Afterlife

by Colin Wilson

  But Steiner goes a step beyond this. He insists that when we are in this ‘inward’ state, we also become aware of the world of the supernatural — both in the sense of spiritual and in the sense of paranormal. This seems to have been Steiner’s own experience. He claims that after the vision of his father’s cousin in the station waiting room, he became aware of Spirits of Nature — presumably he means the same kind of ‘elementals’ that Rosalind Heywood claims to have encountered on Dartmoor — and of the spirits of the dead. (We may also recall Rosalind Heywood’s comment, describing her telepathic encounter with her dead friend Vivian: ‘I quickly became aware that I could not hold the absorbed state which contact with “Vivian” demanded …’ (my italics), suggesting that contact with the ‘dead’ demands a certain inner-absorption.)

  In his Autobiography, Steiner claims two contacts with dead men, neither of whom he knew. These were not ‘mediumistic’ experiences, but involved some kind of inner communion. In Vienna in his early twenties, Steiner was introduced to a cultured, middle-class family. He says: ‘One could sense the presence in this family of someone unknown to us. It was the father. We [Steiner and other friends] never met him, yet one felt his presence.’ The father was an unusual man who avoided social contact and lived like a hermit. From things his family said about him, and from the man’s books, Steiner gradually came to feel that he knew him. Finally, the man died, and Steiner was asked to deliver his funeral address. He spoke of the father with such apparently intimate knowledge that the family told him that it sounded as if he knew him well.

  It sounds as though Steiner means that he learned to ‘know’ the father through hints dropped by the family. But later in the Autobiography, it becomes quite clear that he means far more than this. Ten years later, he had moved to Weimar, to work in the Goethe archive, editing Goethe’s scientific writings. He was introduced to a widow named Anna Eunicke, who was later to become his wife. Living in her house as a lodger, he once again became intensely aware of the personality of her dead husband. And in the Autobiography he states: ‘The powers of spiritual sight which I then possessed enabled me to enter into a close relationship with these two souls after their earthly death.’ What Steiner claims, in effect, is that he was able to ‘follow’ the progress of both dead men in the ‘spirit world’.

  And now it should begin to be clear why Steiner had so little patience with Spiritualism, and why he declared on one occasion: ‘The Spiritualists are the greatest materialists of all.’ A medium going into a trance, or using a pencil to trace out the words of a ‘spirit’, knows nothing of the real nature of the dead, of their inner reality. Rosalind Heywood’s description of her encounter with her friend Vivian Usborne after his death comes altogether closer to it. She says that she ‘ran slap into “Vivian” himself, most joyfully and most vividly alive’. And ‘Vivian’ ‘conveyed in some fashion so intimate that the best word seems to be communion’ what he had to tell her. Mrs Willett also spoke about ‘sensing’ Myers and Gurney in the same direct fashion. This is what Steiner means by contact with the dead, and he feels that Spiritualism has substituted a far more superficial and ‘materialistic’ contact, without the inwardness.

  According to Steiner, men in the remote past had a direct sense of contact with the dead. There is, in fact, one interesting piece of archaeological evidence for this claim. Modern human beings belong to a breed known as Cro-Magnon man, who appeared on earth about fifty thousand years ago, and who is believed to have exterminated his predecessor, Neanderthal man. Neanderthal man was small, squat and ape-like, and his method of communication was probably confined to grunts. Yet his graves contain mysterious spherical stones, which are probably images of the sun, and other ritual objects that suggest that, like the ancient Egyptians, he possessed some kind of belief in life after death. It is hard to believe that creatures who were hardly superior to the ape should have evolved the idea of an afterlife. But if Steiner — like the modern psychologist Stan Gooch — is correct in believing that Neanderthal man was far more ‘psychic’ than modern man, then his belief in a life after death was not a matter of philosophy so much as of direct experience.

