Rudolf Steiner

by Colin Wilson

  Steiner himself admits, in The Threshold of the Spiritual World, that ‘it should on no account be denied that it is difficult to distinguish between illusions and realities in this sphere’ of the spirit. He adds: ‘Many people who believe they have manifestations from a spiritual world are certainly only occupied with their own memories, which they do not recognize as such.’ He seems quite confident that he himself never makes this mistake. But, as we have seen in the case of his visit to Tintagel, he was capable of mistaking ‘active imagination’ for a perception of reality.

  This is not to suggest that most of Steiner's ‘spiritual perceptions’ were a form of wishful thinking. Even a little book like The Threshold of the Spiritual World has a tone of sober precision, of scientific exactitude, that gives the reader an immediate sense of being in the hands of a man who knows what he is talking about. But when we turn from this to a book like Cosmic Memory, it is quite clear that the best attitude to Steiner is not one of unquestioning acceptance. Steiner was capable of being misled by his own highly developed powers of active imagination, and it is up to the individual reader to decide for himself just where he will draw the line. And since Steiner himself advises us never to accept what he says on trust, such an attitude can only increase those powers of scientific discernment and penetration that he regards as the foundation of ‘spiritual vision’.

  * * *

  *Twentieth Century Mystics and Sages, p. 265.

  †See Blueprint for Immortality: The Electric Patterns of Life by Harold Burr (1972) and my Mysteries, p. 388.

  *See my Psychic Detectives, Chapter 2.

  *J. H. Brennan, Astral Doorways (Aquarian Press, 1971).

  Seven

  The Building of the Temple

  IN July 1902, Steiner travelled to London with Marie von Sivers to attend a congress of the Theosophical Society. He wrote: ‘At this Congress…it was already taken for granted that a German Section of the Society should be established, with me as the General Secretary.’ So far there had only been a Theosophical ‘lodge’ in Berlin. Marie von Sivers had been working in Bologna, helping a Russian Theosophist to establish an Italian lodge of the Society. So both must have been regarded as figures of some importance. Steiner was to be not only the head of the German branch, but also of the movement in Switzerland and Austria-Hungary. His working-class friend Rudolph found him much changed when he returned to Berlin. He had shaved off his moustache and wore a bowler hat. He seemed to place a distance between himself and his students, and Rudolph says ‘The intimacy we experienced with him before was never recovered.’

  It was on 8 October 1902 that Rudolph attended a lecture by Steiner at the Giordano Bruno Bund, and it confirmed his worst fears. Instead of looking at his audience, Steiner stared out over their heads. His subject was ‘Monism and Theosophy’, and he began with an attack on Spiritualism. Then he went on to insist that any serious philosophy of life must be based on the scientific method. The trouble with modern science was that it was too narrow, and this resulted in materialism. But the real task of philosophy was to rise above materialism, to transform itself into theosophy by introducing the idea of God. He went on to speak approvingly of Thomas Aquinas as an example of a scientific ‘monist’, a man who based his life's work on reason, yet who recognized that God stands above reason.

  Long before the lecture ended, it was obvious that Steiner and his audience were at loggerheads. When he finished, no one clapped and no one proposed a vote of thanks; the meeting broke up in silence. Rudolph broke with Steiner after this lecture.

  Ten days later, Annie Besant was present when Steiner was appointed General Secretary of the German section of the Society. Ten days later still, he began a series of lectures to the new German Theosophical Society with a talk entitled ‘Reflections on Karma’.

  Steiner's own account of his life—in the Autobiography—ends in 1907; but the years from 1900 to 1907 occupy less than twenty-five pages, and are little more than a hotchpotch; when he wrote them, Steiner was already suffering from the abdominal illness that was to kill him. But the story was taken up by Steiner's secretary Guenther Wachsmuth in his monumental Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner, covering the period from 1900 to Steiner's death. Anyone who opens this book expecting a Boswellian account of Steiner will be disappointed. It seems to consist very largely of sentences like: ‘After a brief lecture tour in South Germany, he went to Switzerland, and there, on September 19 in Basel, a new Group was inaugurated…’; ‘In May 1907 he gave two public lectures in Munich on The Bible and Wisdom, followed by a cycle of fourteen lectures on The Theosophy of the Rosicrucians…’. In fact, Steiner's life between 1900 and 1925 is basically a record of his travels and his lectures. In twenty-five years he delivered over six thousand lectures—an average of one lecture for every single weekday. There were periods when this lecuring activity seemed to rise to a frenzy, as during the period of two and a half weeks in 1924 when he delivered seventy lectures.

