Journal forAnthroposophyYOUTH LONGS TO KNOW John F. Gardner

GLIMPSES OF THE BUILDING Sonia Tomara Clark OF THE FIRST GOETHEANUM Jeannette Eaton

FROM CONSUMER TO PRODUCER Herbert Witzenmann IN THE SPIRITUAL SPHERE

ARCHETYPAL RELATIONS Wilhelm Pelikan BETWEEN PLANT AND MAN

ALBERT STEFFEN: RETROSPECT Henry and Christy Barnes

Also comments on a proposal to Governor Rockefeller, a review and poems by Floyd McKnight, Amos Franceschelli, Danilla Rettig, M. C. Richards and Claire Blatchford.

NUMBER 14 AUTUMN, 1971 The spiritual investigator must not be in any sense a dreamer, a visionary. He must move with inner assurance and vigor in the spiritual world as an in­ telligent man does in the physical world.

Rudolf Steiner Youth Longs to Know

JOHN F. GARDNER

“I am very content, with knowing, if only I could know." — Emerson

Many children today bear within them greater potentialities than ever before, powers the world needs as never before. Educators and parents must recognize and find ways to encourage these new capacities. The schooling and habits of thought to which children are now exposed, however, are not helpful. They frustrate what longs to be fulfilled. Our civilization as a whole represents a concerted attack upon the potentialities of the new generations. We must help youth to withstand this attack. We must make it possible for young people to realize the purpose of their lives: to achieve what they mean to achieve. And the modern world must receive from them just what they alone can newly give, if it is to solve the human and environmental problems that increasingly beset it. It is characteristic of youth that what will later be accomplishment appears first as longing. The young artist is powerfully drawn to music and color and form before he can use them creatively. The boy is fascinated by the business scene long before he can conduct any significant business. For the student, certain figures loom large in history. He is powerfully attracted because he finds himself in these personalities; he reaches out for what he has in himself to become. Thus, longing and desire for what stands on the far horizon often foreshadow what the soul will eventually produce from its own depths; and

1 therefore the environment with which a young person instinctively surrounds himself is often a picture of capabilities that are coming to birth inside him. I feel sure that what modern youth, whose strange customs and preferences often perplex us, is actually seeking is a deepened experience of life, to be gained through forces that lie well hidden yet feel the urgent need for expression. These forces are basically cognitive, but they are directed towards quite different kinds of knowledge than we parents and teachers are acquainted with. The urge to find a higher truth is very strong in young people today, though this fact is often obscured by what appears to be an indifference, or even a positive antipathy, to logic, to factual evidence, and to rationality in general. The young turn against conventional forms of knowledge because they do not find in this kind of knowledge the truth they seek. And their disappointment with the emptiness and falsehood of the world we adults have built on this ordinary knowledge is already deep before we with our conventional thinking imagine their search for truth can even have begun. When youth’s quest for truer forms of knowledge is frustrated, it becomes rebellion against the counsel of parents, the training of the schools, the laws of society, the principles of accepted morality. Youth wants life to make sense; but when it obviously doesn’t, it finds fault with all the custodians of culture who allegedly stand for sense but are evidently making nonsense out of existence. In a sensible life, marriages would be full of love, old people and learned professors would be wise, the leaders of society would be heroes, and practical men would be managing affairs so that nature prospered, man prospered, and the triumph of order, beauty, health, and convenience advanced from day to day. But these things are not happening. It is my belief that the souls of many children today carry in themselves the conviction that real truth is a much higher experience than anything their parents and teachers have presently in mind. It is to be approached through quite other methods, on a different path of training. Whatever practical goods the ordinary kind of scientific knowledge has brought us

2 — and they are many and captivating — it has now reached the point of diminishing returns. Young people see that we are spoiling existence faster than we are improving it. Their conclusion is that if a knowledge that can manage better is to appear, presently established forms and procedures of knowledge must abdicate. Hence, down with home, school, church, and government! Unfortunately, the instinctive goals of the young are one thing; its ability to reach those goals is another. Youth must still be guided by age; it is absolutely dependent upon age to show the way. Yet this way must lead to the new goals, not the old. We adults must discover what youth is about and what it wants. This discovery should be possible, I propose, if we will study the youthful scene symptomatically, if we will heed the testimony of those forerunners of today’s youth, the more advanced souls of yesterday, and if we can give credence to a true prophet among our contemporaries. Many today seek the same bread of life for which youth hungers. They have smelled its aroma and even tasted it. They have reliable clues to offer concerning its nature and the conditions of its appearance. One thinks of an Antoine de St. Exupery, a Laurens Van der Post, a Russell Davenport, an Archibald MacLeish. On the other hand, we shall hardly find another contemporary for whom the gates of the knowledge that is wisdom have so fully opened as for Rudolf Steiner. Steiner’s extraordinarily practical achievements1 support his claim that they were based upon the development of capacities of higher knowledge that slumber unknown today in every individual, and which it is the purpose of the further evolution of man to bring very gradually to light. The religious writer Emil

1Vid. Rom Landau, God Is My Adventure (London, Faber & Faber, 1935); Friedrich Rittelmeyer, Rudolf Steiner Enters My Life (London, The Christian Community Press, 1954); A. P. Shepherd, A Scientist of the Invisible (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1954); Rudolf Steiner, The Course of My Life (New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1971); “Scientific Seer,” MD, Medical Newsmagazine, Vol. 13, No. 2, February, 1969, p. 245.

3 Bock2 has suggested that the young ardently, if unconsciously, seek the kinds of experience described by Steiner in The Stages of Higher Knowledge3 and elsewhere. In his opinion, the frustration of the young in this quest gives the best possible clue to their otherwise enigmatic and dismaying behavior. Dr. Franz Winkler, in his more medically oriented writings and lectures, makes the same analysis.4 To put matters briefly, our present thesis is that the young souls of today hunger and thirst for three things, all of which are functions of the cognitive experience. They want first of all to experience life as life, in living immediacy. And then they long to find a meaning in life that transcends the conventional goals and routines. And they long at last to touch the ultimate ground of being, in themselves, in other men, and in nature. They would see the whole world in God. The power that is able to fulfill the first longing was called by the Idealists, Romanticists, and Transcendentalists of the last century Imagination. Rudolf Steiner chose the same name. He called the second power Inspiration. The last power, he said, because it penetrates to the core of existence, deserves the name of Intuition. Let us see whether certain of the preferences and hungers that appear to motivate modern youth so obscurely and painfully may not reveal nascent capacities for just these higher kinds of knowing, which it is up to the adults who carry the responsibility for education to recognize and support. Then we can go on to see what, under existing circumstances, becomes of such capacities.

* * *

2Emil Bock, The Apocalypse o f St. John (London, The Christian Community Press, 1957). 3(New York, Anthroposophic Press, 1967). 4Man: The Bridge Between Two Worlds (New York, Harper & Row, 1960); “The Mythology in Wagner’s ‘Ring’ Series and in ‘Parsifal’,” Proceedings (New York, The Myrin Institute, Nos. 16-21).

4 The child hungers after imagination because he wants the experience of life as such. He would have the dry dust of everyday experience moistened. He would feel the heavy body of the world beginning to quicken. He longs for buoyancy and flowing movement, in himself and in all beings. Though we can perceive bodily movement well enough, we do not perceive the movement that is actual life. Ordinary thoughts are but images that name life and growth without living and growing themselves. And yet it could be otherwise. It is natural for small children to live with the wind in its blowing and with the white clouds in their sailing. Very young children are so close to the rain that falls, the vapors that rise, the stream that flows, and the sun that comes out shining, that they participate directly in these living movements. They also bring into movement objects that for us adults remain inanimate and inert. Adolescent youth still preserves the taste for living motion, even though it is beginning to dwell more in ideas. Nothing could suit it better than that thought itself should be mobile and alive. It hungers after imagination, because imagination is precisely the ability to think in moving, living pictures. No one has better stated the case for imagination than Emerson. He felt it opens the human soul to the life of the world, because “The nature of things is flowing,” and “the quality of imagination is to flow, and not to freeze.”5 If in any manner we can stimulate this higher form of knowing, new passages are opened for us into nature; the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.6

As it learns to follow the fluent self-transformations of life, thinking itself is transformed. It becomes pictorial and its pictures move. Thinking becomes seeing.

5Emerson, “The Poet,” The Selected Writings o f Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, The Modern Library, Random House, Inc., 1950), p. 336. 6Ibid. , p. 332.

5 Imagination is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees; by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms.7

Imagination is the ability to see knowingly and to know seeingly. It transforms both facts and thoughts into something new, making what is outward more inward, so that it can be felt; and what is inward more outward, so that it can be vividly seen and grasped. Thus on the one hand imagination lifts and lightens material existence until it can be experienced by the human heart; and on the other hand it draws down and condenses immaterial thought to where it becomes creative in the practical world. When a concrete fact is imagined, it dissolves, as it were, into currents of life. We approach the living reality out of which this fact has been precipitated. And, on the other hand, when an abstract idea is imagined, it fashions for itself a visible form. It becomes creative. Through imagination we see how ‘mere’ ideas could be capable, as Plato taught, of having brought forth the physical world in the beginning, and how they continue to introduce new forms of reality into it at the present time, through man’s artistic and moral intiative. In respect of the advance from abstract thought to the living imagination, it is Emerson again who reminds us that “Whilst we converse with truths as thoughts, they exist also as plastic forces.”8 Anyone who has difficulty conceiving that imaginations are something more than pale thoughts set free of logic and experience and allowed to move about whimsically, should consider the following characterization by Steiner:

The pictures of Imagination have a vivacity and a comprehensiveness with which the shadowy memory-

1Loc. cit., p. 332. 8The Complete Writings o f Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1929), p. 1248.

6 pictures of the sense-world, and even the glittering and ephemeral physical world itself are not to be compared. This, too, is but a shadow compared to the realm of Imagination.9

All becoming is a fluent, buoyant, process. What has already become, however, is by comparison static and heavy. When, through imagination, the sense for becoming lightens the burden of factual experience; and when through imagination the sense of becoming gives weight to otherwise weightless ideas, transforming abstract thought into formative power, the soul is doubly invigorated. It can live in the present, breathing in and breathing out. Education should establish this breathing, so that the child may stand as a living soul between the two worlds of matter and of the spirit, and through his breathing bring about their creative interpenetration. Even idealistic youth longs, therefore, to see with the eyes of the soul, through imagination, it longs also to hear with the soul’s ears, and breathe with the soul’s lungs. Youth would add to its experience of the world in creative, living pictures the further experience of the world as utterance and tone. Rudolf Steiner called this experience Inspiration, and described it as follows:

If anything at all in the realm of sense can be compared with this world of Inspiration, it is the world of tone opened up to us by the sense of hearing. But now not the tones of earthly music are concerned, but purely 'spiritual tones.' One begins to 'hear' what is going on at the heart of things. The stone, the plant, and so forth, become 'spiritual words.' The world begins to express its true nature to the soul. It sounds grotesque, but it is literally true, that at this stage of knowledge one ‘hears spiritually

9Rudolf Steiner, The Stages of Higher Knowledge (New York, Anthropo­ sophic Press, Inc., 1967), p. 8.

