Karmic Relationships, Volume II is a cycle of seventeen lectures that Rudolf Steiner delivered at Dornach between April and the early summer of 1924, in the closing year of his teaching. It forms the second installment of the great karma series he carried out across that year, and it sets out to show how the law of destiny is not an abstract doctrine but a readable pattern written into individual biographies, into history, and even into the events of nature. The volume catalogued as GA 236 is, in essence, a course in spiritual observation: Steiner takes named historical figures, traces the thread of their successive earthly lives, and uses those concrete cases to teach a method his audience could begin to apply to their own existence. He opens the first lecture by insisting that the idea of repeated lives should not be received as theory but should take hold of the heart, so that the student feels themselves standing within the whole community of humankind across the ages.
Place in Steiner's Work
By 1924 Steiner had spent more than two decades building anthroposophy as a path of inner research. The karma lectures of that final year represent the most detailed and personal treatment of reincarnation he ever gave, addressed to members of the newly refounded Anthroposophical Society after the Christmas Conference at the Goetheanum. Volume I had introduced the principle with sweeping historical examples; this second volume deepens the practice, moving from spectacular biographies toward the quieter karmic threads of ordinary life. It belongs to a four-volume sequence, continued in the later karma collections, and stands alongside the cosmological and Christological cycles of the same period as part of Steiner's late attempt to give his students working tools rather than finished conclusions.
What sets this cycle apart within his output is its method. Steiner does not argue for reincarnation in the manner of a philosopher; he reports observations and then teaches the reader how such observation is built up. He repeatedly warns against the appetite for sensational detail, urging instead that one study the weightier incarnations in order to learn how to read the lesser ones, and finally one's own. This pedagogical patience, the insistence that a spiritual fact must become a feeling before it becomes useful, marks the volume as a manual of inner training disguised as a series of historical portraits. Read in this light, GA 236 is both a culmination and an invitation: it models how the seer reads destiny, then hands the reader the question of how to begin reading it for themselves.
Themes and Structure
The cycle opens with a set of vivid case studies. Steiner follows the individuality of Haroun al Raschid, the brilliant patron of an eighth-century Asiatic court, into the later life of Francis Bacon, the reformer of modern science; he pairs that figure with Haroun's learned counsellor, reborn westward as the educator Amos Comenius, so that two souls who once worked side by side meet again from opposite ends of Europe. He then presents Marx and Engels as two individualities balancing an old quarrel over a confiscated estate in early-medieval France, the dispossessed lord and the man who seized his land returning to settle their account in the language of modern economics. These portraits are not offered as gossip about the dead but as demonstrations of how an earlier deed metamorphoses into a later cast of mind. From them Steiner draws his governing caution: the student should approach repeated earthly lives soberly, seeking a true understanding of history rather than feverish curiosity about details. He even examines smaller, stranger cases, such as a Polish parliamentarian whose lifelong enthusiasm for Switzerland turns out to echo a journey made in a far earlier life, to show that the method works on quiet biographies as much as on famous ones.
The middle lectures turn inward and upward. Steiner describes how the human ego carries its physical, etheric, and astral instruments through the world, while remaining, in the truest sense, none of them; it is the ego that both suffers and creates karma. After death, he explains, the soul does not simply review its life but lives through its own deeds from the standpoint of those it affected, experiencing what it once caused with an intensity far stronger than ordinary waking life. This is how the raw material of future destiny is gathered. From there he maps the ascent through the spiritual worlds, where the human being comes into the keeping of higher beings: first the lunar teachers who lend such force to the soul's after-death experiences, then the Angels who guide one from life to life, and above them the ranks who govern the long passage between death and rebirth and who are bound to the spiritual nature of the Sun. Here the volume opens onto the cosmic scaffolding behind every personal fate, showing that what looks like private destiny is woven by whole orders of spiritual beings.
The final lectures bring the inquiry to its most searching point: the karma of catastrophe. Steiner asks how destiny works when groups of people are swept from earthly life together by an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, and he draws a careful distinction between such elemental events and accidents produced by civilization, such as a railway disaster. In the case of a natural catastrophe, he suggests, those who perish together are often bound by a shared karma that drew them to one locality; in a mechanical accident the victims may have no such link, having been gathered at one spot by destiny in a quite different way. His most arresting claim is that souls may, between death and a new birth, deliberately seek out the very regions where such elemental forces gather, choosing hardship as a means of growth:
It can happen that we deliberately seek out a volcanic eruption, or an earthquake, in order to find in the path of disaster the path to perfection.
The cycle closes by setting these reflections within the rhythm of the cosmic year, threading the Whitsun festival into the study of human freedom and destiny. Throughout, the structure moves from the outer biography to the inner ego to the cosmic and elemental, so that by the last lecture the reader has been led from a single human life to the working of whole spiritual worlds behind it.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
This volume is the primary source behind several entries in our study glossary. Each link below opens the full entry, where the idea is defined and set in context:
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of the cycle at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, which hosts the English translation of the lectures together with the original German. For a printed edition, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks, where the karma volumes are available in current translations. Reading the lectures in their own order is worthwhile, since each case study prepares the method used in the next.
Continue Your Study
If this volume has drawn your interest, a few next steps can deepen it:
- Browse the full Steiner study glossary to see how the ideas in GA 236 connect to terms drawn from across his work.
- Begin with the three entries linked above, reading them as a small set: catastrophe, the spiritual hierarchies, and the practical karma exercise belong together as the inner arc of this cycle.
- Follow the karma theme outward to neighbouring volumes in our GA Work Library, where the rest of the 1924 lecture year is mapped and summarized.