The Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter

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Fall 2007 Volume #43

HeadinContents 2 What’s Happening in the Library Founding Editor: Fred Paddock By Judith Soleil Editor: Mado Spiegler Copyeditor: Judith Soleil 3 A Word from the Editor Production: Judith Kiely By Mado Spiegler Reviews The library newsletter is a publi- cation of the Rudolf Steiner Li- 4 Anthroposophy and Imagination: brary, the national library of the Classics from the Journal for Anthroposophy Anthroposophical Society in g Selected and edited by Kate Farrell. America. It is designed to keep Review by Frederick J. Dennehy library users informed of the contents of the library, as well as 7 Dostoevsky: The Scandal of Reason protocols for using it. It also fea- By Maria Nemcová Banerjee. tures translations of articles from Review by John Harris Beck European anthroposophical journals that explore anthroposophy’s 11 Goethe’s Science of Living Form: relationship to the world, thus The Artistic Stages encouraging dialogue and the mutual exchange of ideas. By Nigel Hoffman. Review by Mado Spiegler Subscriptions are $16 for three 12 Rudolf Steiner: issues. An Introduction to His Life and Work Subscribe through: By P lace youGary r m essag e h ere. Fo r m axim um i mpact , use two or t hre e se ntenc es. Lachman. Anthroposophical Society in Review by Christopher Bamford America 1923 Geddes Avenue 14 Brave New Mind: A Thoughtful Inquiry Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1797 into the Nature of Mental Life By Peter C. Dodwell. Letters to the editor are welcome. Review by Mado Spiegler

Rudolf Steiner Library Feature Article 65 Fern Hill Road Ghent, NY 12075 16 Idols and Confession [email protected] A Review by Rudolf Steiner. Translation by Mado Spiegler 21 Annotations

What’s Happening in the Library By Judith Soleil

• As the sun shines and the summer greens deepen, we work in the cool of the library’s natural air conditioning (our headquarters is in the basement of a grand old carriage house). Our workplace is blessedly dry, as the drainage installed here this fall to abate flooding in the foyer WORKS! We’ve been sprucing up and improving the building and grounds―painting our funky old outdoor book deposit box; replacing our sad old sign with a handsome new one; pruning foundation plantings. Judith Kiely and volunteer Louise Sierau continue to repair damaged books. The care taken within and without reflects back upon and enriches our work. • With your generous support, we met the library’s appeal goal this fiscal year, making it possible to maintain our high level of service as well as our building and its precious contents. Thank you! • Our first attempt at grant writing last fall (with the invaluable help of Ann Kucera in Ann Ar- bor) was successful: we’ve just learned that the library was selected to receive a grant from New York State for a conservation and preservation assessment! This evaluation will let us know what’s needed to protect the collection in terms of air quality, storage methods, etc. • We have spent much time this spring evaluating library automation products, having given lots of thought as to whether this is a good next (big) step for the library. As we’ve looked at the potential these systems have to help us work more effectively, our affection for the “old ways”―three (3!) hand-signed cards for every book we check out―has gradually given way to glad anticipation of all the indexing, cataloging, and other neglected tasks we could begin to tackle were we to automate circulation. Our patrons would also have greater access to the library’s holdings, and we would have the possibility to post newsletter and other content online. This change would benefit all our patrons, not just those with Internet access, as we would have more time to respond to individual requests. We will be recommending a system to the council of the Anthroposophical Society this fall, and may need to do additional fund- raising to support this undertaking—we’ll keep you posted! • We seek donations of the following: Soil Fertility, by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer; Kunstgeschichte als Abbild innerer geistiger Impulse (GA 292, Bildband); and The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness by Rudolf Steiner. • Many patrons wonder how we’re able to answer so many of their questions. We can’t claim unusually keen intellects or memories (at least I can’t!), but there are resources that aid tre- mendously in our research. The first is the website provided by the Rudolf Steiner Nachlass- verwaltung (http://rsv.arpa.ch/cgi-bin/newuser.cgi), where one can search the full texts of the Gesamtausgabe (Steiner’s collected works) using keywords. The service is only available in German, and while you must register to use the site, registration is free. Joan Almon recently let us know of another great resource: a search for keywords, keyword combinations, titles, and/or authors of non-Steiner anthroposophical works (over 14,000) created by the Anthropo- sophical Society’s library in Stuttgart (www.rudolf-steiner-bibliothek.de). Again, the site is in German, although they do have some books in English, which are also searchable by (English) keyword. For those who don’t read German, don’t despair; one can get surprisingly far with a dictionary! • Look for our annual appeal letter this fall, and please keep in mind the benefits to all when your generosity makes it possible not simply to sustain the library, but to improve it. • We’re very much looking forward to the AGM in October, and hope to meet many of you there.

2 A Word from the Editor By Mado Spiegler

I would like to place this introduction to the newsletter under the sign of Nigel Hoff- mann’s intriguing invitation—in his book, Goethe’s Science of Living Form—to learn to perceive the world in the radically different spirit of each of the four elements. In perhaps less radical ways, the other books reviewed in this issue also present us with this challenge. Christopher Bamford’s favorable review of Gary Lachman’s Rudolf Steiner, an Intro- duction to His Life and Work, while noting the author’s selective focus, ends with an invitation to anthroposophists not to reject the book on that account, but rather to take seriously the gifts of the author’s particular perspective. One key aspect of the years covered by Lachman’s biography is Rudolf Steiner’s friendship with Rosa Mayreder. Steiner’s indefatigable championing of Mayreder’s fiction with publishers and fellow editors reflected their bond as “comrades in arms” in the quest for freedom. As he wrote to her on January 4, 1891: “I have watched my sympathy toward your entire being grow to the same extent that I recognized the thirst for self-affirmation, for the unrestricted unfolding of the human totality. The striving toward a full humanity that doesn’t know class or sex, that refuses to recognize anything that makes us half—or a quarter or an eighth—human, this drive has been for me something so uplifting that I can’t begin to calculate the sum of the joys it has meant for me.” In this issue we bring you an article Steiner wrote in 1899 that reflects on Mayreder’s sharp insight into some of the ways men and women block their own way to love and spiritual freedom. Peter Dodwell’s Brave New Mind, written by an experimental psychologist with a Waldorf background, takes the reader on a tour of experimental psychology in the various incarnations it has taken over the past one hundred and fifty years. This might pose a stretch for many of us who are used to thinking of this field as either uninteresting or sinis- ter; but he allows us to see how the fine grain of the human mind’s reality perpetually slips through the coarse nets in which one attempts to catch it; or alternately how something of its immense reaches forever transcends the boundaries of the unified systems we devise to contain it. John Beck reviews Maria Nemcová Banerjee’s Dostoevsky: The Scandal of Reason, a short and richly provocative book on one of the visionary novelists of modern humanity. We have of course the usual complement of short annotations. Many of the recent ac- quisitions come from the domains of education and of food—what better way to cultivate the many qualities of the world than through the exploration of their tastes, as Indian philosophy or Jakob Boehme well knew. Readers might also note Christoph-Andreas Linden- berg’s Twelve Aspects of Michael, Contrasted by Their Counter-Images, and Willi Finken- rath’s beautiful book on the Last Supper by Leonardo: Das Zeugnis des Wortes—Das Abendmahl des Lionardo da Vinci with a commentary in the light of the zodiac. I hope Fred Dennehy won’t mind my borrowing the final sentence of his review of An- throposophy and Imagination—a selection of past articles from the Journal for Anthropo- sophy—to summarize my invitation to all of us: to engage “works of imagination of all kinds―poetic, esoteric, and more…so that, [quoting Kate Farrell] ‘the vast democracy of light Steiner envisioned passes naturally through…roomfuls of mutually opening doors.’”

3 Anthroposophy and Imagination: Classics from the Journal for Anthroposophy Selected and introduced by Kate Farrell Series editor: Robert McDermott No. 76 (Series volume 2), Summer 2006, 127 pgs. Review by Frederick J. Dennehy

Very few people are “against” imagination. But there are some readers for whom any fiction, metaphor, invention, semblance, or wide-ranging connotation of any sort is a species of error, a deviation from a truth that is fixed by a set form of perception or held tight inside a text flattened and pinched into one di- mension. Even the great majority of readers who are “for” imagination differ in their assessment of its meaning and value. Answers given to the question (as posed by Owen Barfield) “in what way is imagination true?” will be very different. At one end of the spectrum of opinion, imagination is the stuff you make up―at its best, it represents the world the way you’d like to see it. It’s a vaca- tion for the mind―refreshing, reinvigorating, and good for you when you get back to the “real world.” Farther along the spectrum, imagination has the status of an “emotive” or “subjective” truth, walled off permanently from “referential” truth―the truth that has to do with phenomena, nature and the world, and the “truth” nearly everyone has in mind when they hear the word. Still farther along, there is a sense that there is something objectively true in imaginative vision, something more than personal fancy in what is “long ago and far away.” But that sort of “truth” is insular and self-contained, a heterocosm―a world that is very different from the everyday places where we do our work, raise our children, have our coffee, and hedge our bets. We can visit, but getting there becomes trickier as we get older and it’s never quite the same. We could take up permanent residence, and some do, but for them the questions from the border guards become disturbingly probing, often hostile. They may not be allowed back into the everyday world. But at the other end of the spectrum, imagination is a passport between two worlds, between matter and spirit, or in the more evocative phrase from the introduction to this volume, between “the stone and the star.” There is no wall between them. One world is an image or an expression of the other. Imagination is not only true, but also real, since it involves a crossing (in Owen Barfield’s words) of the “stark threshold between knowing and being.” And for those who frequent it, imagination may turn out to be only the first step along a way that finally arrives at “doing the truth.” The writers represented in this second special edition of Classics from the Journal for Anthroposophy approach imagination from a rich array of perspec-