7 the growing of the grass.' The crystal form is perceived like sound; the opening blossom ‘speaks’ to men. The inspired man is able to proclaim the inner nature of things; everything rises up before his soul, as though from the dead, in a new kind of way. He speaks a language which stems from another world, and which alone can make the every-day world comprehensive. 10

Music is the soul’s air. The soul of youth longs to hear the singing and sounding of the world, to experience natural life and human life as a dance; for when the world-process becomes melody, harmony, and rhythm, the human individual can step forth in tune and in time with events. He can introduce his own counterpoint into the dance of atoms, into the dance of the elements, into the harmony of the spheres. All this is known to the musical, breathing experience of knowledge called inspira­ tion. Few of us have any real conception of the future experience of knowledge that youth today is preparing and for which it longs. We would therefore find ourselves quite incapable of characterizing such an experience as inspiration, were it not for poets and artists whose individual achievements foreshadow what mankind as a whole will not reach until later. Dr. Bucke, for example, in his Cosmic Consciousness says of Whitman, “I have heard him speak of hearing the grass grow and the trees coming out in leaf.”11 And as a young man Emerson wrote:

The world . . . should be like the Dance of Plotinus in which *the bodies are moved in a beautiful manner, as parts of the whole/ man moved and moving in ecstasy ... 12

10Ibid., pp. 8-9. 11Richard M. Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness (New York, Dutton & Co., Inc., 1923), p. 216. 12Emerson, quoted in Van Wyck Brooks, The Life of Emerson (New York, E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1932), p. 50.

8 He said that every fact and feature of nature taught him what his office should be: He should become

a professor of the Joyous Science, a detector or delineator of occult harmonies and unpublished beauties . . . an affirmer o f the One Law, yet as one who should affirm it in music and dancing. 13

Bronson Alcott spoke of moral inspiration as the blissful moment when a man abandons himself to the spirit: “The highest duty is musical and sings itself.” And Pope Paul VI told a group of musicians that music is “a most valid instrument in the promotion of humanity and indeed spirituality, for it draws us — perhaps unconsciously — closer to that God who is light and peace and fruitful and living harmony.” Carlyle’s meaning is the same when he asks, “Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us?” Music, he says, is “a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!”14 Emerson affirmed that whenever we are finely enough organized, “we can penetrate into that region where the air is music.” In “The Poet” he says: Like the metamorphosis o f things into higher organic forms is their change into melodies. Over everything stands its daemon or soul, and, as the form o f the thing is reflected by the eye, so the soul of the thing is reflected by a melody. The sea, the mountain-ridge, Niagara, and every flower-bed, pre-exist, or super-exist, in pre-cantations, which sail like odors in the air, and when any man goes by with an ear sufficiently fine, he overhears them and endeavors to write down the notes without diluting or depraving them. 15

13Ibid., p. 49. 14Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Poet,” On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (London, Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 109. 15Emerson, “The Poet,” op. cit., p. 331.

9 Emerson’s experience is echoed by his friend Carlyle in such a passage as this: A musical thought is one spoken by a mind that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing; detected the inmost mystery of it, namely, the melody that lies in its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world. All inmost things, we may say, are melodious; naturally utter themselves in Song . . . See deep enough, and you see musically; the heart of Nature being everywhere music, if you can only reach it. 16 And even if the world could be made alive and this life begin to dance, to sound, and to utter itself, a third longing in youth desires something still more fundamental. The human being ultimately wants to know the world as the manifestation of divine Being. Beyond the passing life and soul of things, it hungers after intuitions of the eternal spirit. The power of knowing was called by Emerson a “resistless menstruum,” a fire that dissolves solid facts. The logical analysis used in ordinary thinking chops the manifest world into blocks of ice that we call scientific laws. Imagination melts this ice into flowing life. This water of life is then dissolved by inspired knowing into air — into the all-pervading musical soul that in the creative order of things is higher and earlier than mere life. And finally air becomes fire, inspiration becomes intuition. Behind the speaking of the world, the highest form of cognition finds the One who speaks. Even this experience is what a deeply hidden part of youth knows to be possible and longs for. “The soul’s advances,” said Emerson in “The Over-Soul,” “are not made by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight line, but rather by ascension of state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis — from the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly.”17 When imagination has risen to

16Carlyle, op. cit., p. 108.

17Emerson, “The Over-Soul,” op. cit., (Modern Library edition), p. 265.

10 become inspired, and inspiration in turn has ascended the further step to become intuitive, the ‘resistless’ fire of knowing comes into its own. Reaching through derivative life and soul to the causative spirit that lies within and behind all beings, cognition at last arrives. It has been said that “fact is the end or last issue of spirit.”18 The present form of science cannot confirm this pronouncement as evolutionary truth; but the longing of youth is for a kind of science that can. And this longing is nothing other than the first stirrings of the very powers that will be able to achieve such a science, based upon intuitive experience. Rudolf Steiner says that the ordinary man experiences, or can experience, one true intuition. That is the realization he can have of himself: “I am.” This experience is the most inward and the surest. Its surety rests upon the fact that it begins with the beginning. It confirms itself. I am because I will to be. In this case, what is to be known I bring into existence, and so I know it beyond the shadow of a doubt. I know it from its own point of view. There is no room for obscurity or doubt in the experience of self-identity. If there is anything weak about a man’s intuition of his own core of being in “I am,” it can only be because he has not come to the still moment when he realizes that in this, of all events, he is the absolute prime mover. In the intuition of self-existence, cognition and will are entirely one. This archetypal experience shows, therefore, that intuitive knowledge may be characterized as the cognitive use of our deepest creative power: it is will that has been wholly transformed to knowing. Intuition in this meaning is obviously the highest form of knowledge, for it alone cancels the separation between knower and known. And if it can be applied to other beings as well as to oneself, it gives the possibility of overcoming at last the split between subject and object, self and world. Steiner speaks of this achievement as follows:

18Emerson, “Nature,” op. cit., (Modern Library edition), p. 19.

11 The attainment of this stage . . . is marked by a very definite inner experience. This experience manifests itself in the feeling that one no longer stands outside the things and occurrences which he recognizes, but is himself within them. Images are not the object but its imprint. Also inspiration does not yield up the object itself but only tells about it. But what now lives in the soul is in reality the object itself. The ego has streamed forth over all beings; it has merged with them. . . . The actual living of things within the soul is Intuition. When it is said of Intuition that ‘through it man creeps into all things, ' this is literally true. . . . The perception of the ego is the prototype of all intuitive cognition. Thus to enter into all things, one must first step outside oneself.19

Obviously intuitive cognition is the highest form of love, for complete love is the full experience of another as one’s self. Intuition is love that has become knowledge, or knowledge that has become love. Intuition is the answer to the alienation young people feel so painfully today. Every soul longs for the experience of love. But we parents and teachers have never given our young people the clue to finding love through cognition. We have given them no hint of what is possible when thought becomes pure devotion and devotion becomes pure thought.20

* * *

What is happening today to the longing of young people for life, for soul, for spirit, in the world and in themselves? These

19Steiner, op. cit., pp. 9-10.

20“In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout and devotion is thought.” Emerson, “Nature,” op. cit., p. 41.

12 longings are being frustrated, and the new capacities for both cognition and creation that lie behind the longings are either atrophied or transformed into counter-forces. All of these longings to know the world in a higher way require that not only the organizing mind, but the feeling heart and the creative will as well, are to be enlisted in the quest for truth. In Emerson’s sense, it is only the depths of human experience that can call forth the depths of world-reality. But, as he also observed, in actual life the marriage between the human soul and the world is not celebrated.21 It cannot be celebrated for modern youth because science has not yet accepted the propriety of any such deepening of the act of knowledge. Until it does, our world conception will become ever less meaningful, and growing human beings will become ever more neurotic, perverse, and destructive. There seems to be a psychological law that if positive powers are suppressed on their own level, they become active as negative powers on a lower level. In the youth of today we are seeing proper longings that have gone unfulfilled transform themselves into improper longings. The terrible strength of the latter is all drawn from the former. Instead of being helped to develop imagination so as to be able to live into the great world picture, young people are besieged and assaulted by images that destroy imagination and make experience of the phenomenal world even more opaque than it is for the ordinary state of mind. The attack of images comes from many directions: from speeding car and plane, from television and movie screens — not to mention the barrage of audio-visual aids laid down in some classrooms. Youth reaches out avidly for these images because it has no understanding at all of what it really wants. It embraces that which destroys it. The less capacity one has to produce images, the more he hungers for images that may be passively received. And the more passive he is in his receptiveness, the more his own imagination atrophies.

21 Ibid., p. 41.

13 It would be one thing if the images that assault the eyes of youth today came from noble sources and had creative power. They do not. The greater part of the whole incredible snowstorm is born in materialism, greed, and lust. It seeks to awaken appetite, not ability. It appeals to the lowest, not the highest. And the ear of the soul that longs to hear reality as inner music? It, too, is being externally assaulted without mercy. While the inner ear longs for the soul’s speech and music, the outer ear is deafened by a bombardment of noise unheard since the world began. Think of the planes that make quiet conversation in a suburban garden impossible; the unnerving screech of subways, the banshee wail of jets, the sucking roar of car traffic. Think of the electric washing machine, vacuum cleaner, and vegetable blender; the grass-mower, chain saw, and the pneumatic drill. Upon this background of incessant mechanical noise, impose the record player, radio, television and sound screen! We know and can be genuinely grateful that each of these noisemakers provides some service as convenience or entertainment, but let us ask for once: What is the effect of such cacophony upon the human soul? Youth drinks the rampant mechanical sound and asks for more. It goes to sleep while the radio is on and cannot wake up or eat breakfast without more radio. It holds the transistor radio to its ear as it walks along the street. It welcomes the juke box in restaurants and the steadily mounting volume of sound in movie theatres. We can now expect the third kind of attack to be the worst, because it will be connected with frustration of the very deepest creative powers in the soul. What youth truly wants is to be, and to experience the being of others. What it gets, and seems perversely to crave, is the cruel assault of sexuality. Just as all forms of imagination and inspiration are but preludes to the ultimate power of intuitive knowing, so in the final analysis it is sex that constitutes the ultimate weapon employed against youth in its desire to be and to know being.

14 The message that comes across in the advertising, the fashions, the novels, plays, music, and dances is an appeal to many appetites and impulses, but through all weaves the appeal to sex. Not spiritual fire is evoked, but bodily craving; and the fire of this craving can consume spirit, soul, and life alike.

