Yesterday
I gave you pictures of two or three personalities. In order to
allow for the possibility of proof and confirmation, at least as
far as external details are concerned; it is necessary to choose
fairly well-known personalities and in describing them to you I
have pointed in each case to characteristic qualities which can
afford clues for the spiritual scientific investigator and help
him to follow up the karmic relationships. This time I have
chosen subjects which will also enable me to deal with a problem
that has been put to me by members of our Society. Simply stated,
it is as follows. Constantly, on every suitable occasion,
reference is made — and of course correctly — to the
fact that in very early times there were Initiates possessed of a
lofty wisdom and at a high stage of development, and the question
arises: If human beings pass through repeated earth-lives, where
are these highly-initiated personalities? Where are they today?
Are they to be found among the human beings who have been led to
reincarnation at the present time? I have accordingly chosen
examples which will enable me to deal with this very problem.
I
gave you, as far as was necessary, a picture of the hero of the
freedom of Italy, Garibaldi; and if you take what I said
yesterday and add to it all that is well-known to you about this
personality — a whole wealth of information is available
about him — I think you will still find a very great deal
in Garibaldi that is puzzling and that opens up significant
questions.
Take
two events of his life which amused you yesterday. — He
became acquainted through a telescope with the girl who was to be
his life-companion for many years, and he learnt of his own
death-sentence when reading his name for the first time in print.
There is still another very striking event in his life. The
life-companion whom he found in the way I have described, and who
stood at his side with such heroism, was the sharer of his life
for many years. He certainly managed to see something very good
through his telescope! Later, she died, leaving him alone, and he
married a second time, this time not through a telescope —
not even a Garibaldi is likely to do such a thing more than once!
— this time he married, shall I say, in a perfectly
conventional bourgeois manner. But for Garibaldi the marriage
lasted no longer than one day. So you see, there is this other
very striking fact in Garibaldi's relations with the ordinary
bourgeois conditions of this world.
And
now we come to something else of importance. The things I am
describing to you come, as it were, with suddenness to one
accustomed to occult researches of this kind; they are clues that
enable his vision to penetrate right into an earlier life or into
a number of earlier lives. And in Garibaldi's life there is still
another circumstance which raises a formidable problem.
Garibaldi,
you know, was a Republican in his very bones; he was a Republican
through and through. I made that abundantly clear in yesterday's
lecture. And yet in all his plans for the liberation of Italy he
never set out to make Italy into a Republic, but rather
into an Empire under Victor Emanuel. That is an
astonishing fact. When one looks at Garibaldi's whole life and
character and then considers this fact, it really does astonish
one.
There
we have on the one hand Victor Emmanuel, who could of course
reign as king only over a liberated Italy. And we have on the
other hand Mazzini — also deeply united in friendship with
Garibaldi — who, as you know, stood for a long time at the
head of what was intended to be an Italian Republic, for
he was willing to come forward only as the founder of an Italian
Republic. The karmic relationships of Garibaldi will never be
solved unless we take note here of a special set of
circumstances.
In
the course of a few years — Garibaldi, you know, was born
at Nice in 1807 — there were born within an area of a
comparatively few square miles, four men who had a significant
connection with one another in the wider course of European
circumstances. In Nice, at the beginning of the 19th century,
Garibaldi was born; in Genoa, not far away, Mazzini; in Turin,
again not far, away, Cavour; and from the House of Savoy, once
more at no great distance, Victor Emanuel. These four men are all
quite near to one another in respect of the times and places of
their births. And it is these four men together who, if not
agreeing in thought, if not even acting always in mutual
agreement, nevertheless established the country which became
modern Italy.
You
can see how the very way in which these four personalities are
brought together in history suggests that they have, not only for
themselves, but for the world, a common destiny. The most
significant among them is, without doubt, Garibaldi himself.