4 tives. But each of them understands that imagination can be true, and that its provenance includes ontology as well as epistemology. And what a group Kate Farrell has assembled here! In their intellectual rigor, their style, grace, and the joy they take in finding what is new, they can stand with anyone who has written anywhere in the wide fields of imagination in the twentieth century. Anthropo- sophists should be proud that the light Rudolf Steiner kindled a century ago continues to shine clearly into the darkness today on the truth of the imagination. “Science and Poetry: Goethe’s Synthesis,” by Arthur Zajonc, illuminates imagination in the arena of science, seeing the Image in the arts and the Idea in science as the same phenomenon, and describing the Goethean scientific method as the mind “becoming where and what it sees.” Gertrude Reif Hughes connects Ralph Waldo Emerson to Rudolf Steiner by showing that both thinkers understood human beings to be sources of knowledge rather than mere observers of what is “out there,” and understood, too, the exquisite mystery that our uniqueness is our commonality. Christopher Bamford’s characteristic all-encompassing scholarship tautly holds the energy he brings to his subject and the delight he feels in it. Here he shows how the tragic epiphany of Novalis prepared him to be the prophet for the Christianity of the future. Andrew Welburn, in “Yeats, the Rosicrucians and Rudolf Steiner,” draws connections between the man who may be the twentieth century’s greatest Eng- lish-language poet and the contemporary Rosicrucianism of Rudolf Steiner, through the intermediary of Yeats’s anthroposophist wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees. Jacques Lusseyran, the blind French Resistance leader who discovered a personal form of imagination in passing beyond the “despotism of the eye,” tells of the profound influence of his visit to the Goetheanum at the age of thirteen. An interview with the great filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, given before the completion of his last film, The Sacrifice, reveals his understanding, based on his acquaintance with Rudolf Steiner’s work, of the spiritual necessity for re- nunciation. That flawed masterpiece, filmed in Sweden, starred two of Ingmar Bergman’s ensemble actors, Erland Josephson and Alan Edwall, and was photo- graphed by Bergman’s favorite cinematographer, Sven Nyquist. Tarkovsky begins the film with a description (unattributed) of the “will exercise” from Rudolf Steiner’s six subsidiary exercises and concludes with the first words of the pro- logue of the Gospel of John. It is endlessly surprising to find the range of Steiner’s imaginative legacy. Georg Kühlewind, in his essay “Love and Fear,” brings a meditative focus to the New Testament, and particularly the Gospel of John. He examines the su- perconscious gift of love against the subconscious reaction of fear, through the evangelist’s realization of the three “heavens” of Alétheia, Cháris, and Arché (related intimately to Spirit Self, Life Spirit, and Spirit Man).

5 Michael Lipson, in “Psychoanalysis and Anthroposophy,” undertakes a comparison of two contemporaries―Sigmund Freud and Rudolf Steiner, scruti- nizing their affinities and their differences. The counterpoint in this essay comes in the related comparison between psychoanalysts and anthroposophists, worked out brilliantly as a fresh and unexpected cautionary theme. Finally, there is the remarkable “Philology and the Incarnation,” in which Owen Barfield traces his own path from agnosticism to belief, and demonstrates, through etymology and other philological methods, that if there were no historical account of the Incarnation available to us, we would almost be obliged to in- tuit it. Interspersed with the main articles, there are superb short reviews of Emer- son’s Demanding Optimism, by Gertrude Reif Hughes; Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams and Tolkien, by R.J. Reilly; Unancestral Voice, by Owen Barfield; and Humboldt’s Gift, by Saul Bellow. There are some who have criticized the recent issues of the Journal for An- throposophy because they have turned to the classics and “neglected” what is new. But here we have something not only new, but wonderful: Kate Farrell’s introduction, “Faithful to Mystery: The Road to Imagination.” “Faithful to Mystery” is the intimate account of her own path to an understanding of imagination, beginning with her plans and dreams at age ten of running away into the woods with her sister. She shares her first experiences of the magic of poetry, her troubled preservation of that magic in the face of personal tragedy and sieges from academia at every level, and her gradual discovery of Owen Barfield and then Rudolf Steiner. She brings to life how she learned to read “more-than- rational” writers in the right way, to avoid the trap of using “merely rational” thinking that can “turn gold to straw.” And it is the magic of Ms. Farrell’s own writing that enables us to see that works of imagination of all kinds―poetic, esoteric, and more―interpenetrate each other, so that “the vast democracy of light Steiner envisioned passes naturally through…roomfuls of mutually opening doors.” It is a personal pleasure for me to report that Kate Farrell’s introduction, in a slightly modified form, has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2007, edited by Philip Zaleski. The light continues to shine. And like the seed of wheat that dies in John 12:24, “Faithful to Mystery” may soon bear even more fruit, growing from an essay into a book. The coming-of-age of a thinker or a writer or an “imaginer” is not a new genre, although it seems underused in anthroposophy. More of these accounts, even with only a touch of the honesty, controlled feeling, and star shower of new understandings you will find in “Faithful to Mystery,” would be a great gift to anthroposophy.

6 Dostoevsky: The Scandal of Reason By Maria Nemcová Banerjee Lindisfarne Books, 2006, 176 pgs. Review by John Harris Beck

Dostoevsky: The Scandal of Reason is a penetrating exploration of two key aspects of the thought world of the great Russian novelist and thinker. Readers having some acquaintance with or prospective interest in his novels, and with European literature, history, and ideas, especially of the nineteenth century, will particularly appreciate this book, but anyone who has worked with history and ideas would find this short volume rewarding. The author specifies that she writes with her former students in mind, and it is a most stimulating book for an old Dostoevskian. Profiled in the Smith College Sophian, Professor Banerjee observed that “every language is a foreign language” for her. Her childhood in Czechoslova- kia saw Hitler’s occupation, the brief democratic restoration, and the Commu- nist takeover. Her family fled to France and then Canada, where she spent her teens. Entering graduate school directly at age nineteen, she earned a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literature from Harvard. She taught at Brown before set- tling with her husband, poet Ron Banerjee, in Northampton, Mass., where she teaches comparative literature and chairs the Russian department at Smith Col- lege. Banerjee recently wrote the introduction to a new edition of The Meaning of History by Nikolai Berdyaev; her earlier book, Terminal Paradox: The Nov- els of Milan Kundera, is highly regarded. Literature “expands your moral imagination—especially with suffering heroines,” she told the Sophian, and the shifting perspectives and insights of new generations of students rekindle a teacher’s enthusiasm. This new study of Dostoevsky is both morally acute and attuned to generational shifts of attitudes. The Scandal of Reason has relevance beyond the academy. Europe’s disastrous collapse of 1914–45 left its two extremities, Russia and the U.S., facing each other in fear and ideological hostility. As the Red Army cast its shadow across Western Europe, “the bomb” hovered over the whole world. It was perhaps too much to hope that Americans would try to understand Russia at that moment. Indeed, it is plausible that some more farsighted Americans were aware of the use of Russia for “socialistic experimentation” as Rudolf Steiner had pointed out, based on a stunning map published in a London magazine in 1890. In the land of old Leo Tolstoy, where the peasant commune and Eastern Orthodoxy indicated a deep communitarian undercurrent, socialism would be unleashed in extreme ideological abstraction, and in due course would discredit itself and vindicate capitalist individualism. For Steiner this also reveals an op-

7 position to the role the eastern Slavs would be able to play many centuries in the future, when individuals have been strengthened enough to receive a new and truly social impulse. Dostoevsky and Steiner have much in common. In reviewing “the social question” as presented in Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky explicated the French Revolution’s slogan of liberty, equality, and brotherhood from a Russian, Christian point of view, in a way that is completely congruent with Steiner’s exposition of the threefold social organism forty years later. Elsewhere Dosto- evsky concluded that the separation of the intellectual from the peasant—a dramatic fact in a country that traveled in one century from medievalism to modernism—could not simply be reversed. The intellectual’s egotistic isola- tion would have to be carried further until it could surpass itself. And the great novelist was a close friend of the philosopher Soloviev, in whom Steiner found prescient descriptions of the Antichrist. Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky lived in a vast contiguous empire that had been expanding in all directions for many generations after the terrible centuries of subjugation by the Mongol and Tatar powers. “Scratch a Russian, find a Tatar” is an old slur, and the specter of Russia as a peril is being ramped up again in 2007. Geography alone makes Russia intimidating: it crowns the “global chessboard” of which British, and more recently American, strategists have written. To dominate Eurasia you must suppress Russia. If we look at the revolutionary and evolutionary flows of ideas, we come to something quite different from this Asiatic peril. Russia in 1800 was an immense nation of serfs, topped with a thin crust of merchants, nobility, and the first intelligents. In Napoleon’s celebrated march from Paris to Moscow and his disastrous return we forget the Russian army that followed him home, almost two hundred years ago. French was already a language of the Russian elite, and in Paris Russian officers met post-medieval ideas in action, in life, for the first time. In 1825 these French-inspired officers demanded a constitution from the Russian autocrat. At the same historical moment Russia had been given her first and deci- sive genius of words, Aleksandr Sergeievich Pushkin. A Mozartean and By- ronic dandy, one-quarter Ethiopian by birth, who liberated his people’s language as dramatically as Shakespeare did English, Pushkin died young in a duel. It was Dostoevsky at the end of his own career who brought home to Russians the full measure of Pushkin’s greatness. The officers’ rebellion was put down, and Pushkin’s sympathy with them was noted. The dandy expressed his fierce inner spirit in a poem “The Prophet,” after Isaiah, which he took to his interview with the Tsar. It ends with the divine injunction, “Rise up now, prophet! See this all, and understand!

