WONDERS OF THE WORLD E-Book

Rudolf Steiner

• Herausgeber: Rudolf Steiner Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

'From the contents of original Greek drama and the soul drama of the present day that leads to self-knowledge, Rudolf Steiner develops his thought processes – pulsating with lively contemplation – about wonders of the world, trials of the soul and revelations of the spirit!' – Marie SteinerIn this remarkable interpretation of Greek mythology, Rudolf Steiner goes beyond Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell in reading mythological figures such as Demeter, Persephone, Eros and Dionysos as primordial archetypes of macrocosmic thinking, feeling and will. Moreover, he explains in detail how this archetypal consciousness was gradually lost, giving way to new-found, subjective experience of these faculties, which in turn opens up possibilities for human freedom. His overarching theme of 'the evolution of consciousness' is grand in its sweep, but Steiner also shows himself to be the master of telling details.Lectures include: 'The origin of dramatic art in European cultural life and the Mystery of Eleusis'; 'The living reality of the spiritual world in Greek mythology and the threefold Hecate'; 'Nature and spirit'; 'The entry of the Christ Impulse into human evolution and the activity of the planetary gods'; 'The merging of the ancient Hebrew and the Greek currents in the Christ-stream'; 'The ego-nature and the human form'; 'The Dionysian Mysteries'; 'Eagle, Bull and Lion currents, Sphinx and Dove'; 'The two poles of all soul-ordeals'; and 'On Goethe's birthday'.The freshly revised text features an introduction, notes and appendices by Professor Frederick Amrine, colour images and an index.

Leseprobe

WONDERS OF THE WORLD TRIALS OF THE SOUL REVELATIONS OF THE SPIRIT

Eleven lectures given in Munich between 18-28 August 1911

TRANSLATED BY DOROTHY LENN, OWEN BARFIELD AND FREDERICK AMRINE

EDITED BY FREDERICK AMRINE

INTRODUCTION BY FREDERICK AMRINE

RUDOLF STEINER

RUDOLF STEINER PRESS

CW 129

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

www.rudolfsteinerpress.com

Published by Rudolf Steiner Press 2020

Originally published in German under the title Weltenwunder, Seelenprüfungen und Geistesoffenbarungen (volume 129 in the Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe or Collected Works) by Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach. Based on shorthand notes that were not reviewed or revised by the speaker. This authorized translation is based on the fifth German edition (1977), edited by Edwin Froböse und Wolfram Groddeck

Published by permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach

© Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Rudolf Steiner Verlag 1977

This translation © Rudolf Steiner Press 2020

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, photo-copying 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 620 3

Cover by Mary Giddens Typeset by Symbiosys Technologies, Vishakapatnam, India Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd., Essex

CONTENTS

Publisher’s Note

Introduction, by Frederick Amrine

LECTURE 1 MUNICH, 18 AUGUST 1911

The origin of dramatic art in European cultural life. The Mystery of Eleusis

LECTURE 2 MUNICH, 19 AUGUST 19 1911

The living reality of the spiritual world in Greek mythology. The threefold Hecate

LECTURE 3 MUNICH, 20 AUGUST 1911

Nature and spirit. Zeus, Poseidon and Pluto as macrocosmic counterparts of the human bodily sheaths. An occult sign

LECTURE 4 MUNICH, 21 AUGUST 1911

Dionysos as the representative of the ego-forces. The entry of the Christ Impulse into human evolution and the activity of the planetary gods

LECTURE 5 MUNICH, 22 AUGUST 1911

The merging of the ancient Hebrew and the Greek currents in the Christ-stream. Dionysos Zagreus and the younger Dionysos

LECTURE 6 MUNICH, 23 AUGUST 1911

The ego-nature and the human form. Dionysos and his band of followers

LECTURE 7 MUNICH, 24 AUGUST 1911

The Dionysian Mysteries

LECTURE 8 MUNICH, 25 AUGUST 1911

The true meaning of ordeals of the soul. Progressive gods and backward beings. The Mystery of Golgotha

LECTURE 9 MUNICH, 26 AUGUST 1911

Eagle, Bull and Lion currents. Sphinx and Dove. Ego-consciousness

LECTURE 10 MUNICH, 27 AUGUST 1911

The two poles of all soul-ordeals. The macrocosmic Christ impulse in the meaning of St Paul

LECTURE 11 MUNICH, 28 AUGUST 1911

On Goethe’s Birthday

APPENDICES

1. Ahriman and Lucifer

2. Friedrich Nietzsche

3. The Etheric and the Astral Bodies

4. The Hierarchies

5. Cosmic Evolution

6. Charles Darwin

7. Ernst Haeckel

8. Karl Gegenbaur

9. Franz Brentano

10. Robert Hamerling

Notes

Rudolf Steiner’s Collected Works

Significant Events in the Life of Rudolf Steiner

Index

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

THIS cycle of lectures given at the anthroposophical centre in Munich was followed by festive stage performances that, from 1909 onwards, had become an annual event. These summer festivals were only interrupted by the First World War. Édouard Schuré’s new drama on Eleusis was presented in 1907 as the first in a series of artistic undertakings and performed again in 1911. Édouard Schuré’s play The Children of Lucifer was premiered in Munich in 1909. It was followed by Rudolf Steiner’s Rosicrucian Mystery Dramas The Portal of Initiation (premiered on 15 August 1910) and The Trial of the Soul (on 17 August 1911).

In her original introduction to these lectures, Marie Steiner wrote as follows:

In his introductory address, the lecturer refers to these events. From the contents of the original Greek drama and the psychic drama of the present day—which leads to self-knowledge—Rudolf Steiner develops his thought processes, pulsating with lively contemplation, about wonders of the world, soul trials and revelations of the spirit. Since the performances immediately preceded the cycle of lectures, it was only natural that the experiences and trials of the personalities appearing in the Rosicrucian dramas should be cited as examples of the cognitive conflicts of modern souls.

