The Karma of Untruthfulness: v. 2 E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Although these lectures were given during 1916, they have much to teach us about the political spin, media distortions, propaganda and downright lies we encounter on a daily basis in public life. Rudolf Steiner's calm and methodological approach penetrates the smokescreen of accusations and counterclaims, of illusion and untruth, surrounding the Great War. Hiding behind this fog, and under the guise of outer events, he reveals the true spiritual struggle that is taking place. His words give a deeper understanding of the politics and world conflicts that confront us today through the filter of the media.In the midst of the turmoil of the First World War, Steiner speaks out courageously against the hatred and untruthfulness in the propaganda of the time. From his detailed research into the spiritual impulses of human evolution, he describes the dominant role secret brotherhoods played in the events culminating in the cataclysmic war, and warns that the retarding forces of nationalism must be overcome if Europe is to find its new destiny. He also emphasizes the urgent need for new social structures if further catastrophes are to be avoided.At a time when political events throughout the world are moving with breathless rapidity, the reader will find much in these lectures that will illuminate what lies behind the symptoms of our turbulent times.This new edition, reproduced in a larger format, is put in a modern context and introduced by Terry Boardman.

Leseprobe

THE KARMA OF UNTRUTHFULNESS

Volume 2

THE KARMA OF UNTRUTHFULNESS

Secret Societies, the Media, and Preparations for the Great War

Volume 2

Twelve lectures given in Dornach between 1 and 30 January 1917

RUDOLF STEINER

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

Translated by Johanna Collis

Rudolf Steiner Press Hillside House, The Square Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2016 Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2005 Previous edition Rudolf Steiner Press 1992

Originally published in German under the title Zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, Das Karma der Unwahrhaftigkeit, Zweiter Teil (volume 174 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. This authorized translation is published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

Translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 1992

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 85584 490 2

Cover design by Andrew Morgan, featuring detail from ‘The Kaiser's Dream’, The Truth, London 1890 Typeset in Great Britain

CONTENTS

Introduction by Terry Boardman, July 2005

Lecture Fourteen, 1 January 1917

Lecture Fifteen, 6 January 1917

Lecture Sixteen, 7 January 1917

Lecture Seventeen, 8 January 1917

Lecture Eighteen, 13 January 1917

Lecture Nineteen, 14 January 1917

Lecture Twenty, 15 January 1917

Lecture Twenty-one, 20 January 1917

Lecture Twenty-two, 21 January 1917

Lecture Twenty-three, 22 January 1917

Lecture Twenty-four, 28 January 1917

Lecture Twenty-five, 30 January 1917

Notes

LECTURE FOURTEEN, 1 January 1917

The karma of untruthfulness. The effect of poisons in man's higher components. People who lag behind evolution fill their being with a poisonous phantom of formative forces, the source of emptiness of soul, hypochondria, aggressive instincts. If spiritual life is possible, it must also be possible to go astray. Untruthfulness is the counter-image of Imagination. Evil comes about through the misuse of higher forces. Those who fail to accept the spirit develop poisons instead. Richard Grelling's J ‘accuse and Romain Rolland's John Christopher as examples of failure to find the spirit.

LECTURE FIFTEEN, 6 January 1917

Nationalism, imperialism, spiritual life. The mechanical world of material progress is non-national, like a body which is to receive non-national spiritual science as its soul. Nationalism arises because soul development lags behind material progress. Profusion of ideas in the age of German Idealism. The power of slogans which are divorced from reality. The abstract idea of ‘eternal peace’. Which countries could have embarked on disarmament? British imperialism. The puritanical and the imperialistic stream in England. The importance of absolute truthfulness.

LECTURE SIXTEEN, 7 January 1917

Tragedy and guilt among nations. How the folk soul works into individuals. An individual belongs to a nation as a result of karma. Nationality as something karmic is above logic, nationality as something belonging to the blood is below logic. ‘Justice and freedom’ are concepts which cannot be applied to nations. Rise and fall of nations. Hebbel's definition of what is tragic. Seeley, the historian of the British Empire. Prophetic writings. Treitschke, Cramb, Kuropatkin. Untruth in the guise of truth. The importance of actual facts.

LECTURE SEVENTEEN, 8 January 1917

Exhortation to members not to misrepresent these lectures. The Austro-Serbian conflict and the World War. Russian and British imperialism. Russia's attention drawn away from India and towards the Near East. The chain reaction: Britain in Egypt, France in Morocco, Italy in Tripoli, the Balkan War. The Grand Lodges as implements of occult impulses. The democratic trend in the world paralleled by an aristocratic trend in the Lodges. German Idealism transforms the mysteries of the Lodges into a purely human matter. The spiritual life of the Lodges originated in Central Europe: Fludd, pupil of Paracelsus; Saint-Martin, pupil of Jakob Böhme. Sir Oliver Lodge: materialistic view of spiritual matters. Fichte: Reden an die deutsche Nation. Polzer-Hoditz: Thoughts during Wartime.