8 Be filled with My Will, and so bear across the land and sea words to light again the fire in every human heart!” Almost a quarter century later Dostoevsky’s rebellion and punishment went much further, but they also led the novelist into a deep spiritual penetra- tion. With both Pushkin and Dostoevsky, it is clear that some great ancient fire, already passé in Paris or London, could burn in a Russian soul alongside the most sophisticated art and thought. Such personal drama is the stuff of art, and Professor Banerjee teaches a course in “the philosophical novel,” a form that is a conjunction of art and mind. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are two of the master artists who engaged ideas and their guiding and motive power in human individuals. Steiner’s Riddles of Philosophy is a complementary gesture from the side of philosophy, using a 2500-year survey of philosophers to reveal the evolutionary journey of the human soul. Banerjee divides her book in two large parts. The first, “A Mouse in the Crystal Palace,” describes Dostoevsky’s relationship to the ideas of Western Europe and the Russian westernizers. This outer challenge of ideas worked on Dostoevsky and his generation quite fiercely. It alienated some from Russia, a path he describes later in The Demons, which points toward the Bolshevik ter- ror. His own near-execution and years in Siberia formed a different path for Dostoevsky, and they are the passageway to the second part of Banerjee’s book, “The Russian Oedipus,” which explores the inner shattering of the iso- lated rationalistic mind faced with humanity’s moral dilemmas. Here is an ex- ample of Banerjee’s examination of the mind of Dostoevsky’s hero/antihero in Notes from Underground: A paradoxalist is, by definition, someone who pits his insights against accepted opinions (para-doxa). The underground man, whom his editor calls “this paradoxalist,” is well practiced at that. But the art of paradoxy also encompasses a higher form of dialec- tic, predicated on the coincidence of opposites. The logic of coin- cidentia oppositorum, which describes a circle of meaning beyond the linear chain of rational causality, generates significance out of contraries. This paradoxical logic is implied in the underground man’s notion that there is good in human evil and suffering, because they connote the possibility of moral choice. In spite of this insight, the underground man is not a mystic but a subversive po- lemicist. Stuck on negation, his mind will not travel full circle. (p. 45) Such a mental-spiritual state becomes familiar in Western Europe only in the twentieth century.

9 Dostoevsky’s human insight and social critique are still at arm’s length in this stage. Banerjee’s second part takes us into his fullest accomplishment, in the terrible intimacy of the Karamazov family. There the middle brother Ivan “makes a scandal” (an archetypal gesture in Russia) with his rejection of God and Christ in the “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” His spiritually awakening brother Alyosha, who is not touched by Ivan’s rationalism, responds with an enduring love, but the admiring half-brother Smerdyakov acts out the intellectual’s flawed logic, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Again Baner- jee exposes the soul of Dostoevsky’s character in a few words: The pathos of Ivan’s rationalism lies in his need to convert “his own ache” into an objective proposition about human nature. He seeks refuge in abstraction from the ugly disorder of a life marked by parental abandonment and a humiliating dependency on distant relatives. In his displacement from a legitimate identity, a condition he shares with Sophocles’ Oedipus, Ivan learned early that his intellect could serve as a protective shield. In his adolescence, he hones the sharp edge of analytical reasoning as a tool in his contest with the powers that had dispossessed him. (p. 85) Dostoevsky lived with and exalted these inner lives with their terrible struggles with ideas. What can that mean to us? To bring it very close we might ask, how far is a contemporary jihadist from the underground man? Do we attempt to understand his or her dispossession? Must the struggle of a soul to experience its own validity turn a human being into a weapon of asymmetri- cal warfare before we can reckon it significant? And is America’s guiding foreign policy doctrine of the “clash of civilizations” so far from the logic of the grand inquisitor, who told Christ that he overestimated human beings and that he should leave and never return? That we’d rather be doing something than thinking about it is perhaps a factor in the dreadful karma of untruthfulness, the karma of Anglo-American world empire, which Steiner pointed out in 1916. To pause to “entertain” ideas, offer them a cup of tea, ask where they come from, what great minds they have lived in—that we may be unlikely to do until we can see the development of the human soul as a concrete and practical project. So we gain our wisdom by hard experience. Insight into great art is a powerful ally in cultivating that wisdom. To vivid and significant moments of art, history, ideas, and biography— all living parts of the social organism and of the individual journey—this small book by Maria Banerjee is a guide of very fine quality.

Goethe’s Science of Living Form: The Artistic Stages By Nigel Hoffmann Adonis Press, 2007, 173 pgs. Review by Mado Spiegler

This thoughtfully elegant, economical, and lovingly produced book breaks exciting new ground in what has become the somewhat familiar field of Goethean science. It is a thoroughly personal and creative digestion of Goethean science, putting into application Goethe’s own stated aims: to create a true life science “spring[ing] from all the human being’s united powers,” to mobilize the “productive power of the imagination, combined with all possible reality.” To say that Hoffmann looks at nature with fresh eyes and that he follows Goethe’s advice to “become as living and flexible as nature herself” would be a drastic understatement. Not content with general admonitions about changing one’s consciousness, or with approximations of what Goethe might have done, he undertakes a disciplined search of Goethe’s own methodological writing, as well as of other sources of phenomenological thinking: eventually he develops a method for a systematic practice of landscape study. He finds a pregnant concept in the idea of the four elements—earth, water, air, fire—taking seriously the conviction that the elements are not just substances, but ways of being and knowing, four distinctly different modes of cognition. “Like knows like,” and thus, “We see Earth by means of Earth, Water by means of Water, divine Air by means of Air and destructive Fire by means of Fire” (Empedocles). Hoffmann’s concern is not to “prove” or disprove this “pre- scientific” statement, nor to try and fit it into the framework of modern scientific thinking. It is, rather, to take seriously the different gestures available to the knower, to use in disciplined fashion the primary qualitative relationships between the knower and the object of the knowing. The mode of knowing we know as the intellectual or mechanical mind is what the ancients meant by Earth. The mode of cognition we mean when we speak of intuition, represented in the poetical, is what they called Fire. Between Earth and Fire are Water, connected with the sculptural qualities of imagination, and Air, which is related to inspiration and the musical qualities. It would be one thing for us to read about this, and in fact the final section of the first chapter (“A Goethean Methodology through the Elemental Modes”) may well prove more than satisfactory for some readers, giving us a clear, wide- ranging yet succinct introduction to his approach. Like the rest of the book this section displays discreetly, but all the more convincingly, an intimate knowledge of literary and philosophical sources. But it is another thing altogether to practice this method, and Hoffmann takes us on a very well-guided tour through the Yabby Ponds, a small Australian landscape. For “to properly understand what is meant by the Elemental modes of cognition one must literally do them. Together

they represent a pathway, a methodology for organic thinking, and to treat them theoretically…is to miss their relevance to modern scientific and artistic praxis.” The doing was a challenge, as one is always exposed to the risk of forcing the mind into a straitjacket. It is easy to see how in the wrong hands, this tool could produce four “elemental” straitjackets, no better than the mechanical straitjacket it is supposed to eliminate. In this case, the author successfully shifts from one mode to another, identifying with geological features, plants and animals, and atmospheric elements. Importantly, he also observes himself observing, re- cording some particularly striking cases of identification with the element being evoked. Both in the field, and under his pen when he recounts and processes his observations, the results are remarkable, provocative, magical at times, and ut- terly convincing.

