madame Blavatsky, so we can observe their points of similarity. Madame Blavatsky's history of the human race is set out in The Secret Doctrine, which is largely a commentary on an ancient work that she calls The Book of Dzyan. (It is written in ‘Senzar’, the ancient language of the Initiates.) According to the Book of Dzyan, there was orginally a great nothingness, the night of Brahm, which ended when the vibrations of eternity announced the cosmic dawn. These vibrations split into seven rays, who became intelligent beings, Dhyan Chohans, who proceeded to create the universe from electricity. (Since the electron was not discovered until after her death, this was a fairly good guess.) The process of creation begins with diffused cosmic matter, then a fiery whirlwind, which leads to the creation of a vast nebula, or cloud of cosmic gas.
The earth, which condenses out of this gas, is destined to pass through seven periods, or Rounds; we are now in the fourth. During the first three Rounds, the earth was nonmaterial; it hardened into matter only in the fourth Round.
The human race originated on earth hundreds of millions of years ago. It will also go through seven cycles (or root races): we are the fifth of these. The first race was purely spiritual in form, and inhabited an ‘Imperishable Sacred Land’ at some unstated location. The second race were Hyperboreans, who lived at a North Pole which was then a tropical region. These were also ‘bodiless’. Procreation slowly developed towards the end of the second race, and continued into the third. It was in the midst of this third race period, about eighteen million years ago, that certain spiritual beings felt a longing to experience earthly existence, and descended to the physical plane; this was the ‘Fall’. They possessed only three senses, hearing, touch, and sight. This race lived in a vast continent called Lemuria, in the Pacific Ocean. (Australia is a fragment of Lemuria; so is Easter Island.) Lemuria was destroyed by fire, and vanished into the ocean.
The fourth race were the Atlanteans, who lived on the fabulous continent in the midst of the Atlantic Ocean. In some respects, they were more highly developed than we are, and understood how to use electricity; they also invented powered flight. The early Atlanteans were giants, and were responsible for building the pyramids and structures like Stonehenge. But they misused their power and became black magicians, and their continent was finally destroyed in a watery cataclysm.
Our own root race is the fifth, and it began in northern Asia. Like all the other root races, it is divided into seven sub-races, and we are the fifth of these. The sixth is already beginning to form. Where matter is concerned, our race is the most ‘solid’ so far. This means that we are more ‘entrapped’ than any previous race. At the same time, we also have more possibilities of creative action than any previous race, just as a sculptor can work better in clay than in soft mud, and better in marble than in sandstone. In due course, we shall be replaced by a more etherialized sixth root race, and then by an almost purely spiritualized seventh…
The obvious objection to Madame Blavatsky's chronology is that it does not agree with that of modern archaeology and geology. In The Secret Doctrine she loses no opportunity of pointing out that science is still ignorant of many things. ‘As regards the duration of the geological periods alone, the learned men of the Royal Society are all hopelessly at sea…’. But since the invention of carbon dating, we are in an altogether better position to state that the Great Pyramid was built a mere 2,500 years ago, not 75,000 years ago, and that the same goes for Stonehenge. The same techniques enable us to be reasonably certain about the history of mankind, and to state with a fair degree of certainty that a hundred thousand years ago (the date of some of the late Atlantean catastrophes) modern man (Cro-magnon) had not yet appeared upon the scene of history. It is true that there are still large areas of doubt—an American professor of history, Charles Hapgood, believes that ‘maps of the ancient sea kings’ suggest that there was a highly advanced civilization covering much of the globe in eight thousand BC, two thousand years before the first cities are supposed to have been built. But even this lends no support to Madame Blavatsky's vast epochs of ancient history.
From his earliest association with the Theosophical Society, Steiner insisted that he would never be willing to toe the party line; everything he taught would be drawn from his own direct knowledge and personal experience. The Theosophists accepted this, and in 1902 Steiner became secretary general of the German section with the approval of Annie Besant, who had succeeded Madame Blavatsky.
None of the books Steiner published in the first three years of his association with Theosophy are in any way contradictory of the views of Madame Blavatsky. Mystics of the Dawn of the Modern Age (the lectures on Eckhart, Boehme, etc), From Buddha to Christ, Christianity as Mystical Fact, and Theosophy were all perfectly acceptable to English as well as German Theosophists—in fact, the book on mystics was an immediate success and when Steiner visited London in 1903 a leading Theosophist told him that ‘it contained the truth about Theosophy’.
In 1904, Steiner began to publish in the magazine he had started, Lucifer-Gnosis, chapters of a work called From the Akashic Records (translated as Cosmic Memory). And it is here, for the first time, that he attempts to go further than Madame Blavatsky, and contradicts her on many points. By comparing this with The Secret Doctrine we can see how far Steiner's cosmology diverged from that of Madame Blavatsky.