Taking into consideration all human conditions and relationships,
we cannot but agree that he is by far the most significant figure
of the four. Garibaldi's mentality, however, expresses itself in
an elemental way. Mazzini's mentality is that of a learned
philosopher; Cavour's that of a learned lawyer. And as for Victor
Emmanuel's mentality ... well, there is no doubt about it, the
most important among them all is Garibaldi. He possesses a
quality of mind and spirit that expresses itself with elemental
force, so that one cannot remain indifferent towards it. One
cannot remain indifferent, for one simply doesn't know whence
these traits come ... as long as they are looked at from the
standpoint of the personal psychology of a single earth-life.
Now
I come back to the question: Where are the earlier Initiates? For
certainly it will be said that they are not to be found. But, my
dear friends — I shall have to say something paradoxical
here! — if it were possible for a number of human beings to
be born today at the age of seventeen or eighteen, so that when
they descended from the spiritual world they would in some way or
other find and enter seventeen- or eighteen-year-old bodies, or
if at least human beings could in some way be spared from going
to school (as schools are constituted today), then you would find
that those who were once Initiates would be able to appear in the
human being of the present day. But just as little as it is
possible, under the conditions obtaining on earth today, for an
Initiate, when he needs bread, to nourish himself from a piece of
ice, just as little is it possible for the wisdom of an older
time to manifest directly, in the form that you would
expect, in a body that has received education — in the
present-day accepted sense of the word — up to his
seventeenth or eighteenth year. Nowhere in the world is this
possible; at all events, nowhere in the civilised world. We have
here to take account of things that lie altogether beyond the
outlook of the educated people of modern times.
When,
as is the custom today, a child is obliged as early as the sixth
or seventh year to learn to read and write, it is torture for the
soul that wants to develop and unfold in accordance with its own
nature. I can only repeat what I have already told you in my
autobiography, that I owe the removal of many hindrances to the
circumstance that when I was twelve years old I was still unable
to write properly. For the capacity of being able to write, in
the way that is demanded today, kills certain qualities in the
human being.
It
is necessary to say such a thing, paradoxical though it may
sound, for it is the truth. There is no help for it — it is
a fact. Hence it is that a highly evolved individual can be
recognised in his reincarnation only if one looks at
manifestations of human nature which are not directly apparent in
a person, if he has gone through a modern education, but reveal
themselves, so to speak, behind him. We have in Garibaldi
a most striking example of this. What did civilised men,
including Cavour, or at all events the followers of Cavour, think
of Garibaldi? They regarded him as a madcap with whom it was
useless to discuss anything in a sensible manner. That is a point
of which we must take note; for there was much in his arguments
and in his whole way of speaking that was bound to appear
illogical, to say the least, to people enamoured of modern
civilisation. Very often the things he says simply do not hold
together. But when we are able to see behind a personality, and
can look at that which in an earlier earth-life was able to enter
into the body, but in this earth-life, because modern
civilisation makes the bodies unfit, was not able to enter
into the body — then we can begin to have an idea of
what such a personality really is. Otherwise we are off the
track, for what is of most importance in such a personality lies
right behind the things he can reveal externally. A good
conventional man of the world, who simply expresses himself in
the way he has learned to do, and in whom we see merely a
reflection of the teaching and education he has received at
school and elsewhere — such a man you can “photograph”
in his moral and spiritual nature. He is there. A person,
however, who comes over from other times bearing a soul filled
with great and far-reaching wisdom, so that the soul cannot
express itself in the body, can never be estimated with the means
afforded by modern civilisation by what he does in the body.
Above all, Garibaldi cannot be judged in that way. In his case it
is rather like having to do — I am speaking metaphorically
— with spiritualistic pictures, where a phantom becomes
visible behind. With a personality like Garibaldi, you see him
first as he is according to conventional standards, and behind
you see something spiritual, a spirit-portrait, as it were, of
that which in this incarnation cannot enter fully into the body.
