The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Foreword by Marie Steiner

[ 1 ] Even before the turn of the 19th to the 20th , when materialistic life in Europe was at the height of its outward power, there were searching souls scattered everywhere who fled the bourgeois dullness of life into the most diverse movements, from which they hoped to gain a spiritual impulse or a respite from the tormenting riddles regarding the meaning of existence. Into idealistic-social, political-revolutionary, sectarian, or Tolstoyan currents: merely to give their existence a purpose extending beyond the narrow confines of personal life, to escape the agonizing questions about the meaninglessness of an existence whose boundaries are said to be birth and death and physical corporeality. Science had no answer to these questions; the intellect capitulated before them, yet in its narrowly defined arrogance, it relegated the rebellious soul back within these boundaries with a categorical imperative. With tenacious obstinacy, it believed it had to persist within the circular labyrinth in which sensory perception held it captive, and regarded it as amateurish to wish to break out of this circle and shake the gates of the spirit. Increasingly burdened by the heavy constraints of all that a dead intellectual life had brought to the people of the present, the human ego stood freezing and at a loss before the closed gates of the spirit.

[ 2 ] From the twilight of ancient times, many a word echoed forth, as if guiding the way. In the past, there had been esoteric knowledge. Places that were closed to the profane. One entered them at the risk of one’s life, after strict trials and vows, and never did any news of the mysterious proceedings taking place there reach the outside world without being punished by death. But cultures emerged from them, leaders of states and their advisors, religions and their founders, art and teachings of wisdom. And so history took shape under the powerful influence of what emerged from the mystery sites, and one culture followed another, constantly opening up new realms of the struggle for existence to humanity, while at the same time guiding the individual human soul, step by step, up the ladder of human development, into its own inner self, from a dull, passive existence to a conscious, self-determined life, so that it might grow strong within itself and return to the collective life as a strong ego.

[ 3 ] In this way, one must endure all those trials through which alone a person can grow. And here, too, lie the dangers; yet by overcoming them, a person can attain wisdom. Self-mastery is the primary goal of this trial; the great danger is that of losing oneself.

[ 4 ] Yet so many people face this danger today: countless individuals who feel their sense of self slipping away more and more, young people who are perishing from this inner death and, as it were, creeping through the world like living corpses, humanity, which, terrified, suddenly finds itself in the midst of an economic crisis in which its humanity threatens to be lost, in which humanity must capitulate to the machine.

[ 5 ] But into this danger of losing human dignity and the affirmation of humanity, the voice of the Mystery resounds loudly and clearly once more. Unlike before. For the Mystery and its proclamation have also changed. It had withdrawn into the night of concealment, had seemingly fallen silent after it had been fulfilled in the event of Golgotha. Through this, it had stepped out of the sacred precincts of its former seclusion and down into the broad expanse of human life. It had taken place before the eyes of the world. With this, a turning point had been reached; a new phase of the Mystery’s work had begun.

[ 6 ] The ancient mystery had fulfilled its purpose. The immense, slowly unfolding process—the meaning of Earth’s evolution—had been revealed as an event, as an achievement. Whatever survived from the ancient mystery sites, if it did not connect with the new impulse, could only be preserved in external formalities, which then, however, lead to decadent distortion. Decadent distortion is soon taken up by the forces of evil, enters into a pact with them, and breaks away from the pure archetype. The hidden, pure essence must seek other forms of expression. Away from the stage of external human events, no longer bound to specific locations, far from ecclesiastical and worldly bustle, a new esotericism arose, whose task was to lead the human ego to waking consciousness, to the grasping of itself, to the reconquest of the spiritual world through the powers of its own free will.

[ 7 ] Unknown to the outside world were the hidden places where the mystery knowledge appropriate to the times was cultivated. It no longer stood at the center and in the background of the culture that poured out into the world. Its radiance worked as if guiding the heartbeat of world events from a hidden chamber, breathing life into the spiritual bloodstream of humanity. Attempts were often made to suppress this life force that urged people toward wakefulness and freedom. The states and churches that were averse to it and did not want to see their worldly power threatened, even the still-existing representatives of the old mystery tradition—who, behind the scenes of historical events, were and wished to remain a guiding power, albeit one bound by political and self-serving goals—are hostile to it. For it has the power to lift people out of their divisions, to lead them from separation into nations, economic circles, and social classes toward unity and community. This is to be prevented, for the benefit of special power interests. But life that springs from the spiritual source cannot be killed. It somehow breaks through all the obstacles hurled against it.

[ 8 ] And today is a time when the Mystery must speak to all people. Humanity can no longer extricate itself from this confusion unless it is given the opportunity to access this knowledge. In the work of Rudolf Steiner, which is the sacrificial act of the greatest genius of our modern age, explanations are provided—tailored to the state of consciousness of today’s humanity—regarding the interconnections of that global spiritual process that has always been unfolding behind the visible facts of history; but also everything that humanity of the future needs to break through the prison of its narrow selfhood and, by overcoming egotism, attain inner freedom, to pass through the gate of knowledge into the world of the spirit to which we inwardly belong.

[ 9 ] There is no other way to reclaim our human dignity, no other way to find the human being within us—the one that the forces opposing human progress seek to take from us, so that the beast within us may triumph or the demon of the machine may strangle humanity— there is no other means than the recognition of the ever-present transformation of form, substance, and consciousness, which is experienced in human events and cultivated in the Mystery.