 FANTASY FLIGHTS Waldorf and Escapism My father was an airline pilot. For this reason, as a kid, I was crazy about model airplanes (I had dozens) and dreams of flight (I had them nightly). By extension, I think this is one of the reasons I enjoyed attending a Waldorf school — until I started to get suspicious about the school’s real agenda. Being a student at Waldorf produced, for at least some of us, a sense of detachment, almost levitation, floating above the world and its merely mundane concerns. Our concerns and interests were far more etheric. For our reading pleasure, our teachers recommended such works as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth trilogy (hobbits, goblins, elves, dragons, the Dark Lord, etc.) and C.S. Lewis's Silent Planet trilogy. [1] Lewis’s books are less well known nowadays, so let’s turn our attention to them. In the first volume of the set (OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET), the protagonist flies to Mars, which is populated by several intelligent but distinctly non-humanoid species. The Martians live deep in the canals of their ancient planet, and they are preparing to die out. They explain that since Christ took human form, henceforth all intelligent species in the universe will assume that blessed form. [2] The vision of the peaceful, doomed Martians in their snug otherworldly digs stirred me so much that for years I dreamed of traveling to Mars myself to meet them.  In the second volume (PERELANDRA), our hero travels to Venus — aka Perelandra — where he finds the Martians’ prediction borne out. Intelligent life has only just begun on Venus, and our hero finds it in a delightfully naked but innocent Eve, the first woman on Venus — who, it so happens, has green skin. God loves diversity, even while insisting that all intelligent, physical creatures must bear the form of humanity. As Eve says, “[I]n your world Maledil [divinity, Jesus] first took Himself this form, the form of your race and mine....” [3] Eve, or The Green Lady, goes on to explain that what happened on Earth (Christ’s adoption of human form, crucifixion, resurrection, etc.) was so important that it need not be repeated elsewhere. “[I]n your world a greater thing happened ... Because the greater thing happened in Thulcandra [Earth], this [i.e., the conditions prevailing on Venus] and not the greater thing happens here.” [4] Earth is called “Thulcandra,” the silent planet. The presiding spiritual powers on other planets are faithful to God, and they therefore speak with one another. But Earth is under siege by the powers of darkness, who remain silent. The third volume of the series tells of the Earthly struggle against the demonic Hideous Strength (the book’s title). To give you a taste: The front man for the dark demon and his cohorts is a human known only as The Head. Near the end of the book, we learn that The Head is just that: A severed head kept alive artificially, and used by darkness as a marionette, mouthing dark instructions.) The hero of the series is named Ransom (get it? Ransom: Christ figure). In THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, he is aided by Merlin, who awakens from his Medieval slumber. (Anthroposophy consists of Christianity mixed — until Jesus and the New Testament are virtually unrecognizable — with pagan fantasies, such as this, and the head-spinning nuttiness of Theosophy.) Over and over, Waldorf directed our attention to the otherworldly. Yet there were no astronomy classes during my years at Waldorf: no study of actual other worlds. The real, physical universe — and science — were downplayed by our teachers in favor of fantastical alternative universes — visions that roughly coincided with Steiner’s or that at least primed us for belief in implausible fantasies (so that ultimately we might find our home in Steiner’s doctrines). Actual space flight was of little interest. Unlike public schools, our Waldorf ignored the Project Mercury launches. Classes did not pause so that we could listen to the blast-offs, no photos or diagrams of the space missions — and no portraits of the heroic astronauts — appeared on our bulletin boards. Moreover, ordinary flight through the Earth’s atmosphere was deemed suspect. Once during a school assembly, our headmaster announced that jet aircraft make so much noise because the air being sucked into the engines is literally ripped apart by the rotating engine blades, and therefore the air screams as if in torment. (Because my father was then a jet captain, I had to reconsider my admiration for him.) The faculty’s antipathy to science and engineering was continually reaffirmed. [5] There was two forms of “flight” our faculty presumably approved. ◊According to Anthroposophic lore, human beings aged 14 and older make phantasmic nightly flights out of their bodies into the spirit realm (“astral bodies” leaving physical bodies), returning refreshed in the morning. [6] According to Steiner, maintaining and strengthening ties to the spirit realm is essential to human identity. And central to that identity is our reliance on our Savior. Bear in mind, very little of