Steiner agrees with Madame Blavatsky that the earth had three previous ‘incarnations’, and he calls these (rather confusingly) Old Saturn, Old Sun, and Old Moon. Old Saturn was made of ‘chaotic, undifferentiated substance’, and was inhabited by creatures who were ‘delicate, tenuous and ethereal’,
and who would later become human beings. Higher beings than man—whom Steiner calls ‘hierarchies’—were in charge of this evolutionary process. It was through their interaction with the natural forces of Old Saturn that physical organs began to emerge. Man's physical body began to form in the Saturnian stage of evolution.
Then came a gap in time, when the ‘seed’ of man lay fallow, and the spiritual hierarchies built up their powers to further his evolution. The next earth—‘Old Sun’—came into being. There was a still further ‘hardening’ of matter, and man acquired his second body, the ‘etheric body’ (or what we have referred to as the ‘life field’). Man had reached the plant stage of evolution.
On the next earth—‘Old Moon’—man was endowed with the ‘astral body’—the part of us that leaves the physical body during sleep, and in so-called ‘out-of-the-body experiences’.
When man was finally reborn on our present earth, his body was still little more than a cloud of vapour. Here again, Steiner is fairly close to Madame Blavatsky. During its first two epochs, the human race remained ‘ethereal’. The third epoch was the age of the Lemurians. These creatures communicated by telepathy, and had an intuitive understanding of plant and mineral life. A Lemurian could increase the strength of his arms at will, and lift enormous loads by using his will power. His intuition also placed him in direct contact with divine wisdom. The Lemurian women began to develop powers of imagination, and because this led them to enjoy certain things and dislike others, the first ideas of good and evil arose. It was during this Lemurian epoch that the moon split off from the earth, in order to give man a better chance to evolve—the ‘moon forces’ were causing man to ‘condense’ too quickly. (Moon rock brought back to earth from the first moon landing seems to suggest that Steiner was mistaken about this: scientists now believe that the moon was never a part of our earth, but was probably ‘captured’ from space.)
As he continues to ‘harden’, man becomes subject to certain evil or hostile forces, known as the Luciferic hierarchies. This is a point that requires some explanation. According to Steiner, it was the Divine intention that man should have free will. So—for some unexplained reason—the ‘hierarchies’ were first of all given a chance to exercise free will, and thus to rebel against God. Two different types of spiritual being took advantage of their freedom to rebel against the divine will; these Steiner refers to as the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings. (These are called—for short—Lucifer and Ahriman.) Lucifer tempts man to pride, while Ahriman tries to push him to advance much faster than he should—for example, by scientific invention. Man is continually surrounded by these ‘bad angels’, who seize every opportunity to influence him.
Fear, illness, and death enter human history during the Lemurian period, due to the influence of the Luciferic beings. Man also develops a taste for rebellion through their influence. The result was an upsurge of egoism that led to a tremendous catastrophe, which put an end to Lemuria.
In the next epoch—Atlantis—man becomes more ‘solid’ still. These descendants of the Lemurians were unable to reason, but they possessed an abnormally powerful memory. They could control the life force in plants and use it as modern man uses coal. But Ahriman pushed them into merely scientific achievement, and even Initiates among them gradually became corrupt. Various sub-races hardened into egoism and power-seeking. Man became increasingly a slave of matter. Evil began to spread, and ‘since the forces of growth and generation, if torn from their original sphere and used independently, have a mysterious connection with certain forces working in air and water, there were thus unchained, through human action, mighty destructive natural forces which led to the gradual ruin of Atlantean territory…’. Atlantis vanished as recently as 10,000 years ago, according to Steiner.
