Foreword to The Soul's Awakening

The colored booklet of the Waldorf-Astoria, Stuttgart n.d. [1918], No. 31; also in: Through the Spirit to the Realization of the Human Mystery, Berlin [1918]

The following two scenes belong to the last of four interrelated dramas that depict the experiences of people undergoing an inner psychological development. These four dramas are: 1. The Portal of Initiation; 2. The Test of the Soul; 3. The Guardian of the Threshold; 4. The Awakening of the Soul (all published by Philosophisch-anthroposophischen Verlag, Berlin W., Motzstr. 17). This development should lead them to a living insight into the spiritual world and to permeating their will with the ideals of this world. The experiences they undergo on the way to this goal are manifold. Among these experiences, there are also those in which they see in pictures people from earlier ages of culture striving towards the same goal under different circumstances. These are people in whom they recognize their own being, their soul qualities, and the direction of their will. They can recognize from the destinies of these people the difficulties and obstacles that such striving encounters. By recognizing themselves in these people, they find the strength to continue on their path. They feel integrated with the whole spiritual development of humanity through their own being. They can see how that which is currently working in their soul has worked in other times. They learn to understand how it must reveal itself now, by becoming a repetition and consequence of what was revealed in times gone by. The two dramatic pictures printed here present the souls looking back to an earlier cultural age. The Egyptian cultural age, already in decline, is to be visualized. The 'sacrificer' who appears recognizes that a new era must dawn. The other guides at the wisdom site insist on the traditional forms. They want to introduce a disciple to the experience of the spiritual world in the sense of these forms. It does not matter to them whether this disciple is truly mature, but rather that their forms should live on. The “sacrificial way” thwarts their efforts by revealing the immaturity of the disciple through his behavior, which is guided by higher goals. In doing so, he brings about a pictorial event that shows how the doomed culture must be replaced by a new one.

Rudolf Steiner.