Rudolf Steiner also refers to the Order of the Star in the East, founded by Annie Besant in 1911, with the purpose of proclaiming the supposed new manifestation of Christ-Maitreya. Marie Steiner comments on this as follows:

An Indian boy had been chosen to serve this purpose, and an order—the Star in the East—had been founded to present him as the Christ reappeared in the flesh. Rudolf Steiner points out the inner impossibility of such an event, explaining the laws of spiritual evolution. He limits himself here to brief details, since the events taking place were known to the listeners of the lectures and the prerequisites for understanding what was said were already given.

INTRODUCTION: GREEK MYTHOLOGY IN A NEW LIGHT

WONDERSof the World is wide-ranging in its scope. Among many other topics, this collection of lectures covers cosmic evolution, the esoteric nature of good and evil, Steiner’s own Mystery Dramas, ancient Israel, and what Steiner calls the Mystery of Golgotha – roughly, the incarnation, passion, and resurrection of Christ. But Steiner discusses all those matters in greater detail elsewhere. This cycle is however Steiner’s fullest and most systematic treatment of Greek mythology. Thus I shall focus upon that in this introduction.

In the first third of the nineteenth century, an academic controversy took place over the interpretation of Greek mythology. It attracted little notice at the time, but the stakes of the struggle were very large, and the eventual repercussions, which finally unfolded fully in the twentieth century, were hugely consequential. The protagonist of the controversy was Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858), whose six-volume magnum opus, Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient Peoples, and Especially of the Greeks (1810–42),1 fomented a roiling controversy that lasted for decades.2 Creuzer argued that Greek culture and the Greek Mysteries were coeval, that Greek culture was an extension of ‘Oriental’ wisdom traditions, and that Greek mythology is a vast array of symbols simultaneously veiling and conveying those primordial doctrines. For Creuzer, the Mysteries were the original, the archetypal, and the purest expression of Greek culture.

The esteemed classicist Gottfried Hermann took issue with Creuzer’s thesis, and the resulting high-level exchange was published by both parties. Other less dispassionate scholars soon joined the fray, notably Johann Heinrich Voß (1751–1826, famous for having translated Homer into German) and Christian August Lobeck (1781–1860). Voß was notoriously unbalanced, and it is impossible to take his ad hominem rantings about Catholic conspiracies seriously, while Creuzer’s other ultra-rationalist opponent, Lobeck, was a pedant whose work had no later resonance. Nevertheless, in the short run, Creuzer is considered to have lost, and he toiled on for the rest of his life in obscurity.

Goethe weighed in as well, initially on the side of Creuzer’s opponents. The younger, Romantic generation’s view of Greece troubled Goethe, whose commitment had long been to Winckelmann’s late eighteenth-century view of Greek culture as exhibiting a fundamentally Apollonian ‘edle Einfalt und stille Größe’ [noble simplicity and quiet grandeur]. Goethe complained of having to suffer ‘unholy Dionysian mysteries’ at the hands of the Romantics.3 Poor Creuzer struck Goethe initially as all too Romantic, while at the same time Creuzer also ran afoul of Romantic classicists such as Karl Otfried Müller (1797–1840), who posited, following Herder, a Greek ‘tribal culture’, out of which their mythology would need to have grown naturally and organically. Creuzer’s cultural cosmopolitanism was anathema to Müller and the other Romantics. But Goethe also understood that ‘the rationalist, Enlightenment version of the ancient Greeks, as formulated by Winckelmann . . . had downplayed and neglected the role of the mystery cults’,4 and in Faust, especially in Part Two, written largely at the end of Goethe’s long life, the Mysteries end up figuring very prominently indeed.5 So paradoxically, despite having dismissed Creuzer in theory, Goethe ended up incorporating into Faust the heart of Creuzer’s doctrine in practice.

Yet another scholarly controversy regarding Greek mythology unfolded at the beginning of the last third of the nineteenth century, and this controversy is far from obscure because of the fame of the protagonist. Friedrich Nietzsche, who was an extraordinarily gifted young classicist, was actually given the Chair in Classics at the University of Basel despite not having written a doctoral thesis. Nietzsche proceeded to write The Birth of Tragedy (1871), with which he hoped to revolutionize the world of Classical Studies. He mounted a head-on assault against the eighteenth-century Apollonian view of the Greeks, which still dominated classical scholarship. Instead, he argued that Apollo and the other Olympian gods were merely a kind of screen that the Greeks used to protect themselves against the darker truths of the Dionysian realm. Following Schopenhauer, Nietzsche saw this tragic abyss of being represented directly only in music, and the musician he had in mind was Richard Wagner, who had not yet risen to fame. In a breathtaking move, Nietzsche concluded his supposedly academic treatise on Greek tragedy with a paean to the music of Wagner, which he claimed represented the true spirit of Greek tragedy.

As Nietzsche surely must have expected, conventional scholars did not take this frontal assault against everything they believed in lying down. A huge controversy erupted. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1848–1931), who would go on to become the doyen of German classical scholarship, led the charge. This young classical philologist published a scathing review, and even Nietzsche’s erstwhile supporters such as Ritschl privately complained that the book reeked of ‘ingenious dissipation’ and ‘megalomania’.6 Nietzsche was hoping to mobilize the profession for a revolution, but as soon as the controversy died down, life went on as before, and Nietzsche had to give up his Chair at Basel. Again, the critics seemingly won.

