by Colin Wilson
it will not be easy to form a true conception of the tasks and the mission of King Arthur and his Round Table…But this becomes possible when one stands on the actual site of the castle and gazes with the eye of the spirit over the stretch of sea…There, in a comparatively short space of time, one can perceive a wonderful interplay between the light and the air, but also between the elemental spirits living in light and air. One can see spirit-beings streaming to the earth in the rays of the Sun, one can see them mirrored in the glittering raindrops, one can see that which comes under the sway of earthly gravity appearing in the air as the denser spirit-beings of the air. Again, when the rain ceases, and the rays of the Sun stream through the clear air, one perceives the elemental spirits intermingling in quite a different way. There one witnesses how the sun works in earthly substance—and seeing it all from a place such as this, one is filled with a kind of pagan ‘piety’—not Christian but pagan piety, which is something altogether different. Pagan piety is a surrender of heart and feeling to the manifold spiritual beings working in the processes of nature.
One can see that Steiner was greatly moved as he stood among the ruins where Arnold Bax had earlier written his famous tone poem Tintagel. He goes on to explain that to ‘take hold of the spirit-forces working there’ at Tintagel would have been beyond the power of one man; a group of men was necessary, one of whom felt himself to be the representative of the Sun (which, in Steiner, is always associated with Christ).
It was here that King Arthur and his Twelve Knights drew into themselves from the Sun the strength wherewith to set forth on their mighty expeditions through Europe in order to battle with the wild, demonic powers of old, still dominating large masses of the population, and drive them out of men. Under the guidance of Arthur these men were battling for outer civilization.
He continues at some length, explaining that ‘the whole configuration of this castle at Tintagel indicates that the Twelve under the direction of King Arthur were essentially a Michael-community…’.
In fact, archaeological evidence has revealed that in the time of King Arthur, the only building on the present site of Tintagel Castle was a Celtic monastery. The castle was built six hundred years later, around AD 1140, probably by Reginald, Earl of Cornwall, a bastard son of King Henry the First (who was, in turn, the son of William the Conqueror).
‘King’ Arthur was, in fact, a Roman general named Artorius, protégé of a commander called Ambrosius. When the Romans left England, about AD 410, Saxon mercenaries began to push back the original inhabitants—the Celts—towards the west and north. Arthur (probably born about AD 470) was the commander who defeated the Saxons again and again, and finally turned the tide in the battle of Badon, about AD 515. Unfortunately, the Celts, who had united magnificently against the Saxon invader, began to squabble amongst themselves, and Arthur spent the rest of his life trying to avoid being stabbed in the back by his own allies and relatives. He was mortally wounded in the battle of Camlann, around 540, fighting against his own nephew, and his body was almost certainly buried in Glastonbury Abbey, where it was discovered in May 1154 by monks digging a grave.
There can be very little doubt that Arthur never left England. His exploits as a conqueror of Norway and Gaul were invented by a Welsh ecclesiastic called Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of Britain, which dates from about 1135. According to Geoffrey, Arthur was marching on Rome when he was recalled to England by the rebellion of his nephew Mordred. In Geoffrey's account, King Arthur was born in Tintagel castle after the magician Merlin had metamorphosed King Uther Pendragon, so that he resembled the husband of a queen called Ygerne, with whom Uther was in love; Uther spent the night with her and she conceived Arthur. Merlin was invented by Geoffrey of Monmouth, although he may have been based on a northern bard called Myrddin. When Geoffrey was writing his History in the 1130s, there was no castle at Tintagel, although there were the ruins of a Celtic monastery. But a castle was built by the time the second edition of the book appeared in 1145 and it seems probable that Geoffrey saw it. (The first edition has vanished, so there is no way of knowing whether Tintagel Castle was mentioned in it as Arthur's birthplace.)