LECTURE EIGHTEEN, 13 January 1917

Materialistic history; history revealed through following one's karma. Wilhelm von Humboldt and Heinrich von Treitschke. History revealed through symptoms. Need to cultivate a sense for truth. Treitschke's love for the truth. Humboldt's work on a concept of the state; his successors Edouard Laboulaye and John Stuart Mill. Treitschke's Freedom. Treitschke as a representative of the German people. Treitschke not an exponent of the principle of power, but a teacher for his people. The note from the Entente to President Wilson. The meaningless term ‘Czecho-Slovaks’. Kramar and Masaryk.

LECTURE NINETEEN, 14 January 1917

The subconscious soul impulses. On self-knowledge. The solar plexus as the point of contact for ego-activity. The ego as bearer of evil forces which are held in check by the abdominal nervous system. Liberation of the ego: madness. The nervous system of the spinal cord as the point of contact for the astral body. Liberation of the astral body: madness, volatility of ideas, manic conditions, depression, hypochondria. The brain as point of contact of the etheric body. The liberated etheric body has chiefly ahrimanic characteristics: envy, jealousy, avarice. Psychiatry will have to learn to distinguish between the abnormalities caused by the freeing of the different components. The earth works on man through the solid element, the angeloi through the fluid element, the archangeloi through the airy element, the folk spirits through the system of ganglia. The working of the folk spirits is removed from consciousness and therefore demonic. This is utilized by secret brotherhoods who pursue the egoistic aims of their groups.

LECTURE TWENTY, 15 January 1917

Recapitulation of previous lecture. The battles of the fifth post-Atlantean period as expressions of the conflict between materialism and spiritual life. The spiritual world-view of the sixth post-Atlantean period. Echoes of the third and fourth post-Atlantean periods in the peoples of Europe. Italy-Spain; France. The British element as representative of the fifth post-Atlantean period. Development of the commercial, industrial element. This strives to dominate the world. The contrast between western commercial thinking and eastern (Russian-Slav) spiritual inclinations. Central European impulses: Luther, Huss, Wyclif, Zwingli, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo-Lomonosov as bridges between East and West. Central Europe strives to find the spirit through the soul. The West seeks to prove the spirit through experiments. Bacon, Shakespeare, Jakob Böhme, Jakobus Baldus, King James I of England. ‘My kingdom is not of this world.’ Theocracy, monarchy, industrial elements to be replaced by the general human element which seeks no form of domination. ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.’ Attacks on Anthroposophy. The Central Powers’ call for peace.

LECTURE TWENTY-ONE, 20 January 1917

The destructive power of untruthfulness in the relationship between the living and the dead. When the living work on spiritual science this gives the dead the opportunity to work in the physical world. Secret brotherhoods bring about ahrimanic immortality by means of ceremonial magic which leads to an illegitimate relationship with the dead.

LECTURE TWENTY-TWO, 21 January 1917

Orientation of the human body according to the stars. The threefold structure of man — head, breast organs and abdominal organs — in relation to life after death. How the dead intervene in the world of the living. Materialism as a barrier to a healthy relationship between the earthly and the supersensible worlds.

LECTURE TWENTY-THREE, 22 January 1917

Consciousness in sleep and consciousness after death. Work of angeloi, archangeloi and retarded spiritual beings on the dead. Retarded archai as opponents of Christ. Occult impulses for egoistic group purposes. Concepts which could provide the foundations for peace. The spiritual significance of Central Europe.

LECTURE TWENTY-FOUR, 28 January 1917

Measure and number. The Platonic Cosmic Year. Goethe's studies on the breathing of the earth. The links between speech and the rhythm of breathing. Sleeping and waking and their importance for man's contact with the spiritual world. The constitution of folk souls; the Italian and Russian folk souls. The lack of concrete concepts. A brochure by Hungaricus.

LECTURE TWENTY-FIVE, 30 January 1917

History of the Anthroposophical Movement. Saint-Martin. Ancient wisdom and the etheric clairvoyance of the future. The flood of ‘occult’ literature compared with the wisdom given by spiritual science. Bridges to be built between the physical and spiritual world. German Idealism as the spiritual life of Central Europe: Novalis, Schlegel, Steffens, Schubert, Troxler, K. C. Planck. W. and J. Bolyai and the question of parallel lines. Honesty in forming concepts. The element of general humanity in Central Europe in contrast to the one-sided elements in the periphery. The necessity for concepts to be in accord with reality. Parting words at a time of utmost difficulty.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

No true anthroposophist can allow himself to be deafened to current events by all those methods used by the powerful to distract us from seeing ‘what they are really playing at’.

Rudolf Steiner, 8 January 1917 (lecture 17)

By December 1916 the slaughter of the conflict that was already being called the Great War had become truly monumental. Hundreds of thousands had been killed in the mobile campaigns of August and September 1914, but whereas Napoleon would have recognized the nature of the fighting in those months, even he would surely have recoiled in revulsion at the unending hells of Verdun and the Somme as something utterly inhuman. A threshold was crossed in 1916 into the new age of mechanized warfare, completely devoid (except perhaps in the air) of any notion of traditional military concepts of chivalry, honour and glory. The first tank attacks and air assaults on cities made their appearance, but the crossing into this new 20th century world was perhaps most aptly symbolized by the fact that all armies on the Western Front, now clothed only in dark and sombre colours, were issued with steel helmets in 1916 in response to the appalling numbers of head wounds sustained, mainly due to shrapnel from the overwhelming artillery fire. Such wounds were also symbolic, since in truth it could be said that the catastrophe of the war had broken out because European civilization was wounded in the head—in its ability to think in terms of reality, and a civilization thus wounded would inevitably produce a culture of untruthfulness that was ultimately bound to lead to catastrophe. Such is the message of these lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in January 1917 in Dornach, Switzerland, to members of the Anthroposophical Society.