Over the longer term, however, Nietzsche has come to be recognized as a classic himself. Great scholars such as Snell, Edelstein, Jaeger, and Lloyd-Jones have called Nietzsche ‘one of the most penetrating modern interpreters of the Greek mind’ and The Birth of Tragedy ‘a work of genius that began a new era in the understanding of Greek thought’.7

Now in retrospect, we can say definitively that Creuzer stands to his critics as Nietzsche to Wilamowitz: the critics won battles in the short run, but Creuzer and Nietzsche each won the war. Comparative mythology is now dominated by Jungians, and Jungians are largely the heirs of Creuzer and Nietzsche. Creuzer discovered Jungian archetypes avant la lettre. Jung’s seminal study of 1912, Symbols of Transformation,8 which precipitated Jung’s break with Freud because Jung insisted there was a transpersonal, collective libido driven not by sexuality but rather by spirituality, which was heavily influenced by Creuzer. Jung cites Creuzer directly on specific topics, but even more so it was Creuzer’s discovery of cultural ‘symbols’ (as he called them) transcending cultural space and time that made modern comparative mythology as we know it possible. Many key ideas that are commonly attributed to Jung and scholars such as Joseph Campbell were originally Creuzer’s. Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is now a must-read for scholars, and often the only thing on Greek tragedy that non-scholars have read.

The point of this long digression on earlier scholarship is this: the seeming losers in the short run turned out to be the victors in the end. And so it will be with Steiner. His interpretation stands head and shoulders above any other that we have, and this will eventually be recognized.

It may take a long time. Alas, there has been no great controversy swirling about Steiner’s reinterpretation of Greek mythology – would that there had! Instead, his thoughts remain largely unknown outside of anthroposophical circles. The aforementioned scope of these lectures has not helped: one needs to have studied quite a bit of anthroposophy to make heads or tails of them as a whole. To specialists they are formidable at best, and at worst they are merely incomprehensible.

However, Creuzer’s six-volume study is far more formidable, and understanding Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy demands both a thorough familiarity with Schopenhauer’s intricate and extensive philosophy and a thorough knowledge of what was then cutting-edge classical music. Yet they both won out over time.

More so than was the case with Creuzer and even Nietzsche, it will take a fundamental reorientation of scholarly ideals as such for Steiner to break through. Scholars today are reluctant to interpret a phenomenon such as Greek mythology as a whole. The scholarly record of surviving evidence is too confused, and it offers too many exceptions. Thus scholars content themselves with focusing on the trees instead of the forest. A somewhat random but excellent example is the entry on ‘Hecate’ from the Oxford Classical Dictionary.9 Allow me to quote it nearly in its entirety:

HECATE, an ancient chthonian goddess … probably of Carian origin as suggested by Nilsson … She is frequently confused with Artemis (q.v.), whose functions overlap to some extent with hers, also with Selene, the theory that she is a moon-goddess being supported also by many modern authors, though without justification, as no cult of the moon is to be found in Greece; however, a goddess of women, such as she was, tends to acquire some lunar features. Her associations with Artemis are so close and frequent that it is not always easy to tell to which of them a particular function or title belongs originally … Hecate is not mentioned at all in Homer, but comes into sudden prominence in a sort of hymn to her in Hes. Theog. 411 ff., a passage whose genuineness has been much disputed. There she is granddaughter of Coeus and Phoebe, other authors giving other genealogies in a way that suggests that her connection with Greek, or even pre-Greek and Titanic, deities was precarious. Zeus honours her exceedingly, giving her power and honour on earth and sea and also in the heavens, and taking away none of her original rights. If a man invokes her, she can benefit him in all manner of ways, for she is powerful in courts of law and in assemblies, can grant victory in war and athletics and success in the horsemanship, in fishing, and cattle-breeding; she is also a nurturer of children … No other passage rates her so high, and this one must reflect the enthusiasm of a strong local cult, Boeotian or other, of which no more is known. Generally she is associated with uncanny things and the ghost-world. For this reason she is worshiped at the cross-roads (typically a place where a side path joins a main road), which seem to be haunted the world over. Here the notorious ‘Hecate’s suppers’ were put out monthly for her … It was a rite of purification, and one of its common constituents was dogs’ flesh … Hecate is herself a formidable figure … i.e. a bogy which ‘meets’ and frightens wayfarers. Hence it is not remarkable she is associated with sorcery and black magic, from at least the tragic Medea (Eur. Med. 394ff.) onwards. Thus we find her invoked to go away and take obsessing spirit with her … To help a dangerous love-charm which may bring destruction on the person it is aimed at (Theoc. 2. 12ff.); and very often in magical papyri, etc. However, a more respectable cult of her seems to have continued … Alcamenes was said to be the first to show her with three bodies (Paus. 2. 30. 2). Apart from the little Roman ‘Hecateia’ which may echo his statue, she is rarely represented in art. On a vase of the time of the Parthenon she lights Persephone from Hades; and other figures with torches may be meant for her rather than Persephone or Demeter.

There is a wealth of detail given here, but much of it is contradictory, and above all there is no mention whatsoever of what the figure of Hecate might mean on the whole. Of course, Steiner has available a source of which scholars cannot yet avail themselves: the Akashic Chronicle, a kind of supra-sensible record in which all past deeds are preserved. Earlier periods, from which no records survive, can be studied in this way as a kind of ‘script of spiritual geology’ [p. 102]. No doubt this is the secret behind Steiner’s astonishing insights.

Let me recapitulate briefly what Steiner has to say about Greek mythology.

We must begin by understanding the polarity of Persephone and Iphigenia. Persephone is the ‘regent of this old clairvoyance’ [p. 7], whereas Iphigenia represents ‘the perpetual sacrifice demanded by intellectual culture’ that superseded it; she represents ‘the perpetual sacrifice which our intellectuality has to make to the deep religious life’ [p. 8].

Demeter is the archetypal figure representing an even older and profounder clairvoyance, ‘the archetypal form of human feeling, thinking, and willing’ in its macrocosmic aspect. Viewing the Akashic Chronicle, we can see that indeed Persephone is the true daughter of Demeter.

