Albert Steffen, the Poet Marie Steiner 34 a Selection of Poems 38 Little Myths Albert Steffen 51

NUMBER 39 AUTUMN, 1984 ISSN 0021-8235

. . . Albert Steffen does not need to learn the way into the spiritual world from Anthroposophy. But from him Anthroposophy can come to know of a living “Pilgrimage ” — as an innate predisposition o f the soul — to the world of spirit. Such a poet-spirit must, if he is rightly understood, be recognized within the anthroposophical movement as the bearer o f a message from the spirit realm. It must indeed be felt as a good destiny that he wishes to work within this movement. H e adds, to the evidence which Anthroposophy can give of the truth inherent within it, that which works within a creative personality as spirit-bearer like the light of this truth itself.

Rudolf Steiner F ro m Das Goetheanum, February 22, 1925.

Editor for this issue: Christy Barnes STAFF: Co-Editors: Christy Barnes and Arthur Zajonc; Associate Editor: Jeanne Bergen; Editorial Assistant: Sandra Sherman; Business Manager and Subscriptions: Scotti Smith. Published twice a year by the Anthroposophical Society in America. Please address subscriptions ($10.00 per year) and requests for back numbers to Scotti Smith, Journal for Anthroposophy, R.D. 2, Ghent, N.Y. 12075. Title Design by Walter Roggenkamp; Vignette by Albert Steffen.

STEFFEN IN THE CRISIS OF OUR TIMES To Create out of Nothing 4 The Problem of Evil 5 Present-Day Tasks for Humanity Albert Steffen 8

IN THE WORDS OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES Albert Steffen as Artist-Knower Hermann Poppelbaum 11 Impressions of Albert Steffen From “The Excellence of Albert Steffen” Percy MacKaye 18 From the Basler Nachrichten Hermann Hesse 19 A T ribute Bruno Walter 21 As Illustrator and Painter Richard Kroth 22 Albert Steffen, A Survey of his Life Henry Barnes 23

POET OF A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS A Book of Poems by Albert Steffen Rudolf Steiner 30 Albert Steffen, the Poet Marie Steiner 34 A Selection of Poems 38 Little Myths Albert Steffen 51

REDEMPTION OF DESTINY: EXCERPTS FROM NOVELS Transplanting, from Ott, Alois and Werelsche 55 Operation; Session of Parliament, from Elderman’s Memoirs 59 Dante and Giotto, A Conversation, from The Mission of Poetry 67 The Burning of the Bau, from Wildiron 71

DRAMATIST OF THE NEW MYSTERIES Albert Steffen and the Drama Frederick Hiebel 77 The Engineer’s Report, from The Fall of Antichrist Albert Steffen 90 Costume Designs and Stage Sets Albert Steffen 80-85

THERAPY OF FREEDOM AND LOVE: ESSAYS Concerning Freedom and Love, from The Mission of Poetry 93 Mani, Part II Albert Steffen 97

COMMENTS AND REVIEWS Albert Steffen and the Dead Manfred Krueger 111 Thoughts on Reading The Mission of Poetry Karl Ege 114 From George Archibald’s Life Story Susan Riley 118 Remolding of Destinies Christy Barnes 121

ILLUSTRATIONS Albert Steffen, a photograph 2 A Eurythmy Form Rudolf Steiner 36 Elisabeth Steffen and Felicitas, a photograph 41 The Little Sylph, a drawing Ann M an Rascher 50 C ontributors to this Issue 123 List of all the Poems in this Issue and their Sources 124 [Image: photograph of Albert Steffen with signature beneath photo] STEFFEN IN THE CRISIS OF OUR TIMES

Chorus

From Adonis Play by Albert Steffen

Let this be for us our cosmic goal: — To paint a living picture for the soul Which the claws of death cannot despoil, Which lights the darkest dungeon deep below — Take a new earth with us when we go, Which no evil shadow e’er can soil, No tide nor flood can ever wash away, No wind that blows can ever bleach or blight, Will never yield to acid’s poisoned bite, Will never melt in fire’s burning ray, That’s brighter than the sun’s own visage is — But only Christ himself can give us this!

Translated by Arvia Ege

----The entire text of Adonis Play has been translated into English by Sophia W alsh.

3 From A SPIRIT SEEKER’S PORTFOLIO

To Create Out o f Nothing

ALBERT STEFFEN

Once and for all — so everyone may say to himself — I am a creative human being. Just when I am confronted with noth ingness and feel myself to be of no account, this is a sign for me to wrest something from the abyss and, by this means, lend courage to my comrades instead of infecting them with a sense of impotence by losing my own courage. The thought that one must never hold oneself worthless is confirmed when I see others despair. This sight of the degeneration that spreads itself about me is the signal that I must become a man who can awaken to insight, find the power to transform himself and become a helper of others. In this resolve — the resolve of the spirit-man — which must ever and again renew itself, always on its own new-won ground, is to be sought the origin of the mysteries of modern times. These have to pass through a threefold abyss. Man, the ego-being, has to overcome the tyrant, the beast, and death within his own soul before being able to be “creative out of n o th in g .” * With this resolve, which has to be seized in the immediate moment, one receives new powers. They are the powers of awakened thinking, dead no longer like that of material sci ence; of purified feeling, which lifts itself to the whole of man kind, instead of only to a group; creative will, filled with the knowledge that it will carry the fruits of the present life into the next. Through this resolve, at some future stage of human devel opment, if not in the present, evil will be turned to good, if I do not now falter. Translated by Arvia Ege

----*An expression of Rudolf Steiner’s.

4 From MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER

The Problem of Evil

ALBERT STEFFEN

I had come directly upon the problem of evil through my own experience and, without any further help, had had to come to terms with it. The certainty grew upon me that it roiled anony mously in the masses who paraded the streets long after mid night and that in every single human being it lay germinant and could shoot up at any moment. Inner and outer watchful ness were the only protection. But the masses slept. He who had become aware, as had happened to me, of what was brew ing in the ocean of the abyss, felt horror seize him.

The “hearth of destruction”* which is present in each human being, but which remains hidden to ordinary conscious ness, had already at that time become perceptible to me. I sensed how evil can surge up out of every individual.

What is it that covers these depths of the abyss for man, out of which only the outermost foam caps, phosphorescent, are throw n up?

It is the idle talk at the surface of every day, although even this is directed from below; public opinion, spread over it by a deceitful press; and as the first sip on awaking, as a last nip be fore falling asleep — the morning and evening papers; the mid day editions may serve as after-dinner nap — instead of self-reflection.

Seen from my room in the Elsasserstrasse in Berlin (although I could only look down into a dark well between buildings) life appeared to me like a monstrous nightmare in which disaster,

----*An expression of Rudolf Steiner’s which I heard him use in lectures at a much later time.

5 lying in wait, was already foreshadowed: poisoning of the blood, disintegration, and soul-leprosy. How must that passage from the lecture cycle given by Rudolf Steiner on August 4th, 1906, in which he speaks of the origin of a future evil race and of a community of men whose task it is to overcome and to transform it through the spirit, have shaken a young man who, in his isolation, was dreaming his way through history. This community is that of the Mani- chaeans, so named because of their founder Manes. Rudolf Steiner speaks in the ninth of these lectures, entitled “Good and Evil,” of the fact that man, who has thrust the ani mal kingdom out of himself, also puts out into the world the good and evil which work within him and separates them. Thus good and evil will each create a race of its own, even though not in the sense of previous races, and this division must be regarded as a preparatory stage in the evolution toward a universal state of humanity. This should not be misunderstood, he said, and went on to state that one must distinguish between soul development and the development of race. A soul may be incarnated in a race which is in decline, but if the soul does not of itself become evil, it does not need to come to birth in a receding race, but may be incarnated later in one which is ascending. Souls enough stream from other quarters into the degenerating races.

But what is within must make its way outward, and man will rise higher when his karma has worked itself out; something extraordinarily interesting is to be realized in this connection.

Rudolf Steiner then referred to that community founded by Manes, about which there existed at that time only very incom plete descriptions, which have since been revised frequently as a result of the well-known discoveries of Manes’ writings. These statements of Rudolf Steiner’s have, as a result, been con firmed from all points of view. He set forth at this point the tasks of the Manichaeans, showing how their task exists in increased measure today and must be fulfilled if humanity is not utterly to fall prey to a war of all against all. He says that there will be men in the future

6 “who have no evil in their karma any longer, and that there will also be a race, evil by nature, in which all evil is present to a greater degree than in the fiercest beasts, for they will commit evil consciously, cleverly, with a highly developed intel ligence.” Thirty-five years after Rudolf Steiner spoke in this way to a small circle, the whole of humanity witnessed the truth of his words. One should indeed take to heart those indi cations about which he spoke at the same time concerning the possibilities of a community whose members could become “transformers of evil” in later generations:

The enormous difficulty of this task lies in the fact that in those evil groups of mankind it is not as in a naughty child where good still exists side by side with evil and may be ennobled by means of example and teaching. To transform radically that naturally inherent evil is what the Manichaean order is already learning today. And this transmuted evil, after the work of transformation is accomplished, becomes a most especial good. A state of holiness will become a moral condition on earth! The power to transform will bring about this condition of sanctity, but this goal cannot be achieved unless evil is at first created, and in the power which must be applied to overcome it, there develops the force for highest goodness. The ground must be manured with disgusting dung; the dung must, as it were, first work its way as a ferment into the ploughed ground. Thus mankind needs the dung of evil in order to reach the state of highest holiness. This is the mission of evil. M an grows strong when he has to exercise his muscles; in just the same way, good which wishes to intensify itself to holiness must first overcome the evil which is set against it. Evil has the task of bringing humanity to a higher stage. Such things allow us to feel our way into the secrets of existence. Later, if man has overcome evil, he can set out upon the redemption of those creatures which have been thrust down, and at whose cost he himself has advanced. This is the meaning of evolution.

Translated by Henry Barnes

7 From A N ADDRESS

Present-Day Tasks for Humanity

ALBERT STEFFEN

The first task of spiritual science, Rudolf Steiner told us, is to be awake, to awaken constantly. Anthroposophy is the great arouser to full wakefulness. It is not sufficient, he emphasized, to look merely for the causes of the catastrophes that are now breaking in upon mankind. The Michael-impulse works with the consequences of what happens, transforming them. It was in keeping with this impulse that Rudolf Steiner laid the new foundation stone for our Society after the tragic burning of the First Goetheanum. During the last months of his life he spoke particularly of the great, decisive events which were to confront humanity at the end of the century: the powerful onslaught of the powers of opposition on the one hand, and of the activity of the Christ in the etheric world upon the other, and of how, in order to meet and to deal with these great decisions, a commu nity of human beings must exist who as free personalities have become firm within themselves, and who at the same time form together a strong whole. This is the task of the Anthroposophical Society, which has become the bearer of the Michael impulse. For this, wakeful ness is necessary. It is a testing of courage, he said. For cour age will keep us awake. Only lack of it could allow us to fall asleep. Here the support which we need can flow from an element of warmth akin to spiritual fire, which is kindled by that pure liv ing thought sprung of selfless enthusiasm for the development of the world and of man such as occurs through a spiritual en counter with Michael.

8 The Archangel Michael, Rudolf Steiner said, is a being who actually reveals nothing unless, through rigorous spiritual work on the earth, we bring something to him. He is a silent spirit, contained within himself. Whereas the other Archangels are talkative spirits — in a spiritual sense of course — Michael is a decidedly contained spirit, who speaks little and at most gives sparse directives. For that which one experiences through Michael is actually not the word, but the glance — the power of his gaze. . . Because, during the development of the past centuries, the power of the intellect has become, in increasing measure, sepa rated from man himself, it can now be laid hold of and used in a mechanistic way by the Lord of Death, Ahriman; while in antithesis to him stands the conqueror of death, Christ, the Resurrected One. And it is here that the new age, named for the Archangel Michael, begins, and with it, the great decision for every human being. In the sphere of thought, Michael has become the pro- claimer, the Herald of Christ. He carries the light of knowledge before him as he moves. He leads thoughts once more into life. He gives us the armour we need for the deeds of life. Concretely spoken, where do Ahriman and Michael work? And what is their main characteristic? A hrim an forces. M ichael frees. *

When we turn again to Rudolf Steiner’s deed at Christmas 1923, that new founding of the General Anthroposophical Soci ety reveals itself as the most individual and at the same time as the most social of all deeds yet accomplished. Through it, Rudolf Steiner united his destiny with that of humanity, both publicly and esoterically. In it the Christ impulse is revealed as presently active and leading on into the future. It can be felt livingly present in the spiritual atmosphere by one who has an inner organ for it. . . . And one may be led to ask: How can the event of Golgotha — the death and resurrection of Christ — be known, without

9 relying upon tradition, by people in the epoch of the con sciousness soul who live in space-perception? The answer is: through the spiritualization of space-knowledge. Space itself must be grasped as something spiritual and not only physical. Every sense perception can be transformed into a moral per ception; for instance, as when the blue of the heavens awakens in us awe, wonder. Or when a spatial perception is trans formed into one in time — as when we follow spiritually the metamorphosis of the plant from seed to leaf, to blossom, to fruit. Hereby the dead space-concept (plant, for instance) is given life once more, which is accomplished through the awak ened will within the ego. This activity which can cause the spirit and soul to permeate physical phenomena is a Michaelic impulse. It can be grasped and achieved only by the free and loving individuality of man. And this it is which alone can grasp the resurrection. The spiritualization of space, Rudolf Steiner says, is the gift which humanity brings to the gods. Were it to fail in this, Michael would have to return to the gods and say: Mankind wants to separate itself from us. But if he is to bring the right message, he will say: During my reign upon earth, men have raised what they have developed as purely spatial judgments to the supersensible once more. We can take humanity to our selves again, for they have united their thinking with ours. You see, my dear friends, it is a cosmic affair, something which humanity has to do, together with the divine world.

Translated by Arvia Ege

10 IN THE WORDS OF HIS CONTEMPORARIES

Albert Steffen as Artist-Knower

HERMANN POPPELBAUM

Among European writers Albert Steffen is in a class by him self. He represents a type delineated by sharpest outlines, spiri tually as well as in his bodily profile, uncompromising and challenging, and yet full of beauty — like the Swiss mountains in whose midst he was born. Stueckgold, the Parisian painter, was right, when painting his portrait, to give him the setting of a rocky path. His unique position, however, he owes to something more than landscape and background. It is the result of a union, often questioned and very rarely achieved in our time, between artist and knower. This union lifts him to a rank among the first citizens of the earth. As an artist-knower he is a challenge to our epoch. He an ticipates a form of human existence which, if the challenge is understood, will make him a model for generations to follow. This is why he ought to be known in the Western world. He bears a message for this part of the globe. How was he able to combine two strivings which seem to go in opposite directions? Have not authorities in both fields told us over and over that there can be no compromise between art and knowledge and that each must suffer when confounded by the other?

---- Reprinted with kind permission from The Forerunner, edited by Virginia Moore, Vol. IV, No. 1, 1943.

11 The answer is not an argument but a fact. And this fact is — Albert Steffen. Since he is artist and knower in one, the union must be possible. It requires such an individuality as his — so much is certain. But his achievement gives proof of a truth which is of profound human importance. The academic debate becomes obsolete. The key to the riddle is that Albert Steffen found a form of knowing which does not impair the creative urge of the artist. This knowledge does not endanger his inspiration; it only puts it through a severe test which purifies it. On the other hand, he who strives for this kind of knowledge need not fear that artistic abilities brought to bear in the field of science will impair his scientific reliability. The two directions of human striving, far from becoming confused, find a common ground on which to work together. But there is more than a cooperation between the two. Albert Steffen is the proof that full humanness can be achieved only at the risk of making the two work together, whatever may happen — a risk which he alone among artists was pre pared to take a generation ago. Whatever he says is imbued with profound method. His hold upon reality, visible or invisible, is unerring. His information reaches far out into all human concerns; however, his thoroughness does not consist in piling details one upon another but is based upon an irresistible penetration in w hich ever direction he turns. In other words, it is not the impact of a dictatorial mind which imposes order on vast materials, but the subtle functioning of matchless perceptual organs which grasp whatever is humanly important. He who can acquire so much and such diversified knowledge must have within him a profound core in which every part of the world can reveal its value for man. To undertake this means a truly Goethean enterprise within the hostile setting of our day. The result is overwhelmingly beautiful: it is as if the world itself rejoiced in finding a place to manifest its intrinsic bent toward order and entirety. A human individuality, with its doors wide open, is the proper ground on which the cosmos can appear in its totality. Indeed, the

12 individual’s lifelong effort is to beome such[become] a suitable ground: a most dignified human attitude in the face of the world, the fulfillment of a time-honored pledge put into man by his cre ators but not becoming fact without his conscious collabora tion. Albert Steffen had the courage to recognize and to take up this most human task. He extended the scope of his perceptual organs, in body, soul and spirit, through the hard work of educating cognition.

It is ju st here that traditional scientific methods have failed. They have made the picture of the world too meager to be able to present true reality: the powers of man to cognize the cosmos have been left underdeveloped in spite of all additions or auxiliary apparatus. It is fear of creative imagination which has led to a kind of methodological puritanism. All the wealth of the world, conveyed through the senses, was degraded into mere subjective illusion. The resulting world picture is a web of processes in space or time, deprived of light, warmth, color, and odor, with no human element in it. So much should be admitted: if this world picture were the truth, then the artist would have no home nor task in this world. And there could be no other task for the knower than to strip his world picture of all the fabrications which the senses put into it. This is why, in our day, the artist is the natural enemy of the scientist: he does not believe in the real value of the latter’s findings. No painter believes that colors are mere vibrations of a colorless medium; he knows that colors speak to one another and he gives them the opportunity to do so. No musician really believes that tones are mere agitations of the elastic air; he makes the musical tones speak their language to man. That artists have not demanded a better science of color and tone from the physicist of today shows that they regard him as in competent and secretly despise him. Steffen knew that agnostic science cannot lend itself to a union with art. It had to be a different kind of knowledge: one which made full use of the messages of the senses and tried to

13 penetrate into the meaning of their various languages. And here the artist could come in and help to unravel the secrets, of which, without knowledge, he had always made use! The limits of the “knowable,” once extended to include the mir acles hidden in light, color, tone, and so forth, embrace a realm of knowledge so vast that the artist becomes a willing contributor. He has to learn patience and self-restriction and orderliness, but he can remain true to himself. From his early studies of natural science, Steffen had these methodological virtues within him. So what he needed was en couragement and spiritual nourishment on his difficult path. And he was granted the joyous blessing of finding what he needed in Rudolf Steiner’s work. When Steffen found him (it was about 1910), the latter had already been at work for three decades, as educator of man in the extension of knowledge into the realm of full humanity. (His work he calls Anthroposophy because man was both its beginning and supreme end.) No wonder that a man-centered, but unlimited knowledge such as this, rich in its perceptual content and lucid and colorful in its con ceptual architecture, was vividly seized upon by Steffen. It was a gift sent by the gods to help him on his life’s path. This is important. The artist Steffen, author already of some unusual novels, did not “pick up” a ready-made system of doctrines. He was not the man to adopt a system. In assuming this, superficial critics have misjudged both Anthroposophy and Albert Steffen. Moreover, they overlook that Steffen’s line of life was oriented before he met Anthroposophy. That he met it was the result of an already chosen direction. Only because Anthroposophy springs from an art of knowledge could the artist Albert Steffen find in it what he sought: a path to truth each step of which was gained in conscientiousness and soberness and yet with all the human forces which the artist is willing to muster. As knowledge of the human being extends beyond the limits of the senses, beyond the gates of birth and death, ever deeper creative forces are required from the student — and he recognizes ever more clearly how his abilities as an artist grow with his cognitive efforts. On the other hand, what Steffen did as a poet and writer provided in

14 valuable experience towards a clearer understanding of spiri tual facts. His diaries of the years in Munich (before the First World War) reflect the phases of this beautiful and moving interplay. Today, Steffen has become the prototype of the artist- knower. When meeting him or reading his prose — not to speak of his poetry — one soon realizes the vast difference from the pre-War artist who despised knowledge for fear that it might impair his inspiration. The opposite is needed now, and Steffen shows how it is done: the artist must be prepared to plunge into the adventure of cognition and to risk his creativeness in order, on a higher level, to regain it. He who would speak of the heavenly beauty pouring itself out on man on a spring morning must know the secret of how color arises from the interplay of light with darkness and how through the human eye the soul goes out to meet a world which is akin to it. He who would praise the dignity of man must know how the dome structure of the human skull arises from a metamorphosis of the upper end of the vertebral column. All this is suprem ely human, but entirely unsubjective knowledge. If the artist fears triviality or delusion, then his faith in world- reality is still too weak. And then he may slide back into comfortable and self-assertive subjectivisms which shun the full light of consciousness lest they be dissolved in it. These subjectivisms were the stronghold of the artist of a previous epoch. Moreover, they often served only as disguise for a secretly fostered materialism in the field of knowledge. The bombardment of atoms can be aesthetically dressed up and made into a tolerable hymn on the beginning of the world. The rise of man from the ape can be adorned by flowery lan guage and offered as a piece of dramatic poetry. Here is a point of great importance: Albert Steffen would never succumb to such a compromise with materialistic science. The new type of artist-knower represented by him will never uncritically accept the doctrines of traditional science and weave a halo of reverence around them. Much as he appreciates the sincerity of the effort, he realizes the basic fallacy in a knowledge which is not deliberately man-centered.