Our own age, the fifth epoch, is the post-Atlantean era. We are the fifth sub-race of this epoch. The first sub-race was Hindu, and their era began in 7227 BC. But they regarded the material world as illusion—'maya’—and so merely turned their backs on it. The second sub-race, the Persians, began in 5067 BC and ended in 2907; they regarded life as a crude battle between the forces of good and evil—Ahriman and Ahura Mazda. Next came the Egypto-Chaldeans, who discovered astrology, and who came altogether closer to accepting matter. Their age ended in 747 BC, the date of the founding of Rome. The Romans went further than any human beings so far in accepting the material world as the only reality—they even worshipped their emperors as gods. At this point in his evolution, man came close to being overwhelmed and permanently defeated by evil forces. And it was at this point that the ‘hierarchy’ called Christ descended into the body of Jesus of Nazareth—in the last three years of his life—and turned the tide of battle. Christ had been around since the beginning, and had been active on behalf of evolving humanity. By the time our earth was created, Christ had become the highest of the sun spirits, and the chief opponent of Lucifer. He realized that, at some point, he would have to enter a human body to finally set limits to the powers of Lucifer and Ahriman. His purpose was to launch a new stage of evolution, in which man finally established a conscious ego, an ‘I’, which could make its own choices, and whose evolution would be purely in its own hands. Steiner called this ‘I’ the ‘intellectual soul’. The age of the intellectual soul came to an end in AD 1413, and was replaced by the age of the ‘consciousness soul’, in which we are still living. The consciousness soul has greater powers of objectivity than any previous soul; it can withdraw itself totally from the object of its studies. The age of the consciousness soul is also the age of the ‘loner’, the ‘outsider’; in the previous age, human beings were far more conscious of being members of a group than of being individuals. The characteristic ‘Mysteries’ of this new age were those of the Rosicrucians, and Steiner seems to associate these with that widespread obsession of the Middle Ages, alchemy. ‘Man prepared himself for his experiments as if for a sacred rite,’ he says in Mystery Knowledge and Mystery Centres. Yet this experimental spirit in itself gradually led to our ‘God estranged’ civilization. According to Steiner, the zeitgeist (‘spirit of the age’) is a real entity, a guiding spirit whose purpose is to guide evolution in a particular epoch. During the ‘Rosicrucian’ epoch, this spirit of the age was the Archangel Gabriel, whose business was to lead the human spirit into materialism, to foster a healthy spirit of scepticism and experimentalism. In 1879 (the year Steiner went to Vienna), Gabriel gave way to the Archangel Michael, whose evolutionary task (as summarized by Stewart Easton) is ‘to bring men together as individuals, so that they recognize their common humanity and Christ who lives within each human being’. Meanwhile, Steiner sees his own task as the inauguration of this new age: what has been lost through the descent into materialism can only be replaced by the new Mystery knowledge that he has given to mankind. Man must regain his perception of nature as ‘God's living garment’. So Steiner sees himself as an important port of the world historical process. And there can be little doubt that when, in 1902, he became general secretary of the Theosophical Society, he hoped that he might succeed where Madame Blavatsky had failed, and create a new religion, a great spiritual movement that would finally rescue man from the consequence of materialism. The fountainhead of this new religion would be a Mystery centre, at the heart of which there would be a sacred temple….
For the reader who is approaching Steiner for the first time, the last few pages must have raised many doubts. It is surely inconceivable—to put it bluntly—that he could have believed this preposterous rigmarole about Old Saturn and Lemuria and Atlantis?
It is reassuring to discover that Steiner was himself fully aware of these objections. He speaks of them in one of the lectures in Karmic Relationships (Vol. 6, No. 8), quoting the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck. In The Great Secret, Maeterlinck says of Steiner: ‘When he does not lose himself in visions—plausible, perhaps, but incapable of verification—of the prehistoric ages, and in the astral jargon concerning life on other planets, [he] is a clear and shrewd thinker
…’. And he goes on:
Steiner has applied his intuitive methods, which amount to a kind of transcendental psychometry, in order to reconstruct the history of the Atlanteans and to reveal to us what takes place on the sun, the moon and in other worlds. He describes the successive transformations of the entities which become men, and he does so with such assurance that we ask ourselves, having followed him with interest through the introductions which reveal an extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind, if he has suddenly gone mad or we are dealing with a hoaxer or with a genuine seer.
Maeterlinck's expression of the conundrum could hardly be improved. Steiner is a clear and shrewd thinker, and his insights are often profound. He is certainly no fake in the intellectual sense—no second-rate mind uttering pseudo-profundities. And it is quite plain that he has not gone mad. Is it conceivable that he is a kind of hoaxer—that is, that he has set out deliberately to create a religion for the twentieth century, and has recognized that such a religion needs a mythology, which he sets out to provide?
This explanation, which seems the most rational explanation of works like Cosmic Memory, becomes rather less convincing as one reads Steiner's later works, written (or delivered as lectures) long after he had broken with the Theosophical Society. Karmic Relationships, a series of lectures delivered in 1924, runs to over a thousand pages, and it is only necessary to read the first dozen to realize that he is perfectly sincere. Besides, no man would elaborate a lie or a hoax at such length.
Was he, then, a genuine seer? That he was a seer there can be no doubt whatever. But does this mean that his ‘visions’ were invariably true? Here, unfortunately, the answer has to be negative. On Sunday 16 August 1924, Steiner visited ‘King Arthur's Castle’ at Tintagel, in Cornwall. It deeply impressed him, and in a lecture the following Friday in Torquay, he spoke at some length about the ‘spiritual perceptions’ he had gained as he gazed down from the ruins across the sea. ‘From the accounts contained in historical documents’, he explained to his audience,