* * *

We have spoken of high powers that long to be fulfilled, and of the perverse expression of these longings on a lower level when they go unrecognized. We have seen that when productive powers are unexpressed, they turn into consuming appetites, and these constitute the ruthless attack now being waged by modern civilization against the very humanity of modern youth. What becomes of youth’s potentialities under this attack? Every teacher knows that the attack by images is destroying imagination. Children are losing the power required to draw mental images out of written symbols: they read with increasing difficulty and with less and less stamina. Children are also tending to look at beast and flower, at rock and cloud, unimaginatively. Too often they see but dimly and are very little interested. Nature as a whole is withdrawing from them because they cannot follow her forms with imagination. At the same time the so-called power of abstract thinking is suffering, too. The best thinkers are those who continually fight abstraction by imagining what they are conceiving. How much further the negative trend goes may be detected in modern art. Here synthesis, the enhancement of reality towards the ideal, has been replaced by fragmenting, haphazard, or simply mad impulses, which show that the artist is not in control at all. Meaningless pictures, junk sculpture, theater of the absurd: all indicate that deterioration of the creative uses of imagination is passing over into a suicidal will-to-destroy the power itself. The addiction to canned music and to mechanical noise in general is, according to recent studies, producing progressive tone-deafness in the population at large. Music teachers know

15 that children’s voices are growing huskier, lower, more limited in pitch, and less ready to sing. The tones being produced prematurely by young children in the chest and body are doomed from the beginning. It is not the body that sings of itself but the soul sings in the body. Right singing starts high and free, descending deeper into the body only so fast and so far as the latter can be inspired. Children do not listen so acutely, sing so sweetly, or walk and run so blithely as they should. Their ears are growing dull, their voices seem to growl, their gait lumbers and shuffles. The aptitude for poetry was never so weak. But the bombardment by sound is having further efforts. The voices of public speakers must be increasingly amplified. Radios and TV sets are turned up. Dance music has become electrified and deafening. With the increase of volume, melody and harmony are lost, as well as subleties of rhythm. Music is degenerating into raw beat and thud. Surfeit of ‘music’ is becoming anti-music. We witness the suicidal will of musicality to destroy itself. All this, of course, has implications that go far beyond speech and music and dance as such. When these decline, one feels, so does belief in the meaningful order of the cosmos; so does the capacity to manage social life with peace and justice; and so does the ability to live one’s individual life with melodic style, harmonious feeling, and rhythmic power through waking and sleeping, work and play, sorrow and joy, inward and outward activity. Once again, we come to what is deepest and most precious. What is the attack of eroticism doing to the creative and intuitive capacities, to the spiritual life, of youth? It is not only making young people un-intuitive, un-creative, and un-loving; it is causing these forces, too, to take the path of self-destruction. As a result of the exploitation of sex, youth is becoming anti-intuitive, anti-creative, and anti-loving. Too many are already nihilists, and the end is not in sight. Why should sexual over-activity affect intuition? How are the two related?

16 When the deep fire of sex sacrifices itself for the high love of truth, knowing is empowered. Through this sacrifice the deepest level of creative power becomes cognitive. Such knowing fully deserves the name of intuition. But when sex is inflamed and squandered in a purely physical way, intuition is destroyed. Knowing is swallowed by unknowing; darkness replaces light; spirit is lost in matter. And this is not all. The suicidal process does not stop with a laming effect; it goes on to complete destruction. One ends with hatred of the knowing spirit and the creative spirit. Do we not see this apathy, this turbidity, and also this dark malice beginning to appear in the ranks of youth? The constant appeals to sexuality draw downward forces that should have been lived out in the heart and brain. And the more sex is squandered, the colder grows the heart and the vaguer grows the brain. Such a heart and brain cannot rise above materialism. They tend, rather, to create an environment that will be still more disappointing to the soul, making still more forces available for conversion into appetite — an appetite that cannot possibly satisfy itself since it is devouring the soul that alone is capable of experiencing satisfaction. The prospect is terrifying, and modern youth is immediately confronting that prospect. It is one to breed heroes or monsters. Teachers are beginning to see signs of both. Perhaps this is the place to mention the strange paradox that in the midst of all this emphasis upon sex, normal sexual vitality may be actually diminishing — in consequence of exploitation. It is well known that preoccupation with a subject often indicates a secret realization that the substance of the matter is disappearing. This sequence is as true of sex as it is of the brotherhood of man in society, about which we talk so much. What is the substance of healthy sex in the human world? Love. When love dies — as die it must when deeper cognition is balked, and the forces of mind and feeling and will that should have established the relationship between I and Thou are subverted into physical appetite — the strength, the beauty, and the ability to give happiness are removed from sex. What is left is impotence, masked by fantasy, sadism, and the like.

17 In this discussion of the unsatisfied longings of youth and of the perverse, self-defeating turn these longings take in an age that acknowledges no higher forms of knowledge, we have not mentioned the phenomenon that has loomed so large in recent years: the use of drugs. The search for an expanded consciousness is plainest of all in this case, and the suicidal effect of frustrated idealism is becoming equally plain. It is clear that the adolescents who experiment with drugs are seeking intensified perception, the appearance of new and dramatic images. They seek escape from the humdrum, entry into the transcendental. Ecstasy is their aim — originally, no doubt, religious ecstasy. Too many young people believe that drugs hold promise of imagination, of inspiration, of intuition. Drugs do not, however, deliver on their promise. While they work in diverse ways, none of them well understood, they all seem to have one thing in common: they exploit the powers of thought and feeling and will that should bring the better future to pass. They waste the future in order to achieve an illusory fulfillment in the present. Drugs leave the user unmanned. His thrill is bought at the expense of thought, for his thinking grows episodic and confused; at the expense of feeling, for his feelings in normal life are thereafter far more dull and torpid; at the expense of will, for the surest sign of a drug user is his indecision, lack of initiative, and uncreativeness: the bankruptcy of his will. Once again, the longing is justified; the false method of satisfying it is disastrous and in the end suicidal. The picture is dark but not black. There are indeed some very strong rays of light shining in the darkness, showing that behind the clouds the sun is still there and has everywhere power to break through. One of the bright rays is the young heroes who are appearing on the scene. Teachers occasionally see evidence that a new kind of youth is among us.22 These young people are remarkable in two respects: they really want to be good, and

2 2 Vid. Franz E. Winkler, M.D., “Rays of Hope in a Dark World” (New York, the Fellowship Committee of the Anthroposophical Society in America, 1966), p. 9.

18 if given sound advice at critical moments, they have the strength to do so. In them the powers needed for a spirited form of knowledge have made a leap forward. Besides evidence that potential leaders are appearing here and there, we see a whole new climate of thought and feeling among the young that is encouraging and widespread. The love of nature is growing in a way that could not have been predicted a few years ago. Readiness for a simpler life is no longer uncommon. The outward comforts are willingly, and even eagerly, foregone for the sake of inwardness, comradeship, creative activity. The spirit of St. Francis seems to be abroad in many quarters, even though too often as the aftermath of, or still associated with, practices that serve to exhaust rather than to build. One encounters among the young today remarkable honesty, as well as tenderness, in human relationships. All these traits, coupled with willingness to accept the pain of self-knowledge, augur that there is in many young people a strong purpose to force open the gates that lead from death to life. To support the young people who are striving to achieve the kind of development the future will demand, there are here and there individual adults — authors, statesmen, ministers, doctors, educators and others — who can offer counsel, friendly encouragement, and even example. Above all, in my opinion, there is the legacy of Rudolf Steiner, especially the educational method founded upon his wisdom. It was Steiner’s view that our present age begins something new in the history of mankind. The whole sequence of recorded history has been a descent of the spirit of man into materiality, with a consequent darkening of spiritual forms of knowing. The ever increasing brightness of physical perception and scientific intelligence has meant deepening darkness for spiritual percep­ tion. But now the tide has turned. Steiner agrees with the Oriental view that the necessary millennia of darkness are to be succeeded by an age of light, already inaugurated in our time. According to this insight, what we are now witnessing is the dawn of the new impulse upwards out of materiality, but also

19 the unequal struggle of this young impulse with the massive, still not halted, downward momentum of the long age recently ended. The sign of the new day, according to Rudolf Steiner, is that at least some men are beginning to realize that cognition can and must break out of its straitjacket. In his Philosophy of Freedom, Steiner established that we can have confidence in the power of thinking to know truth. In later works he described how thinking can retain the clarity and objectivity it has achieved under the discipline of natural scientific method and yet go on to develop additional strength by the enlistment of powers of the soul as yet unused for cognition.23 It is time now, he said, to withdraw our attention from efforts to improve the instrumentalities and techniques of scientific observation, and from the drive to exploit technologically the physical laws discovered. It is time to focus our attention upon thinking itself. The inherent force of thinking, upon which human freedom and all human progress depend, is now declining. This decline must be reversed. Thinking must be resuscitated by the renewal of confidence in it, and then vitalized by our efforts to place our full powers at its disposal. Under these conditions, the capacity for objective thinking will commence an evolutionary development that is overdue. Thinking will be enabled at last to cope with the successively higher levels of phenomena that wait to be properly known. In Steiner’s view, when intellectual cognition evolves to the further capacity of objective imagination, it can for the first time know living beings. It must then rise higher to become inspiration, if it will approach the soul on its own ground. Still higher must it ascend, to objective intuition, if it is to know the primordial spirit that was, and is, and shall be. Our civilization awaits these higher forms of insight as a matter of life or death. “Where there is no vision, the people perish.”

* * *

23E.G. Goethe as Scientist (New York, Anthroposophic Press, Inc., 1950).

20 A very practical question will occur to anyone who has followed the preceding argument. “What if, as is certainly to be expected, the very great majority of young people will not in this life attain any of the three stages of higher knowledge? What may they reasonably expect?” The answer to this question is that every young person who can be guided to the right path of spiritual development will surely receive great gifts. Much is being attempted in this regard by Waldorf schools, working with the methods suggested by Steiner. These methods aim specifically to fulfill the longings of modern youth. They do so by exercising the powers-of-the- future from which these longings issue. Without at all reaching the stage of clairvoyance Steiner calls Imagination, youth can be strengthened in imagination. The result will be an increased ability to enjoy life because its pulse and power are felt. From such awareness spring surprise and delight, refreshment and renewal. At the same time, the disciplined imagination gives an ability to convert what for others would have remained mere thought into practical energy and skill. Obviously, the capacity to transform abstract ideas into plastic forces overcomes the split between thought and action. Without arriving at Inspiration as Steiner understood it, youth can still be inspired to great effect. For example, right education can have the result that a man who is not at all clairvoyant will nevertheless be inspired through sleep. He will find himself awakening with good ideas, ideas that clarify the riddles of ordinary life and show how improvements can be made in the form of new ways of doing things. He will develop ingenuity and originality — bold conceptions that break out of the rut of habit and custom. This ability is incipient inspiration. What will be the third kind of achievement, showing progress towards Intuition? This stage will show itself as an almost magical ability to accomplish the ideal. All things done deeply and permanently are done by grace. Grace attends the work of him who has taken himself in hand sofundamentally as to replace self-will by the will to do what is right and needed. To

21 live under grace is to have an objective spiritual task as the meaning of one’s life. To have such a task is to be vouchsafed the power to accomplish it in spirit and in truth. Every occupation, every profession, becomes real to the extent that it is also a task. The teacher then actually lifts and enables; he does not merely explain and correct. The preacher actually saves; he does not merely exhort. The doctor actually heals; he does not merely medicate and perform operations. Marriage and parenthood, too, can become tasks, can be lived under grace. Then in the home there is love. This above all is the wish of every child and youth. Considered together, these three practical forms of the higher forces of cognition amount to an ability to enjoy life and to contribute to it; an ability to find meaning in existence, solve problems, and persevere cheerfully through adversities that would defeat the ordinary man. Such are the rewards of striving to make ever more room in one’s heart for the mysterious spirit that lives and rules through all.