The historical context: Christinas 1916–17

The Christmas period 1916–17 was the turning point of the First World War, the moment where Europeans were faced with the choice either to end the nightmare or to plunge ever deeper into it. We now know what they chose, but on 1 January 1917 the issue still hung on a thread. The Germans, feeling themselves to be in a slightly stronger military position than twelve months earlier, had offered peace negotiations on 12 December, and eight days later President Wilson of the USA offered to mediate between the belligerents. The Entente allies (Britain, France, Russia and Italy) reacted indignantly, fending off Wilson while condemning the German proposal as insincere, deceptive and vague. The new British Prime Minster Lloyd George, only two weeks into the job, replied to Woodrow Wilson by quoting Abraham Lincoln:

We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it will never end until that time.

He called for ‘complete restitution, full reparation, effectual guarantee’, and added that ‘without reparation, peace is impossible’. Rudolf Steiner clearly hoped against hope that, as he put it in his Christmas lecture of 21 December in Basel, the Christmas call for peace and goodwill would not be ‘shouted down’ (The Karma of Untruthfulness, Vol. 1, Rudolf Steiner Press, 2005). On 26 December he said,

We must not lose courage, so long as the worst has not yet happened. But the spark of hope is tiny. Much will depend on this tiny spark of hope over the next few days. [...] What happens now is crucial for the fortune or misfortune of Europe.

The Entente's initial response to Germany's peace proposal, on 30 December, made it clear that it was not interested in any peace negotiations but preferred to fight on to achieve a peace on its own terms. These terms were then spelled out in a letter to Wilson on 10 January 1917. They were completely unrealistic and called in effect for the break-up of Germany's ally Austria-Hungary and the cession of Alsace-Lorraine to France, neither of which points had even been issues in the crisis of 1914 that had sparked the war. On 12 January, the Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary, Count Ottokar Czernin, replied to Wilson, denouncing the Entente governments for seeking ‘the annihilation and spoliation of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy’ and blaming them for the continuation of the War. The Entente responded in similar fashion, though the governments of the Central Powers had simply refused to sign their own death warrants. In his post-war memoirs, Twenty-Five Years (Hodder & Stoughton, London 1928), Sir Edward Grey (later Viscount Grey of Falloden), whose decisions on 2–4 August 1914 in committing Britain to the conflict guaranteed that a short continental war would become a long world war, also castigated the Central Powers for spurning the chance of peace. On 22 January Wilson publicly set out the terms under which the USA would be prepared to mediate and called for peace ‘without victory’:

Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.

Ironically, this was to be exactly the kind of victorious peace his own government, together with the British, French and Italians, would force upon Germany at Versailles, two and half years later. By 10 January then, Germany and Austria-Hungary knew their enemies were determined to fight on to their destruction. The Germans responded with the desperate gamble of unrestricted submarine warfare in February. It failed and only served to provide the excuse that highly placed pro-British circles in the USA needed to edge Wilson into declaring war against Germany (6 April). Meanwhile, with the assassination in Russia of Rasputin on 30 December, in which a British secret service agent fired the coup de grace,* the last Russian support of the imperial family and significant Russian opponent of the war was removed. As Rasputin had predicted, the end of the monarchy came soon after his murder, and the revolutionary provisional government took over. Under strong pressure from the Entente, this government tried to continue the war against the Central Powers in 1917, but the Russian people, desperate for bread and peace, responded to the Bolsheviks who promised them both. The German High Command had facilitated Lenin's return to Russia; the British and US governments had done the same for Trotsky. By the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks were the government in Moscow, and the USA was the effective controller as well as creditor of the western allies. The world's power balance had shifted; it was the beginning of the end of the European era of domination, which had lasted for 300 years; leaders of anti-colonial movements all over the world looked on at Europe's insanity and weakness and took heart. The year 1916 was the last of the old world, 1917 the first year of ‘the new’. Such was the context in which Rudolf Steiner gave these lectures in neutral Switzerland, an island of peace surrounded by nations at war.