  By 1904, life was already becoming hectic. He had launched a magazine called Lucifer, and his correspondence was demanding. Wachsmuth records that a ‘small group of persons’ came together to try to smooth his path by their unselfish co-operation. They carried his outgoing mail down to the post office in laundry baskets.

  The year 1904 also saw publication of the first of Steiner's major ‘occult’ works, Theosophy—An Introduction to the Supersensible Knowledge of the World and the Destination of Man. In the opening chapter he explains that man is a threefold being, consisting of body, soul, and spirit—not a twofold being, consisting of body and soul, as Christianity has always taught. Body is wholly material; spirit is wholly ‘immaterial’. Soul is the bridge between them, the part of man whose business is to acquire and digest experience for the spirit—it might be regarded as a kind of spiritual stomach. Man acquires a different soul with every incarnation. Steiner's final arrangement of the components of a human being is as follows: (1) Physical body, (2) Etheric body (or Life-body), (3) Astral body, (4) Ego, (5) Spirit self (which is the transmuted astral body), (6) Life spirit (the transmuted etheric body), and (7) Spirit man (the transmuted physical body). To link this with Madame Blavatsky's Theosophy, Steiner also gives these components their Hindu names.

  The book continues with a brief account of reincarnation and karma—the thread of ‘acquired destiny’ that runs from life to life as man is reborn. Then there is an account of the three worlds: physical, soul-world, and spirit-world, including a section on what happens to man after death. The ‘life field’ or etheric body dissolves in about three days, during which time the ego and astral body see the whole of their past life unfolding before them (just as people on the point of death are supposed to see their past lives in a few seconds). Then the ego and astral body enter purgatory (or ‘kamaloca’), for a period lasting about one third of the lifetime just completed, during which the life is relived and re-evaluated. It could be regarded as the equivalent of going through exam papers with the teacher after an exam is over. Since the astral body is still capable of feelings, it will suffer from all the unsatisfied desires and lusts that it still contains. Finally, purified by this suffering, the astral body can dissolve. In kamaloca, we also experience everything we have done during our lives seen from the point of view of those to whom we have done it. So the murderer would experience his crime from the point of view of the victim.

  After kamaloca, the ego rises to the spirit world, and can now choose its next life—and how to make restitution for any wrongs committed in the previous one. We choose the destiny we shall live through, the body we shall inhabit, as well as our parents and the people we shall know in the next life on earth; we often choose to associate once again with people we have known in previous lives, and whose destinies are interwoven with our own. It is, says Steiner, pointless to bemoan one's lot, because we have chosen it ourselves before being born.

  Why, in that case, does everyone not choose to be handsome, rich, and successful? Because the spirit's aim is
its own evolution, and good fortune and success could have the opposite effect. Spiritual progress can only be made on earth, not in the spirit world.

  Theosophy concludes with a chapter on ‘The Path of Knowledge’, attempting to describe how a man can begin to acquire supersensible knowledge. Mathematics, he says, forms an excellent preparation for the Path, for it teaches logic, detachment, and concentration upon non-physical realities. In other words, the first requirement for the ‘seeker’ is the scientific attitude, the certainty that the mind can create order out of chaos. Man is not the helpless plaything of external forces, no matter how powerful and bewildering these forces may be. The first step is to recognize that he is capable of detachment, of using his mind as a compass to navigate his way through the confusion. Once he has done this, he has already taken the first step towards ‘spiritual perception’. He will never again surrender totally to a sense of meaninglessness or defeat, for he knows that his real being is rooted in the eternal world.

