Robert McDermott, PhD, was president and is currently professor of philosophy and religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He was formerly professor and chair of the department of philosophy at Baruch College, CUNY. His publications include Radhakrishnan, The Essential Aurobindo, and The Essential Steiner.

This essay is a revised version of a section of an essay entitled “My Transpersonal Worldview,” written for a forthcoming volume called The Collected Works of Ken Wilber.

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I am often accused by my East Coast friends of having “gone Californian,” and by my San Francisco Bay Area friends of being still “very East Coast.” Neither characterization is intended as a compliment. Reference points for New York academic life tend to be the canonical tradition from Socrates to Godimer whereas comparable reference points for the Bay Area transpersonal community tend to be Asian spiritual teachers; meditation techniques; goddess, shamanic and Jungian symbols; astrological archetypes and Enneagram points. When I appear to my East Coast friends as too Californian, it is because of my delight in the varieties of spirit manifest in transpersonal psychologists and artists, in the eighty dharma centers in the Bay Area, sacred medicine researchers, teachers of biography, eco-feminists, multi-traditional mystics, organizational experts, and astrologers. Anthroposophy is not ordinarily listed in such a catalogue, and there are excellent reasons why it should not be, as well as reasons why it should be — hence this essay.

For my transpersonal colleagues I am too much an Anthroposophist and for my Anthroposophical colleagues I appear too involved in Hinduism, Buddhism, and The New Paradigm. My Anthroposophy is very “East Coast,” and perhaps necessarily so. My version of Anthroposophy includes Krishna and Buddha, but also tends to include references to the European Christian tradition. Anthroposophy has Japanese and Israeli adherents, but non-western and non-Christian voices are not yet as audible as Anthroposophical teachers who look and sound Christian. Furthermore, anyone who accepts Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual-scientific research accepts a Christo-centric view of history and evolution of consciousness. Such a view can, and perhaps will, offer an alternative perspective to Christianity, but it is difficult to imagine a Christo-centric view of the history of the earth and humanity which does not closely resemble and overlap with the view of Christ offered, however imperfectly, by Christianity.

This essay is an attempt to explain why I admit to holding both sides of the polarities introduced above. In this essay I recommend the complementarity of East Coast and West Coast thinking as well as Anthroposophical and transpersonal world views. I am grateful for my fifty years in heady New York and for the past ten years in the transpersonal community of the San Francisco Bay Area. This essay issues from my primary commitment to the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner and from my secondary commitment to the varieties of transpersonal dharma and practice. The sociological difference of East and West Coast is interesting to observe for its subtle influence but the deeper topic is the spiritual paradigm represented by Anthroposophical and transpersonal teachings and practices.

While it would be misleading to say that Anthroposophy embodies East Coast and transpersonal embodies Bay Area sensibilities, the turn of the twentieth century European origin of Anthroposophy and the Asian and pagan origin of the transpersonal worldview continue to affect all who touch one or the other. For ten years I have been trying to integrate the best features of the transpersonal experience, worldview, and practices with Anthroposophy and to introduce Anthroposophical thinking and practice into the transpersonal community. My spiritual home, however, for the past twenty-five years, and no doubt longer in both directions, has been and will be Anthroposophy.

As my Anthroposophical and transpersonal worldviews overlap substantially but not entirely, this essay aims to express a transpersonal Anthroposophy and almost equally an Anthroposophical transpersonalism. As with all comparisons, it is the differences that get disproportionate attention. I will also indicate the strength of the Jewish and Christian elements in East Coast thinking, and the corresponding emphasis in the transpersonal community on a light-paradigm Buddhism — or, negatively, away from Jewish and Christian monotheism, creationism, and messianism. Entirely consistent with my Anthroposophical worldview, my thinking has been and no doubt will remain Mahayanist and incarnational. I attend to the Krishna of the Bhagavadgita, not only of the Mahabharata; to Buddha of the Mahayana tradition, not only Gotama of the Theravada tradition; and to Christ of the John-Logos tradition, not only Jesus of the western humanist tradition.

As it has been the aim of my dharma for approximately thirty years to transform my personal life in the light of the Mahayana and the transpersonal, I sought the guidance, first, of Sri Aurobindo, whom I have long considered the foremost spiritual teacher of modern India. Without revising that assessment, I turned for guidance to Rudolf Steiner, whom I consider the foremost spiritual guide of the West — and perhaps of this historical period. It seems to me that Steiner has given a more comprehensive spiritual teaching than anyone else of the last several centuries. I have been working both at deepening my Anthroposophical work as such, and also at creating relationships between my Anthroposophical discipline and the spiritual work of diverse individuals and groups, many of whom are transpersonalists.

The transpersonal movement is based on a panoply of non-ordinary experiences, including those derived from psychotropics and psychedelics, meditation, shamanic practices, intuition, rituals, spiritual journeys, artistic activities, and organizational transformation — a truly radical empiricism and one deepened by traditions of practice. The entire transpersonal movement has issued primarily from psychology, the most transpersonally advanced western discipline from the 1960’s to the present. The transpersonal movement in turn continues to influence psychology and allied disciplines on behalf of a conception of psyche as profound and proactive. Not properly an ‘ism’ or a community, ‘transpersonal’ is an adjective prefixed to a loose confederacy of ideas, ideals, critiques and practices, as well as cultural (and more typically counter-cultural) mores.

I would propose as a working definition that the term transpersonal refers to a group of worldviews and practices which aim to foster soul transformative experience as well as to deepen and expand awareness of psychic and spiritual realities. It should be added to this definition that the realities which we in the third millennium West consider extraordinary would be perceived as perfectly ordinary in earlier cultures and in cultures at the present time not yet overwhelmed by the modern western paradigm. In recent decades, experiences that were kept out of mainstream cultural and intellectual life have been increasingly recognized as worthy of attention. As positivism and materialism tighten their grip on the intellectual life of the West, so do an increasing number of individuals and communities affirm the interior life. As darkness spreads, individual lights do shine, and need to shine, ever brighter.

In principle, there is no part of Anthroposophy that should be considered incompatible with the ideas and experiences that characterize the transpersonal movement. The degree to which Steiner’s account of the evolution of consciousness is consonant with Ken Wilber’s theory and application of the pre/trans fallacy is one of many areas of agreement between Anthroposophy and the foundational ideas espoused by the most prominent members of the transpersonal community. There are also, however, five important respects in which my commitment to Anthroposophy leads me to make assertions which are not generally included in the worldview most typically associated with transpersonal thinkers:

1. The supersensible reality of Anthroposophy and Anthroposophia;

2. The ontological reality of higher beings;

3. The evolution of the earth and humanity as a framework for epistemology, culture and spiritual discipline;

4. The centrality of Christ — in cooperation with Buddha and other spiritual beings in service of humanity and the earth;

5. A positive regard for historical religions.

First, as “transpersonal” modifies a group of thinkers with a shared worldview and set of experiences, “Anthroposophical” modifies the teachings, practices, and contributions of Rudolf Steiner and everyone who works out of his dharma. But “Anthroposophical” is also a modifier of a spiritual being whom Steiner refers to as Anthroposophia — human wisdom, in divine feminine form. In addition to designating a body of ideas and the method of intuitive thinking which ideally access such ideas, Anthroposophy refers to a spiritual influence of particular beings and events in the spiritual world, particularly Christ, Buddha, the Archangel Michael, Christian Rosenkreutz, and Anthroposophia. Throughout the last week of December, 1923, Steiner created a mystery school, with esoteric and exoteric components, continuous with the western Rosicrucian esoteric tradition, in service of these beings.

Anthroposophy is also linked properly and comprehensively to the karmic biography of Rudolf Steiner, an initiate whose teachings and spiritual mission are right for this time. Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) was a European initiate who brought a modem scientific method to the study of spiritual realities. Science commanded his attention and respect, but he also taught methods by which to break through its perceived boundaries to a direct knowledge of spirit. Steiner exemplified and taught a way of thinking which is capable of accessing spiritual reality and serves as an antidote to the restrictions on thinking placed so effectively by modern Western epistemology. Steiner’s method fully integrates feeling and willing, activity and receptivity. The esoteric research that Steiner conducted in later life led to many practical initiatives such as biodynamic farming and Waldorf education. His epistemology, as theory and practice, provides the necessary foundation to all of his work on behalf of spiritual and cultural renewal. The Anthroposophical Society that Steiner founded is a modern mystery school continuous with the mystery centers of Egypt and Greece, but using western scientific sensibility and open to all who seek knowledge of higher worlds.

Secondly, my Anthroposophical worldview affirms a full hierarchy and pantheon of real, distinctive, and collaborative spiritual beings, including Krishna, Buddha and Christ, angels and archangels, the tempters Lucifer and Ahriman, and the great spiritual leaders of humanity. Steiner’s accounts of these beings and their influence provide us an opportunity to approach, to contemplate, and to make relationships with higher beings. Such specificity, however, can lead to inflated claims of familiarity. Religious fundamentalists have a tendency to regard their images of such beings as the beings themselves, thereby falling into idolatry, a sin warned against in the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament, and the Qu’ran. A similar opportunity and temptation attends our relationships to spiritual leaders of humanity — e.g., Abraham and Moses; John the Evangelist and Mary the Mother; Sankara, Ramanuja, and Sri Ramakrishna; Shantidev and Dogen; Augustine and Aquinas; Dante and St. Francis, as well as Rudolf Steiner. While the personalities and achievements of these figures offer unlimited opportunity for intellectual speculation, it is their essential karmic mission and significance that is efficacious for our spiritual striving.

The task of knowing the essential spiritual work of contemporary spiritual teachers is even more challenging because it is so difficult to penetrate to the spiritual realities of human beings who are familiar in ordinary ways. Among the spiritual leaders of global import in the twentieth century, I would include Sri Aurobindo, M.K. Gandhi, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Rudolf Steiner. Close behind these I would mention Black Elk, Swami Yogananda, Sri Ramana Maharshi, J. Krishnamurti, Simone Weil, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Buber, C.G. Jung, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Bede Griffiths, Thich Nhat Hahn, and Ram Dass. I mention these names in the hope that such exemplars of the divine-human dialogue will give credibility and encouragement to our seeking and striving. The divine continues to reveal and manifest in myriad ways, and none so helpfully as in the lives of our contemporaries. The study of these figures and their esoteric-spiritual tasks is part of the discernment of karma.

For each of these, and others, I want to know the innermost core of their spiritual life, of their connection to the spiritual world, immanently and transcendentally considered. To meet such figures in their spiritual import is to engage in real, as opposed to nominal, knowing. It is to know the objective reality rather than the mere name, the surface, the conventional signification. Steiner’s esoteric epistemology is both a monism and a realism: a monism in that he defines reality as spirit, and matter as an expression of spirit; a realism in that spirit manifests a vast plurality of real beings and spiritual realities. These beings are all knowable, but only by effort. Steiner observes the medieval theological concept of adequatio: the level of knowing must meet the level of the object to be known. As Goethe observed, light created the eye just as spiritual light created the spiritual eye. To know the spiritual reality of beings past or present, physical and discarnate, requires spiritual — or realist, not nominalist — knowing.

Although it would be difficult, and rather to the side of the purpose of this essay, to generalize on the degree to which leading transpersonalist works can be said to be nominalist, I do believe that transpersonal thinkers partake of this nominalism more than I would want to do. Contemporary thought generally, and perhaps particularly psychological thought, regards as constructs of psyche precisely the spiritual ideals, events and individuals that I regard as spiritual facts, as realities that are mediated by, but also transcend, psyche. Among the many kinds of beings to which I ascribe ontological reality — not infrequently to the dismay of readers and colleagues — are angels and bodhisattvas; ideals such as Love, Truth, and Freedom; the etheric bodies of planets, animals, and human beings; and the Christ surrounding the Earth.