What has happened in the evolution of consciousness, however, is that the forces represented by Persephone have gradually ‘gone underground’; they have been drawn down into the individual human soul, and now they assist in the development of the ego principle, making it ever firmer [p. 21]. This ‘rape of Persephone’ is accomplished at the hand of Pluto, who is the macrocosmic representation of the forces of individual human physicality: ‘The soul was robbed of its ancient clairvoyant capacity through Pluto’s intervention’ [p. 22]. The human organism has become denser, which enables it to ‘hold fast the clairvoyant forces in the sub-earthly realm of the soul’ [p. 23]. As Pluto obtained ever-greater power over the human soul, he ‘abducted Persephone’, in the forward-looking language of the myth.

When Demeter saw her child Persephone lost in this way in human nature, she gave up imparting the moral law directly, and instead instituted Mysteries, so that the moral law could be imparted indirectly. With the internalization and individuation of the forces of the soul, the possibility of moral freedom was gradually realized [p. 25]. Demeter’s forces decline proportionately, and it is only in old age that humans are able to realize some degree of her chaste but fruitful love [p. 27].

Poseidon brings forth the macrocosmic etheric body, and Pluto the macrocosmic forces underlying the physical body, ‘… the macrocosmic counterpart of the impulses of will which forced the life of Persephone into the depths of the soul’ [p. 45]. Zeus is the macrocosmic imagination of the forces that eventually are condensed into the human astral body [p. 43]. An all-important change takes place in this human astral body, seat of the ‘torch of knowledge’, as a result of the evolution of consciousness: ‘In ancient times we had clairvoyant or imaginal knowledge; today we have intellectual or rational knowledge.’ The forces of the human astral body have grown individually, but at the tragic cost of the diminishment of macrocosmic awareness.

This process is represented by Hecate, who represents the etheric forces at work upon the astral body, the physical body, and the etheric itself [p. 31]. The process which the Greeks and Romans depicted in the figure of Hecate unfolds in modern times over the three seven-year epochs about which Steiner speaks in detail, especially in his lecture cycles on education. The Greeks ‘were far more conscious of the forces of Pluto, Poseidon, and Zeus outside of them, and took it for granted that those forces worked into them’ [p. 46]. Philia, Astrid, and Luna in Steiner’s Mystery Dramas are the modern equivalent of the threefold Hecate.

Dionysos, however, represents quite a new set of growing forces. He is ‘the macrocosmic representative of the psychic forces living in our egos’ [p. 54]. This figure of Dionysos has to be subdivided in turn into the figures of the elder Dionysos, also called Dionysos Zagreus, and the younger Dionysos.

The elder Dionysos is, appropriately, the son of Persephone and Zeus, which is to say: he is a representative of archetypal clairvoyance in the astral body. He represents the macrocosmic force that causes the individual ego-forces to flow into us. This elder Dionysos has now sunk down into the human sub-consciousness [p. 82]. Greek mythology depicts the loss of the older, unitary ego-consciousness and the beginnings of individuation through the ‘impressive picture … of the dismembered Dionysos’ [p. 83]. The Greeks felt an overwhelming sense of tragedy when they contemplated the gradual loss of this consciousness [p. 82].

The younger Dionysos is appropriately depicted as having a consciousness ‘much closer to humans’; he represents the forces of the nascent individual ego. But more so, he represents the intellectuality yet to come. In a striking connection, Steiner reveals that ‘what we recognize as the intellectual civilization which is spread throughout the world, this mental macrocosmic counterpart of the personal intellectual ego, once lived as a human, as the younger Dionysos …’ [p. 89].

Eros likewise figures a newer set of forces, the budding force of microcosmic love [p. 11]. Hera is a Luciferic being, who labours to bring about individuation, expressed among other things by her jealousy. Fittingly, she plays an active part in the mutilation of the Elder Dionysos; she ‘appears and calls upon the Titans, the gods centred in the forces of the Earth, to cut into pieces the old unified consciousness, thereby driving it into separate bodies’ [p. 84]. The forces seeking to reestablish connections between the severed self and the world are embodied in the figure of Pallas Athena.

It is a grand, coherent, holistic, and altogether persuasive interpretation. Yet Steiner is clear that his reinterpretation of Greek mythology is just one part of an even larger, even more admirable project: ‘Let us ask our feeling: What are we hoping to achieve with what can only be a feeble beginning? What are we hoping to achieve? The answer is that we hope to rekindle in humanity something like a unification, harmony, between art and science’ [p. 2].

Anthroposophy calls upon us to begin reintegrating the unity that once was given macrocosmically, now freely, out of individual insight. ‘Poor Nietzsche’ had heroically undertaken the task; he had addressed ‘the separation of the three branches of culture – science, arts, and religion’, but his tools were inadequate to the task, and the result was that ‘in his soul’s travail’ he was destroyed by it. Anthroposophy enables us to go much further towards completing the task that Nietzsche had shouldered too soon. Neither ancient esotericism nor modern science will serve to satisfy the deepest need of the humanity of the future, the need to establish a link between the human soul and spiritual revelation’ [p. 5]. Here is the ultimate intention of this cycle of lectures: ‘The old clairvoyant culture represented by Persephone must be lit up again’ [p. 9], but now in an entirely new form.

Frederick Amrine October 2020

LECTURE 1

MUNICH, 18 AUGUST 1911

THE opening words of our festival this year were put into the mouth of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and in view of what we want to see in anthroposophy, and the feelings he wants to elicit, we may perhaps look upon this as symbolic. For to us anthroposophy is not just a source of ordinary worldly knowledge, but a true ‘mediator’ upwards into those worlds whence, according to the ancient Greeks, it was Hermes who brought down the spark which could kindle in humans the strength to ascend into the realm of the supra-sensible. And taking my start from these words of Hermes, I may perhaps be allowed to add to what has resounded during the last few days out of the performances themselves some observations that can round out everything into a whole.

