Steiner Predicts

 [Much of the material on this page originally appeared, in a different form, at a discussion list associated with http://waldorfcritics.org ]

“Leading up to the middle of this age [the Sixth], some time about 4300 to 4700, it is the turn of Michael (now an Archon but no longer Spirit of the Age) to act again as the ruling Time Archangel; so a further enhancement of the Christ impulse may then be expected. By now many people have made the eightfold path of Buddha their own in its modern form, which leads through conscious exercises to the unfolding of the 16-petal lotus flower in the larynx.” [1]

Not too nasty, yet. But having a lotus flower of any number of petals unfold in one’s larynx...I guess I’d opt out on that. But some of Steiner/Seddon's predictions sound like good news. It’ll be nice to have Michael back again, for instance. Seddon’s sudden uncertainty about dates is a little surprising, though, given what we’ve heard from him previously. It almost shakes one's faith in him.

Now the nastiness begins: “This age in fact recapitulates the Persian (Gemini) age, especially its experience of the polarities between light and dark, good and evil, which is now an actual division between good and evil races.” [2]

"Evil races." We shouldn’t be surprised. Any close examination of Steiner’s teachings always arrives at his detestable racism. Steiner’s followers, Anthroposophists, claim that Steiner was not a racist and that they are not racists now. Their point is that Steiner and they never hated any races; they merely faced up to the "objective" fact, "verified" by Steiner's clairvoyant wisdom, that some races are better than others.

Let’s get off this hateful topic for a minute. (We will inevitably return to it—in this very paragraph, as a matter of fact.) You know how Google Book Searches work? Book publishers can have Google block your access to certain pages in their books. Is anyone surprised that p. 53 is blocked? (I'm writing this during December, 2007.) Yet in discussing differences between races, Seddon is only telling the Steinerian truth. So, why cover up p. 53? Because  Anthroposophists cover up many things—this is just par for the course, for them. Where's the fun in having secret mystical knowledge if you blab about it? But practicing deception may prove to be a losing game in the Internet Age, when information is more readily available than ever before. (Oddly, the Internet Age is one epoch Steiner didn’t predict.)

“A wonderful legend describes to us the state of development of the soul. The soul is in a different line of evolution than the body of the human being. The difference between soul and racial development can be seen if we look into the past. Souls were incarnated many times in the Atlantean race; all of you were Atlanteans at that time. The souls worked themselves out of that situation and the remaining human bodies belonged to the races that had become decadent and were falling into decline. The souls left the bodies of the races and rose up to higher races. Human bodies afflicted with fundamental evil will not have souls within them that are striving to rise above their present state to a higher one.” [3]


Yes indeed, that’s a pretty swell legend. Bear in mind that for Steiner, legends, myths, even folk tales contain and reveal truth. What we’re looking at, here, is one of Steiner’s preoccupying fixations.

“This was the reason that the lower races had fewer and fewer descendants, while the higher races had more and more. Gradually the lowest levels of the ... [etc.]” [4]

This stuff is horrible. If you want to skip over the next few Steiner remarks, I won't blame you. They are horrible and—if you've been to my other Web sites—a bit repetitious. Certain Steiner quotes should be memorized, if not actually inscribed on currency. If you've already memorized the following, please move on:

“A race or a nation stands so much the higher, the more perfectly its members express the pure, ideal human type, the further they have worked their way from the physical and perishable to the supersensible and imperishable.” [5]

To summarize: According to Steiner, some races are good and some are bad; some are higher and some are lower. Can you guess what race(s) Steiner thought were tops? What would they look like? “Blond hair actually bestows intelligence. In the case of fair people, less nourishment is driven into the eyes and hair; it remains instead in the brain and endows it with intelligence. Brown- and dark-haired people drive the substances into their eyes and hair that the fair people retain in their brains.” [6] Bear in mind that Steiner wrote and spoke a lot about the high virtues of the “Aryan” race.
 
As for whether Steiner hated anyone, try this on: “The use of the French language quite certainly corrupts the soul. The soul acquires nothing more than the possibility of clichés. Those who enthusiastically speak French transfer that to other languages. The French are also ruining what maintains their dead language, namely, their blood. The French are committing the terrible brutality of moving black people to Europe, but it works, in an even worse way, back on France. It has an enormous effect on the blood and the race and contributes considerably toward French decadence. The French as a race are reverting.” [7] The Anthroposophical editors of this two-volume compendium were so embarrassed by the above Francophobe/anti-African passage that they appended an apology and semi-defense.
 

[1] TFOHATEAFBRS, p.49.

[2] TFOHATEAFBRS, p. 53.

[3] Rudolf Steiner, READING THE PICTURES OF THE APOCALYPSE: Notes from Sixteen Lectures (SteinerBooks, 1993), pp. 49-50.

[4] Rudolf Steiner, THE SPIRITUAL FOUNDATION OF MORALITY (SteinerBooks, 1995), p. 30.

[5] Rudolf Steiner, KNOWLEDGE OF THE HIGHER WORLDS AND ITS ATTAINMENT (Anthroposophic Press, 1944 and Steiner Books, 1947), p. 252.

[6] Rudolf Steiner, HEALTH AND ILLNESS, VOL. 1. Lectures from 1922 (Anthroposophic Press, 1981), pp. 85-86.

[7] Rudolf Steiner, FACULTY MEETINGS WITH RUDOLF STEINER (Anthroposophic Press, 1998), pp. 558-559.