Names such as Krishna, Buddha, and Christ — and others, such as Brahman and Divine Mother — designate single beings, and experiences of them result in quite different descriptions of their characteristics and activities. These higher spiritual beings are experienced by human beings in a wide variety of valid transpersonal ways. By their relative vastness and relative perfection, these beings are closer to the singular divine source than any personal life, human community, or earthly existent. Because accounts of higher beings, including those given by Rudolf Steiner, are mediated by the limitations of human capacities, they are inevitably partial and inadequate.

I see the trans-personal and the trans-sensory as accessible and knowable by human effort and grace. The essential task of our time is to establish a noetic relationship between the immanent and transcendent, the supersensible and sensory. If artists, instead of psychologists, had initiated and articulated the transpersonal movement, its impact would have been more focused on the development of positive capacities and less on therapy. Steiner worked extensively with the arts because he considered art to be the most effective way of establishing a relationship between the supersensory and the world of the senses.

An ideal approach to the supersensible seems to me to include, in addition to artistic activity (including speaking and writing), highly individual experiences such as those celebrated in James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, and community experiences such as those celebrated in the religious philosophy of Josiah Royce. Just as an individual person is necessarily part of many communities, and is unintelligible apart from them, higher spiritual beings whom I and others aspire to know have their being as part of supersensible communities.

Third, it makes a decisive difference for one’s worldview if one adopts a perennialist or evolutionary framework for the interpretation not only of the past, present, and future, and equally of one’s spiritual discipline. I accept in broad outline the evolutionism of Steiner, including particularly the significance of Christ in the evolution of the earth and humanity. This framework might be the most important divide between Anthroposophy and virtually all transpersonal perspectives. In Steiner’s view, truths, such as those of the great religious traditions, are not permanently true, and certainly not true in the same ways, as one historical epoch succeeds another. The truth, meaning, and effectiveness of ideas, as well as beings, including higher beings, are all decisively affected by their evolving contexts.

Steiner’s account of the evolution of consciousness is not a simple modern Western view of progress, such that later is better; it is a double process. As human consciousness has expanded and deepened with respect to knowledge, complexity, and inventiveness, and continues to do so, it will continue, proportionately and appropriately, to lose the intimacy and directness of its relationship to the divine. In Steiner’s double evolutionary process, earlier consciousness (shamanic, for example) means closer to spiritual realities and later consciousness (particularly modern Western) means more alienated, individualized, and materialistic. This problem of modern Western alienated consciousness, however, provides the opportunity for humanity to share freely and deliberately in the creation of spiritual-sensory relationships.

As humanity lost its spiritual home and innate capacities (which Owen Barfield refers to as original participation), it also gained capacities. In the course of several millennia of human development, humanity experienced greater independence from the divine and thereby realized correspondingly greater opportunities for deliberate relationships between the human and divine. Steiner considered the twentieth century to be a time of exceptional spiritual darkness — and thereby an exceptional opportunity for the development of human wisdom and human will. To meet this challenge, Steiner bequeathed a host of spiritual insights and practices under the heading of Anthroposophy or spiritual science.

Steiner’s account of the evolution of consciousness does not commit what Ken Wilber refers to as the pre/trans fallacy — i.e., it does not reduce or prefer the pre-personal to the trans-personal (by whatever terms). Steiner essentially holds that even though the present might be terrible and the past might appear to be ideal, earlier modes of consciousness should nevertheless not be confused with, nor preferred to, contemporary modes of consciousness. Similarly, higher modes of consciousness, though perhaps painful or terrifying, should nevertheless neither be reduced to nor sacrificed in favor of lower modes of consciousness.

Steiner developed and recommended as a spiritual exercise a discipline, which he called symptomatology, for the study of the characteristics of each age, event, and biography under review. Steiner’s advice concerning the karma of consciousness is analogous to Krishna’s advice to Arjuna — namely, that despite the pain of Arjuna’s duty as a warrior in the line of battle, it was nevertheless right for him to do his own caste duty, however poorly, than to do well the duty of another caste. So too, it is better to face the task of this age, which Steiner takes to be the cultivation of free and loving thinking, than to revert to the consciousness of a previous age.

Fourth, I see the Christ as the central event in the evolution of consciousness. I am convinced that Steiner’s rendering of the evolution of consciousness will need to be very significantly extended so as to include, for their respective contributions, shamanic and indigenous consciousness, east Asian thought, and the vast research generated by a half century of anthropology, but I am not inclined to reduce or revise Steiner’s account of the role of Christ in cosmic and human history which he refers to as the Mystery of Golgotha. The transpersonal movement, by contrast, seems as focused on the spiritual teachings of Asia as the Theosophists of the past century and a quarter. The transpersonal movement has exhibited a natural preference for Buddhism, and particularly for forms of Buddhism with a light paradigmatic commitment.

The life of Jesus seems to me to have been an instrument similar to that of Gotama. After approximately fifteen years with little or no conscious relationship to the reality of Christ, I began to absorb the voluminous and unique teachings on Christ to be found in the writings and lectures of Rudolf Steiner. As a result of these works, supplemented by the writings of Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, and Bede Griffiths, I now view with gratitude the union of Jesus and Christ for three years that made possible a redemptive sacrifice on behalf of the evolution of human, and particularly Western, consciousness. If I do not fully accept the fundamental premise of Buddhism (particularly the first of the four noble truths — that all existence is dukkha) it is at least partly because the “good news” of the Incarnation described in the New Testament, and particularly its double message of vulnerability and forgiveness, keeps breaking in.

I consider my personal life to be intensely important not, as I ordinarily think, because it is mine, but, as I know transpersonally, because it expresses, however dimly, the reality of Logos — Christ, Buddha, Krishna, and Tao. I am relatively more awake to the reality and transformative power of Logos-Christ in history and enveloping the earth, and of Buddha, the preeminent source of wisdom and compassion prior to Christ, and less awake to other spiritual beings, such as Tao and Brahman, and beings to be contacted in shamanic journeys. As a result of study and meditative reflection, I can say that Buddha and Christ are real to me, but far less vivid for me than I would want them to be. Such beings are more real for me than they presumably are for those who subscribe to a standard modem or postmodern paradigm, but less real for me than they are for those whom William James referred to as “the experts” — converts, mystics, saints, Gnostics, sages, and initiates.

Fifth, just as transpersonal thinkers and teachers are currently attempting to revision psychology, so might they attempt to revision religious traditions as we know them. To do so, transpersonal thinkers who often sound dismissive of religious traditions might heed Huston Smith (whose exposition of religious traditions seems to me unsurpassed in our time) in seeing in these traditions what he refers to as the “traction of history.” Now and in the future, religious traditions — including particularly Asian traditions about which transpersonalists tend to be reactively uncritical — must die not to their rich diversity, sources, or institutions, but to their penchant for atavism, misogyny, and intolerance. Let pragmatism and pluralism help religious traditions replace anachronistic and dogmatic prescriptions in favor of tolerance needed both by adherents of religious traditions and by those who might be adherents if religious communities more faithfully exhibited their espoused ideals.

The first of many positive consequences of this change would be the general acceptance of the yogas that Krishna taught in the Bhagavadgita: spiritual thinking, selfless action, worship, and meditation. A second consequence would be the general acceptance of the dharma of Buddha and his followers. The life of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, made luminous by suffering, and his teachings made efficacious by compassion, might then serve as evidence that spirit manifests itself for all humankind. A third such consequence would be the general acknowledgment that the Christ (Logos), through Its incarnation in Jesus, as depicted in the New Testament and witnessed currently by a third of the human community, decisively brought and continues to bring redemptive grace into human consciousness and into the earth.

Religious traditions can trivialize and distort by dogma and idolatry, but they can also sustain the mysterious relationship between the spiritual and the human. In my view, the spiritual has broken through with particular force and depth in at least these instances — but in many others as well: the revelation of YHWH as “I AM” to Moses; the revelation of the yogas by Krishna to Arjuna recounted in the Bhagavadgita; the way of overcoming suffering by Buddha; the life and teachings of Christ from his baptism through His resurrection and the descent of the Spirit; the reality of the Avalokiteshvara (the bodhisattva of compassion) in the life of Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth incarnation of the Dalai Lama.

It is an essential component of my Anthroposophy (as well as a karmically significant part of biography) that I find deep exoteric and esoteric truths in life and reality of Christ, some of which have been saved and others distorted by Christianity. I hold that as human beings we are born of the Ground of Being (traditionally called the Father), die and resurrect through the Logos, and are drawn to the future by the Spirit. I am convinced that the “persons” of the Trinity should no longer be understood in gender terms and that the divine feminine is emerging in our time from a deeply spiritual, ontologically real source.

Because I need help in my effort to experience, understand and express the reality of Christ and other higher beings who work in harmony with Christ on behalf of humanity and the earth, I practice some of Steiner’s many recommendations — such as meditation, working with mantras, esoteric reading, and regular invocation of the dead — helpful for developing a noetic relationship with the spiritual in the universe. I supplement my Anthroposophical practice by participation in the Christian sacramental life made possible by Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Experience of the Christian sacraments, particularly when deepened by scholarship, can be profoundly revelatory of a positive relationship between the sensory and the supersensory realms.

Christopher McIntosh, D.Phil., Oxford, has written books on Rosicrucianism, the French occultist Eliphas Lévi and, more recently, Gardens of the Gods, dealing with the sacred and symbolic dimensions of garden design.

This article is a transcription of a talk presented in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic, as part of An Esoteric Quest in Central Europe: From Renaissance Bohemia to Goethe's Weimar.

My goal is to link the subject of Rosicrucianism first with the theme of the Quest, the pursuit of some vision or ideal; second with the theme of the Initiatory Journey or pilgrimage, the journey of spiritual discovery; and third with the theme of special places, places that are charged with spiritual or magical power.

Now all of these themes are present in Rosicrucianism. We are following in the footsteps of some famous Rosicrucians of the past, and we are visiting places that have a special link with the Rosicrucian story. I think it might be interesting to locate the journey that we are making within what we might call the Rosicrucian map of Europe, and also look at some of the other places in Europe that have a link with the Rosicrucian story.

Before we go any further it may be helpful to look again at what Rosicrucianism is and how it came into being. I will give you a brief résumé of the Rosicrucian story. Let me recapitulate briefly the circumstances and essential details of the story. As most of you know, it started with the publication of a document called the Fama Fraternitatis, the Fame of the Fraternity, which most likely was authored or co-authored by Johann Valentin Andreae, but it was published anonymously and had already been circulating in manuscript for several years. It was published at Kassel in 1614, so that’s the first place on our map. Kassel is more or less right in the center of Germany and in fact in the center of Europe.

This text and its sequel, the Confessio Fraternitatis, the Confession of the Fraternity, describe the existence of a Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross founded by one C.R. (subsequently identified by the name of Christian Rosenkreutz, a German born in 1378). We are told that Rosenkreutz was placed in a monastery at the age of five for reasons of poverty, and that while still in his growing years he set off to visit the Holy Land with one of the monks, who died when they reached Cyprus. Rosenkreutz then proceeded on his own to Damascus. In the Fama, it actually says Damcar and there’s some doubt about whether Damcar was a real place or whether Damcar might have been Damascus. At any rate, he proceeded to Damcar or Damascus, where he became acquainted with the wise men and beheld what great wonders they wrought.

There he also acquired a book called The Book M which he translated into Latin. The Book M is generally interpreted as the Liber Mundi, the Book of the World. He continued on to Fez in what is now Morocco, where he spent two years acquiring further occult knowledge, then returned via Spain to Germany where he gathered a small group of likeminded men and founded the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross to propagate the knowledge he had acquired and to heal the sick. The house they had built for themselves was called “The House of the Holy Spirit.”

Christian Rosenkreutz died at the age of 106 and was buried in a vault, which remained hidden for 120 years until it was discovered by one of the Brethren while carrying out repairs. Here, in a chamber lit by an artificial sun, they found the perfectly preserved body of Christian Rosenkreutz along with various treasures, including a version of The Book M and a mysterious object called the Minutus Mundus, the Miniature World. It was not exactly clear what this miniature world was, but it was some kind of microcosm of the universe.