These performances have not been given merely as a sort of embellishment of our festival; rather, they should be regarded as a deeply integral part of the annual celebration which has been held there for many years, and as the focus of our anthroposophical activity here in Munich. This year we have been able to open with a renewal of the drama, which is the origin of all Western dramatic art, a drama which we can really only grasp by looking beyond the whole tradition of dramatic art that has been handed down in the West. This also makes it a worthy introduction to an anthroposophical festival, for it takes us back into ages of European cultural development when the several activities of the human mind and soul, which today we find separated as science, art, and religion, were not yet sundered from one another. It carries us back in the feeling to the primal beginnings of European cultural development, to times when a unified culture, born directly out of the deepest spiritual life, fired humans with religious fervour for the highest that the human soul can reach. It was a culture pulsating with religious life—indeed it may be said that it was religion. Individuals did not look upon religion as a separated branch of culture; rather, they still spoke of religion, even when their minds were directly concerned with the practical affairs of everyday life. That very concern itself was raised to the level of a religion, for religion shed its rays over every experience which we could have. But this archetypal religion was inwardly very strong, very powerful in its particular workings. It did not confine itself to a vaguely exalted religious response to great powers of the universe. Rather, the inspiration of this primal religion was so strong that some of those particular workings took forms which were none other than those of art. Religious life overflowed into bold forms, and religion was one with art. Art was the immediate daughter of religion, and still lived in the closest ties of kinship with her mother, religion itself. No religious feeling in our own day has the intensity which imbued those who took part in the ancient Mysteries and saw religious life pouring itself into the forms of art.

But this archetypal religion and its daughter, art, were at the same time so purified, so elevated into the refining spheres of etheric spiritual life, that their influence even brought out in human souls something of which today we have a faint, an abstract reflection, in our science and knowledge. When feeling became more intense, became filled with enthusiasm for what as religion overflowed into artistic form, then knowledge of the gods and of divine things, knowledge of the land of the spirit, was kindled in the soul. Thus knowledge was the other daughter of religion, and she too lived in an intimate familial relationship with the archetypal mother of all culture, with religious culture.

Let us ask our feeling: What are we hoping to achieve with what can only be a feeble beginning? What are we hoping to achieve? The answer is that we hope to rekindle in humanity something like a unification, a harmony, between art and science. For only thus can the soul, fired by feeling, strengthened by the best in our forces of will, imbue every aspect of human culture with that singleness of vision which will lead us up again into the divine heights of our existence, while at the same time it permeates the most commonplace deeds of everyday life. Then what we otherwise call profane life will become holy, for it is only profane because its connection with the divine source of all existence has been forgotten.

The festival we have organized this year is meant to be a direct expression of this feeling, which simply must enliven us if the truths of anthroposophy are to enter into the depths of human souls. That is why in accordance with anthroposophy, in the literal meaning of those words, we should look upon The Children of Lucifer10 as a kind of sun which, shedding its rays in our hearts, can arouse a true perception of what anthroposophy is.

What is generally known as drama, what is recognized in the West as dramatic art and reached its culmination in Shakespeare, is a current of spiritual life originating in the Mysteries; it is a secularization of the ancient Mysteries. If we trace it back to its origin, we come to something like The Children of Lucifer.11

We already had all this in mind some years ago, when we produced this very drama at the Munich Congress of the Theosophical Society.12 I may perhaps mention an incident which may throw light upon our aims, for day-to-day happenings do have a close bearing upon the spiritual ideal which hovers before our minds. When some time ago we were beginning to prepare for the production of The Children of Lucifer, I remembered something which I think greatly influenced the course of our present Central European anthroposophical development. When I myself judged that the time had come for me to bring my spiritual work into connection with what we may call anthroposophy or spiritual science, it was a discussion about this play, The Children of Lucifer, which gave me the opportunity I needed. Following upon that talk we allowed our thoughts about our work to pass through a period of development of seven years; but the seed which had been laid in our souls when speaking about The Children of Lucifer meanwhile developed silently in our hearts, according to the law of the seven-year rhythm. At the end of the seven years we were ready to produce a German version of The Children of Lucifer at the opening of our annual festival at Munich.

In today’s talk, which is to serve as an introduction to the lectures which are to follow, I may perhaps be allowed to link this thought with another, which springs from the depths of my heart, out of deepest conviction. The kind of spiritual life which in future will increasingly influence Western minds will have to be cast in a specific form. Today it is possible to think of anthroposophy in various ways. Humans do not always think in accordance with the necessities of existence, in accordance with the evolutionary forces at work in us, but they think in conformity with their own will, their own sentiment; thus one person may regard this, the other that, as the right ideal. There are many ideals of anthroposophy, according to the dispositions of human hearts, according to their sentiments and feelings which incline them this way or that. True esotericism at a somewhat higher level shows us, however, that such hankerings after an ideal are always connected with our own personality. Ideals of this kind are really only what one or another would like to think of as anthroposophy, something which our own peculiar sentiment and the make-up of our intellect causes us to believe the best. Anthroposophy is not the only thing about which we form our opinions out of feeling and personal motives, but anthroposophy must learn not to take what springs from our own personal feeling as the standard of measurement. As people we are always liable to err, however much we may believe ourselves to be cherishing an unselfish ideal. We can only form an opinion about what has to happen in human evolution when we suppress entirely our own personal feelings about the ideal, and no longer think what we ourselves consider the best way to treat anthroposophy. For we can only come to a true opinion if we let the necessities of life speak, quite regardless of our own inclinations, regardless of what peculiar expression of spiritual life we prefer; we can only arrive at a true opinion if we ask ourselves how European civilization has taken shape in recent centuries, and what are its immediate needs. If we put the question to ourselves without bias, we get an answer which is twofold. First, if European cultural life is not to dry up, not to become a ‘waste land’, the great, the overwhelming need—shown by all that is happening in the life of the mind today—is anthroposophy. Second, it needs a spiritual science suited to the conditions which have developed through the centuries, not in any one of us, but in Europe as a whole. But we shall only be able to give them a spiritual science which meets these conditions if we ask ourselves unselfishly what it is that Europeans have learnt to think and feel during recent centuries, and what it is that they are thirsting for as a means for the spiritual deepening of their lives.

