XVII. The Relationship of Occultism to the Theosophical Movement
GA 90b/1905-10-22/p016
·1905-10-22
·
English
HighHigh alignmentThis translation's paragraph count matches the German original — the locus maps cleanly to the same paragraph in DE.
Record: listeners' notes. Written from listeners' notes, summaries, or memory rather than a shorthand transcript. The wording is the note-taker's as much as Steiner's: weigh a single striking phrase here far more cautiously than the same phrase in a stenographic volume, and do not rest an argument on one word. Evidence: «Frühe Vortragsreihen und Einzelvorträge für Mitglieder in Berlin 1905–1906 nach ausführlichen und z.T. fragmentarischen Mitschriften.» (Early lecture series and single lectures for members in Berlin 1905-1906, from detailed and in part fragmentary listeners' transcripts.). The publisher's description of the volume, as mirrored on AnthroWiki (GA 90b); the description calls them "Hörermitschriften", and the served text carries the note-taker's gap marker "[Lücke in der Mitschrift]". The translation is the maintainer's, not a published one.
Take, for example, Pythagoras' teaching of the music of the spheres, as he taught it to his students. Philosophers seek to present Pythagoras' occult music as a very simple system. The intellect can grasp this quickly. But for him, it was important that the student only came to it when his mind, his mood, was prepared for it. It is also impossible for someone who has no sense for images that originate in the astral to want to explain the deeper meaning of Raphael's Sistine Madonna: the feeling, the mind, must climb up to it. What otherwise leaves the idea cold appears here in the picture artistically full of life as the divine world thought, as that which the divine forces have created the world after - and a simple line becomes something sacred! By entwining thoughts around the element of the divine, thought is brought to divine influence.
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