The answer would appear to be “no”. A look at his work and biography reveals a nuanced yet pragmatic approach. Anthroposophists are currently present in the media as potential deniers of the coronavirus pandemic and anti-vaxxers. But to what extent can opponents of vaccination actually invoke Rudolf Steiner? In this question too – as with many other topics – nuances in Steiner’s work come to the fore, opening up a number of different possibilities. On the one hand, Steiner had reservations about the mass use of vaccination, especially as compulsory vaccination, but on the other hand he also advocated that anthroposophy should recognise medical progress. Anthroposophical medicine, as Steiner developed it together with the doctor Ita Wegmann, therefore always sees itself as an “extended” system of medicine which builds on the findings of conventional medicine: “It is not a matter of opposing medicine working with the recognised scientific methods of the present day. We fully recognise the principles of the latter,” it says, for example, in the introduction to the book Extending Practical Medicine written by Steiner and Wegmann in 1925. Steiner thus also thought and acted accordingly in concrete situations where vaccination was involved. This is shown by his statements to doctors in 1924 on the subject as well as his behaviour during the smallpox epidemic in Berlin in 1917 during the First World War, reported by the stenographer Hedda Hummel. In 1924 Steiner was asked by practising doctors what anthroposophy had to say about vaccination. Steiner told them how, during his time as a tutor with the Specht family in Vienna, he exposed himself to the risk of contracting hemorrhagic smallpox, which had afflicted the mother of his pupils. He had relied on being resilient enough to defy infection: one could minimise the risk of infection through fearlessness, he argued to the doctors. In other words, a positive mental attitude strengthened the immune system in his view – as indeed resilience theory advocates today.

No fanaticism
However, Steiner also pointed out to the doctors that in areas where the population is definitely afraid of infection, “educational measures” in this direction were pointless. “You just have to vaccinate there. There is nothing else you can do,” Steiner emphasised. For “fanatically opposing these things is what I would not recommend at all, not for medical but for general anthroposophical reasons,” he added. It was “completely absurd” to proceed with such fanaticism in specific instances. During the First World War, Steiner was confronted with the smallpox epidemic in Berlin – also in his immediate environment. As Marie Steiner reports, Steiner had made the large art room of his flat in Motzstrasse and its adjoining rooms available for a children’s nursery, and he himself lived in rooms in the back of the house during his stays in Berlin. At that time, Steiner commuted between Dornach and Berlin. With the outbreak of smallpox in Berlin, the question now arose of how to protect children and residents. Schools and kindergartens in Berlin were already vaccinating at that time. Hedda Hummel reports on this: “Dr. Steiner ordered that the children in our nursery be vaccinated as well, and also the people who went in and out of the nursery.” Steiner himself and his wife had also had themselves vaccinated, the stenographer continues. Steiner had suffered from the side effects of the vaccination – just like all the other vaccinated people, mostly women. They often rubbed their aching arms, which had been affected by the smallpox vaccination, which Steiner also did. Thus a joke had circulated in Motzstrasse that Dr Steiner was “joining in the women’s movement”.

Pragmatic approach
Against the background of these reports, we can ask ourselves where Steiner’s place would be today, at the time of the coronavirus pandemic. Certainly not with the anti-vaxxers and coronavirus deniers, for as stated above, he spoke out against a “fanatical approach”. He would look at the new vaccination technologies – mRNA and vector-based – with great interest, as they serve medical progress, but he would reject compulsory vaccination. And as to whether he would have himself vaccinated or trust in his own resilience to COVID-19? Here, too, one can draw one’s conclusions with a look at Steiner’s biography: as a young tutor in Vienna in the 1880s, Steiner – then still under 30 years old – relied on his own resilience. In wartime Berlin, in his mid-50s, he preferred to rely on the smallpox vaccination, which also protected the children in the Waldorf nursery. Thus in the current controversy about vaccination and corona measures it is basically only the pragmatists who can invoke Rudolf Steiner. More ...

The Western Regional Council of the Anthroposophical Society in America invites you to join them in a study leading up to Whitsun. Together we will explore Rudolf Steiner's lecture, The Whitsuntide Festival, Its Place in the Study of Karma. Each of the three study evenings will open with an artistic activity followed by a short seed talk which will encompass the theme, thoughts and questions that can be taken up in the breakout sessions. Please bring paper, colored pencils, crayons for the artistic activities. Sessions will be up to 90 minutes each time. This is a live program and will not be recorded.