22 Passage of Light Through Time

Young eyes Clear pools, Mirror clearer skies, Stars, jewels.

Blurred eyes, Slurred tones, Slick over life’s lies: Through muddied zones The River of Years runs.

Shy are the eyes That like suns rise And shine like suns Through glaze and glass As lesser passions pass.

Floyd McKnight Glimpses of the Building o f the First Goetheanum and o f the Start of the World War

SONIA TOMARA CLARK AND JEANNETTE EATON

The following passage is taken from the manu­ script of an unpublished book about Rudolf Steiner.

Living in a fool’s paradise and enjoying a high level of prosperity, the peoples of Europe in the years immediately preceding the First World War seemed to have no inkling of the destructive forces which such a conflict would unleash. Steiner was perhaps one of the few whose penetrating mind could read the future and embrace the magnitude of the danger hanging over the old continent. He was fully aware of the changes it might bring in its wake. Desperately he tried to warn his contemporaries of the follies of nationalistic adventures. What a relief he felt when he returned from long journeys to the Dornach hill. Already a number of men and women had gathered to help with the building. Roads had been constructed above the village and a large workshop, the Schreinerei, had been built. Some 150 men were at work — swarthy Italian masons and tall blonde carpenters from the wharfs of Hamburg. Rudolf Steiner found that students of his from many countries had come to Dornach ready to undertake whatever he might call on them to do. One of them later described the group:

“Smart American women, a Russian who wears an enormous fur hat, a musician with a grass green

24 umbrella, ladies with short-cropped hair — all these people wander happily through the soft red clay which engulfs our rubber boots beyond retrieving. ... A common effort has brought us together from East and West. We are not experienced builders, only a few of us are sculptors by profession. But with good will one can learn fast..."*

In March, 1914, Dr. Steiner came for an unusually long stay in order to show his friends how to carve the capitals of the great wooden pillars destined to support the ceilings of the two halls. One collaborator, Assia Tourguenieff, a Russian artist, sketched this word picture:

“The person most frequently met on this hill was Dr. Steiner. Wearing a workman’s smock and high boots, he hurried from one workshop to another, a model or sketchbook in his hand, he stopped on his way with a friendly word or a handshake. ...”

And her sister, Nathalie Tourguenieff-Pozzo, gave a detailed picture of the carving lessons:

“The first day of wood carving has come; we have before us a row of wooden blocks more than a yard each in height and width. Dr. Steiner has provided us with small models which we are to copy. We take chisels and mallets .... A great effort is needed to cut even a splinter out of the block. We take counsel, we pull on the wood, we are already tired. Our arms are sore, yet one sees no result of the effort. “Dr. Steiner comes on the second day, takes a mallet and a chisel, climbs on a wooden crate and begins to

*Reminiscences by Nathalie Tourguenieff-Pozzo

25 work. He too has never done such work before, but after a few blows with the mallet he appears to be quite familiar with it and cuts one furrow after another. We see him hammer for ten minutes, one hour, two hours, without stopping: We stand at a distance, pale with exhaustion, and look at him in awed silence. We knew by experience how hard the work was . . . .”

To this her sister Assia added:

“He was completely absorbed in his work, as if he studied inwardly the movements of his hands, as if he listened to something whispered out of the wood. ...”

Both by example and specific directions, Steiner taught his amateur carvers. He teased them merrily, amused them with anecdotes, encouraged their efforts, paid no heed to their weariness and in the evening gathered them all into the workshop to hear one of his profound and inspiring lectures. By April 1st the great domes, covered with Norwegian slate, were in place and a roofing celebration was held. Architects giving Dr. Steiner technical help had warned him that his plan for the two intersecting domes which were to support one another, could not be realized, that the domes would collapse. But there they were, in perfect balance, firm as rocks. It was heartwarming to observe Steiner’s glowing pleasure in this result. Doubtless he would have loved to settle down in Dornach to watch every slight advancement of the building’s construction. Practical activity delighted him. He welcomed visitors as early as eight o’clock in the morning, but two hours later he was usually in the building yards. Then he painted, modelled, carved, interrupted often by questions from architects or workmen. He never failed to attend Fraeulein von Sivers’ eurythmy and dramatic rehearsals. Every evening he gave a lecture to the volunteers. A few hours of sleep were sufficient to restore his forces.

26 Yet even when joyously at work, Steiner found it hard to forget the threat of conflict. His understanding encompassed all countries. He was a citizen of the world. So for weeks he toured Vienna, Prague, Paris and Scandinavia, in addition to visiting many German cities. It was almost midsummer when he returned to Dornach. The end of June brought the shocking news of the assassination in Bosnia of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Imperial throne of Austria-Hungary. Vienna was stunned and excitement spread through the Imperial palace, where the Serbian government was held responsible for the crime. Well-informed, thoughtful persons like Rudolf Steiner feared that this whole situation might be the spark which would start a conflagration in Europe. But several weeks passed without definite signs of a blaze. A small party from Basel had planned to go to Bayreuth to hear Wagner’s opera Parsifal and both Dr. Steiner and Fraeulein von Sivers joined it. As the train reached the station of Bayreuth, a roar of men’s voices arose from the platform and a troop of soldiers rushed cheering through the train. No one knew exactly what the demonstration meant, but feared it marked the mobilization of the German army. Such was the prelude to Parsifal. At the opera’s end a friend offered to take the Dornach party to Mannheim, nearer to the Swiss border. A large automobile was waiting to drive her to that city for a farewell to her two sons. It was a wild trip. At every bridge the shout of “Halt!” from a guard stopped the travellers who were obliged to show identification papers. On through the night the car plunged. A dense crowd was waiting at the Mannheim station for the train to Basel. It did not arrive until nearly morning. Above groans of fatigue arose hysterical cries: “It’s war now! No mistake about it!” Marie von Sivers said of Steiner: “The expression of grief on his face was almost unbearable.” Soon thereafter the group of workers on Dornach’s hill heard the dull, distant roar of mighty guns, a sound which was never to cease for four dreadful years.

27 The immediate effect of the war’s outbreak upon the anthroposophical center was crushing. Most of the men busy on the building, whether artists or laborers, had to leave at once. Even the Swiss were called away for border patrol to protect the neutrality of their country. Some of the women departed to help their families or serve the Red Cross. Hardly half the group was left. Rudolf Steiner accepted these decisions without word or gesture to reveal what this exodus meant to his plans. Instead his farewell message was: “The only thing I can say is that everyone must do his duty.” He was grateful for the nucleus of workers who remained. Representatives of seventeen countries, many of which were already fighting each other, gladly joined together to serve the cause of Anthroposophy. To them Steiner said with quiet force: “Our work must go on.” Yet well he knew that nothing — nothing — would ever be the same again.

28 Sonnet

The weight of heaven presses on us so That we, from morn till night, in God’s embrace, Held and thrust down, must cleave unto the face Of earth, in deep submergence, here below. We walk enoceaned in a ceaseless flow Of circumambient glory, might and grace, Pouring from every side, in every place, Upon our flesh and sense, where’er we go.

Thus whelmed, slow wakening from the fateful swoon Of blinding birth that plucked us from the stars — Swept us from thence and plunged us undersky — We move from day to day and late and soon, Till death, or patient spirit toil, unbars The groaning floodgate of our prisoned I.

Amos Franceschelli From Consumer to Producer in the Spiritual Sphere

HERBERT WITZENMANN

When we regard the situation of today, we see that it comes to meet us with a particular demand. Concerning this particular demand, the historian Toynbee has made a significant statement in a recently published essay. He points out that one of the most characteristic and serious symptoms of the present is the increase in violence in all areas of the earth and that, alongside this symptom of the increase in violence, there exists yet another symptom, the increase in pitilessness, which is evidenced among other things in the fact that nowadays there is no longer any underprivileged class of society, but that in all classes and levels of the populace there are underprivileged people, that is to say the old, the weak, such people who are not provided for by large-scale organisations. These two symptoms of violence and lovelessness are drawing humanity into a constantly worsening state of brutality. Toynbee states that every government is really based on force and that no improvement can be expected as long as nations do not discard the two principles of force and pitilessness. In response to such an utterance, we can feel the challenge of the times appealing to our own hearts, to find a style of working which can confront this violence and pitilessness with a positive example: the working together of free individualities. Certainly, Rudolf Steiner has said that people will and must become more and more individualized and differentiated, that this will and must bring about an increasingly greater danger of estrangement, that there will be no guarantee of safety in the future — this future

30 has in the meantime become the present — and that there will only be one remedy, to live with trust in the spiritual world which expresses itself in single human beings as the impulses of the individual. Now, to these symptoms which I have mentioned with reference to Toynbee, I should like to add a third which is significant and characteristic for everyone, but particularly, I think for young people, and that is, the wish to escape from being a consumer and being part of a society consisting of consumers. This dissatisfaction, this wanting to escape from a society of consumers with its forced production and its surplus of goods, is one of the deepest impulses of our time, especially in young people. Here we encounter a situation similar to the one which confronted Rudolf Steiner at the end of the first World War with regard to the proletariat. The proletariat at that time wanted to escape from a society based on property and commercial interests and it possessed tremendous forces, impulses of will to do so, but it only had the old manner of thinking and habits of feeling. It wanted to escape from this old situation with old forces. That was the tragedy at that time. And the whole of present-day humanity is in a similar situation. The whole of humanity has actually become the proletariat. Fundamentally, everyone wants in his innermost being — even those who are at home in this society of consumers — to escape from it, particularly young people. But they do not yet know how to do so, and consequently they slip back again and again into the old habits of thinking and feeling, into the very attitudes which brought about this consumer situation. So that progress can only be made when people learn to overcome the consumer situation in themselves and instead of being consumers, become producers in the sense of Rudolf Steiner’s words: “My whole work is only the apparatus on which one learns gymnastics.” The consumption of this work has no value. If one wants to help, and particularly to help young people, the first thing is not necessarily to provide answers — of course, one must also in a tactful way provide answers, as far as one can — but it is much more important to try to lead people to the

