Steiner in Context: 1909; the Rhythm of Centenary

by the editor, John Beck

If a composer was writing symphonies containing universes, and painters on two-dimensional canvas were starting to paint all sides of a face at once, or reveal force through finely executed explosions of color; if scientists were reconciling force vectors with invisible radiations, and furniture makers were giving their products the lithe forms of plants; if soul-doctors were helping anxious, ordinary folk to bring up unheard of stuff from their minds’ basements, and women held dependent on men for uncounted centuries were putting hands and minds to any endeavor that called to them; if all this and much more was going on in the year 1909, then why shouldn’t there be someone else in an apartment in Berlin writing up a history of the cosmos and human evolution combined, researched on the inward path of exact imagination and concentrated meditation?

In a moment of time containing Mahler and Strauss and Schoenberg, Rachmaninov and Sibelius and Stravinsky, Elgar and Ravel and Debussy, to name only those who were shaping the European soul with mighty strokes of flowing tone, why would there not be also a Rudolf Steiner?

The Rhythm of Centenary

by Kevin Dann

Lincoln

February 12, 1909 saw Americans from the Atlantic to the Pacific celebrating the centenary of the birth of the “Great Emancipator,” Abraham Lincoln. In Kentucky, President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of a memorial to be erected in front of Lincoln’s log cabin birthplace. At Lincoln’s grave in Springfield, Illinois, the French and British ambassadors joined a host of American speakers to celebrate the “Savior of His Country.” Schoolchildren recited the Gettysburg address and listened to orations from Civil War veterans, and cities bedecked themselves in flags and bunting. In the South, African-American men and women held subdued celebrations wherever they felt free from the potential violence of disapproving white neighbors. America’s greatest city, New York, held its principal commemoration at Cooper Union, where in February 1860, the young Illinois senator had given the speech that elevated him from the expected Vice-Presidential pick of the shoe-in nominee, William H. Seward, to Presidential contender. Mayor George B. McClellan, Jr. celebrated Lincoln as “intensely human,” a man whose weaknesses “were understood by Americans because they too shared them.”

Uptown, at Columbia University, Zoology Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn and his audience celebrated not Lincoln, but Charles Darwin, born the same day as Lincoln. Osborn compared Darwin to Lincoln, saying that Darwin too was a great emancipator, having “paved the way for complete freedom in the study of nature.” Later the same day Osborn joined 300 others at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) for the unveiling of a bust of Darwin and the opening of the new Darwin Hall of Invertebrate Zoology.

Darwin

As he presented the bust, New York Academy of Sciences President C.F. Cox called Darwin “the greatest of seers,” a “liberator” who overcame the “hampering doctrine of supernatural intervention” clung to by his peers.

Scientists from the AMNH that year 1909 would fan out across the globe in their pursuit of retelling the story of creation from a naturalistic standpoint. Paleontologist Barnum Brown was making great discoveries of fossil vertebrates in the Cretaceous strata of Wyoming; Walter Granger had found a nearly complete skeleton of a gigantic horned dinosaur, and Museum preparators mounted dozens of Permian Era reptiles and amphibians to add to the already crowded exhibition halls; T.D. Cockerell was examining petrified mayflies he had dug up from the Florissant fossil beds in Colorado; Roy Andrews (who inspired the character “Indiana Jones”) was following finback and humpback whales in the North Pacific; Osborn was working on fossil carnivores from Egypt; the Peary Arctic expedition would return in a few months with specimens of musk oxen, caribou, walrus skulls and scalps, narwhal tusks, foetal seals, and lemmings in alcohol-filled jars; the entrance to the Museum’s Hall of Fossil Fishes was crowned with the jaw of a gigantic shark; in the new Darwin Hall, visitors were treated to entomologist Frank Lutz’s habitat groups of mussels, crabs, oyster, and starfish from both the Bahamas and nearby Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Another local expression of the Great Chain of Being was on display in Frank Chapman’s bird habitat groups, which included bobolinks, rails, and red-winged blackbirds of the Hackensack Meadowlands, and a “Duck Hawk” (peregrine) on its nest atop the black basalt columns of the Palisades.

Life in 1909 : an ad for the evolved screw-head...

The new Darwin Hall was the first explicitly “Darwinian” exhibit hall to open at the AMNH, and it, along with the great congregation of natural scientists for a Darwin gala in Cambridge, England, and in Baltimore, Maryland, at the annual AAAS meeting, signaled the triumph of Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the “mechanism” of evolution, displacing older notions of the Great Chain of Being. Within the next decade, the Museum would become America’s leading institution for the dethroning of the human being from his central position in Creation, as its president—Prof. Henry Fairfield Osborn—zealously advanced the pseudo-science of eugenics.

...President Taft’s new motor car...

But over the course of the year 1909, another seer was elucidating a very different picture of the Great Chain of Being, culminating in the publication of Occult Science: An Outline in December 1909. This year, so full of the most extraordinary teaching activity by Rudolf Steiner, would witness spiritual deeds that certainly rivaled Lincoln’s and Darwin’s.

...sheet-music for Joplin’s Wall Street rag...