15 He breaks away from materialistic puritanism and shapes the perceptive organs (in spirit, soul and body) into tools which are open to the wealth of world manifestation because they have become unselfish. The artist-knower, by renouncing selfish claims and giving himself over to devoted study, under goes a purifying process which burns up every subjectivism and is rewarded by the entrance into him of an unheard-of variety of experience. He does not refrain from going to the bottom of the current fallacy that colors and sounds, scents and tastes are less dependable messages than movements and forms of things in space. He joins the ranks of those who have understood the er roneous premises in contemporary theories of knowledge. H e b e comes thoroughly acquainted with the intricacies of percept and concept, of subject and object, of idea and semblance because he wants to know what man calls knowledge. But as a practical knower he develops his senses and his reasoning power into vanquishers of every arbitrariness. It is not through a lack of persistent thinking that he fails (as the traditional scientist used to put the case against the artist) to strip the “objective world” of the deceptive “subjective” sense-qualities; on the contrary, he restores color and sound and all the rest to their pristine and righteous role in the universe. And, as his senses clarify, his thought life widens into an organ, too; with its help he is as able to grasp totality as to take hold of the minutest detail which his devotion embraces. The struggle of the search for truth Steffen knows thor oughly. His essays often reflect the by-paths and detours which the student has to take before finding a solution in the light of spirit. But even more are we moved by those characters in his novels who are exponents of a tragic search, entangled in de structive error. There are many of them in his books: histo rians, surgeons, psychiatrists, archaeologists. Some of them suf fer defeat and reap the fruit of their efforts only in the life after death, with the help of a spirit-imbued daughter, husband or friend. Others break through to spirit cognition, as Steffen himself did, and become benefactors of the human race. There is no other author in our epoch who has made alive these

16 tragedies of cognition and these triumphs of knowledge as Stef fen did. With this deed he brought before the eyes of our con temporaries the deadly struggle in which we all are involved and which can only be turned to good if mankind consciously searches for the spirit. He also paid back part of the debt he owes to Anthroposophical cognition, because the vivid descrip tion of the struggle for truth in individual examples may help many a student to recognize his own problems on the way to the spirit and strengthen in him the confidence needed for enduring in his search. Steffen has given in these characters of his books a most human picture of the knower as seen with the eyes of an artist who himself is a knower; it is the one great contribution which may, in the eyes of future generations, atone for the many fail ures of this age. There have been, they will see, invaluable forces even in the errors of this time; for this time has devel oped a most distinguished representative of the realm of love: the hero who woos unstained truth, and whose tragedies and complexi ties will bear more fruit and possess more human interest than the troubles of the romantic hero.

Poem by Albert Steffen

A god’s eye gazes downward through the drear Satanic spheres that shroud the earth we dwell, And heaven’s love appears disfigured here To bloody judgment and the fires of hell. O hero on the battlefield of thought, Trust-armored, wake your heart’s gaze too. Send down its rays of crystal, spirit-wrought, Through black of matter. Brighten it to blue! Fall not a prey to Ahriman’s grey hold. The sun-seed hidden in the ground turns green. The earth, uprisen in shimmering dust of gold Shines shriven in the dawn’s red ether-sheen.

Translated by Christy Barnes

17 IMPRESSIONS OF ALBERT STEFFEN

Percy MacKaye

TO ALBERT STEFFEN

Pure soul of Switzerland, whose cosmic heart Pulses to music of the Morning Stars Chanting their hymn of endless Avatars Incarnating the Christus’ sacred art: You, in whom meek courage is the counterpart Of angel-wisdom, changing the gaunt scars That gash the ruddy scowl of ravening Mars To hieroglyphs of love on passion’s chart:

Steffen, most steadfast-gentle of the bold Who succour freedom in the ultimate lair O f fear — the self itself: seer of the unseen Monsters of twilight and the aureoled Seraphs of Dawn: your spirit rises there Shadowless in the Muses’ burning sheen.

Poet, dramatist, essayist, novelist, artist, each and all, as he is, his very nature makes it difficult to interpret and publicize him. Naivete, imbued with subtlety; intellectualism, with mystical in sight; delicacy, with moral, sensitive human feeling; lyricism, with epic grandeur: these apparent paradoxes, welded into har mony by a whimsical, lovable, unpredictably dependable per sonality all his own, present a living image of genius which the photographer, the engraver, the critic, and the advertiser find almost impossible to reproduce “as is,” for a commer cially-educated public.

---- From Albert Steffen, Translation and Tribute, Adonis Press, 1959.

18 In my own experience, some of the happiest hours of my life were those spent by me in Dornach, while Steffen and I were “inter-translating” nine of each other’s poems, soon afterwards published there, in 1937, in a little volume by us both, entitled “In Aendern Land — In Another Land.” There, at the ring of the door-bell, he would come gliding rapidly down the inner stairway to greet my wife and me, in the hall, with a dancing eye-glint of welcome and an almost whispered utterance of deep gladness, in his Swiss accent, and would lead us to the stately quiet of his arm-chaired sitting-room, decorated with his own quaintly-colorful paintings, or perhaps to a collation in the dim dining room, presided over by the diffident graciousness of his smiling partner in genius, Elisabeth Steffen, his wife. How shall I sketch his portrait for the reader? The staunch piety of William Penn in black, Quakerish hat, all twinkled-over and merrified by the arch smile and skipping gait of the Marble Faun, himself, on a holiday; the athleticism of an Alpine skier, subdued to the tender solicitude of St. Fran cis, feeding his birds; the serenity of a sibyllic figure, carved on an Egyptian tomb, touched to imminent tears by the tragedy of Golgotha: these images may suggest, but they cannot wholly conjure, the spirit of incorruptible friendliness that lives in my heart as the personal symbol of excellence — Albert Steffen.

Hermann Hesse*

Hermann Hesse, writing in the Basler Nachrichten of March 7, 1914, welcomed his younger colleague with perceptive insight. Reviewing the current literary scene of his native Switzerland, Hesse spoke about Steffen as a young author who had experienced the doubtful privilege of having achieved the respect of fellow writers and critics without having become generally known. Hesse felt that this should, and would, change.

----*From Journal for Anthroposophy, No. 14, 1971.

19 Steffen, he said, should be much more widely read because his works “are writings of the kind we need.” Hesse wrote at length about all three of Steffen’s first novels and expressed his delight at the artistry with which Steffen created pictures, colors, tones. He also referred more than once to the “ethical enthusiasm, the earnestly joyous faith in humanity” which spoke to him through the young poet’s work. O f the second novel, The Destiny of Brutality, Hesse observed:

No longer do charming, playful incidents blossom at random along the path; here everything is focused upon the goal, and the goal is the lore of selfless love, of the possibility of atone ment and of psychic healing. Like a dreamer walking in his sleep, the poet traverses the heights and depths of humanity, dwelling in equal love and faithfulness with the scholar and with the murderer; everywhere seeing erring human frailty and everywhere believing with joyful fervor in the possibility of redemption, in the power of goodness, of joy, of brotherly love. This is no dispassionate scientific observation and repre sentation of reality — reality is indeed scorned in a certain way, inasmuch as all outer action melts into nothing before the recognition of the supreme value of the power of the human soul and of love. But no trace of moralistic narrowness, of sit ting in judgment, or of lack of understanding is to be found in the poet’s attitude. Life is for Steffen no mere play of natural forces, but an eternal activity, the struggle and suffering of love, of just that capacity for love in whose triumph and significance he firmly believes.

There is, Hesse feels, a living myth-making power at work in Steffen which reminds him of the second part of Faust and of Dante:

The books of Albert Steffen are a declaration of war against that cult of individualism and irresponsible determinism of which we are all so heartily tired. They breathe a spirit and a will which can serve and help us all. We should be thankful for this reason to their author.

20 Bruno Walter

Since I have gradually become acquainted with the work of Albert Steffen, and destiny has granted me several unforget table occasions of meeting him personally, I have felt a grow ing gratitude for what I owe to him: light from his wisdom, warmth from his kindness, guidance from his Christianity; his encyclopedic learning was a source of knowledge to me and deep was the influence I experienced from the “Leitmotiv” of his life: his service to Anthroposophy. There also live in my heart indelible impressions which I received from my visits with him at his house in Dornach, and from having met him and Mrs. Steffen in Rome, where they listened to the perfor mance of Beethoven symphonies which I conducted, and where my daughter and I had a heartwarming talk with them in their hotel room — unforgettable also because of his spiritual sereni ty despite strong physical pains preceding an approaching dangerous illness. Soon after their return from Rome he was to undergo a very serious operation and I had the moving ex perience of seeing both of them, after this ordeal, in a hospital in Basel where I received an enduring impression of his ex traordinary patience in bearing his suffering. His novel Elder- m an’s Memoirs Written in the Hospital is the noble spirit-fruit of this difficult time. I dare not — as a musician — add to these reminiscences words about his immense literary work. But I cannot resist mentioning at least two themes in his writings, which seem to me highly characteristic of Albert Steffen. One is the abun dance of therapeutic thoughts in his work, revealing the omni presence of profound compassion for the pains and sufferings of mankind on its earthly path. The other theme I see in the genuine atmosphere of dreams, so fully convincing in his tales that we cannot help but dream with him, who appears to us a demiurge of that mysterious world of dreams, and who is en dowed with the vision of images originating in the spiritual w orld.

----From Albert Steffen, Translation and Tribute, Adonis Press, 1959.

21 Richard Kroth

STEFFEN AS ILLUSTRATOR AND PAINTER

The graphic drawings and paintings of Albert Steffen, the Swiss poet and dramatist, are unique in our day. His line drawings, particularly, occupy a singular place in the graphic arts. At a time when the foremost exponents of black and white drawing work out of abstract geometric principles, or out of surrealistic organic symbolism, Albert Steffen creates line draw ings which at first sight are reminiscent of Byzantine art. Rudolf Steiner said of Byzantine art that the images were snowed in, so to speak, out of the cosmos — out of the weight less world of the spirit. Byzantine imagery is expressed in two dimensions, out of a seemingly timeless world always remind ing the onlooker of the world beyond this one. Their figures are held upon the surface by the surrounding gold background. Gold is sunlight that has gained weight, or earthly gravity. Nevertheless this background reminded the Byzantines of the cosmic origin of their art. This first impression of the relationship of Albert Steffen’s art to that of the Byzantine vanishes quickly when one lives into his imagery. One is gradually aware of the dynamic quality which streams from his work. The strongly drawn lines, although treated two dimensionally, lift themselves from the background with tremendous will and movement, imbued with life. Whether he expresses mineral, plant, animal or man or the beings above man, his art is simplicity itself. The whole be comes a powerful gesture of spirit revelation, suggesting a world of endless depth whose luminosity speaks of eternity. His drawings suggest a calligraphy which never loses its stamp of originality — born out of the artist’s inner life. Although his paintings are not as familiar to me as his draw ings, they too carry the same stamp of originality. Their sur face quality expresses a timeless experience, clothed in lumi nous colors of oriental richness. The surfaces are laid on with remarkable surety and simplicity — showing the undeniable hand of a master.

22 Albert Steffen

A Survey of His Life Written at the Time of His Death

HENRY BARNES

When we stand in the presence of one who has died and look on the face which we have known in life, we may feel that we have caught a glimpse of our friend for the first time as he really is. His true being seems to hover around the features which have become still in death and to illuminate them as if from outside. How blind I have been, one may say to oneself at such a moment. I have known my friend for so long and have never recognized him until now, when it is too late. In the tragic finality of this experience an impulse is kindled which leads across the threshold. This is the love one expe riences for the individuality which has been released from the confines of the life which has just ended. One longs to share with the departed his experience of his past life spread out before him in a great tableau and to undergo with him the purification which will free him from the burdens of the past and release him to become more and more truly his full human self. The greater the individuality, the more this process of self-recognition — this dying into one’s higher self — pene trates life before physical death. In such personalities death becomes a conscious transition, long prepared for in life. This was particularly true with Albert Steffen whose most recent work seems to mount toward an inner climax — a spiritual sunrise. To see Albert Steffen’s life through his own

----From Newsletter of the Anthroposophical Society in America, No. 97, Autum n, 1963: In Memoriam Albert Steffen.

23 eyes is to participate in a drama whose scenes become more and more transparent for the spirit. In his novel From George Archibald’s Life Story and Posthumous Papers,* Steffen writes his biography from the point of view of his higher self. What follows is told largely in Albert Steffen’s own words, leading to the encounter with Rudolf Steiner which proved decisive for his entire life. Born December 10th, 1884, in the village of Murgenthal, Canton Bern, Switzerland, his individuality found here the soil it needed for its soul’s growth. A doctor’s house is the best seed-bed for destiny. The way his mother laid out the flower beds, snipped off twigs, decorated the sills with geraniums, wak ened in the boy that tenderness toward flowers which became the fertile soil for his conscience in later life. Running, swim ming, climbing he came to know and love his environment. He attributed his partiality for illustrating human laws with particular cases to his having rubbed his knees sore on fruit laden boughs rather than on bare gymnastic apparatus. A poplar whose brittle top branches cracked under him came into his mind long afterwards when he was in danger of getting abstract. He realized in later years that in his youth he had not really lived inside his body, but rather with the divine forces of the Creator who had made everything so beautiful. An angel had gone in and out of his happy heart and had moved in his pulse and breathing. But death also came to him early. From all around the sick came into the house of his father, the doctor of Murgenthal. Their cramps and seizures, their infections and wounds, filled the boy with horror until his mother told him how the baker got his cough and the thatcher his trembling muscles and the boy’s disgust changed into a compassionate musing. These people became his friends. Evil crossed his path at an early age. On the day he first came home from school Medor, the forester’s huge setter, sprang at him, put its paws on his shoulders and bit him in the right cheek.

---- *English translation by Virginia Brett, Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, Dornach.

24 He carried on a war against wasps and hornets. He beat out their nests, or diverted a streamlet to wash their combs away, and was pursued by them until he flung himself down in the hay and let them fly over his head. “Somehow he felt obliged to carry on this war against evil powers. He felt that it was an essential part of life to conquer them, otherwise one would be overwhelmed by them. For this reason he chose as a bathing place that spot at the bend of the river Aare where, a few dozen years before, during the Franco- Prussian War, three interned fusiliers from the Bourbaki army were sucked down by a whirlpool and drowned. Many times he swam around these shallows in a wide circle, until at last he decided — at the risk of death — to break the spell, and swam straight across with all the strength of his boyish arms. It seemed to him, the while, as if the water- sprite were trying to twist his legs off. But afterwards he pranced all the more merrily along the bank.”* He came to know Jacob, farmhand on the neighboring farm, when he fetched food for his rabbits. Jacob, the taciturn and derided, talked to him about the hobgoblin which squatted on him when the moon was full, but also about the dead, their needs and their suffering. The young boy did not laugh, but was stirred to know more fully and reliably the unseen world with which Jacob’s soul was linked in elemental fashion. The fourteen-year old boy, uncouth and silent, his tongue shaped to the hearty homeliness of his up-country dialect, fail ed the examination to enter the third class of the grammar school in nearby Bern. Set back into the fourth form, he suf fered bottomless humiliation; isolated himself even from his closest friend, who followed him a year later to the new school. The inner battle to overcome the pride and hurt which kept him from opening his heart to his friend taught him to know himself and to experience the healing power of love. He suf fered and grew wise behind the bearish crust which hid his tender, youthful heart. Innermost struggles with himself open ed his eyes for the sufferings of others. Intended by his father to study medicine and take over his country practice, there ripened in the growing youth the in born necessity to write. Alone on his inwardly destined path, the great writers encouraged and accompanied him. First the Swiss triad: Keller, Gotthelf, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Later

25 Rousseau. Then Nietzsche and Dostoevski. None had suffered as they! Both make one squander oneself, the poet wrote in retro spect, — the first, on form, the second, on life . . . Just because I lov ed both so fervently, I was enabled to keep my independence. At 21 he went to Berlin with his first book — the novel, Ott, Alois and Werelesche — in his pocket. Published by S. Fischer (the reigning publishing house for German writers at that time), the book won exceptional acclaim. The young poet sought evil out. He wanted to know the depths, not because they drew him, but because color is born where light strikes into darkness and color — human ex perience in every facet — is the awakener of the soul. One night, in waking consciousness, I had an experience which showed me that there is another vision besides the one which the eyes give us. What was going on in the depths came to meet my imagination. A being rose up out of the abyss compounded of lust, the passion for de struction, and impotency. It rose threateningly before me. I shrank back horror-struck. It disappeared. The memory remained, dark enough to rob me of all the joy of living. I had seen how death works in man, and be lieved I would go to pieces under the weight of the insight.* H e re counted this experience to a friend who directed his attention to Rudolf Steiner. But it was several months (the spring of 1907) before he met him for the first time. Albert Steffen first heard Rudolf Steiner in Berlin. Rudolf Steiner spoke about the years as apprentice, journeyman, mas ter. The young student knew that the time for him to wander had come. In Meetings with Rudolf Steiner** Steffen writes: I im mediately recognized a leader of mankind; wisdom on the brow, love in the eye, conscience in the word. Each gesture was an expression of har mony, formed in freedom, a work of art. While he spoke, I resolved to become worthy of this meeting by trans forming myself. After the lecture, I departed quietly, at the risk of ap pearing rude. More than ever it became my watchword to work on myself.

---- *“Autobiographical Sketch” in Albert Steffen, Translation and. Tribute, Adonis Press, New York, 1959. (Same reference for footnote, p. 25) **Meetings with Rudolf Steiner, Engl. tr. Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, Dornach, Switzerland.

26 Rudolf Steiner’s indications of the path of inner development and his descriptions of the spiritual realities of the world and of man confirmed what the young poet’s heart had sensed intui tively for many years. He did not have to alter his direction; his steps, however, could be quickened. In 1908, at 24, Albert Steffen went to live in Munich. He ventured to introduce him self to Rudolf Steiner. After asking Dr. Steiner about a riddle of human destiny which had deeply preoccupied him, Steffen told about the ex perience he had had in Berlin. Even today, Albert Steffen w rites, I can see the attentive glance fixed on me by Rudolf Steiner. He leaned forward slightly and asked about every detail. He sensed imme diately — although I could not express it — that I had come to ask how to serve mankind better. He gave me instructions as to how to con front the onslaught of even the darkest forces with courage and determi nation. From that moment I felt equal to every encounter and every happening. I had become able to stand on my own feet. Seven years passed before I had another personal talk with Rudolf Steiner . . . Everyone who takes Rudolf Steiner’s work into his inner be ing can help himself. *

Albert Steffen became not merely a student of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner’s spiritual teaching became the central impulse of his poetic life-work. He decided that he would write out of the reality of the spirit even if he never found a single reader. He would be true to what he had recognized, in the light of Rudolf Steiner’s immense insight, as the highest in his own being. With the exception of his first novel, all of Albert Steffen’s work was written under the signature of his meeting with Ru dolf Steiner. Albert Steffen’s literary life-work, fifty-six years of creative achievement, is a mountain which must be climbed again and again to be known and loved. Over seventy pub

---- *Meetings with Rudolf Steiner, Engl. tr. Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, Dornach, Switzerland.

27 lished volumes: sixteen plays, twelve novels, nine volumes of poetry, over twenty collections of essays. His dramas range in theme from the ancient Biblical to the most contemporary, of which two are set at the close of this century. He deals in his essays with the problems of the atomic age, with psychoanaly sis, the mission of evil, life after death, Christianity of the fu ture. Appointed by Rudolf Steiner as editor of the weekly, Das Goetheanum, Albert Steffen discharged his responsibility without interruption for forty-two years. As a writer, Albert Steffen strove to alert his contemporaries to the spiritually significant in the present and in the past. He called on mankind to awake to its dangers and to take its destiny in hand. In 1946 the Swiss Federal Parliament accepted his proposal that Switzer land offer herself as a pilot “oasis of humanity” and declare herself ready to accept refugees from all nations under interna tional guarantee. Steffen’s ideal was the awakening of a respon sibility toward mankind and the establishment of similar “oases of humanity” throughout the world. In 1957 he addressed his booklet Burning Problems “To those who bear responsibility” and sought to draw the attention of political leaders and scientists to the only source of a law and direction transcending race and nation — a knowledge of man in the light of a modern science of the spirit. On behalf of the International PEN Club, Basel branch, of which Steffen had been a member since its foundation, Dr. Jack Thommen, its President, spoke as follows at the cremation service: “Albert Steffen was a good Swiss and at the same time an open-minded citizen of the world who united himself with the ideals of the International PEN Club for this reason. In his sense of ethical and spiritual responsibility he was consequent, straightforward and not to be put off the track. Memorable for this reason for those who were present was Steffen’s speech at the International PEN Congress in Budapest, when he stood up against the writers of Nazi Germany of that time who betrayed the PEN’s ideal of peace and wished to destroy its beneficent organization. Steffen’s Budapest speech revealed his great cour age and his profound piety and remained with the representa

28 tives of over forty nations as a deep-seated impression and source of inner guidance. ... A noble soul has gone from us: a poet, a Swiss and a world-citizen in whom lived the secret of all secrets: the loving power of his heart and his spirit’s creative nature. ” Thus Albert Steffen went, and the respect and love of those who shared his spirit-striving and of those who recognized him as a helper of mankind accompanied him. He had enabled all to see more clearly the goal of cosmic evolution — to find the “power for resurrection’s flight.”

Poem by Albert Steffen

I saw an ox and lion yoked as pair — a casket shouldered on their backs they carried, beheld how just before my door they tarried and heard an eagle rushing down the air.

The silver tasseled pall of black which lay upon the oaken shrine of death outspread, he tore away, revealing in its stead the egohood of him who passed away.

‘Tis I!’ Twelve times I heard the eagle ply his massive beak to drive the nails with might. I felt them pierce the wood. The blows were sure.

I prayed: In Christo morimur, and found the powder for resu rrectio n ’s flight, and soared into the universe on high.

