Home

Editorial

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the Michaelmas issue of New View. This festival moment has a different quality this year as it is one hundred years ago that Rudolf Steiner ceased his public lectures on the eve of Michaelmas 1924. Following which he was to remain in the carpentry workshop, in his sick bed, next to the ruin of the old Goetheanum, destroyed by fire on New Year’s eve 1922/23 and the site from which a new Goetheanum would arise, one we can visit to this day. Increasingly ill, Steiner was to die some six months later. From this distance it still seems so very premature.

Steiner said that rhythm is life. There are so many ways to understand that – and to live it! He also pointed to a century as particularly connecting events at either end of that period of time. A resonance. He showed how 100 years was three times the life of Jesus including the time of Christ from the Baptism to His death and resurrection. A profound template for humanity to live and work with. Rhythms in time; imprinted, pregnant even, with new possibilities for human development and creativity.

Twelve years ago, at this time of year, I interviewed a Scottish blacksmith in his forge. He told me many special things that day about his work and experiences. On thing he showed me has remained indelible. He told me that no one can hammer metal all day without coming to exhaustion if you just keep raining blows onto metal. But if, after a few blows, you let the hammer in your hand gently tap down, bouncing a few times on the anvil, tappity-tap, tappity-tap, and do this constantly throughout one’s metal shaping, then that pause in the hammer blows creates a rhythm and you can work all day without exhausting yourself. It is like a kind of music entering the flow of the activity. I am no blacksmith, but I recognised that what I was being shown was a way to stay healthy in life, no matter what one’s activity. Small, rhythmic pauses bring a wellspring of new energy and creativity into life. Tappity-tap, tappity-tap, rhythm is life. But you have to make it a practice. Quite a challenge in these times, but it is available, embedded in time.

Steiner saw anthroposophy as a living experience, having life in its every aspect. But it has to be lived. I do not write these words as a shining example myself, but I am aware of what I can aspire to through it, because, as for all of us, it belongs to the human condition and we can re-member ourselves through it. This journey has much to do with the essence of Michaelmas, which Steiner considered, a hundred years ago, was a festival for the future. Michaél is the Spirit of our Age, the Zeitgeist for the whole of humanity. Something new beckons, tapping a way into life.

I sought a front cover that would convey a gravitas, serious yet noble, carrying strength yet kindness; to create a right mood to open these pages. I think I found it with a painting by Rembrandt. Steiner said of this artist that he created his great works by using his figures to catch the light, as it were, placing them in the element of light and dark in which we all are living. And that it is the very purpose of Art to reproduce what is not seen in the everyday life.

We begin this issue with The Two Johns – Part 2, where Aaron Mirkin continues his exploration of this subject that was also the theme in Steiner’s very last public address. Then, in Tragedy and Culmination, Richard Ramsbotham describes what the last few months were like for Steiner up to Michaelmas 1924. Wolf Forsthofer from Scotland, writes how for some, Steiner’s ideas just did not take root in Shallow Soil and Thorny Weeds: Through the Eye of the Needle of Modern Intellectual Thinking.

From Australia Nigel Hoffmann envisages a new kind of institute for educating in The Metamorphosis of the University. Karin Jarman then shares a personal challenge when interviewed by Richard House in The Telling is Easy, the Journey Hard: Ill-health as a Gift.

Terry Boardman offers an insightful view of history underpinning our challenges today in relation to Kaspar Hauser and the Peoples of the Middle: Germans and Jews.

Lory Widmer Hess writing from Switzerland takes the reader on a poetic journey with I Am the Stone – The Life and Poetry of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.

Under the Linden Tree by Therese Schroeder-Sheker, writing from Oregon, America, honours one of the liberal arts; Rhetoric.

Sylvie Hétu from Canada is also interviewed by Richard House and shares her life’s work woven into her book in The Song of the Child – Twenty Years on.

Bernard Jarman has translated a lecture by Rudolf Steiner, Man and Woman in Light of Spiritual Science, which throws light on the male/female understanding in this gender confused time.

In Where the Truth Lies our regular Climate Watch scientist Peter Taylor offers research that shows how we are all being misled over what drives climate.

A reader’s letter in response to Terry Boardman’s article in the last issue, about the Sixties, has prompted me to re-print The Ringbearer by Susan Witt, in which she looks at the Grail Quest, as exemplified in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. It speaks to how each of us can find the strength to stand up and do what is needed.

Nigel Gilmer then brings Part III: Essential Questions in his series ‘Divergent Paths of the Future’.
_ Finally, my heartfelt thanks to all those who responded to our New View appeal by sending donations, particularly those from America. We are still here because of you all. Please continue to support us if you can. (See page 106)

Wishing you well, wherever you may be, for the time ahead,

Tom Raines, Editor.

Contents

Back to Top