Lecture topics

The subjects he deals with in the lectures in this volume are:

Lecture

14—Poison in the social organism

15—Real ideas and the British Empire

16—Blood attachment and blame culture

17—The events of 1914 and what was behind them

18—Truthfulness in the practice of history

19—The conscious manipulation of the subconscious

20—The relation between the war and general themes of the modern epoch. Europe: centre vs. periphery—materialism and imperialism

21—Living with the dead; abusing the dead

22—Changes in the relation between the living and the dead and the effects of modern materialism

23—Right and wrong ways of relating to archangels (folk spirits)

24—Spiritual ignorance of rhythm, time and archangels and cultural-political chaos

25—The need for thinking rooted in reality not abstraction

The relevance of the lectures

Much has changed since Rudi Lissau wrote his introduction in August 1991 to the first English translation of these lectures. The Japanese economy still felt strong despite the stock market shock of 1989; China's economy had not yet taken off; the Treaty of Maastricht had not yet been signed; there was no NAFTA; Saddam Hussein was still in power, and the Soviet Union was still in existence—though in that very month of August Mikhail Gorbachev was temporarily ousted by an attempted coup d’état. Hardly anyone knew the name of Osama bin Laden, and not many were seriously worried about global warming. The World Wide Web had not yet been invented, which meant that the great majority were still largely dependent for their information on the mainstream media, and had to sift the truth from amongst its many prejudices. In short, in August 1991 we were still in the 20th century. The following decade proved to be a transition out of that century and culminated in the events of 11 September 2001, when the pundits unanimously declared the 21st century proper—’a new age’—had begun.

But the 20th century, as might be expected given its apocalyptic nature, died with no whimper. In that very year of 1991, the consequences of Sarajevo 1914 bit back—after 77 years. The 45-year-long division of Germany, which came to an end in 1990, the end of the Soviet Union and of the Cold War in December 1991, the first war against Saddam Hussein in the first two months of the year—all these events had their roots in what some have called the Thirty Years War of the 20th Century (1914–45)*. And then, as if to reinforce the fact, in 1991 the last act of the tragedy of the 20th century opened where it had begun—in the Balkans, and ultimately in the very same city, Sarajevo. This was a shattering symbol and symptom of the utter failure of 20th-century humanity to resolve the consequences of what has always been called ‘The Great War’, the epoch-making event that gave birth to the 20th century.

The Balkan War and the sufferings of Sarajevo in the ‘90s rubbed our noses in the fact that we had learned little since that 19-year-old, sickly Bosnian terrorist Gavrilo Princip† pulled the trigger and killed Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his Czech wife Sophie. In this light it is particularly painful to have to read these lectures that Rudolf Steiner gave in the critical month of January 1917—the very turning point of the war. For, following on from the lectures he had given the previous month on similar subjects, he sought, very directly and concretely, to open his listeners’ minds to how they could train themselves to see through the outer events of the day—especially as they were presented by the media—to the real motivations behind them, and how these symptoms and motivations were related to the greater and wider cycles and rhythms of the evolution of consciousness, especially since the 15th century. However, Sarajevo 1992–95 and Rwanda 1994 showed that despite what we ought to have learned from the further catastrophe of the Second World War and then the M.A.D. insanity of the Cold War,* Steiner's advice had not permeated general culture to any significant effect: nationalism, tribalism and ethnic egotism still held sway; some 800,000 were savagely and frenziedly murdered in ethnic killings in Rwanda in 1994 while the Bosnian conflict was at its height.† As I write this in the aftermath of the bombings in London in July 2005, I hear British politicians echoing George W. Bush, saying that ‘their barbaric violence and ideology’ represented ‘an attempt to destroy our values, our democracy, our way of life, our civilization’. ‘It is nothing to do with Islam; it is because they are evil men.’ One is put in mind of what Entente propaganda said about Germans and German ‘Kultur’ in 1914–18.

Things may have changed on the surface—the Cold War may be over and we may have the World Wide Web—but at the level where it really counts, they have not budged that much since 1914. The war, Rudolf Steiner insisted, erupted because mankind had not transformed the materialistic culture of the 19th century; the war was the karma of the poisonous untruthfulness of that century. Europeans had not understood how spiritual reality underlies all the phenomena of the world in which we live; moreover, they had turned their backs in fear and scorn against that understanding. Central Europe for instance, Steiner reiterated, had rejected its own cultural riches of 100 years before—the age of German Idealism— and instead had adapted itself to the culture of material power and commercial imperatives represented so strongly—and necessarily— by the English-speaking world. As a result of a widespread materialism that was almost wilfully ignorant of the nature of both life and death, a culture of untruthfulness and mendacity had pervaded public life, above all via the press and the world of publishing, what we today call ‘the media’. This mendacity—or propaganda (both overt and subtle)—was used as a tool by unscrupulous and manipulative elite forces to lead both unthinking politicians and an unthinking public into unleashing and maintaining a war that was not a war like other wars but a veritable revolution in society and culture. Behind this revolution were conscious forces that had the ultimate aim of extirpating spiritual life altogether and of creating a hypermaterialistic society in which the lie becomes the truth.