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Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work By Gary Lachman Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007, 304 pgs. Review by Christopher Bamford

The importance of Steiner’s fundamental insight: that the human I is an irre- ducible reality; that it is free; that consciousness, spirit, is at the core of existence itself; and that we, for so long alienated from the world around us, are really the solution to its riddle, is impossible to overestimate. If it were ever to take the central position it should occupy in our ideas about ourselves and the cosmos, it would quite literally inaugurate the start of a new age. But when, or if, this might happen is still anyone’s guess… Although anthroposophists might (and probably will) take exception to some aspects of the author’s approach, I think that overall Rudolf Steiner would have approved of Lachman’s work and been pleased to see so honest, independ- ent, unbiased, and well-written an introduction to his work enter the public arena. Gary Lachman is not, of course, strictly speaking the first to have produced such. Rom Landau’s God Is My Adventure, which included a significant section on Steiner, appeared in 1935. Fifty years later, Colin Wilson published Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision (1985). Both of these certainly had some circulation and were sympathetic, but the audience for each book was somewhat limited by their authors’ approach and reputation. The times too were different. Lachman’s is the first “postmodern,” “post spiritual boom” book in which an intelligent, knowledgeable, congenial, freethinking author has sought

to present Rudolf Steiner to the general public as an important, even epoch- making, cultural figure. Lachman begins by giving us his credentials. He first became interested in Steiner in the late 1980s. Working on a degree in philosophy, he came across Steiner in a book on German Expressionist architecture and his interest was piqued. A few years later, working in a New Age bookstore, he decided to in- vestigate. At first, the style put him off: he found it dull. Nevertheless, he was bitten. Colin Wilson’s book helped him, as did Robert McDermott’s anthology, The Essential Steiner. With the help of these two, he discovered, as he puts it, “an important thinker,” which is to say that, while he did not quite know what to do with the results of some of Steiner’s research, he was convinced that Steiner’s “philosophy of mind”—his ideas about consciousness, the I, and the ability of “active thinking to overcome the opposition between the mind and the outer world”—was revolutionary. It is from this point of view that this book is written. For Lachman, The Phi- losophy of Freedom remains Steiner’s greatest single accomplishment, and he is much more at ease with the earlier Goethean and epistemological work than he is with the later spiritual research that, as he honestly admits, he does not know quite how to handle. This temperamental and, perhaps, to some extent, tactical bias—Lachman is, after all, trying to convince the general reader of Steiner’s importance—does not, however, hinder him from presenting Steiner’s life and work in a remarkably clear, readable way. Perhaps it even helps. Nevertheless, it is only fair to warn anthroposophical readers that some of what they might consider central—for instance, Steiner’s Christology and his generally Christocen- tric orientation—while mentioned, remains more or less peripheral. His narrative, at least for the first half of the book, is based on Steiner’s Autobiography, and his retelling of Steiner’s life is exceptionally warm and friendly; hence it is also moving and convincing. Attuned to Steiner’s own in- nate Gemütlichkeit, he very nicely adds a layer of his own humanity so that, as readers, we are drawn to author and subject in equal measure, which in itself is no small accomplishment. Anthroposophical readers may perhaps be surprised to discover that it takes Lachman most of the book—175 pages—to reach the foundation of the Anthroposophical Society in 1913, which means that he covers the remaining twelve years in only sixty pages. However, as he himself says, there is “good reason to argue” that at a certain point Steiner’s life as a separate individual ends and Steiner as it were disappears into the history of anthroposophy, after which his own story and the story of anthroposophy become one, and “more or less indistinguishable.” While this is true in a way, it also reveals Lachman’s primary concern—Steiner, the man and human being, and his philosophical and spiritual breakthrough—and allows him to skirt over what he feels less competent to deal with, namely, “Steiner, the seer.” Some will find this emphasis disturbing.

Nevertheless, on balance it must be said Gary Lachman has written a good introduction to Rudolf Steiner that can be given to anyone. We have long needed such a book, and must be extraordinarily grateful to Lachman for having written it. Longtime anthroposophists can also learn much from it. They will find it highly instructive to read how a philosophically sophisticated author, who is both an expert in the occult and esoteric traditions of the West and a deep thinker with profound commitment to the evolution of consciousness and the present need to “change how we think,” understands and presents Rudolf Steiner’s contribution as a significant—and magnificent—contribution to the culture of consciousness.

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Brave New Mind: A Thoughtful Inquiry into the Nature of Mental Life By Peter C. Dodwell Oxford University Press, 2000, 262 pgs. Review by Mado Spiegler

Brave New Mind, by Peter Dodwell—a respected researcher in the fields of space perception and pattern recognition, as well as an “old scholar” of Michael Hall, a Waldorf school in Great Britain—is an interpretive overview of the science of mental activity and the self, written from a cognitive scientist’s vantage point. It surveys in chronological sequence the successive directions taken by the field over the past 150 years. Along the way, the author gives precise sum- maries of the vast field of experimental psychology in its different approaches: constructivism; introspectionism; behaviorism; pragmatism; psychophysics; psychometrics; linguistics; psychophysiology and neuroscience; information theory; robotics and artificial intelligence—all of them referring to the “standard model” of the mind connected with nineteenth-century ideas of nature as a “clockwork” mechanism. According to this model, all mental activity is a func- tion of brain processes, i.e., the interactions of neurons and their supporting structure, and all observable processes in the brain will ultimately be understood in terms of chemical and physical laws. These processes in turn are the products of the natural biological world, developed under the same evolutionary pressures as the rest of the body, and fully understandable in chemical and physical terms. When brains became large and complex enough, mental activity—conscious and unconscious—emerged as a means of coping with an increasingly diverse environment. Cognitive science aims at the full understanding of the brain as a mechanism, and experimental study, by these lights, will account for “menta- tion” of any sort. Recent additions to the model include the goal of determining

what sort of machine the brain is, and what design principles underlie its com- ponents and their mutual interactions. It is assumed that any theory of mental activity must be computational, i.e., expressible either in abstract, formal terms, or as simulations on a suitable machine. The conventions of the standard model have ruled the debate for the last century or more, and shaped the image cognitive science presents to the public. Yet, Dodwell’s meticulous account makes clear that the evolution of the science and philosophy of mind has been driven in part by the repeated realization of the conventional nature of these assumptions, as each new trend in the field encoun- ters the limits of the model. Dodwell takes at face value the questions asked by each of these schools, surveys in detail their premises and methods, and docu- ments their strengths and the achievements they made possible. He also docu- ments their weaknesses, and the dead ends or insoluble paradoxes attained by each investigative path as it followed its internal logic to the bitter end. If nothing else, this meticulous book could fruitfully be read as the logbook of many partially successful expeditions in search of an ever-receding Eldorado. How- ever short they fell of their ultimate goal—finding the be-all and end-all expla- nation of consciousness and self within the paradigm of the “standard model”— these quests have accumulated what is by now a huge warehouse of research materials. These materials, Dodwell shows, lead in two directions: “on one hand the agreement that mental activity is merely the expression of particular biological exigencies, on the other, that it is just a machine-like phenomenon.” The mind, neither a thing nor a substance, is a set of functions or activities that are by common consent agreed to manifest unexplained (and unexplainable) mental attrib- utes. Consciousness is seen to reside either in the driver’s seat, controlling (or at times arbitrarily creating) reality; or else as an illusory and narcissistic accom- paniment to the real, physical-chemical work of the brain. Yet nothing accounts for the brain sustaining anything like an “inner life,”―an I, a self, a consciousness―something to hold together all the phenomena associated with the mind. These remain unresolved problems, regularly dismissed as “pseudo-problems” by experimental psychology, and just as regularly pursued with each new attempt to corner the mind into “just this…or that…facet.” Equally mysterious, logically, are the multilevel and multilayered phenomena of perception; human creativity, with its capacity to yield understanding of the world; mathematical thinking; invention and discovery, what Dodwell, quoting Rudolf Steiner, calls “the drama of knowledge” as opposed to “the grammar of knowledge.” Cogni- tive science has nothing to say about those “unusual states of awareness... of [the] artist, poet, musician, philosopher, or mathematician.” And thus we come to the second layer of Brave New Mind, in which Dod- well describes at length various attempts to extend our concepts of mind in ways that apply natural science’s own critique of the mechanistic model (e.g., Heisen-

berg, Hawking, and Penrose) and incorporate them into the framework of cognitive science, to liberate it from the confines of this straitjacket. The trouble with cognitive science is that it “has developed far too restricted an image of humankind, a truly pusillanimous concept of mind.” A broader vision is required, which Dodwell sees in the works of Potter, Penrose, Polanyi, and some others. He himself lyrically evokes a possible future for cognitive science in the image of the “sacred river” from Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” that shapes the last chapter of the book. Other reviewers have regretted, rightly so, that this latter part of the book remains quite general. But anyone with an interest in the history of theories of the mind will find this book a valuable resource, most notably due to its having been written by a concerned cognitive scientist who, while fully aware of the achievements of his field, also views these critically. Anyone wishing to transcend the temptation of blanket dismissal of all cognitive science as materialistic and mechanistic will find in Dodwell a cautious and reliable guide through a many-stranded reality.