1909 saw “centennial fever” too in the commemorations of the 300th anniversaries of the territorial “discoveries” made by explorers Samuel de Champlain and Henry Hudson, in July 1609 and September 1609. On “Champlain Sunday,” towns and villages throughout New York and Vermont’s Champlain Valley gathered to hear orators honor Champlain, whose deed of discovery became the opening scene in tale after tale of America’s special destiny; at Plattsburgh, Bishop Nelson of Albany began his sermon by proclaiming America’s divine dispensation: “The North American continent appears to have been held in reserve for the working out of a Divine purpose to which all nations of the earth have contributed and in which all are destined to share.”

...Orville Wright’s fly-by of the Statue of Liberty, celebrating the Hudson-Champlain tricentennials...

and “the Kodak girl”

In Europe, Boccioni’s 1909 portrait of a young woman scratches at the surface of appearances...

That same day, far from the Champlain and Hudson Valleys, in the German town of Cassel, a very small audience attended the eleventh in a series of fourteen lectures given by Rudolf Steiner. Though he addressed many questions in his lecture, the key one was: “What really happened at the Baptism by John?” Indeed, the lecture series had begun on St. John’s Day, June 24th, the feast day of John the Baptist, and in the opening words of his first lecture, Steiner had briefly sketched the history of the June festival, finding antecedents in ancient Persia, Rome, and northern Europe. In the Christian era, the marking of the period when days began to shorten and nights to lengthen was transformed into a celebration dedicated to the forerunner of Jesus Christ. Steiner made it quite clear to his listeners that this event—the appearance on Earth of Christ—was the “turning point in time,” the most important event in all of Earth history.

Clearly, Rudolf Steiner’s task for twentieth century humanity was analogous to the one performed twenty centuries earlier by John the Baptist—to serve as witness, as forerunner, and even as facilitator of the descent of the Sun Spirit into the etheric realm, just as John had stewarded Christ’s descent into the body of Jesus of Nazareth. The stunning outpouring of wisdom from Rudolf Steiner beginning with his emergence as a spiritual teacher in 1900 until his death in 1925 can be seen as a revelation through which Christ spoke to mankind at the advent of His return within the etheric realm of the Earth. A few months before the lecture cycle in Cassel, Steiner had outlined in a series of ten lectures in Dusseldorf the nature and role of spiritual beings in the evolution of the cosmos, and indicated that the heliocentric orbit of the planet Jupiter marks the boundary of the evolutionary stage known in esoteric cosmology as “Ancient Sun.” He also stated that this was the period when the human etheric body was first formed. The “body” that approached the Earth in 1909 was Christ’s resurrection body—the physical body as it had been transformed by the events of the Mystery of Golgotha. The resurrection body “remembered” that Ancient Sun period, in that it has a 12-year rhythm, like the planet Jupiter (whose exact orbital period is 11.86 years, so that Jupiter spends about one year in each zodiacal sign in its orbit of the Sun).

...Klimt’s “Tree of Life” is full of strange consciousness...

1909 was truly the year that Steiner’s work as a spiritual teacher quickened. On January 6, Epiphany—the day that marks the incarnation of Christ through the Baptism by John—in a room whose walls bore reproductions of paintings by Raphael, Rudolf Steiner revealed the karmic connection between the German poet Novalis, the Renaissance artist Raphael, John the Baptist, and the prophet Elijah. The year of lecturing in 1909 would conclude the day after Christmas with Steiner again speaking of Novalis, in such a way that clearly suggested that this great individuality was supersensibly present throughout the entire lecture. A couple of weeks after his Epiphany lecture, in Heidelberg, he began to further unfold the mysteries of “spiritual economy,” which continued in his Cassel lecture cycle on the Gospel of John and then reached their climax in September in a series on the Gospel of St. Luke. Over two weeks in May he gave one of his extraordinary lecture cycles on John’s Book of Revelation. Within these lectures in September of 1909 there began to appear a “Fifth Gospel,” a suite of images of the events in Palestine that seemed possible only if they had been witnessed by Jesus himself.

Hidden within the course of Rudolf Steiner’s indefatigable activity in 1909 are two events of special, historic significance. In early April, Steiner traveled to Malsch, Germany, to give an address on the occasion of the dedication of the Francis of Assisi branch of the Theosophical Society. Laying the foundation stone for the building that was the forerunner of the new Mystery center that he would establish in Dornach, Steiner spoke these words:

...a vase of the century’s first decade...

In pain and suffering our Mother Earth has become materialized. It is our task to once again spiritualize her, to redeem her, in that through the power of our hands we fashion a spirit-filled work of art. May this stone be a first foundation stone for the redemption and transformation of our planet Earth, and may the power of this stone work a thousandfold.

The surprisingly modern expression “Mother Earth” was indeed Steiner’s, one that he used frequently. The deed of white magic he performed at Malsch was both inspired by and preparatory for “the Mother.” The dedication ceremony was performed under a Full Moon, as Rudolf Steiner was mindful that each Full Moon “remembered” the moment of Christ’s crucifixion, activating the forces of Christ’s etheric body and making them available for those who were receptive.