The role of the media here is key, because it is through the media that people get their information and form their ideas, and it is ideas, as Steiner never tires of repeating in innumerable ways, that determine human action. Reaching back to the very beginning of his public life in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894), he shows how vital it is that we need to combine the correct thought with the object, that is, to find the concept that truly corresponds to the percept, as distinct from illusory or sentimental abstractions of the kind put forward by President Woodrow Wilson. If our ideas about the world are full of untruth, empty phrases and dead abstractions, Steiner maintains, we cannot but create a deeply sick society, and catastrophes like the wars of the 20th century are bound to recur. Although it was not ‘cold’ for those in the Third World, where it was fought out by proxy, the Cold War of 1945–91 followed the ‘hot war’ of 1914–45, and now the Cold War has been soon followed by the ‘War on Terror’ which already in the week of 9/11 we were told by the powers-that-be would last ‘for decades’. Meanwhile, the media go on distracting us from awakening to the realities of world events by presenting an endless circus of celebrity, sport, sex and shopping. We are indeed still wrestling with the karma of the 19th century today as privatization and globalization, driven by huge economic interests, proceed apace in accordance with economic and political thinking that has not changed fundamentally since the days of Adam Smith and Edmund Burke 200 years ago. Americans wonder ‘Why do they hate us?’, oblivious to the consequences of their own government's foreign policy for the last 100 years, and westerners in general wonder ‘Why are we having to work ever harder?’ ‘Why are our lives becoming ever busier and more stressful?’ ‘Why do we not manufacture anything anymore?’ ‘Should we be afraid of “the East”?’

The purpose of the lectures

Similar questions were posed in 1914–16 by Steiner's anxious audiences in response to the crisis of the war: ‘What can we do? ‘How can we respond?’ Indeed, he says that this was the reason why he gave this whole series of lectures: to illuminate what was going on from the spiritual-scientific viewpoint and to answer the question: ‘What can we do?’

His answer was simple and direct: endeavour to understand! See through things! Thoughts are forces and have effects. It is not supposed to be easy for human beings to enter spiritual life. Crises are opportunities for change. Clear and proper understanding of what is going on is the only way—’Nothing else is of any use’. Steiner firmly rejected as anti-modern and harmful all forms of atavistic mediumism and spiritual practice that avoided the conscious mind. Wide-awake vigilance and discrimination in all things, the application of the true scientific approach, which is the fruit of the development of natural-scientific consciousness of the last four centuries but which need not be restricted only to quantitative analysis based on the five senses—this is what is required, whether in spiritual and meditative practices or in observation of world events. The term ‘consciousness-raising’ has been with us since the 1960s and that is what Steiner was referring to in 1917, but despite the 1960s, the growth of the Internet and the Web, consciousness has still not been raised enough to the point where sufficient numbers of people are able to see through the manipulative techniques of their would-be overlords.

To cite just a few of the practical indications Steiner gave to his listeners in this ‘applied media course’ to help them deal with misrepresentations of the truth and manipulation, firstly, he said that it is crucial to ask about those who make public statements not ‘What does this person mean?’ but ‘Who is paying him?’ In whose service is he? This does not mean that we become suspicious to the point of thinking that everyone is corrupt or that black magic is everywhere but that we must learn to recognize historical symptoms without passing judgement; just see phenomena in their proper light. Secondly, one must not be dazzled by the empty phrases so beloved of politicians in democratic societies, who are accustomed to stroking their listeners’ egos or collective personae; we need to be awake enough to discriminate when ideas are arising normally from a person's consciousness or abnormally—when something has in any sense been ‘planted’, whether as a result of personal threat, membership of some special interest group, ritual or suggestions. Thirdly, a judicious combination of open-minded imaginative thinking that can relate seemingly disparate elements—in the way a keen police investigator might—and a simultaneous insistence and reliance on solid facts are what we need to see through the distractions and fog of untruth that is spread to confuse the unwary.

The uses and abuses of dualism

Already in 1917 Steiner was telling his listeners that concepts applicable to individuals (such as freedom, justice etc.) could not be applied to nations. Sympathies and antipathies, particularly those related to ethnicity, must be separated from judgements if we are to act in a modern spiritual-scientific manner and avoid the perils of nationalism and chauvinism. We need to recognize how the practitioners of what Steiner calls ‘grey magic’ in the media and elsewhere work with the fact of dualism in life. For example, whatever takes place on the material plane needs two counter-posed elements. History, as Hegel recognized, moves in a dialectical fashion—a force will be resisted by a counterforce. Thus, Steiner shows how egotistical elite forces divert their enemies’ attention to other geographical areas where it is not wanted (e.g. Russia diverted from the Far East back to the Balkans after defeat by Britain's ally Japan in 1905) and one can even ally with the person or nation one considers to be one's real enemy if it serves one's short-term interest (e.g. Britain allied to Russia in 1914–17).

One of the keys for understanding the war, Steiner pointed out, was the way in which the new, economic impulse to World Empire stemming from Britain sought to create a bifurcated world, in which one half of the world would be the producers and the other half the consumers. ‘To create this contrast,’ says Steiner, ‘is a conception of universal proportions, against which everything else pales into insignificance.’* The bipolarity of the Cold War and the apparent split between western capitalism and eastern communism needs to be seen in this light. Admittedly, things may seem to have changed since his day in that he was pointing to the western plans, laid already in the 1880s and about to be realized in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, to create a socialist state in the East (beginning with Russia) that would ‘consume’ western produce, whereas today it is nominally Communist China (with one sixth of the world's population) that is producing so much and selling it to the West. The fact is, however, that the East—Russia, India, China and Japan—in the 20th century all became consumers of western ideas as well as producers of western products. First the Japanese and now the Chinese have become the economic slaves of the West, producing cheaply what the West wants in accordance with western economic thinking. (Steiner would have more to say on this theme in his lectures of 1918, published as The Challenge of the Times.*) Another aspect of dualism to be aware of is the ‘hen's beak principle’: avoid investigating only one stream; remember that there is always a complementary at work and notice how the complementaries interact. In doing this, a careful differentiation of streams is needed in order to avoid nebulous jumbles in one's understanding.

