Another Piece From My English Journey

Report in: Das Goetheanum, vol. 3, no. 6

Rudolf Steiner

Remembering the Druids

The second of the lecture series that I was invited to give by friends of anthroposophy in England this summer took place in Penmaenmawr (North Wales). It was a beautiful thought of Mr. Dunlop's, a long-standing custodian of spiritual knowledge and current member of the Anthroposophical Society, to choose this location. It is located on the west coast of England, where the island of Anglesey is just off the coast.

One lived completely in the spiritual atmosphere that emanates from what the ruined places of worship of prehistoric Druidic service still say today. In the mountains around Penmaenmawr and on the island of Anglesey, these promising stones lie in places where one can still see the careful selection today. Places where nature reveals many of its secrets to man.

Unhewn stones were arranged in a ring (in the cultic structures now called Cromlech) and covered by a larger stone, so that they enclosed a small space. In other places, larger circles were formed from such stones, the actual Druid circles.

You can find two such circles by climbing one of the mountains near Penmaenmawr. You walk along a path that offers wonderful views of the mountains and the sea at many points. You reach the uppermost area of the mountain, where the summit surface slopes gently, so that you are surrounded by a ring wall, as if by nature, over which you can see the most magnificent landscape everywhere. There are two such stone rings lying next to each other, one larger and one smaller.

History sees in these formations monuments over graves and also allows them to be considered as a kind of place of pilgrimage, as places where meetings were held to organize the affairs of the people, etc.

What I have to say about these places may be considered fantastic from the point of view of present-day thought; for me, however, it is the result of spiritual insight, of which I have often spoken in this weekly, and is of the same character as any currently accepted knowledge. A visit to Penmaenmawr provides ample inspiration to talk about these things.

The Druidic service had its time of decline. In this time, it certainly revealed some rather ugly aberrations. In its heyday, it consisted of institutions through which an ancient humanity sought in its own way to fathom the secrets of nature in order to order life in its own sense. The Druidic cult sites served the purpose of what history, which adheres to the external, speaks of. But they also served other purposes. The sun cast shadows on these stone structures; and the path of the heavenly body could be read from the directions and shapes of the shadows at different times of the year and day. From what was seen, the connections between the earth and celestial events were interpreted. The power of the sun is present in growth, in life and death, in all living things. As Druid priests, they observed the change of the sun's activity in the course of time by the way it showed itself through the place of worship. What they interpreted was knowledge of the sun's activity, which is reflected in the products of the earth in a living way. The Druid priest received a kind of inspiration there. Reading the secrets of nature was part of his ministry.

Then came to this solar inspiration what he, equipped with it, had to see as the effect of the moon. In those days, the causes of what is present in the living things of the earth were sought in the sun and moon. The sun brings forth burgeoning life. But what it brings about would stretch into infinity if it were extended everywhere. The way in which the moon absorbs its effects and transforms them, casting them back onto the earth, captures what wants to grow immeasurably in plants, in animals, in all of nature, shaping it within limits.

In the minds of the Druid priests, these life-giving, form-shaping forces became images, in which their wisdom consisted. They owed the inspiration to what they had to see as lunar effects their kind of knowledge of nature. They saw the result of these lunar effects in the shaping of forces with which the plant took root in the substances of the solid earth, with which it penetrated the air when forming leaves, and then, when the flowers unfolded, it strove freely towards the being of the sun.

This shaping of forces was seen in the images of living spiritual beings in all forms of natural existence. It was not abstract natural laws that were thought to be effective; living spiritual beings, in secret relationship to the sun and moon, were seen to be effective in the roots, leaves and flowers of plants. The spiritual realm was seen as the cause of the physical realm.

But the forces of the world reveal themselves in many different ways. In the roots of the plants, the nature spirits work in a beneficial way within the limits assigned to them by the sun and moon. But they can break out of these limits. What contracts the salts of the earth in the root in order to incorporate them into the plant form can leave the limits of the plant and become independent. Then it proliferates into the gigantic. Instead of the narrow root nature, it takes hold of the vastness of natural events. It lives in the products of frost, in the wild effects that emanate from the cold of the earth. The root spirits develop into the frost giants. What the leaf brings to the plant of the air in the way of form, lives, emancipated from its narrow boundaries, as storm and wind giants. And what the blossom and fruit release in the plant in the way of solar power becomes, proliferating independently, the fire giants.

Thus arose in the north of Europe an understanding of nature that saw the Frost, Storm and Fire Giants where we see “forces of nature” today.

During our stay in Penmaenmawr, we became aware of the natural effects that arose from the earth, lived in the air, and streamed down from the sun and radiated. Every hour, glorious sunlight often alternated with cloudburst-like rainstorms. The memory could truly awaken to the natural giants that revealed themselves to the ancient Druid priests.

And what was often seen in a terrible way in the nature beings that had grown into the gigantic, the druid priests sought to entice beneficial effects from it again. What worked from within the plant through the sun and moon shaped it into root, leaf, blossom; what played itself out in the independently become gigantic: in the sap content of the ripening, dew; in the formations that arise on the earth through wind and weather; in what is formed by charring, burning, etc. as a result of the fiery. Human art finds in this that with which it can treat plants from the outside. What is often harmful, when used in the right way, becomes a remedy. The Druid priest becomes a healer.

He wrests the powers of the giants, the enemies of the gods, where they become harmful, in order to put them back into the service of the gods.

The Druid service thus ordered life through the way it connected with the spirit of nature. The spirit quest, to introduce the spirit into earthly life, is what these stones lying around speak of in a haunting way. It was therefore deeply satisfying to be able to talk about the spirit quest in the very atmosphere of these memories, in a way that seems appropriate to the present day.