When
we take all this into consideration, and particularly if we
meditate upon the special facts I have mentioned, then our vision
is indeed led back from Garibaldi to a true Initiate who to all
appearance lives out his Garibaldi-life in a quite different way,
because he is unable to come down into his body.
If
you consider the peculiar characteristics of Garibaldi's life to
which I drew your attention, you will not find this so
astonishing after all. A man must surely be somewhat of a
stranger to earthly conventions if he finds his way into family
relations through a telescope! Such a happening is certainly not
usual, and it was not the only one in Garibaldi's life. In the
characteristic style of his life there is something that
immediately points away from ordinary alignment with bourgeois
conventions.
Thus,
in the case of Garibaldi, we are led back to an Initiate-life,
and it was a life in those Mysteries which I described to you
some months ago as proceeding from Ireland. Garibaldi, however,
is to be found in an offshoot of those Mysteries at no great
distance from here, in Alsace. There we find him, as an Initiate
of a certain degree. And it is moreover fairly certain that
between this incarnation in the 9th century, A.D., and his last
incarnation in the 19th century, there was no further
incarnation, but a long sojourn in the spiritual world. There you
have the secret of this personality. He received all that I have
described to you as the wisdom of Hibernia, and he received it at
a very high stage of Initiation. He was within the places of the
Mysteries in Ireland, and was actually the leader of the colony
that came over later into Europe.
It
goes without saying that just as an object reflected in a mirror
becomes different in its reflected form, so all the wisdom of
that time and place, embracing as it did the physical world and
the spiritual world above it — all the wisdom in which an
Initiate of those times participated, as I described it to you a
few months ago — had to express itself during the 19th
century in accordance with the civilisation of that period. You
must accustom yourselves, when you find a philosopher in bygone
times, or when you find a poet or an artist, not to look
for the same individuality in the present epoch as a philosopher,
poet or artist. The individuality passes from earth-life to
earth-life, but the way in which he is able to live out his life
depends upon what is possible in a particular epoch. Let me here
insert an instance that will make this plain.
We
will take another very well-known personality, Ernst Haeckel.
Ernst Haeckel is famous as an enthusiastic adherent of a certain
materialistic Monism — enthusiastic, one may say, to the
point of fanaticism. He is well enough known to you; I need not
give you any description of Haeckel. Now when we are led back
from this personality to a former incarnation, we come to the
monk Hildebrand, who later became Pope Gregory VII.
I
have chosen this instance so that you may see how differently the
same individuality may express himself externally, in accordance
with the cultural “climate” of the period. One would
certainly not expect to look for the reincarnation of Pope
Gregory VII in the 19th century representative of materialistic
Monism.
The
things that a man brings to manifestation on the physical plane,
with the means afforded by external civilisation, are far less
important to the spiritual world than one is inclined to suppose.
Behind the personalities of the monk Hildebrand and Haeckel lies
something wherein they are alike and this is of much greater
account than the differences between them. One of them fights to
the utmost to enhance the power of Roman Catholicism, and the
other fights to the utmost against Roman Catholicism, but for the
spiritual world it makes little difference. These things,
fundamentally speaking, are important for the physical world
only; they are quite different from the underlying elements in
human nature which count in the spiritual world. And so we need
not be astonished, my dear friends, if we have to see in
Garibaldi an Initiate from an earlier age, an Initiate, as I
said, of the 9th century. In the 19th century this comes to
expression in the only way possible during that century. You will
agree that for the whole way in which a man takes his place in
the world, his temperament, his qualities of character are of
importance. But if everything that made up Garibaldi's soul in an
earlier incarnation had emerged in the 19th century, together
with his temperament, he would most certainly have been regarded
as a lunatic by the men of the 19th century. He would have been
considered quite mad. As much of him as could emerge —
that, externally, was Garibaldi.
And
now, once we have been led in a certain direction, explanations
light up for other karmic connections. The other three men of
whom I have spoken, who were brought together again with
Garibaldi in one region and approximately in the same decade, had
been his pupils in that distant time — mark well, his
pupils, assembled from distant parts of the earth, one
from far away in the North, another from far away in the East and
the third from far away in the West, called from all corners of
the earth to be his pupils.