this theology was ever laid out explicitly for us students. But as I have argued at length elsewhere, such doctrines pervaded our schooling in unspoken ways. [7] ◊Steiner taught that human beings migrated to various planets a while ago. I guess this counts as a form of flight: “[D]uring the Lemurian epoch only very few human beings had outlasted, on the earth itself, the happenings of this evolution ... the majority of souls withdrew from the earth to other planets, continuing their life on Mars, Saturn, Venus, Jupiter, and so forth ... during the Atlantean epoch, these souls gradually came [back] down to earth in order to incarnate in earthly bodies under the changed earthly conditions.” [8]  But these Anthroposophical flights remained, for us, shrouded in the background. We students were kept largely clueless — our teachers nudged us toward the fantastical while dismissing other, realer types of flight. Science classes at Waldorf were distinctly human- and Earth-centric. (“Anthroposophy” means the wisdom of man; we were our own best subjects of “study;” the subjective and intuitive always aced the objective and empirical.) Once in a chemistry class, our teacher explained that matter occurs in three forms: solid, liquid, and gas. I raised my hand and suggested that these three divisions were not as categorical as they might seem: On a hotter planet, materials that are solid for us would be liquids, whereas on a colder planet our liquids would become solids. The teacher was not at all pleased. “What is you point?” he asked me, glaring. He stared me down and I kept mum after that. So much for flights of intellect. — Roger Rawlings Some illustrations on each page are closely connected to the essay on that page; others are not — they provide general context.  Flight, wings, escape — these are central concepts and images in mankind's romance with "higher worlds" — our unappeasable yearning for transcendence. It is built into us, the desire to fly away, beyond the skies I've illustrated over and over on this site. Steiner's version of this ancient yearning is just one on the endless roll. The question is whether he has provided any more realistic hope of attaining this release than any of his innumerable predecessors did.  Wings. [R. R., 2010.]  The dream of transcendence. [R.R., 2010.]  [Rudolf Steiner Press, 1983.]  Whether describing flying creatures or swimming creatures — or, come to that, anything else — all of Steiner's teachings are flights of fantasy. "The butterfly rightly regards itself as a creature of the light, the bird as a being of warm air, but this is impossible for the lower animals — amphibians, reptiles and fishes ... A fish lives primarily in the element of water. But water is certainly not just the combination of hydrogen and oxygen which it is for the chemist. Water is permeated by all kinds of cosmic forces. Stellar forces also enter into it ... [T]he bird actually feels the air that enters into it and is everywhere diffused through it, as its own being ... The fish has water within it, but it does not feel itself to be water ... It feels itself to be the glittering shell or vessel enclosing water .. [T]he fish experiences the ether to be the element in which it actually lives. It does not not feel the astral as something belonging to it." [Rudolf Steiner, HARMONY OF THE CREATIVE WORD (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2001), pp. 99-100. R.R. sketch, 2009, based on the one in the book.]  Steiner said that the ego (red) and the astral body (yellow) separate from the physical body (blue) and the etheric body (ochre) each night. The ego and astral body spend the night hours in the spirit realm. They rejoin the two earthbound bodies in the morning. [This is my rendering of a black-and-white illustration on p. 115 of Rudolf Steiner, EVIL (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1997). The value of such schematics — which Steiner created during his lectures — is perhaps open to question.]  Here is some additional surprising information about our bodies. “[T]he astral body makes itself very much at home everywhere in the [physical] body. It gets too strong. It attacks all the organs and wears them down. And that is the consequence of rapid arsenic poisoning. If someone takes a lot of arsenic, quickly, his astral body begins to become terribly active, whirling, whirling, whirling ... The ether body gives life, the astral body gives sentience. But there can be no sentience unless life is suppressed. To draw it in diagrammatic form, therefore, it is like this. There you have the astral body [darker areas], there the ether body [lighter areas]. They are always fighting one another. If the ether body wins we get a bit sleepy; if the astral body wins we come wide awake ... [T]he astral body gets what it needs ... from the arsenic human beings produce themselves." [Rudolf Steiner, FROM ELEPHANTS TO EINSTEIN (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1998), pp. 19-20. R. R. sketch, 2009, based on the sketch on p. 20.] The Earth from which parts of us depart each night is, perhaps, different from what you think. The