Cost: This program is free! Any donations go towards supporting future programs. Thank you!

SCHEDULE*  Tuesdays at 5pm Pacific / 8pm Eastern  *Sessions will not be recorded so please do your best to attend live.
April 27: The Relationship Between the Human Being and the Cosmos
May 11: The Mysteries of Time and Space
May 25: Look upon Human Destiny

STUDY: The Whitsuntide Festival, Its Place in the Study of Karma. This lecture is also found in The Festivals and Their Meaning, June 4, 1924.

Click here to register! We look forward to seeing you there,  The Western Regional Council of the ASA 

Easter Morning by Ninetta Sombart
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​(…) “We keep Easter, the festival of Resurrection, but in our materialistic outlook we have long ago ceased caring whether or not we have a real understanding of the Resurrection. We set ourselves at enmity with the truth and we try to find all manner of ingenious ways of accepting the cosmic jest — for indeed it would be, or rather it is a jest that man should keep the festival of the Resurrection and at the same time put his whole faith in modern science which obviously can never make appeal to such a Resurrection. Materialism and the keeping of Easter — these are two things that cannot possibly belong together; they cannot possibly exist side by side. And the materialism of modern theology — that too is incompatible with the Easter festival. (…)

The only possible way in these days for man to unite a right feeling with Easter is for him to direct his thought in this connection to the world-catastrophe of his own time. For in very deed a world-catastrophe is upon us. I do not mean merely the catastrophe that happened in the recent years of the war, but I refer to that world-catastrophe which consists in the fact that men have lost all idea of the connection of the earthly with that which is beyond the earth. The time has come when man must realise with full and clear consciousness that super-sensible knowledge has now to arise out of the grave of the materialistic outlook. For together with super-sensible knowledge will arise the knowledge of Christ Jesus. In point of fact, man has no other symbol that fits the Easter festival than this — that mankind has brought upon itself the doom of being crucified upon the cross of its own materialism. But man must do something himself before there arises from the grave of human materialism all that can come from super-sensible knowledge.

The very striving after super-sensible knowledge is itself an Easter deed, it is something which gives man the right once more to keep Easter. Look up to the full moon and feel how the full moon is connected with man in its phenomena, and how the reflection of the sun is connected with the moon, and then meditate on the need today to go in search of a true self-knowledge which can show forth man as a reflection of the super-sensible. If man knows himself to be a reflection of the super-sensible, if he recognises how he is formed and constituted out of the super-sensible, then he will also find the way to come to the super-sensible. At bottom, it is arrogance and pride that find expression in the materialistic view of the world. It is human pride, manifesting in a strange way! Man does not want to be a reflection of the divine and spiritual, he wants to be merely the highest of the animals. There he is the highest. But the point is, among what sort of beings is he the highest? This pride leads man to recognise nothing beyond himself. If the natural scientific outlook on the world were to be true to itself, it would have the mission of impressing this fact again and again upon man: You are the highest of all the beings of which you can form an idea. The ultimate consequences of the point of view that sets out to be strictly scientific, are such as to make a man turn pale when they show him on what kind of moral groundwork they are based — all unconscious though he may be of it. The truth is, we are today living in a time when Christ Jesus is being crucified in a very special sense. He is being put to death in the field of knowledge. And until men come to see how the present way of knowledge, clinging as it does to the senses and to them alone, is nothing but a grave of knowledge out of which a resurrection must take place — until they see this, they will not be able to lift themselves up to experiences in thought and feeling that partake of a true Easter character.

This is the thought that we should carry in our hearts and minds today. We still have with us the tradition of an Easter festival that is supposed to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. The tradition we have, but the right to celebrate such a festival — that we have not, who live in present-day civilisation.

How can we acquire this right again? We must take the thought of Christ Jesus lying in the grave, of Christ Jesus Who at Easter time vanquishes the stone that has been rolled over His grave — we must take this thought and unite it with the other thought which I have indicated. For the soul of man should feel the purely external, mechanistic knowledge like a tombstone rolled upon him; and he must exert himself to overcome the pressure of this knowledge, he must find the possibility, not to make confession of his faith in the words: ‘Not I, but the fully developed animal in me,’ but to have the right to say: ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’ ”

This extract comes from the lecture given on April 2nd1920 in Dornach. With thanks to James Stewart and the invaluable Rudolf Steiner Archive.

