Afterlife (28 page)

But once again we encounter the central paradox of the ‘survival’ problem.
Swan on a Black Sea
is perhaps the most convincing proof of the reality of life after death ever set down on paper.
Yet it does not actually
say
anything in the least important.
For a message from the ‘other side’, the mysterious realm of the all-knowing dead, it seems curiously banal, like a conversation overheard at a jumble sale in the church hall.
It
will convert no sceptic to the doctrines of Spiritualism because no sceptic would take the trouble to read it.
And so once again we encounter James’s Law: that perplexing mandate that seems to assert that the evidence for life after death shall always be strong enough to reassure the converted, but never conclusive enough to have the slightest influence on the unbelievers.

On the evening of 22 August 1900, a slim, mild-looking man presented himself at the library of the Theosophical Society in the Kaiser Friedrich Strasse, Berlin, and introduced himself as Dr Rudolf Steiner.
The Countess Brockdorff, who was secretary of the Lodge, looked at him without any great curiosity.
Rudolf Steiner was almost forty years old, and his accent had a touch of the lower-Austrian peasant.
The pince-nez glasses, attached by a cord, gave him the look of an absent-minded schoolmaster.
His smile was friendly but shy.
The countess knew that he had written books about Goethe, and lectured about history and politics to the Workers’ Educational Association.
He was to lecture that evening on Nietzsche — not entirely a suitable subject for Theosophists, who believed that most of the world’s deepest wisdom came from ancient India, for Nietzsche, after all, was an atheist and an arch-rebel.

When Dr Steiner began to lecture, the countess’s doubts seemed justified.
His voice was a little monotonous, and his sentences were sometimes abstract and involved.
And his own attitude to Nietzsche seemed rather odd.
Dr Steiner obviously believed in a spiritual reality underlying the universe, and Nietzsche undoubtedly did not.
So what on earth was Dr Steiner doing lecturing about him?
Yet when one grew used to the rather dull manner, there was something endearing about Dr Steiner.
His eyes twinkled with friendliness, and as he talked, he seemed to take the audience into his confidence.
After the lecture, in answer to a question, Steiner described his visit to Nietzsche in Weimar.
The philosopher was already insane — he would die only three days after Steiner’s lecture — and Steiner told of his beautiful forehead and calm eyes, which gazed blankly into space.
Suddenly, said Steiner, he had a deep inner-perception of the real Nietzsche, as if he could see his soul hovering over his head …

As she was saying goodnight, the countess asked Steiner whether he meant he had literally seen Nietzsche’s soul hovering over his head.
And to her surprise, Steiner answered: ‘What
I saw with the eyes of the spirit was Nietzsche’s astral body pressing against his physical body.’ ‘You
saw
it?’ He smiled at her.
‘Yes, but not with the physical eyes.’ Then he said goodnight.
He was certainly an intriguing man.
By general request, the countess asked him to come back again the following week to talk to them about his own mystical interpretation of Goethe’s puzzling story called
Fairy Tale
.
And this time he spoke with such quiet authority that no one had any doubt that he was speaking from inner experience.
Steiner was asked if he would consent to give a series of lectures to the Theosophical Society, and when he suggested a series on the great mystics, they accepted with enthusiasm.

That winter, Steiner became the darling of the Berlin Theosophical Society.
It was true that a few members had their reservations; what he was saying often seemed to contradict the ideas of its founder, Madame Blavatsky, and its present leader, Annie Besant.
When someone pointed this out to Steiner, he only smiled mildly and said: ‘Is that so?’ Yet it was obvious that he was not out to challenge or shock.
He was speaking from direct personal experience.
And his erudition was formidable; he seemed to have read every important writer of the past three centuries.
One rather beautiful young lady, Marie von Sivers — an actress who had been studying in Paris — made no secret of her total adoration, and Dr Steiner was obviously charmed and overwhelmed by her attitude of discipleship; he seemed to blossom and become more confident.
Some members shook their heads, knowing that he was married.
The countess had never met his wife, but had been told that she was a peasant woman — at any rate, definitely not a ‘lady’ — and that she was many years Steiner’s senior …

And then — it seemed to happen overnight — Dr Steiner had become head of the Berlin Lodge of the Theosophical Society, and was being accepted by an increasing number of people as a kind of messiah.
Its membership increased remarkably.
Mrs Besant had met Steiner, and been impressed.
She had seemed a little concerned about the strange, mystical Christianity preached by Steiner — but then, Madame Blavatsky had taught that all religions are roads to the same truth, so that was no cause for alarm.
Steiner certainly seemed to accept Madame Blavatsky’s basic teaching — that the present human race is the fifth ‘root race’ (the fourth were the inhabitants of Atlantis) — and that we all go through many reincarnations.
He also professed to be able to read the ‘Akasic
records’ — those invisible records of history that have been stored up on the cosmic ether — and talked with staggering authority about the childhood of Christ and the various spiritual movements in Western history.

Within ten years, Steiner had become one of the most famous men in Europe, and his following was enormous.
In due course, he broke with the Theosophical Society — when Mrs Besant tried to introduce a new ‘messiah’ called Jiddu Krishnamurti, a mere boy — but the German Theosophists regarded him with such reverence that almost all of them preferred to follow him into his own new organisation — which he called the Anthroposophical Society.
By the year 1912, many of Steiner’s followers believed that he was an avatar — an incarnation of the God-principle, like Buddha and Christ, sent to earth to bring enlightenment — and that Anthroposophy would one day become the new world religion, replacing all those that had gone before … Steiner himself spoke of building a new mystical centre, a magnificent temple, perhaps in Munich.