If we put this question to ourselves, then all the signs of the times show us that it cannot be a continuation of the esotericism, the mysticism, which has been known for thousands of years, and which has been rich in blessings for diverse peoples. The continuation of this mystic lore as it has always been known, as it has been handed down by history, could not meet the needs of European civilization. We should be committing a sin against European civilization and everything connected with it if we were merely to immerse ourselves in ancient esotericism; we should be putting our personal inclination for some or other ancient esotericism ahead of the necessity of existence.

Let us suppress this, and ask ourselves what it is that humanity needs in the conditions which have come about through centuries of development. Then signs of the times make it equally clear that what we call modern science, however high may be the esteem in which it is held today, however great may be the authority which it enjoys, is like a tree that has passed its prime and will bear little fruit in future. When I say that what today is known as physical science is a withering branch in humanity’s mental and spiritual heaven, I know that it will be thought a bold assertion, but it is at any rate not an idle one. Science has rendered good service; to throw light upon the conditions of its existence, as I have just done, is not to disparage it.

Neither ancient esotericism nor modern science will serve to satisfy the deepest need of the humanity of the future, the need to establish a link between the human soul and spiritual revelation. That is what hovered before us, as if inscribed in letters of gold, when we began some years ago to develop the spiritual life on broader lines. And if I may be allowed to say something which is as much a matter of feeling as of conviction, I would say that, considered objectively and without bias in relation to the question I have raised, the work of our esteemed friend Édouard Schuré, Les Grands Initiés,13 steering as it does a middle course between purely historical esotericism, which can be read up anywhere from historical records, and the academic learning which is a withering branch of civilization, is an extremely important literary beginning of the kind of spiritual life which will be needed all over Europe in the future.

It is a most significant first movement towards the apprehension of true anthroposophy, an anthroposophy which observes life directly, sees how spiritual life at present is a slow trickle, sees how the stream will widen.

I pointed this out at the commencement of my lectures here a year ago.14 Anyone who can to some extent see into the future, anyone who sees what that future demands of us, knows that with Les Grands Initiés a first literary step has been taken along that golden middle road between ancient esotericism and modern—but decadent—science, and that this beautiful and important beginning which has already been made by that book in all European countries will assume ever further forms. The book is coloured by a turn of thought which does not impress us sympathetically just because of our own personal preferences, but because we see that the necessities of European civilization, making themselves felt ever more insistently, demanded that such a literary beginning should be made. If you know this book, my dear friends, you know how impressively it calls attention to the Mystery of Eleusis, a subject which Schuré subsequently developed further in Sanctuaires d’Orient.15 What kind of thoughts are aroused in us by these indications—anthroposophical in the best sense—which we find in Les Grands Initiés, and by the reconstruction of the Mystery of Eleusis?

If we look back to the primal sources of European artistic and spiritual life, we find there two figures, two individuals who have had a deep significance for a truly theosophical grasp of the whole modern spiritual life—two figures which stand out as symbolical presentations of great spiritual impulses. To those who can look below the surface of the spiritual life of today, these figures appear like two beams of prophetic light. They are Persephone16 and Iphigenia.17 With these two names we are, in a way, touching upon what are really two souls in modern humans, two souls whose union is achieved only through the severest ordeals. In the course of the next few days we shall see more clearly how Persephone arouses in our hearts the thought of an impulse to which we have often alluded in our anthroposophical studies.

Once upon a time it was given to humanity to acquire knowledge in a way different from that of today. From earlier anthroposophical lectures we know of an ancient clairvoyance which in primeval times welled forth in human nature, so that clairvoyant pictures took shape in human souls, as inevitably as hunger and thirst and the need for air arise in their bodies—pictures filled with the secrets of the spiritual worlds. This was the primeval gift of seership which we once possessed, and of which we were, so to speak, bereft by the gradual birth in us of knowledge in its later form. The ancient Greeks felt that in their own time the debasement of ancient clairvoyance by modern knowledge was already taking place, and they partly foresaw that this would happen more in the future—a future which has become our own present. Thus they turned their gaze upwards to that divine figure who released in the human soul directly out of elemental nature the forces which led to that ancient clairvoyance. They looked up to that goddess called Persephone, who was the regent of this old clairvoyance bound up with human nature. And then the ancient Greeks said to themselves: ‘In place of this ancient clairvoyance another culture will become more and more widespread, a civilization directed by humans themselves and born of them, born of humans to whom the ancient clairvoyance is already lost.’

In the civilization which the ancient Greeks associated with the names of Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Menelaus, we find the external civilization which we know today, untouched by forces of clairvoyance. It is a civilization whose knowledge of nature and her laws is assumed to be as useful for finding a philosophical basis for the secrets of existence as it is for making armaments. But we no longer feel that this kind of mental culture requires a sacrifice—we no longer feel that in order to achieve this mental culture we must offer sacrifice in a deeper sense to the higher spiritual Beings who direct the supra-sensible worlds. These sacrifices are in fact being made, but we are as yet too inattentive to notice them. The ancient Greeks did notice that this external culture which they traced back to Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus involved sacrifice; it is the daughter of the human spirit who in a certain way has to be sacrificed ever anew. And they represented this perpetual sacrifice demanded by intellectual culture as the sacrifice of Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon.

