VIII. Karmic Effects: Anthroposophy as a Way of Life

Some time ago I was called upon to spend a few days lecturing in our southernmost European branch – I mean in so far as we speak of Rosicrucian Theosophy – in Palermo. And when I entered Sicily from Naples by ship, I already had the very definite feeling that there was something to be learned there about occult facts that are difficult to study in the north alone. For there is a personality, an individuality that emerged, which I cannot name now, that played a certain role at the turn of the Middle Ages and the modern era, which made a lot of noise in our and neighboring areas and which makes the occultist wonder: What was the previous incarnation of this personality? That was an important research question for me, and strangely enough, I hoped to find out something about this question through the occult research that was possible there, especially at this entrance to Sicily. And that was indeed the case very soon. Of course, what is being told is something intimate, but within our branches, there is no longer any need to hold back on these intimate things. Something very, very remarkable has been poured out into the whole spiritual atmosphere of Sicily – I do not say the outer, but the spiritual atmosphere. And the pursuit of this remarkable thing really led at last to its origin, to a great sage who worked in Sicily and who is also dismissed with a few words in the history of philosophy, but whom we really know very little about in an outwardly exoteric way. His name is Empedocles.