Translation by Arvia Ege

29 POET OF A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS

A Book of Poems by Albert Steffen

RUDOLF STEINER

Albert Steffen has given to those who revere his poetry a lyric gift. We must indeed speak here of a “gift.” For, anyone who has found in this poet the earnest seeker into the riddles of human destiny — who, wrestling with the powers of form strives to reveal the secrets of the world in the sphere of soul activity — will be one who harbors in himself a longing for just this most personal form of expression, and he must be thankful for this gift. The book is small in the number of its pages.* The gift is great. For the man who gives it out of the fullness of his heart and soul has a great deal to say that can enrich those who receive it. It is good for everyone who takes it in, yet only one could give it as it is — Albert Steffen. For he sees what each of us should really see — with a quite personal artist’s eye. Steffen strides through nature both observing and experienc ing. And through him nature reveals her spirit being. There is wisdom in this revelation — tragic wisdom, wisdom full of goodness, love-awakening wisdom — wisdom which unveils itself to this decipherer of riddles who, in deciphering, is wholly filled with the power of the poet and, as he forms and moulds, is wholly carried by the quiet enthusiasm of the artist. The first impression could, perhaps, estrange the reader. For Steffen actually lives in realms of feeling which are wholly his

---- *Wegzehrung, Food for the Journey. This article appeared in Das Goetheanum, January 15, 1922.

30 own personal possession. But one can quickly become at home in these worlds. For this home, in which the poet Steffen gives form to the world in his own particular way, is permeated through and through with warmth of heart and is filled with genuine goodness. Steffen’s images are often brought up as though out of deep mountain crevasses; yet they have been shaped by one who, even when plunged into the depths of thought, never loses the artist’s living powers. He often confronts world problems in the face of which others have become philosophers. He remains the artist. Others draw all manner of rounded lines. Steffen draws a few strokes and forms diverse angles. The whole is then more graphic than the curves of others. Many stay on the surface in order not to become lyrical, self-absorbed brooders. Steffen on the other hand often dives deep below the surface, but when he does so he can speak with such penetration that for the listener all such self-absorption vanishes. His poetic works have their source in that region of the soul where world-secrets are beheld and human riddles are ex perienced. But the spirit who is able to see and experience there — daring the depths of the abyss, often swinging up into starry heights — remains always a moulder of images, a tone- creator and is nowhere misled into the frost of mere ideas. Stef fen paints with words. The words have color. And the colors have an effect similar to those of paintings which have survived the centuries and proven their true worth. He climbs deep down into the obscure ravines of the soul. He brings back images that are like mobile replicas of nature- beings — images of a quality which the eye cannot see, and yet without whose accessibility through the life of phantasy the world seen by the eye would be only an illusion. These spirit nature-beings have sharp, clear outlines, yet are outlines drawn not by the intellect but by the human heart. In the presence of these images, one often has the feeling that an unknown power in the poet has wrested them from nature, and once this power has made them present, Steffen has simply set them down.

31 Steffen, the poet, never stands there alone. Round about him there is always a whole world. He does not merely utter his own feelings, but always lets us sense an immeasurable world surrounding what he expresses. His pictures sometimes seem, at first, to have formed themselves out of empty space; then when we have experienced them fully, they acquire a back ground. Now a whole universe is revealed, whereas at first they appeared to reveal only themselves. They are often like people who to begin with seem reserved, but from whom, later on, there emanates a love-spending warmth. At times one of his poems may seem to us an assertion of defiant self-will, and this seeming self-will holds us fast. But suddenly we discover that this apparent defiance actually clothes a deep dedication to truth that is only to be reached through uncompromising clari fication of soul. His lyrics come often from the mountains, but from their mountain birthplace have wandered across the plains as spring waters do which have become rivers. They still bear within them their mountain origin, but on the level lands that lend them serenity, they mirror the sun, and magically conjure up there the reflection of the moonlight and of the stars for the souls of those who breathe them in and enjoy them. They mur mur and resound with the mysteries of nature, and this rever beration and murmuring becomes, as it is heard, a well-known language. A delicate poem, “Felicitas,” penetrates to our hearts as though awakening feelings that pour out into cosmic spaces. One is both in a little silent room and yet at the same time in the wide expanses of the universe: a human child in all its misery — and a creature of the starry spheres.

Oft when I in the night consider, out of dream awakened by sheer fright, how fragile bodies seem, when ever heavier weigh my fear and error, and I must weep for my dark days of terror — I run to the window lightly

32 to see the starry dust: how they all shine so brightly! Oh, surely I may trust! I know it — as their child, in wondrous wise, I am adopted by the starry skies.

Translated by Virginia Brett

... When Steffen brings his experience of pain to “bush and tree” in order that the trees may teach him peace of soul, then these emotions express themselves through the strict form of the sonnet, and we sense that what he has to say can be expressed in this form only. The poetic works of this kind in his book Wegzehrung (Food for the Journey) are like the reception, or con ception, of the forces of form through the effort of the poet, who finds in them the quiet for those feelings and experiences which, without this discovery, would strive out into limitless expanses. *

That Steffen’s experiences can also carry in themselves their own measure and weight reveals itself when he expresses him self in ascent from personal experience to a feeling with, and in, world being in the form of the hymnos, and also when he finds the means to communicate, when the heart is full, in such a way that every overindulgence in feeling, even to the smallest degree, is avoided.

You seem to be So hopeless, scarred. Oh why! Oh teach, Oh tell — what loss.

For Christ in me — It is so hard. He carries each! I am His cross.

Translated by Arvia Ege

33 Albert Steffen, The Poet

MARIE STEINER

The spiritual knowledge which Albert Steffen has absorbed gives him the courage to plunge his gaze deep into the nether regions of life in order to seek those paths which can lead to transformation and catharsis for mankind. His life is given to wrestling with the problem of evil. He sees its solution in the Christianizing of the powers of the human ego. That is to say, not alone in Christianizing the sentient soul, as did Francis of Assisi in such an exemplary manner, but, in penetrating through all levels of consciousness, he grasps the problem of freedom at the root and puts it into practice, both in his own being and in his relationship with others. Only the inwardly free human being can call up forces strong enough to meet evil with the love-fires of purification and transformation. This path — shedding light into the abysses of life where so much evil dwells — Albert Steffen has taken as epic writer, and he has pressed his way mercilessly into all the hidden soul-crannies in which evil gathers, until finally the tremendous tension generated has had to erupt dra matically in the play The Four Apocalyptic Beasts, which seems to form a conclusion to one period of his creative activity. With this begins simultaneously a new ascent. Into this drama shoot the deadly arrows of a deteriorating culture, and there spring forth at the same time, like a purifying life-stream, those forces which rinse away the decay. One could say that this drama stands in the sign of Cancer. The source from which it springs is to be found in the interval between the instreaming and

----From the Albert Steffen number of the magazine Anthroposophie, Stuttgart, December 10, 1934.

34 outstreaming of movements. From this source, out of pain transformed into life experience, have sprung the lyric works of Albert Steffen — crystallized into spirit-cleansed, transparent imaginations. What is offered to us in these lyrics is spirit perception ex pressed in the released, mobile sculptural forms of disciplined and noble speech, aglow with color. Behind the words stands a realm which for the physical senses is unenterable, never to be trodden, the realm of reality — the world of true actuality.... The poems are an inexhaustible source for all that the eurythmic art of movement strives to express, and have become for a large number of young people the content of their work. Rudolf Steiner has transposed them into lyrical line and forms in space for the art of eurythmy. He discovered that a special style was required for them and created it. They belong now to the treasure-store of the artistic work at the Goetheanum.

Translated by Virginia Brett

Poem by Albert Steffen

Light I see, A l l th a t’s inborn Know the star, P lies to win the Still and steadfast: Seed — I am. Bright with neither A l l th a t’s m ortal W o e nor joy — dies within the W ill naught more. Deed of Christ.

“Y o u” — is all the R a y is saying. Translated by Arvia Ege Rest I’ll never D o, until I M ay within my Breast enfold you.

Note that the rhyme falls at the beginning of each line. This poem was writ ten on the 35th birthday of the poet. Virginia Brett has also translated it.

35 Poem by Albert Steffen “Licht seh Ich”. .. (with eurythmy form by Rudolf Steiner).

Prelude ofeurythmyform][Image:drawing

Licht seh ich seh den Stern, still und stet: Nicht scheint er W eh und Lust, will auch nichts. D u, sagt der Glanz allein. Ich hab nicht A “eurythmy form” is the picture of Ruh, bis ich the path taken by the eurythmist dur ganz trage ing the eurythmic presentation of a dich in mir. poem on the stage. Every poem Erbliches receives its own form corresponding to wirbt um den the content, but built up according to Kern, das Ich. general eurythmic principles. Colors Sterbliches for the eurythmist here: lilac dress, stirbt in den light yellow veil. Herrn, den Christ.

---- From p. 90 of Albert Steffen on the Occasion of his 50th Birthday. Reprinted with the kind permission of the Section for the Performing Arts at the Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland.

36 Poem form][Image:drawingofeurythmy

Postlude drawingofeurythmyform][Image:

37 A SELECTION OF POEMS

N ow I know what soft astounding Wonder in the winter night Touched my soul with grace abounding Gently but with might — Often seeming like a tone, Often like a light, Message from the Son of Sun Mazed my ear, my sight.

Since the spring is by my side, And the lovely eyes Of the blossoms open wide, I may now surmise: Soul and senses, both can win us Christ, His presence prove, For without us and within us H e is wholly love.

Translated by Virginia Brett

38 O h let us love the trees. They do us so much good! Within their fresh green leaves Flows God’s own living blood.

The wood was growing hardened Till Christ hung there as man; That we be fed and pardoned Eternal bloom began. ----

After A Service For The Dead

W h at is it greets me without As I am leaving the house? Bell chimes rung on the wind, Bird songs sung in the wood.

And I ponder the soul Who would come back to the body But can find it no longer Since the flame has consumed it.

Home, she longs for with spirits Whom she is eager to love, Yet she seeks still the tones That she once loved on the earth:

Bell chimes rung on the wind, Bird songs sung in the wood.

Translations by Arvia Ege

39 Picture Of My Life’s Companion

T h e presence radiating from your eyes and lending them their constancy of glance, I felt before I drew your countenance. My loyalty sensed its profundities: How you, eternal spirit, from mild light and fleeting shadow — pure ethereal red — created for yourself the blossom-breath of your complexion, after your first fight with death, before rebirth, upon the path that led you to yourself, as aftermath of some past life, where, coming from afar, we met like sister and like brother, ere I saw what in your face I find so fair: Your smile, soft flush, and eyes that shine like stars.

Translated by Rex Raab

40 [Image: photograph]Frau E lisabeth Stueckgold-von V eress (later F rau Steffen), about 1914, with her daughter Felicitas Stueckgold. O child, great-eyed with wisdom and amaze, Angelic shapes around your countenance Shine forth and light my wonder-lifted glance To heavens living in your sinless gaze.

They fill my eye with spheric harmony Which drew you down to earth from star to star. They give me inward sight of what you are, Enfleshed from beauty’s ancient symphony.

Begot of God — upon your mother’s arm, You have not known the lot that man must bear. Compassion not of earth has led you where We dwell in thralldom to destruction’s harm.

Through fault of ours our woe has been ordained, While you take on yourself our death unstained.

Translated by Theodore Van Vliet

42 W hen we say eternally I for you and you for me, then the Christ goes with us twain.

Fear not that the darkened way leads us from the path astray. His holy light will never wane.

Not upon the torture bed nor among the ghostly dead will He leave the true to pain.

When we to the grave have passed, He is with us to the last; coffin becomes heaven again.

Since He sacrificed His blood, love is in the hands of God. All the stars are His domain.

Translated by John Root

43 The Pilot's Homecoming

A hrim an’s vulture! Now it whirs up and swings out from the hillside, bearing between its wings rattling machine-guns and at its hips a brace of deadly bombs to hurl through aetherial space.

“Ah! Death leads me to kill in fulfillment of duty, and I want but to listen to words of beauty. I must mangle the holy limbs of man, get off scot free, return snugly to land.

But the earth underfoot feels ever more wounded, even at home by the fireside the heart is hounded. Conscience longs to be weighed in the balance of heaven. And no longer can blood from the spirit be riven.

I will learn from the Cherubim how to rebuild all that I had to destroy, all that I killed, down the long aeons, all that the war-machines rend, men, women, children, and myself in the end.”

Translated by Rex Raab

44 Into God’s Day

W hom you seek, he is not here W here our w eeping is. He who breathes the light as his Has no grave to fear.

One who rose from death to birth Broke His tomb apart. None who holds Him in his heart Hides in walls of earth.

Fling the rigid shroud-cloth wide As eagle wings! Take breath: Rise up from the hill of death On the spirit’s tide.

Lay the old long ache away. Kneel not with earth’s woe. Praise the Gods! Let grieving go — Stride into God’s day!

Translated by Christy Barnes

45 W inds, what you whine, is woe.

T h u n d ers, what you roll, is vengeance.

T ears, what you drop, is death.

Soil, what you shelter are blossoms.

Translated by Daisy Aldan

The Wanderer

W h a t one, who is sunk in deep repose of heart, after wandering long over the earth, battling fear and temptation, observing the world with luminous senses in self-awareness, has achieved — let it sound forth ringing as word, borne by the community — awaking mankind.

What did the wanderer find returning out of heavenly realms into time? — Homelessness.

46 Gazing from lofty peaks, longing envelops him, an overwhelming hunger for redemption hollows him out, and his eyes, that drink in the blue of the heavens, turning inward, eat out his heart. He asks his way. Directions given by mortals lead him astray. The beckoning line of the distant horizon is but a lie. Its outreaching rim covers the corners of his casket. The earth is the grave of mankind.

Amid such darkness there appeared the teacher and lifted with light hand the heavy hanging. The wanderer beheld in perfect order star on star. United, each one with the other, they became a visage, with arms, stretched forward full of love, that held him, as his life forsook him, and his limbs gave way, standing him erect in footprints that were carven deep into the ground. But the wanderer knew — they were the tread of his destiny, hewn out before him into future time, inscribing the space to be outpaced!

O h see, the footprints become steps that lead far down into the earth. A passage runs through many strata. And bright of sight he strides through deepening darkness. In fathomless night the teacher proclaimed the evolving of worlds, the will of the gods, in rumbling ground, in surging and bursting of the element.

47 And wherever his words rang out there demons seized up their shovels and hammers and piled up the portal to a temple. But at the center of the earth there glows the plan of the heavens. And when the wanderer beheld the cross encircled within vaulting pillared aisles his weight — fell away from him. He rose aloft. To rise means to erect the house, the master said to him, and gave him tools.

Now pausing from long labours, he stands erect in a high hall before the altar. ‘Tis covered over with a cloth wherein enwoven he beholds a double-tree with blue and crimson branches, blown by a tone that softly lifts and falls. Here, the wanderer breathed freely and laid the cloth aside and found the goblet full of light and drank — and ever dropped the dew of heaven from on high. Drops — falling from the stars.

And, as at first, he now beheld once more a visage, with arms, stretched forward full of love, and heard the angel’s words: Know yourself as wakened one in your own house. The body of man is the deed of the gods.

Translated by Arvia Ege

48 L ook at all the butterflies, butterflies upon the blossoms, on the blossoms of your soul, of your soul, soon fledged in spirit.

Spirit, weaned from matter, Dove, Dove, that leads to Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Son of God, who is the Saviour, Saviour in the Sign of the Fish.

Fish within the cosmic ocean, cosmic ocean that was heaven, heaven turned to purest warmth, purest warmth to luminous breath, luminous breath to clearest water, clearest water to hardest ice.

Ice that melts through hearts aglow, hearts aglow in holy love, holy love now resurrected, resurrected from the ashes, from the ashes of the Phoenix, Phoenix-Ego on Parnassus. Climb Parnassus and behold!

Translated by Rex Raab

49 [Image: drawing] Sylph ittle L e h T

m * n Rasher Ann From LITTLE MYTHS

The Little Sylph

Two five-year-old children, a boy and a girl, sat propped up against each other in the heat of noon in a summery meadow, rosy-red with clover. The flowers were fragrant, the bees hummed softly; the children were overcome with drowsiness. Suddenly something whirled and whirred right under their noses: back and forth, up and down, round and round like a wheel, and off into the distance like an arrow towards the gaily-painted beehive. — I saw it! A little bee with a face? A little flower with legs? What could it have been? — They blink ed, and just caught a glimpse of it riding a sunbeam straight into the sun: the little sylph! Translated by Marjorie Spock

Gardening

I used to know a quiet little boy. He was an invalid and could not go to school. But he loved to draw the letters of the alphabet with his colored crayons on a shining sheet of paper. When he died, I kept the book to remember him by. One day as I was looking at it, it seemed as if a hand were laid across my eyes. An inner vision woke in me. The lad came up to me in the spirit and said: “Drawing the letters is the same as gardening. “F” “F” “F” “F” are fences. “P” is a pavilion, “V” is a rivulet.” And as he sang these words, a park appeared: leafy walks, fruit trees and flower beds. The lad strung garlands and tied vines. “Best of all I love the blossoms,” he said. “‘Oh’ the rose! ‘Ah’ the dahlia! ‘U ’ the tulip! ‘Ee’ the lily! ‘I’ the violet!” Mightily the sounds re-echoed all about. And when I looked up to see why they singing too. rang so wonderfully, I discovered a whole host of angels who were

Translated by Sophia Walsh From LITTLE MYTHS

Death of A Fawn

Along by the hedges and through the green grain, a fawn came out of the forest into the flower-filled garden, and stood in the velvety pansy-bed, its reddish soul taking on a bluish hue. Into the fragrant mist that caressed its nostrils shot sudden darts of red lightning. Nooses felled and dragged it. Red welts, red stabs, red cuts in its flesh, every fiber a red flame. Red that burned, red that ran, red that shuddered. Red muscles torn by knives and clipped apart by scissors. Red heart in a red hollow. Hands, eyes and breath: a red voluptuousness. But the angel who stood beside the human beings as they ex amined the fawn’s denuded heart caught up its suffering and gave the fire to the waiting spirit hosts. They carried it away into the darkness, where it glowed. The angel’s countenance shone bright and mild. “No one,” he said, “comes to the heart of God until he has passed through the baptism of this fire. Every soul finds therein its cleansing. So shall the impure breath of the human breast be burned away.” The fawn heard the angel’s words. It was filled with well being. It died with grateful dimming eyes. It had experienced death in the angel.

Translated by Marjorie Spock

52 From LITTLE MYTHS

Constancy

After all the discussions, quarrels and insults which you had listened to at the meeting, you went home and in your own room seemed to yourself lonelier than ever. You asked yourself, “Are we then a community at all anymore?” To answer this conscientiously you realized that it was necessary first to become quite still within your soul. So you imagined to yourself that at this late hour of the night, not only the room which you had left, but also your own inner self which had experienced there such turmoil, were now completely empty. Within and without, all was cleared away. Even all light was extinguished. Having closed your eyes, you had only with your senses fal len asleep, and in spirit were yet more awake than by day. No impression, no memory! N othing. Whereupon you beheld above you a crystal form, from which a rosy flood of light poured forth. And you knew instant ly the source of this super-earthly brightness. It was the spiritual will to remain true, which in spite of all the conflicts still held sway within this community.

Translated by Arvia Ege

53 From LITTLE MYTHS

Judge and Redeemer A man who had shed blood was gripped in the night by a water fall, whipped around and whirled down into the abyss. Half suf focated, he struggled free from the whirlpool. From now on wards he heard, through everything that he did and suffered, the voice of that terrible element. It dripped, trickled, splashed, gushed, thundered; it was trying to proclaim something, but the tortured man did not know what. After twenty-five years the roaring grew stiller. One night he discovered the man whom he had murdered standing beside a stream. He held a rod in his hand and cried: “I turn water into blood.” “How?” asked the murderer. “By means of the law,” answered the murdered man. “Condemn me,” begged the murderer, “so that you may love me once again as I love you.” Then, in the place of the judge, appeared the Christ.

Translated by Virginia Brett

The Tone Ladder A woman whose husband was dead entered with her child into a church where the coffin stood. The boy began at once to sing. “Be still!” commanded his mother. “Don’t you see that your father is lying there?” Then a man in a white robe stepped out from behind a pillar and spoke: “He will not awaken to life before his son comes and sings with him.” “Ah,” said the wife, “the lad is so little he scarcely knows the notes.” “Begin!” encouraged the stranger. The boy began: “Do-re-mi- fa-so-la-si. ..” and at once there rose out of the coffin a ladder of light. The dead man sat upright on the bier and mounted from rung to rung — up into the heavens.

Translated by Lacy van Wagenen

54 NOVELS: REDEMPTION OF DESTINY

From OTT, ALOIS AND WERELSCHE

Transplanting

ALBERT STEFFEN

Dr. Tenger was called to become director of a hospital in the city. He sold his house in the country and bought an old villa surrounded by a large park. His wife and Hanna almost regretted the time and effort they had put into the beautiful garden which they now had to leave behind. They had raked, cut clean borders for the lawn sections and strewn the paths with new tanbark. But they kept on anyway, carefully bound up the heavy roses, dug over the beds of wilted spring flowers, making the earth loose and work able. The lawn was mown one last time and new seeds sown in the sparse patches. They even bedded the ripe strawberries in soft sedge hay so that no mud could splash up in a downpour and dirty them. Every evening they made their rounds in the orchard, and each time they were saying farewell. All the trees had blos somed abundantly and the young ones had also put out good fruit-bearing boughs. “And it’s precisely these that I don’t feel good about leaving to strangers. They could be damaged if they bear so much fruit the very first time,” said the mother. Hanna thought up a plan which seemed impossible but which, if carefully organized and carried out, would most likely

---- Book I, Chapter 10, Fischer Verlag, Germany 1907. Daniel Marston’s English translation of this novel is as yet unpublished.