Now
in the Irish Mysteries a definite obligation went with a certain
degree of Initiation. It consisted in this, that the Initiate was
bound to help his pupils in all future earth-lives; he must not
desert them. When, therefore, owing to their special karmic
connections they make their appearance again on earth at the same
time as their teacher, this means that he must experience the
course of destiny with them; their karma has to be brought into
reckoning with his own. If Garibaldi had not, at an earlier time,
been associated as teacher with the individuality who came to be
Victor Emmanuel, then he would have been in very deed a
Republican and would have founded the Republic of Italy. But
behind all abstract principles are actual human lives passing
from one earth-existence to another. Behind lies the duty of the
Initiate of old towards his pupils. Hence the contradiction, for
in accordance with the conceptions and ideas facing Garibaldi in
the 19th century, he became quite naturally a Republican. What
else should he have been? I have known a number of Republicans
who were faithful servants of royalty. Inwardly they were
Republicans, for the simple reason that in a certain period of
the 19th century — it is long past now, at the time when I
was a boy — everyone who counted himself an intelligent
person was a Republican. People said: Of course we are
Republicans, only we must not show it in the outer world.
Inwardly, however, they were Republicans. So, of course, was
Garibaldi, except that he did not show it in the outer world. He
did not carry his republicanism into effect and those who were
inspired by him could not understand this. Why was it? Because,
as I have explained to you, he could not desert Victor Emmanuel,
who was karmically united with him. He was obliged to help him
on; and this was the only way he could do it.
Similarly
the others, Cavour and Mazzini, were karmically united with
Garibaldi, and he was able to do for them only as much as their
capacities allowed. Whatever could proceed from all four of them,
that alone Garibaldi was able to bring to fulfillment. He could
not go his own way independently.
From
this deeply significant fact, my dear friends, you can see that
many things in life can be explained only from out of an occult
background.
Have
you not often experienced how at some moment of his life a person
does something that is quite incomprehensible to you? You would
not have expected it of him; you cannot possibly explain it from
his character. You feel that if he were to follow his personal
character, he would do something different. And you may be right.
But there is another man living near him, with whom he is
karmically united, as in Garibaldi's case. Why does he act as he
does? It is really only against an occult background. that life
becomes explicable. And so, in the case of Garibaldi, for
example, we can truly say that we are led back to the Hibernian
Mysteries — it sounds like a paradox but it is a fact. If
we turn our gaze to the spiritual, we find that what meets us in
external life on earth is, in many of its aspects, maya. Many
people with whom you are constantly together in ordinary life —
if you could tell them what you are able to learn about them by
looking through to the individuality behind — would be
exceedingly astonished, they would be utterly bewildered. For
what a person expresses outwardly — and this is
particularly so in the present age, for the reasons I have given
— is the merest fraction of what he really is, in terms of
his former earth-lives. Many secrets are hidden in the things of
which I am now speaking.
And
now let us take the second personality of whom I gave you
yesterday a brief characterisation —
Gotthold Lessing, who at the end of his life came forward with
his pronouncement on repeated earth-lives. In his case we are led
very far back, right back into Greek antiquity, when the ancient
Mysteries of Greece were in their prime. Lessing was an Initiate
in these Mysteries. In the 13th century, as a repetition of his
life in ancient Greece, we find an incarnation when he was a
member of the Dominican Order, a distinguished Schoolman with
subtle and penetrating concepts; and then, in the 18th century,
he became the journalist par excellence of Central Europe.