The discovery of the vault was taken by the Brethren as a signal that a new age was dawning and that the time had come for the Brotherhood to declare themselves, and the text ends with an appeal to all the learned of Europe to contact the Brethren and join in their enterprise.

A little later a third manifesto appeared, very different from the other two actually, published at Strasbourg in 1616 under the title Die Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz, the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz. In this work the narrator, supposedly Christian Rosenkreutz himself, describes his experiences as a guest at the wedding of a king and queen who dwell in a splendid castle, and the whole affair takes place over seven days and develops into a sort of initiatory process involving a voyage and a sort of alchemical transmutation

I believe that what we are dealing with here is a movement of spiritual change and renewal—what we would call today a New Age Movement, based on a holistic vision that would heal the religious divide. Remember that this was at the time of a very sharp divide between Catholic and Protestant Europe, and the Thirty Years War was about to erupt. So this was a holistic vision that would heal this religious divide and bring religion, science and arts into one harmonious whole.

Now this vision wasn’t invented by Andreae and his friends. It had been around for some time, brewing up in various different places. One of the key names in connection with it was Paracelsus or Theophrastus von Hohenheim, to use his real name. Paracelsus was an astonishing example of a universal mind embracing alchemy, medicine, astrology and religion, and he also had this holistic vision that went along with the expectation of a coming new age.

Paracelsus had died just half a century or so earlier but his ideas had become part of a quasi-religious cult sometimes referred to as the Sancta Theophrastia (based on the name Theophrastus), which looked for religious revelation not only in the scriptures but also in the physical world and the laws of science, and also in certain ancient wisdom traditions coming from the Middle East and borrowed from other religions. The Jewish Kabbalistic tradition is an example.

So this, I believe, was essentially what lay behind the Rosicrucian manifestos. The time in which they appeared, in the early 17th century, was a crucial moment in history. It was, you could say, a sort of window of opportunity, when Western Civilization might have gone in a different direction and this Rosicrucian-Paracelsian vision might have been realized. If that had happened, I think we would probably be living in a rather different world today, a much more holistic world. Well it didn’t happen as planned. I’ll go into that in a moment.

But at that time, the beginning of the 17th century, it seemed to many people that the promised new age was about to begin. This expectation was linked with certain places, and most of all with Bohemia and its capital, Prague. Those who have been to Prague know what a magical place it is. Prague has always had a reputation as a city of magic and it still has today, and rightly so. Few cities have had so many legends attached to them and probably no other city has inspired so many novels and stories on esoteric themes.

At the time we are talking about, Prague, under the Emperor Rudolph II, was enjoying a particular heyday as a vibrant center of esoteric studies and scientific pursuits in general. It was full of astronomers (such as Kepler and Tycho Brahe), alchemists, visionaries. The English Magus John Dee and his companion Edward Kelley went there. So what was it about Prague and Bohemia that drew all these people? Why was it that Rudolph moved his capital there from Vienna? Well, first of all, the name of the city tells us something. The name Prague in Czech—Praha—means “boundary, threshold, frontier.” Thresholds are traditionally magical places. They’re places where you stand between two worlds or between many different worlds and that, in itself, creates a special kind of energy. But I also think there’s something more than that.

This is the title page of the Fama Fraternitatis—Johann Valentin Andreae, as I said, was almost certainly the author or co-author of the Fama and was one of the key figures behind the Rosicrucian movement.

Take a look at this map showing Europe in the form of a queen. This is a very remarkable image.

This shows Europe at the height of the Habsburg Empire, which stretched from Spain (the figure is on its side) right over to the Balkans. As you can see, Spain is portrayed as the head wearing a crown and right in the center—in the solar plexus—is Bohemia. Clearly, Bohemia was seen in some sense as the power center of Europe. The map, dating from the 17th century, is reproduced in the book Opus Magnum (The catalogue of a remarkable exhibition of the same name, which took place in Prague in 1997. The book was edited by Vladislav Zadrobílek, who also organized the exhibition, and published by his firm Trigon).

Take a look at this other map, showing Bohemia in the form of a rose, with Prague right at its center. Now we can speculate about whether the rose has something to do with the Rose Cross. But certainly it’s a very striking image, and again it shows the special mystique of this land.

One explanation for this mystique might have to do with the fact that the territory of Bohemia was originally a vast crater in the earth’s surface caused by a meteorite that fell some 1,000 million years ago. There’s a possible connection here, although this is somewhat speculative, with the story of the Holy Grail. This theory is described in detail in the Opus Magnum volume that Vladislav Zadrobilek published.

In one of the most famous of the Grail stories, Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, the Grail is described by the term lapis exilis which could be a garbled Latin version of lapis ex coelis, “the stone from the sky,” or lapsit ex coelis, “it fell from the sky.” At any rate, the theory is that Wolfram was referring to the meteorite and the crater that it made when it fell. Remember that the word “crater” is Greek for a “chalice” or a “cup,” so if this theory is correct then Bohemia itself is the Grail.

This is a satellite picture of the territory of Bohemia, again taken from the Opus Magnum volume. It shows the crater that is now the territory of Bohemia, i.e., the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Bohemia and Moravia, and we are right in the middle of it. Now this may seem far-fetched, but it could help to explain the mystique of this region and why the control of Bohemia was fought over time and time again.

This brings us back to the Rosicrucian story because one of the rulers who wanted to gain control over Bohemia was the Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate, who was married to Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England. Frances Yates, in her book The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, argues that Frederick was a sort of Rosicrucian monarch. Certainly his castle at Heidelberg was a very Rosicrucian place.

This is the castle of Heidelberg, the residence of Frederick V and the famous gardens beside it. These gardens were designed by the French garden architect Salomon de Caus. This is an engraving by de Caus. Now, as I say, this is to my mind very Rosicrucian. De Caus was another of those “universal” men—he was an architect, a garden designer, an engineer, an expert on music and a philosopher. And the garden expressed that universality. There were for example, parterres laid out so as to represent different musical intervals. There were grottos with statues that played tunes. There were ingenious automata and there were knot gardens laid out in intricate patterns, as you can see—all of it laid out on this marvelous hillside overlooking the town of Heidelberg. So this garden really embodies that holistic vision that I was talking about.

Unfortunately, Frederick was not content with Heidelberg. He wanted the crown of Bohemia and he went to war against the Habsburgs to try and seize it, and in 1620 he was defeated at the battle of the White Mountain near Prague. And thereby not only did he lose Bohemia, he was also driven out of Heidelberg and went into exile at The Hague, and the gardens fell into ruin. If you visit them today, there is unfortunately very little of the original gardens left, although the main walls and terraces and some remains of fountains and grottoes are still there.

By then the Thirty Years War was raging and everything collapsed into chaos and the whole Rosicrucian vision appeared to have gone up in smoke. But not quite, because the Rosicrucian idea spread very rapidly to other parts of Europe. In Britain for example, it had apologists like the alchemist and physician Robert Fludd and another alchemist, Thomas Vaughan, who published English translations of the Fama and Confessio. And there’s also a connection with Scotland through a man called Sir David Lindsay, Earl of Balcarres, an alchemist and hermetecist who possessed the earliest known manuscript of the Fama. At his home, Edzell Castle in the County of Angus, in Scotland, Sir David Lindsay created a remarkable garden of the planets.

Now here you see part of the garden—it’s a walled enclosure with carved panels representing the seven Planets, the seven Liberal Arts and the seven Cardinal Virtues. Here you see a representation of one of the Virtues—this is “Charity.” It shows a maternal figure looking out to several children.

One very striking thing about this garden is that there is a stone plaque over the entrance bearing the date 1604, which is the date given in the Fama Fraternitatis for the opening of Christian Rosenkreutz’s tomb, which was the signal for the new age to begin. So it seems very likely that Sir David Lindsay saw himself as part of the Rosicrucian tradition.

Meanwhile in Central Europe, the Rosicrucian current went more or less under ground, only to reappear a few decades later with the emergence of a new Rosicrucian order—called the Golden and Rosy Cross. What sparked this revival was a book which appeared in 1710 at Breslau, then in Prussia, now the Polish town of Wroclaw. This book was called Die wahrhaffte und volkommene Bereitung des philosophischen Steins der Brüderschaft aus dem Orden des Gülden und Rosen-Creutzes (The True and Perfect Preparation of the Philosopher’s Stone of the Brotherhood from the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross Brotherhood).

As we can tell from the title, this is basically an alchemical treatise. Here we already have one of the major differences between this new Rosicrucianism and the earlier one. In the manifestos, the theme of alchemy is there, but it doesn’t play a central role and the physical side of alchemy is played down. Now, with the revival, alchemy, including practical alchemy, has become a major preoccupation of the Rosicrucian movement and the Rosy Cross has become the Golden and Rosy Cross.

The author of this work called himself Sincerus Renatus. He was in fact a Silesian Protestant pastor called Samuel Richter. The fact that he came from Silesia is in itself very interesting. It is now on the border between Poland and the Czech Republic and Germany. It was then mainly a German-speaking territory.

Now Silesia is a very interesting region. The Lausitz, essentially part of the same territory, was the home of Jacob Boehme. Silesia was also the home of the great mystical poet Angelus Silesius, named after the region. So Silesia was a great breeding ground of mystical thinkers. The other significant thing about Samuel Richter was that he was a member of the German religious movement called Pietism. This is highly important because Pietism is one of the key influences in this revived form of Rosicrucianism.

Pietism was essentially an attempt to rediscover a purer and more authentic form of Christianity. It had its counterparts for example, in Quakerism in England and Quietism in France. The Pietists emphasized feeling, personal virtue and direct awareness of the divine, rather than what they saw as the empty dogmatism and formalism of the established churches. There is a strong Gnostic streak in the Pietists, as there is in the Rosicrucians. This is a very important feature—the belief that the human soul is somehow trapped in the world of matter and longs to find its way back to the divine realm—this is the essence of the Gnostic world view. This Gnostic streak is quite unmistakable and we find it cropping up again and again in the neo-Rosicrucian writings.

So we have Pietism, Gnosticism, alchemy and something else that should be mentioned as well, namely mining and metallurgy. The alchemist, the mining engineer and the metallurgist were often one and the same person. In Central Europe there has always been a special mystique to mining and metallurgy, as well as to alchemy. It’s no coincidence that Silesia was a mining area, and it’s no coincidence that for example Novalis, the great mystical poet of the Romantic period, was a mining engineer by profession. It’s also no coincidence that Kutná Hora is associated not only with silver mining, but with alchemy and hermeticism.

If we look at the writings of mystics like Boehme or many of the Pietist writers, we find they are full of alchemical and metallurgical images and metaphors. They speak of God as the “Great Smelter,” they compare the divine spirit to a holy tincture or quintessence, and some of them believed that the Holy Trinity was actually present in the world of matter in the form of the three Paracelcian principles of salt, sulfur and mercury. Many of them also practiced alchemy. Again, as we mentioned, Goethe had a Pietist friend, Fräulein von Klettenberg, who stimulated him to experiment with alchemy, and this was an important influence in Goethe’s life and work as we shall see later on in the Quest when we go more deeply into Goethe.

Now going back to the Golden and Rosy Cross Brotherhood, we don’t know precisely when it came into being. There are a number of other books and manuscripts of the early to mid-eighteenth century which describe it, and there have even been discovered some Italian manuscripts of the late 17th century referring to an Italian Golden and Rosy Cross Order, which may even have preceded the German one. However, the first reasonably solid piece of evidence is a document of 1761 describing a Prague Lodge (so this brings us back to Prague again) called the Lodge of the Black Rose and giving a list of members.

Another important thing to point out is that by now the Golden and Rosy Cross had become part of high-degree Freemasonry. To be admitted you had to have passed through a regular Masonic Lodge and from now on we find various Masonic systems of one kind or another invoking the Rosicrucian symbology.

