The Finnish national epic, which Steiner read occultly as three heroes who inspire the Sentient, Intellectual, and Consciousness Soul.
The Kalevala in Anthroposophy is the Finnish national epic read occultly by Rudolf Steiner, who in his lecture of 9 April 1914 (printed in GA 133) interpreted its three heroes as the inspirers of the threefold soul. Wainamoinen creates the Sentient Soul, Ilmarinen the Intellectual or Mind Soul, and Lemminkainen the Consciousness Soul. Compiled by Elias Lonnrot from oral folk-runes and published in 1835, the poem preserves, in imaginative pictures, an ancient clairvoyant memory of the soul descending into the human form. The mysterious Sampo it describes is, for Steiner, the human ether-body forged by the interworking of these three soul-members. He ranks the Kalevala beside the Iliad and the Nibelungenlied as a genuine folk-epic carrying initiatic knowledge from the northern Mysteries, recoverable today through spiritual science.
In Steiner's Own Words
The Finnish epic tells of three Heroes. To begin with, these three Beings seem strange and remarkable in the highest degree; they have something superhuman about them and at the same time something that graduates into the genuinely human. But if we examine the matter more closely, and with occult means, it becomes apparent that these three figures, these three Heroes, are the Creators and Inspirers of the threefold powers of the soul in man. The Creator of the Sentient Soul is the figure to whom, in the Kalewala, the name of Wainamoinen is given; the Creator of the Mind Soul is Ilmarinen, and the Creator of the Consciousness Soul, Lemminkainen.
What it Means Today
Steiner's reading lands inside a living scholarly conversation about the Kalevala. Elias Lonnrot stitched the published epic in 1835 (the expanded "New Kalevala" in 1849) from oral songs he collected on field-trips into Karelia, and the question of how much is folk-memory versus authorial composition has never settled. The Finnish ethnographer Matti Kuusi and, later, the folklorist Lauri Honko of the University of Turku spent careers on exactly this seam between inherited tradition and editorial hand. Honko's work on oral epic and the "great tradition" treats the runes as a memory-system, a way a people stores knowledge it can no longer state in plain prose. That is close to what Steiner claims, from another doorway: that the Kalewala holds a picture-knowledge of the soul that predates abstract thinking.
Where the academy reads the Sampo as a mill, a talisman, or a sky-pillar, Steiner reads it as the human ether-body. Thalira synthesis: the value of his reading is not that it overrules the folklorists but that it supplies the missing referent for why a forged object should sit at the epic's structural centre, namely that the poem remembers the moment the threefold soul was wrought into a physical form. A reader can hold both: Lonnrot the nineteenth-century compiler, and the runes as a clairvoyant inheritance older than any compiler, the two meeting in a single coherent whole.
Where to Read More