1970 The Golden Blade The Golden Blade The Golden Blade Copies of the following back issues are still available from the 1970 Rudolf Steiner Bookshop, 35, Park Road, London, N.W.I. Postage 112 per copy 1951 1953 The Cosmic Word and Indi From Philosophy to Anthro- vidual Man Rudolf Steiner posophy Rudolf Steiner T h e E a r . Rudolf Sieitier 13 The Heavenly Hierarchies The Threefold Structttre of the A d a m B i t i l e s t o n World George Adams A Student with Rudolf Steiner Heinz Miiller 33 Evolution and Creation Michael and St. George (I) The Disappearing Trick Owen Barfield E . L - G r a n t W a t s o n Isabel Wyatt 53 Form in Art and in Society "Going Through the Mill" Biography and Behaviour John Davy 67 Owen Barfield Maurice Wood The Chess-Gazing Boy The Feast of Torro M i s t l e t o e T h e r a p y f o r C a n c e r Dietrich Boie 82 C h a r l e s W a t e r m a n John Bolsover Price 3/- Price 3/9 Age and Destiny Adam Bittleston 94 1962 Beethoven's Two Worlds . Charles Waterman 109 Boundaries of Natural Science, Rudolf Steiner. Paths to the Spirit, The Situation of Universities in Rue>Olf Steiner. Translating the Gospels, Adam Bittleston. Bacon and Modern Science, John Waterman. The Heritage of Man, Violet Plincke. France Colette Courtais 131 Moving Through Human Life, Olive Whicher. Subud at First Hand, Katharine Trevelyan. Studies of Threefold Man, C. D. Feast of All The Mentally Handicapped in Souls, Isabel Wyatt Price 4/3 OUR Midst . Jforman Davidson 135 1967 1968 Conscience & Astonishment Nervous Conditions of Our Time Rudolf Steiner Rudolf Steiner Ephesus & the Castle of the Grail The Meaning of Initiation A. C. Harwood Emil Bock B O O K R E V I E W S Poetry & Knowledge in an Age of Science & Human Rights S c i e n c e C h a r l e s D a v y John Davy William Blake, Painter, Poet, Visionary . 1 5 2 Words are Death & Resurrection Where is Fancy Bred? John Turner Owen Barfield The William Blake Trust Facsimiles ■ 154 The Dove as a Sacred Bird Shakespeare''s Troubled Kings Russia, Past, Present and Future • ' 5 5 A d a m B i t t l e s t o n Karl Konig Personal Memories of Dr. Karl The Leap Carl Kovacs Stave Churches in Norway ■ 157 Konig The Dews of Memory Berta Konig, Tilla Konig and Isabel Wyatt A. N. St. Paul Arnold Freeman Dolphins, Children of the Sea Spiritual Science and Mysticism Karl Konig Alan Howard Edited by Adam Bittleston Incomes Policy & Personal Fulfil The Grand Illusion S t a n l e y M e s s e n g e r ment Gerald Rowe Price ioj6 {ii/8 post free) from the Rudolf The Protestant' G e r t r u d e M . W a r d Traffic and Character A d a m B i t t l e s t o n Steiner Bookshops 35 Park Roady London, ff.W.i Price 10/6 Price 10/6 or the Rudolf Steiner Book Centre, 54 Bloomsbury 1969 Street, London, W.C.i The Great Virtues, Rudolf Steiner. The Threefold Sun, E. Vreede. From a Notebook of 1924, Rudolf Steiner. Oracles, A. C. Harwcwd. An U.S.A. Distributors: The Anthroposophic Press, Interchange of Letters. The Woodward of BrocHiande, Isabel Wyatt. 211 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016 Violet Plincke, A. M. Gray. What is Eiving Water' /'Theodore Schwenk. Man, the Creation of Cosmic Powers, I. Wegman. Thoughts on Heart Transplants B. C. J. Lievegold. Reincarnation in Clinical Practice, A. Guirdham. 10/6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS EDITORIAL NOTES The editor's particular thanks are due to Miss Bosset, Librarian at Rudolf Steiner House, London, for WITHMr the Owen great Barfield unspoken writes questionin his article, 'Do 'The I exist?' Disappearing of which patient help in finding an appropriate lecture by Trick', much else in this issue is concerned. Though it may not Rudolf Steiner for this issue. be apparent, this question has been sharpened by the events of The cover design is by Mr John Wilkes. 