All this leaves no possible doubt that Steiner's ‘spiritual perception’ of King Arthur and his twelve Knights of the Round Table was pure imagination. (Geoffrey makes no mention of the Round Table; this was added by the Norman poet Wace in a long poem in 1155.) Steiner repeats his claim to have ‘seen’ the truth about King Arthur in another lecture in Karmic Relationships (Vol. 4, No. 4):
Even today, if one is receptive to these things, one receives a very real impression which tells one what it was that the Knights of the Round Table of King Arthur did in their gigantic castle…Looking with occult vision at what takes place there to this day, we receive a magnificent impression. We see them standing there, these Knights of the Round Table, watching the play of powers of light and air, water and earth, the elemental spirits…It was the task of the Order of King Arthur, founded in that region by the instructions of Merlin, to cultivate and civilize Europe at a time when all Europe in its spiritual life stood under the influence of the strangest elemental beings…There were, so to speak, later ‘campaigns of Alexander’ undertaken by the Knights of the Round Table into Europe, even as the real campaigns of Alexander had gone from Macedonia into Asia.
The reference to Alexander the Great is explained in an earlier lecture, in which Steiner speaks of ‘that genuine spiritual life which had been cultivated as between Aristotle and Alexander’. According to Steiner, the motive of Alexander in ‘conquering the world’ was to spread the treasures of wisdom far and wide. Although it is true that Alexander imbibed Greek culture from his teacher Aristotle, it is difficult for anyone who has studied his life to accept that he was interested in spreading the treasures of wisdom far and wide. He was an alcoholic who killed his best friend in a drunken rage, and his motives seem to have been typical of the ‘world conqueror’—enjoyment of war for its own sake. Again, one suspects that Steiner was inventing another myth that was pleasing to his imagination.
In the lecture already cited, Steiner pokes mild fun at Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck had described him as ‘one of the most erudite and also one of the most confusing among contemporary occultists’. This, says Steiner, is like saying that a man is both black and white at the same time. The comment is unfair; in fact, it is nonsensical. Maeterlinck is right: Steiner is both erudite and confusing, and there is no contradiction. Steiner shows the same weakness in argument when he derides the comment that the introductions to his books reveal a well-balanced mind, but that later pages make it seem that he has suddenly gone mad.
Very well, then…I write a book. Maeterlinck reads the introduction and I seem to him to have an ‘extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind’. Then he reads on, and I turn into someone who makes him say: I don't know whether Rudolf Steiner has suddenly gone mad, or whether he is a hoaxer or a seer. Then it happens again. I write a second book; when he reads the introduction Maeterlinck again accepts me as having an ‘extremely well-balanced, logical and comprehensive mind’ [Steiner obviously enjoyed repeating this phrase]. Then he reads further contents and again does not know whether I am a lunatic or a hoaxer or a seer. And so it goes on. But suppose everybody were to say: when I read your books you seem at the beginning, to be very clever, balanced and logical, but then you suddenly go mad! People who are logical when they begin to write and then as they write on suddenly become crazy, must indeed be extraordinary creatures! In the next book they switch round, are logical at the beginning and later on again lunatics!
But this kind of mockery leaves Maeterlinck's main point untouched. And the King Arthur episode suggests that he was basically correct. Steiner's ‘occult vision’ could be misled by his imagination. And once we know this, it becomes very difficult to accept Steiner's repeated assertions that his readings from the ‘Akashic records’ are ‘a matter of conscientious research, no less exact in its
methods than any researches in physics or chemistry…’ (Vol. 4, p. 30). He tells us, for example, about how a certain Egyptian Initiate, whose business was embalming mummies, gradually lost interest in his work, and allowed a servant to do it for him. In a later existence, the Initiate was reborn as Julia, the nymphomaniac daughter of Augustus, who married Tiberius, while the servant became the Roman historian Livy. Later still, the servant was reborn as the medieval minstrel poet, Walter von der Vogelweide. The Initiate was reborn as a Tyrolese landowner who was Walter's patron. This landowner rediscovered the legendary castle of the Dwarf King Laurin, hollowed out of the rocks, which ‘made a profound impression upon him’. Finally, he was reborn as August Strindberg, whose misogyny was a reflection of his unsatisfactory career as a Roman nymphomaniac, while the servant became Strindberg's friend Dr Ludwig Schleich. (It often happens, Steiner says, that people associated together in one existence meet again in later ones—for their karmas are interlinked.) Steiner met Schleich, and was able to trace back his previous lives by what Maeterlinck calls a kind of ‘transcendental psychometry’.
