Steiner's name for a Folk-Soul that reaches the human being from beneath the earth, seizing the will rather than being met in freedom.
Possession by Subterranean Currents in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name for the condition in which a Folk-Soul reaches the human being from below the earth, through what he called the underground magnetic and electric currents, instead of working from above the earth downward. Steiner drew the distinction in Berlin on 30 March 1918, in the lecture Folk Souls and the Mystery of Golgotha, printed in Earthly Death and Cosmic Life (GA 181). A Folk-Soul approaching from above can be met by the whole free personality, so the human being forms the relation consciously and keeps it as his own. A Folk-Soul rising from beneath does not wait for that consent. It works on the will before judgment forms, and the person is then, in Steiner's German, von der Volksseele besessen, possessed by the Folk-Soul. The test he proposed is not the content of what someone says but whether that person fought it out in his own soul.
Possession by subterranean currents is one half of a distinction Steiner sets down in a single paragraph. A Folk-Soul can approach from above the earth, where a person meets it in full freedom, or rise from beneath the ground through currents that vibrate under it. The first leaves thinking, feeling, and willing the person's own. The second reaches the will first.
In Steiner's Own Words
Man can only with his whole free personality stand in relationship with the element above the Earth and down to the Earth. If he is influenced by underground Folk-Soul activities, he is not forming his Folk-Soul in freedom, he is then, as it were “possessed” by the Folk-Soul. I have shown in the public lecture that the Americans may even say the same thing as a Central-European, Herman Grimm, also says; and yet it is not the same thing. While we notice in Herman Grimm how everything is humanly acquired and won, with Woodrow Wilson it is as though he were humanly possessed by it.
What it Means Today
The closest modern statement of this idea was written by someone outside Anthroposophy. In March 1936 Carl Gustav Jung published Wotan in the Neue Schweizer Rundschau, an essay later collected in Civilization in Transition, volume ten of his Collected Works. Jung argued that what was then moving through Germany read better as a possession than as an economic event: an old god-image had woken in the collective psyche and taken hold of people from underneath their own opinions. He built the piece on a German word, Ergriffenheit, the state of being seized, and on the roles it implies, the Ergriffener who is seized and the Ergreifer who seizes. Eighteen years after the Berlin lecture, from a different starting point, Jung arrived at Steiner's criterion: two people can say a sentence with identical content and own it differently.
Thalira synthesis: Steiner and Jung both put the danger in the direction of approach rather than in the doctrine, which makes the diagnostic question never what a movement believes but whether its members could set the belief down and take it up again by choice. Steiner's own application, given in wartime Berlin, ran to national character and named Woodrow Wilson, and that application is contested and belongs to 1918. The criterion under it travels. Take a conviction you hold about a nation or a market and ask when you last examined it. If it was fought over in thinking, it is yours. If it arrived intact and resists weighing, something reached the will before you did.
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