by Colin Wilson
Other titles by Colin Wilson available in this series:
C.G.JUNG: Lord of the Underworld
G.I.GURDJIEFF: The War Against Sleep
ALEISTER CROWLEY: The Nature of the Beast
The Strange Life of P.D.OUSPENSKY
RUDOLF STEINER
The Man and his Vision
by
Colin Wilson
Originally published by The Aquarian Press 1985
This edition published 2005 by
Aeon Books Ltd
London W5
www.aeonbooks.co.uk
© Colin Wilson
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. is available for this book from the British Library
ISBN 1 904658 26 1
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Contents
Acknowledgements
One The Door to the Inner Universe
Two Childhood of a Visionary
Three The Goethe Scholar
Four The Long Apprenticeship
Five Rebirth
Six Occultist and Guru
Seven The Building of the Temple
Eight Disaster
Nine Postscript: Steiner's Achievement
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
I WISH to express my gratitude to members of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain and particularly to Mrs E. Lloyd, who used to run the Steiner Bookshop at Museum Street, London WC1. I also wish to thank John Bowyer for providing me with material and for many helpful suggestions and Eileen Hutchins for her interesting comment on the problem of Steiner's ‘vision’ of King Arthur at Tintagel.
It need hardly be emphasized that the members of the Anthroposophical Society who have offered their help should be in no way held responsible for the views expressed in the present book.
I also wish to thank the London Library, and in particular Christopher Hurley, for valuable help.
I also owe a debt of enormous gratitude to Dan Lloyd, who sent me invaluable photostat material of lectures by Steiner not published in English.
One
The Door to the Inner Universe
OF ALL the important thinkers of the twentieth century, Rudolf Steiner is perhaps the most difficult to come to grips with. For the unprepared reader, his work presents a series of daunting obstacles. To begin with, there is the style, which is formidably abstract, and as unappetizing as dry toast. But a determined reader could learn to put up with that. The real problem lies in the content, which is often so outlandish and bizarre that the reader suspects either a hoax or a barefaced confidence trick. Books like Cosmic Memory, with its account of Atlantis and Lemuria, seem to belong on the same shelf as titles like Our Hollow Earth, or My Trip to Venus in a Flying Saucer. The resulting sense of frustration is likely to cause even the most open-minded reader to give up in disgust.
This was, I must admit, my own experience when the publisher of the present volume approached me in the mid-1970s and asked me to write a book on Steiner. I accepted because I had always found Steiner an interesting figure. I first came upon his name in my early teens; it was in a remarkable book called God Is My Adventure, by Rom Landau. Landau begins his account by describing the experience of a certain Baron V—, a German officer with whom the author became acquainted during his student days in Warsaw. The Baron was a member of a flying corps on the western front in the First World War, and he developed a disturbing psychic faculty: the ability to foretell which of his comrades would be killed when they flew out on a mission. This gift of prophecy threatened to wreck his health, so when he was advised to go and see a certain Dr Rudolf Steiner, he seized the idea with relief. Dr Steiner proved to be a quiet man with deep-set eyes, and he advised the baron to practise certain simple mental disciplines. These had the desired effect, and the unnerving gift vanished.
Landau's account made it clear that Steiner was no charlatan messiah; whenever people met this calm, serious man and heard him speak quietly and sensibly about the ‘spirit world’, they felt he was speaking from direct experience.
Over the years, I had picked up many copies of Steiner's books in second-hand shops. I had dipped into them, but found the style off-putting. I promised myself that one of these days I would settle down to a systematic study of Steiner's ideas, and the publisher's offer seemed to be the opportunity I had been waiting for. So I accepted, and blew the dust off the dozen or so volumes of Steiner on my bookshelves.
There seems to be a general agreement that An Outline of Occult Science is Steiner's most important book, so I started with that. It begins by acknowledging that ‘occult science’ is regarded with suspicion by many people, a danger to weak minds. It goes on: ‘All occult science is born from two thoughts…first, that behind the visible world there is another, the invisible world, which is hidden from the senses, and from thought that is fettered by the senses; secondly, that it is possible for man to penetrate into that unseen world by developing certain faculties dormant within him.’
So far, so good. After another ten pages of introductory matter, Steiner launches into a chapter on the nature of man. And its opening paragraph proceeds to repeat what he has already said more briefly and effectively:
Considering man in the light of occult science, we are at once reminded of its general characteristics. It rests upon the recognition of a hidden something behind that which is manifest to the outer senses and to the intellect brought to bear upon their perceptions. These senses and this intellect can apprehend only a part of all that which occult science unveils as the total human entity, and this part is what occult science calls the physical body….
I was already becoming irritated by this repetition of the words ‘occult science’, and by what sounds like an attempt to impress by sheer wordiness (‘this part is what occult science calls the physical body’; why not just: ‘i.e. the body’). He goes on:
In order to throw light on its conception of this body, occult science at first directs attention to a phenomenon which confronts all observers of life like a great riddle—the phenomenon of death—and in connection with it occult science points to so-called inanimate nature, the mineral kingdom. We are thus referred to facts which it devolves on occult science to explain, and to which an important part of this work must be devoted.