The living and the dead

A central theme in these lectures is the relation between life and death, the living and the dead. As life bears death within it, so living truth bears within it its counter-image—the lie and the half-truth. The very best evolutionary impulses in our age, Steiner warns, are those most likely to be turned into their opposite. Evil and falsehood are the counter-image of the normal impulse to spiritual development in the modern epoch. Among the justified impulses of the age, for example, is the urge to peace and to solve differences peaceably rather than resort to war, as was so often the case in earlier times. But it is possible to appear to be peaceable by making suggestions for completely unrealistic peace conferences, as, Steiner indicates, Sir Edward Grey did in July 1914. One can then later smear one's enemies by declaring them to have been the warmongers. It is possible to appeal to the subconscious will for brotherhood and mutual assistance, which are also justified features of the modern epoch, by setting up organizations like the League of Nations— which President Woodrow Wilson sought to do from 1917 onwards—and the United Nations, and by using the media to draw popular support towards such organizations. Today, among many on the left of the political spectrum, for instance, support for the UN is almost an article of religious faith and many have been persuaded that only world government by the UN or something similar will enable us to avoid the global challenges that threaten to overwhelm us. But Steiner's realism draws our attention away from such illusory and sentimental abstractions that appeal to our subconscious will to the good and urges us to seek the facts behind phenomena.* This was sometimes difficult to elucidate in Steiner's lifetime, as ordinary citizens did not have easy access to the requisite materials; today, it is a much easier task—if one has the insight and the will to do it.

Occult brotherhoods

One of the reasons why insufficient progress in consciousness-raising has been made is that those who would be overlords employ occult means to carry out their activities, and in these lectures Steiner goes into considerable detail as to how and why they do this. A key element here is the way in which ritual magic is used by occult brotherhoods to use the forces of the dead to strengthen their own power and to keep the dead bound to them. These are gruesome topics, which in the climate of the 1920s or even the 1950s would have been difficult to discuss but which since the 1960s, and the increasingly bizarre phenomena that have been coming to light since then, are no longer considered beyond the pale of intelligent discussion. In November 1917, at the time the Bolsheviks seized power—a development which can now be shown by exoteric historical research to have been guided and controlled by Anglo-American circles (Lenin's free passage through Germany notwithstanding)—Steiner gave a course of lectures on the subject of the secret brotherhoods which went into further detail about the way these groups worked. (See Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double, Rudolf Steiner Press, Sussex 2004).

In conclusion

Finally, it would be remiss in the introduction to this new edition of these crucially important lectures to avoid commenting on Rudi Lissau's original introduction of August 1991. Rudi Lissau was a most sincere and conscientious pupil of Rudolf Steiner; indeed, he loved and respected the individuality of Rudolf Steiner ardently. However, it has to be recognized that he allowed certain personal characteristics to enter his assessment of these lectures. He felt a great debt of gratitude to the people of Britain among whom he had lived since coming to Britain as a refugee from Austria in the 1930s, and he wished to cushion British anthroposophists against what he perceived to be Steiner's sometimes critical words about Britain and about Sir Edward Grey in particular—a man considered by most members of the upper and middle classes in his own time and in later decades as ‘a thoroughly decent chap’—the best sort of Englishman.* Lissau believed British readers might feel ‘baffled’ by what they read about the First World War here—obviously because it differed so much from the view of the conflict with which they were familiar. But today, with our greater knowledge of the obfuscations of the British and American Establishments with regard to such events as the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana in 1898, the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, the events of 11 September 2001, and the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and with the knowledge available to everyone able to access the Internet, we are no longer ‘baffled’. Lissau allowed his sympathy for the British to draw him into suggesting in his introduction that Rudolf Steiner may seem to have had ‘pro-German bias’, was ‘emotional’, ‘partisan’ and ‘exaggerating’, not always ‘calm and collected’ and that these lectures included ‘cant’ and ‘smears’. Rudolf Steiner, however, in these lectures was at pains to show that he was not speaking out of partisanship but only seeking the truth of the matter. Rudi Lissau wrote that Steiner was ‘a product of his age’ whose ‘prejudices [occasionally] become manifest’ and implies that he was ‘occasionally affected’ by the ‘nationalistic emotions’ of his listeners, but no real evidence is adduced to support these statements. He says that in the 25 lectures of the cycle (Vols. 1 and 2) ‘we find discrepancies and occasionally factual mistakes’, but does not cite any apart from the long quote from the Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Germany, Szogyeny, which he clearly feels is at variance with Steiner's view of German foreign policy pre-1914. Interestingly, this quote—which might seem to be inimical to any pro-German position—is the longest in his introduction. Unfortunately, however, Lissau does not put it in context, apart from saying that it predates by five years the Anglo-French rapprochement. This would put it at 1899—the time of the Boer War, when anti-British feeling and indignation at British imperial arrogance was indeed at its height in Germany—but also everywhere else in Europe!