55 work. She said, “We can’t disturb the fruit-bearing trees in their growth, of course, but we could take the others with us!” So they traveled together to the town, looked all over in the park for sunny places where the apples could be ripened on one side by the morning sun and on the other by the afternoon sun, had holes dug and the earth around each hole watered thoroughly because it was a very dry period, and organized the wagons and gardeners to pick up the trees at the station as soon as they were to arrive. At home again, they supervised the digging out, and both cried out at once, “Oh, the brute, the monster!” as a gardener grabbed the stem of a small tree and pulled at it while another dug about heedlessly with his shovel and broke off the fibrous roots. The tap root lay exposed and naked and many branches and buds were crushed. They sent the two away and did the rest themselves as best they could. They protected the roots by packing them in a huge earthball and then wrapped it round with wet sacking. Hanna watched over the loading up to make sure the trees were not mishandled. Hausi, too, was there and laid his little hand cautiously and seriously on the slender wrapped trunks. They all rode together in the same car, continually had to watch out for hob-nail boots and elbows, and found themselves greeted on arrival by skilled gardeners who immediately cut off all the damaged branches, loaded up the trees and transplanted them in the park. They strewed porous soil carefully among the rootlets, traced out a little circular ditch and watered with luke warm water. All this occurred in the evening, at the time when people wake up from the afternoon heat and feel alive and re freshed again, and things were so well prepared in advance, down to the speed of the trains, that it had hardly taken four hours altogether. In the days that followed, the most beautiful fuchsia, pome granate trees, oleander, geraniums and carnations came and for the time being were all placed together in the park where they would be safe from pelting rains. They brightened up its darkness and above them the birds and butterflies gathered to have a look at the miracle. The little family stood and stared at the park, a neglected,

56 overgrown wilderness. The Lombardy poplar looked like noth ing but briar patches. Mistletoe hung in the ash trees and cat erpillar cocoons in the tall cherry trees; Hausi made a little fire with them and danced around it crowned with mistletoe bran ches. The fruit trees one had to leave as they were, and the cleaning away of moss and warts and growths as well as the pruning of excessive shoots had to be postponed until the fall. Mother, to whom all passive looking-on was unbearable, had already by the first visit searched out all the branches that would have to be pruned, no slight accomplishment, as even the main fork of the tree was no longer recognizable in the overgrowth. The ground was eroded and dry and had to be manured. Thirsty shrubs and bushes had to be flooded; flowerbeds had to be planted with asters, pelargonium and fuchsia; pansy and forget-me-not seeds had to be sown in boxes, and the delicate sprouting green had to be cared for. The strawberries were thirsty and the wild tangles on the trellises had to be painstak ingly pruned back. So it went from morning until nightfall. Deep into the red of evening they quenched the thirst of the lovely geraniums. All available watering cans were brought out and filled with the well water which had become warm and soft standing in containers in the heat of the mid-day sun. Hausi sprang about here and there, filled up, carried over and hur ried back, all the while dripping wet from the splashing, over flowing water. It delighted him to see how the plants recovered almost immediately and that he himself could help work such a wonder. He thought it would surely do the same for him, and poured a canful over his own hot head from time to time. Soon a wonderful fragrance arose in the whole garden, found its way through the open doors and windows and streamed through the whole house. Hanna got wonderfully brown, and mother downright young. The father made jokes about the vegetable conversa tion. Even at the dinner table they held counsel. Evenings, books were pulled out which should help in the fight against ants, aphids, and rust. Hausi especially enjoyed it when the authors referred to them as, “scoundrels,” “culprits,” and “a bad lot.” The red-

57 backed shrike was called a “hypocritical dummkopf” who would sit on the top of a tree for hours with the most humble expression in the world, as if he were thinking great thoughts. But then he’d nip off all the fruit buds, the wretch. Hausi was even more indefatigable than all the others. He built nesting boxes for starlings and nailed them up all over. Hanna followed him and sometimes had to turn them around so the opening did not face against the weather side. He searched all around in the area for seeds of rare plants and sowed them in secret corners. During these days he and the doctor became especially good friends. “I’ve found another strange flower,” he’d say, and point behind a tree where his seeds sprouted shyly. “Aha, what is it?” And then the Latin name which Hausi loved to pronounce again and again because he enjoyed the sound so much. But the really important project was the gymnastics school for snails. He split reeds and pushed them into the crevices of the wooden house, tied threads and strings of different lengths and thicknesses to them to serve as swings or tightropes. There were also sticks which he rammed into the ground, sticks with very sharp points on top — goals that allowed no loitering. He gathered snails from all over the garden, picked them out of the gooseberry bushes which they love and out of the deli cious lettuce beds. He delighted in the elegantly slender little bodies with the long feelers. The yellow ones with the brick-red houses he called his little Indians, the black ones with the brown and white striped shells, his little blackies. The blackies were his favorites. By the river he found large gray edible snails — the old maids. He taught the others to climb quickly and better by swinging and turning them on the reeds or strings. A champion he would keep awhile, setting him out every evening in a spinach patch — to make sure he would not ru n aw ay. And then they all had to race. He placed them cautiously on the starting line, waited until they stretched their feelers out and saw the goal, and then went off to play. After a while he looked to see who had won. A blackie, of course! — Translated by Daniel Marston

58 From ELDERMAN’S MEMOIRS WRITTEN IN THE HOSPITAL

Operation

ALBERT STEFFEN

Return journey. From noon till midnight. As we enter our gar den in the darkness, the scent of the lilacs and the peonies is for me like the enveloping protection of an angel. In the morning, on awaking, I see on the sunlit coverlet the features of Ahriman, which leads me to conclude that I have fever. It rises during the course of the next days and the pains become unbearable. The doctor orders immediate hospitaliza tion and an operation. I am content with the thought that I need no longer live. Two strong hospital interns arrived, took hold of me roughly but skillfully, lifted me together with my covers out of the bed, and transported me on a stretcher to an ambulance. Inside, it was a polished white with light blue slats closed in below with untransparent glass. But the upper half of the panes allowed me to see the tops of the trees and the roofs of the houses. My wife had seated herself at my side in order to be able to help me. A quiet drive brought us to the hospital. Here the stretcher was taken into an elevator and then carried through long hallways. I still remember distinctly the narrow board covered with a white cloth and firm padding, the hardness of which under my back I hardly noticed, as something like a handkerchief was held in front of my mouth. With one last in different glance, despite my curiosity, I took in hastily the sur roundings which had composed themselves here about my body — the surgeon, who had hurriedly covered his elegant business

----Altmanns Memoiren aus dem Krankenhaus, Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, 1956. No further translations into English have as yet been published.

59 suit with a white uniform, the nurses, left and right, with their clean wing-like caps, further back various figures moving quickly to and fro. Instruments and vials were passed around. Curiously enough it called up in me the memory of an ancient Egyptian picture in the Book of the Dead. Then everything melted away as if in a mist. But as if out of far distances of time other tones, sounds, words were wafted towards me. I was conscious of being out side my body. And it appeared to me that I was taking part in its transformation, as though I lived within other beings who stepped against a hostile, evil-plotting multitude which hereto fore I had not noticed. I saw distinctly the features of a man who watched me hatefully out of the corners of his eyes. I could hear how he aimed at me with sharp bits of syllables, like arrows, which he read from a court document. They were in tended to strike me, but were turned aside by these other forms into whose protection I had given myself. The bevy of hang men disappeared, putting the files containing the sentence against me away in their briefcases, still arguing and scolding because they were unable to carry it out. But their discordant voices were replaced by sweet-sounding ones. They came from different regions of the heavens. Something stupendous was happening to me, through me, round about me, in the farthest and at the same time closest proximity to me, in my deepest and highest being, to my body-spirit. I was being remolded to another human being: out of an aged one into a youthful one, from a man of bones to a man of the spheres. My limbs were unlocked, expanded in structure; extended from pillars, that rose from the depths of the earth, to architraves built according to the vault of the heavens, whereby from the lofty creative be ings who wrought all this came sounds of singing. They were melodies familiar to me from my childhood — lullabies. All became white. I saw myself wrapped like an infant, immovable as a tiny Tanagra doll under the dome of the heavens, lying in a wide open square and unable to stir. Round about me rose to view splendid palaces with cupolas, towers and turrets. From the streets that ran together from all

60 sides wagons approached full of people in medieval garb. They threw me flowers and fruit. These were at the same time words of friendship, and they invited me to come with them. But I could not rise. I understood everything clearly, but was unable myself to bring a single word across my lips. And I would so gladly have told what I experienced within me. For the whole cosmic orb reflected itself in my innermost being — yes, I un derstood the speech of the stars. Yet nothing whatever of it was I able to utter. Nonetheless, I knew that from a child, who was helpless, I would become a man who could help others — a creative human being with the aid of the creating gods, a cos mic being like them, although the lowliest among their ranks, a poet, who would bring the memories of the earth, its sufferings and joys, its origin and its goal, the experiences of its creatures back once more to the heavens from which they had fallen away. And in thanks for this it would be granted me — of this I was eternally certain — to overhear the speech of the divine hierarchies and to reveal it to my sisters and brothers. Now, however, I should sleep in order to gather forces in re storative slumber. Yes, I am blessed to be able to live still a lit tle while longer here upon this earth. I may communicate to mankind what without me they would not experience. There fore I will be humble and confess that I am only a tiny child and at the beginning of that which one day I might become — a poet. How glorious are the heavenly beings who work creatively upon me and from life to life form me ever anew, who trans form my aged bones into a youthful head, who permit me to be born again out of the divine world-all, who teach me the primordial language of man and endow me with the memory of the stars, who lead me along the pathways of the spheres — until I come again upon the earth as one arisen in spirit, who in future may love all men. . . When I came to myself again, I was all wrapped in ban dages, a glass pipe with a rubber tube hung from a wound in my side, which except for a small round opening had been sewed together. It led to a flask which stood beside my bed and

61 could be seen to fill gradually with a dark brown fluid. . . It was the bile draining out.

* There came to Elderman’s mind those moments when he had passed through periods of passion but had overcome them and could then experience how he was aware of a transforma tion in his innermost soul. Again he experienced such a trans formation, and it presented itself to him in such a way that he descended into an enormous whirlpool of fire and by the power of his own will changed it into a gentle sea of light. At the same time he was borne upward. He saw how the rays of the stars wove a fabric of light over the whole vault of the heavens and in the forms there inwrought he was able to read the passage of his life. Comrades of destiny in long bygone ages came to his side, led him up into their houses and entertained him with food and drink until all at once he stepped out again from their dwellings onto the paths that led on to other vil lages. Here he experienced more and more about himself when he was able to decipher his destiny from the paintings which hung upon the walls, or from the statues which had been plac ed in niches. He felt the need as a guest to bring gifts which, without its causing him the least surprise, he found imme diately at hand. Here one did not pay as on earth — so a memory of it flitted through him — with coin, but with pic tures, which did, to be sure, have their origin on earth, but now were shone through and clarified, bettered, because he himself had become better. Yes, at the sight of many a sorrow ful countenance he said to himself that it was he who was the cause of this shadow. He wanted to make it good. This will in him grew into a divine longing, and from now on nothing else had any place in him except that he might hallow himself in order to be able to heal. Oh, to help — help — help — so swept and resounded through him a heavenly song. Like a lightning storm of lyre-clang, an outpouring of trumpets, a thunder of drums, a rushing of feathered pinions. Angel throngs bore him afar with a beat of their wings through m illennia.

62 One of these heavenly beings, however — the loveliest, he thought — detached itself from the others. As he saw it flying thus through the distances, and how it steered its course towards a darkness, dove into it, and on the other side sudden ly appeared again, but now flooded about with silver light, he was aware that it was his life-companion, and that this was why she could smile so gently — because she had stood in the shine of the moon before she was born, while from the sun he had learned to observe her earnestly and untiringly in order to fathom her innermost being. This is what he experienced at the moment when he awoke out of his deep sleep into which the anesthetic had borne him, and beheld her tear-veiled face bending above him.

SESSION OF PARLIAMENT

As the deputies entered the conference hall, a silent observer noticed in each one, how in his manner of walking, pausing and sitting down, there lay something quite particular which differed from that of the others to such a degree that it caused him to ponder about their inmost natures. Each carried himself into the room. His ego came to light in his steps. In these, des tiny could be read, both past and in the making. Right down into the arches of their feet, the calves of their legs, the build of their hips it was visible. It seemed to express itself even in their clothing, the form of their shoes, the creases in their trousers. Yes, one noticed it almost more through their limbs than in their faces, because all of them made an effort to put on im penetrable masks. One could see in advance: he will remain erect like the pillar of a temple and this one will fall over like a house of cards. That one there is like a swaying reed in the w ind. And now they sit there with legs crossed, nodding their feet up and down in order to keep awake. Others are like sacks of

63 meal and gradually fall asleep. There are also some who twist about restlessly from side to side, and gaze around ironically or angrily when someone speaks. The discussion revolves around problems of utility. A sense of responsibility is appealed to. They debate about the situation of the country and what should be the proper attitude of a citizen. The silent observer asks himself: How would it be if someone were to step in among these people and were to point out to them the way to the spirit, — to the unknown God, as did Saint Paul on the Areopagus in Athens? To the experience of the Risen One? Is this not possible? They all of them call themselves Christians. He looked at these heads, one after another, and had to say to himself that without question they were nobly formed. It was possible to read from them, without great effort, that the skull formation must have been moulded, not by earthly forces but by celestial ones. It was visibly an expression of the starred vault of heaven, variously differentiated in the case of each ac cording to his inclination for the one or the other region of the cosmos, even though modified by terrestrial influences which showed themselves in the protuberances, narrowings and angles of each head. As they sat there in a semicircle they might have been considered — just as the Round Table of King Arthur’s knights — an image of the zodiac. For there was much in their various postures and attitudes which seemed reminiscent of the signs of the bull, the ram, the fish, and so forth. Yet, however unaltered for the eye the forms of these skulls were, the more full of motion the expressions which played across their faces appeared, despite the fact that most of them hid themselves behind a mask. Only when each spoke did his true physiognomy come into evidence, and it spread down over the neck, shoulders, and into his arms and their gestures. To find through these the character, temperament and attitude of mind of each one was the rewarding endeavor of the observer. But this was still not sufficient. The facades had to be broken through.

64 Behind these another face revealed itself. Arising, as it were, from below and activated from within. It told of what origi nated from the instincts and urges and in how far these were entangled in the lower nature of man. Its features were ruled by self-seeking — invisible to the senses, openly revealed before the spirit. Nothing in it could be hidden. And if perchance it resembled a mask, then this was its veritable being. It showed unmistakably the worth or worthlessness of each word which passed the lips of the speaker. Sometimes it was as though this face emerged in the knee cap or in the hip-joint and wanted to rise upward in a longing to become more beautiful, only to be torn down again by the lower passions. Often it was an animal face which transformed itself into a human countenance when the passions were puri fied. These heads which appeared arranged in long rows seem ed to rise from the horizontal into the vertical like an ascending musical scale, whereby the notes, which were at first black, became colorful and grew bright from within so that one could recognize features in the dark shadowy spots. And at this point man entered the cathedral of the heavens for he had become good. But the melos of life rises and falls in accordance with the motifs of destiny which the individual has brought with him through birth and which he carries through death. Each one, beheld from within, is a sonata which he himself plays, — from without, a symphony played by the hierarchies. . . About this nothing can be intimated in the records of this m eeting. He who exercises self- and world-knowledge reports for the record only in the presence of the spirit. Look into yourself and discriminate between what comes from above and from below. You look into a soul-sphere where the eternal interpenetrates the temporal, where the divine puri fies the human in a burning process kindled by the spirit. Speaking figuratively, you behold the Phoenix bird which arises from its own ashes. The higher being within you arises out of the lower when you permeate your blood, which floods through you in your body — now in red arteries, now in blue veins —

65 with the light of spirit-discernment and the love of God so that in your face it shimmers through as the hue of peach blossoms which reddens when you are ashamed and pales when you are afraid, — which is brightened by your conscience because within this there streams a light from the heavens that warms you in your inmost core when you follow the higher man within you, and congeals you to ice when you follow the lower. — It leads you through the regions of soul, which are layered about the earth like banks of clouds, into the sun-filled spirit- spheres, out of mists into the heaven’s blue, aloft to the starry dome whereon your destiny is inscribed, until your inner eye has itself become space whence it surveys its earthly journeyings. You see now where these began and whither they lead. You win insight into the being of your individuality.

Translated by Arvia Ege

Poem by Albert Steffen

Oh, look within the blossom’s cup until you know the lore of life. You utter so for all the dead the word that lets them love the earth, and to the living give the light that ripens heaven’s wisdom here. Yet but for Him who woke from death you fill the blossom’s brim no more — with draught of memory no more — and never with oblivion’s dew. Oh, learn yourself what flowers are, Be chalice for the Living Sun.

Translated by Christy Barnes

66 From THE MISSION OF POETRY

Dante and Giotto, A Conversation

ALBERT STEFFEN

The most wonderful example of how a poet and painter, comple menting each other in word and picture, can learn from one an other is perhaps that of Dante and Giotto. A meeting between the two, the possibility of which reveals itself to spiritual expe rience of the Trecento, may provide an illustration. Dante visited Giotto, who was a friend of his, in Padua — in order to see the latter’s recently completed frescoes. The painter led the poet from picture to picture. He allowed the sequence of paintings to speak for themselves. First, the life of the Mother of God, then the life of the Son of God. Then he turned again to the entrance wall, to the Last Judgment and the World- Redeemer. Lastly he showed him the ways of earth’s children, their virtues and vices. Dante saw everything, missing nothing — not a star on the ar ches of the vault, not an architectural ornament, not a tendril or rosette placed in between as embellishment. “You paint what I am unable to put into poetry,” said he — to which Giotto replied: “And yet we are both going the same way. I use the Sectio aurea, the golden section, in the composition of my paintings and you in the construction of sonnets.” And he pointed with a gesture toward the line from head to heart and from heart to foot, and then to the relation of the upper section to the lower, and of the lower to the whole line. And he showed how the way upward points to death, the way downward to birth, and the whole to the life-path between them. “But what you bring to expression in your terza rima,” he add ed, “reaches beyond this into the Inferno, Purgatorio and P aradiso.”

67 They had come to the middle of the chapel, and were peering — now to the left toward the virtues, now to the right toward the vices. “Stupidity is the final theme I painted,” Giotto said — com pleting the tour. Dante looked at one figure after the other. “They are well con ceived,” he said. “Opposite to Hope, who wears a crown, stands Despair, who has a cord wound round her neck. Charity, with fruits and flowers given to her by heaven, Envy, from whose mouth hangs a snake. Vacillation, Infidelity, Falseness, Anger — all represented exactly. According to these archetypes the human race can be more truly judged than by the nominalism of the Florentine Courts of L aw...” “You still have your banishment too much on your mind,” Giotto interrupted him. “Be thankful that now you have time to finish your poem, instead of struggling among political parties.” “The ‘unjust judge,’” replied Dante with a grim laugh, “has been pronounced sacro-sanctimonious, but the throne on which he sits stands awry. I will await its fall. But wherefore your double representation of Stupidity? Do you not spend too much diligence upon her?” “Stupidity,” answered Giotto, who liked joking, “has to be conquered, not only from without, but also from within. She stu pefies all men and herself also. She exists in a duplicity of dubi- tation. She becomes duller, the more wicked she appears. She in flates and puffs herself up. When she swings out with her club, the whole world can founder.” “I have experienced that,” said Dante; “World- and self-dummification is the motto for today. But no more of this. By disputation we get no further. Let us turn to the eternal tasks of painting and poetry. — Why, in the highest sense, did you become a painter and I a poet?” Out of this question followed a paradigmatic conversation.

Giotto: Painting is the most faithful servant of the Creator. For she is capable of transmitting to all men what providence in tended for mankind. She can also make this visible to those who possess no higher faculties.

68 Dante: But in order to make the insights comprehensible, one has to translate the picture into words — and therefore poetry is regarded as the highest Art. Giotto: Your poem reaches its climax just there where it be comes painting: in the Purgatorio. The purified man can move upward as well as downward, and can transform himself in ac cordance with his freedom. Dante: Yet it is more usual to get stuck in hell! Giotto: Certainly in your poem evil men do not progress. Who, however, can be called good? In the prison of the past, crimi nals are irretrievably lost. For there, in the caves of hell, your mighty word works as though chiseled into form. Its contours confine the sinners. Death is the greatest of sculptors. The poet should not only lead souls out of these dungeons through purg ing flames into freedom, but also transmute the inflexible form into the release of color. Dante: That is indeed my intention. It is the significance of my Trilogy. The sculpture of the underworld becomes the painting of the Hill of Purgatory, whose shades of color lead at length to the heavenly songs of the Hierarchies. Giotto: In Paradise, however, you get caught up within the non-visibility of music. Here no one follows you any more, ex cept the Blessed. And they fail to hear how the Damned in hell cry for help. Dante: The Word reaches as far as the crystalline Heaven. There it seems to soar away. Yet this is not so. For it has in deed become Man, and as Man has taken on form. Giotto: It is true; Christ has risen, but he will never again be reborn in a body. Dante: The Dead gather around his heavenly Form and await their resurrection. Giotto: They undergo the Last Judgment, either as good souls who unite with him, or else as bad souls who have fallen away from him . . . Dante: And supposing an evil exists, of whose existence no man knows, but by whom every man can be led astray? 69 Giotto: From that I will protect myself through my painting. Dante: And I through my poetry. Giotto: Are you satisfied with your work? Dante: Just as little as you with yours, although I know that as artists no one excels either you or me.

* That was the last conversation between the two friends. After both their deaths it was continued. Then, however, it became clear that their Art had very much stronger effects than it had in life. When the one spoke of poetry and the other of painting, it was now a reciprocal interchange. For the one filled the soul of the other, so that there arose a mutual self-outpouring. The one was builder of the other. It happened that they actually no longer exchanged words or pictures, but themselves became word-pictures, and these they reciprocally impressed on one an other. Each had become a hieroglyph which the other had to decipher. Each of them turned into the speech-sounds — vowel or consonant — of a word, into the words of a sentence, into a sentence in a story — which they told — each alone, yet both as one — to the divine Hierarchies. And Dante said to Giotto: “You are now yourself my poem . ” And Giotto to Dante: “And you are my painting.” And seen in comparison with the graces of devotion, they recognized how imperfect they both had been. For they mea sured themselves now against the immeasurably high standing of the Resurrected One, whose image they had striven to create on earth — in words and in painting. Now, in the cosmos, they had to make their way from head to heart of the Heavenly Man, and from heart to feet. There and back, with all the wounds inflicted by earthly men. This, however, they were not able to do up there. Therefore they desired to descend again, to return, in order to share the burden of the sufferings of Mankind’s Ego.

