History, Symptoms & the Karma of Untruthfulness

Steiner's name for the historian's working path from documented surface events to the deeper currents they express, set out in his Dornach lectures of October 1918.

Historical judgment is Steiner's term for the disciplined act of testing historical and political claims against primary facts instead of accepting them ready-made from names, phrases or the press.

Steiner's reading of modern history since 1413 as the age of the consciousness soul, when human beings must form their judgments independently instead of receiving them from tradition.

Steiner's term for collective judgment formed by the press and repetition rather than by individual verification, analysed in his Dornach lectures of December 1916 (GA 173).

Steiner's reading of the modern religious currents, Catholicism, Protestantism and Jesuitism, as outer symptoms of the consciousness soul asserting itself in European history.

Rudolf Steiner's term in GA 173 (Dornach, 1916) for closed occult societies he argued influenced public life through suggestion, a claim he presented as his own historical analysis.

Steiner's reading of the modern age's convulsions, above all the catastrophe of 1914 to 1918, as birth pangs of the consciousness soul rather than political accident.

Steiner's teaching, given in Dornach in January 1917, that the so-called dead remain active in earthly affairs and seek to work into the thoughts and deeds of the living.

Steiner's name for the unconscious drives of peoples and classes that steer historical events until the consciousness soul lifts them into deliberate, examined judgment.

Rudolf Steiner's Dornach lecture cycle of 1916 and 1917 (GA 173 and 174), which argued that untruth in public life works on as a force with karmic consequences.

Steiner's reading of history as held in balance between two adversary forces: luciferic enthusiasm that inflames movements and ahrimanic calculation that hardens them into mechanism.

Rudolf Steiner's method of reading outer historical events as symptoms of deeper changes in human consciousness, set out in lectures at Dornach in October 1918.

Steiner's teaching, from the 1917 Dornach lectures, that untruth spoken into public life works on as a real destructive force, and that every speaker carries a duty to verify.

Steiner's wartime reading of Europe as a threefold spiritual geography: the West, the Middle and the East each carrying a distinct soul-task within one shared human evolution.