The channel by which a decadent oriental spiritual life re-entered Europe: merchants working between the Danube basin and the East, carrying it below the Latin layer.
Orientalism Through Medieval Trade in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the route by which a late and decadent form of oriental spiritual life re-entered Europe: not through the Church, and not through the schools, but through the merchants who moved goods in both directions between the Danube basin and the East during the middle of the Middle Ages. Steiner set this out in the second lecture of European Spiritual Life in the 19th Century (GA 325), given at Dornach on 16 May 1921. The point is one of stratum. Latin culture, carried by bishops and by Roman law, passed over the heads of the village and town populations. The trader spoke their language. What he brought to the householder along with spices settled into the folk dream-life, and the union of the two produced popular alchemy, astrology, and fortune telling, the ground from which Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme later rose.
Orientalism through medieval trade names a transmission line that written history tends to lose. Steiner asks who actually carried spiritual content to the people of eleventh to fourteenth century Europe, and answers: the man with the pack, not the man with the book. Because the merchant worked below the Latin layer, what he brought reached the wide masses who understood no Latin, and mingled there with their own dreaming.
In Steiner's Own Words
First of all there is the commercial traffic which had in fact always existed in Europe between the Danube basin and the East. There was constant trading in both directions particularly in the middle of the middle ages. In this way oriental ideas in an advanced stage of decadence were brought over into Europe. And someone who had probably never been in the east himself but had only traded with men from the east, brought to the householder not only spices, but spiritual life, a spiritual life tinged with Orientalism. This traffic went on throughout the whole of Europe. It had less influence on Latin culture, far more on the wide masses of people who understood no Latin.
What it Means Today
Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms, published in Italian in 1976 and in English by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1980, is the nearest thing academic history has to a test of what Steiner describes here. Ginzburg worked from the Inquisition trial records of Domenico Scandella, called Menocchio, a miller of Montereale Valcellina in Friuli, first interrogated in 1584 and executed in 1599. Menocchio told his judges that the world had curdled into being as cheese curdles out of milk, and that angels had appeared in it as worms appear in cheese. No Latin schoolman taught him that. Ginzburg's case is that a vernacular cosmology was running underneath the clerical layer with a memory of its own, and he was willing to ask how far its materials had travelled before they reached a Friulian mill. Friuli sat on the roads feeding Venice, the chief European door to the Levant. Steiner is describing the same layer from the inside, and naming its courier: not what the masses read, but what came into the house with the pepper and the cinnamon.
Thalira synthesis: the trade route is a catechism nobody wrote down, which is why the historians of doctrine keep losing it and the historians of the market keep finding it filed under freight. For a reader the practical consequence is a change of question. When a folk practice turns up in a European village, ask first which road it came along and who on that road had no reason to translate himself into Latin.
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