Translated by Virginia Brett

70 From WILDIRON

The Burning of the Bau

ALBERT STEFFEN

Rudolf Steiner stood at the mighty carven podium in the center of the space under the vault where the two interpene trating domes met above his head — behind him the East, before him the West. He spoke words of rebirth. He led human cognition over into cosmic cultus. He, to whom citizen ship on earth had been denied, opened the way for humanity to its home in the heavens. Towards the end of the lecture, it was as though each single word took wing as it passed over his lips. It flew to his lis teners. It brought light to their heads and warmth to their hearts. It refreshed their entire being. It poured forth the forces of the gods who build up the earthly body. When the teacher then wrote some verses on the blackboard, the letters appeared like star pictures a-light upon the dark night heavens. After the lecture, Christof and Justine walked up to the front with the others to copy down the sentences to take home. After that they left the Bau. It was a clear night. All day long the foehn had blown. Now the wind stood still. The stars looked close. Together they gazed upward. Eye, breath and step were transformed. They felt that their beings reached up into cosmic heights. They knew their heavenly origin. Gradually they drew farther away from the Bau along a nar row path. In a holy stillness they walked on, side by side. Then a strange shouting reached their ears.

71 “It is part of the New Year’s celebration,” they thought and paid no attention. But as they came closer to the road again, a shock ran through them. There was a hastening along the paths up the steep hill, a suppressed howling and calling, and now a trumpeting outcry: “It’s burning!” The road was black with people who streamed upward as though a flow of lava had its source in the valley and poured mountainward. In the crowd, Christof saw several friends he had worked with in the Bau. Their breathless panting sent a cramp through his heart. Their pain mingled with his own: a wild lament wanted to weep for woe. For Justine, it was as though a thunderstorm raged over her; space as far as the stars seemed the arena for spirit battle. They both ran up the hill. At the south entrance, that had been carved on up to the last few days, helpers had gathered. Men and women, workers on the Bau, from architects to handymen, sculptors, painters, musicians. They erected lad ders, lugged pails, screwed hoses together. They ran in and out, rescuing what they could, with cloths held over their mouths, for the Bau was already filled with smoke. Christof and Justine joined in. Rudolf Steiner stood in the front of the studio where by day he carved on the Christ statue. It was as though angels were there at his side to support him. Yet he sent them forth to pro tect others. He whom misfortune struck hardest remained strongest. No word of accusation or of despair passed his lips. Only sober advice on how to help. “If anyone is hurt, I am to be told at once,” he said, “bring all who are injured here.” It was reported that as soon as the first smoke was discovered, the night watchmen had immediately put through the alarm to the fire station. Sirens sounded. Telephones rang. In the building, all the rooms were opened and thoroughly searched. Yet no fire was to be found. Only the “White Room” was filled with smoke. Here the wall from which it billowed was broken through with an axe and revealed that the construction inside the outer shell stood in flames. Immediately all available fire-fighting equipment was directed there.

72 Fire engines from neighboring villages rushed in. All that was humanly possible was done. Yet the fire, the real core of which remained hidden, wandered, invisible both from within and from without, behind the sheathing towards the conjunction of the two domes where the curtain hung that separated them. There a red spot became visible that grew rapidly larger, and into which the people on rescue ladders looked down as into a crater. Shining jets hissed, streams flowed. The fiery sea en gulfed the water flood. Through the thick banks of smoke, the paintings deep inside the Bau came into view again and again as though their shining colors could never, never be annihilated by the fire clouds. The floor was flooded over with water, black with charcoal. What was born out of light mounts now into the heights. What has grown out of darkness sinks into the depths. There the gods wait — here demons. Midnight nears. A blast of wind drove its way into the fire storm which then broke out through the dome. A rain of glowing sparks spiraled into the distance. The neighboring woods, vineyards and farm steads shone red in the fireshine. Far and near, men stood and stared and threw their inner most — good and bad — into the flames. An order sounded: “Everyone out of the Bau!” Bells in the nearby villages began to ring in the New Year according to the old custom. They rang out in accompaniment to the fall of the building built for all mankind, as though they wanted to warn all those who had eyes and ears to perceive and to be aware of what was taking place at this moment. Oh, hear and see: human pain — woe of the gods. “Ten years’ work,” said the Master Builder. He made his way in great arcs around the burning. He saw how the domes broke in. He watched the molten sea of flames, round which the blazing columns stood like gigantic torches. He sank himself into the depths of the fiery cauldron out of which colors glowed, red, golden and violet. With his

73 spirit, he remained within the Bau and let the fire speak to his soul. There — the deeds and sufferings of light painted upon the inner domes spoke. The sounds of the language of the stars carved into the columns spoke. The memories of the metals spoke, wafting as tones through space. Human hearts spoke — hearts that had come to know a home; gods spoke who had found meaning in the goals of the earth. What the Creator had created in mankind spoke there. “Ten years’ work.” Slung about now with serpent swarms, infested with red and smoke-ridden demons! Suddenly, great clouds of sparks shot up and spun far out, up into the heights, darkening the stars. A heap of ruins lay there below. Iron spikes, cement ribs, charred beams, dirtied chaos. And a crowd of men, black in the fireshine, looked on. “Ten years’ work.”

— A grey morning follows. Rudolf Steiner still stands there. “We will continue the work in the place that is left us,” he says and gives orders for the carpentry shop, which has remained protected from the flames, to be cleaned.

* Officials come and consult. Insurance agents appear with their yellow raincoats and black notebooks. Journalists ask for interviews. An entrepreneur wants to take motion pictures. He estimates the enormous sales. “New York alone has 35,000 movie theaters. Each pays five dollars showing rights. Add it up your selves.” He is politely turned away. Meetings, consultations, decisions pile up. When the most essential needs are taken care of, Rudolf Steiner, as planned, holds his next lecture.

Translated by Christy Barnes

74 Poem Albert Steffen

What a fearful, thrice-wailed cry of woe overwhelms your Self, frightens it back to the void? Your wide-open eye uplifted to heaven hollows w ith horror: Parched the crystalline spring, the divine fire extinguished, faded all colors of the earthly realm and the dear faces of men so ashen! The world in shadow, and, to flee it, excites inhuman greed, which devours all to sustain itself, along with fear, that the food turns to poison. Sickness lays hold of your body, all leads but to death. Am I still I, you ask, or is hatred in the crumbling bones, heat in the blood linked to all humankind, which is evil — Ah, does mankind confirm itself destined to murder? So say all crimes on the earth, inscribed in the Book of the Cosmos. Co-partners in guilt are all in the torture trial of nations. How will the Dead, however, receive the living yonder?

75 In horror they turn away even from the dearest on earth. But, O wonder, they behold only the one body with wounds bedecked, but healed. The scars shine like stars, the hands hold the Chronicle of Death on high. Blank are the pages in the Book of Life.

The Risen One speaks: O living one, take the blood, that is pure as blossoms of roses, the water of tears, sanctified salt; effaced are thus in the book of life, the pages w here once your misdeeds were inscribed, redeemed in the Word whose sounds as stars on the Dome of God ray forth.

Take joy, O Man, in the blossoms of earth, in smiles of the children, in communion with your brothers in the Spirit. All the Angels love you once m ore. It is the Offering of Christ, that redeems you. As redeemed, we know you on the new-risen Star. Begin inspired — Translated by Daisy Aldan

76 DRAMATIST OF THE NEW MYSTERIES

Albert Steffen and the Drama

FREDERICK HIEBEL

When, with Aeschylus, the drama emerged from the shadow of the Eleusinian mystery temple, it was the youngest child of Greek poetry. To be sure, Greek tragedy, during its life span of three generations, was only a prologue foreshadowing the epoch which, since the days of Elizabethan drama, has placed the stage in the center of all cultural life. Not only have drama and opera become the most significant culminations of poetry and music, they have influenced all other forms of art; have given expression to philosophy and penetrated into the realms of religion. Only in this light can the influence of such works as Hamlet and Lear, Faust and Parsifal be understood. The crisis of our culture has also become the crisis of our drama. Materialism has revoked the heritage of the ancient mysteries and of the mystery plays of the Middle Ages — the Resurrection and Christmas plays. For this reason the culture of the stage has fallen prey to naturalism or been dissipated by the films, although Shakespearean drama, Goethe’s Faust, W agner’s operas, and, more especially, Parsifal as performed at the Bayreuth festivals, stemmed from the world of the Mys teries and were thus a preparation for a new mystery poetry. The most decisive step towards a new drama of the twentieth century was made in Rudolf Steiner’s Mystery Plays. The Goetheanum became a school for a new art of acting and a force in the renewal of the drama. Rudolf Steiner’s four Mys tery Plays can be compared with nothing else presented on to-

----From the special Albert Steffen Issue of the Forerunner, Vol. IV, No. 1, 1943, edited by Virginia Moore.

77 day’s stage. They arise from such a profound consciousness of the world and the human soul that they are to be considered only as seeds of what will be developed in the future, just as the Eleusinian dramas of Persephone and Dionysus became the basis for the Greek Theatre. Albert Steffen is a dramatist who was determined to draw the art of the drama once more into the circle of mystery wis dom. He treads the same path which spirits like Goethe, Wag ner and Strindberg have already travelled before him, only he strikes on further, with determination and with a clear con sciousness of his task. Each of his dramas is a world in itself, although more careful consideration shows that one creative principle underlies them all: a striving toward the creation of a new “mythology” out of the spirit of the mystery arts. It is noteworthy that, from the very beginning, and of his own accord, Albert Steffen turned away from naturalism. At an early age he wrote his first poetic drama, The Manichaeans. H ere all that is to come later is already contained as in a seed. What is it in Manichaeism which came to occupy the poet so deeply? The teaching of Manes, who lived in the third century after Christ, belongs to the deepest revelations of Christianity. It reaches its height in the endeavor to transform evil into good. Manichaeism is in the highest sense dramatic. And this drama is bound up with the strongest undercurrent of our epoch, the new Faustian era. Its particular problem is that of the struggle against evil, against Mephistopheles. This has become a funda mental question in poetry, from Dante’s Divine Comedy through Hamlet and Macbeth, up to M ilto n ’s Paradise Lost and G o eth e’s Faust. For this reason Albert Steffen’s two dramas, The Manichaeans and The Death Experience of Manes, are focal points of the poet’s work. The first as prologue and promise, the last as fulfillment and revelation. In the later play, the experience of death leads to the knowledge of the demonic passion for destruction inher ent in the triumph of matter. The knowledge of death is thus knowledge of the demons. That is the road of the Mani chaeans. Albert Steffen’s drama reveals this in great artistic

78 images. The five acts of the play are in the truest sense five steps in Manes’ experience of death. The first experience takes place in the sphere of present-day consciousness. The Jew Nik- anor is Manes’ greatest opponent, but when he is condemned to death by the Persian King Schapur, Manes undertakes his defense. Schapur insists that only the light-born Persians have a right to share in the sowing and reaping. Nikanor fights for the teaching that all peoples should have an equal share. To the cross with men of this belief! But as Schapur’s son lies dy ing at the sight of the execution of this unjust judgment, Manes is able to awaken him from death and thereby rescue Nikanor. This touches the heart of the King, and Nikanor is converted by the reconciliation between father and son, into overcoming the Father principle. The first act suffices to show the reality of the symbolism in this composition. Such symbolism is the cornerstone of a new Mystery Drama through which history becomes the eternal present. A third-century document becomes a life-giving myth in the twentieth century. What is presented in The Death Experience of Manes as the cen ter of the tragedy in the battle between darkness and light ap pears in altered form in Christine’s tragedy in The Four Beasts of the Apocalypse, in W ilson’s in the Peace Tragedy, and in the con flict between the Kaiser and Moltke in Chief of the General Staff. In the apocalyptic scenes of The Fall of the Antichrist, the thoughts are uttered in Steffen’s most crystalline style. It was written in 1928 in the course of a few weeks, in the Engadine. Nourished upon alpine granite, it is itself like a piece of prime val rock. Written close to the spot where Nietzsche once wrote his Zarathustra, this work of Steffen’s is filled with apocalyptic forces and thunderstorms, an antidote to Nietzsche’s W ill to Power. Steffen’s vision of the Antichrist proved to be an antici pation of events and problems which, five years later, appeared in the tragic history of neighboring Germany. In his Adonis Play Steffen wrote a cultic piece for an autumn festival. The play is, in a certain sense, comparable with The Fall of the Antichrist as a vision and in presenting a problem ly ing in the future.

79 [Images: sixdrawings]Greatly[Images: reduced reproductions of costume designs in color by Albert Steffen First row: for Adonis Play, Second and third row: for The Death Experience of Alanes. 1. Men’s cultic robe; 2. Farmer; 3. Bahram; 4. Nadhira; 5. Archer; 6. Homophoros. [page80] [Images: twophotographs]Above: Stage set after a design by Albert Steffen for Adonis Play and below: for The Death Experience of Manes. (Premiere at the Goetheanum, 1938 & 1935; Director: M arie Steiner.) [page81] Albert Steffen has often affirmed that his innermost striving is to restore the myth to humanity. The mythical content of the Old Testament and its dramatic power prompted him to write, ten years after his first play on a biblical theme (The Flight out of Egypt), the drama of Hiram and Solomon. The uniqueness of this composition lies in its handling of poetic speech-formation. What a vivid experience of the value of sounds, tones and colors within the words! The iambic rhythm reveals itself as a delightful bearer of the great content. The verses raise the words above all earthly meaning, up to the realm of the spirit. Each sentence appears almost like a deed or a world in itself. So the verse and rhythm become building stones in the temple of the Word — the true drama. Here in Hiram and Solomon we find the first artistic fulfillment of that unique course of lectures on Speech-Formation and Dramatic Art which Rudolf Steiner gave to actors and dramatists in September 1924, shortly before his death. The action between Hiram the architect, and Solomon the king, goes into all the depths of human and cosmic being, for eternal world-forces stand behind them. Solomon is a child of Abel, Hiram a son of Cain. Cain’s children work below on the primitive mountains of the earth, while the children of Abel come from the vastness of the starry spaces. It is most characteristic of Albert Steffen’s work and poetic style that the sphere of a higher consciousness is always inter woven with the realm of daily consciousness. Dreams of pro found insight appear before King Solomon and Balkis, the Queen of Sheba. How strongly we feel that this is truly a mystery-drama, not only because of its sacred content, but also because the poet is able to visualize these pictures in the light of an earlier con sciousness, when dream and visionary soul-life were intermin gled with sense-perception and the first beginnings of intellec tual reasoning. The true poet is the true historian. The drama’s dedication reads: “Dedicated in devotion to Rudolf Steiner.” The first act of this drama appeared during the week in which Rudolf Steiner died; he was able to see the dedication before his death. This seems a profound gesture of

82 [Images: twophotographs]Stage sets after designs by Albert Steffen for his dram a Hieram and Solomon. (Premiere at the Goetheanum, Dornach, 1935 — Director, Marie Steiner.) [page83] destiny, full of symbolic significance: the great poet in Dornach at the Goetheanum was able to continue the work of Rudolf Steiner with his enlightened creations. H is Peace Tragedy, written (like the Four Beasts of the Apocalypse) in prose, is the tragedy of Woodrow Wilson. The language is adroit, diplomatic, precise, factual, full of brief assertions, rapid remarks and short anecdotes. It sometimes glitters, as in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, laden with an atmosphere of worldliness and charged with the high tension of current world diplomacy. Wilson, in the drama, is neither damned nor sanc tified. The play is indeed a tragedy, but one can sense in the end a transforming note through its chief character. Steffen sees his task as a writer to be “the uplifting of the Word from decline.” This is not meant merely in a stylistic or esthetic sense. With him it has a deeper ethical and religious foundation. He quite deliberately avoids dramatic crises, the blow of fate conveyed by the medium of theatrical effect. He avoids the stage device of a tragic finale. He shapes the final scene to a redeeming requiem. This is especially apparent in the next play which once more is connected with America and, like the Peace Tragedy, is played out between the two continents. Voyage to Another Land concludes — following the sinking of the Titanic — with a mystery action of the experience of bap tism, the gradual coming to consciousness of the Christ power in the ego. The ocean as background like a River Jordan, is swollen to universal proportions. The death-journey into another land becomes the birth-day of the new man. In 1901 Christian Morgenstern wrote: “What should we call by the name of tragedy and what should we recognize as the most stirring impulse coming to us from the stage? What but the portrayal of a truly significant human being, who is always a tragic figure since in human greatness there dwells by the side of great joy great pain; since in each uncommon fate the yea and nay of all life sound as from two trumpets, because a great man is in small the whole secret of the universe. Tragedy is the deep song of the world-being, and to listen to it with

84 [Images: twophotographs]Above: Stage set after a design by Albert Steffen for his dram a The Fall of Antichrist. (Premiere at the Geotheanum, 1933; Director, Frau Marie Steiner.) Below: Stage set for the drama Voyage to Another Land (boiler room of the Titanic). (Premiere at the Basel State Theater, 1938). quaking heart from time to time in the midst of the over whelming Everyday is our eternal reward.” In his Pestalozzi, Albert Steffen has created a drama around a “truly significant human being,” who is in small the “whole secret of the universe.” Although Pestalozzi’s world appeared to his noblest contemporaries like a beacon shedding its light far out into the sea of educational life, the course of his own outer life was a chain of unutterable misfortunes and failures. The discrepancy between ideal spiritual ability and earthly physical accomplishment could not be greater and therefore more tragic than in Pestalozzi’s life. The drama of Pestalozzi can, however, be given form only by one who keeps in view both of the basic forces in his life: the sensible as well as the spiritual, the day’s perception and the night’s revelation. With great penetration and dramatic technique, Albert Stef fen has mastered the substance of the educator’s life history, which sped from tragedy to tragedy, yet ran its course with the nobility of an epic. He sketches scenes from this life stemming from two realms: the transitory in time and the spiritual- eternal. The drama encompasses the last three days and nights of the dying, eighty-year-old Pestalozzi. Art can scarcely attain to a more living portrayal of a life than Albert Steffen has attained in this short span. Day is the vessel of destiny, night its fulfillment — the ap pearance and the very being of faith, past reality and future possibility. The great picture of life appearing immediately after death (as was painted for the first time, clearly and exact ly, before our modern consciousness in Rudolf Steiner’s spir itual science) is reflected with masterly brevity in Pestalozzi’s last earthly days, as he slowly withdraws and relaxes his hold upon life. The sleep of the last three nights was a “convalescent sleep,” as Pestalozzi’s doctor intuitively calls it. The illness which led to his earthly end was to be in the sense of St. John “not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.”

86 To present this within the limits of a naturalistic drama would be impossible. What the contemporary stage produces with scrupulous attention to every detail of historical costume and chronology is after all only the presentation of the outer most shell. A play which is a festival of resurrection must con sciously forego these details. The surface of sense perception, visible to the biographer, can tell us of the tragic strife over method which took place among Pestalozzi’s pupils. The events of the night offer to us glimpses of the eternal Entelechy. The scene of the last night, which leads directly to death itself, reveals to us the spirit of Pestalozzi as the educator of humanity. The theme of The Martyrs is connected with the Swiss founder of the Red Cross, while the drama of the tragic poet ess, Caroline von Gunderode, again bears the character of a requiem . Barrabas, as a mystery play, is dedicated to the Easter event, just as the Adonis Play is dedicated to autumn and Cry at the Abyss to Christmas, and as seasonal festival plays they fit into the stage activities of the Goetheanum. Alexander’s Transformation is a work on a Faustian scale. Even more than earlier plays, this drama is a proof of the artistic courage to enter upon paths which hitherto have not been trod den. If in Pestalozzi a scene was shown in which a double tab leau of present and past lie spread out before us, the opposite happens in the Alexander drama. This begins with the death of the hero, and the subsequent scenes carry the action into the soul and spirit realms of existence after death, resembling the course of a modern Divine Comedy. Listening to such a play de mands of the onlooker a mood of quiet and, at the same time, active contemplation. In spite of the variety of events, com plications, catastrophes and sudden changes, the main action is consummated in the innermost recesses of the soul in the form of a poetic “missa solemnis.” That Steffen was able, four years after the appearance of Alexander’s Transformation, to present a new play, diametrically opposite in theme, language and form, is evidence of his inex haustible power of output. His last drama Lin is in prose and

87 runs its course in the Far East: the China of the Opium War. With the exception of the voices of the dead, it presents no supernatural elements. Dramas such as The Martyrs and The Fall of the Antichrist are set ahead, at the turn of the century. They deal with basic problems of western humanity. Lin is played in the previous century and is a typical Eastern drama. Its problem is not the fall of Antichrist but the redemption of the pre-Christian, of the blood-ties of the East. Lin appeared in its author’s seventy-third year, and shows not the slightest diminution of his dramatic powers. On the contrary, it reveals the breath and pulse of a stage action almost unequalled in any of his plays. Lin will by no means stand as an epilogue to his many dramas. It signifies, rather, a new milestone in his task of recreating the miracle play. Christian Morgenstern wrote in 1910, in his journal Stufen: “The new Christian tragedy will first be possible when men more and more awaken from the material world. ... It will mirror the terrible fall of man into the unspiritual and his superhuman efforts to atone for the seemingly unatonable. For this let us humbly wait and do what we can.” Albert Steffen was able to fulfil these words, written a gener ation ahead of their time. He has begun to write the new drama. It is self-evident that, as a pathfinder of new ways, Steffen wrestles with all the problems of form. His women characters are paler than the men. The structure of certain scenes, especially in the Antichrist, seems as if made according to a formula for the simplest and hardest mineral. Sometimes the fullness of life seems lost because schema and survey out balance it. But of what significance is this, compared to the impulse given for the future, compared to the imperishable steadfastness of character and loyalty of the poet, who never compromises with the lack of spirituality in modern taste or with the conven tions of the contemporary theatre? And let us not forget that, besides the dramatic works which have so enriched the stage of the Goetheanum (to say nothing of many Swiss and Middle European theatres), Albert Steffen has also given us a new dramaturgy. His essays on the theory

88 and origin of drama are collected in his book Dramaturgical Con tributions to the Fine Arts. This work, together with Rudolf S tein er’s Dramatic Course, contains the basis of knowledge for a new art of the stage, which the modern world must not over look if it is not to sink hopelessly into the night of the material ism which is the origin of decay and chaos. As Albert Steffen has said: “To create poetry means, in real ity, to raise the word, which fell to earth, once more up to the spirit!”