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Idols and Confession A Review by Rudolf Steiner in Magazin für Literatur, 1899. Nr. 69, 23-24. Reproduced in GA 32, p. 248-255. Translation by Mado Spiegler

One of the most interesting phenomena in the intellectual development of the last century has unquestionably been the revolution of our valuation of “Ideals.” Unconditional veneration has given way to doubt. Nowadays we perceive this veneration as prejudice, and we ask ourselves what it is in our human constitution that prompts us to turn our feeling toward an area that has no match in reality. Even the highest ideal representation, the idea of God, has become questionable. In her novel, Im Kampf zum Gott, which touches most deeply upon the culture of our time, Lou Andreas-Salome said: “The highest form of human creativity is that which allows people to transcend themselves by looking upward.” Education in the past centuries worked very hard at making it impossible for human consciousness to discover that the world of ideals is a human crea- tion. Alongside—and above—the reality of nature, ideals were supposed to lead an intangible existence; intellectual battles were presented as the human striving to match the ideal and the real. If there turned out to be a conflict between the two realms, ideals were considered to be right at any cost, and one

demanded that reality fit itself more to the ideal. Schiller’s highest joy resided in the flight from ordinary reality into the pure majestic world of ideals. This has changed. In our consciousness, reality has won. We can only understand the ideal insofar as we can find its roots in pure nature. If we can’t find those roots, we assume that the ideal is a lie or a fetish invented by human beings tempted to find comfort in the sphere of illusion when they can’t find it in im- mediate life. What matters first and foremost to us is “truth.” We insist on unveiling it without inhibition, even if it means destroying qualities considered sacred by humanity for centuries. This process of unveiling is of great concern for women in our time. For a long time, they have been forced to divert their gaze from the real features of life and expected to connect their emotions to what the unprejudiced eye would see as mere appearance. Two recent books indicate that women have revelations for us, coming out of the depths of their being: Rosa Mayreder’s Idols (Berlin, 1899) and Adele Gerhard’s Confession (Berlin, 1899). Anyone paying close attention to these two books is immediately struck by the feeling that important things are being said to us; the authors have found the courage to express without any reticence what takes place in the depths of women’s souls. The second impression is the insight we gain from these works about noble individual women who in complete honesty fight a hard, energetic battle in life. Rosa Mayreder has told us about this battle in earlier short novels. The best way to describe what she expresses there is by saying that we encounter the heroic in the particular form it assumes among these high-minded women of the present time. Idols unveils the essence of love with the psychologist’s clarity and the brave truth-seeker’s honesty. Rosa Mayreder has a gift for cast- ing the light of greatness on the web of the world. We follow what she is saying with an open ear because we quickly become aware that only she can say what she is saying. Adele Gerhard on the other hand has no great revelations to offer. Anyone with the least bit of life experience will have encountered what she speaks of on innumerable occasions. Still, we have probably not looked at those things with the degree of attentiveness that this woman devotes to them. We are less interested in what she sees than in the way she sees it. While the stories in themselves have an undeniably banal quality, what is interesting is her stance toward them. We feel we can see through the author’s eyes, and they see very differently from the way we usually do. We observe a free soul for whom it is painful to be free. For Rosa Mayreder truth-telling is a relief; for Adele Gerhard it is martyrdom. Rosa Mayreder’s Idols springs out of a feeling expressed long ago that the worthiest human study is the human being itself. The value of her book lies in her presentation of women’s soul life from the same point of view as philosophers employ to study the whole universe, “from the point of view of eternity,”

or rather in this case “from the point of view of the ‘meaningful.’” Rosa May- reder’s own life is the source of the deepest riddles, and the answers she elicits open perspectives into the abysses of human nature. Every page of her books makes clear that the woman writing here has needed extraordinary power to cope with her own experiences, and that she really has that power. The result is to surround the work in a remarkable ethical atmosphere that testifies to the se- riousness and dignity of life. The mystery of the relation between the sexes—a relationship that is the source of much puzzlement to anyone reflecting on the relationship between the individual and the collective—stands at the center of her work. What is it in the other sex that attracts us to find in it the completion of our own being? Rosa Mayreder represents the attraction to the other sex in its full force; but she also shows the element that comes between the souls of men and women. When all is said and done, the individual cannot transcend itself. Something prevents our becoming truly familiar with an alien soul. It is the image of the other that arises in our own being. What does a sober, cool observer find when comparing the observer’s image of a man loved by a woman with the image of that same man arisen in the woman’s own psyche? One particular man has aroused this love, and it is not aroused by infinite numbers of others. This cool observer does not know the causes of this love; in fact cannot know anything about it. For what the woman loves is not the object of cool observation, it is a being born out of her love, not the (just-encountered) stranger, but the idol, the “graven image” of that man. Thus, Gisa loves Doctor Lamaris. “When this man entered the room, the instant I saw him, he seemed as strangely, as intimately, familiar as if I had known him for a very long time. And after we had spoken a few minutes, po- lite, empty phrases of the kind any young man exchanges with any young woman, I suddenly formed the impression that our conversation was quite re- fined, that the whole assembly (which was actually standing and sitting around in rather dull fashion), was animated as never before. Yet, how different Lama- ris appears when Gisa learns to known his true being! “Many times later the image of a luminous inner life reappeared, but never in his actual presence. She could not tolerate any contact with the reality”: “reality bristled with wounding impressions, drilling into my soul like sharp needles.” Gisa’s entire feeling life is rooted in the belief that the right person stands in relationship to the world in a way that corresponds to the deepest, most elemental tendencies of their nature. The doctor, on the other hand, sees everything from another point of view. For him, a young woman’s piety is the best sign of “her adaptation for life.” He conceives of “religion as soul diet, psycho- logical hygiene,” which to the young woman is a hateful conception. “It emp- ties everything of its richness, makes it flat and uninteresting.” But that is the only thing Lamaris knows: “Civilized humanity, if it doesn’t want to go to

ruin, will learn to consider life exclusively from this point of view…. Love too, in fact love most of all. For while love normally determines the well-being of future generations, all too often the ties established on the basis of love bring about some downright criminal manifestations. It is a sentimental insan- ity to consider love the worthiest foundation of marriage. The illusionary character of this affect makes its victims fully incapable of making any choices on rational grounds, namely in the sense of the improvement of the race.” We see here the second idol. The woman whose sexual instincts are intel- lectualized into a fantasy of love interposes this fantasy between herself and the man she loves. The man with his fantasy of rational culture similarly interposes between himself and his beloved an abstraction of culture. As the story proceeds, we find out that Lamaris also feels deeply attracted to Gisa. But he does not follow his inclination. He comes from a family some of whose members are mentally ill; he has a profession that privileges the mind at the cost of the body. Gisa is a young woman who (like Lamaris) aspires to life in the intellectual sphere. He chooses for his wife a young woman from a “more protected class background.” The spirit that lives in him is not allowed to unite with that of a young woman who also strives toward spiritualization. Therefore, he marries a healthy girl with less education, for it is his principled view that “men whose lives strongly challenge the brain should marry women from protected classes—for the sake of their offspring.” How this idol works out in the real life of feelings can best be seen in the fact that the woman he marries looks strikingly like Gisa. His spirit was seeking Gisa, but his rational mind determines his life. The magic in Rosa Mayreder’s book resides in the way she sets human experiences within a larger universal context. Her artistic intuition constantly leads her to see the part in the light of the whole, leading us to perceive the depths of life. Mayreder sees things on a large scale. The way she considers the problem of love is different from the way other authors approach it. Usually we are presented with the external appearances of love; Rosa Mayreder goes for the essence of love, one would like to say the ding an sich of love. The enlightenment that she has gained about her own heart has sharpened her gaze when she looks at the human condition. It will not be possible in future spiritual evolution to bypass the form that this woman has given to human experiences. Adele Gerhard’s assignment is different. Her four “sketches” show that her interest does not reside in the colorful richness of life, but rather in the out- lines. These small novels are like charcoal drawings; they are the fruit of Gerhard’s intellectual consciousness. What she expresses is the tragedy of feminine love. She starts out from the contradictions between women’s position according to nature and the demands of life experience. Love attracts the woman to the man; they connect. She assigns him tasks [in the form of an idol-

ized image of the man—trans.] that bury his individuality. The woman who speaks in the last story is most significant: “I constantly look for an exit, but I can’t find it. My nights are tormented by heavy, disturbing dreams. The ring on my hand is compressing me. I look at my child, it squeezes my hand: Mommy will stay with Johannes. I kiss him. But I am here, too, something in me keeps calling out, I am here and I too want my right, my right that you call non- right.” The women she describes are women who must just as urgently get themselves into a relationship as they must find a way out of it once they have become familiar with it. The author is a woman who acknowledges women’s calling to live their lives to the full, and yet is constantly aware of the barriers that interfere with this calling. Nature appears to her as an evil daemon. The striking thing about this way of thinking is that there is no outlet in sight, no way to resolve the contradiction being described. Has nature really assigned women the role of eternal martyrs? The conflict is described most tragically in this little book that seems to express Schopenhauer’s philosophy about women. Rosa Mayreder seeks to unveil the essence of love; Adele Gerhard presents the catastrophe of idolized love. It is characteristic of our time that both books appeared at the same time. Idols in some way explains Confession. It is unsurprising, then, that the “fantasy of a luminous inner life” should not tolerate any contact with reality, and that the “wounding impressions of this reality drill into the soul like sharp needles.” As Dr. Lamaris puts it: “While love normally determines the well-being of future generations, all too often ties established on the basis of love produce monstrous aberrations.” Adele Gerhard starts from the point of view that reality appears flat and uninteresting before marriage, when the relationship is dominated by the idol. But after marriage, reality pushes back the idol in two ways. The idol in which the woman had lost herself is destroyed and individuality makes its claims again; but the needs of the next generation, which until then were strictly a rationalization, now become a matter of the heart. The child’s needs are now experienced by the heart, not the mind. And once again, the woman stands before the demand to sacrifice her individuality to an alien being. Laura Marholm has claimed that the women’s question is actually essen- tially a man’s question. Women, she claimed, find their natural fulfillment in men. Rosa Mayreder shows us that this quest for fulfillment (through a man) is under the influence of an idol and must therefore be kept within bounds. Adele Gerhard speaks of the tragedy caused by the idolization of love, making clear that men must be part of a solution (if not a satisfying one) to the women’s problem.