Thus to the question raised by the sacrifice of Iphigenia there resounds a wonderful answer! If nothing but that external culture which can be traced back, as the ancient Greek understood it, to Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus, were given to humanity, then under its influence our hearts, the deepest forces of souls, would have withered away. It is only because humanity retained the feeling that it should make perpetual sacrifice and should single out, set apart from this general intellectual culture, rites which, superficially, but in a more profound sense, may be called sacerdotal—it is only because of this that this intellectual civilization has been saved from drying up completely. Just as Iphigenia was offered to Artemis as a sacrifice, but through her sacrifice became a priestess, so in the course of bygone millennia certain elements of our intellectual civilization have had repeatedly to be cleansed and purified and given a sacerdotal and religious character in sacrifice to the higher gods, so that they do not cause our hearts and souls to wither up. Just as Persephone represents the leader and the guide of the ancient clairvoyant culture, so Iphigenia represents the perpetual sacrifice which our intellectuality has to make to the deeper religious life.

These two factors have already been alive in European cultural life from the time of ancient Greece right up to the present time—from the time when Socrates first wrested scientific thinking from the old unified culture, right up to the time when poor Nietzsche,18 in his soul’s travail, turned to the separation of the three branches of culture—science, art and religion—and was destroyed by it. Because forces are already working towards the reunification of what for millennia had to be separated; because the future already illumines the present with its challenge, the present age, through its representatives—thinkers inspired by the Spirits of the Age—have had to realize anew the two impulses just characterized, and to connect them with the names of Persephone and Iphigenia.

And if we realize this, it brings home to us the significance of Goethe’s19 action in immersing himself fully in the life of ancient Greece and expressing in the symbol of Iphigenia what he himself felt to be the culmination of his art. When he wrote Iphigenia20 which in a way brings the symbolic expression the whole of his work, Goethe made his first contact with primal European spiritual riches. Out of Goethe’s deed there resounds to us today the most secret thought: ‘If Europe is not to be blighted by her intellectuality, we must remember the perpetual sacrifice which intellectual culture has to make to religious culture.’

The whole compass of intellectual civilization furnishes for the higher spiritual life a backdrop as harsh as that of King Thoas in Iphigenia.21 But in the figure of Iphigenia herself we meet gentleness and harmony, which do not hate with those that hate, but rather love with those who love. Thus when Goethe infused his heart with Inspiration in presenting his Iphigenia to Europe to testify to the perpetual sacrifice of intellectuality, it was a first reminder of all-important impulses for the spiritual life of Europe. We may indeed feel that his soul was enlightened by the spiritual inspirers of modern times.

A second reminder was needed, for which we had to wait a little longer—one which points to an age when the old clairvoyant culture was still alive, the culture associated with the name of Persephone. In that chapter of Les Grands Initiés which rises to a certain climax in referring to the Mystery of Eleusis, we again feel how European spiritual life and its inspirers are working to conjure up out of the glimmering darkness of the ages a growing recognition that the old clairvoyant culture represented by Persephone must be lit up again. One pole of modern European spiritual life was given in the revival of the ancient figure of Iphigenia; the other pole comes with the recreation of the Mystery of Eleusis by Édouard Schuré. And we must regard it as one of the most fortunate of the stars that rule our efforts, that this re-creation of the Mystery of Eleusis is allowed to shed its light out upon anthroposophical life in the presence of its recreator, who has now for several years rejoiced us by his attendance.

What I have just said is, on the one hand, only partly a matter of feeling. From another aspect it is a thought springing from the most sober and objective conviction. If I have expressed this conviction today, it is because I hold with Goethe that ‘only what proves fruitful is true’—a pearl of wisdom for our whole pursuit of knowledge. If there is any sign of fruitfulness in what we have been doing for years past, we may acknowledge that the thinking which has inspired our work for many years, the thinking which has always been present with us as a hidden guest, as a comrade in arms, has shown itself to be true by its fruitfulness.

In the next few days, when we come to talk in the most manifold ways about ‘Wonders of Nature, Trials of the Soul, and Revelations of the Spirit’, we shall have much to say in illustration of our theme which will have a bearing upon what I have just said about Iphigenia and Persephone. Here let me only mention that as Iphigenia is the daughter of Agamemnon—one of those heroes to whom the ancient Greeks traced the cult of its intellectuality in its widest sense, with all the practical and aggressive military forms it takes—so Persephone is the daughter of Demeter.

Now we shall see that Demeter is the ruler of the greatest wonders of nature, she is an archetypal form of human feeling, thinking, and willing. She points to a time when the life of the human brain was not yet cut off from the general bodily life, a time when nutrition by external foodstuffs and thinking through the instrument of the brain were not separate functions. When the crops were thriving in the fields, it was still felt at that time that thinking was alive there, that hope was poured out over the fields and suffused nature’s miraculous effects22 like the song of the lark. It was still felt that together with matter, spiritual life is submerged in the human body, becomes purified, becomes spirit as the archetypal mother, out of whom what is born elementally becomes Persephone in human nature itself. The name of Demeter points us back to primordial times in human development, in which human nature still worked in such a unified way that all bodily life was at the same time spiritual, that all bodily digestion went hand in hand with spiritual digestion, digestion of thought.

Today we can only learn what things were like then from the Akashic Chronicle.23 It is from viewing the Akashic Chronicle we learn that Persephone is the true daughter of Demeter. It is there, too, that we learn that Eros, another figure who appears in the reconstruction of the Mystery of Eleusis, represents the means whereby, according to Greek sentiment, the forces of Demeter have become what they are today in the course of human development. When Demeter stands before us on the stage, with the stern admonition of a primeval force, forever and magically permeating all human feeling, the whole marvel of human nature is immediately conjured up before our souls. Something stands before us there in Demeter which speaks through all ages of time as an impulse of human nature. When Demeter is on the stage we feel it streaming towards us. She is the mightiest representative of ‘chastity’, as today we abstractly call the archetypal force that is fruitful and efficacious when it is not mere asceticism, but embraces humanity’s archetypal love. On the other hand, what speaks to us in the figure of Eros? It is budding, innocent love. Eros is its ruler—that is what the Greeks felt.