  Of all Steiner's books, Theosophy is probably the best through which to approach Steiner's ideas. It is short and well written (which is more than can be said for its successor, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, which is dry and abstract). It states his basic views about the spirit and life after death clearly and straightforwardly. But even if we choose to reject these—or to suspend judgement on them—the book has an atmosphere of serenity and detachment that produces on the reader the same effect as the Bhagavad Gita, or the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, or Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy. It allows the open-minded reader to take the measure of Steiner's mind; and no matter what doubts we may feel about his ‘esoteric’ doctrines, that measure is impressive. No book shows more clearly that, no matter what his faults may have been, Steiner was no charlatan.

  Yet for anyone with a wider interest in the ‘paranormal’, the book does raise some puzzling questions. Steiner's attitude to spiritualism seems to be one of complete dismissal. On the day after the notorious ‘Monism’ lecture he told a disciple that ‘the spiritualists are the worst materialists of all’. In the light of his own philosophy, it is easy to understand why he said this: there is a certain literal-mindedness about the spiritualists that was bound to strike Steiner as simplistic. Most of them seem to feel that the ‘riddle of existence’ is solved by the assumption that we simply go on living in the ‘next world’. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the phenomenon of ‘mediumship’ really exists, and that there is strong evidence that mediums have been in touch with the dead. How could Steiner take up such an apparently negative attitude?

  The answer can be found in a lecture called ‘The History of Spiritism’ delivered in Berlin on 30 May 1904. Here, he explains that there was a time in the past when man found it far more easy to contact the dead. ‘The questions which the Spiritist wishes to answer today were during ancient times the concern of the so-called Mysteries.’

  It was clearly understood that in each human being, spiritual forces slumber which in the average man are not developed. But spiritual forces slumber in human nature which can be awakened and developed by prolonged exercises, through stages of evolution that are described by the adherents of the Mysteries as very difficult. When a man had developed such forces in himself and had become able to make research into truth, the opinion was then held that such a researcher was related to the ordinary man just as one who can see is related to a man born blind. That is what those in the holy Mysteries aimed at.

  According to Steiner, there were in the Middle Ages certain secret societies which led their members ‘to the development of higher intuitive forces along the same lines that had been followed by the ancient Mysteries’. Then, with the rise of materialism, this direct, intuitive ‘knowledge of higher worlds’ slowly faded away.

  And at this point, along came Spiritualism, with its mediums going into trances, its speaking trumpets flying around the room, its ‘spirits’ made of ectoplasm, and all the rest of the paraphernalia. The trouble with Spiritualism, according to Steiner, is that it encourages man to remain blind, instead of trying to achieve that direct, intuitive insight into the spirit world.

  Oddly enough, Steiner thoroughly approved of Allan Kardec, the Frenchman who, in the mid-1850s, compiled an important body of ‘spirit teachings’ from automatic writing—The Spirits’ Book. Kardec, like Steiner, accepted the reality of reincarnation. The rest of the French spiritualist movement, like the English spiritualists, flatly rejected it.

  During these early years as a Theosophist, Steiner's main concern seems to have been to emphasize the continuity of the great religious tradition, from the mystery centres of primitive man to the creation of Anthroposophy. This had been one of the major themes of Madame Blavatsky; but Steiner took it further—a task for which he was well qualified through his knowledge of history and philosophy. Reading Wachsmuth's Life, it becomes very clear that Steiner believed that he could, single-handed, create a great religious movement comparable to Christianity or Islam. The time seemed propitious; there was a widespread hunger for ‘spiritual values’, and he had made many powerful allies: in 1904, for example, he stayed in Lugano as a guest of the industrialist Guenther Wagner, and began his ‘conquest’ of Switzerland. A student named Ludwig Kleeberg started a Theosophical group at the University of Munich, with the blessing of the Rector; in the following year, the movement spread to the University of Marburg. With his lectures, Steiner made an immediate impact that has led one German commentator* to compare him to Hitler. Kleeberg said of him:

  He began to lecture. His gaze, first turned outward, seemed now and then to be turned inward. He spoke out of an inner vision. The sentences were formed while he spoke. There was power in his words. In his words dwelt the power to awaken to life the slumbering unison of hearts. The hearts sensed something of the power of which his words were formed, and felt a strengthening of that tie which…connected them with the reality of a larger, broader and richer world.