FINAL CHORUS

o f Voyage to the Other Land

Oh let us build a ship for Christ’s disciples, Set sail to seek His visage through the dark — For mankind in the cradle and the coffin And for the blissful in the sun’s bright barque.

The Cross her anchor, rudder — the Spirit’s ray! O brother, sister — you, to steer the way! And guiltless or guilty, all who sail from land Shall know the mercy of His saving hand.

Translated by Arvia Ege

89 From THE FALL OF ANTICHRIST, Act III*

The Engineer’s Experience

The following brief excerpt seems appropriate to quote here at a time when there is a growing awareness throughout the world that there are today many who speak of having had an experience of the immediate presence of the Christ. The play was written in 1928 and had its world premiere, on Good Friday, 1933, at the Goetheanum in Switzerland, just when Hitler was consolidating his power in Germany. In Act III, the Engineer is returning from his 24-hour flight around the earth, outspeeding the sun, and ordered to drop down on every country the Regent ’s message proclaiming that he has emancipated the earth from the cosmos, made bread out of stones, and assumed absolute rulership over humanity. The Editor

REGENT: The days, the years, the centuries, calculated according to the Sun, have ceased to be. The day of judgment comes at my command . . . (The airplane is heard descending unseen, quick as lightning. The Engi neer is carried, shoulder-high, onto the platform. With the greatest effort, he stands upright before the Regent.)

REGENT: Give your report!

----*The Fall of Antichrist, A Dramatic Sketch by Albert Steffen in Three Acts, authorized translation by Dora Baker, Folder Editions, New York; Dor nach, Switzerland.

90 ENGINEER: (turning towards the setting sun) Sun, you sacred constellation, be with me also in the night which comes. Oh, be my leader in the growing darkness!

My airplane rose up as the sun was sinking, (when did it happen? — A world-day ago!) I flew up — and I saw the rising sun —

It stood on my horizon all the time, as golden gate, as entrance to the gods.

Westward I flew, my eyes upon the sun. Through empty spaces of the world I glided, which have completely hollowed out my soul. — The sea: — when I espied the violet waves, beating against the portals of the Sun, a tide leapt up within my heart, streamed forth, and in my blood a Being came to life, which rose into my eyes, so that I gazed — stars looking through my eyes — down on the earth. I flew above the red and yellow lands of America. I saw the burnt-out strips upon the prairies, and the clouds darkening moist virgin forests, tombs of beasts and monsters. It is God’s lifeless body in corruption.

REGENT: Yes — God is dead!

ENGINEER: Dead — through the deed of man. I looked down on the cities of the world, bringing their foulness to the wilderness.

REGENT: Have you thrown down the proclamation? — Speak!

91 ENGINEER: I meant to, but an image rose before me. The highest mountain ranges I had reached, by flying ever higher. In the distance, the ocean’s ruddy glow was visible. And in the spirit, I discerned the growing of two great columns: One rose from the earth, the other one arose out of the sea. And over both the clouds were massed together into a body: all the gathering storms threatening to burst over the distant East. Over the body was a shining face, which sorrow veiled: — yet it was like the sun. A faintly coloured rainbow like a breath around the shining image, spoke of peace. And then I knew and recognized that Being. The Sun’s own Son, the God who rose from death and joined himself once more to earth and water and air and light, the lifeless elements, thus animating them with his own spirit. I saw it, and I wish to say to all: Throughout my flight around the earth, in every direction, East and West and Center, I’ve seen the Christ, the Christ as Living One.

And led by Him, my flight has been fulfilled.

REGENT: (in a terrible rage) And my message?

ENGINEER: Is a lie.

REGENT: Death... to you! (He stands up, possessed by magical forces of destruction. From his eyes and from his clutched hands, zig-zag lightnings strike. The Engineer, struck by lightning, sinks down unconscious.)

Translated by Dora Baker

92 THE THERAPY OF FREEDOM AND LOVE: ESSAYS

From THE MISSION OF POETRY

Concerning Freedom and Love in the Crisis of Modem Consciousness

ALBERT STEFFEN

World creation can begin anew at every instant. Within himself each human being is able to set the seed for his further development. No being has the power to prevent the “I ” that is free from doing so .. .

The “I” of man proves itself to be creative when it grasps itself in its very own being, that is free, and in its love for the “you,” which is selfless. Then it creates always something new. Whoever has understood this will observe his experiences other wise than formerly. This means that he himself wants to be come different. When something confronts him that binds him and fills him with antipathy (against his innermost nature) he strives to change himself. How shall he look back upon something, however, which confronted him prior to this insight, and felled him through a more or less partial “fall” into sin? Can he raise himself out of the depths into the heights again? Or must he remain bound to the past? Must he drag it on forever with him? In any case he is able to observe it in freedom and through the power of his “I” to separate it from the thinking, feeling and willing which caused his deed. He says to himself: Because I was as I was then, this had to happen to me. It will not repeat itself if I change myself. I was then too confused, too

93 dark, too rigid. Now I will put my destiny in order, give it light, grow myself wings, in order to win an entirely new point of view. From here the fall takes on quite a different aspect. Above all, it is necessary that I consider not only myself, but the one who has wronged me as having progressed further in his development. To see him as he was then has lost all mean ing. What was decisive for my earlier judgment is no longer sufficient for putting things aright, let alone for future guidelines. Of judging, there can no longer be any question. What is observed outwardly cannot be looked upon as the cause. It is in itself already a result. In spite of all documents, the doer who wanted to deal me a destructive blow, as these show, did not proceed as consciously as the evidence would in dicate, but something acted within him which he himself did not yet perceive. Yet aside from this, it would be good to observe the case as such, wholly from the point of view of the future. One can observe oneself, guilty or innocent, innocently guilty perhaps, from the aspect of a higher consciousness. Why not make the spring upward already today? One could at least conceive it as a poem. Everyone experiences that he reads a book — and were it the one he loves most — differently in old age than in youth. Should one do otherwise with the chronicle of destiny? The one who practices retrospect in order to arrive at a valid imagination says to himself — I will now express my ex periences in colours. They are to begin with, because the past seems to me so impenetrable, still shadowy. The happening is still not fully formed. I set it before me as torso. As it was not lacking in danger it calls for a burning-red. I cleanse myself in order to attain to more light-filled shades such as I perceive at its core, as in the flame of a candle. This I can only do when I slip out of myself and into it. I must burn something away within myself, in order to become luminous within it; in other words I must experience it no longer through dependence on my physical body, but in my “I” my Ego, which has become free from it and is filled with interest for the “You” In this way the experience becomes for me an image, a pic ture that is perceived with my soul’s eye, but lies outside the

94 range of my physical vision — becomes a supersensible seeing. Hereby I have brought something from the still evolving life forces of the cosmos into the already evolved earthly happen ing. It is indeed as if a photograph that is developed in the darkroom were to be suddenly transformed into the living por trait of an artist for whom colours are the deeds and sufferings of light. And this experience, which has been transmuted by my free and loving “I,” has in itself become something possessed of continued living activity. It works creatively on my physical organism, where it still dwells as memory, and awakens there fresh upbuilding forces. It makes my body finer, more spiritual, more imperishable. It calls up within it feelings which until now the body has never made use of. They are its own for mative forces, freed from the weight of the earth, which are borne toward it by heavenly beings. They have, upon their wings, eyes, like butterflies, and give us leave to look through them into the world-all. Harbingers, they are, of that lofty Cherubim who stoops down to the I of man, clad in feathers of light out of which the deeds of your earlier incarnation take on form. These forms and figures you youself [yourself] have inscribed there as joy and sorrow. You learn to decipher them insofar as you raise yourself into the starry all. Then you awaken again to your earthly consciousness. You are wholly alone. The heavenly being who allowed you to see yourself in your archetypal image has disappeared. Lonely and forsaken as human being, with all your imperfections, you stand there. But within your blood the world-all-human-being speaks in your conscience . . . *

The world-all I (the cosmic ego) — the Creator-god — has bestowed upon human-creation, through Christ, the power of I-becoming. The Resurrected One awakens the dying-one again so that in a new earthly life he may learn to walk, to speak, to think and to live in the spirit of world-righteousness. He lifts from him the deeds that lead to death. He sets free.

95 He loves. Something in every human being announces this, without, to begin with, his knowing anything about it. He is able, however, to come to know it. It is the presence of the World-all spirit who guides his destiny. — It encourages me in my soul-capacities, in my thinking, feeling and willing, inso far as they are not dependent upon my perishable body, so that they are brought into harmony with the world-all, with the rhythms of the stars, with the music of the spheres, with the cosmic word, and works so mightily that even my physical body is laid hold of by it and can serve the course of heavenly fulfillment. Every human being is destined to say to himself: I am on the way there, but still far distant. For the goal is a star that reveals itself to be still more glorious than the earth.

Loyalty — Life — Eternal —

Loyalty — spake my spirit, And I saw all things that pass away, But the Word holds true And my fate springs anew.

Life — spake my spirit, And I saw my bones in their burial clay, But the Word holds true And my fate springs anew.

Eternal — spake my spirit, And I saw Christ nailed to the world’s cross way, But the Word holds true And my fate springs anew.

Translations by Arvia Ege

96 [Image:drawing of bird] Mani

ALBERT STEFFEN

The essential essence of M ani’s Christ-experience is that he immersed himself in the Mystery of Golgotha in body-free spirit, independent of any historical tradition. His selfhood, purified from every vestige of his physical organization, was able to grasp the spirit in nature pictorially and as a real be ing. He had a pure spirit-self experience of the world. There was for him no sense experience that was not at the same time

The---- second of two essays published in 1930 by Verlag fuer Schoene Wissen schaften.

97 a moral one. Light and Darkness were good and evil, and were accordingly the deeds of beings. Matter and Spirit did not appear as abstract concepts, but as powers. Stars as gods. His adversaries were no longer able to understand the basic tenets of his teaching, namely that the senses are conveyors of spirit. Aristotle (who called Ormuzd the good daimon and Ahriman the evil one, over both of whom the most perfect primal being πρώτον αριστον[protonariston] held sway) was still able to understand the Zarathustrian world conception to which that of Mani — which tells of the Light-King of Paradise and the Archon of Darkness — bears such a great resemblance. Post-Christian personalities, like Saint Augustine, could no longer perceive the divine within the sensory world. This father of the church, who said of himself that when he had to learn Greek as a child, he hated it, could no longer find the living spirit in nature but had to search for it within himself. Mani, however, through his own development in the mysteries, had regained a relation to Spirit-nature on a higher plane than the Greeks. He is a precursor of Goethe, who saw color as a moral-sensory experience. For Mani’s adversaries darkness was devoid of being, a mere absence of light. — The sun disappears below the hori zon. Darkness strides in. Light is absent. Elsewhere it shines; here it shadows. However, when we consider this more deeply, we must ask what causes the night to break in upon us. This lies in the im penetrability of the earth which has become mineral-hard. It no longer lets the light radiate through it. The earth itself has become dark. What is more: it has imprisoned light within itself (as color in the rocks). And further still: the light which shines within the earth itself (subterranean fire) is dammed up by the hard crust that separates it from the cosmos, forcing it, against the orderly progression of evolution, to unburden itself in volcanic eruptions and the like. And so, through such a simple consideration, we can distin guish between various potencies of darkness, which are alto gether different from the mere absence of light — not just neg-

98 ative luminosity, so-called shadows, but rather a counteraction, a negative “thrust,” an anti-earth. Through the configuration of matter, even water becomes something other than what it was originally. It grows denser and heavier (an example: the Dead Sea). In the same way, the air is transformed through the miasmic vapors which rise up from the earth. Basically storms have a terrestrial origin. Even light decomposes within the earth’s atmosphere. It be comes electricity. And this lifts the curtain of night, but only by means of a lie. We have to say that man deceives himself if he thinks darkness is absence of light. It is not merely the absence of a particular force but presence of a counterforce. The more we penetrate into the depths of the earth, the more clearly these forces of opposition to the cosmos reveal themselves. Were the earth only water, it would be formed quite other wise. Its form would appear, still to a certain extent, as an ex pression of the cosmos that worked upon it from without. It would be more mobile, more rhythmical, more musical. Its basic being would reverberate as primal thunder, into which, as into a general bass-resonance, the planetary harmonies once embedded themselves. A boding of this rings in a boy’s ear when he dives to the bottom of a river. The Tao is a remembrance of this primal tone which once filled the very differently constructed ear of m an. Furthermore, the cosmic relationship of day and night, if matter were less dense, would also be different. The course of the day or the year, as they are today, depends partly upon the substantiality of the earth which has become solid. Here, too, darkness plays its part as impenetrability, as resistance, as the earth’s very own life. But if this earth consisted only of air and fire, then it would itself have to become a source of light. It would have to re unite with the Sun, the star from which it stems. Here we arrive at a concept which signified a reality to the true Manichaean: the Terra Lucida. It first appears unaccom

99 panied by the principle of Darkness. The Darkness had its be ginnings later. In mighty world epochs the light-earth condens ed to air, to water, to the solid state. What today we loosely call the aggregate conditions are leftovers of earlier stages of the earth, but so formed that they show the imprint of death received from our present planet, the stark and crumbling earth. Only ghosts of earlier creator-powers haunt such a clod. We speak in an altogether Manichaean sense when we call the watery condition of the earth in its earlier stages of evolu tion, Moon, and the fiery, still earlier one, Sun. Even Augus tine, when he speaks of the origin of the Sun as evolving from the “good fire” and the Moon from the “good water,” grasped this principle accepted by the Manichaeans, despite his opposi tion to it. Terra Lucida has a spiritual kernel and an etheric sheath. Its creator, King of the Paradise of Light — for which Wesendonk in annotations of his book, Teachings of Mani, finds the title Pidar Roshan, Father of Light, and Zerwan, Time, in the section on the “Pehlewif Fragments from Turfan” — is that gloriously intertwined being of the Persians, Zeruana Akarena, from which all things came to be: in essence, the Word of the St. John G ospel. Terra Lucida reveals itself in the stages of its evolution as living-breath, -air, -light, -water, -fire, and represents a pre-earthly field of activity for divine spiritual beings who, as Aeons, surround the God of Light. Through the intervention of these forward-striding Aeons this light-earth gradually becomes an airy, a liquid, a solid earth — although, to begin with, only as a kind of skinlike hull or sheath. And this first fiery form of physicality offered certain beings the possibility of falling away from the general plan of creation. Cosmic fire is usurped and transformed into earthly fire through these retarded spirits. This principle, called “Hummana,” which had fallen away from the light, is of feminine gender and consequently brings forth the Archon of Darkness. Here a new beginning com m ences.

100 The Divine Fire, one aspect of the Terra Lucida, becomes a conflagration, the expression of the revolting spirits. “Further more this conflagration mingles with the earthly fire; for the ef fects of fire contained in annihilation and destructiveness stem from the conflagration; its qualities of illuminating and warm ing come from the (good) Fire.” (According to the Finrisial Ulum, translated by Kessler and quoted from Wesendonk.) At this point the opportunity for the commencement of an anti-earth arises through the further densification of the ele ments. Just as Terra Lucida consists of pure elements, so Terra Pestifera — as St. Augustine calls it — consists of corrupt ones. With its regions of densest darkness, opaque slime, violent winds, destructive fire, black smoke and their respective inhabi tants of ordered ranks of demons surrounding the Archon of Darkness, it is the anti-earth of that Terra Lucida willed by the King of Light. And just as this Terra Lucida reaches into cosmic heights, so the Terra Pestifera into the depths of the earth. The further densification of the earth no longer occurs only in accordance with the God of Light but also with the opposing intent of the Spirit of Darkness. Samnu, as the Archon of Darkness is called in the “Turfan- fragments,” seizes hold of the other elements as well, not only of fire but also of air, and thus interferes in the process of evo lution. The winds which are sent from the ends of the world are driven into the blind alleys of the Abyss. The inhabitants of Terra Pestifera win one region after another from Terra Lucida, whose spirits of Meekness, Wisdom, Understanding, Taciturni ty and Insight and even the King of Light himself, the spirit of boundless Love, aim too high, as it were, to ward off the dem ons. They are like the compassionate mother who should curb and guide her naughty child but kisses it instead. But even greater insolence and outrage is the result of such love.

* Only now is the original human being first created as a helper. The commentators have described how he arose in vari ous ways. The most profound presentation of this primal prob lem I found in Rudolf Steiner’s rendering of the Temple-Legend.

101 “The Spirits of Darkness attempted to take the Light-realm by storm. They came as far as the border but were powerless against the Light-realm. Now the Light-realm was to punish them, but only good prevailed there. So the Demons of Dark ness could only be punished by means of the good. “The spirits of the Light-realm therefore took a part of their own realm and mixed it into the Realm of Darkness. “In this way a kind of sourdough came about in the Realm of Darkness causing a sort of dancing vortex. Death entered in to it, whereupon it began to consume itself. Now it harbored the seed of its own destruction. As consequence, the human race arose. Original man, springing from the Light-realm, merged with the Realm of Darkness in order to overcome it.”* The King of Light offers up a sacrifice in that he gives away a part of his own realm in order to embrace the whole. Simplicius considered, as do many professed Christians and defenders of morality, that such tactics are unworthy of God. “A fearful God,” he says, “is put forward (by the Mani- chaeans) who becomes worried when Evil approaches his bor ders and threatens to penetrate his realm; and because of this fear he gives over parts of his own being, souls who have not sinned before, to the Evil in an unjust and useless way in order to save the rest of the Good — like a general who sacrifices part of his army to the approaching enemy in order to save the rest. For this is the sense of their assertions, although they use other words to express it. However, he who abandoned the soul, or allowed it to be abandoned, as they say, either did not know or did not consider what souls abandoned to Evil must suffer; that they would be plagued by all kinds of ills although they had not previously sinned but had been an integral part of God. And the godless ones (for such already are those who re ject the two principles of Good and Evil) should never be able to return to Goodness but remain chained to Evil for all times. So God, having lost part of his own being, remains imperfect and appears foolish, since he was not in a condition to see what served his own advantage nor to understand the nature of Evil.

----*From an unrevised lecture by Rudolf Steiner.

102 For how could Evil have penetrated the realm of Goodness since both are separate from eternity and sundered by their very natures — since light remains light and cannot absorb darkness? How could it be anything but cowardice, injustice, imprudence to deliver the soul to Evil, and ever after to endeavor to call it back, knowing that this can never be fully achieved because some souls will remain engulfed in Evil for ever? And Divinity is supposed never once to have foreseen this! How much better it would have been to let Evil grind away at itself without mixing it into the Good, knowing that the latter could never gain the upper hand.” Strange, that Simplicius completely overlooks the fact that it is the highest deed of the Light-God to create a being that is totally free and destined to continue the work of his creator in freedom. Only when the creation of the creator becomes creative itself, is it perfect in itself. And only a creator who creates perfection can himself appear perfect. One could readily lead the didactic objections of Simplicius to a dialectic ad absurdum, regardless of the fact that the sacrifice of the King of Light occurred in a sphere where the lower prin ciple of logic was still wholly embedded in the higher one of the Logos and therefore had no independent value. Logic is a human faculty, but man had not even originated at that time. The kind of argument Simplicius uses really aims at sending Creation back into the void, into nothingness. This shows itself particularly in the attitude of Alexander of Lycopolis which Ferdinand Christian Baur mentions: “The Godhead would have been far more dignified if it had destroyed this ‘matter’ at once together with the thought of existence.” However, in order to do justice to his name, the creator willed to create something creative. But only a free being who can set its own goals for itself can be creative; and only he who continues to work creatively upon himself as a creature and of one mind with his creator can be — not only a free being — b u t also good. Only at this point can one first speak of a more or less perfect state: that is, of a relative goodness, and no longer of an evil that is of an altogether different character, for the warranty for transformation to the good is given through

103 freedom, even though the point in time when the not-quite- good will have been entirely eradicated cannot be prophesied. The totality of the Aeons into whom the King of Light pours out his essence (Love, Faith, Loyalty, Courageousness, Wis dom, Meekness, Knowledge, Understanding, Discretion, and Insight, or however one may inadequately call these forces which originate in the Zodiac according to the teaching of Mani, the Zodiac through which the Sun courses) can only be understood as sacrificial will. And the devotion or surrender of one’s own psyche is the crowning glory of all divine deeds. You become party to the revolt — that is, to the exact oppo site of love, faith and loyalty, etc. — when you argue as Simplicius does. Of course, what he says about the general’s tactics is quite accurate if he means he sacrifices others rather than himself; if he does not surrender his own being, but those of other Ego- Men. If, however, the King of Light were himself to become a man, then he would do just the opposite: He would take to himself all those who were already lost. And so it is: Christ calls the twelve disciples unto him. Each is called by name, from Simon Peter to Judas Iscariot. “Go not the ways of the heathen nor journey through the cities of the Samaritans,” Christ warns them, “but go to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.” It is this that is most deeply embedded in matter. This is the darkest wolf’s lair. “The Kingdom of Heaven is close at hand.” The highest approaches the lowest. Christ bids us to heal the sick, to make the lepers clean, to awaken the dead and cast out the demons. Mani gives these words from the Gospel of Matthew to his disciples also. *

The battle of primal human beings — which comes about through the intermingling of those souls sacrificed by the King of Light with dark materiality — continues for an entire cosmic year. The period from the Atlantean catastrophe to the War of All against All that lies before us is only one particular phase, of which there have been previous ones and which will be fol

104 lowed by others in the future — mere earthly-historical sections of the cosmic wars. At the outset of this epoch (after the sinking of ancient Atlantis) there is still a preponderance of the inherited element of light. But the weapons which ancient man had received from the gods are gradually lost, the first to go being the grav ity-conquering force issuing from the Mystery Temple of the Rocks. Man no longer finds divinity in the solid earth. And very soon no longer in the water either, despite its cleansing power. No longer in the air: the Aum-Culture loses its force. And finally even sense impressions no longer render a spiritual experience. The eye no longer sees divinity in the outer world. Thus primal man has had to suffer the loss of one protective sheath after another and stands at last naked before the abyss, forfeit to the Void, the Nothingness. But the King of the Paradise of Light removes man again and again to his own realm when he dies. Buddha, this delegate — who teaches that the earth is Maya and that life upon her brings only suffering — preaches world-flight. However the progress of history shows that this is bought at the expense of those who remain chained to the earth. These become even more shadowy images of primal man who must eventually succumb completely to the Archon of Darkness. The purpose of this Archon is to usurp the egohood that was engendered through the sacrifice of the Light-King. As mediator, Zarathustra still proclaimed the victory of Ormuzd over Ahriman. But already in the following epoch man loses the active sun-principle and gives himself over to the passive moon-principle; the widow’s son is threatened with ruin. The darkness is deepest in Egypt. Israel evades it by flight to Ca naan in order to create the way for the Light; but it prepares for it the way to death. The law leads the ‘Sacrifice’ to the place of skulls. When for this great event, the picture of the grave, the par able of the pit is used, a cosmic process is indicated: namely the descent of Christ at a particular point in time in the cosmic year when the sun was in the sign of Aries. Into the pit the shepherd thrusts a single ram to lure the wolf and so save the rest of the flock. The wolf-pit is the earth.