Now the drama unfolds. What are the forces which are at work with vivid, tragic power throughout the whole drama from beginning to end? Chastity, which is at the same time archetypal love in all its fruitfulness, in its interplay with budding, innocent love. This is what holds sway in the drama, just as positive and negative electricity hold sway in the everyday wonders of nature. Thus, throughout the space into which this pregnant archetypal drama is poured, there may be more or less consciously sensed something of the forces which have been at work since the beginning of time and which still permeate our modern life; though those archetypal currents, the Demeter current and the Eros current, will in the future become more and more absorbed in a way by the tendencies represented in the three figures Luna, Astrid, and Philia.24 This will be further elucidated in the next few days. We shall be shown a living relationship between the currents underlying humanity’s origin—Demeter and Eros, with Persephone between them—and on the other hand something which dawns in us today in a form as yet impersonal. It is like a spiritual conscience which calls to us as yet from the unknown and does not venture upon the stage; it is only a voice from without. I am speaking of the three figures Luna, Astrid, and Philia, the true daughters of Persephone.

I have tried to put before you the feelings which prompted us to give pride of place, at the opening of our studies, to The Mystery of Eleusis as reconstructed by Édouard Schuré. No doubt the training you have received in recent years will enable you to view our present performances of this important work in the way which should come naturally to us in the anthroposophical movement. Today it is frightfully easy to taunt us with amateurishness in comparison with what we are given as dramatic art in the world outside; it is easy to point out the mistakes which we all make if with our feeble capacities we tackle such a great work as this The Mystery of Eleusis. But we are not trying, or at any rate we ought not to be trying, to represent things in the same manner as is done on the ordinary modern stage. Those today who already have some inkling of the effect our special kind of spiritual knowledge would have on art will know that we are aiming at something quite different. They will also know that performances, which will only be able to achieve a certain perfection in the future, must make a beginning in all their imperfection in the present. We are not called upon to compete with ordinary stage performances. We do not dream of such thing, and it is a mistake even to make such comparisons. Let the dramatic critic say what he will about other stage performances, he is a mere amateur as regards what anthroposophy is aiming at, what it must aim at, even in the realm of art.

Those of you who can share the profound gratitude which I feel every time at the opening of our Munich festivals to all who have helped to bring them about will not think it inappropriate or too personal if again this year I express my thanks to them at the close of this introductory lecture. Not only have many hands been needed to make this festival possible, but it has needed souls who have already permeated themselves with what can be the finest fruit of a life of spiritual effort—spiritual warmth. This spiritual warmth is never without effect and always brings a gradually developing skill in this appropriate sphere. Thus, each time we set to work—first the small group of those here in Munich who are the forerunners of the larger community which then gathers here—we find ourselves filled with spiritual warmth, and, even when to begin with everything seems to go very badly, we have faith that our work must succeed.

And it does succeed to the full extent of our capacities. This undertaking proves to us that spiritual forces hold sway in the world, that they help us, that we may entrust ourselves to them. And if sometimes it seems as if things are not going well, then we say to ourselves that if we are not successful, it is because the powers behind our activity do not intend us to succeed, and not to succeed would then be the right thing. Thus we do what we have to do without giving a thought to the sort of performance which will finally emerge. We think of the spiritual forces, to which we too in the sense of our own time are making our puny sacrifice—the sacrifice of modern intellectuality to the religious deepening of the human heart. It is beautiful to see what spiritual warmth there is in that small group, wonderful to see how each individual in undertaking his or her by no means easy sacrificial task actually experiences something spiritual. It is a fraternal offering which those who participate in it carry out for us. Those who understand this will share the grateful feeling to which I now give expression.

Our thanks of course go in the first place to the recreator of the Mystery of Eleusis, and then to my numerous fellow-workers here in Munich. I remember especially those who throughout many years of work in the service of anthroposophy, permeated with loving spiritual warmth, have felt the call to unite their knowledge and experience with what we here are trying to do. Let me first gratify a heartfelt wish by alluding to the two ladies who have co-operated with me in quite a special way, Ms Stinde and Countess Kalckreuth,25 so that today the beautiful harmony between their spiritual thinking and their purely technical work shines upon us everywhere in this Munich festival. Permit me to mention our good friend Adolf Arenson,26 who in this as in previous years has composed the music for all three plays. I leave it to your own hearts to judge these compositions. I myself regard it as a fortunate destiny that our work should have been completed by the musical compositions of our dear friend Arenson. Further I feel it to be a particular mark of good fortune that the stage effects which hovered over the scenes and imbued them with truly religious spirit should have been carried out so admirably by Baroness von Eckhardtstein.27 To me every flicker of light, be it red or blue, every shade in the scenic effect, be it light or subdued, is important and meaningful, and that the Baroness should feel this is among the things which we should regard as indeed the work of the spirit.

I need only call your attention to the scenery contributed by our artists Mr Linde, Mr Folkert and Mr Hass, and in mentioning them I would like you to understand that the spiritual thought which lives in their souls has found its way even into their paint brushes. It is spirituality that you see in the scenery which these three have contributed. Of course, in none of the things I have mentioned do we find perfection, but we find the beginning of an aim. I should like you to see in all that is willed here, in all that cannot yet be fully achieved, how one can think of the future development of art.

That is why it is so tremendously important too that the dramatic production should only be in the hands of actors who are striving for spiritual knowledge. It is my wish, not out of personal preference but because it cannot be otherwise, that not a single word in our dramatic performances should be spoken by someone with a different orientation, even if the lines were spoken with perfect artistry and the utmost refinement of stage diction.