The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Questions and Answers

Question: There are people in Finland who have begun to doubt the country’s future. And then there are others who are full of enthusiasm for the future of Finnish culture. Do you believe that Finland’s guardian angel still has a role to play in the world?

[ ] Rudolf Steiner: It is perhaps a good thing that, when it comes to such questions, occultists generally adhere to the rule of not going too far in their answers. It is, after all, quite understandable that an objective, unbiased assessment of many answers we receive from occult research requires a high degree of impartiality, which we really—forgive me for emphasizing this—cannot always possess in practical life. And therefore it is necessary that I, too, here in this place, cannot go any further in answering this question than the practical occultist can go at all when dealing with a question that relates to contemporary social life and the forces at work within it. What can be said at all about this question may first be indicated in a few words, which I also interspersed when I once spoke about national spirits in Kristiania. There I expressly noted that the national spirits of certain territories belonging to smaller nationalities have a far greater significance for the future of humanity, for the next phase of cultural development, than is generally imagined in the exoteric world today. Peoples who, in a certain sense, have had less of a say for a time in the “great concert” of European or other contemporary world developments have at times been positively called upon to preserve, apart from the great cultural process, certain significant assets of humanity. As far as I have been able to engage with the spiritual life of Finnish culture, I may say that I must acknowledge as true for Finland what I said back then in Kristiania. And I ask that this not be taken to mean that I am saying this as a German who is permitted to speak among Finns and intends to tell anyone something that might please them. It will never happen that I say anything for the sake of pleasing any individual or group of people, but solely because it is my conviction, the result of my research, that it is true.

[ ] When one observes the development of Finnish culture as a non-Finn—to the extent that this is possible for a practical occultist—one must count Finnish intellectual life, in its spiritual evolution, among those that will play a very significant role in the future cultural development of Europe. I say this as a matter of pure objectivity. I say this regardless of my own nationality or the nationality to which I am speaking. Certainly, the most diverse national spirits will have a say in the future of the Earth; but everything we can come to know as the characteristic, the essential nature of Finnish spiritual life, possesses something that must not be missing in future world culture if this world culture is to follow the paths we must attribute to it according to our occult insights. For the course of world development is such that whenever evolution progresses, at a later stage something must be renewed, something that existed in earlier cultural periods must be taken up again. For example, in our present, fifth post-Atlantean cultural period, many things are being taken over from the Egyptian era—only in a different form; in the sixth cultural period, many things will be taken over from the ancient Persian era, and in the seventh from the ancient Indian culture. This ancient Indian culture, which lives on, as it were, enveloped beneath the surface, will experience a great and mighty resurrection. The sacred wisdom of the seven Rishis will experience a great and mighty resurrection precisely in the seventh post-Atlantean cultural period.

[ ] What is generally the case with regard to these repetitions also takes place in a vivid way among peoples who become living custodians of certain spiritual forces in the ongoing evolution. And so I have come to the conviction that there are hidden forces within Finnish culture which, I believe—and I say this explicitly at this point: as I believe—and that there is something of the utmost significance in all this, which in many respects is still hidden but will emerge in its full significance—even more so than is already the case today—and which will have a profound impact on the future culture of humanity. I believe that a second assertion may indeed be justified, one that attributes something extraordinarily significant and luminous to the future of Finland and Finnish culture. Once again, I would like to expressly emphasize that what I have just said I have said out of my conviction and, as I believe, out of my occult knowledge, and not to flatter anyone. I would have told you something unpleasant as well, if it had been the truth.

Question: The Kalevala shows us that it is legitimate to speak of a past—or at least spiritual—culture in Finland. A culture presupposes a higher influence. Therefore, one might perhaps speak of ancient Finnish mysteries. Do you know what kind of mysteries these were? Would you like to tell us something about them?