105 The Egohood of the original man who possesses the most glorious light-soul, Jesus of Nazareth, is lifted up; and Christ himself, the Light-King of Paradise, enters into his sheaths to redeem them. The Logos, which created earthly humanity through the sacrifice of the psyche, brings the created creature back once more to his original purpose. Christ descends into the bodily sheaths of Jesus of Nazareth at the baptism in the Jordan river. He offers himself up in all His fulness, His entirety. And this sacrifice gives to humanity new armour in place of the old. Through the fact that Christ — the Being Who had not participated in the fall into matter, Who remained guiltless, untouched by death — experienced the sinning, sickness and dying of humanity, more was achiev ed than penance, suffering and crucifixion. These are merely earthly aspects of this event which — seen from the cosmos — redeems, heals and glorifies. In death, the King of Light triumphs over the Archon of Darkness. The crucifixion is the birth of light within the physical world. And thereby the weapons of the elements, which this Archon had conquered for himself, now slip from his grasp. More still — he, the Archon of Darkness, is now fet tered to the cosmos through the action of the human light-soul that has received the Christ into itself. And just as pre- Christian man was bound during his physical life to this dark Archon, so now post-Christian man, in his life after death, binds the Archon of Darkness to the King of Light. For the Archon of Darkness follows man’s soul, which still bears his dark physiognomy after death, and does not recognize that under this animal mask it has an angel countenance. He reckons with the fall into darkness, not the flight into light. Unawares, he allows himself to be led upwards. Primal man, who in his physical life has lost the spirituality in the formerly pure elements, receives through the Christ three supersensible powers that replace those he has lost. First, the power or force of the Spirit-Self (or Manas, as Rudolf Steiner designates it), so clearly described by Mani in his life- teachings gleaned from his journey through the mysteries. Second, the power of Buddhi or the Life-Spirit, that of the

106 ether body, and finally the third: that of Atman or Spirit-Man, which can be wrested from the physical body as its immortal attribute. (See Rudolf Steiner’s Occult Science.) These are members of the resurrected body of Christ Jesus Himself — which in mortal man can become seeds of eternity. Armed with these new powers, man is again able to regain the lost spirituality of Nature. Just when he passes through death, he comes in contact with the primal elements of which the physical water, air and fire are mere reflections. Once more the evolving cosmos becomes accessible to man, who lives despite the Death which came about through earthly materiality and which he has overcome. Turbo, a pupil who had deserted Mani, gave an account to Archelaus — the bishop with whom Mani held converse on religious matters after his sojourn in the castle of Arabion — telling of the regions into which the soul enters after death. After the Light has cleansed it from all the dark evils of matter, it comes to the region of living waters, upon which the Light-vessel of the Moon rides, and on which it must embark in order to reach the heavenly regions of the Aeons. He calls the Moon navis vitalium aquarum, thereby pointing to the kind of water that is no longer permeated by anything phy sical. From here the way leads on further through the Fire of Life aboard that other, greater Light-Ship, the Sun. These ships-of-death bear the soul back to its origin, the Light-King of Paradise. “Each soul and every living being that moves partakes of the essence of the Good Father-Being. The Moon (still more the Sun) hands over the souls which the ship is carrying to the Aeons of the Father where they enter the region of perfect air. This air is a column of light for it is filled with purified souls. And in this manner the souls are saved.” After death, the soul goes through a repetition of the cosmic conditions of the earth as it was in its pre-earthly, non-consoli- dated substantiality: Water-earth, Air-earth, and finally Light- earth, those phases which obtained when the Archon of Dark ness had not yet initiated his own beginning. Now the Archon of Darkness becomes utterly paralyzed

107 because the soul, in whose inmost being the Light-King of Par adise now dwells, has won through to those higher spiritual faculties which affect the light-, air-, and water-earth right down into the solid material state, even into the realm of death. Death has lost its sting. The scorpion of humanity is conquered by the eagle of the gods’ divine Spirit. However, it is not only Psyche — once released by the King of Light to become the soul of ego-conscious humanity — who must be redeemed, but also the very earth itself. Through the birth of God on earth, for such in truth is the resurrection, the earth herself shall rise to a higher state and so reveal her an cient and original kinship with the Paradise of Light. The battle for this goal does not end with the Mystery of Golgotha; but it takes a new direction. From now on, through the deed of Christ, man is free. Of his own volition, he can turn either to the principle of good, the Light-King of Paradise, or to the principle of evil, the Archon of Darkness. The phases of this cosmic battle determine the earthly wars of the post-Atlantean cultures. First of all there were divine wars: the Iranians against the Turanians. In these, Ormuzd battled on one side, against Ahri man on the other. Then Persia itself became ahrimanic. Its later rulers destroyed the sanctuaries of Apollo. That was the true cause of Persia’s decline. Later on, as a result of this deca dence, the Greeks under Alexander the Great were able to penetrate Persia, and Persepolis was destroyed. Here luciferic gods fought against ahrimanic ones in order to create a balance and prepare the way for Christianity. However, in place of the Sun-principle which Mani pro claimed with inward intensity during the reign of the Sassa- nides, the Moon-principle gained the upper hand through the unfolding of outer power. The Templars battled with this indu rated element during the crusades. They were soon sidetracked by the influence of Mercury. Mars-forces rose to the surface. And so armies roamed the earth, not only overarched by star- studded banners, but also guided by gods and spirits who direct their own courses. For earthly campaigns are mirrorings

108 of cosmic events. The battle order, the signals that are sound ed, the insignia of military rank, all give evidence of this, right down into our own time where everything grows uniform, serv ing the leveler, Death. Now the moment has arrived in which war becomes alto gether senseless. From now on the massive armies confront each other as equals in arms, for they have attained the same stage of development, until finally they are ground to dust. No one possesses an idea worthy of victory. Knowledge transposed into science and technical know-how is everyone’s heritage. Ballistics that shoot, chemicals that poison, electricity that de stroys (not only physically but also in the soul realm): the pur pose is not only the murder of men but of the earth altogether. *

In order to realize in life their basic premise of transforming evil into good, the Manichaeans practiced a particular attitude toward life. Each pupil had to impose upon himself the practice of self-education. This was only possible if he wished to develop insight into himself. And that presumed a knowledge and understanding of the teaching itself: that is, one had to be an Auditor before one was chosen. The instructions were divided into three parts which evolved out of the threefold nature of the human being.

These teachings are described in the final pages of the original German essay.

Translated by Mechthild Harkness

109 POEM Albert Steffen

Awake, O man, and fin d your being in the world!

I think. In thoughts the world is frozen. Dreaming in lifeless pictures I feel nothingness. I do. The inner being dies away in works. The deeds of a lifetime are consumed by the universe.

Grasp yourself, O man, in the word! I lend my speech a living breath and pulsing of the heart. It quenches the heat of passion in the starry coolness of its constant transformations. The word prepares by many devious cosmic paths an entry for the creative spirit into m an’s being.

Go through probation, O man, in creative deeds!

I have to feed myself like the animals. I am inclined to sleep like the plants. I fall heavily like stone. Born of God like all creation, I recognize the Cross that has been loaded onto the new life now born in me.

Yet do I raise myself on high. The senses of man can become mediators of the spirit. The souls of men a dwelling place for the words of the gods, The deeds of men constructive work on the great world edifice.

Translation by Rex Raab

110 COMMENTS AND REVIEWS

Albert Steffen and the Dead

MANFRED KRUEGER

From the Introduction to THE WORKS OF ALBERT STEFFEN in a new edition in Four Volumes; Verlag fuer Freies Geistesleben and Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, Stuttgart and Dornach, 1983.

The poetry of the future must be, at one and the same time, a celebration for the dead and a festival for the living — a bridge from here to yonder, writes Albert Steffen. Albert Steffen does not write about the dead, but with them. Again and again they urge him on, “Be our pupil; create in our company.” They imbue him with the breath of the Crea tor. The young Steffen wrote in his diary as early as February, 1908: We must, in the realest sense, be a friend to the dead. * A nd so all his life he asked, What can I do for the dead? For he knew and said in the simplest words:

Whatever in their name you do Grows — even in the grave — for you.

His later work, especially, takes its meaning and special character from his spirit-inward relation to the dead. His diary contains the remark: Without any doubt, the spirits of those who have left us are more and more isolated from the living. They can no longer be as effective as formerly since nuclear forces have come in between. And so

---- *Albert Steffen: Die Mission der Poesie, Dornach, 1962, p. 37. On another page: But, perhaps, so the poet tells us, it is of greater significance that the dead read in your soul than that the living read in your works.

111 the living must take over the tasks of the dead. Poetry, if it is still to have any kind of justification, must help to prepare for this, especially the works done in later life. In his essay “The Poet and the D ead,” Steffen decribes [describes]how in olden times men were closely bound up with the dead. The world of the dead was not only important but gave the world of the living direction. Today, the relationship is just the opposite. The living are free to seek out the dead. But when they do not do so, the dead starve; for the dead are not free, but are dependent upon the freedom which can be won only upon earth. Only the living are able to give their ego without losing it. Steffen writes: The consciousness of modern man, which is awaken ed through sense impressions, becomes empty when these impressions are no longer present and memory pales. Longing hollows. Sensing consumes. The one left behind must grow — for the sake of the one gone on ahead — from one who takes to one who gives; otherwise he loses himself. However, just the nothingness that he sees himself exposed to enables him, out of the fullness of his ego, to make a gift of his whole being. The dead need real world-knowledge from the living, for they themselves lose their knowledge in that they spread their being out over the entire cosmos to prepare the upbuilding of a new earthly body. On the other hand, the living need to learn from the dead. The dead, Steffen writes, who have passed through purification convey the essence of divine nature to the living whom they love. Albert Steffen was already an excellent observer of nature as a child. The keenness of his sense impressions, which predestined him to become a natural scientist, was a gift he brought with him. As poet, he spiritualized this inward rela tionship with nature. Nature became for him — as for the teachers of Chartres in the 12th century — a goddess who pointed him the way to the dead; and the dead, for their part, showed him the way into nature. The dead have in fact no “knowledge,” but an experience of being, of which the living have little, but which the poet cannot do without. The dead cannot learn from theories.... Steffen has passed on to us the lore and teachings of those who have died in his book Journeys Here and Yonder: “ . . . when you no longer

112 know how to go further, let the plants tell you, the plants that you let spring up, grow, blossom and fruit within you. Learn the language of the flowers.” The poet has painted his conversation with the dead. The last of these is called “Resurrection.” The child’s soul hovers above a flower bed as though over a grave. The bed is a blue chest. In the middle, between roses, lilies, larkspur and other flowers, a great passiflora blossom: Suffering is overcome; the spirit is free. The first painting in this portfolio, “Natura,” is a flower painting as is the last one, “Resurrection.” Flowers are to be seen in almost all of these paintings, teaching us of this god dess. In his Journeys Here and Yonder, Steffen writes: A ll earth- dwellers are able to understand the language of flowers, for their teacher is the spirit of the sun who speaks to every human heart. The plants point the way from grave to resurrection through whatever clefts and abysses, over whatever pastures and to whatever heights the path may lead: elderberry, wild rose, chrysanthemum, aster — they are the stair steps of transformation, of purification, and of healing from the wrongs and woe of the world. Earth ’s plant lore, conveyed through fairy tales, is continued in heaven through the wisdom of the stars. This the goddess Natura teaches us. Natura teaches the Way from Grave to Resurrection because the Risen One has united himself with her. So the poet is led through Nature to the Redeemer. And so he himself hopes to work healing with his poetry. . . . During the Second World War, Steffen wrote an essay about the healing power of the Word in which he says: The poet does not live without death. Death walks closer beside him than beside other men. He must — since he takes hold of life just where it becomes free, that means in death — constantly take death into himself. H is task is untiringly to seek out illnesses, crimes, seemingly unsolvable destinies in order to experience through them the healing, the catharsis, the way out through the Word that goes through death and resurrects and, as spirit revelation, turns itself towards all peoples of every tongue.

Translated by Christy Barnes

113 Thoughts on Reading The Mission of Poetry

KARL EGE

The little stories that I read today are all, actually, novels. I say — they are novels; not — they are like novels. Every essen tial is contained within them — the action, the development of the characters, the underlying spiritual relationships, the link ing and resolving of the threads of destiny, the catharsis. The description of the setting, the conversations and happenings are handled with few words, in such a way as to awaken in the reader a complete picture. In this terseness nothing is lacking. Quite the contrary, we are glad of the limits the poet sets him self so that he creates, in reality, a concentrated fullness and spares us the temptation of skipping unessentials. Neither are these stories miniatures; for spiritually they are of such a powerful character that they have the effect of full- scale dramas. Each one of them, like a plant, has the quite natural beauty of a starry constellation. *

Steffen’s attitude towards the world and man is one of self- education through self-transformation; for the self must acquire the capacity to form within itself an image of the divine crea tion, both in its evolving as well as its finished form. In doing so it encounters both heavenly powers and hellish opponents. As a true knower he seeks, as poet, to become a confederate of the divine beings, and thus a helper and healer, because he recognizes evil, illness and death as the deeds of the adversary. Such a knower is, in truth, a “Seeker after Selfhood” — a dis ciple of the divine self of mankind. And in this sense Steffen’s life work became a therapeutic deed.

114 His sentences fill me with a deep joy and satisfaction. Every word is necessary, comes just at the right instant and stands there where it belongs — not a vowel or a consonant could one imagine altered. They are winged, sun-filled color-beings, in terwoven to a symphonic choir through which in turn some thing higher resounds. Here is the purest clarity, sternest exactitude — logic. But this logic is life that resounds in the sentence structure, in the choral interweaving of vowel and consonant, and forms them to a final unity. Hereby, I experience an intimation of the Logos; my feeling — which has become almost a seeing — says to me: So must the Word speak into the choruses of heavenly spirits and form their unfolding development and creative deeds to one universal composition, revealing the archetypal image of man. It sounds down even to me. And one day, so I hope, I shall be able to perceive it in its actuality within me, and to answer “I am .” This spiritual-scientific fact I would not now be able to see and comprehend in this way without Steffen’s pre-experience. He is a forerunner, like the mountain guide who shows the novice the hand- and footholds on the well-known ascent to the summit, secures his rope, steadies him and thereby breathes into him confidence in himself.

Steffen’s words are living beings with bodies of color which move and hover without weight in a space of light. What gives them this light-ness — so that, borne upon the light, they dance in light, in dance-patterns which reveal the harmonies of the stars? He would perhaps say: the cosmic Word which has become creative within the ego.

When Steffen writes, it is all “according to word.” In the case of other authors, one can distinguish between word and content. And often more words are used than necessary.

115 With Steffen, spirit-reality is densified to word. That is why he is a poet, ein Dichter, — a “spirit-densifier. ” *

The main impression which I had today in reading the chap ters written after the death of his wife is: — how human! One experiences the sorrow of a man at the death of his beloved life-companion. He weeps as any other human being. But the suffering is in no sense self-pity. It becomes a selfless organ of perception which unites him with the spiritual being of the be loved and unlocks for him the holiest secrets of the “I” — “the I which is free and that loves the you.” The words and images in which these insights and harkenings are expressed stand there in simple beauty, without pretense. But through them there wafts, as delicately as a breath of color, hidden rhythms and melodies which place the spiritual reality before the soul in its purest clarity. If we attempt to put this experience into our own words, then it is almost as though we tried with clumsy hands to grasp the light.

When a human being exchanges experiences, as is done here, with those dwelling in spiritual existence, and speaks of them as Steffen does to the living, then this must be something which weaves and wafts through all the spheres, awakening joy and hope, and giving to human beings and spirits “yonder” impulses for their further evolution. A book like The Mission of Poetry can be read to the dead.

While still a very young man, Steffen had oriented his whole life in the direction of a fully experienced “spiritual aware ness,” and a fortunate destiny enabled him to shape his life ac cordingly. Very early, the world of the dead, and contact with them, became for him an experienced reality.

116 Only late in life did the circumstances of his destiny permit the union in marriage with his beloved wife. She saved his life, at one point, by insisting, just in time, upon a gall bladder operation. It seems also as though her death — insights received by him at that time let us surmise this — brought about a further ex tension of his life in order to allow him to round out his earthly task and to prepare future fulfillments. As one of the loftiest consummations of his poetic genius, he was able to complete the book The Mission o f Poetry, a descrip tion of his path to the spirit, an encouraging, inspiring exam ple, showing that “it” can be achieved, and how “it” was done. * It is inherent in the mission of poetry that it should reveal the smallest and seemingly most insignificant personal expe rience, as a particular case, in its eternal being and scope, and to raise it thus into an archetypal sphere. Self-education is in reality the path of initiation, which con sists in transforming the outer into the inner, knowledge into experience, the earthly into the heavenly. And herein, this most modern of all poets is for us a god-given example. As awe- inspired onlookers, we are permitted to take part in his soul purifications and spiritual transformations. T he mission of poetry is thus to depict initiation in a personal, individual case, raised to the sphere of a “fine art” — “ Schoene Wissenschaft. ”

Poem by Albert Steffen

Wouldst thou teach, how in each mortal immortality reflects, thou must penetrate the portal where thine angel thee perfects; learn where the departed are, “Hitch thy wagon to a star.” Translated by Rex Raab

117 FROM GEORGE ARCHIBALD’S LIFE STORY AND POSTHUMOUS PAPERS by Albert Steffen, translated by Virginia Brett, Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften; hardbound, 268 pp.

When reading Albert Steffen’s From George Archibald’s Life Story and Posthumous Papers, one is immediately struck by the unprec edented originality of Steffen’s work. Nowhere in one’s mem ory can one find any previous basis in ‘style’ or ‘school’ (in the past or as a ‘renaissance’ of the past) for his poetic works, dramas, essays or novels. For every word written by Albert Steffen originates directly out of the wellsprings of Anthropo sophy itself. In his own words in George Archibald (clearly auto biographical) Steffen states this: “To be a writer,” my great teacher said to me, “is a Way of Initiation.” And it becomes ever clearer that not only did Albert Steffen take this Idea to heart, but that he was also able to make it into an Ideal in his work, where it came to realization. Why was this particular work George Archibald the one Steffen considered of especial significance for the West? Why did he consider it specifically his work for the West? If one looks at the central theme of the book, an answer to this question might be found. This can be seen, I suggest, at the moment when George Archibald as a young boy fails his school examination, and is therefore dropped back a grade in school. This personal blow of destiny brings about an entire change in George’s life. Later on he refers to it as such to his friend Hans: “Having been backward myself, I want now to help all backward people.” What task or ideal is more central to the West than this? This it is which is inscribed into the ‘Statue of Liberty’ at the entranceway into America from Europe ... “Give me your tired, your hungry, yours who yearn to be free!” This intention, and how poetry can serve this intention through revealing the archetype, the true ‘mythos’ or spiritual entelechy of every human being, becomes for George Ar

118 chibald a burning quest. He wanders the streets of a city, choosing to take for his teacher this “school of life,” rather than the university, and using as raw material all his observa tions of human beings of every kind: on the streets, in the fac tories, in the brothel. In his inner being he grows ever more able to penetrate into these observations, through his loving in terest and profound insight, till he reaches their spiritual reali ty. This activity of “redeeming evil,” as a task of the poet, is contrasted with the path of his oldest friend, Hans — who has the same intent to help others, but feels that this can only be achieved in the physical world. He feels that George is too far removed from the real needs of humanity. Their relationship is much like that of Estella and Sophia in the prologue to Rudolf Steiner’s first Mystery Drama. George Archibald becomes, out of his intense striving for the spirit, more and more a lonely being. However, in his inner self he begins to enter into a new “community” — a spiritual community. He comes to the realization finally that: “Loneliness in the physical realms means companionship in spiritual regions.” His growing supersensible experience, which at first in creases his sense of isolation from those around him, and often inspires a deep mood of melancholy, is counteracted by his even stronger desire to “mold his soul into an organ with which he could inwardly comprehend all the beines of the w o rld .” Through this unceasing striving, he finds the teacher who can show him how this faculty can be cultivated. The teacher whom he meets says to George: “Do you know why you are more successful in this spiritual life than other people? Because once upon a time you were a painter, who painted not only the life of earthly beings, but also that of heavenly ones, and who knew that in order to become worthy of divine service he must feel himself as belonging to a supersensible community.” Soon after this, George’s visual experiences change to expe riences of the Word: “Up till now his companion spirit had in structed him in vision, and had taught him how he could bring into distorted, anguished or tearstained faces, harmony, bliss

119 and an up-welling of light. But now he opened his soul-ear. And this enabled him to hear his surroundings in sounds, tones and voices. Now it was jubilation and song — now howling, gnashing of teeth or woeful whimperings. And new tasks opened up before him “What must I do to help?” he asked his angel. “Find the Word which — for everyone who through dis tress, pain or sin has lost his human speech — may be a sign post to that star which can bring healing.” George Archibald continues to follow the Word, the signpost to that star, — and the novel ends with his finding it: It is I myself, who am not yet born in my eternal being, and who can no longer die in my eternal being, the eternally unborn and eternally un dying human being: and I must learn to mold the earthly man into the likeness of the heavenly man, of the primeval self that is spread out over the whole universe and encompasses a complete humanity. I myself, the fallen creature of earth, must raise myself up to the higher self, which leads the creature to the Creator. I and all men, each according to his kind. One earthly man lives more in the head, a second more in the hands, a third more in the heart of the heavenly being, but each is bound up with the other, and no one could exist without all the rest. Only the whole man is complete, only mankind as such, and only because it has been borne through death by the Risen One. The vital problem which George Archibald states in the be ginning of this novel — the problem per se of the modern artist — is resolved in the course of it: a true Way, a true path to Christian art is trodden and revealed. The problem of “how one might Christianize Lucifer,” as the main theme of future poetry, is pre-figured here, and henceforth can be taken up by all poets yet to come! And all human beings are called upon to become ‘poets’ in an inner sense. This path, upon which evil can be redeemed, is the path of the guiding star, of the Way of the Word to the Risen One. It is also the path of Albert Steffen. Deep gratitude is due to all those (translators, editors, pub lishers and others) who are now more actively making this work accessible and known to the “Westerner,” for whom it was intended. — Susan Riley

120 REMOLDING OF DESTINIES, Five Short Stories by Albert Steffen; Cover: Steffen design, light blue on magenta, arranged by Peter Stebbing; 86 pp. Adonis Press; $3.95.

