Karmic Relationships, Volume VI is the sixth book in Rudolf Steiner's eight volume series on karma and reincarnation, drawn from lectures he gave in the final year of his teaching. The twelve addresses collected here were delivered between January and August of 1924 in Berne, Zurich, Stuttgart, Arnheim, and London, during the intense outpouring of esoteric work that followed the Christmas Conference at the Goetheanum. Where earlier volumes traced the karmic biographies of individual historical figures, this collection turns toward the great spiritual currents that shaped the West: the Platonic school of Chartres, the Aristotelian work of the Dominicans, the pre-Christian wisdom of King Arthur's knights, and the long migration of cosmic thinking from the heavens down into the human head. It is a book about how whole movements of soul carry their destiny across centuries.
Place in Steiner's Work
This volume belongs to the very end of Steiner's life. He spoke these lectures in 1924, the year before his death, after he had personally taken over leadership of the Anthroposophical Society at the Christmas Conference of 1923. That event reframed his teaching. He no longer wished merely to instruct from the background; he wanted the deepest esoteric questions, including the working of karma, to be spoken openly. The karma lectures of 1924 are the fruit of that decision, and they were given with unusual directness about spiritual research into individual and historical destiny.
Within the wider karma series, often catalogued together, this sixth volume is distinctive for its geographic spread and its historical sweep. Steiner gave several of its most important lectures in England, near Torquay and in London, and he tied his themes to the very soil of the British Isles. The collection sits alongside his lectures on the spiritual mission of Michael, and it can be read as a companion to his teaching on how the present age inherits the work of ancient initiation centres.
It helps to remember why Steiner thought these histories mattered for ordinary readers. He held that the spiritual streams he described are not finished events locked in the past, but living forces still at work in the souls of people now. To study Chartres or the Arthurian knights, in his view, is to recognise something of one's own inner constitution and the unseen currents that move a culture. The volume therefore reads less like a chronicle and more like an attempt to wake the listener to a destiny he or she already carries. This is why the lectures repeatedly circle back from cosmic history to the single human being sitting in the hall.
Themes and Structure
The twelve lectures move between two registers. Some examine the mechanism of karma itself: how the human being, asleep, carries the results of former earthly lives in the astral body and the I, and how an older humanity once perceived its own destiny directly before that vision faded into ordinary waking consciousness. Steiner describes three states of consciousness in archaic man and shows how the perception of karma was gradually withdrawn so that freedom could be won.
The second register is historical, and it is the heart of the volume. Steiner traces a long contest over human thinking. In the age of Alexander, he teaches, ideas were not produced by the individual mind but received as revelation; the Archangel Michael, dwelling in the Sun, administered this heavenly intelligence and sent it down to Earth. Aristotelianism then prepared humanity to unfold thought from its own inner force, and by the eighth century this once cosmic thinking had sunk entirely into the earthly intellect. Steiner frames this descent not as a loss but as the necessary price of freedom: only when the divine source of thought was hidden could the human being begin to think as an independent self.
One short passage captures the older condition Steiner is describing. Of the time after the great catastrophe he taught, he says:
The day-consciousness of men who lived directly after the Atlantean Flood was a gradually fading astral vision of the physical world.
From that fading vision he leads the listener forward through the centuries, showing how the bright certainty of an older clairvoyance gave way to the sober, sharply outlined waking mind of the present, and how that very dimming made room for conscience and individual judgement.
Against this background Steiner sets two streams that he says made a great agreement in the spiritual world. The Platonists of the twelfth century, taught at the cathedral school of Chartres by figures such as Bernardus Sylvestris and Alanus ab Insulis, gave their wisdom in living pictures rather than abstract concepts. As they passed through death, they met the souls who would descend as Dominicans to cultivate the sharpened Aristotelian intellect of scholasticism. Steiner reads the whole later history of philosophy, including the quarrel between the Nominalists and the Realists, as a battle over whether Michael could one day reclaim the intelligence that had fallen to Earth.
In the London lectures Steiner turns to the British Isles and the pre-Christian Sun wisdom centred on Tintagel, where he places the castle and Round Table of King Arthur. He describes how the knights, gazing at the play of light and elemental spirits over the sea, took into themselves the forces of the Sun, and how their messengers went out to civilise the still wild peoples of Europe. He sets this Sun stream, working from West to East, beside the Christ stream that flowed through human hearts from Palestine westward, and he weaves the Grail and the Michael mystery into a single tapestry of European destiny.
Reading the two streams together is the interpretive key to the closing lectures. The Arthurian impulse, in Steiner's account, belongs to the time before the Mystery of Golgotha, when the Christ was still a Sun Being and could be perceived in the great processes of nature. The Grail stream belongs to the time after, when that same power had to be sought inwardly, in the blood and the heart. The knights of the Round Table represent an outward, cosmic Christianity drawn from light and air; the Grail knights represent an inward Christianity carried through the awakened soul. Steiner suggests that the marriage of these two, the cosmic and the inward, is part of the unfinished karmic task of the modern West.
Throughout the cycle Steiner returns to a single warning. He names the adversary powers, the Ahrimanic spirits, who in the materialism of the nineteenth century sought to keep thinking severed from its spiritual origin and to prevent Michael from reclaiming the intelligence that had fallen to Earth. For Steiner the renewal of spiritual science was nothing less than a contribution to that contest, an attempt to reunite human thought with the spiritual world from which it first descended. The historical pictures of this volume are, in the end, his way of showing readers what is at stake in their own inner life.
Glossary Terms from this Volume
The following entries in the Thalira glossary draw on Karmic Relationships, Volume VI as a primary source. Each links to a full study of the term:
The School of Chartres Cosmic Intelligence King Arthur's Round Table
Where to Read It
You can read the full text of these lectures online at the Rudolf Steiner Archive, where the volume is presented lecture by lecture in English translation. For a bound study edition with editorial apparatus and notes, search the publisher catalogue at SteinerBooks. We recommend reading at least two consecutive lectures together, since Steiner builds each historical picture across several evenings rather than completing it in one.
Continue Your Study
To follow the threads of this volume further into the Thalira library:
- Browse the full set of defined terms in our Steiner glossary, where the Chartres, Michael, and Arthurian entries connect to dozens of related ideas.
- Return to the GA Work Library to find the neighbouring karma volumes and other lecture cycles from Steiner's final year.
- Trace the figure of the Archangel and his struggle for human thinking through the Cosmic Intelligence entry, the natural next step after this study guide.