Cosmic Child - Book Review

Cosmic Child - Inspired Writing from the Threshold of Birth, Selected and Arranged by Eve Olive

Review by Gertrude Hughes

Cosmic Child, a book of wisdom and surprises about the “threshold of birth,” offers a wealth of insight into an area of human knowledge that has been rarely visited until recently. Eve Olive, eurythmist, architect, and founder of the Emerson Waldorf School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has selected and arranged with care the content of Cosmic Child. In her acknowledgments she thanks Maurice York, her editor at Wrightwood Press, for the pleasure of working with him, and the contribution of “his ear for language and his aesthetic sense,” which this reviewer certainly agrees does indeed grace the book. So, by the way, does the cover: a gorgeous painting by Ninetta Sombart.

Compared to the threshold of birth, the threshold of death pre-occupies people more readily. When we think of our coming death, we look back over our physical life and ask ourselves what mixture of promise and punishment we might encounter once we have left physical life. We are poorly equipped for meeting what comes next because, if human beings are to understand the mysteries of the threshold, we need to know higher, supra-sensory worlds—a capacity that Steiner devoted his life to demonstrating for human beings of the 20th century and beyond. In the first lecture of his beloved 1923 lecture course, Evolution of Consciousness, delivered at Penmaenmawr in North Wales, Steiner contrasts two sides of consciousness. One side is the ordinary consciousness of death or post-earthly life. The other side of immortality, “which is never brought out today” according to Steiner’s lecture cycle, is the consciousness not of death but of “unbornness,” the pre-birth side.

Life after death holds mysteries, and so does life before birth. The latter is the main vein of Cosmic Child, a daring and absorbing book about pre-birth consciousness. The titles of the book’s various sections give a sense of what is included: “Around the World, Across the Ages” collects poems and questions that ask George MacDonald’s “Where did you come from, baby dear?” or murmur longingly in a poem called “Unsated Memory,” “Where is that world that I am fallen from?.../Ah, Surely I was rather native there/ Where all desires were lovely….” The sections titled “Speaking of Angels” and “Meditations and Prayers” give insight about pre-birth existence in direct, sacred language; and two farewell sections provide a final view with “Coda,” a single poem, and “Postlude,” a brief piece of prose describing connections between returning to heaven from earth, and coming to earth from heaven.

In my two favorite sections, “The Things Children Say” and “Glimpses Across the Threshold,” mothers and other grownups tell how children themselves speak of “unbornness”. These feel like the very soul of the book, and they are delightful to read.

One mother’s report from “The Things Children Say” tells us, simply, “My two-and-a half-year-old son was sitting on the bed with his little legs stuck out in front of him, watching quietly as I tied his shoes, when he said thoughtfully, “‘I used to be able to tie my own shoes.’”

Another mother describes being suddenly informed on one “glorious day near midday, in Durban, South Africa, back in 1971” by her four-yearold son, Tom about past times: “Our two young sons, ages three and four, were playing happily in the garden; I was hanging the washing on the line to dry in the kind of sun that only Africa can provide. Suddenly there was a tug on my blouse. Tom, our four year old, was standing beside me looking earnest, apologetic, and a little rushed, having briefly broken away from his game with Simon. ‘Mommy, I don’t want you to be sad,’ he said, ‘but you’re not my first mommy. I have had many mommies before you.’ That said, he dashed back to his game with Simon and never referred to the matter again.”

The mother of a six-year-old daughter and a four-year-old adopted son describes a day when her “usually quite delightful” children could not stop grumping as she walked them to school. Even when she returns later to take them home, they are still fighting. As they leave the schoolroom, the mother hears the daughter saying “some triumphant statement which she [the daughter] obviously thought would outdo anything her brother could think of and then she stomped off ahead of us.” The brother just stood there watching the sister go and then said to his mother, “I was so glad when she got borned and left me in peace in heaven.” The mother ends the tale saying, “I have loved this story ever since it happened, particularly because of the adoption involved and the fact they certainly believed they were together before they were born.”

Birthday stories from Waldorf school kindergarten or nursery teachers, can be found in Eve Olive’s book. So can scenes from children’s story books, including one from P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins. In a Jewish legend retold by Louis Ginberg (1873-1953) an angel gives a tour to a soul before setting it back in the womb of its mother for nine months:

Between morning and evening the angel carries the soul around, and shows her where she will live and where she will die, and the place where she will be buried, and she takes her through the whole world, and points out the just and the sinners, and all things. In the evening, she replaces her in the womb of the mother and there she remains for nine months.

In 1898 at the age of 23, the playwright Percy Mackaye (1875-1956) wrote in a notebook found after his death a charming little piece on how angel and man need one another. Man, Mackaye thinks, is more helpless than an angel, but then again, an angel needs man in order to become perfect, which the angel does “through his revelation in the flesh”; but then again “man needs angel in order to become perfect through his resurrection from the flesh…”

I hope these examples have shown the width and depth of Eve Olive’s book as well as its joyous moments. She has arranged its content in a sensitive way that is both humorous and reverent, as behooves the quoting of children. But Cosmic Child does more. From beginning to end it shows that a consciousness of “unbornness” has come into its own. In this time of the Consciousness Soul and of the astral body’s transformation into Spirit Self (also called Manas)—as Steiner has named and valued the current situation—children can speak their knowledge if we listen. When grownups heed seriously as well as lovingly what small children want to tell, we can expect to hear it and adjust to its greatness as well as its charm. If we do that, we will be on the way to learning what “unbornness” has to teach and exercise our supra-sensory consciousness.

Having failed to praise, as I wanted to, the translations, including those of Elaine Maria Upton, and failed also to include an especially beautiful poem, “Angel of the Twilight” by Eve Olive herself—which ends with, “Be near me in the darkness of earth light/ Meet me in the light of heaven’s night”—I end this review with words from Steiner’s Evolution of Consciousness once more: “Understanding for the ideas of the spiritual world has to be won by our coming to know in our own being all that was forgotten on entering earthly life.” Meanwhile, Grandparents, mothers and fathers, teachers, and all people who love children, should be given Cosmic Child as a present, for reading this book will be an excellent way for adults to start retrieving the essence of the capacity that children still have. Cosmic Child announces clearly the full truth and value of both post- and pre-incarnation. Steiner summarizes both in four lines in the book at the end of the first section:

Life After Death

Life after death—

Life before birth;

Only by knowing both

Do we know eternity.