Truth Wrought Words
GA 40
Foreword to the Second Edition
Ten years have passed since Rudolf Steiner passed away. When he left us, there was a heartfelt desire to collect all the sayings and dedications that were available at the time, in order to combine them with the poems he wrote for eurythmy in a volume of memories, like a treasure trove of the spirit.
We have been waiting for a long time for a second edition of the Warspruchworte, which has long been out of print. In the meantime, a considerable number of such sayings have been collected from travel portfolios, lecture notes, and notebooks left behind. Others were copied from donated works, guest books, photographs, etc.
Even if they are sometimes just rhythmic or even simple random prose, their wisdom makes it seem justified to include them in the new edition.
Even small changes in the versions of similar sayings stimulate thought and were therefore allowed to be taken into account several times. A chronological order has been dispensed with in this volume. As they are presented here in a seemingly colorful order, these sayings are intended to reflect spiritual life in all its rich diversity. The foreword to the first edition contains a reference to the surprisingly impersonal nature of Rudolf Steiner's way of presenting himself, the absence of the little pronoun "I" in the personal sense in the poems of this herald of the impersonal noun "I". In the new collection, too, we find it only rarely and only in representation of the human "I" as such. With one single exception, the There was one single exception, which made it all the more shocking. It was found in one of the last used notebooks and was unknown to anyone, a passionate prayer for humanity rising from the depths of the soul, an expression of the spirit now prevented from its usual extensive activity by the lack of physical powers.
“I would like to inflame every human being
with the spirit of the cosmos…”
This passionate yearning for human waking through the power of the baptism of fire is followed here by words that were spoken in the last year of life, at a cremation, but at the same time they seem like a last greeting left to us by the departing person from a distant spiritual height, like a personal word of consolation and warning to us from Rudolf Steiner himself.
“I was united with you,
remain united in me…”
When the first Goetheanum, destroyed by fire later, was opened in 1920, I was commissioned by Rudolf Steiner to recite the words of Hilarius from The Guardian of the Threshold, with a few modifications made by him. In memory of that celebration, these words are placed at the beginning of the new edition.
They are accompanied by the words spoken by Rudolf Steiner himself at the Christmas conference in 1923/24 at the laying of the spiritual foundation stone of the second Goetheanum.
Marie Steiner,
Dornach, September 1935