[ ] Rudolf Steiner: It is, of course, easy to understand that anyone who knows the Kalevala only through a translation must overlook certain details that are extraordinarily important to the impact of such a work of poetry. But this work of poetry, the national epic of Finland, appears to anyone who views it with an occult eye as something so significant, something so deeply rooted in occult foundations, that it must surely be permissible to recognize those occult foundations even when one cannot fully appreciate the immediate, great beauties that can certainly only be conveyed in the language in which the epic originally exists.

[ ] Now, what is peculiar about the Kalevala is that we immediately encounter its occult foundation. It was immensely striking to me—I say this here, even though I will be compelled to repeat some of these thoughts at the public lecture the day after tomorrow—when I encountered the three heroes you all know well, Väinämöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäinen, in the great Finnish national epic. —Please forgive me if I sometimes make mistakes in pronunciation. It goes without saying that one cannot pronounce a language as difficult for us as Finnish is without making mistakes. — When these three heroes appear, one immediately ceases, as an occultist, to speak of ordinary heroes and heroes, as the word is often used in other national epics. It struck me to find three very specific things behind these three main heroes. You know that in my *Theosophy*, the entire scope of human soul life—in accordance with what the oldest European mysteries, in full harmony and agreement with the Rosicrucian mysteries of more recent times, provide—is presented in three fundamental aspects of the human soul: what I call the feeling soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the conscious soul. We must conceive of the development of all humanity in such a way that, in the course of human evolution, these soul elements have also developed one after another. First came, in the evolution of humanity, the development of the feeling soul within the three sheaths: the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body. Later, the development of the intellectual or emotional soul built upon this; and the richest product of this development is the conscious soul. We must create a mental image of beings that are spiritual and that are involved in the physical world, and that are involved in humanity’s participation in these forces. Thus, behind the physical world in which we humans live, we must see the spiritual givers and bearers of the forces of our sensory soul, the forces of our intellectual or emotional soul, and the forces of our conscious soul. Now, I cannot go into these details; but it has become a matter of absolute certainty to me that in Wäinämöinen we must recognize the bringer, the giver, the bestower of the feeling soul to humanity, so that everything we cite today in European theosophy as the forces of the feeling soul must appear as a gift from the spiritual being designated by the name Wäinämöinen in the Kalevala. Not only do these things point to the historical, but the historical always contains within it what lies behind it as occult forces. This is not to say that historical heroes do not also stand behind the personalities; but what lies within these heroes is what we must necessarily recognize. The giver of the consciousness soul is Lemminkäinen. Precisely because he is the giver of the consciousness soul, Lemminkäinen is in a situation one might call Dionysian: it is striking, when one is familiar with the mystery of “being dismembered into the world,” that the dismemberment of Lemminkäinen occurs in the Kalevala. So that when we delve into the matters of the Kalevala, we encounter everywhere powerful images—which, precisely because they embody the pre-human, superhuman, go beyond the magnificent and the mighty—we find expressed precisely what we must today convey in theosophy regarding soul development, and what originates from the oldest mysteries of Europe—primarily from the Nordic mysteries, though it is also in harmony with the Rosicrucian and Grail mysteries. So that this very, I might say, external reason simply reveals to us the insight into what lies behind this poetry: that it conveys, in a grand, powerful, and pictorial way, ancient and sacred mystery truths that originate from the deepest mysteries of northern Europe. So that we must—I cannot go into details regarding what confronts us in this poetry—acknowledge something that has welled up from the deepest mysteries of northern Europe. This is evident, for example, even to an external observer in the way the creation of the world preceding humanity confronts us right in the first runes. This corresponds in every respect to what the European mysteries contained regarding the origin of the world—only expressed in grandiose images. These are the results of mystery truths; this is how the earlier consciousness received them. In addition, one can also demonstrate from occult history, from the Akashic Records, the direct connection between these Finnish mental images—I shall now say, for the sake of caution, the mental images underlying the Kalevala—and the correspondence between these images of the Kalevala and the images given in the ancient European mysteries concerning the marriage of Heaven and Earth. Thus, what we characterize as the interaction of the Upper and the Lower in the sense of the Mysteries is presented to us in the first rune.