Take
that drama of tolerance, Nathan the Wise, or such a book
as The Dramatic Art of Hamburg — read for yourselves
certain chapters of that book and then read The Education of
the Human Race. These writings are comprehensible only on the
assumption that all three incarnations of this personality have
worked upon them: the Greek Initiate of olden times (read
Lessing's treatise, How the men of old pictured death);
the Schoolman, versed in medieval Aristotelianism; and lastly he
who, with all this resting in his soul, found his way into the
civilisation of the 18th century. Then, if you will keep in mind
what I have just told you, a certain fact will become clear, a
most striking and surprising fact.
It
is remarkable how Lessing's life gives one the impression of a
continual search. He himself brought this characteristic
of his spiritual nature to expression when he uttered the famous
saying, which has been quoted again and again (quoted, however,
with very little understanding, by people who have no particular
desire to strive after anything at all): “If God held in
his right hand the whole full Truth, and in his left the
everlasting striving after Truth, I would fall down before Him
and say, ‘Father, give me what thou hast in thy left
hand’.” A Lessing could say that. But when a mere
pedant says it after him, it is of course intolerable. Lessing's
whole life was indeed a search, an intense search. This comes to
expression again and again in his works, and if we were honest
with ourselves we should have to admit that many of Lessing's
utterances are clumsy on this account, precisely those that are
the most full of genius. People do not dare to admit that they
stumble over them, because in history and literature Lessing is
accounted a great man. In truth, however, his sayings often trip
one up, so to speak; or, rather, they give one a feeling of being
stabbed. You must, of course, become acquainted with Lessing
himself to understand this. If you take up the book by Erich
Schmidt, the two volumes on Lessing, then even when Erich Schmidt
quotes him word for word you will not feel as though his
utterances impaled you. Not at all! They may be the
utterances of Lessing as far as the sound of the words goes, but
what is written in the book before and after them takes away
their edge.
It
was not until the end of his earthly life that this seeker came
to write The Education of the Human Race, which closes
with the idea of repeated earth-lives. What is the explanation?
My
dear friends, the way to understand this fact is through another
fact I once mentioned. In the quarterly periodical Das
Reich, edited
by our friend Bernus, I wrote an article on The
Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz
and I drew attention to the fact that it was written down by a
boy of seventeen or eighteen. The boy himself understood not a
word of it. We have external proof of that. He wrote down this
Chymical
Wedding
from beginning to end. The last page is not extant, but he wrote
down the whole of the Chymical
Wedding,
without understanding a word of it. If he had understood it, he
would have been bound to retain the understanding in later years.
The boy, however, became a pastor, a good, honest pastor of the
Württemberg-Swabian type, who wrote exhortations and
theological treatises which are distinctly below the average, and
very far indeed from having anything to do with the content of
the Chymical
Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.
Life itself proves to us that it was not the Swabian pastor-to-be
who wrote this Chymical
Wedding
out of his own soul. It is an inspired writing throughout.
So
we may not always have to do with a person's own personality;
there may be times when a spirit expresses itself through him.
But there is a difference between the good Swabian pastor
Valentin Andreae, who wrote those conventional theological
treatises, and Lessing. Had Lessing been Valentin Andreae, merely
transported into the 18th century, he might perhaps have written
in his youth a beautiful treatise on the Education of the Human
Race, bringing in the idea of repeated earth-lives. But he was
not Valentin Andreae; he was Lessing, Lessing who had no visions,
who even — so it is said — had no dreams. He banished
the inspirer — unconsciously of course. If the inspirer had
wanted to take possession of him in his youth, Lessing would have
said: Go away, I have nothing to do with you. He followed the
path that was normal for an educated man in the 18th century. And
so it was only in extreme old age that he was mature enough to
understand what had been in him throughout his life. It was with
him as it would have been with Valentin Andreae if the latter had
also banished the inspirer, had written no trivial, edifying
sermons and theological treatises, but had waited until he
reached old age and had then written the Chymical Marriage of
Christian Rosenkreutz consciously.
