Subsequent Remarks

I would just like to add a few thoughts here. They came to me after completing the soul painting “The Awakening of Souls.” They did not play a role in the conception and development of the painting. The images were accepted as they came to me. The spiritual reality that is reproduced presents itself to the soul with the same necessity as things in physical perception. It also brings with it its inner disposition and composition. I could not have changed anything that presented itself to the soul. And if I had tried, what wanted to be expressed would certainly not have been improved.

This follows on from the previously published soul paintings: “The Gate of Initiation,” “The Test of the Soul,” and “The Guardian of the Threshold.” What takes place in “The Awakening of the Soul” occurs about one to two years after the events of “The Guardian of the Threshold.” In “The Awakening,” a particularly important point in the soul development of the persons in question seems to me to have been reached. The events in “The Gate of Initiation,” insofar as they relate to the spiritual world as soul events, are entirely inner soul experiences of Johannes Thomasius. The events of the physical world that occur in the painting are only those that are related to these inner soul experiences. Nothing is depicted from such outer events that does not find its spiritual continuation in the inner soul processes of Johannes Thomasius. At the end of the “Gate of Initiation,” Johannes has progressed so far on his soul journey that, of the three stages of spiritual-soul experience of reality, the first, the world of real imagination in its essence and in its relationship to spiritual reality, is transparent to him.

Just as nowhere else in these soul paintings are mere symbols or allegories meant, so too is this not the case with the depiction of the temple process at the end of the “Gate of Initiation.” Those who are unfamiliar with the nature of the real spiritual world may see symbolism or allegory in these depictions. In images such as the temple image at the end of the “Gate of Initiation,” the forces active in the spiritual world are summarized for the soul's view, whose expression in the sensory world are such processes as are given in the other images of the “Gate of Initiation.” Certainly, the image of the temple as it is presented is not in itself the reality under consideration; but there is the way in which this reality must shape itself into experience in the imagination of the soul living in the physical world. In the “Trial of the Soul,” the spiritual-soul processes are already detached from the inner being of Johannes Thomasius. He no longer lives merely in what remains subjective to him; he is placed in life processes whose spiritual factors and connections he experiences. — However, this does not mean that the soul experiences in the “Gate of Initiation,” which Maria experiences, for example, are not real soul experiences. It is just that they exist independently of those of Johannes in Maria's soul. In the “Trial of the Soul,” the actual shared experience of the spiritual world begins. Everything that then takes place, such as the return to the previous incarnation (of the fourteenth century), is possible because of the higher spiritual development that the individuals have entered into during the time between the “Gate of Initiation” and the “Trial of the Soul.” —

At the end of the “trial of the soul,” Johannes Thomasius is at a point where the spiritual world is real to him, but where he also wants to assert himself freely as a personality within the spirit. The healthy part of his being wants to feel itself within itself and cast off all the sentimental dross that so easily arises in devotion to the spiritual world. —In the long time that then passes until the events of “The Guardian of the Threshold,” he devotes himself to work that arises from the healthy foundation of his being and also from his healthy relationship to the spiritual world. The fact that, after completing this work, he then approaches the mystical order of the “Guardian of the Threshold” as described in this soul portrait is because, while working on his book, he has arrived at a point of view that allows him a clear overview of the objective value of such work as he has accomplished. It was precisely during his work that he was able to realize how such a spiritual creation fits into the fabric of the real spiritual world. In the process, his soul is enlightened as to how such creations, which are easily accepted as entirely objective, are nevertheless connected with the personality and its subjective position in the world. Johannes Thomasius is confronted with something that may leave him cold as long as he considers it theoretically, but which takes on a serious aspect as soon as it becomes a soul experience: the connection between what man can believe to be completely detached from his personality and this personality and his destiny. The words Johannes speaks before the Mystic Brotherhood in The Guardian of the Threshold: “That this work had to be done by another human being and not by me” can become a serious inner soul tragedy when they are a soul experience. This tragedy is then connected with the emergence of personal experience. The latter naturally presents itself differently for different people. For Johannes, it seems to me from all his predispositions that it takes the form in which it plays into the third, fourth, and fifth images of The Guardian of the Threshold. In connection with these “aberrations” of his soul, which contrast with his acquired level of knowledge, the possibility develops in the depths of his soul to arrive at his own kind of real self-knowledge, which results for him in the experiences of the seventh and eighth pictures of The Guardian of the Threshold. This self-knowledge is ...