So let’s look a bit more closely at this Golden and Rosy Cross Order. What was it like to be a member? Well, alchemy played a major part in its activities. Alchemical symbolism featured in the initiation ceremonies and members were supposed to have their own laboratories, and work diligently at their furnaces, and retorts and crucibles, and I think some of them blew themselves up in the process. There survive today many alchemical manuscripts that circulated among the Fraternity and, as you progressed up the Order, you supposedly received more and more alchemical secrets. So they took alchemy very seriously, as you can see from this engraving of a candidate being received into a Rosicrucian lodge clearly identifiable as such from the alchemical equipment on the shelves. You see some distilling apparatus there and some retorts and so on.

So we’re not here in the realm of the Jungian idea of alchemy just as a set of symbols for a spiritual process; this is very much physical, nitty-gritty alchemy. The Order was grouped into circles of nine members each, and had nine grades of initiation, each involving elaborate initiation rituals. In ascending order, the grades were as follows: Junior, Theoreticus, Practicus, Philosophus, Minor, Major, Adeptus Exemptus, Magister and Magus. That may be familiar to some of you because this grade structure, slightly modified and extended to 10 grades, was adopted by the English Occult Order, the Golden Dawn, and later by other Rosicrucian orders.

Here you see a symbolic tableau used at the initiation of members into the grade of Minor corresponding to the Adeptus Minor grade in the Golden Dawn. As you can see, it shows a form of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with the Sefiroth arranged in two pentagonal figures here. Above is the eye of God in the triangle and in-between a sort of Adam Kadmon figure. The crosses on his clothing and in the sphere underneath emphasize the basically Christian nature of the Order.

The Order was highly hierarchical and secretive but, despite the secrecy, we know the names of many members, some of whom were quite prominent. One, for example, was the naturalist and explorer Georg Foster who accompanied Captain Cook on his second voyage around the world. Foster, however, became disenchanted and eventually left the order.

By the 1770s, the Golden and Rosy Cross was well-established all over central Europe, with centers in places like Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt am Main, Regensburg, Munich, Vienna and Prague, and there were also centers further east in Poland, Hungary and Russia.

One interesting center was at the Castle of Rájec near Brünn (now Brno) in Moravia, the home of one Prince Salm-Reifferscheidt. He was evidently a remarkable figure, a sort of Rosicrucian man of learning whose interests encompassed the world of the French Enlightenment philosophes, the world of modern science and the world of alchemy and spiritualism. He gathered about him a highly eclectic group of individuals, philosophers, chemists, metallurgists and so on. So here we have a group of people very much in the spirit of the original Rosicrucianism of a century earlier—a sort of invisible college pursuing a universal vision of knowledge at the cutting edge, as they saw it, of scientific research and at the same time rooted in the older inner traditions of alchemy and philosophy. And we must not forget that someone like Prince Salm-Reifferscheidt would have known the original Rosicrucian manifestos intimately and may very well have been working quite consciously to create a Rosicrucian invisible college in line with the original vision of Andreae and his circle a century and a half earlier.

The Russian branch of the Order also had some remarkable members, notably the great writer and publisher Nikolai Novikov whom you see in this picture here. Novikov and another Russian Rosicrucian, Lopuchin, ran a publishing house called the Typographical Society, which made available to the Russian public for the first time, in Russian, the works of foreign mystical writers like Jacob Boehme, Angelus Silesius, Louis Claude de Saint Martin, the French Quietist writer Madame Guillaume and the English mystic Pordage. So Novikov is a major figure in Russian history and an interesting example of someone who was a supporter of the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment but also deeply interested in esoteric traditions. Unfortunately, Novikov fell foul of the Empress Catherine the Great, who was opposed to Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, and she had him thrown into prison. But fortunately, he was released four years later when she died and her son came to the throne.

The Golden and Rosy Cross also spread to Poland along with another Neo-Rosicrucian Order called the Bon Pasteur and Warsaw became quite a center of Rosicrucian activity. Even the Polish king Stanislas Poniatowski was initiated into both Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism.

Another Rosicrucian king was the nephew of Frederick the Great, namely Frederick William II, who became king of Prussia in 1786 when his uncle died. He already as crown prince had been initiated into the Golden and Rosy Cross Order through the influence of his military aide de camp Johann von Bischoffswerder, and he appears to have been a keen member.

Historians have not been very kind to Frederick William. He has generally been portrayed as a weak and rather ineffectual successor to Frederick the Great. But I actually find him a rather likeable and engaging figure. He was a curious combination of mystic, libertine and artistic patron. He had several mistresses and a couple of bigamous marriages. At the same time he kept an orchestra with a European reputation and he patronized composers such as Mozart and Beethoven and he built a beautiful palace at Potsdam and a park to go with it filled with Rosicrucian motifs.

This is the new garden in Potsdam, close to Berlin, and here you see one of the motifs—it’s an ice house in the form of an Egyptian pyramid. Now pyramids are a common motif in Masonic and Rosicrucian imagery, representing the idea of an age-old wisdom tradition going back to ancient Egypt and taking its highest expression in architecture.

This pyramid also has a set of seven alchemical symbols picked out in gold leaf over the doorway. This reminds us of the key role that alchemy played in the Golden and Rosy Cross.

Here you see the Egyptian theme again on this orangerie made to look like an Egyptian temple with the sphinx over the portico and two figures of gods in black marble flanking the doorway. The whole park is a very beautiful place laid out along the side of a lake. If you’re ever in Potsdam, I can recommend visiting this palace and garden.

The Golden and Rosy Cross basically came to an end after the death of King Frederick William II in 1797, by which time it was already falling apart because of internal disputes and adverse publicity. But it’s worth mentioning an offshoot called the Asiatic Brethren, which was unique for its time in that it had a mixed Jewish and Christian membership, and the rituals and symbolism of the Order had a strong Jewish element. The Asiatic Brethren in turn had an offshoot in the form of a Masonic lodge at Frankfurt of mixed Jewish and Christian membership called the Lodge of the Rising Dawn, which may have been the antecedent to the Golden Dawn.

The head of the Asiatic Brethren in the 1780s and 1790s was the Landgrave Carl von Hessen-Kassel, one of the most fascinating and influential figures at the time in the world of Masonry, Rosicrucianism and hermetic studies. He not only belonged to innumerable orders and rites, but he was a practicing alchemist and was a friend of the mysterious French alchemist, the Comte de St. Germain, whom he harbored during the last years of St. Germain’s life on his estate Louisenlund in what is now Schleswig-Holstein, which he turned into a great center of Masonic and esoteric activity. The park at Louisenlund (about an hour’s drive northwest of Kiel) was laid out in the form of an initiatic journey that involved the candidate passing through a dense wood finding his way through a labyrinth and encountering various alchemical and allegorical images along the way.

In the park was an alchemist’s tower with a laboratory and a room where Masonic rituals were conducted. There was also a pond with a secret grotto concealed behind a waterfall, in which the most solemn rituals were held. Over the years, unfortunately, most of these symbolic features have disappeared. All that remains of the alchemist’s tower, for example, is this Egyptian stone doorway which was moved to a different position, and cemented into the wall of a stable building where it stands completely out of context. Today this property belongs to a private school.

I’ve also put Stockholm on the map, because there was a very important transmission of Rosicrucianism to Sweden, particularly with a man called Johannes Bureus, who was a great apologist for the Rosicrucian tradition and there was quite a center of Rosicrucianism in Stockholm.

So far I haven’t mentioned Weimar. So what about Goethe? Well, we know that Goethe was a Freemason. He was a member of the Lodge Amalia in Weimar along with his patron the Duke Karl August. It’s debatable whether we can call Goethe a Rosicrucian but we do know that he was extremely interested in Rosicrucianism. He wrote an unfinished poem on Rosicrucian themes called Mysteries (Die Geheimnisse) and a story inspired by the Chemical Wedding called The Fairytale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. He also wrote the novel Wilhelm Meister, in which the young hero Wilhelm is initiated into a secret society called the Turmgesellschaft, which is somewhat reminiscent of a Rosicrucian Order.

Now when we go to Weimar, we’ll be visiting the park along the banks of the river Ilm, which Goethe helped to plan together with Duke Karl August. I’d like to show you three items in the park. The first item is the Snakestone. This is a very alchemical image—a snake curled around a stone—and it’s also an image that one sees often in Masonic illustrations. The Latin inscription on it says genio huius loci, “to the spirit of this place.” It’s a rather mysterious object. If you read about it in the guidebooks it says that this was simply a monument either to Karl August or to somehow represent the spirit of the river Ilm. But I think it’s much more than that—I think it’s very alchemical and you can look at it when you go to Weimar.

Then there’s this grotto with a sphinx reclining in it, again invoking the theme of Egyptian wisdom which we saw in the garden at Potsdam. This object in the garden of Goethe’s garden house in the park, the so-called stone of good fortune, a very simple piece of symbolism, is simply a sphere and a cube, the sphere representing heaven and the cube representing earth or the two representing the movable and the fixed principles.

Now looking at the further transmission of Rosicrucianism, we find Rosicrucian influences in the Romantic movement, which began around the end of the 18th century and, like the Golden and Rosy Cross, was a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. We find Romantic writers like Novalis and Romantic painters like Friedrich Otto Runge using Rosicrucian and alchemical motifs. Now here is a painting by Runge called “Morning.” Runge belonged very much to the sort of world view we’ve been talking about and he was very much influenced by writers like Jacob Boehme, and one can see this clearly in this painting. What we have here really is a depiction of the divine world, the world of the spirit and the world of matter. There are two ways to reach the divine spiritual world, either one can go directly through the spiritual path—through this Sophia figure in the middle, who is surrounded by a sort of ring of cherubs—or you can go through the physical realm. What you see underneath there is a sun obscured by a moon. This reminds me of an image we saw yesterday of the sun rising in the depths of the earth, and this is what really lies at the heart of the mystique of mining and metallurgy and alchemy. It’s the idea that the divine spark is present in the depths of matter, in the form of gold, and what the alchemist and the metallurgist is trying to do is to extract that divine spark by extracting the gold ore from the rock. So one can go down into the depths of matter and find the divine gold, the divine sun in the earth, and then this light is transmitted through the plant and animal kingdoms and reaches the divine source that way. This painting hangs in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg and we have a reproduction of it on our wall at home.

Let me move on now to France and to Paris where we find a colorful Rosicrucian movement taking place in the late 19th century, under the leadership of two eccentric characters, the poet Stanislas de Guaita and the novelist and occultist Joséphin Péladan, or “Sâr Péladan,” as he called himself. These were two rather eccentric characters. They founded an order called the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose Cross, but they soon quarreled and Péladan broke off to form his own order called the Order of the Catholic Rose Cross, the Temple and the Grail, to use its full title.

Now Péladan’s order was not just an esoteric order but it was a whole cultural and artistic organization which had its own theater and orchestra and ran a series of art exhibitions—the Salons de Rose Croix, which were actually quite influential at the time and played quite a significant role the French Symbolist movement in painting. I’ve written about this in my book Eliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival.

At roughly the same time in London there was the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, using a structure, as I said, based on the Golden and Rosy Cross. The Golden Dawn consisted of two orders, an outer and an inner one, and the inner one was Rosicrucian. You were admitted to it by going through an initiation ceremony which was essentially an extremely dramatic re-enactment of the discovery of the vault of Christian Rosenkreutz. Here you see the Rose Cross symbol used by the Golden Dawn and it reflects the very eclectic nature of the Golden Dawn. As you can see, they put on this cross Hebrew characters, planetary symbols and alchemical symbols.