Annotations row it from the library, nation, inspiration, and in- you’ll want to get your tuition; sleep and dream own copy. life; and life between Anthroposophy—Rudolf —jk death and rebirth. The Steiner farewell address includes The Evolution of Con- a statement about the ef- Esoteric Lessons 1904- sciousness as Revealed fect of wireless telegraphy 1909 (GA 266/1), trans- through Initiation upon spiritual communica- lated by James Hindes, in- Knowledge, Rudolf tions, which is even more troduction by Christopher Steiner Press, 2006, pertinent today given the Bamford, SteinerBooks, 297 pgs. proliferation of wireless 2007, 549 pgs., with notes, First published in Eng- technology throughout the chronology of Steiner’s lish in 1926, The Evolu- world. life, and index. tion of Consciousness The book also includes Containing “lectures, (volume 227 of the col- facsimiles and endnotes. notes, meditations, and lected works of Rudolf —jk exercises by Rudolf Steiner) includes thirteen Steiner” from the Esoteric lectures, two addresses, School and “notes of eso- Anthroposophy— and two question-and- teric lessons from memory Steiner—Works answer sessions held in by the participants,” this Penmaenmawr, North book is the first of three O’Meara, John, The Wales, 18-31 Aug. 1923. volumes of esoteric les- Thinking Spirit: Rudolf Steiner gave the lectures sons to be translated into Steiner and Romantic in German, and George English. Theory—A Collection of Kaufmann (Adams) pro- As Christopher Bam- Texts with Notes, with a vided synopses for the ford writes in his introduc- Further Commentary on English-speaking attention, the emphasis in this Rudolf Steiner’s Spiri- dees. This revised transla- collection is on “practice.” tual Science, Heart’s Core tion by V.E. Watkin, Here, writes Bamford, Publications, 2000, C. Davy, and P. Wehrle “We witness Rudolf 96 pgs. includes material not pre- Steiner the spiritual With quotations from viously translated. teacher in action, ex- eight of Rudolf Steiner’s Encompassing the pounding and commenting written works from the pe- “spiritual and physical on various meditations” riod 1882-1897— evolution of the world and while also placing “inner including his introductions humankind in the past, work into the larger pic- to the scientific works of present and the future, ture of human and cosmic J.W. von Goethe from the point of view of evolution.” (Goethean Science, Mer- anthroposophy,” the lec- Esoteric Lessons is a cury Press, 1988), as well tures discuss a wide range book to go back to again as his Philosophy of Free- of subjects, such as imagi- and again—after you bor-

dom—author O’Meara sixties. That was in 1987. Course, which can be a aims to “relate the name In the 1970s, Lisle discov- struggle for many of us. of Rudolf Steiner to ered biodynamics (thanks The book is recom- the…best known product to his gardener wife), mended for the serious BD of romantic theory in Eng- abruptly quit his career as gardener or farmer as well lish,” the Biographia Lit- a chemical engineer, and as soil scientists; but it is eraria by Samuel Taylor made a profession of agri- also for those who are in- Coleridge. culture, both practically terested in the fascinating O’Meara regards and in research at the relationships between sub- Steiner’s work as a “direct Brookside Laboratory in stances of the earth and and entirely natural evolu- New Knoxville, Ohio. the cosmos, and want to tion of Western intellec- While at Brookside he be- learn more. tual thinking up to his came increasingly inter- —Nancy Dill time” and endeavors to ested in the agricultural show “how Coleridge… uses of different rock directly anticipates the powders, but it was after Anthroposophy—Art— whole of Steiner’s work of trips to Egypt and Greece Leonardo da Vinci this time.” with Charles Walters of The book is likely most Acres U.S.A.—where Finkenrath, Willi, Das useful as a reference Lisle learned “much of the Zeugnis des Wortes: Das source, as it comprises a information found in this Abendmahl des Lio- list of quotations, with no book”—that the book took nardo da Vinci, Edition explanatory comments— form. Lionardo, 2003, 180 pgs, the reader must assimilate In this book, Lisle sets large format, illus. the excerpted passages, out to explain, often with a A quote by Rudolf and determine whether or whimsical voice, not only Steiner (one of several in not the material supports the origins of the rock which Rudolf Steiner de- the author’s thesis. powders and their mineral scribed Leonardo’s Last —jk content, but also their rela- Supper as “giving the tionship to, and impor- meaning of all Earth- tance for, growing things. existence”) introduces this Anthroposophy— Explanations go deep into splendid book: “If a Mar- Agriculture the heart of biodynamics tian came down to Earth, as given by Rudolf he would find everything Lisle, Harvey, The Enli- Steiner, lightened by there more or less interest- vened Rock Powders, Lisle’s humor, but still of- ing, even if he couldn’t Acres U.S.A., 1994, ten challenging to “mod- quite understand it. What- 194 pgs. ern” ways of thinking. His ever is formed in the Peter Tompkins, in his work would be a useful earthly image has meaning book, Secrets of the Soil, companion to a study of for the entire cosmos: the describes Harvey Lisle as Steiner’s Agriculture opposition of particular a sprightly, outgoing, powers against the immor- gnomelike character in his tal divine powers.

“With the appearance course of restoration— in Waldorf Schools, of Christ in the middle of 1980-2000—has made it AWSNA, 1995) when he his apostles, he who over- possible to see it now in was recently asked to came death on Earth, sig- its most authentic form, speak on the subject to nifying the triumph of despite some irreparable Norwegian teachers. immortality, points out to damages. The book is both a us the momentous univer- Among other things, practical guide to conduct- sal moment when the gods details have now become ing research and an impas- separated from temporal visible again that enable sioned plea to respect existence in the first place us to interpret many im- teachers’ knowledge and and vanquished time to plicit esoteric dimensions experience. Finser’s prem- become immortal…. in the composition, the ise is that teacher research “There were forces in perspective, the partici- can give teachers the tools Leonardo da Vinci that pants’ facial expressions, needed to speak out and could bring to expression and their subtle gestures. be heard, empowering precisely this sublime, this Finkenrath’s sparse com- their advocacy for educa- most significant event. mentary, partly consisting tional change in the face This is why his great artis- of quotes from Leonardo’s of state-mandated “stan- tic works have such a tre- journals, elucidates these dards.” mendous effect, because meanings. —js they are connected with —ms the cosmic order.” The Last Supper was Anthroposophy― Grigaff, Anne-Dorthe, painted in 1498. Few Education Knitted Animals, Haw- paintings have impressed thorn Press, 2006, 60 pgs. themselves so deeply on Finser, Torin M., Silence Irresistible! This book human consciousness. It Is Complicity: A Call to has a very high “awwww” was copied in many Euro- Let Teachers Improve quotient! Kittens, squir- pean cities, and with the Our Schools through Ac- rels, puppies, foxes, and advent of modern printing tion Research, Steiner- hedgehogs, as well as the techniques in the 20th cen- Books, 2007, 95 pgs. more familiar lambs and tury, it could be hung in The author, a professor chickens are waiting to people’s living rooms all of education at Antioch come to life under your over the world. Yet, it University and an experi- knitting needles. Clear in- hadn’t been painted very enced Waldorf teacher, structions, wonderful yarn long before it started to took the opportunity to re- suggestions, and color deteriorate, and there fol- vise and expand his earlier photos make this an ap- lowed 500 years of resto- work on teachers as re- pealing book for both rations—and also altera- searchers (Research: Re- children and adults. tions, which were brought flections and Suggestions —js to light at the beginning of for Teachers for Creating the 21st century. The latest a Community of Research

Kearney, Vicki, ed., Cre- you to discover a world of ues in this practical vein. ating Avenues for wonders: a living space How to fit gardening into Change: Timeless Mo- full of stones, plants, and an already busy school ments, Avenues for animals of countless col- schedule? Why is autumn Change, 2006, 96 pgs. ors and shapes. This is a the best time to begin gar- This book, a collabora- place where the sun some- den work? Season by sea- tive effort among Steiner times shines, and the rain son, Lockie presents pro- school communities in sometimes falls; where the jects, songs, and stories, Australia, Kenya, Taiwan, wind blows and the clouds always with a focus on Vietnam, and Japan, gives float by. This is a garden creative, practical peda- us shining glimpses of the in which young and old gogy in the context of a beauty and wonder that can come together to build thriving garden. are so alive in Waldorf a clay oven or a willow —js education. Color photos hut, carve a walking stick, predominate; the relatively wash wool, pick fragrant Mitchell, David, ed., spare text is poetic and herbs and nibble on deli- From Norway: Teaching well chosen. It is delight- cious berries. An inspiring History through the ful to see scenes so famil- environment like this Grades, AWSNA, 2007, iar from our own schools makes us ask certain ques- 110 pgs. transposed into other set- tions: —How will our This 8th edition of the tings and cultures. world look in 20 or 40 Waldorf Journal Project, —js years? —What skills do translated by Ted Warren, our children need to learn features a selection of arti- to grow into healthy, con- cles on teaching history up Kutsch, Irmgard, and fident adults?” This book to the ninth grade. Their Brigitte Walden, Summer suggests answers aplenty. depth and detail contribute Nature Activities for —js not only suggested content Children, Floris, 2007, for lessons, but explain the 79 pgs. pedagogical significance Another volume in a Lockie, Beatrys, Garden- underlying a subject. Top- wonderful series of sea- ing with Young Chil- ics include, among others, sonal activity books from dren, Hawthorn Press “Modern History in the the Children’s Nature and 2007, 140 pgs. Light of the Renaissance Garden Center in Ger- We receive regular re- and the Industrial Revolu- many (the library also has quests for books on gar- tion”; “A Phenomenologi- the spring and autumn dening with children; this cal Approach to the Sub- volumes, and will acquire new one is a gem. Written ject of History”; “Fairy the winter volume this by a Waldorf kindergarten Tales and Legends”; and fall), where children en- teacher, it starts with some “What about the Old Tes- gage in real work involv- “down to earth facts” tament?” ing all their senses. about different soils and —js The authors open with which soils different an invitation: “We invite plants prefer, and contin-