With a striking new cover, this second edition of Steffen’s short stories adds another volume to the set of pocket-sized books, largely by the same author, published by the Adonis Press. In every story, old karma is resolved and reshaped into the beginnings of new destiny. These transformations are set in mo tion by imaginations that are akin to myths or the world of dream, yet more awake and individualized than either. Pictures full of color and of an extraordinary wealth of unusual and original detail embody the fundamental forces underlying the various destinies. The poet has entered into the essential being of each character, into the being who existed before birth and will continue after death; and from this vantage point, he surveys, with caring discernment and great warmth of heart, the larger currents moving beneath the surface of their lives. The first story concerns itself with a painter, his daughter and her fiance, a peasant woman, a dancer and a poet. After listen ing to a series of “little myths” which the poet tells for each of them, they are all able, of themselves, to untangle and give new direction to their interrelated destinies. A new and unexpected future opens out for each one. The second story glows with a vi sion which initiates a new life for the apprentice shoemaker, Jacob Boehme — a vision that occurs during that instant between the moment when his master raises his hand and the moment the hand strikes Jacob’s cheek a resounding blow. The third, “Hans Holbein the Younger,” is the most complex of the stories. Amaz ing picture after unpredictable picture piles up, involving such persons as Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Thomas Moore and Thomas Cromwell. Land- city- and battle-scapes, on earth, in hell and in heaven, the Dance of Death, and the events that led to Golgotha are all woven into its extraordinary tapestry. By constrast, “The Singular Destiny of a Librarian” deals with a particularly humble man, whose unobtrusive life widens as he enters selflessly into the knotted lives of three people who frequent the library’s reading room, and when, in his meditations, he

121 follows a suicide over beyond the barriers of death. The last tale of all tells of a doctor’s encounter with a young woman and her child in the wastelands of war, and how they give permanence and hope to the course of their lives. Sometimes it seems that Steffen has seen into the very problem which has been occupying us most intimately and has illuminated it in a way that speaks directly just to ourselves. The suddenness with which momentous changes of events are often solved and recounted reminds one of the economy and decisiveness with which Tolstoi, in the last period of his life, ended some of his most significant short tales. These are stories to read slowly so that the life wisdom that permeates them has time to reverberate in the heart and become a part of ourselves.

Christy Barnes

As Once the Tone — by Albert Steffen

As once the tone upon which worlds are founded Rang out from heaven’s core — within its hold Harboring all-oneness, past and future — M en’s ears were frozen closed and yet it sounded, Hearts slept, yet throughout aeons, long and cold, It spoke to each — who asked his inmost nature — The Word: I was, and am, and I shall be — So is the boon of poetry: a welcome, A glad re-knowing and a forward-going.

Its rescue cry — does it die silently? The words that feed the gods — shall they grow dumb? Must language hewn of truth fade past all knowing? Men tolerate what pedantry lets pass? In such forsaken spaces, demons forage, And murder breeds from lies that they have sown. Oh, do one deed, the last, Forgive all trespass, The while you wait, till on the tree of knowledge That’s turned to stone — grows resurrection’s tone.

Translated by Christy Barnes

122 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE

ALBERT STEFFEN (1884-1963) — Swiss poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist; editor of the weekly periodical Das Goetheanum 1921-63; President of the General Anthroposophical Society, 1925-1963. • HERMANN POPPELBAUM (1890-1979) — Ph.D. in zoology; eminent lecturer in science and other fields; author of Man and Animal and A New Zoology, succeeded Albert Steffen as President of the General Anthroposophical Society. • PERCY MACKAYE (1875-1956) — Poet-dramatist; author of St. Louis Masque, Jeanne D 'Arc, The Scarecrow, Hamlet, King of Denmark, My Lady Dear, Arise. • HERMANN HESSE (1877-1962) — Author of Siddhartha, Demian, Steppenwolf. • BRUNO WALTER (1876-1962) — World renowned symphony orchestra conductor; author of Music and Music Making. • RICHARD KROTH (1902-1959) — Painter and lecturer; student of Goethe’s theory of color; lectured at the Goethe Centennial in Aspen, Colo. • RUDOLF STEINER (1861-1925) — Inaugurator of Anthroposophy. • MARIE STEINER (1867-1948) — Helped to further Rudolf Steiner’s work in Berlin, Munich and Dornach, arranging for publications of his books; guided and directed the development of eurythmy, speech formation and drama at the Goetheanum. • ANN MARI RASCHER — Attended the Royal Academy of Art in Stockholm and Copenhagen; solo exhibition in Stockholm. After bringing up a family she has returned to her profession. • FREDERICK HIEBEL — Editor of Das Goetheanum 1968-1983; author of The Gospel of Hellas, Seneca, a drama, Albert Steffen, Poems. • MANFRED K R UEGE R — Editor of Das Goetheanum, author and poet. • KARL EGE (1899-1973) — Teacher in original Waldorf School, Stuttgart, in the Rudolf Steiner School, N.Y. and High Mowing School; lecturer; author of An Evident Need of our Times. • SUSAN RILEY — Student of Anthroposophy 1968-84; mother, cook and baker. • CHRISTY BARNES — Retired Waldorf English teacher, editor of Albert Steffen, Translation and Tribute, and Journal for Anthroposophy.

123 LIST OF POEMS AND THEIR SOURCES

Chorus Adonis Play 3 A god’s eye gazes . . . Epoch (Epoche) 17 I saw an ox and lion . . . The Path of the Poet 29 Felicitas Passiflora 32 You seem to be Food for the Journey (Wegzehrung) 33 Light I see Food for the Journey (Wegzehrung) 35 Now I know what soft astounding In Death, Arise! (Im Sterben Auferstehen) 38 Oh, let us love the trees Food for the Journey (Wegzehrung) 39 W hat is it greets me without Late Sowing (Spaetsaat) 39 Picture of my Life’s Companion Epoch (Epoche) 40 O child, great-eyed . . . Wiedergeburt der Schoene Wissenschaften 42 When we say eternally Food for the Journey (Wegzehrung) 43 Pilot’s Homecoming Sleeper unto Death, Awake! (Wach auf du Todesschlaefer) 44 Into God’s Day Food for the Journey (Wegzehrung) 45 Winds, what you whine is woe In Death, Arise! (Im Sterben Auferstehen) 46 The Wanderer At the Crossroads of Destiny (Am Kreuzweg des Schicksals) 46 Look at all the butterflies Climb Parnassus and Behold (Steig auf den Parnass und schaue) 49 Oh, look within the blossom’s cup The Comforter (Der Troester) 66 What a fearful, thrice-wailed cry Climb Parnassus and Behold (Steig auf den Parnass und schaue) 75 Oh, let us build a ship Voyage to the Other Land (Fahrt ins Andere Land) 91 Loyalty — Life — Eternal — Food for the Journey (Wegzehrung) 96 Awake, O man Epoch (Epoche) 110 Wouldst thou teach Book of Retrospect (Buch der R ueckschau) 117 As once the tone . . . Epoch (Epoche) 122

124 WORKS BY ALBERT STEFFEN AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH and carried by the ADONIS PRESS H aw thorne Valley / H arlem ville / G hent, N.Y. 12075

ALBERT STEFFEN, an Anthology. A comprehensive selection of Steffen’s work, and tributes for his [Advertisement:]ADONIS PRESS 75th birthday. Hardbound: gold Steffen design on white cloth. Adonis Press, 1959. 146pp. $16.95

MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER An account of Steffen’s impressions, insights and gratitude to Rudolf Steiner, experienced throughout many years; First Meetings; Remarks by Rudolf Steiner on the Conduct of Life, A Community of Builders, On Meditation, The Founding of the Weekly “Das Goetheanum,” The Literature of the Future; Passages from Steffen’s diaries; The Bridge between the Living and the Dead; A Turning Point in World History. Translated by Reginald Raab, Erna McArthur and Virginia Brett. Hardbound: gold lettering on purple cloth. Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, Dornach, Switzerland, 1961. 344pp. $12.00

FROM GEORGE ARCHIBALD’S LIFE STORY & POSTHUMOUS PAPERS, a novel, translated by Virginia Brett. A book intended especially for the West. George, after a humiliating failure and the inner wrestlings of adolescence, seeks out the suffering and the depraved in order to learn an under standing that can heal. Translated by Virginia Brett. Hardbound: gold Steffen design on purple cloth. Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, 1961. 270pp. $8.50

REMOLDING OF DESTINIES, short stories. The characters and the fundamental forces at work within their lives are pictured with an extraordinary wealth of original detail. Old karma is resolved and reshaped into the beginnings of new destiny. Softbound: blue Steffen motif on plum color, arranged by Peter Stebbing. Adonis Press, second edition, 1984. 86pp. $3.95

DRAMAS

THE DEATH EXPERIENCE OF MANES Scenes in Gondhishapur, Mesopotamia and Simurghia; the deeds and visions of Manes, and the victory of the spirit when the Manichaeans are surprised during their ritual and face destruction. Translated by Daisy Aldan, Elly Simmons and Virginia Brett. Hardbound: silver lettering on green. Folder Editions, New York and Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, Dornach, 1970. 105pp. $6.75

HIRAM AND SOLOMON, translated by Virginia Brett. The tragic conflict and seeds for reconciliation between the descendants of Cain and Abel; the casting of the Brazen Sea in the Temple of Solomon. Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, 1970. Hardbound: gold lettering on red-violet cloth, $7.50. Softbound: 90pp. $4.95

THE FALL OF ANTICHRIST, translated by Dora Baker. A dramatic sketch set in the future. A priest, engineer and poet are pitted against the Regent, whose goal is to emancipate the earth and mankind from the spiritual cosmos. Softbound: white lettering on dark red. Folder Editions, New York. 52pp. $4.95

VOYAGE TO THE OTHER LAND, translated by Arvia MacKaye. Scenes in an Egyptian tomb and in the salon and boiler room of the S.S. Titanic reflect forces at work in our civilization which strive towards titanic dimensions and are mysteriously connected with the culture of ancient Egypt. During the catastrophe, a group of passengers win insights whereby to build a ship of life which can bear them securely into the future. Hardbound: eold lettering on light blue cloth. Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, 1956. 122pp. $6.75 [Advertisement:] WORKS BY ALBERT STEFFEN AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH and carried by the ADONIS PRESS Hawthorne Valley / Harlemville / Ghent, N.Y. 12075

D R A M A S (Continued)

ALEXANDER’S TRANSFORMATION, translated by Eleanor Trives. Alexander’s experiences, together with Aristotle, in the spiritual world after death, and their preparations for a new incarnation. Hardbound: gold Steffen design on white. Verlag fuer Schooene Wissenschaften, 1956. 122pp. $6.75

LIN, translation by Margaret Lloyd revised by Sophia Walsh. Human tragedies in China arising from the Opium War and their implications for us today. Hardbound: blue lettering on yellow cloth. Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, 1956. 140pp. $6.75

ESSAYS

PILGRIMAGE TO THE TREE OF LIFE, translated by Eleanor Trives. “A little book that lives . . . Steffen is able to illuminate nature so that, through his wonderfully-wrought sentences, she lets the radiance of her mysteries shine back to us.” — Rudolf Steiner. Frontispiece: Photograph of the author. Softbound: Steffen motif, mulberry on green, arranged by Peter Stebbing. Adonis Press, second edition 1978. 66pp. $3.95

THE ARTIST BETWEEN WEST AND EAST: THE PATH OF THE POET Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov leaves unsolved questions. How shall the poet answer them? “Never before did the poet stand in such danger of being swept away. A twofold tempest threatens him from both sides . . . ‘For myself,’ says the poet, ‘I seek my master in my own being.’ ‘And who shall be my guide?’ ‘Nature!’” — Albert Steffen Translated by Reginald E. Raab. Adonis Press, 1946. Hardbound: gold label on deep blue, $5.00. Softbound: 84pp. $3.50

RACE, FOLK, INDIVIDUALITY AND MANKIND, translated by Arvia MacKaye. The mysteries of Advent and of the Three Kings in the light of the consciousness soul. Softbound: red lettering on buff. Adonis Press, second edition, 1982. 30pp. $2.50

MYSTERY-DRAMA FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN TIMES, arranged by Erna Grund. Origin of the Drama; Sophocles as a Poet of the Mysteries; The Iphigenia of Euripides and Goethe; Dante’s Style; Shakespeare; The Way Forward in Dramatic Art; Signpost to a New Mystery-Drama; From a Notebook. Translated by Virginia Brett and Christa Macbeth. Illustrated by photographs of scenes from Steffen’s dramas. Softbound: Steffen motif, orange on light blue, arranged by Peter Stebbing. Adonis Press, 1977. 40pp. $3.75

ADDRESS AT THE DEDICATION OF THE GOETHEANUM WEST WINDOW, translated by Virginia Brett. The Michaelic themes and colors of the Goetheanum windows in the midst of modern forces directed towards “total war, tyranny and terrorism.” Delivered at Michaelmas, 1945. Softbound: eold lettering; on deep blue. Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, 1966. 26pp. $2.00

THE DETERMINATION OF EVIL, translated by Daniel Marston. The Determination of Evil; The Gorgon Head; The Knowing Eye; The Hearing Heart. Translated especially for Steffen’s Centennial. Softbound: large format, black lettering on orange. Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, 1984. 18pp. $3.45 [Advertisement:] WORKS BY ALBERT STEFFEN AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH and carried by the ADONIS PRESS Hawthorne Valley / Harlemville / Ghent, N.Y. 12075

POEMS

IM AENDERN LAND — IN ANOTHER LAND Poems inter-translated by Albert Steffen and Percy MacKaye. Hardbound: gold Steffen design on white. Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, 1937. 60pp. $3.95

SELECTED POEMS OF ALBERT STEFFEN, translated by Daisy Aldan. Poems chosen from four of Steffen’s books of verse. German and English on facing pages. Softbound: white lettering on purple. Folder Editions, New York, 1968. 70pp. $4.95

STEFFEN, verses translated by Virginia Brett. Poems for which Rudolf Steiner created eurythmy forms. Verlag Walter Keller, Dornach, Switzerland. 54pp. $4.95

BOOKS IN PREPARATION — ADONIS PRESS FROM A NOTEBOOK, second edition, translated by Arvia MacKaye. Aphorisms and short passages that throw light on the nature of language and individual destiny in ways that bring help, healing and health.

THE CRISIS IN THE LIFE OF THE ARTIST, second edition, translated by Arvia MacKaye. Two essays that kindle enthusiasms for taking new steps in all the arts, especially in the arts of dealing with life, illness and destiny.

LITTLE MYTHS, translated by various writers. “Often I am asked how my ‘Little Myths’ come into being. ... I find them, to my own astonishment, on the way to the spirit, like precious stones, trees, birds, like a perspective of clouds and rainbows . . . but always otherwise than I had supposed in advance before I had walked the path of knowledge.” — Albert Steffen Illustrations and cover arranged by Van James.

NEW BEGINNING, Freedom and Love in the Crisis of Modern Consciousness. Selections from The Mission of Poetry, translated by Arvia MacKaye Ege. “Steffen’s attitude towards the world and man is one of self-education through transfor mation. ... In this sense his life work became a therapeutic deed. . . . The words and images in which these insights and harkenings are expressed stand there in simple beauty, without pretense. Through them wafts, as delicately as a breath of color, hidden rhythms and melodies which place the spiritual reality before the soul in its purest clarity.” — Karl Ege

POEMS, an Anthology of translations by various poets. *Gift-sized books 4-1/2” x 6-3/4”.

STEFFEN’S WORKS IN THE ORIGINAL GERMAN (14 novels, 14 sketches and miniatures, 11 books of poetry, 16 dramas, 18 volumes of essays) may be ordered from Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, Albert Steffen Stiftung, 4143 Dornach, Switzerland.

Write to ADONIS PRESS for information of assorted Steffen post cards and small prints in color. Large portfolios available through St. George Book Service. Please add $1 for postage and handling of one book and 35c for each additional book, enclose your check made out to ADONIS PRESS, and send your order to ADONIS PRESS, Hawthorne Valley, Harlemville, Ghent, N.Y. 12075. [Advertisement:] Prachtvolle Reproduktionen im Grossformat und Siebenfarbendruck: RAPHAELS FRESKEN IN DEN STANZEN

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Please enclose 75c a book for handling. [Advertisement:] [Advertisement:] Penguins, Seals, Sun an d G ross Dolphins, Salmon The development from and E els megalithic culture to early Sketches for an Imaginative Christianity in Ireland Zo0logy Jakob Streit Karl Koenig The author is unique in trac By the end of the moulting ing the unbroken evolution of penguins are so emaciated spiritual culture in Ireland, that they are too light to dive through the ancient sun- under water. So now they orientated monuments of the begin to swallow small stones megalithic age in to the Celtic from the beach in order to era and then into that of the reach the necessary weight... great stone sun-crosses of Now the penguin begins to early Irish Christianity. turn into a fish once more.' Streit follows the develop In the legends of Greece ment of the profound symbols and Rome, and from the used by the advanced megal Iona ithic culture and carried fu r writers of antiquity, many Fiona Macleod stories are told about remark ther by the Druids when they Floris Classics, Celtic litera able meetings and experi settled in Ireland three or four ture; 1st edn 1900, reprint ences with dolphins and their centuries before Christ. Early 1982; 22 x 14cm; 176pp; sb; friendship with humans. Not hymns and liturgical texts £ 3 .5 0 -.0-86315-500-6 only do these animals have a combining the older nature- special relationship with wisdom w ith the new spiri human beings, but they also tuality of Christianity bear T he Sun D an ces live in close co-operation witness to this symbiosis, as Prayers and Blessings with one another — some do also the Irish crosses and from the Gaelic thing rare among animals. early stone circles. Collected and translated What are dolphins and what The first motifs found on by Alexander Carmichael is their origin? these crosses are enriched Introduction and chosen Koenig's lively and inform by rhythmic plaited and by Adam Bittleston ative essays, combining bio banded patterns, then with Celtic literature; 2n d edn logy and mythology, come introduction of carved figures 1977, 18x11 cm; xx+ 124pp; close to the quintessence of the form of the risen Christ pb; £ 2 .5 0 ; 0-903540-07-X the animals. He is indebted to becomes visible. Streit posits Goethe's morphological a quite independent cosmic Christ Legends works which taught him stream of Christianity, estab Selma Lagerloef always to see a particular lished across Europe in the Illustrated by V & G Knapp type as a variation of the ideal Dark Ages by such Christian Floris Classics, Swedish basic form. His other major monks as Columban. In the literature, children; tr. from source of thought was the eighth century this stream Swedish; This edn Sep 27, theory of evolution held by was eclipsed by Roman 1984; 22 x 14cm; 208pp; sb; Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Christianity. £ 4 .9 5 ; 0-86315-506-5 Anthroposophy. This theory This book deals w ith the of evolution speaks of the cross from its earliest connection between the appearance in pre-Christian If you have any difficulty destinies of human beings form to its development in ordering from a bookshop and animals from the most early Christian times. you can order direct from: ancient times. History, art, religion; tr. from Floris Books Zoology, mythology; tr from Germ an; 1st edn Sep 27, 21 Napier Road Germ an; 1st edn Sep 27, 1984; 25 x 18 cm; 102 photos Edinburgh EH10 5AZ 1984; 21x14 cm; 96pp; sb; & diagram s; 224pp; hb; Great Britain £4.95:0-86315-014-4 £ 4.95; 0-86315-010-1 Please send payment with order. Calculate US $ equiva lent and send US $ cheque Floris adding 10% for surface post (minimum 50 c ), or 40% for Books air mail (mini mum $1.50). ISSN 0021-8235