Karmic Relationships is full of astonishing revelations of this sort. We learn that in an earlier existence, Karl Marx was a warlike Frenchman who often went off plundering his neighbours. One day he came back and found that his own house and lands had been seized by another noble; he was forced to become this noble's vassal. In due course, the two were reborn as Marx and Engels; Marx's bitterness at having his lands seized would seem to explain how he came to write Das Kapital…
Reflecting upon Eduard von Hartmann's afflicted knee—which compelled him to spend most of his life on a couch—Steiner tells how he was ‘guided to one of his earlier incarnations’ in which he was a knight in the Crusades. One day he met a man ‘concerning whom he felt instinctively that he had had something to do with him in a still earlier life’. Moved by some instinctive distaste, Hartmann proceeded to persecute his former acquaintance in the midday sun. This injustice literally rebounded on Hartmann's head, for he suffered sunstroke. And because of some psychic law that connects the head and the knee, the sunstroke reappears in his later existence as a diseased knee…
In the same lecture, Steiner retells the story of his encounter with Nietzsche, and says he felt that Nietzsche's astral body and his ego were trying to escape, but his physical body and etheric body were too strong and healthy to allow this to happen. Steiner's spiritual vision then led him to Nietzsche's previous incarnation, as a Franciscan monk, who spent his days inflicting self-punishment, kneeling in front of the altar until his knees were a mass of bruises. This pain had the effect of knitting him closely with his physical body, so in his next incarnation, as Nietzsche, he had no desire to be in the body at all…
Steiner was obviously unaware of what now seems reasonably certain: that Nietzsche was suffering from the tertiary stage of syphilis. It is true that there are still some vestiges of doubt about this; but there can be no doubt that Nietzsche's illness was basically physical in origin, and not—as Steiner believed—simply the result of his detestation of the age he was born into. Again, one is inclined to entertain some mild doubts about Steiner's ‘spiritual vision’.
The answer to this central problem about Steiner can be found in his own writings about the ‘spiritual world’. In 1912 and 1913 he produced two little books—now usually published together—called A Road to Self-Knowledge and The Threshold of the Spiritual World. They contain an extremely useful and lucid summary of his ideas on man's ‘four bodies’, on ‘supersensible worlds’, on ‘cosmic beings’, and so on. Discussing how ‘spiritual events’ and beings come to manifest themselves, he compares it to the act of remembering something. ‘Now let us imagine an image rising up in the soul in the same way as a picture of memory, yet expressing not something previously experienced, but something unfamiliar…If we do this, we have formed an idea of the way in which the spiritual world first makes its appearance in the soul when the latter is sufficiently prepared for it.’ And he explains: ‘If the soul wishes to acquire the ability to enter knowingly into the supersensible world, it must first of all strengthen its powers by unfolding from within an activity which is fundamentally one of imagining.’
To sceptics, this sounds like an admission that Steiner's ‘visions’ were pure imagination. But anyone with the slightest acquaintance with the occult tradition will read quite a different meaning into it. We have already noted Aldous Huxley's comment that man has an immense inner world that could be compared to the earthly globe. Occultists call this the ‘astral world’. We can, according to the magical tradition, learn to ‘travel’ in this world just as in the physical world. What it requires basically is a highly developed power of visualization. This involves training oneself to summon up mental pictures that are as clear as real objects—for example, one of the simplest exercises is imagining a wooden cube, and trying to visualize it so clearly that you can turn it around, look at it from every angle, feel the texture of the wood, even smell it. Eventually it should even be possible to visualize with the eyes open, projecting the image into the real world. One authority on the subject suggests that it should take about a month of practice, for a quarter of an hour each day.*
Once this has been achieved, the next stage is to make a series of five cards containing ‘tattwa symbols’—symbols for earth, air, fire, water, and ether; the symbols are coloured respectively yellow, blue, red, silver, and black. A symbol should be chosen, and then stared at until it produces an ‘after image’; this after image will be in its complementary colour. At this point, the symbol should be visualized in its complementary colour, with the eyes closed. It should then be regarded as a doorway, and the next step is to try to pass—imaginatively—through this doorway. This is the first step of ‘astral travel.’ Depending on what symbol has been chosen, the ‘landscape’ on the other side of the doorway should be quite distinctive. And, according to practised ‘astral voyagers’, it can be explored like any other landscape.