Mitchell, David, and ing, Hawthorn Press 2007, research on adolescent Douglas Gerwin, Survey 274 pgs. brain development in an of Waldorf Graduates, The author, a Waldorf accessible style, making Phase 2, Research Insti- parent, teacher, and the case that many of the tute for Waldorf Educa- teacher trainer of long changes associated with tion, 2007, 169 pgs. standing, says that this adolescence (such as risky There is great interest book contains a mixture of behavior and sleep diffi- among parents, research- reflective and practical culties, among others) ers, and journalists regard- writing. While much of it have their basis in the ing how Waldorf gradu- “will reflect what relative immaturity of the ates fare in their higher is…thought and done in teenage brain as well as in educational endeavors and Steiner Waldorf schools, it changing hormones. in the ubiquitously in- will also cross-reference While many scientists voked “real world.” This this with current main- have long held that the comprehensive survey, stream principles and growing pains of adoles- based on a sample of practice. In so doing it cence are primarily psy- around 550 participants also assumes that both ap- chological, Strauch high- spanning some 60 years, proaches have something lights the physical nature looks at college accep- to learn from each other. of the transformation, tances, attendance, and “Literacy should be or- making the case that the success; vocational activi- ganic, not mechanical, in changes the brain goes ties and job satisfaction; the way it is developed. If through during adoles- graduates’ cultural and so- it is cultivated in relation cence are as dramatic and cial interests; perceived to life and life’s processes crucial as those that occur influence and importance it will remain adaptable, in the first two years of of Waldorf education to both in itself and in its life. their current lives; physi- service to humanity.” —js cal and mental health; and Teachers will find this Waldorf graduates’ rela- book invaluable. Anthroposophy— tionship to anthroposophy. —js Therapies The study includes much anecdotal as well as statis- Strauch, Barbara, The Kurz, Susan West, Awak- tical content, making it Primal Teen: What the ening Beauty the Dr. quite an interesting read as New Discoveries about Hauschka Way, Clarkson well as a valuable source the Teenage Brain Tell Potter, 2006, 208 pgs. for researchers. Us about Our Kids, An- We’ve had several re- —js chor Books, 2003, quests for this book, and 242 pgs. found an inexpensive “un- Rose, Michael, Living The author, medical corrected proof” for sale, Literacy: The Human science and health editor which is the copy we pur- Foundations of Speak- for The New York Times, chased for the library. All ing, Writing and Read- presents neuroscientific the text is included, but

the glossy photos in the “Snow Children”; and transmitted through the commercial edition are now, the “Wind Chil- Western esoteric rituals of black and white in our dren”) have such great ap- initiation?” and “What copy. Although the focus peal and “staying power.” ‘types’ of esotericism are on “beauty” might strike I wonder how many more transmitted?” some as frivolous, the au- forgotten volumes in this The author analyzed thor clearly conceives of series await republication written ritual texts only, this quality as denoting far and introduction to a new and included no “quantita- more than physical attrib- generation of delighted tive interviews, nor any utes. For her, health and children? participant observations.” wholeness are the neces- —js Viewing esotericism as a sary foundations for “‘form of thought’ beauty, and she discusses (Faivre),” the author fo- the importance of rhythm, Esotericism cused on rituals represen- sleep, good nourishment, tative of different histori- and right thinking and ac- Bogdan, Henrik, Western cal periods spanning over tion in this regard. Do-it- Esotericism and Rituals three hundred years. yourself recipes for skin of Initiation, State Uni- (Note: The book con- care and appealing recipes versity of New York tains one minor mention for nourishing and appe- Press, 2007, 235 pgs., with of Rudolf Steiner, in a ref- tizing foods make this an bibliographic notes and erence to the Mysteria accessible, realistic, and index. Mystica Aeterna.) practical guide to holistic Author Bogdan asserts —jk health and natural beauty. that “masonic rituals of —js initiation…have suffered from academic neglect far Evil too long, and it is hoped Education—Stories that this study will…bring Faraday, Michael, Obses- this fascinating field to the sion, or How Evil Spirits Von Olfers, Sibylle, The attention of a wider pub- Influence Mortals, Story of the Wind Chil- lic.” Kessinger Publishing Co., dren, Floris, 2006 (1910), In this work, Bogdan 1997, 23 pgs. unpaginated. presents the “‘masonic Rudolf Steiner called We purchase very few rituals of initiation’ from Michael Faraday “one of children’s picture books an historical perspective,” the greatest spirits of all because of limited space and seeks to “analyze the time” (GA 173). and limited funds. Books relationship between ma- This facsimile edition by Sibylle von Olfers al- sonic rituals of initiation of an unusual work pub- ways tempt me to make an and Western esotericism.” lished in 1884 by Faraday, exception, because their His research focuses on the foremost experimenter classic charm and themes two questions: “How is in the field of electricity in from the natural world Western esotericism the nineteenth century, (the “Root Children”; the

begins with the following: aloud book for evenings veal a twelve-fold balance “Obsession is the irregular around the family hearth. of key noble qualities that or perverted action of the —js the human being can strive natural law, existing be- for. Along with these vir- tween spiritual and physi- tues are also described, in cal life. This law, under- Festivals—Christmas contrast, the all-too- stood and utilized for be- recognizable failings of neficent purposes, is that Marion, Isabel, Christmas human nature, which have which gives to man the in the Family, Floris, to be recognized and un- idea of immortality; but 2006, 107 pgs. derstood before they can perverted in its action… Reminiscent of a long- be overcome.” This book produces intense mental time favorite, Festivals, invites contemplation and suffering and often moral Family, and Foods, this meditation. obliquity upon those who new book includes activi- —js do not know of its exis- ties suitable for very tence or the real source of young children, and crafts their troubles.” that older children (and German Literature— Thanks to Mark Gard- adults) can enjoy on their Novalis ner for bringing this work own. Included are recipes, to our attention. stories, songs, decorations, Novalis, Notes for a Ro- —jk gifts—all brightly illus- mantic Encyclopedia— trated with both photos Das Allgemeine Brouil- and drawings. lon, translated, edited, and Fairy Tales —js introduced by David W. Wood, State University of Lundburgh, Holger (trans- New York Press, 2007, Festivals—Michaelmas lator), Swedish Folk 290 pgs., with endnotes, Tales, Floris, 2004, Lindenberg, Christoph- bibliography, and index. 239 pgs. In this book David This anthology of clas- Andreas, illustrated by David Newbatt, Twelve Wood has translated all sic tales retold by such au- 1151 entries from No- thors as Elsa Beskow, Aspects of Michael, Con- trasted by Their valis’s “Universal Note- P.A. Lindholm, and Anna book,” in which Novalis Wahlenberg features the Counter-Images, Wyn- stones Press, 2006, 47 pgs. sought to “reunite all the original illustrations by separate sciences into a John Bauer (1882–1918) Most people are familiar with various images of universal science.” This is in a handsome, large for- the first time all this mate- mat. The illustrations are St. Michael and the dragon. In words and pic- rial has been available in dark, moody, and other- English in a single vol- worldly, evoking a world tures, the author and illus- trator “explore other at- ume. of mystery and strange- The Encyclopedia cov- ness. An appealing read- tributes of St. Michael in such a way that they re- ers such diverse subjects