  And so, says Steiner:

  if we look back with spiritual vision even but a few centuries to earlier times, we come upon something which must greatly surprise anyone ignorant of these things. We find that the intercourse between the living and the dead is becoming increasingly difficult, and that a comparatively short time ago there was a much more active intercourse between them.*

  According to Steiner, the dead need intercourse with the living to nourish their being. In former times there was a direct link between the living and the dead, so that the living could follow the progress of dead relatives in the ‘afterlife’. This clairvoyant faculty was gradually lost, but even then, there was a kind of semi-conscious feeling of the presence of the dead. Now, he says, this has virtually disappeared. But insofar as men learn to gain ‘access to inner worlds’ through ‘spiritual science’, they will regain the ability to communicate with the dead.

  What happens to man after death is described by Steiner in one of his most important early works, Theosophy (although it is necessary to add immediately that even as early as 1904, Steiner’s concept of Theosophy had evolved a long way beyond Madame Blavatsky’s). Like all ‘occultists’, Steiner accepts that man consists of four ‘bodies’ — physical body, etheric body (or aura), astral body and ego. After death, the astral body and ego leave behind the physical body. The etheric body takes about three days to dissolve. During this time, the ‘soul’ (astral body plus ego) sees the whole of its past life unfolding in review. Then it enters a realm called ‘kamaloca’, which corresponds roughly to the purgatory of Christian doctrine. The past life is relived and examined. Since the astral body is still capable of feeling, it will suffer from its unsatisfied desires and lusts. When purified by suffering, it can finally dissolve. In kamaloca, the astral body also experiences all the sufferings it has inflicted upon others from its own point of view.

  After this, the purified ego rises to the ‘spirit world’, in which it can choose its own next life. It will choose the form in which it intends to be born, and the circumstances. (Steiner emphasises that no one should bemoan his lot, because he has chosen it himself.) These are carefully chosen to afford opportunities for evolution (which explains why we do not all choose to be fabulously successful). And, in due course, the soul will return to earth to live another life. One of Steiner’s most fascinating books is an eight-volume work called Karmic Relationships, consisting of lectures delivered not long before his death, in which he claims to have used his power of ‘spirit vision’ to trace the past incarnations of many famous men. Even for those who regard it as pure fantasy, it offers an interesting vision of Steiner’s sense of the way reincarnation operates.

  One eminent member of the Society for Psychical Research, Whately Carington,* produced in 1920 a brilliantly suggestive work called A Theory of The Mechanism of Survival in which he offers the following criticism of Theosophy:

  In Theosophical literature … we are confronted with a scheme of things built up of such terms as ‘Astral plane’, ‘Etheric Double’, ‘Causal Body’, ‘Karma’ and so forth. With all due deference to my Theosophical friends I submit that this is not scientific explanation and cannot be so unless its exponents are prepared to tell us what is the relation between the astral plane and the physical world, between the etheric double and the body as known to physiologists.

  It is a valid point, but it applies less to Steiner than to Madame Blavatsky. Moreover, Steiner’s explanations have much in common with the theory Carington puts forward in his book. Carington begins from the concept of the fourth dimension, as discussed in the work of mathematicians such as Riemann and Lobatchevsky, and goes on to argue that much of the evidence for ‘survival’ suggests that the dead exist in a world that has one more dimension than ours has. (And this receives support from the ‘near-death experience’ of Sir Au
ckland Geddes, described in Chapter Two, in which Geddes said that he was ‘now free in a time dimension of space, where in “now” was in some way equivalent to “here” in ordinary three dimensional space.’) In a lecture delivered in 1918 under the title ‘The Dead Are With Us’, Steiner explains that:

  in the spiritual sense, what is ‘past’ has not really vanished, but is still there. In physical life men have this conception in regard to space only. If you stand in front of a tree, then go away and look back … the tree has not disappeared … In the spiritual world the same is true in regard to time. If you experience something at one moment, it has passed away the next as far as physical consciousness is concerned; spiritually conceived, it has not passed away. You can look back on it just as you can look back at the tree. Richard Wagner showed that he possessed knowledge of this with the remarkable words: ‘Time here has become space.’