1969. Many people have spoken or written about the contrast between man's technical ability and his social failures. But it has not been seen clearly enough that the kind of thinking of which man is today such a master, and which has enabled him to step on the moon, is essentially concerned with space, and with time only as it is expressed in spatial movement; while the real understanding of human individuality has to leave space alto gether, and is concerned with time in a different way. A wide spread, not fully conscious feeling that this problem exists may well be at work in the profoundly ambivalent attitude of humanity to its latest achievement. (These notes have to be written before the November Apollo mission.) In ordinary life, we understand other people and ourselves through the sequence of experience in time. A more far- reaching understanding depends upon finding our way back, at first in a very general and tentative way, into the kind of existence which preceded for each of us the taking on of an earthly body. Behind the world-wide student unrest, which Mile Courtais describes as it affects France, an intense dis satisfaction with knowledge limited to spatial conceptions (even to a great extent in historical studies) is at work. For msmy young people, the only experience that does something to re-unite them with their pre-natal existence is found through music. Again and again between 1900 and his death in 1925 Rudolf Steiner gave descriptions, made possible by his clear and disciplined initiate vision, of the experience which the human soul and spirit pass through between death and a new birth. He showed how difficult it is to describe this experience in human language; it could only be done by means of com parisons which are always in some way inadequate. But one of Printed in Great Britain by Robert Cunningham and Sons Lid, Alva the best comparisons, which he uses in the lecture on 'The 4 E D I T O R I A L N O T E S E D I T O R I A L N O T E S 5 Ear' here printed and elsewhere, is with the experience of that what he may have to endure has a meaning, both for music. others and for himself. * * * For fifty years now, as Dr Boie points out in this issue, much patient work has been devoted to putting Rudolf Steiner's in The great achievements of medicine in our century are also dications about the treatment of cancer into practice. Many based upon a spatial thinking. Indeed it would seem absurd to who turn to his article will do so with the urgent, and entirely most people today for them to be based on anything else, for justified question 'How far is this work succeeding?' And they the physical body is incontestably a spatial thing. And it is may grow impatient with all he has to say about the place of taken for granted that illnesses are essentially mechanical mistletoe in the history of the earth and about the myth of failures, though in a machine even more complicated than man Baldur. As the end of his article shows, those who use the constructs himself. If 'psychological factors' are thought of mistletoe therapy are deeply concerned to express their results only in terms of behaviour, as Mr John Davy describes, these in a form which can interest researchers and practitioners in can be seen as spatial too. general. But in writing for general readers, or for students of But where we get to know any particular human life at all anthroposophy who are not doctors, it would be onesided to be closely, neither illnesses, nor peculiarities of behaviour, appear concerned only with measurable results. Though cancer as a just as failures in the efficiency of a system. They are intimately disease appears to go far back into the past, it is in several ways concerned with the innermost being, the spaceless reality, a particularly characteristic disease of our time. There is which we are beginning to understand. If we know someone much in technological civilisation which is demonstrably car who suffers from a disability, it does not seem just an external cinogenic. And a complete therapy will aim at widening the or accidental fact about him; how the disability came about, consciousness of our civilisation so that it can include in wake how in practice he deals with it, how far he overcomes the ful awareness what was once expressed in the significant dreams limitations it imposes, what changes it brings in his whole handed down as mythology. bearing towards life - all these things appear as essential tokens * * H s of his individuality. In the treatment of an illness or disability, such considera It was during the surgical treatment of an illness that the tions can easily be ignored, both by the doctor and by the young Heinz Muller experienced the backward vision through patient himself. All attention may be concentrated on getting his life which aroused in him questions, for which he could find the body back into good working order as quickly as possible. answers only from Rudolf Steiner. A number of instances of And very much, that is of immense value in human life, is done such backward vision have been recorded, particularly by in this way.