The sixth post-Atlantean epoch, where the spirit self develops through felt brotherhood, freedom of thought, and a spirit-grounded science Steiner called pneumatology.
The Sixth Epoch in Anthroposophy is the coming sixth post-Atlantean culture epoch that Rudolf Steiner described in the lecture Preparing for the Sixth Epoch (GA 159, Dusseldorf, 1915), the age in which the spirit self, or Manas, will work into the human soul as the consciousness soul works into it now. Steiner names three marks of this epoch. The first is a felt brotherhood, where each person experiences the hunger and need of another as their own and the well-being of one rests on the well-being of all. The second is complete freedom of thought in religious life. The third is pneumatology, a science that accepts only knowledge grounded in the spirit. These qualities are prepared now within communities of souls joined by free spiritual association rather than by ties of blood.
The Sixth Epoch is the cultural age Rudolf Steiner saw following our present fifth, consciousness-soul epoch. In his 1915 lecture at Dusseldorf he marked it by three coming qualities: a brotherhood in which one soul feels another's suffering directly, full freedom of thought in matters of belief, and pneumatology, a knowing that rests on the spirit. The epoch is being prepared now, in small working communities bound by spirit rather than blood.
In Steiner's Own Words
In the sixth epoch, however, it is the spirit self that must be developed within the souls of men, just as now the consciousness soul is being developed. The nature of spirit self is that it must pre-suppose the existence in human souls of the three characteristics of which I have spoken: social life in which brotherliness prevails, freedom of thought, and pneumatology. These three characteristics are essential in a community of human beings within which the spirit self is to develop as the consciousness soul develops in the souls of the fifth epoch.
What it Means Today
Steiner's sixth epoch is not a date on a calendar but a social form to practise toward now, and the clearest modern attempt to live it is the Camphill movement. Fleeing the Nazi annexation of Austria, the Viennese physician Karl Konig settled near Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1939, and in 1940 founded the first Camphill community at Camphill House by Milltimber, on the city's outskirts. From that single house Camphill grew into a worldwide network of more than a hundred life-sharing communities, where people with and without intellectual disabilities share home, work, and table as equals. Konig built these settlements on exactly the principle this lecture sets out: community founded on souls freely associating, not on family blood. The well-being of each member is bound to the well-being of the whole, which is Steiner's first mark of the sixth epoch made into daily household practice. Thalira synthesis: Camphill shows that the sixth epoch is rehearsed in the small, where a shared kitchen becomes the seed-bed of a brotherhood the wider world has not yet grown into, the spirit self practised at the scale of a single roof.
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