Coming to the 20th century, an important name to mention is that of Rudolf Steiner (who you see here in this picture), the founder of Anthroposophy, which he saw as incorporating the Rosicrucian stream. Now Steiner, in my view, is one of the modern figures who came closest to realizing that holistic vision of the earlier Rosicrucians that I was talking about. In Steiner’s view, spiritual knowledge was of no use unless you applied it in the real world. As Steiner put it, “Rosicrucian wisdom must stream not only into the head, nor only into the heart, but also into the hands, into our manual capacities, into our daily actions.” So Anthroposophy became a movement that attempted to act in a practical way in many areas of life, including architecture, education, medicine, agriculture and the arts. Steiner was a great admirer of Goethe, so when he came to build the Anthroposophical headquarters in at Dornach in Switzerland, he called it the “Goetheanum”. Here you see a picture of the first Goetheanum, built of wood, which was sadly destroyed by fire in the 1920s and was replaced by a concrete building.

I’d just like to end by saying a bit about how I see this whole phenomenon of Rosicrucianism. When I began studying this subject, I thought that one could understand it simply by doing careful historical research, and then gradually I began to understand that there’s something here that one can’t understand if one looks at it simply through the eyes of the historian. Rosicrucianism is like a story that keeps reinventing itself and retelling itself, and perhaps that’s the reason why writers of fiction have often understood Rosicrucianism better than historians.

To give you one example, I would like to quote a story from the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, in which he brilliantly creates his own fictional version of the Rosicrucian phenomenon. This story deals with a group of people who decide to create an imaginary world and to present this world as though it really existed. So they compile an encyclopedia all about this world, containing minutely detailed descriptions of its geography, its history, its customs, its religions and so on, and then they carefully leak out parts of this encyclopedia so that they begin to be quoted. They also plant in various places mysterious little artifacts from this world, like a tiny little cone made of some metal so heavy you can hardly lift it up. Gradually this mysterious world starts to fascinate people to such an extent that the real world starts to imitate it.

Now it’s quite clear that when Borges wrote this story, he had the Rosicrucian movement in mind, because he attributes one of the books about the imaginary world to Johann Valentin Andreae. In Borges’ story, the movement, the fraternity is called “Orbis Tertius,” the Third Sphere, and here is his account of its history. He writes, “One night in Lucerne or London in the early 17th century, the splendid history had its beginning. A secret and benevolent society arose to invent a country. Its vague initial program included hermetic studies, philanthropy and the Kabbalah. From the first period dates the curious book of Andreae. After a few years of secret conclaves and premature syntheses, it was understood that one generation was not sufficient to give articulate form to a country. They resolved that each of the masters should elect a disciple who would continue his work. This hereditary arrangement prevailed.”

The story then goes on to relate how the movement spread to America, where it was supported by an eccentric millionaire who persuaded the brethren that, instead of just inventing a country, they should invent an entire planet. Towards of the end of the story Borges writes, “a scattered dynasty of solitary men have changed the face of the world, their task continues.” The story has an unpronounceable title, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

If, for a moment, we accept Borges’ scenario of this group of people who invented this imaginary world and surreptitiously leaked information about it into the real world so that the real world starts to imitate it—if we accept that for a moment—it’s extremely likely that this group of people would have continued in secret, surreptitiously, to influence our world, and maybe we’re living in a Rosicrucian world without realizing it.

Just to give one example of what I mean, in the story of the vault of Christian Rosenkreutz, as I mentioned earlier, there’s this object that is discovered called the Minutus Mundus, the miniature world. Perhaps the Internet is this Minutus Mundus. I’ll leave you with that thought.

This article is a transcription of a talk presented in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic, as part of An Esoteric Quest in Central Europe: From Renaissance Bohemia to Goethe's Weimar.

I want to begin with an epigraph: “Eternal will be for you the one that self divides into the many and, remaining one, remains eternally the only one. Find the many in the one, feel the many as one, then you will have the beginning, the end of art.” 

Now appropriately if only by name, this legendary Bohemian spa, Marienbad, is oddly a place of alchemical associations, harking back to the legendary alchemist Maria Prophetessa (Maria the Jewess), the reputed sister of Moses who was the inventor of many alchemical vessels including the Bain Marie or the double boiler, which is, in German, the Marienbad.

Maria is the source of the central alchemical maxim: “One becomes two, two becomes three and out of the third becomes the fourth as the one.” Or, in another translation: “One becomes two, two becomes three, and by means of the third and the fourth achieves unity. Thus the two are only one.” She also said: “Join the male and the female and you will find what you seek.” Or, more alchemically stated: “Marry gum with gum in true marriage.”

Goethe to my knowledge does not mention Maria but, as we shall see, he certainly lived and loved by her principles. For Goethe’s whole work—all fragments, as he says, of one great biography—is hermetic through and through: his poetry, novels, dramas, no less than his science, which is explicitly so.

And, continuing with alchemical associations, there is the hermetic fact that it was John Joseph Nehr, the doctor of the Premonstratensian monastery of Teplá here, who began to promote the healing properties of the springs, which the monastery owned.  Until that time only the local people had known of it because the springs were in an inaccessible location, way back in the hills. Now the Premonstratensians had always included alchemy, hermeticism and medicine among their interests, and it is therefore not unlikely that a hermetic motive in the larger sense lay behind the foundation of the spa, and inspired both the doctor and the abbot, a friend of Goethe, and inspired them to name the spa with these hermetic associations.

And hermetic and Herculean likewise was the effort to domesticate the inhospitable terrain which would then be the site of the spa. Vast amounts of earth had to be removed, ravines filled in, bogs drained, and a staggering job of landscaping recalling the end of Faust Part II when Faust himself is engaged in just such a project. Now which if any of these associations most appealed to Goethe is unknown, when he began visiting the spa in the summer of 1819, about 11 years after the spa was first built. He had just finished his West/East Divan, his homage to the peerless Persian poet Hafiz, and in fact the only full-length lyrical work that he published during his lifetime.

Celebrated as the first work of world literature, the Divan was intended to overcome the dichotomy of East and West by raising it to a higher unity. The title page of this work is in both German and Persian, as are the half-titles of all the 12 books that make up the collection of more than 200 lyrics. But the title itself in German and the title in Persian are not the same. In typical Goethe fashion, the apparent unity conceals a duality—“the Eastern poetry collection of a Western author.”  The German immediately sounds a dialogical or synthetic note whereas the Persian indicates something more unified—a more integral, monological note. 

The poems themselves, Sufi-like invocations of divine and human love, are dense and illusive in their language and draw on the Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures and the Koran, and Western and Persian traditions. Multiple citations from East and West, from Bible and Koran, from Hafiz and Western poetry, are embedded in the text.  The whole text echoes this arising sense of the eastern origin of the Bible, which suddenly casts doubt for Europeans on the supposed opposition between East and West by demonstrating that religion was one, and Oriental or Eastern in origin. “Who knows self and other will cognize here, that East and West are to be divided no more. The West is God’s, the East is God’s, northern and southern lands rest in the peace of His hands. He, the only just one, makes justice for everyone. Of his one hundred names, let this one be the highest praise. Amen.”

Goethe had always been interested in Oriental studies, and above all, Islam. Over the years he had read and reread the Koran intensively, making his first notes in Hebrew and Arabic when he was only 21. Throughout his life, in fact, he studied and collected Arabic handbooks, grammars, travel books and whatever collections of Eastern poetry and philosophy he could find. As a collector he owned original manuscripts of Rumi, Hafiz, Attar and others.

Now Goethe himself was an accomplished penman. He always prided himself on his penmanship and so admired deeply Arabic calligraphy and was delighted when the page of the last Sura of the Koran came into his possession.

All this interest in Islam came to a head in 1814, when his publisher sent him a copy of a new translation of the complete poems of Hafiz. Overwhelmed, Goethe realized a kindred spirit, “another self.” So close did he feel to Hafiz that he almost believed that, in another lifetime, he himself had lived, loved and strolled in the gardens of Shiraz. In June, he wrote, “So Hafiz, may your charming song, your holy example, lead us as the glasses clink to our Creator’s temple.”

At this time too, Russian Muslim soldiers were quartered in Weimar. “Who would have dared to say a year or two ago,” Goethe wrote to a friend, “that a Mohammedan service would be held in the hall of our Protestant grammar school and the Sura of the Koran would be murmured there.” Perhaps he experienced a kind of conversion there. As he later said: “The poet does not refuse the suspicion that he himself is a Muslim.”

Emotionally, however, this was not a good time for Goethe. His marriage was becoming more difficult, the burdens of his official position oppressed him. So he did what he always had done in such situations—he ran away. He went in search of love.

On July 25, he left Weimar for Frankfurt, which was his old home. The journey was, however, extremely productive. Powerful and inspired poems began to come right away as he left. Above all, and most significantly, the great poem Holy Yearning.

“Tell it to no one, only to the wise, because the crowd will only mock. What lives I will praise, what yearns for death by flame. In the coolness of the love nights that begot you, or you begot, a strange feeling comes over you, while the candle still shines. No longer are you hemmed in by the shadow of darkness. A new longing rends you for higher copulation. No distance is difficult, you fly onward and enchanted, and finally passionate for the light, Butterfly, you are burned. As long as you do not have this die and become, you are but a cloudy guest on the dark earth.”

By the end of August, 30 poems existed; and he had met his old banker friend, Johann Jakob von Willemer, who introduced him to his little friend, his lady Marianne Jung. This “dear little woman” would become Goethe’s inspiration for the divine, his Suleika and a co-conspirator in its production. 

Later, thinking of Marianne, Goethe would speak of a “temporary rejuvenation, a repetition of puberty,” explaining, “This can happen to outstandingly gifted people, even during old age, while other people are young only once.” For Goethe, such a renewal of the springtime of human life was a rule, the means of new birth, of continuously dying and becoming.

Though the relationship with Marianne was completely secret and, in a physical sense, nothing happened, Mr. Willemer must have sensed something, for on September 27, on Goethe’s recommendation, he married Marianne. However, in October, Marianne and Goethe spent nine unforgettable days together in Frankfurt. Poems continued to be written and Goethe, having named her Suleika, named himself Hatem. “Now that you are called Suleika, I should also have a nickname; when you praise your beloved, Hatem is the name to use.”

The following summer he spent six weeks with the Willemers. In the morning, he wrote, appearing at noon in his frock coat; in the afternoons he took a walk; in the evening he dressed in his white flannel robe. The master read poems, mostly from the Divan.   Marianne played her 8-string guitar and sang folk songs. Goethe then gave her a copy of all he had written for the Divan so far. Mysteriously he noted in his journal, “Divan, beginning . . . . end.”  But only he and she knew that it was that he had also given her a poem called “Hatem.” “It’s not opportunity that makes a thief, because it itself is the greatest thief. It stole what was left of the love that still remained in my heart. I handed over to you the sum of all my fortune so that now, penniless, I depend on you alone for sustenance. Already in the jewel of your glance I feel your mercy. I enjoy, within your arms, destiny renewed.”

And a few days later, Marianne returned with a poem of her own, entitled Suleika. Goethe made a few corrections, copied it and placed it with his other manuscripts. Marianne was to write three other poems, which he called the most beautiful poems by a woman in the German language and they, likewise unattributed, slipped within the pages of the Divan. Here truly is unity in duality.

This done, Goethe then hastened to Heidelberg to confer with Orientalists and Bible critics, and to deepen his study of Arabic and Persian. His Grail he sought to discover, and to reconcile in himself a new higher unity in the multiplicity of monotheism’s divine expressions. This unity was always Goethe’s goal, for he well understood the alchemical truth that unity only divides to find itself again in a higher sense. As he wrote in the Color Theory: “Anything that enters the world of phenomenon must divide in order to appear at all. The separated parts seek one another and may find each other and be reunited. In the lower sense, by each mixing with its opposite, that is, by simply coming together with it, in which case the phenomenon is nullified or at least becomes indifferent. But the union can also occur in the higher sense, whereby the separated parts are first developed and heightened, so that the combination of the two sides produces a third higher being of a new and unexpected kind.”