“The Blue Flower” from the style-setting magazine Jugend (Youth). Many young American artists were going to Central Europe in this decade.

Just four days later, in Cologne, Rudolf Steiner began his proclamation of Christ’s second coming in the etheric realm. Most anthroposophical writers assume that Steiner’s first announcement of the return of Christ in the etheric dates to January 12, 1910; however, on April 10/11, 1909, in two lectures called Spiritual Bells of Easter, Rudolf Steiner makes this historic proclamation in a veiled fashion. In these lectures he speaks of Kashyapa, the name for two distinct but related figures from the spiritual tradition of India. According to Hindu tradition Kashyapa was: 1) one of the seven Holy Rishis who brought the primal wisdom to the ancient Indian culture; 2) Gautama Buddha’s chosen successor, i.e., the one who will become the next Buddha, the Maitreya Buddha. During the lecture, after describing the spiritual fire brought down to Earth by the Maitreya Buddha, Steiner proclaims the return of Christ:

He will be revealed to us in a spiritualized fire of the future. He is with us always, until the end of the world, and he will appear in the spiritual fire to those who have allowed their eyes to be enlightened through the Event of Golgotha. Human beings will behold him in the spiritual fire.

According to the research of Robert Powell, these two Easter 1909 lectures were inspired by Kashyapa, the Bodhisattva who will become the Maitreya Buddha.1

1 See Appendix II in Robert Powell and Kevin Dann, Christ and the Mayan Calendar: 2012 and the Coming of the Antichrist

A 1910 announcement of a Rudolf Steiner book in the USA.

The intense combination of historical retrospective and progressive prospect occasioned in 1909 by the Lincoln and Darwin centennials, the Champlain Tercentenary, and the HudsonFulton Celebration came about because all who participated felt instinctively the propriety of marking some multiple of a hundredth anniversary. Beginning in 1876 with the centennial celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, America in the late nineteenth century had marked countless hundredth anniversaries of Revolutionary era battles, and two hundredth anniversaries of the settlement and founding of towns. In 1709 and 1809, no one had taken notice of the anniversary of either Champlain’s or Hudson’s feats; in 1909, however, no one failed to mark his calendar both outwardly and inwardly. The explosion of public commemorative events in post-bellum America served to reinforce the experience of a century as a “natural” rhythm, just as the pace of modern life quickened so that a hundred years would bring greater changes than ever before.

...another European vase of the century’s first decade...

In the reckoning of historical change, the rhythm of a century is wholly arbitrary, an artifact of a human mathematical system, and yet, there is hidden within it an intuition of its symmetry with the single year in the life of an individual—taking the birth of Jesus of Nazareth as the starting point. Rudolf Steiner revealed the key to this symmetry: “All of the actions of former generations, all the impulses and the deeds connected with them, pour into historical evolution and have a life cycle of 33 years. Then comes the Easter time of these deeds and impulses, the time of resurrection… All things in historical evolution are transfigured after 33 years, arise as from the grave, by virtue of a power connected with the holiest of all redemptions, the Mystery of Golgotha. . . Just as we calculate the cyclic rotations of celestial bodies so we must learn to calculate historic events by means of a true science of history. . .”

“33” was Rudolf Steiner’s shorthand for 33 1/3, for the historical law that Steiner suggests is a consequence of the actual biography of Jesus Christ, whose life—from the birth of Jesus of Nazareth on the night of December 6/7th, 2 BC, to the Resurrection at sunrise on Easter Sunday morning, April 5th, AD 33— lasted 12,173 ¼ days, or 331/3 years less 1½ days. Rudolf Steiner pointed out that, in addition to the various planetary rhythms (the one-year rhythm of the Sun; 29½-year rhythm of Saturn; 12year rhythm of Jupiter, and so on), since the moment of Christ’s resurrection, the 331/3 -year rhythm of the life of Christ Jesus has become of signal importance to the unfolding of human history. This is where the popular acceptance of the century as an increment worthy of celebration overlaps with this esoteric truth: the rhythm of 331/3 years occurs almost exactly three times in one century. According to Rudolf Steiner: “One can recognize the intensity of an impulse that is implanted into the historical process by virtue of its effect through three generations, through a whole century.”2

2 Mysterienwahrheiten und Weihnachtsimpulse (“Mystery Truths and the Impulses of Christmas”), lecture of December 26, 1917, Complete Works, volume 180.

Knowledge of the Christ rhythm can deepen our experience of any hundredth anniversary, but it is especially significant as we approach, on April 10 and 11, 2009, the hundredth anniversary of Rudolf Steiner’s heralding of the Etheric Christ, under the inspiration of the one who shall become the Maitreya Buddha. This Easter we have the opportunity not just to celebrate the past event of Rudolf Steiner’s John the Baptist-like deed, but also the present event of an intensification of Christ’s manifestation in the etheric realm. In this time when the soul-renewing potential of historical commemorations is severely limited by hyperactive hedonism, crass commercialism, and a deeply distracted citizenry, bringing our attention and appreciation to the hundredth anniversary of this historic Easter 1909 deed of Rudolf Steiner may itself become a Michaelic and Sophianic deed for our time.

17 January 2009