Questions and Answers

GA 158 — 7 April 1912, Helsinki

following lecture V of Spiritual Beings in the Heavenly Bodies and in the Kingdoms of Nature

Question: There are people in Finland who have begun to doubt the future of Finland. And yet others are full of enthusiasm for a future Finnish culture. Do you believe that Finland's guardian angel still has something to do in this world?

Rudolf Steiner: It is perhaps a good thing that occultists as a rule do not go too far in answering such questions. It is quite understandable that an objective, unbiased assessment of some of the answers we receive from occult research requires a high degree of impartiality, which we really — forgive me for emphasizing this — cannot always have in practical life. And therefore it is necessary that I cannot go any further here in answering this question than the practical occultist can go at all when dealing with a question that relates to the social life of the present and the forces at work in it. What is possible to say about this question can be indicated in a few words, which I also scattered throughout my speech when I once spoke about folk spirits in Kristiania. I expressly remarked that the folk spirits of certain territories of smaller nationalities have a much greater significance for the future of humanity, for the next stage of cultural development, than is generally imagined in the exoteric world today. Peoples who, in a certain sense, have had less say in the “great concert” of European or other contemporary world development for a time, have sometimes been called upon to preserve certain significant assets of humanity, separated from the great cultural process. As far as I have been able to study the spiritual life of Finnish culture, I must say that I have to acknowledge as true for Finland what I said at that time in Kristiania. And I ask you not to take this as if I were saying it as a German who is allowed to speak among Finns and intends to say something to someone that might please them. I would never say anything for the sake of pleasing any individual or group of people, but only because it is my conviction and the result of my research that it is true.

When one observes Finnish cultural development as a non-Finn—insofar as this is possible for a practical occultist—one must consider Finnish intellectual life in its spiritual evolution to be among those that will play a very important role in the future cultural development of Europe. I would like to say this as something entirely objective. I say this regardless of my own nationality or the nationality of those to whom I am speaking. Certainly, the most diverse national spirits will have a say in the future of the earth; but everything that we can come to know as characteristic, as essential to Finnish spiritual life, has something that must not be missing in the future world culture if this world culture is to follow the paths that we must attribute to it according to our occult knowledge. The course of world development is such that whenever evolution progresses, at a later point something must be renewed, something that was present in earlier cultural periods must be taken over. For example, in our present, fifth post-Atlantean cultural period, many things are being taken over from the Egyptian period—only in a different form; in the sixth cultural period, many things will be taken over from the ancient Persian period, and in the seventh from the ancient Indian culture. This ancient Indian culture, which continues to live on, as it were, hidden beneath the surface, will experience a great and powerful resurrection. The sacred wisdom of the seven Rishis will experience a great, powerful resurrection in the seventh post-Atlantean cultural period. What happens on a large scale in relation to these repetitions also takes place in a living way among peoples who become living preservers of certain spiritual forces in the ongoing evolution. And so I have become convinced that there are hidden forces in Finnish culture which, I believe, are being felt by the present Finnish population in the renewal of the ancient legends of Finland's ancient culture — I say this explicitly at this point: I believe — and that there is something highly significant in all this, which in many respects is still hidden, but will emerge in its full meaning — even more than is already the case today — and which will have an impact on the future culture of humanity. I believe that a second assertion may indeed be justified, one that attributes something extraordinarily significant and luminous to the future of Finland and Finnish culture. Once again, I would like to emphasize that I have said what I have said out of my own conviction and, as I believe, out of my occult knowledge, and not to flatter anyone. I would have said something equally unpleasant if it had been the truth.

Question: The Kalevala shows us that it is justified to speak of a past, at least spiritual, culture in Finland. A culture presupposes a higher influence. That is why one can perhaps speak of ancient Finnish mysteries. Do you know what kind of mysteries these were? Would you like to tell us something about them?