Gurdjieff's followers suspect that he wrote certain works—like Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson—in a deliberately complicated style, to force the reader to make enormous mental efforts. I wondered at first whether this was Steiner's intention: to weed out the lazy. But further reading makes it clear that this is Steiner's natural way of expressing himself.
I persevered for another week, reading various other works by Steiner: Theosophy, Knowledge of Higher Worlds, Christianity as a Mystical Fact, and finally gave up. I wrote a regretful line to the publisher telling him that, with the best will in the world, I just couldn't go through with it. In large doses, Steiner simply infuriated me. The publisher was perfectly amiable about it. He approached that brilliant cultural historian of the ‘occult underground’, James Webb, who agreed to write the book.
Alas, Webb began to show signs of mental instability in 1979, and on 8 May 1980, he committed suicide with a rifle. Webb and I had been in correspondence over the years, and I was saddened by his death. I also found myself wondering whether his attempt to digest hundreds of yards of Steiner's woolly prose had anything to do with his suicide. Webb's own drily ironic account of Steiner in his book T
he Occult Establishment (1976)—in a chapter entitled ‘Ginungagapp’—makes it clear that his book would have been written from the viewpoint of an ‘unbeliever’.
But circumstances were to draw me back to Steiner. In 1982, I started making plans to write a history of psychometry—the strange ability of certain people to hold an object in their hands and ‘see’ its history. This is by no means as absurd as it sounds. The word was invented by J. Rhodes Buchanan, an American professor of medicine, in the mid-nineteenth century. A bishop named Polk happened to tell Buchanan that he could distinguish brass in the dark by touching it with his fingertips—it caused a peculiar brassy taste in his mouth. Buchanan noted this as a medical curiosity, and discovered that many of his students possessed the same faculty. They were able, for example, to identify various chemicals wrapped in thick brown paper packages, merely by touching them. But the strangest thing of all was when Buchanan discovered a man who could hold a sealed letter in his hand, and ‘sense’ the mood and the background of the person who wrote it.
Buchanan's discoveries were taken up by a professor of geology named William Denton; he discovered that ‘sensitives’ could hold a geological specimen—a meteorite, a piece of dinosaur bone, a fragment of tile from a Roman villa—and see visions of its history. Denton, like Buchanan, was convinced that this was a perfectly normal human faculty, merely waiting to be developed, a kind of ‘telescope into the past’. He had no doubt that it would revolutionize the science of history, as historians trained themselves to hold some relic from a battlefield or death chamber, and to witness scenes from the past as if watching some ancient film material from the archives.
Regrettably, the birth of ‘spiritualism’ in the 1850s led to bitter controversies, and caused scientists to dismiss anything that sounded even vaguely ‘occult’. Buchanan and Denton were tarred with the same brush as Madame Blavatsky and Daniel Dunglas Home (Browning's ‘Mr Sludge the Medium’) and their attempt to create a new science was forgotten.
That remarkable and irrepressible lady Madame Blavatsky also claimed to possess a certain power of psychometry. In her two major works, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, she states that the universe is permeated by a kind of psychic ether called Akasa—telepathy and clairvoyance are ‘waves’ in this ether. Akasa also records everything that has ever happened, like some incredible combination of film camera and gramophone record, and the ‘Akasic (or Akashic) records’ can be ‘played back’ by psychics and clairvoyants. Madame Blavatsky wrote a great deal about the history of Atlantis, Lemuria and other ‘ancient civilizations’, claiming to have acquired her knowledge direct from the Akasic records. And in his book Cosmic Memory, Steiner makes much the same claim.
All this has done Steiner's reputation no good. In The Occult Establishment, James Webb represents him as a kind of gifted dabbler with the mind of a jackdaw. ‘Steiner's ideas form less of a “system” than an accumulation of sometimes disconnected items. Thus from Theosophy he took the ideas of karma and reincarnation; from his mystical studies and possibly the O.T.O [a dubious magical order], a personal “Rosicrucianism”. He discovered an entirely new idiosyncratic and personal interpretation of Christianity, and somehow contrived a seeming coherence with these teachings for theories of the social and artistic life of man.’ In other words, Steiner was an intellectual opportunist who patched together his own religious system from attractive bits and pieces of other people's ideas. And when he goes on to talk about the ‘gaggle of adoring women’ who caused the break-up of Steiner's first marriage, and a tale (told by Steiner's stepdaughter) of how her mother found Steiner in bed with one of his disciples, it is not difficult to read between the lines to his view of Steiner as a pious fraud.