While he was in Heidelberg, the Willemers suddenly appeared there. Goethe took Marianne into the castle grounds where he showed her a gingko tree. Presenting her then with a gingko leaf, he suggested something of a secret meaning by asking (because the gingko leaf is almost two leaves): “Is this one thing that divides into two or two that unite into one?”

On their very last day together, September 26, walking through the park, he inscribed “Suleika” in the sand in Arabic. They would never meet again. Filled with emotion, Goethe plunged again into the study of Persian. However, the next day he sent her a poem, Gingko Biloba, which is also in the Divan and he would place it in the Book of Suleika. “This tree’s leaf,” he writes, “which from the East is entrusted to my garden, let’s taste its secret meaning that edifies the learned. Is it one living being that divides itself in itself? Are there two who selected themselves so that we know them as one? To reply to such a question I have found, I think, a higher sense. Do you not feel that I in my poems, that I am one and doubled?”

The two lovers become one in love and unity, but unity which is love is conditioned by duality. Hatem and Suleika are two, as Goethe is himself who both loves and writes about it. His life is doubly doubled, hermaphroditic and inward-outward. He is both male and female, within and without. He lives and writes as both subject and object, but what he praises and becomes is one, the unity of the lover and the beloved. To achieve this unity requires renunciation. To become love, to love love, he must renounce both himself and the beloved. 

All this is actually hermetic. The opening poem of the Divan announces: “North, West and South are shattering. Thrones burst apart. Empires shake. Flee then to the East. Taste of the air of the Patriarchs. There with love, wine and song, Khidr’s fountain will make you young again.” Now Khidr, for those who don’t know, in Islamic mysticism is the green or emerald One—the source of all greening vegetation, the freshness of spirit, eternal liveliness, what Hildegard of Bingen calls “veriditas,” which Hildegard regards as both caritas and sapienza, wisdom and love. Khidr is a supra-earthly being, the angel of humanity, the true and one single initiator of all saints, sages and prophets, including Moses himself, as the Koran states. His fountain is none other than the fountain of life. His wisdom is drawn from the living sources of life. It is the divine science of life, the science of creation itself, and his disciples formed that invisible trans-historical spiritual order of those who have become truly free. Goethe must have known this when he invoked Khidr in the first stanza of his Divan. And he also knew that Khidr, in Islam, was the sole possessor of the philosopher’s stone and the master of the elixir of life.

So the Divan appeared in 1819. Marianne continued to write to Goethe sporadically, remembering his birthday, sending him important poems and never forgetting the Gingko leaf. “It lets me savor a secret meaning,” she writes, “that edifies the one who loves.” Goethe reciprocated, never forgetting her. In 1832, just before he died, he collected her letters—“Letters,” he wrote, “pointing to the loveliest days of my life”—into a packet and returned them to her saying, “I would only like one promise that you would leave it closed for an undetermined time. Letters of this sort give us the happy feeling that we have really lived. These are the most beautiful documents upon which we may rest.”

Nevertheless, the ending of that beautiful moment for Goethe left a void in his life. His imaginal trip to the East and his travels to Frankfurt and Heidelberg would be the last that he would ever make. He was getting too old for such distances. He was 70 when the Divan was published. He became a legend, a sage, a patriarch, but a lonely one. His wife Christiane Vulpius had died, his home life was completely chaotic. He lived with his son August and his daughter Ottilie and her sister Ulrike, but he could rely on no one.  August was completely useless. Ottilie had no idea of housekeeping at all. She just ran from one affair to another. The house got dustier and dustier! No one took care of Goethe. Meanwhile Weimar had become the Goethe shrine. Visitors came to seem him daily. He felt like a piece of statuary that was being pulled out as a tourist attraction. His creativity wasn’t there. He assembled his Italian journey from his old letters. He edited his campaign in France from his old diaries. He dictated two volumes of his annals, which are incredibly boring. When he did write, he wrote mystical poetry that was extremely obscure.

It was in this mood that he began summering in Marienbad, which had become his favorite spa since he had exhausted the geology of Carlsbad. But it wasn’t only geology that drew him here. In 1821, by apparent chance, he stayed in a pension when he came to Marienbad run by retired Prussian officer whose daughter was Amalie von Levetzow. He had previously met Amalie, years before in 1806, when she was 19. Now she was 35, separated but not divorced (her husband was a Catholic), and she had three daughters. Her partner, who was a count, had built the pension where Goethe stayed.  Goethe took to these daughters immediately. They had the freshness and youthful vitality that he needed. He was particularly taken with Ulrike, the middle one, who was only 17 and just returned from finishing school in Strasbourg where Goethe too had spent his schooldays. So they spent many hours together chatting about the towns where they had both been students and about which Goethe had written at length. But he soon realized that in fact Ulrike had no idea of who he was. She called him a “great scholar” and had never heard of his poems or Faust or any of his works. Yet Goethe just loved her innocence. He would go out every morning geologizing and botanizing and spend his evenings with Ulrike, telling her what he had found. He’d bring all his rocks and things he’d knocked off with his hammer. She didn’t make much of it, so gradually he learned that he had to put chocolate in among the stones. After a while, he brought her flowers instead. So that was the first year.

The following year, he went back. As usual you must remember that while all this is going on, he attends all the receptions. He promenades up and down, greeting all the ladies, but clearly his favorite is Ulrike. Soon everyone is jealous of her because it is only through her that you can get an introduction to the great man. 

Goethe gets more and more interested in her. He notes that he is observing with ever greater emotion all her little behaviors. And gradually what had begun as a mere love interest began to turn into this enormous passion, what he would call “an impassioned state,” though the lover was now 73 and the beloved only 18. Returning home that year, Goethe’s mood became tumultuous. He moved rapidly from ecstasy to complete depression. He fell ill, some said he nearly died. In January, he noted in his diary, “I am imprisoned, as if in a deep, deep tomb.” He was caught. At the same time, he wrote, “If only I could flee from myself, the cup is overfull. Why is it I that always strived for things not meant for me? Ah if only one could be well again! What insufferable pain! Like a wounded serpent it turns and twists one’s heart!”

In February, a darker mood seized him. He lamented the “masses of psychological stuff” that “have burdened me for 3000 years.” By summer however, his feelings overwhelmed him. As a friend said, in an impassioned state he conceived of the idea of marriage and consulted a doctor to find out if this would be detrimental to his health. The doctor, with a smile, said it would not.

Goethe then brought the Grand Duke Karl August into his plans. At first, the Grand Duke wanted no part of it—he teased his old friend. But then he saw that Goethe was deadly serious and was deeply moved by the sight of this white-haired old man—the greatest man in Europe—begging him to be an intermediary. Accordingly he agreed and he paid a formal visit to Frau von Levetzow and presented her with Goethe’s offer of marriage for her daughter, even going so far as to assure the mother that they would all be taken care of—and very handsomely—in the likely event that Goethe would pass first. Gently but firmly she turned him down. However, it must also be said that everyone knew this was going on. Goethe began to talk about it quite openly. He wrote letters to his family darkly alluding to his passion and hinting at the addition possibly of a third or a fourth person their household.  

In the middle of this (this is indicative of Goethe) and before this drama had run its course, Goethe heard the beautiful Polish pianist Szymanowska playing and he fell in love with her too, so unstable, as he says, was his impassioned state. He wrote in her album “verses on reconcilement.” These verses would finally be the concluding section of the Marienbad Trilogy or the Trilogy of Passion.

So in her notebook, before it was over, he wrote: “Passion brings suffering. Who, anxious heart, can soothe you who have lost so much? Where are the hours so swiftly flown by? In vain was the greatest beauty chosen for you, the spirit is clouded, the undertaking confused. How the glorious world disappears from the senses. Then the music soars on angels’ wings, tone upon tone a million notes intertwining, penetrating the core of our inmost being and filling it with eternal beauty, the eyes moistened and you feel with higher longing the divine value of  tones and tears. Thus the heart is made light and quickly sees it still lives and beats. It would still beat more in purest gratitude for this given gift, a willing offering of itself. Then you feel, oh would it last forever—the double joy of music and love.”

Reconciliation however, was not yet Goethe’s state. He would still have to propose marriage himself. Again, gently he was rejected. The Levetzows hastily left Marienbad. This was August 17^th. Three days later, Goethe noted in his diary: “a quiet night, conciliatory dreams.”

Then on the 23^rd, he too left Marienbad, supposedly to visit a friend to gather more mineralogical samples. He was after slate rich in flint and pyrotypical stones of several kinds. He reached his friend and sent Ulrike a poem from there, saying that she dwelt much in his heart and he cannot understand that she is not with him. Meanwhile he talks about mineralogy and geology and visits the pharmacy to view its weather glass. All seems fine but in the diary he also notes “working on the poem.” Finally he arrives at Carlsbad and takes a room at the same inn where the Levetzows are staying. In fact, his rooms are directly above theirs. On the surface, things went smoothly.

August 28^th was Goethe’s 74^th birthday, but he told no one of it. It would be a secret—he would organize an excursion on that day. When he came down to breakfast, he found a cup in which a garland of ivy was painted. “Why the pretty cup?” he asked.  “To remind you of our friendship,” he was told. (Ivy is a symbol of friendship.) Later, at the picnic, he was given a glass on which the names of Frau von Levetzow and her three daughters were engraved. “Despite it all,” she said, “we don’t want to be forgotten.  Remember us all on this occasion.”

The following day unfolded like the others at Marienbad. Ulrike read to him. He didn’t think she had too good a reading style—he thought that she ought to read with more energy and vivacity. Then, on September 15^th, he finally turns home to Weimar after a tumultuous farewell. And, already in the carriage, he begins to write the main section of the Trilogy of Passion.

He had written in his play Torquato Tasso: “When a person is speechless in his pain, the god will help him speak his suffering.” And, by October, the god had spoken. On October 23^rd, he asked Eckermann, his amanuensis and secretary, to stay a little later than usual. As the gloom of the dusk grew darker and deeper, Goethe asked his servant to bring and light two exquisite wax tapers, the best he had. Eckermann would read something. Then Goethe brought in the Trilogy of Passion, calligraphed in perfect Roman characters on his best vellum and fastened with a silk cord into a red Morocco case and sitting between the two candles. Eckermann had to read this poem in the red Moroccan case. Goethe said, using Frankfurt slang: “Gel?” (Which means: “Not bad, ain’t it so? Haven’t I shown you something pretty good?”)

The next month, the pianist Madame Szymanowska played in Weimar and he was asked to propose a toast in her memory. He leapt up, couldn’t contain himself and said: “I suffer not memory in the sense you mean. Whatever enters our life that is great or beautiful or important is not to be remembered merely from without and hunted down, as it were, but from the start it must be woven into the very heart of our being, united with it, so that it might create within us a better self and thus live on in us eternally active. There is no past for which we have a right to long, there is only what is eternally new, formed from expanded elements from what has gone before. True longing must always be productive and must always create something new and better.” Of course at the memorial for Madame Szymanowska, they had no idea what he was talking about.

After he left, he collapsed. Word was that he was near death. But when his friend Werther visited him he saw the truth, noting in his diary: “I stand at the door, is there Death in the house? Ah, what do I find? Someone who looks as if his body is wracked with all the love of youth, with all its agony. Well, if that is what it is, he will get over it.  No he must keep it and he must burn like quicklime.”  Burn he did and rise from the dead he did, and the poem richly unveiled for Ackerman with candles like a sacred text remained for him a numinous thing, a gift of the gods. He gave it three parts: the first, to Werther, was written to celebrate the 50^th birthday of the Sufferings of Werther, which  had made Goethe celebrated throughout Europe and had brought on a rash of suicides for love’s sake. For Goethe this was not an occasion for looking back, for once again he himself is in the same situation. Confused strivings, whether inside or outside, still tear him apart. Perhaps, after all, Werther took the right decision. “I chose to remain, you to depart. You went ahead. You have not lost much.”

