The Karma of Untruthfulness, Volume Two gathers the second half of a course of lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Dornach during the winter of the First World War. The twelve lectures collected here run from 1 January to 30 January 1917, continuing the inquiry begun in the first volume. Steiner had set himself an unusual task for a spiritual teacher: to read the catastrophe of the war as a symptom, asking what hidden currents of soul and spirit had made it possible for whole nations to believe contradictory accounts of the same events. The volume is, in effect, a spiritual diagnosis of public falsehood, and it remains one of his most pointed treatments of how untruth becomes a shared habit rather than a private failing.
Place in Steiner's Work
These lectures belong to the wartime cycles in which Steiner turned his attention from cosmology and inner development toward contemporary history. By 1917 he had spent nearly two decades building anthroposophy as a path of spiritual knowledge, and he now applied that method to the events filling the newspapers. Where the first volume laid out the broad picture of how propaganda and rumour spread, the second volume goes deeper into the human being, showing how forces that distort thought are anchored in the body and soul. The course connects naturally to his later social writings and to his account of the consciousness soul, the stage of awareness humanity is meant to develop in the present age. Steiner repeatedly insists that clear judgment is now a moral duty, because the age of the consciousness soul gives people a freedom that can be used to see truly or to deceive themselves wholesale.
The volume also sits beside Steiner's study of historical symptomatology, the practice of treating outward events as visible signs of deeper spiritual movements. He asks his listeners to read history the way a physician reads a fever: the heat is real, but it points to a cause that lies out of sight. This habit of looking behind the obvious links the wartime lectures to his broader teaching on the dead, on hidden brotherhoods, and on the two opposing forces he names Lucifer and Ahriman.
It is worth understanding the context in which Steiner spoke. He was addressing members of the Anthroposophical Society at the Goetheanum, the building then rising in Dornach, while Europe was locked in a war that each side described in terms of pure self-defence. Steiner refused to take sides in the ordinary sense. Instead he treated the mutual accusations of both alliances as material for study, asking how it was possible for honest people to hold to accounts that could not all be true at once. This is why he frames the volume as a study of karma rather than a piece of commentary. The untruth he examines is not a single lie told by a single person but a condition that whole communities take on together, and that condition, he argues, carries consequences that reach far beyond the lifetime in which it is formed.
Themes and Structure
The twelve lectures circle a small number of large questions rather than marching through a fixed syllabus. A central thread is the difference between an idea born of reality and an abstract slogan that merely imitates one. Steiner argues that the war was sustained partly by catchwords, by phrases that sounded convincing yet had no living root in fact. He observes that genuine ideas resist being turned into slogans because their absurdity would become plain, while empty abstractions can be repeated endlessly and seized on greedily by people reluctant to think for themselves. As he puts it in one lecture:
An idea must be born of living reality.
A second theme is the inner anatomy of self-deception. In one of the most striking lectures Steiner describes how the ego, the astral body, and the etheric body each find a point of contact in the human organism, and how each carries an inheritance of distortion that ordinary health keeps in check. When this binding loosens through illness or trance, the result is spite, cunning, and the urge to place oneself in the light while pushing others into shadow. Self-knowledge, he concludes, cannot be built on introspection alone; it grows only when a person turns attention away from personal feeling toward the affairs of humanity as a whole.
The third recurring theme is the working of the dead within the living. Steiner held that those who have crossed the threshold of death continue to act into earthly life, and that some of the spiritual confusion of the war drew on this hidden traffic between the worlds. He suggests that certain currents of feeling sweeping through populations are not generated wholly within the living at all, and that learning to recognise this influence is part of an honest reading of history. Alongside this he traces the polar influences of Lucifer, who pulls toward fantasy and self-importance, and Ahriman, who pulls toward cold materialism and mechanical thinking. Both, he argues, are at work in the way public opinion is manufactured, and only a balanced, reality-filled judgment can hold the middle ground between them.
Threaded through all of this are sharp observations about the press. Steiner shows how a novel written years before the war could later supply ready-made slogans for newspaper editorials, and he points to the strange ease with which quotations are misattributed once a public mood demands them, noting that lines confidently ascribed to well-known writers often cannot be found in their work at all, or carry the opposite meaning. His concern is not merely that newspapers print errors, but that a whole machinery of opinion forms beneath the surface of awareness, shaping what people are willing to believe before they have examined anything. The remedy he offers is demanding rather than comforting. He asks each listener to develop a sense for which small events are genuinely significant, to fill judgment with living ideas instead of borrowed phrases, and to accept that clear sight is hard-won work rather than a natural possession. The volume closes less as a verdict on the war than as a training in how to think truthfully when everything around one invites the opposite.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
Several entries in the Thalira glossary draw directly on this volume. Each links to a fuller treatment of the term, with this lecture course standing as one of its primary sources:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translation alongside the German originals. For a printed edition you can search the publisher's catalogue at SteinerBooks. Reading the volume in full is worthwhile, since Steiner builds his case slowly and the force of the argument depends on the accumulation of detail across all twelve lectures.
Continue Your Study
To go further with the ideas in this volume:
- Begin with the linked entries above, then browse the full Thalira glossary to see how these terms connect to the wider body of Steiner's thought.
- Compare this course with the first volume of the same lecture cycle and with Steiner's social writings, where the question of truthful judgment reappears in the context of community life.
- Follow the thread of historical symptomatology into Steiner's lectures on hidden spiritual streams, where the same method of reading events as signs is applied to longer stretches of history.