In the spring of 1916, with the First World War grinding through its second year, Rudolf Steiner stood before his Berlin audience and delivered the twelve lectures that the Rudolf Steiner Press collected as Things in Past and Present in the Spirit of Man (GA 167). These were members' lectures, given between February and July to listeners already familiar with his spiritual science, and they range across an unusually wide field: poetry and the etheric word, the secrets of occult brotherhoods and Freemasonry, the strange history of Thomas More, the pansophic dream of Comenius, the Jesuit experiment in Paraguay, and the two opposing pressures Steiner saw bearing down on the coming centuries. The volume's recurring question is how the spirit lives in human culture, and how the same spiritual truths can be carried honestly or used as instruments of power. Across the cycle Steiner keeps returning to a single tension: the difference between knowledge that a person understands in waking thought and knowledge that is poured into the soul below consciousness, where it can be steered by others. That tension gives the lectures their unusual moral charge, and it is what makes a volume nominally about history and ceremony read instead as a warning addressed to the future.
Place in Steiner's Work
GA 167 belongs to the dense wartime cycle of lectures Steiner gave in Berlin and Dornach while the cultural crisis of Europe sharpened his historical thinking. By 1916 he had already laid out the architecture of the post-Atlantean epochs and the membering of the human being in his foundational books, and he now turned that framework on recent European history rather than on cosmic evolution. The lectures sit close in spirit to his cycles on the karma of untruthfulness and the symptomatology of history, where he reads political and religious events as the visible surface of hidden spiritual streams. They were spoken to an audience that had followed him for years, so he assumes the basic vocabulary of his teaching and uses it to interpret the events pressing in on his listeners from every newspaper.
What distinguishes this volume is its candour about secret societies. Steiner speaks plainly here about how ceremonial knowledge, once a living perception in the fourth post-Atlantean age, hardened into ritual that could be transmitted without understanding, and how that gap between sign and comprehension makes people usable. He frames anthroposophy itself as a counterweight: knowledge meant to be grasped first by the awake intellect, not implanted below consciousness through symbol and grip. This concern connects the volume to a deeper thread running through his work, namely the conviction that the present age of the consciousness soul demands inner clarity rather than inherited authority. Where older epochs could rest on tradition and atavistic perception, Steiner argues, the modern human being must understand in full waking thought what earlier generations received in dream and ceremony.
Themes and Structure
The twelve lectures do not march through a single argument so much as circle a cluster of related concerns. An opening pair takes up art and the etheric, reading the poetry of Friedrich Lienhard and Wilhelm Jordan to show how the spirit of nature can still sound through poetic language. Steiner contends that what matters in art is not the content but the how, the way the formal element carries an elemental life that materialist criticism has gone blind to. From there he moves to the deeper soul-spiritual nature of the human being and to what he calls the deeper impulses of history, with a critical glance at Blavatsky and the theosophical inheritance.
The heart of the cycle is the sequence on occult brotherhoods. Steiner describes the threefold grade structure of such orders, the meaning of sign, gesture, and word, and the way ceremonial education once corresponded to real movements of the etheric body that most people can no longer perceive. He recalls that Goethe valued his initiation into such an order, and he explains how gestures of reverence, the crossed arms, the upward gaze, once mirrored what the etheric body actually does when the soul turns toward the spiritual. He distinguishes a cosmic Christian stream, which he links with the Masonic side, from a church Christian stream he links with the Jesuit training in rhetoric and effect.
Later lectures widen the lens. Steiner takes up the original revelation to humanity and the formula of the great architect of the worlds, which he reads as evidence that the brotherhoods descend in unbroken line from the temple wisdom of antiquity. He gives an Easter reflection on death and resurrection, returns to the four members of the human being, and then in the historical lectures examines the founding of the Anglican church under Henry VIII, the strange canonization of Thomas More, the universal-wisdom project of Comenius, and the Jesuit state in Paraguay as a working experiment in cult and symbol. The cycle closes with a meditation on the value of truth, a fragment drawn from the Jewish Haggadah, and a final warning about what he names the Luciferic dangers pressing from the East. Throughout, Steiner reads history as the meeting place of spiritual forces, and he asks his listeners to develop an organ for seeing those forces at work rather than taking the documentary surface of events at face value. He is insistent that this is not a license for fantasy: the discipline he recommends is to test every claim against the long arc of earth and human development before letting any symbol speak.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
This study guide is the hub for the glossary entries in the Thalira Codex that cite GA 167. Each term below is treated in its own entry, drawing on these Berlin lectures:
- Freemasonry: Steiner's account of the Masonic grades, the cosmic Christian symbolism, and the discovery of the lost word.
- Jesuitism: the church Christian counterpart, with its threefold training and its mastery of speech and effect.
- Comenius and Pansophia: the seventeenth-century vision of a universal wisdom and its place in the temple of pansophia.
- Thomas More and Utopia: Steiner's reading of More, the founding of a new church under Henry VIII, and the rational state of Utopia.
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translations of GA 167 alongside the original German. For a printed edition or to search current scholarly releases, try the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. Because these were members' lectures rather than a book Steiner prepared for print, treat the transcripts as a record of spoken teaching, with the German originals as the touchstone for any close reading. The English versions vary in quality and completeness, and a few passages survive only as fragments, so it helps to read the historical lectures, on Thomas More, Comenius, and the Jesuit state, alongside a standard account of the same events to keep Steiner's spiritual reading anchored to the documentary record he is reinterpreting.
Continue Your Study
To go further with the ideas in this volume:
- Browse the full Thalira Quantum Codex glossary to follow the threads of occult history, the etheric body, and the post-Atlantean epochs across many volumes.
- Return to the GA Work Library to see how GA 167 connects to neighbouring wartime cycles on the symptomatology of history and the karma of untruthfulness.
- Read the four glossary entries above in sequence to trace one of Steiner's central distinctions, between knowledge that is understood and knowledge that is merely transmitted.