As for disregard for facts, certainly Steiner is in error when in lecture 23 he says that ‘in the periphery [Britain, France, Russia] even language has stopped developing [emphasis—TMB], whereas in the German language of Central Europe there still exists, in the sound shifts, the possibility of growing beyond the sounds and ascending to the next stage of sound evolution’. While it may be true to say, as he describes at some length in lecture 6, Vol. 1, of this cycle, that the consonants of German have advanced while those of English have remained at an earlier stage, to ignore the fact that German has retained basic grammatical elements that English has long since put aside* is to be oblivious to a key aspect of language development in English, one that has simplified English greatly and made it more accessible to foreign learners worldwide. While some purists may even deplore these particular simplifications of English over the past 1000 years, no one can deny that they are a significant development of the language.

Unfortunately, when it comes to facts, Rudi Lissau himself commits something of a howler when, in the penultimate sentence of his introduction, he states that the Sarajevo assassin Gavrilo Princip ‘returned to Serbia and became a schoolmaster’ after the war. In fact, Princip died from tuberculosis of the bone in the Austrian prison of Theresienstadt in April 1918. It was one of the other conspirators, Vaso Cubrilovic (1897–1990), who was released from prison in 1918 and later became a schoolteacher, then a leading member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and, ultimately, a Serbian government minister under Tito. His lectures and writings against the Albanians in 1937, calling for ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia and Kosovo, are said to have had a major influence on Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic policies in the Yugoslavia of the late 1980s and early 1990s. From Cubrilovic to Milosevic— thus did the karma of Sarajevo 1914 come full circle.

Terry Boardman

July 2005

* BBC documentary, Timewatch, 19 September 2004.

* E.g. former British Prime Minister John Major, in Berlin 1995.

† His very name means Gabriel Prince, or Gabriel Principle. It was in the Age of Gabriel (1510–1879) that nationhood and nationalism became such powerful driving forces in history. In 1914 the new Age of Michael had hardly began; the ‘Gabriel Principle’ was at full tide.

* M.A.D. ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ was the official name given to the policy of mutual nuclear annihilation effectively practised by the USA and the USSR for 20 years from approximately 1960–80. The term was first used by US Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

† Eighty years on, both Sarajevo and Rwanda echo the events of 1914. Britain's entry into the war, over Belgium, transformed the continental conflict into a world war. The Belgians occupied Rwanda, then under German colonial administration, in May 1916, and their subsequent rival policies until independence in 1962 did much to exacerbate the ethnic tensions between Tutsis and Hutus that exploded in April 1994.

* Lecture 20.

* Six lectures, November to December 1918 (Anthroposophic Press, New York 1941).

* In this case, a study of the facts behind the establishment of such organizations as the UN reveals the extent to which the misguided idealism of many was abused and exploited by the egotism of the powerful few who sought to use these organizations to bolster and increase Anglo-American world domination in order to spread hypermaterialism more easily throughout the world. See lecture 20 “materialistic realm”.

* The present writer knows this to have been Rudi Lissau's feeling and wish because Rudi Lissau was honest enough to admit that this was the case in response to a question put to him by the writer at a meeting in early 1991, following articles written by Rudi Lissau in the journal Anthroposophy Today on the subject of secret societies.

* E.g. dropping of gender and declension of nouns and articles; simplification of personal pronoun address; simplification of past tense forms; maximal avoidance of inversion in sentences containing adverbial phrases.

LECTURE FOURTEEN

Dornach, 1 January 1917

What was said yesterday1 about so-called poisonous substances indicated strongly how all the impulses of life are graded in relation to one another. For instance, some substance is said to be poisonous, and yet the higher nature of the human being is intimately related to this poison; indeed, the higher nature of man cannot exist without the effects of poisons. We are touching here on a most important area of knowledge, one with many ramifications and without which it is impossible to understand a good many secrets of life and existence.

Looking at the human physical body, we have to admit that if it were not filled with those higher components of existence, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego, it could not be the physical body as we know it. The moment man steps through the portal of death, leaving behind his physical body — that is, the moment the higher components withdraw from the physical body — it begins to obey laws other than those which governed it while those components were present there. The physical body disintegrates; after death it obeys the physical and chemical forces and laws of the earth.

The physical body of man as we know it cannot be constructed in accordance with earthly laws, for it is these very laws which destroy it. The body can only be what it is because there work within it those parts of man that are not of the earth: his higher components of soul and spirit. There is nothing in the whole realm of physical and chemical laws which could justify the presence of such a thing as the human physical body on the earth.

Measured by the physical laws of the earth, the human body is an impossible creation. It is prevented from disintegrating by the higher components of man's being. It follows, therefore, that the moment these higher components — the ego, the astral body and the etheric body — desert the human body, it becomes a corpse.

