5. The Idea of Reincarnation and its Introduction into Western Culture. The Heralding of Christianity.

It is interesting, here, to speak of a case—which I could multiply a hundredfold—because it is an example of what is alive in all those who have contemplated the picture presented by human evolution and in their life of feeling have discerned the rhythmic recurrence, the rhythmic return of events. I will quote one example, which shows how this thought has taken root, causing something to spring to life in the soul. This writer could not have been a theosophist in the modern sense, for what I am going to refer to is a poem written in the year 1835.[^3] The writer could have had no knowledge of the vista of human evolution one day to be opened up by Spiritual Science. Yet something rises up in him that is like a dream of the future of humanity—an instinctive perception of recurrent phenomena in human existence. I am speaking of the poet Anastasius Grün, who in the year 1835 published a poem ( Schutt) in which he depicts five recurrences of a certain happening, rhythmic repetitions of the spiritual message working in humanity. The poem depicts how on Easter Day, Christ re-visits the Mount of Olives in the Spirit, in order to look again at the places where He had lived and suffered. The poem speaks of five returns, four of which lie in the past, and the fifth in the future. The first occurs in the period after the destruction of Jerusalem. The second, “when Christ beholds the conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders”; as He looks down, Christ sees what is happening in the places He had once known. The third return falls in the period when Islam was spreading its power over Jerusalem; the fourth in the period when humanity, split into countless sects, was quarrelling about the mission of Christ. All this is vividly and graphically described by Grün. Then there opens out the vista of a return of Christ on an Easter Day in the far distant future. Although the picture is dreamlike and Utopian, we cannot fail to discern—apart from the actual content of the poem—something of the blessing experienced by the soul when spiritual knowledge, especially as it has unfolded since the thirteenth century, opens up glimpses of a future when a spiritual culture will spread peace instead of wars and strife. Grün sees the blessings of peace in the culture of times to come and speaks of a future return of Christ to the Mount of Olives on an Easter Day, describing it as it appeared to his imagination. Children are playing on Golgotha; they have been digging in the ground and find a strange thing made of iron, not knowing at all what it can be; it proves, subsequently, to be a sword. And in the mood of exultation which comes upon him, Grün says that there will come a time when the very purpose of such an instrument as a sword will have been forgotten and the sword will be an object of amazement to men. Then he says that the iron will be used as a plough and describes the feeling which the rhythmic return of Christ to the Mount of Olives quickens in him. What has been forgotten and will again be revealed, is a Cross of Stone! It is raised again and Grün says that something happens to the Cross, indicating what part the Cross will play hereafter. In the following verses he describes what feelings arise in him when the children unearth a Cross and set it up for all the world to see—and he speaks, too, of the function and the power of the Cross in mankind:—