Such
are the links that unite successive earth-lives. And the day must
come when this will be clearly understood. If we take a single
earth-life, whether it be that of Goethe, or Lessing or Herbert
Spencer or Shakespeare or Darwin, and look at what emerges from
that life alone, it is just as though we were to pluck off
a flower from a plant and imagine that it can exist by itself. A
single life on earth is not comprehensible by itself; the
explanation for it must be sought on the basis of repeated
earth-lives.
And
now we shall find it most interesting to study the two
personalities of whom I spoke yesterday, Lord Byron and my
geometry teacher. (You will pardon me if I become personal here.)
They had in common only the construction of the foot, but this is
a feature that specially repays attention. If one follows it up
in an occult sense, it leads one to a peculiar condition of the
head in an earlier earth-life. I have shown you a similar
connection in the case of Eduard von Hartmann. — There is
no getting over it. One can do no other than simply relate such
things, as vision reveals them to one. No external, logical
proofs, no proofs in the ordinary sense, can be given for
these things. — When we follow the lives of these two men,
it appears to us as though the lives they led in the 19th century
had been shifted out of place. For we find, first of all, a
contradiction of something mentioned here a few weeks ago —
that in the course of certain cycles of time, those who were once
contemporaries will incarnate again as contemporaries.
Everything, of course, has its exceptions. In the spiritual world
there are rules, but there are no rigid schemes. Everything is
individual.
Thus
in the case of these two personalities one is led back to a
period when their lives ran together. I would never have found
Byron in this earlier life if I had not found this geometry
teacher of mine at his side. Byron was a genius. My geometry
teacher was not even a genius in his own way. He was not a genius
at all, but he was an excellent geometrician, quite the best I
have ever come across, because he was a genuine geometrician and
nothing else. In the case of a painter or a musician, you know
that you are dealing with a one-sided man. For as a matter of
fact, people are significant only when they are one-sided. As a
rule, however, a geometrician in our time is not one-sided. A
geometrician knows the whole of mathematics; when he constructs
something in geometry, he always knows how to state the equations
for it. He knows the mathematical, calculating side of it all.
But this geometry teacher, though an excellent geometrician, was
properly speaking no mathematician at all. He understood, for
example, nothing whatever of analytical geometry. He knew nothing
of the geometry that has to do with calculating and equations; in
that respect he sometimes did the most childish things. On one
occasion it was really very humorous. The man was so entirely a
constructive geometrician and nothing else that he arrived by
means of constructive geometry at the fact that the circle is the
locus of the constant quotient. He found it out by construction,
and since no one had found it before by construction, he regarded
himself as its discoverer. We boys, who were as yet
unsophisticated and had a good store of high spirits left in us,
knew that in our book of analytical geometry it is shown how one
sets up such and such an equation and the circle results. We took
the occasion to change the name of the circle and to start
calling it by the name of our geometry teacher. The “N.N.
line” we called it (I won't give his real name). This man
had in fact the one-sidedness of the constructive geometrician to
the point of genius. That was what was so significant about him;
his character and talents were so clearly defined. People of the
present day are not like that at all; you cannot get hold of
them; they are like slippery eels! My teacher was anything but a
slippery eel; he was a man with sharp corners, and that even in
his external appearance. He had a face shaped like this —
quite square, a most interesting head, absolutely four-angled,
nowhere round. Really, you could study in the face of the man the
right-angled nature of his peculiar constructive talent. It was
most interesting.
Now,
in vision, this personality is found directly by the side of
Byron, and one is led back to early times in Eastern Europe, one
or two hundred years before the Crusades. I once told you how,
when the Roman Emperor Constantine founded Constantinople, he had
the
Palladium —
which had been taken originally to Rome from Troy — removed
from Rome to Constantinople. The transference was carried out
with tremendous pomp and ceremony. For the Palladium was regarded
as a particularly sacred object, which bestowed power upon
whoever had it. It was firmly believed in Rome that as long as
the Palladium lay beneath a pillar in the city, the power of Rome
resided in it, and that this power had been brought across to
Rome from the once mighty city of Troy, devastated by the Greeks.
