Symbols reflecting original wisdom

[^7]: Rudolf Steiner’s source for this clearly was the 18th century French philosopher Louis Claude Marquis de Saint-Martin (1743 - 1803). He publishes his first work Des erreurs et de la vérite ou les homines rappelés an principle universel de la science, par un ph... inc... [philosophe inconnu] in 1775, fictitious place of publication ‘Edimbourg’ (really Lyon). This earned him the epithet ‘Saint Martin, the unknown philosopher’. Rudolf Steiner would often refer to Saint-Martin as representative of a spirituality that had been lost and needed to be regained through the modern science of the spirit. He suggested that the Der Kommende Tag publishing house brought a new edition of the German translation by Matthias Claudius in 1925. The preface he had intended to write was not written because of his death. In the chapter on errors and truth, it says that in his original state, before the Fall, the human being had to fight all the time to overcome disorder and restore unity of all. This was potentially dangerous and so he was clothed in impenetrable armour and armed with a lance which would always strike in two places at once. The country where this human being was to fight his fight ‘was covered with a wood of seven trees, each of which had sixteen roots and 490 branches.’ At the end of the book the ‘book of man’ is described, saying that although it only had ten pages it nevertheless contained ‘all insights and knowledge of what has been, of what is and of what will be.’ See also note 111.