Rudolf Steiner: It is easy to understand that anyone who knows the Kalevala only in translation must overlook certain details that are extremely important for the effect of such a poem. But this poem, the national poem of Finland, appears to anyone who looks at it with an occult eye as something so significant, something so deeply rooted in occult foundations that it must surely be permissible to recognize these occult foundations even if one cannot appreciate the immediate, great beauty that can only be conveyed in the language in which the poem was originally written.

Now, what is peculiar about the Kalevala is that we immediately have the occult foundation. It was extremely striking to me—and I say this here, although I will be compelled to repeat some of these thoughts in my public lecture the day after tomorrow—when I encountered the three heroes Wäinämöinen, Ilmarinen, and Lemminkäinen, whom you are all familiar with, in the great Finnish national poem. Please forgive me if I sometimes make mistakes in pronunciation. It goes without saying that a language as difficult as Finnish is for us cannot be pronounced without mistakes. When these three heroes appear, as an occultist one immediately stops talking about ordinary heroes and heroines, as the word is often used in other folk epics. I was struck by three very specific things I found behind these three main heroes. You know, in my “Theosophy,” , the entire scope of human soul life is presented, according to the oldest European mysteries in full harmony and agreement with the Rosicrucian mysteries of more recent times, in three basic essences of the human soul, which I call the sentient soul, the intellectual or emotional soul, and the conscious soul. We must think of the development of the whole of humanity in such a way that, in the course of human evolution, these soul elements have also developed one after the other. First, in the evolution of humanity, the development of the sentient soul took place in the three sheaths: the physical body, the etheric body, and the astral body. Later, the development of the intellectual or emotional soul built upon this, and the richest product of this development is the conscious soul. We must imagine that behind everything that happens in the physical world, including human participation in these forces, there are spiritual beings. Thus, behind the physical world in which we humans live, we must see the spiritual givers and bringers of the forces of our sentient soul, the forces of our intellectual or emotional soul, and the forces of our conscious soul. Now I cannot go into these details, but it has become completely certain to me that Wäinämöinen can be recognized as the bringer, the giver, the bestower of the feeling soul to human beings, so that everything we refer to in European theosophy today as the forces of the feeling soul must appear as a gift from the spiritual beings designated by the name Wainämöinen in the Kalevala. Not only do these things point to historical events, but the historical events also always contain what lies behind them as occult forces. This does not mean that there are no historical heroes behind the personalities, but what we must necessarily recognize is what lies within these heroes. The giver of the consciousness soul is Lemminkäinen. Precisely because he is the giver of the consciousness soul, Lemminkäinen is in what one might call a Dionysian situation: it is striking, if one is familiar with the mystery of “being torn into pieces in the world,” that the Kalewala describes the dismemberment of Lemminkäinen. So that when we go into the things of the Kalevala, we find everywhere in powerful images — which, precisely because they give us something pre-human, superhuman, go out into the magnificent, the powerful — what we must today, in relation to soul development, reproduce in theosophy and what comes from the oldest mysteries of Europe — preferably from the Nordic mysteries, but it is also in accordance with the Rosicrucian and Grail mysteries. So that this, I would say, external reason alone shows us what lies behind this poetry: that it reproduces in a grand, powerful, and pictorial way ancient sacred mystery truths that originate from the deepest mysteries of the European North. So that we must acknowledge — I cannot go into details here about what we encounter in this poetry — something that has welled up from the deepest mysteries of the European North. This is evident, for example, from an external observation, in the way the creation of the world that preceded human beings is presented to us in the first runes. This corresponds in every way to what the European mysteries contained about the origin of the world — only expressed in grandiose images. These are the results of mystical truths, which the earlier consciousness absorbed in this way. In addition, occult history and the Akashic Records reveal the direct connection between these Finnish ideas — I will now cautiously refer to the ideas underlying the Kalevala — and the correspondence between the images in the Kalevala and those given in the ancient European mysteries about the marriage of heaven and earth. Thus, what we characterize as the interaction of the higher and lower in the sense of the mysteries appears to us in the first rune.