The hopes of a great new religious revival all came to nothing.
Just as it seemed to be coming about, the Great War burst like a storm, and for the next four years, Europe had other things to think about besides Anthroposophy.
There were even unpleasant rumours that Steiner had paved the way for Germany’s defeat by giving bad advice to General von Moltke, whose wife was a Steiner disciple.
Steiner built his ‘temple’ — at Dornach, in Switzerland — but it never became more than a cult-centre.
When the war ended, Steiner probably knew that it had cost him his chance of becoming the founder of a new religion.
He went on lecturing indefatigably, but a kind of weariness set in, and he died in March 1925, not yet in his mid-sixties.
His name remained well known largely because it was associated with a new type of school, and with ‘natural’ agricultural methods.

And yet, in his way, Rudolf Steiner, the man who became a ‘messiah’ between his fortieth and fiftieth years, was one of the most remarkable spiritual teachers of the twentieth century, the man who blended the Christianity of earlier epochs with the new ‘spiritualism’ that was trying to replace it.

To understand why, we must first say a word about Madame Blavatsky.
Born Helena Hahn in 1831 — thirty years before Steiner’s birth — the future founder of Theosophy was the daughter of a female Russian novelist.
She was a plump but highly strung little girl.
Sitting one day gazing into space, with
a pencil in her hand, she was astonished when her hand began to write.
The ‘communicator’ announced herself as Tekla Lebendorff, an aunt of an officer in the regiment of Helena’s father.
Helena’s father became so fascinated by all the information that Aunt Tekla gave about herself that he used his position to check on her in the government archives.
To his amazement, everything she said about herself proved to be true.
It seemed that the dead
could
communicate.
Then came a shock.
One day, Helena met Aunt Tekla’s officer nephew, and learned that Aunt Tekla was still alive and well.
And yet the information dictated by her was accurate.
How could that be?

Oddly enough, this curious anomaly might be regarded as one of the more convincing proofs that man can survive death.
One of the major objections to ‘survival’ is that sleep seems to contradict it.
After all, our ‘astral body’ is supposed to separate from the physical body in sleep, just as in death.
So why do we not feel ourselves floating out of the physical body when we fall asleep, just as we are supposed to do in death?
The answer of Spiritualism is that the ‘astral body’
does
wander off during sleep, but we experience total amnesia about its activities.
A medium — or spirit-control — is said to be able to attract the spirit of a sleeping person just as easily as that of a dead one.
This sounds highly unlikely, but that is what seems to have happened in the case of Helena Blavatsky.
It also happened in a well-authenticated case of the twentieth century, when a ‘spirit’ called Gordon Davis communicated through a medium with Dr S.
G.
Soal.
Davis gave an abundance of precise information about where his widow was living, and described the house — on a sea front — in considerable detail.
When Soal finally located the house — in Southend-on-Sea — it was all as Davis had described it.
But Davis was alive and well and sitting in front of the fire.
Here, then, as in the case of Tekla Lebendorff, we seem to have some kind of proof that the ‘astral body’
does
separate from the physical body in sleep, just as it is supposed to in death.

Helena Hàhn made an unhappy marriage to a man called Blavatsky, declined to surrender her virginity, and ran away from home at the age of eighteen, in 1849, the year after the strange rappings began in the home of the Fox sisters.
When she arrived in New York in 1873, she herself had developed into a formidable medium who could make raps resound from all over the room.
A newspaper reporter — Henry Steel Olcott — sent to interview her became a disciple, and supported her
while her hand scribbled — at an incredible pace — a book called
Isis Unveiled
, that was to make her a celebrity.
And, having achieved fame, Helena decided that her spiritual home was in India, and took her newly founded Theosophical Society to Bombay.
Disaster came in 1884, when the Society for Psychical Research sent Richard Hodgson to investigate her claims, and a housekeeper with a grudge managed to convince him that Madame Blavatsky’s spirit communications were all a fraud.
Her reputation never recovered from his denunciation in the
Proceedings
of the Society for Psychical Research.
She died of heart disease at the age of sixty, in 1891.
But her new doctrine of ‘Theosophy’ — a combination of Hinduism, Buddhism and Spiritualism — continued to have a worldwide influence.
We may say that Madame Blavatsky’s form of spiritualism achieved a far greater success than the version promulgated by the Fox sisters in Rochester in 1850, which never became more than a minority cult.

Rudolf Steiner was the son of working-class Austrians; his father was a telegraph operator on the Austrian railway.
In the material sense, his childhood was ‘deprived’; they were very poor.
But he was brought up amid beautiful scenery — mountains and forests — and, being a naturally bright boy, he made the most of the books that were available.

He was sitting in the station waiting room one day when a strange woman came in, a woman whose looks resembled those of the rest of the family.
She went to the middle of the room, made some curious gestures, and said: ‘Try to help me if you can — now and later on.’ Then she walked to the big old stove and vanished into it.
The child had enough self-possession to decide not to tell his parents what he had seen; they were good Catholics, and would have scolded him for superstition.
But he noticed that his father became sad and thoughtful in the following days.
Later, he learned that a female relative he had never met had committed suicide at the time he had seen the woman in the waiting room.
And, since she had asked for help, it followed that she was, in some sense, still alive …

Telling this story later in one of his lectures, Steiner said:

It seems, then, that like Wordsworth, Steiner was able to sense ‘unknown modes of being’ in the nature around him.
He was obviously — like Helena Hahn — a natural medium.
But he differed from all the mediums of the late-nineteenth century in one important respect: he was possessed of an enormous intellectual curiosity.
A volume on geometry, lent to him by a schoolmaster, filled him with almost ecstatic delight.
And this was because he could ‘work out forms which are seen purely inwardly, independent of the outer senses … To be able to grasp something purely spiritual brought me an inner joy.
I know that through geometry I first experienced happiness.’