In order to write the section of my Psychic Detectives that dealt with ‘The Akasic records’, I had to renew my acquaintance with Rudolf Steiner. I read the biography by Johannes Hemleben, and set out to trace the development of his ideas from his early days in the Goethe Archive, where he edited Goethe's scientific writings. This led me to look at early works like The Philosophy of Freedom and Goethe's World View. Rather to my surprise, I discovered that Steiner was a philosopher and cultural historian of considerable brilliance. There was not the slightest flavour of the bogus in these works—on the contrary, they give the impression of a man who is totally fascinated by the history of ideas, and who tries to say what he has to say as simply and clearly as he can. The rather abstract quality of his style is due to complete lack of artifice; he is not out to impress—either with beauty of style, or with an obscurity that might be mistaken for profundity. A reference to Goethe, the man Steiner admired above everyone, led me to look up the passage in question, and it suddenly struck me that this is the key to Steiner's style. To modern ears, Goethe's prose sounds disagreeably stiff and stilted—even in novels like Wilhelm Meister and Elective Affinities. The Conversations with Eckermann indicate that he even talked like that: ‘Religion stands in the same relation to art as any other of the higher interests of life. It is merely to be looked upon as a material, with similar claims to any other vital material. Faith and want of faith are not the organs with which a work of art is to be apprehended. On the contrary, human powers and capacities of a totally different character are required….’ The thought is perfectly clear, but it is hard to imagine a modern sage, even if he happened to be a university professor, expressing himself in this rather abstract manner. I believe that, after years of working in the Goethe Archive in Weimar, Goethe's prose style simply became second nature to Steiner.
I also found myself in deep sympathy with what Steiner is trying to do in these early works. Like the young H. G. Wells at about the same time, he was fascinated by science and the scientific method. Yet he was revolted by the materialistic world-picture of modern science. He wanted to show that it simply wouldn't hold water—that total material fails to account for the complexities of the universe and of human existence. But he was not content with denouncing it on vaguely poetic or artistic grounds. He wanted to get an intellectual crowbar underneath it and overturn it from the foundations. Madame Blavatsky also spends a great deal of time in Isis Unveiled attacking modern science; but as a spiritualist and an ‘occultist’ she never stood the slightest chance of convincing a single scientist. Steiner argues as someone with an immense grasp of modern science and philosophy, and the result is impressive. If Steiner had died before he took the leap into ‘occultism’, he would now be classified with Bergson, Whitehead, Samuel Alexander, Hans Driesch, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Karl Popper as a philosopher who wanted to demonstrate that scientific materialism is too narrow.
After reading these books I felt stricken with guilt—like a man who has condemned someone as a crook and then discovered he is rigidly honest. It was possible, of course, that Steiner had ‘sold out’ after about 1900, and decided to settle for the rewards of a religious messiah; but on the evidence of his early writing, that seemed unlikely. Self-deception comes hard to men of Steiner's type.
Because I had become so fascinated by the development of Steiner's ideas, the section I wrote about him in my history of psychometry—The Psychic Detectives—was far too long. When it came to a question of cutting the book by a few thousand words, these pages on Steiner's philosophical ideas seemed an obvious candidate. But removing them caused so much regret that I thereupon decided to use them as the foundation of a book on Steiner. I wrote to the publisher and asked him if he was still interested; fortunately, he was. So once again, I took a deep breath and plunged into the works of Steiner.
This time I decided to begin with the autobiography he had written two years before his death. It was a happy decision. Pupils had asked Steiner to write something about his intellectual development, and he did this in a series of articles that were published in the ‘house magazine’ of the Anthroposophical Society, The Goetheanum. Since he was writing for students and disciples, and not for the general public, Steiner obviously felt that he could write about a
nything that interested him, and pause for lengthy ruminations whenever he felt inclined. After four hundred pages, he had only brought the narrative as far as the year 1907, and at that point he died, worn out by the burdens of a messiah with too many disciples. (There must have been times when he felt like a cake divided into crumbs.) The result is a marvellously detailed account of his early development which answers every major question. It also leaves no possible doubt that there was any fundamental change of direction in Steiner's life. By the early 1890s—by which time he was in his early thirties—Steiner had already developed all the insights that were to form the basis of his ‘occult science’. W. B. Yeats once said that when he went to London, he was like an old brass cannon primed to explode. The same is true of Steiner when he went to Berlin in 1897. He was prepared to launch a new vision of human evolution on the world.
What then went wrong?—for there is no doubt in my mind that something did go wrong, leading to his early death at the age of sixty-four. (He had always been in robust health, and might have been expected, like Goethe, to live into his eighties.) I suspect that he made his first major mistake in agreeing to become the German head of the Theosophical Society, the organization founded by Madame Blavatsky. Intellectually speaking, Steiner was far more of a heavyweight than anyone in the Society. He had already formulated his basic philosophy. He had nothing whatever to gain from association with people who were regarded as occultist cranks, who believed that Madame Blavatsky was the mouthpiece of Secret Masters who lived on mountaintops in Tibet. Worse still, the Theosophists discovered a new messiah in 1909, a fourteen-year-old Hindu boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti, and announced that he was to be the next world saviour. Steiner flatly declined to accept this, and not long thereafter, severed his connection with the Theosophists. But it was too late to prevent himself being tarred with the same brush as the Theosophists. It has done Steiner's reputation no good whatever to be bracketed with Madame Blavatsky.