This month, at the beginning of the spring season, we're sharing both a difficult decision and new opportunities. As you’ll see below, we've come to the conclusion that it is best not to host a conference this year. At the same time, all of us believe in the power of the conference to change lives and further the biodynamic impulse. Without a conference this year, we need other opportunities to collaborate and grow!  More ...

​Please share the info for our Collaborative Summer Arts Conference: Periphery Within Center- Celebrating Diversity within the Universal All. 

Our featured speaker will be Dr. Michaela Glöckler who is the former head of the medical section at the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland. She is a former Waldorf student herself and a longtime puppetry enthusiast who we have often quoted in our gatherings. 

​Registration information will be made available in the coming weeks.

​We are dedicated to deepening the understanding and enjoyment of teaching Waldorf handwork. Refresh, renew, and re-inspire yourself. We offer conferences, professional development, and teacher training for Waldorf handwork teachers and home-schoolers. All programs are led by Elizabeth Seward and Shellie Smith with 50+ years of combined teaching experience. More ...​

Warm Valentine's greetings to all! The inspiration for a story is like a little heart seed… if tended, it sprouts and grows into an imaginal journey - leafing out as a narrative that nourishes us with the richness of what it means to be human. We can encounter new dimensions of ourselves on that journey, and also make discoveries in place, time, and wider consciousness. We inhabit our own individuality, yet are united with a deeper understanding of humanity. Since the beginning of civilization, stories have woven threads of connection from one human soul to the other. A fabric of wisdom, in which the weft of our individuality and the warp of our universality are united.
 
In this past year of the pandemic, fear, illness, and death have risen up as ever present specters in our midst. These are not new, and have plagued humanity throughout the ages. It can be our tendency to push them away and deny them their place. In many stories, death is personified as the grim reaper, the monster, the demon… Death is feared, respected, and powerful. At times, the hero tries to outwit death  - yet learns a lesson about destiny along the way. For, despite our aversion, illness and death are teachers for us mortals of the earth. Knowledge of our fragile impermanence leads us to gratitude for the gift of life and each other. Too often, in the business of this 21st century, we have forgotten how to lovingly care for others and ourselves; we need to relearn compassionate service. Ultimately, by working through life’s resisting forces and illness, we can develop capacities of renewed resilience. 

More ...

Love and Its Meaning in the World --- A lecture by Rudolf Steiner given at Zurich, 17th December, 1912

When we say that at the present point of time in his evolution man must learn to understand the Christ Impulse, the thought may well occur: What, then, is the position of one who has never heard of the Christ Impulse, may perhaps never even have heard the name of Christ? Will such a man be deprived of the Christ Impulse because he has not heard the name of Christ? Is it necessary to have some theoretical knowledge of the Christ Impulse in order that Christ's power may flow into the soul? We will clarify our minds about these questions by the following thoughts concerning human life from birth until death.

The human being comes into the world and lives through early childhood in a half-sleeping state. He has gradually to learn to feel himself as an “I”, to find his bearings as an “I”, and his life of soul is constantly enriched by what is received through the “I”. By the time death is approaching, this life of soul is at its richest and ripest. Hence the vital question arises: What of our life of soul when the body falls away? It is a peculiarity of our physical life and of our life of soul that the wealth of our experience and knowledge increases in significance the nearer we approach death; but at the same time certain attributes are lost and replaced by others of an entirely different character. In youth we gather knowledge, pass through experiences, cherish hopes which as a rule can only later be fulfilled. The older we grow, the more do we begin to love the wisdom revealed by life. Love of wisdom is not egoistic, for this love increases in the measure in which we draw near to death; it increases in the measure in which the expectation of gaining something from our wisdom decreases. Our love for this content of our soul steadily increases. In this respect Spiritual Science may actually become a source of temptation, inasmuch as a man may be led to believe that his next life will depend upon the acquisition of wisdom in this present life. The effect of Spiritual Science may be an extension of egoism beyond the bounds of this present life, and therein lies danger. Thus if wrongly understood, Spiritual Science may act as a tempter — this lies in its very nature.