31 point where they create the prerequisites in themselves, whereby they can answer their own questions, and provide their own counsel. Wilhelm von Humboldt said that if you really want to counsel someone you should not give him advice. If young people are to help themselves through an inner exertion of will, through inner discipline and exercise, then it is just the overcoming of the consumer mentality which is urgent. In this sense, I should like to attempt a brief contribution. I should like to take as my starting point something which one often meets as a question particularly from young people. This is the question concerning the path of inner training, of meditation. I intentionally choose the most delicate question just because it cannot receive a direct answer, since the best and most productive course is not to speak of the results and experiences of meditation if one wishes to make progress in one’s meditative life. Nevertheless, in the preparatory stage leading to meditation one can make significant observations. I should like to present observations of this kind as they might emerge in a living way during the course of a conversation, observations which need in no way be adopted by others, but which may serve as a stimulus to develop out of oneself whatever corresponds to one’s own nature. Let us consider the seed meditation which you all know. Not only can it be meditated, it allows one to observe the preparatory stage of consciousness — that which precedes supersensible impressions or presentiments — with the sober, reflective calmness of the scientist. Out of a seed, we can let the plant appear before us in an inner formative process in somewhat the same wonderful way in which it occurs in Goethe’s elegiac lines on metamorphosis. Then we see rising before this inner, active process a growing, a striving from the darkness of the earth into light, from the formless to the formed, from the colourless to the colourful, from the arid into the juicy. We follow these metamorphoses of plant growth, their expansions and contractions, closing to complete the ring of growing and becoming, which in turn becomes a link in the chain of life. But if at the same time we

32 fix our observant gaze on ourselves, we notice that this meditation can only succeed if we produce a stronger power of will than we do in ordinary life. In ordinary life, our will is actually drawn along by that to which we are accustomed, by outer influences and coercions. It actually submerges itself in our activity and therefore eludes our consciousness. When we meditate, however, we must make a free decision to activate our will. And it is through this effort that we become conscious of it. But it enters our consciousness in a strange way. Under ordinary conditions, it is always directed outward. Now it is directed inward. A complete reversal of the will occurs. And now as a consequence, the following experience can perhaps make itself delicately felt. This reversal of the will which is directed inward on the seed or on any other phenomenon or being of the world, is like sending down roots into the essential nature of things. From these roots of will, the trunk of our own being begins to grow up. We notice, when we continue this self-observation, that our life of feeling also undergoes a transformation. We feel ourselves wondrously refreshed through living like this in the growth of a plant. Green shoots begin to sprout in us, and perhaps even to blossom, and we notice that, in this sprouting and blossoming, we overcome the consumer attitude, the consumer mentality. No longer do we consume the seed, as we not only do by chewing it with our jaws, but which we also consume by simply accepting it, or simply accepting any other object of knowledge in order to nourish our soul-life with it. But now within the “greening” in our soul, in our feeling life, the seed begins to unfold its leaves all over again. It achieves, so to speak, a new dimension to grow in. Not only does our relationship to the world change in that we provide the beings which are part of it with a new opportunity of growth, rather than consuming them, no, also our relationship to ourselves changes, as I have already touched on, for we begin ourselves to spring up and grow out of the elements and the beings of which the world is composed. But this springing growth is evinced in the sphere of our

33 feeling life by still another change of direction. Previously, we reversed the will from an outward to an inward going. In ordinary life our feelings are turned inward and are tremen­ dously interested in themselves. In meditation, our life of feeling turns outward. We feel ourselves inside the being and becoming of things. And this allows another delicate experience to present itself. Attached to the trunk which is growing from the roots of the will, now, suddenly, wings appear, wings of feeling, for in the spiritual sphere roots and hovering do not contradict each other, just as Pherecydes, the European forebear of us all, imagined the world as a winged oak. This feeling life which is no longer confined to its own narrow limits and, in its limitation, is estranged from the world, now lives at one with the world and gives us the wings which support us in the world. Thirdly, something changes in the life and events of our cognitional faculty. The processes which underlie our cognitional life, our representational faculty, usually elude our observation. Only in exceptional circumstances do they enter our conscious­ ness in a living way. Usually we only have the dead final products of these processes of our cognitional life in our consciousness. This means that we move in a bloodless world of shadows. But when, in meditation, we send down the roots of the will into things and spread the wings of feeling, we experience the law of plant growth, of the formative being of a thing, not as a dead image but as a living formative force, which lives both in us and in things themselves. In this way, our cognitional life is now two-sided, like a Janus head, its gaze turned both in an inward and an outward direction. And now on this winged trunk with its roots sent down by the will, blossoms begin to appear, the blossoms of cognitional knowledge. The blossom, too, has two aspects towards which it turns. With its perfume, its radiant beauty of color, the blossom turns outward, inwardly it conceals the seed. If we now ask ourselves: What has actually taken place, what are the forces through which our own being is conjured up once more out of the being of things as something that takes root and blossoms and has pinions? How does this seed ripen in our

34 meditative experience? then we must answer: It ripens, it grows, not through the forces of nature, but through a force which lies in our own being. And when, now, to conclude, we inquire as to the nature of this force, we can say: It is a force which counteracts the forces of death that are also at work in our being. These death forces are just the opposite of the process I have been describing. They lead us away from the world, let us become estranged from the world, constrict our feeling life within the narrow limits of what is subjective and egoistic, and finally destroy our physical form. These forces, however, which allow us to sprout roots and blossoms and pinions, they build up our spiritual form, they widen our feeling life beyond its narrow limits out to the periphery, into the encircling horizon, and they unite us finally with the being of the world. They are not the forces of death, but Easter forces of resurrection. And it is these forces of resurrection which spread and move the wings of this blossom- and root-sprouting sapling, in that we ourselves allow our own being to spring up and grow out of the beings of the world. These forces carry our being through incarnations and through the progressive development of consciousness. Perhaps this may serve as a stimulus to overcome the attitude of the consumer in favour of an inner state of productive soul alertness.

*Excerpt from an address, April 10, 1971, to the Annual Meeting of the General Anthroposophical Society, freely translated into English by Sophia Walsh.

35 Winter Song

O you who sleep with watchful eyes And know what angels dream for Man Advance along the star-blazed skies And let your eyes their message scan . . . How courage to the earth is poured Along these paths of light Oh they have let a Lamb be born; This is a Holy Night Redeeming the forsaken form That man has wrought on Earth. Behold the Savior’s Star this morn Proclaiming here His birth. Hallelujahs to Him bring! All Mankind Hosanna sing!

Danilla Rettig

Word-ness World-nest autumn-falls

falls inward.

Earth-word sows heart-seed:

word-worlds.

M. C. Richards

36 Archetypal Relations Between Plant and Man

WILHELM PELIKAN

GOETHE’S PIONEERING WORK

Goethe has been called the Kepler and Copernicus of the organic world by Rudolf Steiner. Through his concept of metamorphosis he opened up for human perception a dynamic image of the plant, grasping it as an entity both “sensible and supersensible”. He was looking, not for what had come into being and was apparent to the eye, but for what was coming into being; not the finished form, but the form-giving process; not something which, as it comes into being, is already dying, but that in it which lives on, the formative law, the metamorphosing form, the archetypal life element, the essential nature of the plant. Goethe described how this essential being of the plant enters into the physical material world from a spiritual world of forces which are beyond immediate perception, and how it does so in three great stages of development; how in the physical world it manifests in a form apparent to the senses and then “passes away” again, back into the sphere of the “supersensible”, the essential. The three stages of development may be seen as three variations of an interplay between forces of expansion and contraction. From the contracted seed or bud, the leafy shoot arises; this contracts in the calyx and again expands in the flower; it finally gathers itself up again in the seed, and expands in forming the fruit. From the seed, the cycle of life then begins anew. Contemplation of this cycle of life will yield an important discovery: the more perfect a plant element appears in its external, visible form and structure, the more it has lost of its

37 vital energy. The structures which abound with life are always less well formed out: seed, bud, root, shoot. In the flower, a rose for instance, the plant appears in the most perfect form it can have in the world of the senses—but it is also very short-lived. The noblest form goes hand in hand with the shortest life-span and great fragility. Goethe’s concept of metamorphosis is a foundation stone in the study of life, therefore, and the laws of life it reveals are comparable in significance to those discovered by Kepler. Every future botanist will have to take this into account. Yet in its present form it does not lead to a materia medica. Only a study of the archetypal relations between plant and man can provide the basis for such a materia medica. These archetypal relations were subsequently discovered and described by Rudolf Steiner.

THREEFOLD PLANT AND THREEFOLD MAN

Leaf process and rhythmic system One of the chief indications of the existence of such archetypal relations, in which nature reveals herself beyond all theory, is the relation between plant respiration and human respiration, and between leaf pigment (Chlorophyll) and blood pigment (haematin). This brings us face to face with one of the archetypal polarities in life. The fundamental organ of the plant, the organ through which it manifests most strongly and purely as plant, is the leaf and the node belonging to it — all other parts of the plant must be seen as metamorphoses of this. The plant is therefore actually inviting us to look for the archetypal relations between itself and man in the leaf Even externally the foliage — node upon node piling up in rhythmic repetition — is quite obviously the middle part of the whole plant, its rhythmic system. Its counterpart in man is the middle, rhythmic, system, anatomically based on the spinal column and its rhythmic sequence, on the rhythmically arranged arches of the ribs forming the thorax. Rhythmic — in accord with the changing light of night and day — are also plant

38 respiration and assimilation; they represent the complete polar contrast to human respiration and the dissimilation connected with it. The leaf takes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and puts it through a process of carbon-condensation, a carbohydrate metamorphosis providing most of the material for the physical part of the plant; oxygen is exhaled in the process. In man, the rhythmic system takes up oxygen in the chest organization and breaks down the “carbon-ness” of the body, fighting against its condensation, and ejecting carbon dioxide. Both processes are rhythmic and take place between the fluid and the airy elements, but they go in opposite directions. The hollow structure of the lung with the trachea and its branches, bronchial space, may be seen as an ideal tree. Like a real tree, it takes up carbon dioxide and gives off oxygen to the inner world of the blood-filled lung. The whole of it is an illustration given by nature herself, of the ideal relations between the rhythmic systems of man and plant. The same rhythmic processes as those in the airy element may also be observed in the fluid and the semi-fluid spheres. The leaf pigment — how clearly nature spells things out for us here — is extraordinarily similar to blood pigment in its material composition. In each case the respiratory metal is surrounded by four pyrrole nuclei, the only difference being that in the plant the metal is magnesium and in man it is iron. The plant also needs iron in order to form chlorophyll, but this iron does not enter into the structure, it remains outside it. Man interiorizes iron. Conversely, chlorophyll used as a remedy will greatly stimulate haemopoiesis* in man. With all this great similarity between blood pigment and leaf pigment, we must not overlook the fact that even in external appearance the two are polar opposites: chlorophyll, the green pigment, fluoresces blood-red, the red pigment, fluoresces leaf-green. An archetypal phenom­ enon of life, at the same time an illustration that behind polar opposition a secret unity must nevertheless exist, that it must represent a true “dis-unity”. Having grasped this, one is forced

*blood-building

39 to come to far-reaching conclusions. It means that man, the more highly developed being, cannot have evolved from the less developed one, the plant. An archetypal existence must have “disunited” and thrown off the plant form of life, so that the human form of life might be released. The archetypal relations between plant and man and their polar opposition must have their cause in the evolution of earthly existence, and that is where we must look. Any notions we have of the evolution of earth and of man must take into account such primed facts as these. The modern schools of thought on the subject omit this; but it is taken into account in the description of world and human evolution given by anthroposophical spiritual science. But more of this in later chapters. To sum up, one may say: the rhythmic systems of man and plant correspond to each other as polar opposites. There will be many examples later on of how remedies from the leaf sphere act on the thoracic organs, on breathing and on the circulation, but also on all other rhythmic activities.