  In modern physics, time is regarded as the fourth dimension; what Steiner seems to be saying is that the ‘spirit world’ has, in effect, yet another dimension which means that time is, in some sense, ‘static’. (A modern investigator, T. C. Lethbridge, came to much the same conclusion on the basis of some curious experiments in dowsing, using a pendulum.*)

  While many people will feel inclined to dismiss Steiner’s account of life after death as completely unverifiable, it cannot be denied that there is an impressive consistency about his views, and that this makes a strong appeal to the intelligence. He writes:

  It must … be emphasised that this [spirit] world is woven out of the material of which human thought consists. But thought, as it lives in man, is only a shadow picture, a phantom of its true being. As the shadow of an object on the wall is related to the real object which throws this shadow, so is the thought that springs up in man related to the being in spiritland which corresponds to this thought.

  This notion that the world of the mind is the spirit world is somehow far more convincing — certainly more thought-provoking — than accounts of life after death that make the spirit world sound like a cross between fairyland and a holiday camp.

  According to Steiner (in the lecture ‘The Dead Are With Us’):

  We encounter the Dead at the moment of going to sleep, and again at the moment of waking …

  These moments of waking and going to sleep are of the utmost significance for intercourse with the so-called Dead — and with other spiritual beings of the higher worlds.

  The moment of going to sleep is especially favourable for us to turn to the Dead. Suppose we want to ask the Dead something. We can carry it in our soul, holding it until the moment of going to sleep, for that is the time to bring our questions to the Dead … On the other hand, the moment of waking is the most favourable for the Dead to communicate to us.

  For, says Steiner, there is no one who does not bring with him ‘countless tidings of the dead’ on waking up. But there is, he explains, one rather odd problem, When we speak to the dead, the relationship is somehow reversed, and when we put a question to the dead, the question comes from him: ‘He inspires our soul with what we ask him.’ ‘And when he answers us, this comes out of our own soul.’ ‘In order to establish intercourse with those who have died, we must adapt ourselves to hear from them what we ourselves say, and to receive from our own soul what they answer.’

  It is interesting that in his book on Swedenborg, Dr Wilson van Dusen — whom we encountered in the opening chapter — suggests that Swedenborg’s visions of the ‘spirit world’ were obtained in what he calls a ‘controlled hypnogogic state’ — the hypnogogic state being that curious borderland between sleeping and waking. And Thomson Jay Hudson, in The Law of Psychic Phenomena, describes how he attempted to use the miraculous powers of the ‘subjective mind’ to cure a relative who had become a hopeless invalid through rheumatism. His method was to concentrate on healing his relative — who lived in another city — just as he was on the point of sleep. He began the treatment in the middle of May 1890. A few months later, a friend who knew about the proposed treatment met his relative, and found him so much improved that he was working again. The improvement had started in mid-May. According to Hudson, the subjective mind works best on the point of sleep because it is then free of its usual domination by the ‘objective mind’. We would say, of course, that on the point of sleep the right cerebral hemisphere is freed from its usual domination by the left-brain self.

  According to Steiner: ‘We should not seek for the Dead through externalities, but become conscious that they are always present.’ And ‘among the practical tasks of Anthroposophy will be that of gradually building the bridge between the living and the dead by means of spiritual science’. He is also convinced that ‘a vast transformation will take place in human life when the ideas of reincarnation and karma are no longer theories held by a few people’.

  We have seen that, in fact, the argument about reincarnation was to split the Spiritualist movement at a very early stage, and that Kardec’s Spiritism — which taught reincarnation — was virtually driven underground by the Spiritualist teaching that originated in America. Nowadays, the doctrines of reincarnation are not widely accepted by Spiritualists, although some accept it as a possibility. When I was writing The Occult in the early 1970s, I asked a Spiritualist friend, Professor Wilson Knight, if, next time he attended a seance, he could ask the ‘spirits’ for a straightforward yes or no on this issue. In due course, he told me that the answer was neither yes nor no. Reincarnation, according to Professor Knight’s ‘communicators’, happens occasionally, but should not be regarded as a general rule …

  ‘Myers’, in his communications with Geraldine Cummins (published as The Road to Immortality), offers an unusual interpretation of the idea of reincarnation. He speaks of the concept of the ‘group soul’, ‘a number of souls all bound together by one spirit, depending for their nourishment on that spirit’. He himself, he says, belonged to such a group soul while on earth. And if we sometimes appear to be paying for the sins of a previous existence, this is because ‘a soul belonging to the group of which I am a part lived that previous life which built up for me the framework of my earthly life, lived it before I passed through the gates of birth’.