as physics (entry # 88: cludes an afterword by tion of the German folk “Absolute passivity is a Paul Allen, as well as Ru- spirit….” perfect conductor— dolf Steiner’s 1899 essay, Includes endnotes and absolute activity is a per- “The Character of indexes. fect nonconductor. The Goethe’s Spirit,” trans- —jk former is just as much an lated by Adam Bittleston. extreme effort of force as —jk the latter. Passivity is not Medicine—Alternative as contemptible as one imagines...”); psychology History— Zieve, Robert J., M.D., (entry # 205: “Pain and Kaspar Hauser Beyond the Medical anxiety denote the dreamy Meltdown: Working To- members of the soul. Bod- Boardman, Terry, Kaspar gether for Sustainable ily pleasure and displeas- Hauser: Where Did He Health Care, Bell Pond ure are dream products. Come From? A Phe- Books, 2006, 88 pgs. The soul is only partly nomenological Inquiry Writes Robert Zieve in awake…”); as well as into Rudolf Steiner’s his introduction, “This mathematics, history, re- Question, illustrated by book begins where [my] ligion, and more. David Newbatt, Wyn- Healthy Medicine [Bell The appendix includes stones Press, 2006, Pond Books, 2005] left extracts from Novalis’s 188 pgs. off,” presenting a succinct Freiberg Natural Scien- The author calls this plan to enact the compre- tific Studies. book a “modest supple- hensive health care model —jk ment” to the work of Peter described in that earlier Tradowsky, Kaspar work. Hauser—The Struggle for After outlining the cur- Goethe—Works the Spirit (Temple Lodge, rent problems of a health 1997, also available from care system driven by the Goethe, J.W. von, Fairy our library). profit motive and bur- Tale: The Green Snake Boardman considers dened by governmental and the Beautiful Lily the question, “Where did regulation, Zieve presents (translated by Julius E. Kaspar Hauser come the seven principles of Heuscher, edited by Joan from?” and focuses on the healthy medicine, and de- deRis Allen, paintings by details of place and time tails his solution for creat- Hermann Linde), Steiner- in Hauser’s incarnation, ing “Healthy Medicine Books, 2006, 53 pgs. concluding that “The Associations,” which are Illustrated with paint- space and time elements modeled on associative ings by Hermann Linde of the story of Kaspar economics. (1863-1923)—who helped Hauser…suggest that —jk paint the cupolas in the Kaspar Hauser (an angelic First Goetheanum—this being) was in fact the large format edition of touchstone for the incarna- Goethe’s Fairy Tale in-

Music—Mozart Kalevala, Dover, 2006 ics between Myth and Re- (1912), 208 pgs. ality,” by Andrew Lorand; Masters, Brien, Mozart: An unabridged republi- numerous excerpts from His Musical Style and cation of the 1912 origi- Rudolf Steiner’s work; His Role in the Devel- nal, with illustrations by and a very useful section opment of Human Con- N. C. Wyeth, this book in- on storing vegetables after sciousness, Temple cludes thirty-eight tales they’ve been harvested. Lodge, 2006, 146 pgs., from the Finnish epic All this, plus colorful pho- with appendices of musi- adapted into prose. tos, excellent illustrations, cal scores, glossary, and —js comical asides, and infor- index. mative gems throughout. Describing Mozart as a This book is one to sa- “veritable star at a crucial Nutrition vor. point in the firmament of —js Peterson, Farmer John, human evolution,” author with Angelic Organics, Masters seeks in this book Farmer John’s Cook- to “describe the self’s Post, Marsha (compiler), book: The Real Dirt on journey towards the rich- The Waldorf School Vegetables—Seasonal ness of Mozart’s musical Book of Soups, Bell Pond Recipes and Stories from style” as well as to “shed Books, 2006, 48 pgs. a Community Supported Mozartean light onto the Arranged and intro- Farm, Gibbs Smith, 2006, self as the central element duced by Andrea Huff, a 360 pgs. in the human constitu- biodynamic foods caterer, This is a big book that tion.” and charmingly illustrated grew out of a big garden As much about the an- by Waldorf kindergarten (the Angelic Organics throposophical under- teacher Jo Valens, this CSA serves more than standing of the evolution handy little spiral-bound 1200 families), and any- of the human ego as about collection features soup one who likes to cook the music of Mozart, the recipes from Waldorf and/or eat will find it a big book’s tone is conversa- teachers, parents, and treat. Lifelong farmer John tional and at times light- friends around the coun- Peterson started working hearted. A detailed analy- try. Vegan, dairy, meaty, with biodynamics after his sis of the first movement fishy, vegetarian—there’s farm faltered under con- of Mozart’s Piano Sonata a tempting recipe here for ventional practices in the K533 is presented in the every sort of cook and 1980s. Along with 225 latter portion of the book. eater. eclectic recipes, his book —jk —js includes contributions on nutrition from Louise Fra- Mythology—Kalevala zier (author of Louise’s Leaves, which is available Baldwin, James, Nordic through our library); a Hero Tales from the chapter titled “Biodynam-

Prentice, Jessica, Full In an introduction and “provides us with a com- Moon Feast: Food and three masterly chapters, prehensive approach to the Hunger for Connec- “Prophesy,” “Spiritual understanding nature.” By tion, Chelsea Green, 2006, Magic,” and “Demonic focusing on the develop- 344 pgs. Magic,” Webster demol- ment of Schauberger’s We read about this ishes the idea that the on- ideas through his biogra- book in Lilipoh magazine, set of mechanical, ration- phy, Cobbald’s book pre- and are glad to add it to alistic science brought a sents a “concise introduc- our collection. Personal, swift end to magical sci- tion to Schauberger’s life ruminative, challenging, ences such as astrology and thinking,” and “teases and inspiring—this is and alchemy. In so doing out the different strands of much more than a cook- he sheds new light on his system of thinking… book. The author de- many of the key figures of in his [own] words.” scribes her transition from 16th and 17th century sci- Filled with numerous food fanaticism and con- ence. In Webster’s hands anecdotes from Schauber- fusion to a more relaxed Paracelsus, in particular, ger’s life, the book also approach grounded in sea- emerges as much more includes a conversation sonal eating. Following scientifically respectable with Frau Ingeborg the thirteen lunar cycles of and as having greater and Schauberger, who shares the agrarian year, she more lasting influence her memories of her fa- characterizes the changing than is usually the case in ther-in-law; as well as a seasons with their festivals exoteric histories. This list of sources and con- and traditions, and shares book is strongly recom- tacts, references, and an recipes that reflect and en- mended to anyone inter- index. hance these times of year. ested in the historical Recommended for —js manifestations of the evo- readers interested in fur- lution of consciousness. ther study of Schauber- —Keith Francis ger’s work is the book Renaissance—Paracelsus Hidden Nature: The Star- tling Insights of Viktor Webster, Charles, From Science—Ecology Schauberger by Alick Ba- Paracelsus to Newton: tholomew (Floris Books, Magic and the Making of Cobbald, Jane, Viktor 2003), also available from Modern Science (The Schauberger: A Life of our library. Eddington Memorial Lec- Learning from Nature, —jk tures Delivered at Cam- Floris Books, 2006, bridge University, No- 170 pgs. Hofstetter, Adrian M., vember 1980), Dover Pub- Viktor Schauberger Earth Friendly: Re- lications, 1982, 107 pgs., (1885-1958) was an Aus- Visioning Science & illustrated, with biblio- trian naturalist whose in- Spirituality through Ar- graphic notes and index. novative study of water, istotle, Thomas Aquinas, agriculture, and energy, and Rudolf Steiner, Lin- writes author Cobbald,

disfarne Books, 2004, ings of St. Thomas Aqui- Faraday was the experi- 196 pgs. nas and the early scholas- menter supreme. His dis- Many today see our tics, through the interven- coveries and insights ex- time as one of transition, ing centuries and finally tended across a very wide one in which we will be- the spiritual science of canvas, from organic gin to transform the think- Rudolf Steiner, Hofstetter chemistry and electro- ing of the last three hun- grew to understand that a chemistry to the science of dred years into a new living science of life, one materials; electromagnet- paradigm. In exchange for that honors the holistic ism; and the connection of the fruits of modern tech- view of the organism, is magnetism to light, which nology and science which, the urgent new direction opened the door to the along with their benefits, for science and teaching concept of unified fields. have resulted in mechani- science. These essays ful- All his work was zation, control, and ma- fill her commitment to a grounded in observation nipulation of our envi- revision of science teach- and beautifully conceived ronment, there is now an ing. experiments of startling approaching shift toward a Teachers of science, simplicity and directness. more integral culture of especially Waldorf teach- He also gave lectures to science and spirituality, ers, will find Sister the general public; was a one that is actually a re- Adrian’s insights inspir- fervent advocate of the turn, in part, to an earlier ing. Philosophers of sci- popularization of science sense for the sacred. ence and society will also for young people; served As an important con- find much of interest in as a consultant and advisor tributor to the upcoming her carefully traced his- to governments; was a transition, Sister Adrian tory of thought from the deeply religious man and a Hofstetter has given us influences of the Greeks to good friend―and last but this important collection the turmoil and crises of not least, was a faithful of essays. With them she today. and prolific writer. rightfully joins writers —Nancy Dill The present book pro- such as Father Thomas vides a portrait of Faraday Berry, Gregory Bateson, through a selection of his Brian Swimme, and Science—Movements & writings, taken from all Wendell Berry in a call to Figures aspects of his public and conscience for the con- private life: letters, jour- temporary world of sci- Faraday, Michael, The nals (both personal and ence and ecology. The es- Philosopher’s Tree: Mi- scientific), articles, re- says reflect her own path chael Faraday’s Life and ports, and science for the in life as a Dominican sis- Works in His Own young all bring to life a ter, scholastic, ecological Words, The Institute of delightful and modest yet advocate, teacher, and re- Physics Publishing, 1999, fascinating man. searcher in several fields 211 pages. —ms of biology. From the writ- In the great age of experimentation, Michael