Steiner taught that each European folk soul takes hold of a different member of the human soul, with no rank implied between them.
The Folk Souls and the Soul Members in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of which part of the human soul each folk soul takes hold of in the people who belong to it. He set it out on 7 January 1917 at Dornach, printed in English as The Karma of Untruthfulness, Volume Two (GA 174). The human soul, in his anthropology, is threefold: sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul, and consciousness soul, enlivened by the I. The Italian folk soul works into the sentient soul, the French into the intellectual or mind soul, the British into the consciousness soul, the folk souls of Central Europe into the I, and those of the Slav peoples into the spirit self. Steiner insisted the sequence carries no rank, and reported that one listener left furious at a hierarchy he had read into it. He placed the folk soul itself at the rank of archangel, working below waking consciousness.
The folk souls and the soul members name one relationship in Steiner's spiritual science: a folk soul is a real being, not a headcount of people who share a language, and it reaches the individual through one soul member, not the whole person. What passes for national character is, on this reading, a contact point beneath waking consciousness.
In Steiner's Own Words
We are familiar with the threefold nature of our soul in that it consists of the sentient soul, the intellectual or mind soul and the consciousness soul, all three being filled, spiritually permeated, enlivened by our egohood. When the Italian folk soul works into individual human beings, it is the sentient soul that is influenced by the forces and impulses with which it works. In the French individual it is the intellectual or mind soul, and in the British individual the consciousness soul through which the folk soul works. For the folk souls of Central Europe it is the ego that is receptive, and for those of the Slav peoples the spirit-self. If we could fill ourselves with an understanding of this, we should no longer be tempted to form judgements in the way in which they are so frequently formed.
What it Means Today
The nearest modern discipline to this map is comparative cultural psychology, whose founding document is Geert Hofstede's Culture's Consequences, published in 1980 from employee attitude surveys gathered at IBM subsidiaries in forty countries. Hofstede, later professor of organisational anthropology at Maastricht University, found the scores clustering along a few axes: power distance, individualism against collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, and a masculinity to femininity scale, with long-term orientation added later from the Chinese Value Survey work with Michael Harris Bond.
Two features of that work rhyme with the Dornach lecture. Hofstede held that the dimensions were no league table, that a high score was not a good score, and warned for decades against the ecological fallacy, the slide from a country mean to a judgement about the person in front of you. Steiner set the same guard, and named the listener who left furious over a rank he had read in and Steiner had not put there. They part company on cause: Hofstede reads culture as mental programming learned in family and school, Steiner as a being of archangelic rank touching one soul member from outside conscious life. Thalira synthesis: the worth of Steiner's version is that it tells you which part of yourself to watch, since the member a folk soul takes hold of is the one you are least able to catch it working in.
Where to Read More
- The Karma of Untruthfulness, Volume Two, GA 174
- Find The Karma of Untruthfulness at SteinerBooks [THALIRA_BLOG_LINKS_PLACEHOLDER]