A will arising after death to wipe out one's own karmic traces, dulled by higher beings so that the soul can accept a new earthly life.
The Effacement of the Traces of Karma in Anthroposophy is the will impulse that arises in the second half of the life between death and a new birth, in which the soul seeks to wipe out the traces of its own karma rather than carry them forward into another earthly life. Rudolf Steiner described it in the second lecture of the cycle published in English as Historical Necessity and Freewill (GA 179), spoken at Dornach on 9 December 1917. The German phrase he used is das Verwischen der Spuren des Karma. Steiner's claim is that a soul holding an unbroken survey of the wisdom available soon after death would, in countless cases, prefer erasure to a new incarnation. Beings of the higher hierarchies therefore dull that light of wisdom and paralyse the soul's activity, contracting its will until it is narrow enough to unite with a physical body in the stream of heredity and live out an earthly destiny there.
The effacement of the traces of karma names one of the stranger turns in Steiner's account of the afterlife. Having surveyed what it has made of itself across earlier lives, the soul wants to erase the record. Steiner treats that wish as real rather than pathological, and describes the counter-measure by which the spiritual world keeps the human being willing to return to earth at all.
In Steiner's Own Words
Such a will, aiming at the effacement of the traces of karma, becomes more and more evident in man. This effacement of the traces of karma is connected with the deepest secrets of human life. Were man to have a continual and full survey of the wisdom which he can acquire very soon, comparatively soon, after death, then there would be numberless human beings who would prefer to wipe out the traces of their existence, rather than enter into new lives. The elaboration of our earlier lives into a karmic connection, which we achieve, can only be achieved because we are dulled by certain beings of the higher hierarchy during the second half of the life between death and a new birth; we are paralyzed in regard to the light of wisdom, so that we restrict our activity and our will-impulses more and more.
What it Means Today
Steiner's proposition is that total recall would end the willingness to live. That sounds like an empirical claim, and one famous case study puts it in an unexpected light. In 1968 the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria published The Mind of a Mnemonist, a short monograph on Solomon Shereshevsky, a Moscow newspaper reporter whose memory Luria tested across roughly thirty years without ever finding its limit. Shereshevsky could reproduce tables of digits and strings of nonsense syllables years after a single reading.
The book is not a celebration. Luria records that his subject could not read for meaning, because every word detonated into images; could not reliably recognise faces, because each face registered as a new one at each viewing; and eventually experimented with techniques for forgetting, including writing material down in order to be rid of it, a method that failed him. A man who could not lose the traces of his own experience found ordinary living close to impossible.
Thalira synthesis: Luria's case suggests that forgetting is not the failure of memory but the condition of action, and that Steiner's hierarchies perform at the threshold of birth what Shereshevsky attempted and could not do for himself. The dulling is a gift rather than a theft. Karma survives it, working on from beneath the wisdom-light that has been dimmed, which is why Steiner can call earthly destiny something we sleep through and author at the same time.
Where to Read More
- Historical Necessity and Freewill, GA 179
- Find Historical Necessity and Freewill at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]