INTRODUCTION
In studying
— alone, or in study-groups together — the lectures of
our teacher Rudolf Steiner about the Missions of the Nation-Souls, we
want to be imbued with the feeling that what we do is for the benefit
of all mankind. The present ailments and convulsions of mankind will
only be healed out of the great resources of the Spirit, and these in
turn can only be approached with inner quiet and serenity. ‘The
mills of God grind slowly.’ The occult disciple must learn to
distinguish reality from illusion. Unreal and destructive things
which are being done on so vast a scale to-day are mostly done out of
excitement and fanaticism. What will outlive them will be born out of
this faculty — discriminating real things from vain — to
which belongs quiet conviction of the inherent power of the pure
Spirit. To approach the Spirit in this way is the deed of Faith in
our time, and will be needed more and more. We may then enter upon
this study with a good heart and in good faith; the Spiritual World
will be able to make far more of it than we can know.
It is
important that human beings turn to Reality in these great questions
of mankind, race and nation. For in Reality alone is the creative
source of peace and harmony. The ground on which we stand (I write in
autumn 1938, when in a number of working groups in this country we
are entering, on this particular course of study) gives us the
opportunity, denied to-day through a great part of Europe, to work
together freely. We use this ground on behalf of all mankind. The
knowledge we shall gain, once founded in our hearts, will find its
way into the world of outer realities also, to help in mankind's
liberation.
We base our
studies primarily on the lecture-course about the
Mission of Folk-Souls
(Cycle XIII), given by Dr. Steiner in Oslo — or
Christiania, as it then was — in June 1910. This course contains
only a part of all that Dr. Steiner gave upon this subject,
especially in later years, and in the Bibliography we therefore draw
attention to some — if only to a very few — among his
other lectures and writings containing spiritual knowledge
about the peoples, countries and civilization-epochs of our Earth.
Nevertheless the ‘Folk-Souls’ cycle, as we may briefly
call it, will naturally and rightly be taken as the centre and
starting-point in an approach to this realm of Spiritual
Science.
A word or
two more may be said about the history and circumstances of this
lecture-cycle. Held in the summer of 1910, four years before the
outbreak of the Great War, it is the first of the numbered and
printed lecture-cycles of Rudolf Steiner to have been given in
Scandinavia. Like all the lecture-cycles until 1912, it was held
within the Theosophical Society. Dr. Steiner, as General Secretary of
the German Section, was speaking by invitation in the Norwegian
branch of that Society. In Hamburg on his way thither (May, 1910) he
had been giving the well-known lectures on the
Manifestations of Karma.
The Christiania course was followed, in August of the same year, by the
first of the four Mystery Plays,
The Portal of Initiation,
and by the
Genesis
lecture-course, in Munich. Then in September Dr.
Steiner went to Berne and gave the lectures on
St. Matthew's Gospel.
(The
St. Luke
lectures had been given a year previously.) The
Outline of Occult Science
had just been published in its first edition. These were the works
of Dr. Steiner immediately before and after the
Folk-Souls
cycle. I will
however also mention certain other lecture-courses, the subject of
which is related to this one. The souls of the nations (Archangels)
and the guiding Time-Spirits (Archai or Principalities) are Beings of
the Hierarchies, and in this cycle much about the spiritual
Hierarchies in general is contained. Dr. Steiner himself frequently
refers to his earlier lecture-course,
Spiritual Hierarchies
(Düsseldorf, April 1909, Cycle VII). His other well-known
lecture-course on the same theme,
Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature
(Cycle XXI) was given two years later, 1912, in Helsingfors.
Two other
works of Dr. Steiner bear very closely, from another aspect, on the
subject of the ‘Folk-Souls’ cycle, namely the lectures on the
Apocalypse
(1908), in which the history of mankind, the
sequence of races and civilization-epochs is dealt with in some
detail, and then the lectures given in Copenhagen a year after the
Folk-Souls course, in June, 1911, which Dr. Steiner himself —
against his usual custom — revised for publication in book form
(The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind)
immediately
after they were held. The last-named and the ‘Folk-Souls’
lectures were among those to which Dr. Steiner in later years —
during and after the War — repeatedly referred, indicating that
he had dealt with these subjects at the time he did with fully
conscious purpose. There can indeed be no doubt that Dr. Steiner in
those years very deliberately chose to speak upon the ground of
Occultism concerning the character of nations and details of the
spiritual guidance of mankind, and that he afterwards looked back
with satisfaction upon the fact that this had been done before the
outbreak of those terrible events — events in the midst of
which, after all, we are still living. In the preface to
The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind
(August, 1911),
apologising for his departure from his usual custom of not mixing up
the written and the spoken word, he says: “I have reasons for
publishing this work precisely at this moment, and to re-write it
completely on this principle would take too long.” And in the
introductory lecture of the ‘Folk-Souls’ cycle
itself (page 2 in the English edition) he says still more
definitely:
“It is
not without reason that in our time we should also choose to speak
quite candidly upon this subject which we are naming: ‘the
mission of the several nation-souls within mankind.’ As good a
reason as there was for silence hitherto (on the part of occultists)
about this mission, so good a reason is there to begin to speak about
it now. It is important because the approaching destinies of mankind
will, in far greater measure than was hitherto the case, bring human
beings together into a mission common to all mankind. To this, the
members of the different peoples will only be able to bring their
free and proper contributions if in the first place they have an
understanding for their nationality — if they appreciate what
we may call: ‘self-knowledge of a people.’ For even as
the saying ‘Know thyself’ played a great part in the
Mysteries of Apollo in ancient Greece, so likewise in no distant
future this will be spoken to the folk-souls or nation-souls:
‘Know yourselves as nation-souls!’”
