The Karma of Untruthfulness, Volume One gathers lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Dornach and Basel across December 1916, in the middle of the First World War, drawn from the thirteen-lecture cycle catalogued in the Steiner archive as GA 173 (the lectures are archived as the linked cycles 173a and 173b). It is not a book of doctrine but a sustained exercise in reading current events spiritually. Steiner sets out to show how falsehood works as a force in history: how the press, propaganda, and inherited national feeling manufacture judgments that people then mistake for their own, and how those untruths leave karmic consequences far beyond the moment they are spoken. The volume is one of the most direct confrontations in his work between the inner discipline of spiritual science and the public chaos of his own time.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1916 Steiner had spent more than a decade building the conceptual architecture of anthroposophy: the constitution of the human being, reincarnation and karma, the cosmic evolution traced in his great lecture cycles. These December lectures take that framework and turn it toward the most painful material imaginable for his Swiss and German listeners, namely the war then consuming Europe. The cycle belongs to what readers later called his symptomatological lectures, given alongside related courses such as GA 174, in which he examines contemporary history not for its surface causes but for the hidden currents expressing themselves through events.
This places the volume at a hinge in Steiner's biography. The same impulse that drove him to describe spiritual worlds now drove him to insist that spiritual science must be tested against the hardest facts of public life. Steiner is explicit that anthroposophy cannot live in isolation from the world. He tells his audience that what seems to belong to materialistic life is in fact an effect of spiritual life, and that the student of spiritual science therefore has a duty to understand how spirit works through newspapers, treaties, and the daily reporting of a continent at war. He opens the cycle by recalling the movement's motto, drawn from Goethe:
Wisdom lies solely in truth.
The whole cycle is an attempt to take that sentence seriously when truth itself has become a casualty of war. It is a document of anthroposophy refusing to retreat into private consolation. Steiner is careful, too, to head off a misreading. He does not exempt his own circles from the warning. The failure to weigh judgments honestly is, he insists, a feature of modern culture as a whole, and anthroposophists are no more immune to it than anyone else. The volume thus reads as both a diagnosis of the age and a discipline addressed inward, to the listener's own habits of thought.
Themes and Structure
The thirteen lectures of the full cycle, of which Volume One carries the opening movement, circle a handful of connected ideas rather than marching through a syllabus. The lectures were given across December 1916, almost all in Dornach with one delivered in Basel, and they read as a continuous meditation that returns again and again to the same few nerves. The first concern is the emptiness of the ready-made judgment. Steiner argues that people increasingly form opinions about whole nations and whole peoples from sentences that carry no real content, sentences absorbed from their surroundings and repeated as if they were knowledge. He treats this not as a minor failing but as a defining sin of the age, and he asks his listeners to notice how quickly a judgment about millions of people can be pronounced with neither evidence nor hesitation. The faster the verdict, he observes, the fewer the genuine insights behind it, and the more comfortable it feels to the soul that holds it.
From there the lectures turn to the machinery that produces such judgments. Steiner reads aloud from newspapers, parliamentary statements, and circulated letters, then asks who benefits from each framing and what reality it conceals. He is fascinated by the way history is now being made with words that carry no content, and he treats public opinion not as the spontaneous voice of a people but as something produced, steered, and harvested. A statesman's phrase about freedom or the rights of small nations becomes, in his reading, a screen placed in front of the actual interests at work. He invites his audience to develop a habit he calls reading symptomatically, which means treating each reported event as a flash of lightning that briefly illuminates a far larger landscape of forces.
The lectures then move to one of the cycle's most striking and most contested claims. Steiner speaks of organized groups in the West, what he calls secret brotherhoods, who he says worked for decades before 1914 to steer European tensions toward war. He describes pupils being instructed by means of maps that showed how the continent was to be redrawn, and he points to the cultivation of Pan-Slav political dreams as one instrument among several. He is careful to say that he is naming forces rather than condemning particular men; the British foreign minister of the day, for instance, he treats as a figure manipulated by interests larger than himself. Whatever a modern reader makes of these specific assertions, the underlying method is consistent. Events on the physical plane are symptoms, and the historian who stops at the symptom understands nothing of the currents beneath.
A further strand is the threefold cultural geography of West, Middle, and East. Steiner describes the peoples of Europe and beyond as carrying distinct spiritual tasks, and he reads the conflict partly as a collision and distortion of these tasks. The cultural impulses of the East, the political and economic energies of the West, and the position of the central European peoples between them are sketched not as fixed national characters but as living currents that can be deformed when one is pressed into the service of another. He is sharply critical of the way each side in the war casts itself as the lamb and its enemy as the wolf, and he refuses to let his own listeners off the hook, warning them repeatedly against the comfortable generalizations they themselves are tempted to make.
Running beneath all of this is the title's central claim, that untruthfulness has a karma. A lie is not merely a moral lapse that ends when it is exposed. It is a real deed with real consequences that ripple forward through the lives of those who tell it and those who believe it. The careless judgment, the empty phrase repeated in good faith, the propaganda absorbed without examination: each of these, in Steiner's account, becomes a force that works on in time. His purpose is less to assign blame to one nation than to wake his audience to the seriousness of judgment itself, to the responsibility carried by every sentence a person accepts as true. The cycle is, in the end, a call to a more honest inner life, made urgent by the catastrophe unfolding around the lecture hall.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The following entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on GA 173. Each links to a fuller study of the term and the way Steiner develops it across this cycle:
- The Karma of Untruthfulness
- Public Opinion
- Secret Brotherhoods
- Historical Judgment
- West, Middle and East
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of the lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translations of the GA 173a and 173b cycles alongside the wider body of Steiner's work. For the published English edition in print, search the publisher's catalogue at SteinerBooks, where the volume appears under its English title.
Continue Your Study
To go deeper into the ideas raised here, the following paths in our library may help:
- Browse the full Thalira glossary to trace how terms such as public opinion and historical judgment connect to the rest of Steiner's vocabulary.
- Explore the wider GA Work Library to see how this cycle sits among Steiner's other lecture courses from the war years.
- Read the companion study on the karma of untruthfulness itself at the central glossary entry for this theme, then follow its links into the surrounding concepts.