The Golden Blade The Golden Blade TWENTY-SEVENTH (1975) ISSUE The Golden Blade E d i t o r i a l N o t e s 3 The Twelve Senses and the Seven* Copies of the following back issues are still available from the Rudolf Sieiner Bookshops—35 Park Road. London NWl 6XT and 38 Museum Life-Processes . Rudolf Steiner 7 Street, London WCIA ILP—or other bookshops The Sense-Organs and Aesthetic Experience . Rudolf Steiner 22 1973 1974 O n C o m i n g t o o u r S e n s e s . J o h n D a v y 3 9 The Recovery of the Living Source C o m e t s a n d t h e M o o n of Speech Rudolf Steiner Rudolf Steiner Evolution of Light, Darkness and The Forming of Destiny in L e t t e r s o n C o m e t s Colour Michael Wilson 53 Sleeping and Waking E l i s a h e t m V r e e d e Rudolf Steiner Initiation: Old and Modern Modern Theories of the Cosmos . Georg Unger 70 Language and Discovery A. W. Mann Owen Barfield Some Uses of Language in Threefold Ideas in English Life Nicholas Roerich .... John Fletcher 84 Modern Poetry Paul Matthews A. C. Harwood Eurythmy and the Word Economics and Consciousness Three Estranged Sisters . Charles Davy 100 Cecil Harwood A d a m B i t t l e s t o n The Eurythmy Figures The White and the Black Races A Grail Castle in the Brain Inner Language and Outer L. F. C. Mees Margarethe Kirchner-Bockholt 117 Language John Davy Curative Education Alls' Wahrspruchworte' Margarethe Kirchner- Rudolf Steiner Bockholt Where is Music Going? . Joscelyn Godwin 122 Sayings from Various Times Rudolf Steiner Search and Protest in Popular Poems by H. L. Hetherington, Peter Gruffydd, Songs JosccLYN Goodwin Eipiality and Justice Charles Austin and Paul Matthews C h a r l e s D a v y P o e m s b y P e t e r G r u f f y d d , Speech in the Family Charles Austin and Allyn B O O K R E V I E W S A d a m B i t t l e s t o n Moss Price 89p post free Price 99p post free Europe: a Cosmic Picture—New Life on the Land—Spirit of the Circling Stars—Science and Morality—Eurythmy and the Impulse of Dance—Shorter Notices I N D E X T O T H E G O L D E N B L A D E 1949-1973 Cover Design by Ted Roberts Still a few copies available from Rudolf Steiner Press Edited by Charles Davy and Adam Bittleston I5p post free Price £1.00. Published by the Rudolf Steiner Press, 35 Park Road, London, NWl 6XT,for the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain EDITORIAL NOTES Alexanderbe forgotten. Solzhenitsyn's Not only Letter does itto pose—whether Soviet Leaders it is should heeded not at all or not—a great, reasoned question to the rulers of Russia; but at moments it looks, with a detachment we should value, at the situation in the West: The catastrophic weakening of the western world and the whole of western civilisation is by no means due solely to the success of an irresistible, persistent Soviet foreign policy. It is, rather, the result of an historical, psychological and moral crisis afiTecting the entire culture and world outlook which were conceived at the time of the Renaissance and attained the acme of their expression with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. And Solzhenitsyn adds: " An analysis of that crisis is beyond the Anthroposophy springs from the work and teaching of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). He spoke of it as " a path of knowledge, to scope of this letter." Later, nevertheless, he ventures on something like a prophecy. He has been saying that mankind will have to give guide the spiritual in the human being to the spiritual in the up the ideal of economic growth and adapt itself to the technology universe of a stable economy within the next twenty or thirty years, or the biosphere will become unfit for life. And we must begin this trans The aim of this Annual is to bring the outlook of Anthroposophy formation at once. But he goes on: to bear on questions and activities which have relevance to the Actually, though, it is more than likely that western civilisation will not perish. It is so dynamic and so inventive that it will ride out present time. even this impending crisis, will break up all its age-old assumptions and in a few years set about the necessary reconstruction. The title derives from a reference by Rudolf Steiner to an old We are still very far from understanding this deeply enough. Persian legend. " Djemjdid was a king who led his people from the Man is a complicated being; it is difficult for him to observe the north towards Iran, and who received from the God, whom he changes in himself while they are going on, or afterwards: there is called Ahura Mazdao, a golden dagger, by means of which he was to loss and gain, and the gain may hide the loss. fulfil his mission on earth ... It represents a force given to man What was lost in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was the living, spiritual picture of man which the soul needs. " Humanism " whereby he can act upon and transform external nature ". arose as the search for this lost picture, or for one that could replace it. " One does not aspire to humanism because one has man, but be cause one has lost him." (Rudolf Steiner, The Michael Mystery^ 30 November, 1924). The search led back to the Greeks, and later on, in the nineteenth century, to the wisdom of the East; but pictures brought from the past did not fill the need. ' Many people believed that the great new ideas about the universe and the history of the EDITORIAL NOTES 5 4 EDITORIAL NOTES earth would provide an idea of man as well. And twentieth-century on a great scale in the study of nature; Goethe's work on light and man has still not understood why this does not happen. colour—described here by Michael Wilson—is a rare success. Rightly, we seek objectivity. But we make a great mistake about There are two sorts of objectivity we can recognise: a one-sided this: we identify objectivity with a limited use of the senses and of sort, which in the end proves misleading, and one that is achieved thinking. The great, new, enormously successful ideas about the much more slowly but is much more complete. The first brings the material world are indeed achieved with the help of this limitation; human spirit into subjection beneath the being called, in anthiopo- but man himself cannot be understood in this way. " It is not enough sophical cosmology, Ahriman—though man remains unconscious to be able to think this distinction; we need to admit it deeply into of this subjection. The second leads to a conscious understanding our hearts. In ordinary life, after all, we can notice at every step of the Christ. For thoughts which take full account of the reality our failure to understand one another; quite practically, we fail to and freedom of the human soul are thoughts in which man meets use all our senses well enough, and fail to develop our thinking to with Christ. grasp what we observe. But again, it is not enough to accept In every field of human knowledge and activity we need such this in a general way; we need to look quite specifically at the senses thoughts. Dr. Georg Unger shows here how thoroughly modem we have, and at those beyond them which can be developed. cosmology is permeated by Ahriman—and by really powerful Perhaps even those long concerned with the work of Rudolf "Luciferic" elements. A thorough-going restoration of health in Steiner have done this too little. We have not realised enough cosmology can be achieved only when a conception of space is that what he says about the twelve senses of man is not just an worked out in accord with the life of the soul. Ahriman teaches interesting study, but has far-reaching social and moral consequences; his concept of space—an emptiness which he nevertheless presents in particular his description of those senses which are little as the abiding reality. For the Christian mind, space is something understood—^the speech-sense, the thought-sense, and the sense extended by the World-soul like a tent into which human souls can of another person's *1.' Thus in printing in this issue two lectures come, from which they can go. And its directions differ in quality, by Rudolf Steiner and an article by John Davy, all concerned with as up and down, and forward and backward, do for the human the senses and life-processes in man, the editors of the Golden Blade body. are not offering a holiday from social and economic problems— Rudolf Steiner looked forward to the time when all sorts of but a way of approaching them which can be much more effective, relationships between astronomy and embryology would be estab in the long run, than outer calculations can be. For in the whole lished. Some of his followers, notably Dr. Karl Konig and Mr.