  This undoubtedly explains Steiner's enormous influence: his ability to convey the feeling of a ‘broader and richer world’. Another disciple, the writer Albert Steffen, described how he travelled to the ancient town of Augsburg to hear Steiner lecture: ‘as I walked through Augsburg's old streets, it seemed to me as if everybody harboured this festival feeling, as if it were poured into everyday life…A fragrant breeze arose, filling me with the bliss of knowledge as I inhaled the sky's purple.’ And as he came out of one of Steiner's lectures: ‘It seemed to me that I felt spheres of consciousness which…we usually do not see, or at least, do not heed…’. Steiner filled his disciples with a sense of poetry, a feeling that the world was about to be ‘shattered, and rebuilt nearer to the heart's desire’. So in a sense, it is not inappropriate to compare him to Hitler who, in the mid-1930s, filled his audiences with the feeling that the world was about to be transformed by a kind of Wagnerian idealism, and raised to a new mythological level of reality. Steiner's movement lacked the sinister undertones of Nazism, but its appeal was otherwise similar in many ways. This helps to explain the increasingly bitter opposition he experienced as the years went by; it was based upon the feeling that anybody who can acquire such an enormous following by preaching a fundamentally irrational doctrine must be a charlatan and a trickster.

  But during the early years, things went deceptively smoothly. Steiner travelled and lectured, and took every opportunity to visit historic sites and ancient monuments, always receiving strong ‘spiritual impressions’. In 1903 he was in London again for another Theosophical congress, and launched his magazine Lucifer. In 1904 he was at the Theosophical congress in Amsterdam, and lectured throughout Germany. In 1905 he lectured extensively on Richard Wagner, an artist for whom he felt profound sympathy, since Wagner had laboured to create his own ‘Mystery centre’ in Bayreuth, and had subsequently crowned his career with a celebration of the Christian mystery in Parsifal. In 1906, Steiner enjoyed a remarkable personal triumph at the Theosophical congress in Paris, whe
re he set up a kind of rival congress in the suburb of Passy, filling the house with distinguished Russians—like the mystical novelist Merejkovsky—and creating an atmosphere of enthusiasm and dedication. He finally met Edouard Schuré, author of The Great Initiates, whose drama The Children of Lucifer had been translated by Marie von Sivers; Schuré stated in print that at last he had met a genuine Initiate. He said of Steiner: ‘The first impression was one of plastic power. When he spoke of the events and phenomena of the supersensible world, he spoke as one who was at home there…He did not describe; he beheld objects and scenes and made them visible, so that cosmic phenomena seemed to us like actual objects of the physical plane. When one listened to him, it was impossible to doubt his spiritual vision, which was as keen as physical sight…’.

  In 1907, Steiner lectured in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Switzerland, and was host to the Theosophical congress in Munich. It was his opportunity to show what he could do. The great concert hall was elaborately decorated in a way that would ‘correspond in form and colour with the mood prevailing in the oral programme’. He encouraged the designers to give ‘free expression to artistic feeling’—an approach which may be said to be the essence of Steiner's theory of art, drama, and education. He also broke with Theosophical tradition by presenting a Mystery drama. It was Schuré's Sacred Drama of Eleusis, an attempt to reconstruct the ancient Greek mystery drama. This is, in fact, a powerful piece of work that can bear comparison with Sophocles or Euripides: the story of how Persephone was dragged down to the underworld by Pluto—with the connivance of Zeus—and how she was rescued by Prince Triptolemos, son of the king of Eleusis. But the essence of the drama is the part played by the god Dionysus, Persephone's brother. Dionysus had been born when Zeus embraced Demeter, the earth goddess, in the form of a flaming astral serpent. But when the beautiful child was contemplating his own reflection in a mirror, the Titans threw themselves on him and tore him to pieces. Zeus destroyed them, and mankind was born from the vapours of their burning bodies, mingled with the vapours of the dismembered Dionysus. Demeter then seduced the lord of the gods against his will and conceived Persephone.