Earth is not flat, obviously — but neither is it a globe, in any normal sense. "[T]he earth stands in the universe, curiously, as a rounded tetrahedron, as a kind of pyramid." [Rudolf Steiner, FROM SUNSPOTS TO STRAWBERRIES (Rudolf Steiner Press, 2002), p. 185.] Here we see one panel of the tetrahedron: It extends from a volcano in Mexico to the numerous volcanos at the South Pole to the volcanic mountains in the Caucasus. Problem: There is no cluster of volcanos around the South Pole. But let's not quibble. The main point is that the Earth is not a tetrahedron, rounded or otherwise. [I've added a touch of color in my version of the book's b&w sketch, and I've omitted Antarctica because the book's sketch omits it — even though the point of the sketch depends on the mythical volcanos way down there.]   Speaking of flights: Anthroposophical art can seem very modern — strange angles, slanted perspectives, undulating forms. A flight of steps leading up to a double door becomes an abstract sculpture. You may or may not like such art, but you should learn to recognize the idiom. When such patterns and forms show up in Waldorf schools, devotion to the occult doctrines of Anthroposophy is being pronounced. The strange exteriors house strange interior beliefs and practices. [This is the entry to the eurythmy training center on the campus of the Anthroposophical headquarters, the Goetheanum. R. R. sketch, 2010.] Rudolf Steiner was a polymath, at least to the extent that he dabbled in many fields, asserting his superior knowledge in each. His influence outside the circle of his devoted followers has been modest, at best. Our concern here, however, should be to acquaint ourselves with the occult doctrines that his work in all spheres was meant to advance. Ultimately, you can celebrate Steiner and his creations, such as Waldorf schools, only if you embrace — to one degree or another — his occultism. The worldview that underlies Waldorf education is so fundamentally divorced from reality, even some defenders of Rudolf Steiner admit that it resembles science fiction. To see how far from reality Steiner flew — and how far many of his followers are willing to fly with him — please see my essay "Everything" and the essays that follow it.  [R.R., 2010.] ENDNOTES [1] Our teachers did not assign us any Steiner books (see “Unenlightened,” on this Web site). Instead, they assigned and recommended books by writers whose ideas bore some relation to Steiner’s. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were two of these writers. The Tolkien trilogy — as we all now know, thanks to Hollywood — consists of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING, THE TWO TOWERS, and THE RETURN OF THE KING. When I was in grade school, our Waldorf sold these books — in the original British editions — in the lobby at Christmas time. As for Lewis: “The Lewis trilogy (OUT OF THE SILENT, 1938; PERELANDRA, 1943; THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, 1945) is a science fiction PILGRIM’S PROGRESS. The war of the Christian Good and Satanic Evil becomes an interplanetary struggle within the entire solar system. Consistently the villains are scientists, who, to Lewis, embody the sin of pride.” [Martin S. Day, HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 1837 TO THE PRESENT (Doubleday, 1964), p. 347.] [2] “[A] world is not made to last forever, much less a race; that is not Maleldil’s way.” [OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET p. 100.] I should explain that Maleldil is Lewis’s name for God or Christ (Christ is sometimes referred to as Maleldil the Younger). Lifting the siege of Earth will require something like Steiner’s War of All Against All. “The best of all humanity must be chosen and prepared for survival beyond the time of the great War of All against All, when people will oppose them who bear in their countenances the sign of evil ....” [Rudolf Steiner, EVIL, (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1997), p. 194.] [3] PERELANDRA, p. 62. There is no overestimating the impact Christ had on the Earth. “In the future, scientists will perceive that the Christ has arranged every atom of the earth, and a new physics and chemistry will result.” [Rudolf Steiner, THE SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND HUMANITY (SteinerBooks, 1992), contributor Hilmar Moore, p. xiv. Also see Rudolf Steiner, APPROACHING THE MYSTERY OF GOLGOTHA (SteinerBooks, 2006). [4] PERELANDRA, p. 197. [5] See the essays “ Unenlightened”, “Oh My Stars”, and “Steiner’s ‘Science’”, on this Web site. [6] “During sleep our astral bodies return to the harmony of the universe again. When we awaken, we bring enough strength with us out of the cosmic harmony into our bodies so that we can go without being in that state for a while. The astral body returns home during sleep and brings renewed forces back into our life when we awaken ....” [Rudolf Steiner, AN OUTLINE OF ESOTERIC SCIENCE (Anthroposophic Press, 1997), p. 68.] [7] See, especially, the essay “Unenlightened.” [8] Rudolf Steiner, OCCULT HISTORY (Rudolf Steiner Press, 1982), p. 36.  [R.R., ~ 1997.] |