After all, as always for Goethe, yet again, the farewell awaits, as if there were no higher life without death. As if life were not, if lived rightly, a continuous dying and becoming. He ends that poem: “You smile to Werther, you smile, friend, full of feeling as befits you. A horrible separation made you famous. We celebrated your wretched ill fate. You left us behind, for better or worse. Then, once again, an uncertain path of passion drew us into its labyrinth, in entangled and repeated need we end once more in separation. Separation is death. How stirring it sounds when the poet sings to avoid the death that separation brings. Half guilty and caught up in such torments may a god giveth to say what we suffer.”

What the god gives him is the Marienbad Elegy itself, which is an astonishing performance (not at all Wordsworthian—there is no emotion recollected in tranquility here.) It’s the thing itself in its own suchness. It begins almost theologically: “What can I hope for from this reunion, from this day’s still closed blossoms. Paradise and Hell   stand open before me. How ficklemindness rules in my heart. But enough of doubt. She steps to Heaven’s door. She lifts me into her arms, and I was received into Paradise as if I deserved eternal beautiful life. No wish, no hope, no desire was left me. Here was the goal of my inmost aspiration—beholding the singular beauty, the source of my yearning tears was overcome.”

But then this splendid tissue of intertwining love was ripped apart. It was as if a fiery cherub drove him out of Paradise. The gate closed, his heart likewise shut as if never opened and yet the world’s beauty in all Nature, in all its fecund glory, was still there.  The canopy of the Cosmos still poured its invisible powers upon the earth. Even in the blue ethers, Seraphim-like, Ulrike floated toward him—the loveliest of forms but that was a fiction, better not to hold her in his heart. How she had welcomed him, how each act had inscribed her in his heart, which would preserve her forever in eternal gratitude. He had thought love was lost until she appeared. Then within his heart she became a sign of hope and renewed hope, faith and peace.

And then she disappears. What does that moment demand? Tears, frenzy a heart split open. A life-and-death struggle—pain, solitude, more tears and then he ends (amazing for Goethe): “Leave me here, true companions. Leave me alone with the rocks, marsh and moss. Hold to your paths. To you the world is open, though earth is wide, the sky sublime and great. Observe, research and gather the details. Nature’s secret will be stuttered out, but I have lost the all. I have lost myself, I who have been the darling of the gods who tested me and gave me Pandora who is so rich in blessings and richer still in dangers. They pressed me to bountiful lips, cut them from me and destroyed me.”

“In every great separation,” Goethe wrote, “lies a seed of madness. One must be careful not to foster it.” Such partings are death and one could die. Goethe of course, does not. There is always a higher longing, a dying into which we are reborn.

Goethe’s great theme in all his work was always unity, multiplicity or division and multiplicity or division in unity. As he put it: “to divide what is united, and unite what is divided is the very life of Nature. This is the eternal systole and diastole, the eternal syncresis and diacrisis; the rhythmical breathing of the world in which we live and move and have our being. Goethe knew—like the old alchemist Maria, to whom Marienbad owes its name—he knew that creation and consciousness arise as primal love between one and two, between unity and duality. He understood that in the moment that unity looks at itself, it sexualizes or polarizes in love and begins the sequential process of expansion and contraction, death and renewal—whereby reuniting, it becomes conscious of itself.

For Goethe, the name of this one/many, many/one is Nature. Goethe’s love was always Nature and Nature was love for him. Nature was for him the “all.” For Goethe, the love that was the greening power of nature for Hildegard of Bingen and the love that moved the stars for Dante was the same love that brought two human beings through the process of encounter and separation into the unity that was love.

One sees in his early poems how this love for nature and love for woman is the same thing. Nature was for Goethe the same as Woman, and it was the “Ewig-Weibliche,” the “eternal womanhood” celebrated at the end of Faust, where he writes: “Everything transitory is only a symbol, the unattainable here becomes event. The indescribable, here it is done, the eternal womanhood drives us on.  In everything Goethe did, whether in science, poetry, drama or fiction, he sought to realize the famous alchemical adage: “Nature rejoices with Nature, Nature conquers Nature, Nature restrains Nature.”

You can see this if you study his metamorphosis of plants, how the whole metamorphic process of plants (as the leaf unfolds from seed to seed)—how the same process goes on. He knew that, as in Nature, so in the poet who was Nature too. He writes in his Divan a poem called Reunion.

“Can it be, Star of Stars, do I press you to my heart again?  Then the night of separation, what abyss, what pain! Yes it is you, my friend, sweet beloved counterpart. I recall past sufferings, I shudder before the Presence. When the world lay in deepest depths in God’s eternal bosom, He had ordained the first hour with creative desire and spoke the word, ‘Let it become.’ And a painful cry rang out as the All, in a gesture, shattered into separate realities. Light opened, shyly darkness departed from it, separated from it; elements dividing flew asunder, each pushed to the distances becoming rigid in unmeasured spaces without longing, without tone. All was mute, still and empty and for the first time, God was lonely. So He created the Dawn, who took pity on the torment of separation and developed, through the gloom, a sounding play of color so that what had fallen apart could now love again. Then, with hasty striving, those belonging to each other sought each other, and feeling and gaze returned to immeasurable life. Let each one seize and even snatch the other, if they can but grasp and hold. Allah needs create no more, for we are now creating this world. Thus with wings of dawn I was drawn to your lips. Star bright night with its thousand seals, now empowers our union. Exemplary are we too on Earth in joy and pain. No second, let it become, will separate us a second time.”

Goethe in this is amazingly prescient. Whoever Dawn is, she is clearly an intermediary and a figure of Sophia or wisdom. She mediates Heaven and Earth, spirit and matter, God and humanity or God and creation. She is in-between—a veil that conceals and reveals both the medium of theophany or revelation and sheer human creativity itself. There is a saying by the prophet Mohammed, attributed to the Creator, which states: “I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known. Therefore I created creatures to be known in them.”

Perhaps Goethe knew this and knew how the Sufis, interpreting that saying, told the story of how the Creator suffered the solitude and sadness of not being known. And how His sadness and anguish at being unknown—because unnamed, unseen and unembodied—His desire to be known (which is the secret of his creativity) suddenly unfolded in a sophianic sigh of compassion—the Absolute.

This gives you some sense of what Goethe is about. In the last few days I found an interesting quotation that I think says a lot about the eternal feminine in Goethe. “A man has two wives. One is the woman with whom God commanded him to be fruitful and multiply. The second is his holy soul which God placed in man and because of her, man can attain the level of unending greatness.”

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To find out more about the author, click here: www.steinerbooks.org

Charlene Spretnak, author of States of Grace and The Resurgence of the Road

Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom by Christiane Northrup, MD
A valuable antidote to the biomechanical model of modern medicine, this book illuminates pathways to health and healing for the richly relational female bodymind. A non-medical companion volume would be the entertainingly physiological Woman by Natalie Angier, a science writer.

Turning Away from Technology: A New Vision for the 21st Century, edited by Stephanie Mills, introduction by Theodore Roszak
Alas, this vital book is burdened with a misleading title: it is not about eschewing all new technology but, rather, about identifying the systematic effects of new technologies and the hypermodern condition they have brought about, such as the globalized economy and global monoculture. The book consists of well-edited insights presented at two conferences by many of the leading eco-political analysts. The final entry is “78 Reasonable Questions to Ask about Any Technology.”

The Great Work: Our Way into the Future by Thomas Berry
One of the great eco-sages of our time, Berry has gathered here a collection of his essays on the ways in which highly industrialized societies can awaken from the “technotrance” and realign their cultures with the bioregions and the delicately balanced Earth Community of all species — before it is too late. The book is strong on deeply pragmatic alternatives, including the recovery of an intimate relationship with the earth itself and all that would flow from such a deliverance.

Andrew Harvey, mystical activist, author of The Return of the Mother

The Life Divine by Aurobindo
This book maps the possible future of humanity, a future that could be the marriage of heaven and earth, and the creation of a wholly new divinized human race.

The Nag Hammadi Library
For all those who think that Christ consciousness is the clue to the transformation of the planet, this book is essential reading because it contains the thoughts of the mystic Jesus, the Jesus censured and for years covered over by the church.

The Gospel of Ramakrishna
This is simply the most moving, revealing, inspiring, and instructive of all depictions in any culture of a great saint and mystic.

Kyriacos Markides, sociologist, author of Riding the Lion

The Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas
The most clear, accessible, and brilliantly written overview of Western thought and its inner purpose, from ancient times to the present.

The Marriage of Sense and Soul by Ken Wilber
A grand, breathtaking attempt at the integration of all knowledge and the resolution of the conflict between science and religion that began with Copernicus.

The World’s Religions by Huston Smith
No other book has managed to present — in such a lucid, exalted, and exciting manner — the distilled wisdom of the human race.

Frederick Franck, artist, sculptor, author of The Zen of Seeing

Essence of Buddhism by D.T. Suzuki
This book consists of two lectures he gave to the Imperial Couple after Japan’s surrender. I have taken my copy on fifteen Trans-Pacific and close to a hundred Trans-Atlantic trips. It is so filled with jottings done in the stratosphere that it is not very legible anymore.

The Prologue of St. John’s Gospel
The Prajna Chapter of the Sutra of Hui Neng (Seventh Century)
The Human Face by Emmanuel Levinas
Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke
My other choice is not a book, but a folder which contains tearsheets from the above. Of course I know all these by heart, but have to read them again and again because what they have in common is what is deeply hidden between the lines. The skinless sensitivity is painfully familiar.

Thomas Berry, geologian, author of The Dream of the Earth

The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos by Brian Swimme
I suggest this book because of the present deficiency of a functioning cosmology in our society. We have much science, abundant spirituality, plenty of theology but no meaningful interpretation of the universe. The scientists remain totally dedicated to a radical empiricism. Here is a superb scientist who gets beyond an ultimate empiricism. He brings everything together with a rare linguistic skill of expression.

An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field by Terry Tempest Williams
She provides that depth of understanding and feeling mystique for the earth that has long been needed in our society with its attachment to technologies that devastate the earth physically. Our attachment to electronics renders the mind unsuited for the natural wonder of nature that should be there, unfits the soul for the experience of beauty, and enervates the emotions in their capacity for intimacy. This author restores the wonder, the beauty, the intimacy.

Christopher McIntosh, author of The Rosicrucians and The Rose Cross and the Age of Reason

If there is one writer who can give us an inspiring vision for the 21st century and the third millennium it is the poet, literary scholar, and philosopher, Frederick Turner. At the center of Turner’s thought is the quality of beauty, which he believes to be an innate human need that has been neglected by modernity with disastrous consequences. In pursuit of this theme, he ranges in his writings over areas as diverse as poetic meter, neurology, artificial intelligence, architecture, ecology, and economics. In addition to his poetry and fiction, his ideas are presented in five brilliant prose books beginning with Natural Classicism and leading up to the most recent one, Beauty: The Value of Values.

Another author I would like to recommend is the British esoteric writer who appears under the name of Ramsey Dukes. His writings are full of marvelous wit, insight, and quirky observation. There is no one else like him writing in the esoteric scene today. His latest collection of essays is called What I Did in My Holidays — a typically tongue-in-cheek title. It ranges from the millennium to artificial intelligence and from sexuality to the Aeon of Horus.

Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, author of The Dream Assembly and Spiritual Intimacy

A Psychology for the Third Millennium: The Evolving Self by Shikson Michaeli
Describes the direction to which we are growing.

The New American Spirituality by Elizabeth Lesser
The best cookbook for the current American person pursuing spirit.

John Welwood, psychologist, author of Journey of the Heart and Love and Awakening

Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior and Great Eastern Sun: The Wisdom of Shambhala by Chögyam Trungpa
These two books, by one of the most original and provocative modern teachers of Buddhism, discuss the essential connection between a spiritual practice that helps us meet life fully and the great work of creating an enlightened society.

When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön
This book provides highly useful teachings on how to remain present, awake, and helpful to oneself and others under the most difficult of circumstances — when things fall apart — which is likely to be a more common occurrence for people in the 21st century.