In man, the rhythmic system mediates between two polarities, and the same pertains to the plant. In man, the sphere of nerves and senses, chiefly concentrated in the head but extending all over the body, stands opposed to the metabolic system which is chiefly concentrated in the abdomen but also permeates the whole organism and organically speaking, includes the activity of the limbs. In the plant, the rhythmic leaf system lies in the middle between flower and root processes. The threefold form of man and the threefold form of the plant invite us to look further into their relations.

Root process and system of nerves and senses Let us first of all go down and contemplate the root. Through the root, the plant belongs to the earth and its sphere of forces. It is also the organ through which the plant comes to grips with the kingdom of nature below it, with the dead mineral kingdom.

40 The root is subject to the forces of gravity, it is “geotropic”, i.e. “sensitive to the earth”, just as shoot and leaf are “sensitive to the cosmos”. “Sense-of-gravity organs”, statoliths, have been found in root cells. But the root is also “sensitive” to the material conditions of the soil, its water content and concentration of salts; it is in “perceptive contact” with its physical environment — just as the head is in touch through its sense organs with its physical surroundings, the world of the senses, though this only reveals to it the external mineral and physical aspects. (Our sensory perception cannot grasp the vital activities and the conditions pertaining to the soul or spirit of the objects around us; it perceives them merely as “ob-jects” standing out in opposition, like “ob-stacles”. Until man develops higher forms of perception, anything beyond this will have to be grasped by thought.) The root grasps what it “perceives” in its environment by actively growing into it. It employs a selective faculty by very specifically, in a manner dependent on the species, taking up this or that substance from the earth and making up a “salt composition” that is individual to each species. An analysis of the plant ash only gives a dead image of this. The whole process is analogous at the material level to the way in which sense perceptions are taken up and processed in the functions of the brain and nerves. In the root, salts and water are vitalized, lifted out of gravity and the laws of the earth, and then handed over to the plant’s own organization. Through the salt processes which have been taken up, a process of mineralization goes through the whole plant, permeating all its vital processes and in this way making it into a being that truly belongs to the earth. Hardening and mineralizing processes are also emanating from the human head; the head is the most hardened, mineralized (calcified) part of our body. But one must always look for the polarities in such analogies. Root process and head process correspond as polar opposites. The head, with the highly organized brain floating within it, rises above gravity; the root becomes part of it. The root does, however, wrest away from gravity the substances which it takes up, enlivening dead substance, meeting the dead mineral with

41 the highest vitality of the plant and handing it on to the forces of “levity”. The root is the most vital organ of the plant. In the head, on the other hand, great finesse is used to throttle down the vital processes most strongly; here mineral processes previously taken up into human vitality are forced into the human form. The daring feat is done of bringing this human form into appearance in a calcium skeleton. This form represents the greatest contrast to the form of unenlivened mineral — truly a masterpiece of creation. The skeleton is human mineral. In the head and the sphere of the nerves and senses one may therefore see a human counterpart and polar opposite to the root processes. Numerous drugs from roots with their marked effect on head and nerves give proof of this — later chapters will discuss it further.

Flower and fruit process and metabolic system Descending from the leaf to the root we have lost sight of the leaf form and the rhythmic sequence belonging to it; only the nodes and their vessels remain, in a way, pressed closely together, almost without form but highly dynamic, concen­ trated, sucking, the root organ. Ascending to the region of flower and fruit we also move up into a region where form is highly developed. The purely plant element, the green leaf, becomes the stuff used in sovereign fashion by a higher form-giving principle. Not just one leaf, but a multiplicity of leaves are taken together and appear as a new structure. The green colour, and the assimilating function belonging to it, are lost. The rhythm of leaf arrangement, spiralling upwards according to strict mathematical laws, is held up and changed into a circular movement. The time sequence of the leaves becomes an arrangement side by side in space, with new numerical laws coming in to establish something new. The leaf, ideally part of a plane reaching into infinity, touching infinity and nourished from the infinite cosmos, now curves up into a spherical surface. Forming a bowl, a bell or a tube, it now encloses internal spaces, whilst for the leaf there is only one

42 space, external space. Deep within the internal space the fruit node lies enveloped, the highest form of development of the node. Colour, scent, nectar, warmth and pollen are now exhaled. Pollen brought to the flower from the air or through animal activity is inhaled. To the final contraction, the concentration of the seed, is now added the final expansion, the swelling of the fruit. This fruit is not merely a structure enclosing a space and enveloping it, for now the inner space is completely filled with inner substance. The far-away outside world has become interiorized, right into physical substance. This substance develops with the aid of a great deal of warmth coming from outside, and in some flowers the plant even develops a certain amount of heat of its own. In the root, the plant needs water and salts; in the fruit, it needs ripening warmth and cosmic radiations coming in. The whole force of summer is enclosed in the formation of the fruit. The connections with the reproductive process immediately make us relate the upper organs of the plant with the abdominal organs of man. But this actually applies even more comprehen­ sively to the whole metabolic sphere. But it is the “how” of these connections that deserves particular attention. The plant is being “opened to the world”. This is clearly indicated by the form and function of its chief organ, the leaf. Ideally the leaf is a plane tangential to the infinitely great sphere belonging to it. From this cosmic sphere, activities and influences are radiating which either form the basis of the metabolic processes in the plant, or at least influence and integrate them. These activities are incorporated in the plant, but the centres giving the impulse remain outside in the universe. Man, on the other hand, has taken these centres of impulse into himself, in the world of his inner organs. Liver, kidney, heart, gall-bladder and so on are autonomously, in co-operation with the wholeness of the human being, performing tasks which the plant can only carry out together with the outer universe. (The building up and breaking down of carbohydrates in the plant, for instance, follows the rhythms of the sun and of the earth, in the cycle of day and night, in the cycle of the seasons. In man, however, in the life

43 process, this carbohydrate metabolism is subject to the will which move the limbs.) The specific metabolic activity of each plant species, from the leaf to the formation of flower, fruit, and seed, may be seen to be a synthesis and accumulation of substance that is definitely peculiar to the species; the fruit element serves to nourish others in the natural kingdoms above that of the plant. In the flower, this is expressed more in form, in the fruit, more in substance. The form developed by the flower tells us something of the forces that are involved, by the way it comes close to animal form and animal nature. Tendencies related to those normally belonging to animal and human nature take effect, are accepted into the life principles of the plant, in order that the flower form may arise. Deviation from plant principles of formation and from the form of the leaf is even greater in the development of the fruit. As a nutritive substance the fruit then enters directly into the form and mobility of the system of metabolism and limbs in man. It becomes obvious that the polar projection to the region above the leaf must be found in the region below the rhythmic system of man. Such connections are emphasized by the medicinal action of the flower element of the plant on the metabolic region. It is possible to represent this diagrammatically as follows:

Plant Man flower region system of nerves and senses leaf region rhythmic system root region system of metabolism and limbs

A brief reference to the threefoldness of man We owe the discovery and systematic description of the functional threefoldness of the human organism to Rudolf Steiner. After thirty years of preliminary studies he published his first outline of this in 1917, in his book Von Seelenraetseln

44 (Riddles of the Soul). This book describes the relations of the human soul to the physical, bodily element. The nerve processes, extending into the sense organs on the one hand, and into the internal physical organization on the other, are the physical counterpart to the soul process of ideation. This agrees more or less with modern scientific thinking. What is new is that in the same way as ideation and nervous activity are linked, so feeling must be brought into relation with the rhythmic processes, with the “rhythm of life that has its focus in the activity of breathing, and is connected with it right down into the furthest periphery of the organization”. And just as the soul, in feeling, rests on the breathing rhythm — though also in its encounter with nervous and sensory processes reflecting the mental image of what has been felt in consciousness — so the activity of willing rests on metabolic processes, throughout the whole of the organism. If something is willed, “a metabolic process occurs, providing the physical basis for what we experience as ‘willing’”. A fully conscious, waking experience, however, exists only for mental images formed through mediation of the nervous system. In ordinary consciousness, anything mediated by the breathing rhythm has the power only of dream images: all emotions, affects, passions, etc. And “the willing based on metabolic processes is not experienced at a level of consciousness higher than the very dulled one that goes with sleep”. The experience of willing must be distinguished from the “idea of willing”. “Willing is a mental concept because, within the conceptual experience of the soul, a non-conception comes in, entering into fully conscious experience very much as sleep represents interruptions in the progress of conscious life.” The system of “motor” nerves also serves perception, but the perception of the subtle metabolic processes which provide the physical basis for the activity of willing. It would be wrong to see the “threefoldness’ of man as a division of the human body into three. Nervous activity, breathing rhythm and metabolic activity “do not lie side by side, but one inside the other, they interpenetrate, and enter

45 into each other. Metabolic activity goes on all over the organism, it permeates the organs of rhythm and those of nervous activity. But when it permeates rhythm, we cannot ascribe to it the physical foundation of feeling, nor when it permeates nervous activity that of ideation; in both these spheres, it remains linked with the activity of willing, permeating rhythm and nerves.” In the nerve, “metabolism is to be found to the extent to which it is permeated with willing”. Whatever “metabolic activity there is in rhythm, has to do with the element of willing present in that organ”. Not only metabolic and rhythmic processes are to be found in the nerve, but also the physical processes which form the foundation of ideation. These are processes of degradation and paralysis only to be found through “a process of elimination”. It is not possible to go further into this here, but readers are strongly recommended to read the book already mentioned (Riddles of the Soul). What is so important is that “the body as a whole, and not only the nervous activity included in it, is the physical basis of soul life; that the three elements of the human body we have been discussing lie one inside the other, not side by side; though the maximum concentration of sensory and nervous activity is predominantly in the ‘upper man’, that of rhythmic activities in the ‘middle man’, and that of metabolic activities in the ‘lower man’”.

Translation from the German of the first chapter of the author’s Heilpflanzenkunde (Medicinal botany), Vol. 1; published with the kind permission of the author and of the publishers, Philosophisch-Anthroposo- phischer Verlag am Goetheanum/Dornach, Switzerland. Translator: R. E. K. Meuss, F.I.L. Translation reprinted from The British Homeopathic Journal, Vol. LIX, No. 3, July 1970, by kind permission. Reprints of the articles as they appear in the British journal may be obtained from Rudolf Steiner Press, 35 Park Rd., London, N.W .l.

46 Looking at a Tree

The eye begins with earth Where roots anchor the tree. The eye grows up the trunk To branches and the sky. Or else one can reverse The tree, so to the eye Branches are roots immersed Within the bowl of sky

While it is to the sun That branches draw the eye The roots reach down and run Where bones and ashes lie. One trunk completes the whole. Between the earth and sky One trunk stands still and is A ladder for the eye.

