Steiner's name for spiritual knowledge pulled down to Earth before humanity has ripened for it, taken from souls sent violently through the Gate of Death.
Premature Spiritual Birth in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's term, in German geistige Frühgeburt, for spiritual knowledge brought down into earthly life before humanity has ripened enough to carry it. He set it out on 6 November 1917 in Zürich, in the cycle Behind the Scenes of External Happenings, collected in GA 178, Individual Spirit Beings and Their Influence on the Soul-Life of Man. A soul sent through the Gate of Death by violence keeps the use of forces that had been bound up with its physical body, and can therefore reach certain secrets sooner than evolution intends. Where a lodge arranges such deaths and draws those secrets out through a trained medium, a truth is born into the Earth ahead of its season. Steiner set this against the rightful task of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch: knowledge of birth, illness and death reaching people at the hour they are ripe for it, through genuine Inspiration rather than occult crime.
Premature spiritual birth names a particular occult crime, not a general unease about knowledge arriving early. Steiner pointed to the Order of the Thugs, still active in the East in the nineteenth century, whose killings were commissioned so the murdered would carry usable forces across the threshold. What those souls fathomed there was drawn out through mediums by men wanting the secret of controlling masses.
In Steiner's Own Words
For the very reason that here, on the physical plane, they were deprived of life in this way and sent with such violence through the Gate of Death, these souls retain a certain possibility of turning to account the powers and forces they possessed on Earth, for example, the power of intellect. From the other side, from the spiritual world, such souls can make use of the powers which were bound up with the physical body here on Earth and achieve with them something quite other than it is possible to achieve during life in the physical body. Thereby these souls are able to acquire knowledge of certain things earlier than is really conducive to the progress of human evolution.
What it Means Today
In February 1975 about 140 molecular biologists, physicians and lawyers met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California, at the invitation of Paul Berg of Stanford, to settle what to do about recombinant DNA. The technique worked; nobody could say what the new organisms would do outside the lab. Berg and his co-signatories had already published a 1974 letter asking laboratories to suspend the riskiest experiments, and Asilomar sorted the work into grades: proceed, contain, wait. A community with the power to do something agreed, in writing, not to do it yet.
Steiner's 1917 lecture measures that same distance from the far side. He does not call the knowledge of birth, illness and death false, nor say it should be withheld; it will arrive in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch by rightful means. His concern is timing and ownership, whether a truth reaches humanity at the hour humanity can carry it or gets levered down early to a few who want the control it confers. Asilomar shows a ripening honoured; the commissioned deaths behind the mediums show one broken open.
Thalira synthesis: call the distance between what a civilisation can already do and what it has matured enough to carry the Ripeness Gap. Steiner's contribution is the claim that this gap is not merely ethical but occult, that forces can be taken from the dying and spent to close it by force.
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