  The real Frederick Myers — the author of Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death — was fascinated by one of the most striking cases of reincarnation ever collected by the Society for Psychical Research, the case of Lurancy Vennum, and he cites it at length in his chapter on ‘Disintegrations of Personality’.

  On 11 July 1877, a thirteen-year-old girl, Mary Lurancy Vennum, living in Watseka, Illinois, had a fit and was unconscious for five hours. The next day it happened again, but then it became clear she was in a trance, for she declared she could see heaven and the angels, as well as a brother and sister who had died. For the next six months, these trances recurred, and Lurancy Vennum was apparently possessed by a number of disagreeable personalities, including an old woman called Katrina Hogan. Relatives advised her parents to send her to an insane asylum. But neighbours called Roff, whose deceased daughter Mary had also been subject to fits of ‘insanity’, persuaded the Vennums to see a doctor, W. W. Stevens, of Janesville, Wisconsin.

  When Stevens first saw Mary Lurancy Vennum, on 1 February 1878, the girl was ‘possessed’ by ‘Katrina Hogan’, who sat hunched up in a chair staring sullenly into space. When Stevens tried to move closer, she told him sharply to keep his distance. Then she seemed to soften towards him, and talked about herself and her parents. (She called her father ‘Old Black Dick’.) Soon the personality changed; the newcomer described himself as a young man called Willie Canning. But he talked disconnectedly, and then had a fit. Stevens tried hypnosis, and it worked; Lurancy Vennum reappeared, and explained that she had been possessed by evil spirits. She was still in a state of trance, and told them that she was surrounded by spirits, one of whom was called Mary Roff.

  Mrs Roff, who was in the room, said: ‘That is my daughter.’ And she advised Lurancy to accept ‘Mary
’ as her ‘control’. After some discussion with the ‘spirits’, Lurancy announced that she would allow Mary Roff to ‘possess’ her. Soon after, she woke up.

  The next morning, Mary Lurancy Vennum’s father called at the office of Asa Roff, and told him that Lurancy Vennum was now claiming to be Mary Roff, and that ‘Mary’ was asking to go home.

  Mary’s case history resembled, in many ways, that of Lurancy Vennum — and even more that of the Seeress of Prevorst, Friederike Hauffe. Mary had also started to suffer from fits, and in one of these she cut her arm with a knife — deliberately — and fainted. For the next five days, she was delirious; yet she could read through a blindfold. After another period of fits, she had died in July 1865, twelve years before Mary Lurancy Vennum’s ‘possession’. Her clairvoyant powers had been attested by many prominent citizens in Watseka.

  Before Lurancy Vennum — or rather ‘Mary’ — could be taken to the Roffs’ home, Mrs Roff and her daughter Minerva came to call at the Vennum’s. ‘Mary’ was looking out of the window as they came along the street, and said: ‘Why, there comes ma and my sister Nervie!’ When they came in, she flung her arms round their necks and burst into tears of joy.

  The Vennums were understandably reluctant to let their daughter go, but ‘Mary’ became so homesick they finally agreed. On 11 February 1878, she was taken to the Roffs’ home. On the way there, they passed the house in which the Roffs had lived at the time Mary was alive. ‘Mary’ insisted this was her home, and had to be persuaded that her family no longer lived there. When they arrived at the new home, ‘Mary’ said: ‘Why, there’s our old piano, and the same old piano cover.’ She greeted the crowd of relatives who were waiting there with plain signs of recognition. A Mrs Wagner, who (under the name of Mary Lord) had been Mary Roff’s Sunday school teacher, was greeted with the words ‘Oh Mary Lord, you’ve changed the least of anyone.’ She told them that ‘the angels’ would allow her to stay until some time in May — three months ahead.