Love of the wisdom acquired from life may be compared with the flowering of a plant when the necessary stage of maturity has been reached. Love arises for something that is contained within ourselves. Men have often made the attempt to sublimate the impulse of love for what is within themselves. In the Mystics, for example, we find evidence of how they strove to transmute the urge of self-love into love of wisdom, and to let this love ray out in beauty. By sinking in contemplation into the depths of their own soul-life they strove to become aware of the Divine Spark within them. But the truth is that the wisdom which man acquires in life is only the means whereby the seed of his next life is unfolded. When a plant has completed its growth through the year, the seed remains. So it is with the wisdom acquired from life. Man passes through the Gate of Death and the spiritual core of being in its process of ripening is the seed of the next life. A man who feels this may become a Mystic and mistake what is only the seed of the next life to be the Divine Spark, the Absolute. This is his interpretation of it because it goes against the grain for a man to acknowledge that this spirit-seed is nothing but his own self. Meister Eckhart, John Tauler, and others, spoke of it as the “God within”, because they knew nothing of reincarnation. If we grasp the meaning of the law of reincarnation we recognise the significance of love in the world, both in a particular and in a general sense. When we speak of karma, we mean that which as cause in the one life has its effect in the next. In terms of cause and effect we cannot, however, speak truly of love; we cannot speak of a deed of love and its eventual compensation. True, if there is a deed, there will be compensation, but this has nothing to do with love. Deeds of love do not look for compensation in the next life.

In the mighty Celtic calendar, the year is marked by the two solstices and the two equinoxes. At the Winter Solstice, the days are the shortest of the year; at the Summer Solstice, the days are the longest of the year. At the Autumn Equinox and the Spring Equinox the days are exactly as long as the nights.The days that mark the halfway mark between these four celestial events are traditionally named “cross-quarter days” as they are the between the quarters markers.

The second day of February is one of those cross-quarter days. Some celebrate it as Ground hog day or the day when our hope of an end to winter might be divined by a groundhog. “Punxsutawney Phil,” from Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, has been the official weather groundhog, marking this day since 1887. For over 100 years the groundhog has been predicting, with 100% accuracy, whether or not winter will be done in six weeks or will continue beyond that six weeks. The legend is that Punxsutawney Phil has never died but continues predicting winter’s end by drinking the elixir of life each summer at Punxsutawney’s annual Groundhog picnic.

If Phil comes out of his groundhog home on a sunny day, he sees his shadow (of which he is evidently afraid) and heads back in to hibernate some more. This mans much more winter for all of us, not just for Punxsutawney Phil. If the day is cloudy and ol’ Phil does not see his shadow? In six weeks winter will be done. An early spring is then in store!

In the Druid and Christian traditions, the cross-quarter day on February 2nd is called Candlemas Day. Traditionally this day was reserved for preparing candles for the coming year – first for the whole village and then for the church – sort of a working festival!

There is a little round with words to help keep straight which weather means which:

When Candlemas Day is bright with sun;
Then Winter’s power has just begun –  
But when Candlemas Day is dark with rain
Then Winter’s power is on the wane!

Are you Irish? Then you might know that Candlemas Day, or Groundhog Day is also St. Brigid’s Day.

Brid, on the first or second of February, collects kindling to warm the spring and to make her young again, as a cailleach-becoming-maiden.

Brigid (Brighid, Brigit, Brid, Bridie, Bridgette) invented the Irish tradition of keening or coaineadh. Brid herself keened the death of her son, Ruadán, and launched the art form of mourning the soul just passed onto the spiritual path with loving wailing that protects the deceased from usurping spirits during the transition.

February first or second is a good time to make “St. Brigit crosses." These invoke the North Star and evoke the pattern that the Big Dipper makes in the sky in the course of the year. As the night sky turns around the North Star, the Big Dipper turns through the seasonal year like the hands of a clock, only counter-clockwise.

Like the flaming might of the North Star, Brigit is the fire-keeper of that flame of life that mothers tend so that families do not freeze to death in winter. Her star shows the overlapping connection of families whose lineage is not broken prematurely because of trauma in the cold months. It’s in winter that Brigid becomes the cailleach, the old woman, who keens. On Imbolc (Groundhog Day) she collects her kindling to encourage the spring of regeneration and this renders her young again.

Children make St.Brigit crosses by weaving bits of straw into spiraling crosses that then become kindle on Imbolc for St. Brigid. If we take up the tradition, our minds focus meditatively on craft and we get through the last, long ,freezing days of winter, connecting our work to the stars. Our winter minds become then part of the great celestial sphere that turns and brings us spring .

Here’s a simple plan for making St. Brigid crosses!  Enjoy!