Rudolf Steiner's Eagle, Lion, and Bull Teachings on Race and Culture
An Expanded Version of my Harvard Divinity School Presentation
Every new object, clearly seen, opens a new organ of perception in us.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Warm 2026 greetings to my subscribers!
On Tuesday, December 16th of 2024 I made a 20-minute presentation at the “100 Years Rudolf Steiner” conference organized by Harvard Divinity School on research I have been conducting on Rudolf Steiner’s view of race and ethnic culture and its relevance for our time.
As you can imagine, bringing this far-reaching research into a 20-minute time slot was rather challenging and I felt I had to leave out a lot of things that would have brought more nuance to what clearly proved to be, for some anyway, a highly provocative presentation.
For these reasons, in the two videos below, I have decided to offer a significantly expanded version of my Harvard presentation.
While the 20-minute version of my presentation was recorded, unfortunately that recording is temporarily unavailable. My understanding is that the recordings of all the different panels from the conference will soon be posted on the YouTube channel of Harvard Divinity School which can be found here. I suggest you keep checking that website, and I will let my readers know via a substack note as soon as I see that they are available.
As I prepare to publish these videos on this highly controversial topic, I wish to address in writing what is perhaps the most likely and unfortunate misunderstanding that could arise from this effort, namely that my attempt to bring nuance to Rudolf Steiner’s view of race is seen as a defense of his seeming racist viewpoints and remarks.
As I see it, such a perspective succumbs to the polarizing tendencies of our cultural moment, which tends to view any effort to truly understand something or someone as the same as agreeing with that person or thing. Just think of how, at this moment, any critic of the recent attacks by the US on Venezuela can be labeled as a supporter of the current regime in Venezuela. This kind of black and white thinking is the death of both democracy and of enlightened discourse of all kinds.
Using the laws of dynamic polarity, however, which I introduce in these videos, we can chart instead a healing or middle path, as follows:
Here I seek to show how both the denial of Rudolf Steiner’s seeming racist views (or the unwillingness to honestly examine or acknowledge these views), and the disavowal of those views without a proper effort toward a deeper understanding of them (or the knee jerk accusation that Rudolf Steiner was a racist), can both be seen as one-sided responses.
What I propose instead—and what I seek to embark upon in these presentations—is a sensitive, nuanced exploration of these aspects of Steiner’s legacy using the phenomenological disciplines that lay at the heart of spiritual science itself. As I understand it, this approach is also a basic principle of sound hermeneutics as articulated by William Dilthey:
An author or thinker can only be understood by reconstructing the life context and experiential world in which they articulated their ideas.
For those who might be interested in delving more deeply into this topic, I am considering offering an online short course this Spring. If you might be interested in being part of such a course, please let me know by clicking on this link.
Part I:
Part II:
Looking forward to listening to these. Are these videos also on YouTube, by chance? I ask because I could grab a transcript from there (it is much faster for me to read than listen to the videos, and I tend to digest the written word better than oral presentations).
I'm excited to hear another perspective on this subject. I'm aware that Steiner specifically makes clear why only a very small group of people can understand what he means in 174b-2 when he says that for the next 1500 years only white skinned people can integrate with the Christ in the way necessary if humanity is to make it successfully into the 6th epoch.
That said, before we simply agree with a flat statement that none of us can understand what that means, we might also open the space to think about that very claim.
I'm very open to many reasons why context matters. But I'm hoping to hear people talk about the reasons why, perhaps, Steiner is over-stating the case that only people from a very specific region and time can understand this massive difference between white-skinned people and all non-white peoples.
My hope is that conversations can take place that at least allow for the possiblity that Steiner is making some errors in reasoning when he makes such claims.
If he isn't capable of making such errors, I guess we just assume that we simply have no way of knowing what it means that non-white people must wait till around 3500 before they can receive the gift of The Christ.
I wonder if we have evidence that the small group of white Germans that he was speaking to were able to grasp it?
What would that kind of evidence look like?
For instance, can we find any evidence that Scaligero's work on race and blood proves that he understood Steiner fairly well. Since he was not part of the region or exact time as those listening to that lecture, should we take any of Scaligero's accuracy as a sign that he was reaching very similar spiritual understandings completely independent of Steiner?
Full disclosure: I think Scaligero's work reflects major cognitive blind-spots and presuppositins that don't hold up, many of the same ones that I see Steiner reproducing.
That said, more than anything, it'll be such a relief to find an Anthroposophical space in which we can, before anything else, see if we agree with Steiner's presuppositions regarding who can and can't understand his words.