Claire Blatchford Albert Steffen: Retrospect

On the occasion of the publication of HIRAM AND SOLOMON and THE DEATH EXPERIENCE OF MANES

HENRY AND CHRISTY BARNES

The publication in English translation of two major dramatic works by Albert Steffen offers an opportunity to consider briefly the unique position of this remarkable poet in the cultural life of our time. Perhaps no other author is as much of a riddle and a challenge to us, yet perhaps no other belongs so surely to the future. Looking back in 1932 over a quarter of a century of literary achievement, Steffen observed: “From the very beginning, I renounced all intention of writing as the popular writers do. Why? It would have been by far the easiest course. But, in doing so, I would have had to give up the most difficult task: my own development toward a higher humanity, my relationship as a man of conscience toward the spirit. In deciding to be so rigorous with myself, I found myself face to face with the question: shall I, in this case, find any readers at all? But even in view of the danger that I might lose my entire audience, I wanted to go this path.”1 This was a decision, as Steffen says, which was implicit in his work from the start, yet as a young author, published by the leading German-language publisher of his day — S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin — Steffen not only found a small following of readers but won critical recognition of the highest order from some of his contempo­ raries.

1Introduction to Goethes Geistgestalt (Goethe's Spiritual Stature), Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, Dornach, Switzerland. 1932.

48 Hermann Hesse, writing in the Basler Nachrichten of March 7, 1914, for instance, 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. 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 (Ott, Alois and Werelsche, 1907; The Destiny of Brutality, 1912 and The Renewal of the Covenant, 1913) and expressed his delight at the artistry with which Steffen created pictures, colors, tones, but 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. Of the second novel 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 atonement 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 representation 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 sitting 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,

49 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 o f 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."

* * *

Albert Steffen was thirty at the time Hesse wrote. He had already met Rudolf Steiner in 1907 in Berlin and had recognized in him a leader of mankind. “More than ever,” he later wrote, “it became my watchword to work on myself.” And, just as he had already decided to write without compromise out of the spirit, he now entered the lists on behalf of Rudolf Steiner’s science of the spirit as the knowledge which the time required. The methods of spiritual science, Steffen saw, could be applied to the problems of social life and offered the healing so desperately needed for the sickness of civilization. To write and to speak about them was not merely a personal decision but a matter of social responsibility. To prepare himself to work under Steiner’s leadership and in association with him became Albert Steffen’s unspoken aim during the tragic years just before and during the first World War. It was in 1920 that Steffen left Munich where he had lived as a freelance writer and moved permanently to Dornach. He accepted Rudolf Steiner’s invitation to edit the weekly magazine, Das Goetheanum, which was then about to be founded. From that time forward, Dornach was Albert Steffen’s home. He had worked on the first Goetheanum during the war

50 years on periodic visits to Switzerland; on New Year’s Eve 1922/23 he witnessed its destruction by fire, and, at the refounding of the Anthroposophical Society, Christmas 1923, Steffen was named by Rudolf Steiner as a member of the new leadership of the Society, whose president he became in 1925 after Rudolf Steiner’s death. Rudolf Steiner wrote on a number of occasions about Albert Steffen as a writer. He stressed that it was never as an imitator that Steffen wrote; never did he merely clothe a scaffold of anthroposophical ideas with the garment of his own poetic phantasy, a criticism leveled at that time at Steffen’s work. Writing in Das Goetheanum of February 22, 1925, in connection with Steffen’s drama Das Viergetier (The Fourfold Beast), Rudolf Steiner said:

"""""Such a feeling can not arise if the soul really penetrates into the drama with full experience. For the dramatic action flows from sense-perceptible reality into the spiritual sphere through deeper human knowledge which is native to the poet as the inner being of his own spirit.”

Steffen remains the artist, Rudolf Steiner saw, even when his thought ascends into alpine regions. “His poetry stems from a soul region where one gazes upon world secrets and experiences human riddles. But the spirit which, seeing and sensing, often dares descend into deep abysses and swings into starry heights remains a picture-former, a tone-creator, and is nowhere lured into cold abstraction. Steffen paints with words. The words have colors. And the colors impress one like those in paintings which have survived the centuries and have stood the test of time."2

* * *

2Das Goetheanum, January 15, 1922.

51 Steffen was able to hand Rudolf Steiner a copy of his completed drama, Hiram and Solomon, just two weeks before his death on March 30, 1925. Rudolf Steiner gave directions that it be printed in Das Goetheanum. Of the impulse which led him to write the play, Albert Steffen writes:

“The legend which I have dramatised in my tragedy belongs, like the Paradise-myth, to the oldest tradi­ tional literature. It had lain waiting in print for a long time, but in spite of that had found no poet. When I heard it for the first time, it was immediately clear to me that for a dramatist it would be a sin of omission not to try to master material of this depth and comprehensiveness. In ancient epochs, with their high forms of culture, names were still one with the beings to whom they belonged. Consider the name of Abel who still lived in Paradise and dwelt in wondering contemplation of its splendor. The innocence of nature lived in him also. The first sound that releases itself from the lips is the AH. Abel sees himself standing before the Godhead, surrounded by a protective sheath which comes to expression in B. But at the same time he rests, even though in the gentlest way, in himself, which he expresses in E (AY). The last sound, L, lends him the angel-pinions o f his higher being. In such a sound- sequence Abel experiences himself. His brother Cain has in his hands tools that crush and hack: hammer and hoe; he strikes the ax into the trunk to fell it. Before he builds, he must destroy. K (C) is a wedge. In him also works astonishment, but the I (in German the I is pronounced EE forming the diphthong AH-EE) is overpowered by egotism. N has in it something of the gesture of rejection. Cain has no angel wings for he feels his own fire within himself. He allows himself to be overwhelmed by this inner fire

52 and strikes the deadly blow. And so he is not, like Abel, raised into heaven, but banished to Gehenna. The scenes arise o f themselves out of the two names; from Abel the soft cloud-forms, from Cain the splintered rock-chasm. Hiram wants to reconcile the hostile brothers. His name is derived from the Greek work, hieraomai — the celebrant of a religious ceremony. This ceremony comes to expression in the casting o f the Brazen Sea from the seven metals which bespeak the powers of the planets, made possible by gifts, based upon music and mathematics, as master carpenter. The Sea has the form of the lily, o f a hexagon, of the ancient temple that prepares the new cultural epoch."

Of the Death Experience of Manes, Steffen writes,

“Manicheism is a world view which appears not only in the form of ideas but in pictures. Mani or Manes is not only thinker but artist. He is also a musician. I have tried to show him in my drama as uniter o f science, art and religion. In the Mani documents found in Egypt there is a spiritual testimony written by himself. ‘He (the living Paraclete) revealed to me the mystery of the depths and o f the heights, the mystery of battle, and the mystery of war on which the darkness has set its mark. He revealed to me how the light and darkness through their interblending built up the world .... He disclosed to me the mystery of the creation of Adam, the first man . . . . ' Manes wanted to transform the pre-Christian mysteries in the light of the Christ impulse. The names of the three pupils who with him carried his message out into the world: Addas, the Indian — Tamas, the Persian — Hermes, the Egyptian pupil — indicate this. He lived at a time in which the folk myths, which till

53 now had shaped the various cultures, were already disappearing, and Christendom, although in many ways endangered from without and within, was to unfold itself He was born in the year 215 A.D. and grew up under Ardaschkr, the founder of the Sassanid dynasty, worked under his son, Shapur I, and spread his teaching as far as India and China. After the Death of the king, Hormisdar and then, after his death, Bahram came to the throne. By him he was condemned in the year 276. As I wrote my first drama The Manicheans before the outbreak of the first World War, my contempo­ raries, except for a few students of religion, scarcely took notice of the life and teachings of Manes. I, myself, laid little stress on his destiny in my piece, which had its first performance in 1917 at the Zurich Municipal Theater, but presented without any prelimi­ naries the battle between two world views which still prevail today: the polarity between spirit insight founded in the free act of knowledge and agnosticism bound by natural necessity. Manes' spiritual gaze reaches back into primeval times when humanity was not yet fragmented into separate religions. Noah, who rescued the mystery of bread at the time of the Atlantean flood and who was the first tender of the vine, appears to him surrounded by his sons: Salem, Arpacksad, Japhet, Cham and Sem, the archetypes o f the races. As seer, his vision also shows him the kingly, priestlike figure of Melchisedeck, who points the way from pre-Christian mysteries toward Golgatha and so prophesies unity upon a higher stage, the resurrection of Christ, the new Adam. ... The Death Experience of Manes celebrates the victory of the living spirit despite physical destruc­ tion. : * * *

54 The clear, strong green and rose-crimson bindings of these two new volumes remind one of the extraordinary world of color that opens out to an audience as the curtains part upon a Steffen stage set. Such colors live also in the organ tone and star-song of this poet’s vowels,

“Enclosed, protected, cherished, held in place By many-sided care of consonants,” as he himself has described the language of poetry — consonants which build an almost metallic-hard, sculptural setting for the jewel-like vowels. To translate the words of such a painter, musician and sculptor of words, to convey, as he does, a whole soul landscape with the economy of a Chinese brush stroke in a few deft, revealing phrases, is an inspiring and well nigh impossible task. Yet one experiences in reading Virginia Brett’s translation of Hiram and Solomon that she has learned from Steffen, and through her years of work in bringing the spoken word to life, how the harmonies and repetitions of vowels and consonants can form a structure into which you enter as into a cathedral, countryside or temple, illuminated by colored imagery, filled with fragrance. Meaning has become music and language landscape. Elly Simons has steeped herself in the artistic values of two languages and Daisy Aldan, is herself a poet. Her volume of Steffen poem translations put his imaginations into English with gripping, idiomatic directness and consonantic skill. These three artists have preserved the poetic form of The Death Experience of Manes and have caught to a heart-warming degree something of the magic of sound and epigramatic structure of Steffen’s poetry. We are indebted to them for making so beautifully available in English these plays that have so often appeared on the Goetheanum stage and for which Steffen — himself, like Blake, a painter — designed sets and costumes in a style which, with its smack of almost oriental color and masterly childlikeness, may perhaps foreshadow the dramas of some Russian theater in the far future?

55 HIRAM AND SOLOMON - From the Sixth Scene

A t the center of the earth. Fiery vault. Cain (seems to have issued from the living fire-kernel o f the earth itself. His heavenly origin is visible in face, breast and limbs. His face glimmers like moonshine. His breast pulsates in lightening and darkening rhythms. In arms and legs the glittering and glistening colors of the planets appear like confused effluxions of metal. On his forehead, between the eyes, he bears the T-sign, as a shadow) ....

CAIN: . . . — Rock becomes pliant round me, metals melt, the mighty mountains moulded into chains range round the fiery framework of my bones. My head expands to a vast vaulted dome. And through my veins goes flowing, by the glow of world-fire impulsated, molten gold. A frightful fever rages in my blood, that cauterizes, tempers to adamant, refines me to a gem — of Lucifer. Yes, Lucifer assumes my light, the star of the Risen One, and he deceives with it. The seers of truth are done to death by him. — O Hiram, dearest to me of my chidren, go not aloft. Death waits for you above. Stay here where you are out of reach of death.