And so Constantine, whose destiny it was to transplant the power
of Rome to Constantinople, caused the Palladium to be taken
across to Constantinople with great pomp and ceremony, though to
begin with, quite secretly. He caused it to be buried, a wall
built about it, and set up an ancient pillar that came from
Egypt, over the spot where the Palladium lay. On the top of the
pillar he placed an ancient statue of Apollo, so arranged as to
look like himself. Then he had nails brought from the Cross of
Christ. And out of these he made a sort of halo for the statue,
which was, as I have said, an ancient statue of Apollo and at the
same time was supposed to represent himself. And so there the
Palladium lay, in Constantinople.
Now
there is a legend which has later assumed strange forms, but is
in reality very, very ancient. Later, in connection with the
Testament of Peter the Great, it was revived and transformed, but
it goes back to very ancient times. The legend tells how at some
time in the future the Palladium would leave Constantinople and
come further up towards the North-East. Hence the idea in the
Russia of a later time that the Palladium must be brought from
the city of Constantinople into Russia, in order that all that is
connected with the Palladium, and had been corrupted under the
rule of the Turks, might have its place in the rule of Eastern
Europe. Now these two personalities in olden times — it was
one or two hundred years before the Crusades but I have not been
able to fix the exact year — resolved to go out from what
is now Russia to Constantinople in order, by some means or other,
to capture the Palladium and bring it into the East of Europe.
They
did not succeed. Such a project could never have succeeded, for
the Palladium was well guarded. There was no possibility of
getting hold of it, and those who knew how it was guarded were
not to be won over. But an overwhelming pain took possession of
these two men. And the pain that entered into them like a
piercing ray, paralysing them both in the head, manifested in
Lord Byron in his being somewhat like Achilles who was vulnerable in the heel, for Byron
had a defect in his foot. On the other hand he was a genius in
his head, which was a compensation for the paralysis he had
suffered in that earlier earth-life. The other man also, on
account of the paralysed head, had a defective foot, a clubfoot.
But let me tell you (for it is not generally realised) that man
does not get geometry or mathematics out of his head. If you did
not step the angle with your feet, your head would not have the
perception of it. You would have no geometry at all if you did
not walk and grasp hold of things. Geometry pushes its way up
through the head and comes forth in ideas. And in anyone
who has a foot such as my geometry teacher had, there resides a
strong capacity to be alive to the geometrical constitution of
his limbs and his motor organism and to re-create it in his head.
If
one penetrated more deeply into this geometry teacher of mine,
into his whole spiritual configuration, one gained a significant
impression of him as a human being. There was something really
delightful about his way of doing things! Fundamentally speaking,
he did everything from the point of view of a constructive
geometrician and it was as if the rest of the world were simply
not there. He was a singularly free human being, but one had only
to observe him closely enough to feel as though some inner spell
had once held sway over him and had brought him to the one-sided
condition I have described.
But
now in Lord Byron — I have mentioned the other man only
because I should not have been able to get at the truth about
Lord Byron if he had not put me on the track — in Lord
Byron you can truly see karma working itself out. Once, long ago,
he goes across from the East to fetch the Palladium. When he is
born in the West, he goes eastward to help the cause of freedom,
the spiritual Palladium of the 19th century. And he is drawn to
the very same region of the earth to which he had gone long ago,
from the other side. It is really staggering to see how the same
individuality comes to the same locality in one life from one
direction, in another life from another direction; first,
attracted by something that is still deeply veiled in myth, and
later by what had become the great ideal of the “age of
enlightenment.” There is something in all this that stirs
one very deeply.
The
things that come to light out of karmic connections are indeed
startling. They always are. And in this realm we shall come to
know of many other striking, paradoxical things. Today I wanted
to give you a grasp of the remarkable way in which the
connections between earlier and later earth-lives can play into
human existence.
Continued
in the next issue of SCR.
Previous lecture
Thanks to
the Rudolf Steiner Archive.