Most of us will, admittedly, find it very difficult to envisage any such result, for our powers of visualization are feeble. There is, nevertheless, nothing ‘unscientific’ about the notion. The psychologist Jung called it ‘active imagination’, and had no doubt that it was a faculty that could be developed by most people—although he warned about the danger of developing these powers without proper supervision. In his autobiography, Jung describes how he came to discover his own power of active imagination. After the break with Freud in 1912, Jung went through a mental crisis, and was for a time afraid of losing his sanity. Life became a continual struggle to fight off panic and foreboding. One day, seated at his desk, he suddenly decided to try the experiment of ‘letting go’ and surrendering completely to the chaotic forces of his unconscious mind. ‘Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged into dark depths.’ Then he had a feeling of landing on a soft, sticky mass, and found himself in deep twilight. In a wholly real ‘waking dream’ he entered an underground cave and saw the body of a blond youth floating down a stream, with a red sun rising in the background.
Jung had discovered that he could ‘dream’ while awake, and he began to make regular voyages into these mental realms. On one of these ‘journeys’ he met an old man and a blind girl who seemed to be real people. Subsequently, holding conversations with one of these dream figures, he was convinced that ‘it was he who spoke, not I’. It was this dream figure—whom he called Philemon—who taught him ‘the objectivity of the psychic world’—a phrase of which Steiner would certainly have approved.
Like Ramakrishna after his attempt at suicide, Jung had induced in himself a permanent ability to enter these mental states, to break down inner barriers between the conscious and the unconscious.
Some people, like the mystic William Blake, seem to be born with the ability to enter this mental—or astral—world of visions; as a child, Blake was beaten for saying that he had seen a tree full of angels.
But he undoubtedly had seen a tree full of angels. Blake also laid enormous stress on the idea of imagination, and emphasized that it is the gateway to inner worlds. Emanuel Swedenborg, whose temperament was altogether closer to Steiner's (he was trained as a scientist and engineer), had to pass through a severe mental crisis in middle life before he suddenly achieved his ability to see ‘visions’.
Now we know that Steiner passed through a long period of mental crisis after he left Weimar—although he says so little about it in his autobiography that it is difficult to grasp exactly what happened. He says that his experience of Christianity ‘underwent a severe test’, and speaks of ‘severe inner struggles during the time of testing’: ‘These inner struggles took place behind the scenes of everyday experience.’ They resulted eventually in his ‘revelation’, when he stood ‘in the spiritual presence of the Mystery of Golgotha in a most profound and solemn festival of knowledge’.
It is surely significant that this vision occurred just before the beginning of the new century, and of the new epoch in Steiner's life. Before this, he had been vaguely hostile to Christianity, feeling, like Nietzsche, that it was an excuse for indulging in daydreams of salvation. After the ‘vision’, Christ became the centre of Steiner's life. The ‘vision’ was Steiner's equivalent of Ramakrishna's experience of the Divine Mother; it is clear from his work that from then on the thought of Christ could produce a state of ecstasy, an immense welling-up of inner conviction. It was at this point that Steiner's philosophy became a ‘Christology’, with its central emphasis on Christ's descent into history to ensure man's ultimate salvation. This deep, unwavering conviction was the source of the enormous charisma that Steiner developed during this period of his life, and explains why his lectures made so many converts.