HIRAM: . . . But a death-bringer. Never. I remain servant of the Creator of all life.

CAIN: O Hiram, in these great gusts of fire that at the center of the earth transfuse us both, there lives the resurrection force.

56 HIRAM: For you and me alone, for others not. But I will bear that force aloft for all, remove the mark of murder from our children.

CAIN: And fall by murderer’s hand.

HIRAM: But first fulfil my present task, redeem the fratricide.

* * *

Albert Steffen: Hiram and Solomon. Translated by Virginia Brett, Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, Dornach, Switzer­ land, 1970. Distributors in U.S.A. Folder Editions, 325 East 57th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. $3.95.

Albert Steffen: The Death Experience of Manes. Translated by Daisy Aldan, Elly Havas Simons, Virginia Brett. Folder Editions, N.Y. and Verlag fuer Schoene Wissenschaften, Dornach, 1970. $3.95.

57 “Towards a Truly Public Education”

Comments on a proposal by John F. Gardner

HENRY BARNES

“By establishing independence as the life necessity of good education, we can better satisfy children, teachers, and parents; can arrive at a state policy that makes all good schools members of the first team; and can heal the long-standing split between public and non-public schools.”

With this statement, John Gardner introduces the proposal which he submitted to the New York State Commission on the Quality, Cost and Financing of Elementary and Secondary Education on February 26, 1971 under the title, “Towards a Truly Public Education.” The proposal reads:

That Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller appoint a task force of distinguished educators to study the relation­ ship between New York State and its schools, public and non-public, to the end that recommendations may be made to strengthen freedom of initiative and choice in all schools, yet to bring all kinds of schools for the first time under a single theory of the most productive relationship between government and education.

In support of this proposal, Gardner points out that we have no fundamental concept of the true relationship between education and the state and, because of this, neither flourishes. Education does not find its own creative sources and the state is burdened with a responsibility for which it is not equipped.

58 Frustration and discouragement is the consequence on both sides and the children, to say nothing of the long-suffering taxpayer, are the losers. Let us, John Gardner proposes, boldly take the dilemma by the horns. If education is properly the responsibility of government then let us accept this responsibility fully and make it work. If, on the other hand, “we feel that initiative and choice are essential to a spirited, productive and disciplined form of education, we should give much stronger support to independent schools than any now contemplated — and without strings being attached that work to destroy independence while pretending to underwrite it.” Having stated the challenge, he then outlines the arguments from both points of view, leaving the reader to come to his own conclusions. If the reader has been awakened by the confrontation and is prepared to tackle the question on its own merits, he can not fail but be impressed by the cogency of the ten reasons which the author presents in support of the need for independence. But whatever the outcome, we can no longer afford to live in a dream. The issue is too immediate and too real and must be faced. “Drastic present dangers and great future possibilities require it. ... By permitting two basically incompatible ideas to reign at the same time, we have prevented ourselves from being able to visualize the full consequences, or draw the full benefits, of either.” Mr. Gardner directs his proposal to the Governor of New York State, and wishes that, by acting on it, New York State might become an example to the nation as a whole, initiating a discussion which would go to the core of the question of the relation between education and government. Wherever this is achieved, be it only in conversation between two concerned individuals, something has also been achieved on behalf of that larger question of which the relation between education and the state is but one aspect, albeit a most important and most urgent one. This is the question of the independence of all cultural and spiritual life, in the arts, in

59 science, in religion, or in education. This is the realm from which ideas, inspirations, creative productions spring and where innovation and renewal in every sphere begins. Here it is the individual’s initiative, his gifts and perceptions, his responsibility, and the interest and understanding with which his contempo­ raries respond which count. Freedom is the key which unlocks spiritual productivity. It is the excellence of the conception, the speaking power of the artistic achievement, the depth of religious experience by which in this realm things should stand or fall, “The life of the spirit,” Rudolf Steiner wrote, “can only have its full weight within the social order, when it is represented there by men who have their footing in a domain that is self-ordered and self-developed. Art, science, general philosophy, and all that is connected with these, have need of such an independent place within human society.”* And only when spiritual life has been set free from control by the economic and the political spheres will these spheres in turn, discover their true role and function. Justice and the safeguarding of those rights which are inherently human and in the enjoyment of which we are all equal will come to be recognized as the lifespring of political action and the economy will find itself set free to bend its energies to the production, distribution and consumption of goods which are its inherent function. It is against the background of a conception of the social order in which the spiritual, economic and political are disentangled and are recognized in their intrinsic functions, autonomous yet interweaving, that John Gardner’s proposal is seen in its full significance. For there is no single step which might be taken in public life today which would do more toward the achievement of social health than the radical re-appraisal of the relations between education and the state. If a breakthrough could be made at this point, we would experience a release of tensions, a new vigor of creative life, a

*Rudolf Steiner, The Threefold Social Order, Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1966.

60 strengthening of social justice and an upswing in economic productivity and genuine social wealth which now taunt our best hopes as chimeras. His little five-page pamphlet which can be had by writing care of the Waldorf School, Garden City, N.Y. 11530, is a small, but significant and practical fruit of a lifelong engagement with Rudolf Steiner’s descriptions of the realities which are at work today below the chaos and confusion which mask the true nature of social life.

Coming to Terms with Rudolf Steiner

Laurence Clark, Interim Paper 6, Veracity Ventures, 6 Temple Gardens, Rickmansworth, Herts., England. 1971. $1.20

“Chiefly owing to its reliance on original methods of occult research, the life-work of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) is still ignored by universities and commonly written off as eccentric. This Paper, which was first published, without the final section and the notes, in Twentieth Century Magazine (vo. CLXXVIII, no. 1045), takes the opposite view: that Steiner’s work potentially is, and should become, of central importance to our culture.”

The 22-page pamphlet by Laurence Clark is introduced to its reader in this way and, on the back cover, the publishers have the following remarks to make about The Interim Papers, of which this is No. 6:

61 “I.P.’s are produced at irregular intervals. They have been used to call attention to aspects of public affairs which are either ignored or inadequately stressed elsewhere. This Paper attempts to put into perspective the life-work of Rudolf Steiner because it is not reaching many of those who could benefit from it.”

Among the five preceding Papers one finds such titles as: On Political and Economic Democracy, Instead of a National Purpose, and Is it lawful to pay Mr. Jenkins' Taxes? Prices of the leaflets are always given both in pounds and in dollars. The pamphlet is written for those who have either never heard of Steiner or have heard of him in an unflattering context. It is written by someone who has an overview of his life and work similar to that presented by A. P. Shepherd in far greater detail in his Scientist o f the Invisible. It seeks to disarm the embarrassment which is frequently experienced by one who comes into contact with Anthroposophy for the first time by forestalling what he may think or say to himself: “ ‘Bull-frog of a coterie’ — ‘Astral bunny club’ — with some such Kafkaesque quip to himself, the newcomer may shy away from the establishment. Or he may sample a book on a subject of special interest to himself and find it (without the basic training) incomprehensible.” The author also asserts his independence by expressing critical judgments and pointing out apparent contradictions. In speaking of Knowledge o f the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, for example, he writes: “The best-seller of Steiner’s books, its prose is poor, while always interesting for the information it conveys.” (p. 6) And, in writing about the lectures: “Some arouse expectations they do not fulfil, others — making the same points to different audiences — are repetitive. Steiner had his vintage and non-vintage years.” (p. 14) Yet he goes on to say that Prospero, in telling Miranda of “volumes that/I prize above my dukedom” might well consider Rudolf Steiner’s works as “the only books produced in our time which would have qualified” for a place on his bookshelves!

62 But apart from such “asides” which Mr. Clark may himself come to look back upon more as youthful needling rather than objective questioning there is an undertone of earnestness and recognition of the need that the voice of spiritual science be heard in today’s culture. This comes to expression, for instance, in the final paragraph (p. 21) where he mentions a recent lecture by A. C. Harwood on Anthroposophy given to an audience of a couple of hundred persons and goes on to say: “Two hundred people — out of a world population of three thousand million: but if Steiner is right, as I think he is, in declaring that familiarity with these concepts is necessary to adults if they are to retain balance in face of the mechanization and half­ knowledge of our age, such familiarity must tend, through channels direct and indirect, to become general.” The leaflet deals within its brief compass with the four basic books, Rudolf Steiner’s life, the lecture cycles, his work in the arts, the practical activities deriving from his work and the situation of Anthroposophy in the world today, which he subtitles, “Less than a Success Story”.

Questioning and open-minded criticism can, in the long run, only strengthen the recognition of Rudolf Steiner’s work. Catering to superficial objections by descending to their level weakens respect for the very work to which one wishes to draw attention. Before giving, or recommending Laurence Clark’s booklet to others the reader should decide for himself how he feels the author has succeeded in this regard.

Editor

63 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE

JOHN F. GARDNER - Faculty Chairman of the Waldorf School and Director of the Waldorf Institute for Liberal Education of Adelphi University. ■■ FLOYD McKNIGHT — Poet, editor The Glen Ridge Paper, Glen Ridge, N.J. Author: Building, X Equals .... ■■ SONIA TOMARA CLARK — Former foreign and war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Born and brought up in Russia. ■■ AMOS FRAN- CESCHELLI — Mathematician, Teacher in the Rudolf Steiner School, New York. ■■ HERBERT WITZENMANN - Philos­ opher, lecturer, author. Leader of the Section for the Spiritual Striving of Youth, Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. ■■ DANILLA RETTIG — Eurythmist, teacher in the Rudolf Steiner School, New York. ■■ M. C. (Mary Caroline) RICHARDS — Poet, potter, free lance teacher and lecturer. Author of Center­ ing: in Pottery, and the Person. Translator: The Theater and its Double by Antonin Artaud. ■■ WILHELM PELIKAN - Botanist and pharmacognocist, author, Goetheanum, Dornach, Switzerland. ■■ CLAIRE BLATCHFORD — Poet, teacher. Centering, A Collection of Poems, 1971. ■■ CHRISTY BARNES — Poet, teacher. Wind in the Grass, Harpers, 1931. ■■ ALBERT STEFFEN — Swiss poet, dramatist, essayist. President of the Anthroposophical Society from 1926 until his death in 1963. Editor Das Goetheanum 1921-1963. ■■ HENRY BARNES — Chairman of the Faculty Rudolf Steiner School, New York. Editor, Journal for Anthroposophy.

64 The Journal for Anthroposophy is published twice a year by the Anthroposophical Society in America. Editor, Henry Barnes. Subscriptions $2.00 per year. Back numbers including contribu­ tions by Albert Steffen, Bruno Walter, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, Russell Davenport, Christoph Linder, Olin Wannamaker, Rex Raab, Arvia MacKaye Ege, Ernst Katz and many others may be obtained upon request from Journal for Anthroposophy, 211 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016. Title design by Walther Roggenkamp.