At the same
time, while emphasizing how important this knowledge is for the
present age, Dr. Steiner realizes that there are special difficulties
in the way of its reception, — national prejudices, jealousies,
emotions. A still higher degree of open-mindedness, he says, is
necessary for the receiving of these things without resistance or
antipathy. And he refers in this connection to the occult degree of
‘homelessness’ or of the ‘homeless man,’
where the disciple appears to lose his connection with his particular
country or nation, yet in reality only does so to reach up to it
again on a higher level. In ‘homelessness’ he learns to
know and understand the great laws of all-human evolution,
uninfluenced by his own country or nationality, —
‘without admixture of the particular shades of sentiment or
feeling that might arise from home and soil.’
It is no
doubt significant that these lectures were held in a Scandinavian
country. In a peculiar way these Northern lands have been protected;
they are far less involved in political strife, in matters of
national prerogative. To speak and listen with detachment was more
possible in Norway than it would have been in many other countries.
Moreover Dr. Steiner chose to relate his main theme, that of the
Nation-Souls, with the Germanic and Norse mythology, thus giving it a
setting reaching far away back into the pre-historic beginnings of
European culture. One feels transplanted, as it were, into a clearer
and a cooler air; the deeper sources, the eternally appointed tasks
of European humanity as a whole are touched upon. Thus one is taken
right away from the rather narrow international rivalries which are
so largely at the surface of men's minds to-day.
The
mythological aspect mainly comes in during the latter half of the
lecture-course: I may here mention the full title and its
translation, and clear away one or two possible misunderstandings.
This is the title Dr. Steiner gave in the original:
Die Mission einzelner Volksseelen im Zusammenhange mit der
germanisch-nordischen Mythologie.
We may translate it:
‘The Missions of Individual Nation-Souls, in connection with
Germanic and Scandinavian Mythology.’
For Scandinavian —nordisch — in this booklet I have
sometimes also written ‘Norse’ or even ‘Northern’;
the words, I trust, will be understood in their right context. In the
existing English translation the hyphened adjective which Dr. Steiner
uses has as a rule been rendered ‘Germanic-Scandinavian.’
In one place it is translated ‘Northern Germanic’ —
surely misleading — though ‘Northern and
Germanic,’ with the ‘and’ rightly understood, would
be admissible. Altogether, it seems to me truer to replace the
frequent hyphen of the German by an and.
These are
more subtle difficulties. There is however one very grave error which
must be guarded against, and as unfortunately it occurs in the
Synopsis at the beginning (though not, so far as I have seen, in the
actual text) of the present English edition, it shall be mentioned.
The word germanisch means, not German, but Germanic.
German, as we use the word in modern English, is the name of a
nation, whose name is really deutsch in their own language,
and also incidentally — spelt duitsch — in the
language of that other nation whom we call
‘Dutch’! Germanic on the other hand,
germanisch, is the name of a race — one to which not
only the German but the Dutch, the Scandinavian, the English and
several other nations belong.
One other
matter of translation: the German Volk, which Dr. Steiner uses
for example in Volks-Seele, is a word in daily use, both for
‘people’ in the sense of ‘the common people,’
and also for ‘nation.’ At the same time it has something
of the meaning and sentiment of the cognate English
‘folk.’ It is impossible to render it quite truly.
‘Nation’ is always in danger of being interpreted too
nationalistically, too politically. ‘Folk,’ as we
understand the word to-day, is too archaic and limited in meaning.
‘People’ is nearer than either, and for
Volks-Seele we may rightly say ‘the soul of a
people.’ Perhaps it will be best for us to speak of
Nation-soul and Folk-soul alternatively, the one
expression to some extent correcting what might be misleading
in the other.
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