Theodore Roszak, author of The Voice of the Earth and The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein

The Fitness of the Environment by Lawrence Henderson
This was the first effort by a respected biologist to define what we would now call “complexity” in nature. Written in 1913, it significantly modifies Darwin by placing life on earth within the framework of a cosmos that was curiously “ready” to receive life.

Flight from Chaos by Harlow Shapley
Shapley, next to Hubble the most important astronomer of the twentieth century, was the first cosmologer to grasp the overall hierarchical order of an evolving universe. Writing in 1930, he opened the search for principles that would account for the ordered complexity of nature from the sub-atomic to the galactic level.

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis
In the Gaia Hypothesis, Lovelock and Margulis laid the foundations for an organic and holistic understanding of life that credits the earth with a creative and adaptive intelligence. Here, Margulis went on to prove the radically symbiotic character to evolution.

The Next Development in Man by L.L. Whyte
The non-science book that did the most to launch these themes into mainstream culture, written in 1948.

Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities

The Gifts of the Jews by Thomas Cahill
An overview of how we became western, conscience-driven, and linear.

King Remembered: The Story of Martin Luther King, Jr. by Flip Schulke and Penelope McPhee
A great reminder of the ongoing need for social justice.

The First World War by John Keegan
Reminds us of the horrors of the past so we can avoid recommitting them in a new millennium.

Robert Muller, former assistant secretary general, the United Nations

Frontiers of the 21st Century, Prelude to the New Millennium, edited by Howard Didsbury
Twenty-three premium essays on the world’s future, selected by the World Future Society. Essays include “The Global Impact of Information Technology” by former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, John W. McDonald.

Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism by David C. Korten
This follow-up to Korten’s best-seller, When Corporations Rule the World, is an absolute must read for the millennium. An earth-shaking book showing us the way to mindful responsibility for the course of human and planetary evolution or face his startling conclusions: the prospect of our own extinction as a failed evolutionary experiment.

Terry Tempest Williams, writer on nature, author of Unspoken Hunger

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
If we are to understand that our health as a species is intrinsically tied to the health of the land, Aldo Leopold is our mentor. Written in 1949, I believe it is one of America’s sacred texts regarding “land health,” the ability of the land for self-renewal. Never has this book been more relevant, particularly the closing essay, “The Land Ethic.”

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
I want to carry these poems into the next century, because Miss Dickinson reminds me of the beauty of language, the necessity of poetry, and how it opens our hearts to the spiritual correspondence between our interior and exterior landscapes.

The Complete Collection of Peterson Field Guides to Natural History
A complete set will be essential for each one of us to have and to study as we maintain a biological literacy, to know the names of things, to understand who we live among, and to extend our notion of community to include rocks, rivers, wildflowers, trees, insects, spiders, reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds, and mammals. The degree of our awareness is the degree of our aliveness. These field guides are a delight, opening up the wonders of the natural world.

David Shi, president of Furman University, author of The Simple Life

Building a Bridge to the Eighteenth Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future by Neil Postman
Postman reveals how much our modern technocracy can benefit from the rational skepticism and humane values of the eighteenth century philosophies — Voltaire, Rousseau, Jefferson, etc.

Ptolemy Tompkins, author of Paradise Fever

Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield
Paints a picture of the universe as an arena for the evolution of human consciousness more convincingly than any other book I know.

Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth by Henry Corbin
Despite his difficulty, Corbin feeds the increasing hunger for a genuine visionary geography, bringing material from traditions where such geographies were genuine living realities rather than weak abstractions.

Forgotten Truth by Huston Smith
The central ideas of the world’s primordial wisdom heritage, summarized without sacrificing their subtlety, humanity, or urgency.

J.P. Harpignies, co-producer of The Bioneers Conference, author of Double Helix Hubris and Visionary Plant Consciousness: The Shamanic Teachings of the Plant World

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
To go somewhere desirable, it helps to know how we got here: this is the definitive analysis of the deep dynamics of prehistory that shaped our world — agriculture, writing, political structures, diseases, how and why they developed and spread where they did.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
For a world increasingly dominated by the megalopolis, here’s an ultimate hallucinatory journey through the dreaming psyche of the urban idea.

Island by Aldous Huxley
Not great literature, but it is his last book, the utopian counterpoint to Brave New World, that reminds us of the glorious life-affirming ambitions that birthed the modern counterculture.

Satish Kumar, editor of Resurgence magazine, program director of Schumacher College

The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi
This is a story of spiritual and political struggle. The book is inspiring, instructive and challenging. Mahatma Gandhi tells the difficulties and delights of his life honestly and with humor. The book is published by Navajivan Publishing House, Amhedabad 380 014, India. There may be an American Edition of this book.

Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher
In the world of giantism and obsessive economic growth, this book reminds the reader of the value and profoundness of the small, simple, local and non-violent way of being. The book brings economics and ethics together, particularly the chapter on Buddhist economics.

The Gift of Good Land by Wendell Berry
Industrialism has disconnected western society from its roots in the land. But without the land there is no life. This book, in its deepest analysis, brings forward the home truths without which humanity has no future.

Huston Smith, author, scholar of world religions

The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon by Seyyed Hossein Nasr
The best introduction to the greatest metaphysical and religious thinker of our century.

Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey Into Christian Hermeticism by Anonymous
Misleading title and not for everyone, this book will make profound thinkers gasp on almost every page for the profundity of its insights.

Robert Bly, poet, author of The Sibling Society

Revolt of the Masses by Ortega Y. Gasset
The first and still the toughest book about the collapse of cultural standards we see all around us.

Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being by Ted Hughes
The grandest book ever written on Shakespeare. It‘s past Harold Bloom.

Avicenna and The Visionary Recital by Henri Corbin
These are outstanding ideas from the spiritual life of Persia.

Douglas Sloan, professor of the history of education, Teachers’ College, Columbia University

Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield
This seminal, still all-too-unknown treatment of objective imagination in the context of the evolution of consciousness holds far-reaching potential for the transformation of science, art, and religion and a meaningful future evolution of the earth.

The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature by Henri Bortoft
With radical implications for ecology, cognitive science, education, and ethics, this explication of Goethe’s scientific method demonstrates the possibility of a genuine science of qualities — a science in which life, growth, development, meaning, and consciousness are no longer peripheral but central to our knowledge of nature and of the human being.

The Philosophy of Freedom by Rudolf Steiner
First written in 1894, a truly postmodern work before its time, this book lays the foundation, desperately needed as we face the coming centuries, for a truly human ethic grounded in genuine knowledge of the spirit and full freedom in the spirit.

Joscelyn Godwin, teacher, and author of The Theosophical Enlightenment

The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach
Something to work on for the next hundred years.

Balthus by Stanislas Klossowski de Rola
What a joy to look at the paintings of a man who has resolutely defied the Century of Ugly Art!

Atma-Darshan: At the Ultimate by Sri Atmananda
An aphoristic masterpiece by the Tamil policeman and sage that saves one from taking this cosmic joke too seriously.

Kathleen Raine, poet, founder of Temenos Academy

The Bible

The Bhagavad Gita

The Complete Works of Shakespeare

David Yeadon, travel writer, artist, author of Lost Worlds: Exploring the Earth’s Remote Places

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
A masterpiece of tone and content. At first appearing to be a rather artless, journal-like recitation of a potpourri of travel experiences and exploration in the middle east and the ancient Byzantine empire, this cutting-edge book is actually, according to one admirer, “a brilliantly wrought expression of a thoroughly modernist sensibility, a portrait of an accidental, but highly perceptive man, adrift between frontiers.”

The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
The writer loses himself in mysteries of the Australian Aboriginal culture and its earth-birthing legends in which “the whole world is wrapped in songs of creation.” These songs must be re-sung on endless “walkabout” odysseys by each tribesperson as his personal contribution to the earth’s perpetuation, and the description of his experiences on “the fringe of these great myths” is utterly enticing and spirit-lifting.

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
A touchstone of one of the most seductive descriptions of a personal inner journey wrapped in rich externalities. I’ve found this book in stores from Kingston, Jamaica to Kathmandu, invariably in the used section and well-marked by previous readers and I suggest you savor it slowly, mark it too, and pass it on to someone you love…

Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst, author of The Pregnant Virgin

Six Memos for the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
One of the most clarifying, robust, finger-on-the-pulse books I have ever read. At the beginning of the millennium, it is a powerful stimulus for change in our individual lives.

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
If you read this book with all your senses truly alert, your perception of life will be forever slightly changed.

Bill McKibben, environmentalist, author of The End of Nature

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
It’s the Walden of our time, an incredibly gritty and funny plea to reestablish contact with the actual earth.

Home Economics by Wendell Berry
Essays from the writer residing furthest from our Kingdom of Irony, they remind us what sanity actually involves.

Suzi Gablik, artist, author of The Re-enchantment of Art

Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Materialism, The Global Economy, and Other Earthly Whereabouts by Chellis Glendinning
This shamanic journey into the imperialist mindset brings together gritty and little-known information with a wonderful and unique style of writing that merges the masculine and the feminine. Powerful, at times, shocking; the best book I’ve read in a decade.

Jay Kinney, former editor of Gnosis magazine, co-author of Hidden Wisdom

The rationale behind my three choices is that the best preparation for the future is a good understanding of the past and present. With that in mind, I recommend the following:

Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens
Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit manages to skewer perennial scams and pretensions with creations like the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company and the nearly virtual frontier City of Eden, which bear uncanny resemblance to the present economic landscape of Internet IPOs and get-rich-quick spam.

Mystical Languages of Unsaying by Michael A. Sells
This is not exactly an easy book, but it’s masterful dissection of how great mystics capture the paradoxical experience of union with the absolute in their often puzzling writings helps bridge the centuries and gives some hope for our own futures.

The Man Who Knew Too Much by Dick Russell
Much more than just another book about the Kennedy assassination, this 824-page volume reveals the behind-the-scenes world of intelligence operatives whose rarely acknowledged impact on our lives is likely to be as significant in the 21st century as it was in 1963.

Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul

Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman
If we could appreciate Hillman’s basic proposals for a poetic way of life, we would be released from the crazed habits of acting out that feed our self-destruction and keep our spirituality naive.

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki
Suzuki offers the cleanest, clearest approach to Zen I know of — a means for emptying ourselves of all the idols, especially the close and subtle ones, that keep us from living courageously and openly.

Women in Praise of the Sacred edited by Jane Hirshfield
This collection of women’s spiritual writing from many cultures and periods austerely and lovingly gives us the voice of woman, which we will need as our source of deep soul to counter runaway technology and ambitious spirituality.

Charmaine Crockett, human rights activist, feminist, and author

Making Face, Making Soul: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color, edited by Glora Anzaldua
This book is like coming home to a house filled of wondrous women whose fingertips are on fire. If there is a collection of criticism, poetry, folktales and essays that speaks of and to a community of women, this is it!

Hua Hu Ching: The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu by Brian Walker
We always remember how to add two plus two but pearls of truth we easily forget in the angst of modern day life. This small gem of a book consisting of eighty-one lessons beckons us back to our cosmic home, where Lao Tzu guides us to magnificent enclaves of heavenly light.

The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches, and Documents From the Bible to the Present, edited by Micheline R. Ishay
A comprehensive historical and contemporary collection of movements, influential leaders, ethics and political documents, this book has it all! It’s the handy guide to jolt our memories in the next century and will be sure to inspire us to lead the way for a holistic human rights revolution.

David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World

The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
A shaman’s eye view of our capacity to live at one with life and its mysteries.

What is Life? by Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
A beautifully written and illustrated exploration into the history and nature of life by two respected scientists with the courage to step beyond the bounds of scientific reductionism.

The Universe Story: A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry
A tale of the greatest of all journeys that calls us to find meaning and purpose beyond the limits of a science that denies the spirit and a theology that denies reason.