You know from many earlier lectures that the diagram of the human being we have often given is quite correct as such, but that in reality it is not as simple as some would like. To begin with, we divide the human being into physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego. I have pointed out on other occasions that this in itself implies a further complication. The physical body, of course, is what it is — the physical body. But the etheric body, as such, is something supersensible, invisible, something that cannot be perceived by the senses. It lives in the human being as something that cannot be perceived by the senses. But it has, in a sense, its physical counterpart because it imprints itself on the physical body. The physical body contains not only the physical body itself, but also an imprint of the etheric body. The etheric body projects itself onto the physical body; so we can speak of an etheric projection onto the physical body.

It is the same in the case of the astral body. We can speak of the astral projection onto the physical body. You know some of the details already. You know that the ego projection onto the physical body may be sought in certain features of the blood circulation, where the ego projects itself onto the blood. In a similar way the other higher components project themselves onto the physical body. So the physical body in its physical aspect is in itself a complicated system, for it is fourfold. And just as the most important aspect cannot exist in the physical body if the ego and the astral body are not in it — for it then becomes a corpse — so is it also in the case of these projections, for they are all present in the physical substance. Without the ego there can be no human blood, without the astral body there can be no human nervous system as a whole. These things exist in us as a counterpart of man's higher components.

When the ego has been, shall we say, ‘lifted out’ of the physical body, when it has passed through the portal of death, the physical body has no real life any longer, but becomes a corpse. In a similar way, under certain conditions, these projections cannot live in a proper way either.

For instance the ego projection — that is, a certain quality of the blood — cannot be present in a proper way in the human organism if the ego is not properly fostered. To turn the physical body into a corpse it is, of course, necessary for the ego to depart entirely from the physical body. But the blood can go a quarter of the way towards becoming a corpse if you prevent it from being permeated with what ought to live in the ego, so that it can work in the right manner of soul and spirit on the blood. You will gather from this that is possible to bring disorder into man's soul in such a way that the right influences cannot be brought to bear on the blood nature, the blood substance. That is then the point when the blood can change into a poisonous substance — not entirely, for in that case the person would die, but in part. The human physical body is abandoned to destruction if the ego departs from it, and in a similar way the blood is brought into a state of ill health — even if this is not necessarily noticeable — if the ego is not fostered and interwoven with the right care.

So when is the ego not fostered and interwoven with the right care? This is the case under certain quite definite circumstances. Let us look for the moment at the post-Atlantean period. We see that as human evolution proceeds, certain definite capacities, certain definite impulses are developed in each succeeding cultural epoch. It is impossible to imagine people living in the ancient Indian period having a condition of soul development similar to ours. From epoch to epoch, as human beings pass through succeeding incarnations on earth, different impulses are needed for the human soul.

Let me draw you a diagram. Imagine this to be the main, the actual physical body, the one that has to be filled with all the higher components of human nature in order to be a physical body at all. Of all these higher components, I shall deal solely with the ego, though I could deal with all three. The shading here indicates that the physical body is permeated by the ego. So, in a certain way, the other projections also have to be permeated. Here let me indicate the projection of the etheric body, which is for the most part anchored in the human being's glandular system; for this, too, has to be permeated and interwoven. Thirdly, let me indicate what is anchored chiefly in the nervous system. This, again, in a certain way, must be interwoven with the workings of the ego. And the ego body itself — this, too, has to be interwoven in the proper way.

As I said just now, as man passes through succeeding periods of evolution he has to step into different developmental impulses with each period. He has to absorb whatever the contemporary age requires him to take in. In the first post-Atlantean period, ancient India, impulses of soul and spirit had to be absorbed which enabled the etheric body to be developed; in the next period, ancient Persia, the astral body was developed; in the period of Egypt and Chaldea it was the turn of the sentient soul; in the Greco-Latin period, the intellectual or mind soul; and today, the consciousness soul.

Whether the human being absorbs in the right way whatever is suitable for the age in which he is living will depend on whether he has properly entered into all these bodily principles — just as the physical body is permeated by the higher components of his being — so that they absorb what the age requires. Suppose an individual during the fifth post-Atlantean period were to resist absorbing anything of what ought to be absorbed during this period; suppose he were to reject everything which could cultivate his soul in the manner required by the fifth post-Atlantean period. What would be the consequence?

His bodily nature cannot revert to an earlier state if he belongs to that part of mankind which is called upon at present to absorb the impulses of the fifth post-Atlantean period. Not everyone is called upon at the same time, but at present all the white races are called upon to absorb the culture of the fifth post-Atlantean period. Now suppose an individual were to resist this. A certain member of his bodily nature — above all, the blood — would remain void of all that could be taken in, were he not to put up this resistance. This member of his bodily nature would then lack what ought to permeate its substance and its forces. This substance and the forces living in it — though not to a degree comparable to bodily death brought about by the departure of the ego — would then become sick in its life forces, which become degraded so that man bears them as a poison within him. Thus to remain behind in evolution means that man impregnates his being with a kind of formative phantom which is poisonous. On the other hand, if he were to absorb what his cultural impulses require him to absorb, the state of his soul would be such that he could dissolve this poisonous phantom he bears within him. By failing to do so, he allows this phantom to coagulate and become a part of his body.