The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Special Note on Statements made in these Lectures about the Atom in Connection with Freemasonry

[ 1 ] In Rudolf Steiner's complete works, there are a wide variety of statements about atomism, the atom, and future new forces of nature. To avoid serious misunderstandings, these various statements must be evaluated in a differentiated manner. Above all, a distinction must be made between his criticism of atomic theory as a worldview and his statements about the nature of the atom from the standpoint of occultism.

[ 2 ] The criticism of atomic theory as a worldview, already beginning in two of his earliest treatises, “The Only Possible Criticism of Atomic Concepts” (1882) and “Atomism and Its Refutation” (1890),^{1Printed in “Beiträge zur Rudolf Steiner Gesamtausgabe,” No. 63, Michaeli 1978.} aims to show that it is not possible to see the atom as “the fundamental principle of all existence.” Just as in a telegram, wire and electricity are only mediators of the thing itself, so atoms can only be understood as mediators or carriers of spiritual effects. This basic attitude runs through his entire work. Even in one of his last writings, his autobiography Mein Lebensgang (My Life, chapter 32), he states: “Atoms or atomistic structures can only be the results of spiritual effects, of organic effects.”

[ 3 ] The statements about the atom in the present lectures are something completely different. Here, for a very small circle, the atom was discussed from the point of view of occultism as the primordial building material of nature in connection with Freemasonry. For just as the Masonic cult symbolism was originally intended to sanctify the service of nature, Rudolf Steiner wanted to awaken an understanding through the cult-symbolic section of his Esoteric School, which he prepared with these lectures, that “the laboratory table must become the altar” and that the impulse of selflessness must be implanted in the whole of social life, lest our culture, dominated by the principle of utility, perish in egoism. For this reason, he published at the same time the “social law” of the future, which he derived from occultism and which reads: “The salvation of a community of people working together is greater the less the individual claims the fruits of his labor for himself, that is, the more he gives of these fruits to his fellow workers and the more his needs are satisfied not by his own labor but by the labor of others.” ^{2In the essay “Theosophy and the Social Question” (October 1905) in “Luzifer-Gnosis,” Bibl. No. 34, also available as a special edition under the title “Spiritual Science and the Social Question.”}

[ 4 ] The impetus to speak about the atom from an occult point of view came not from occultism but from external science, and resulted from the foresight of what would be in store for humanity as a result of the latest physical discoveries at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. The insight that modern knowledge of nature and technology are rushing toward stages of development that can only benefit humanity if people's souls are deepened in the sense of a spiritual scientific view of life had fundamentally determined Rudolf Steiner to advocate the public dissemination of secret knowledge. Rudolf Steiner recognized that the fact that physics was beginning to investigate the connection between atoms, electricity, and ether was an enormously important turning point in the development of human thinking, because as an occultist he knew that “a new starting point would emerge from the atom into the mineral-physical world.” (December 16, 1904, in this volume.)

[ 5 ] For this reason, he attached extraordinary importance to a speech pointing in this direction by the then British Prime Minister Balfour. This speech, delivered on August 14, 1904, at the British Association, appeared in German in the same year under the title “Unsere Weltanschauung” (Our Worldview), Leipzig 1904. At the time when Rudolf Steiner referred to this speech in his lectures of December 1904, he had already discussed it in the November issue of his magazine “Luzifer-Gnosis.” (See Bibl. No. 34.)

[ 6 ] However, the prediction made in the three lectures of December 9, 16, and 23, 1904, that human beings would learn to think down to the atom and be able to use its power, is not only connected with a warning of the grave dangers that threaten if this power is not selflessly placed at the service of the whole, but also the indication that the “most important thing for the future” is that atoms, as “the smallest building blocks,” will be used for construction in future times.

[ 7 ] This second, unexplained hint is somewhat more clearly outlined in the notes of October 21, 1905, and the addition from the lecture of October 21, 1907, according to which the occultist is able to make the atom “grow.” ^{3Many years later, in his lecture in Berlin on June 22, 1915, in “Menschenschicksale, Völkerschicksale” (Human Destiny, the Destiny of Nations), Bibl. No. 157, GA 1960, Rudolf Steiner returned to the subject of atoms in connection with the development of Jupiter and mentioned the lectures now published here. The exact wording is: “I have spoken before about the atom as being prepared out of the whole cosmos. You can find this again in those earlier lectures that were given at the very beginning of our work in Berlin.”} At the same time, there is also mention of the ability to shrink. These ideas were not entirely unknown to the listeners at that time. For in the literature of the Theosophical Society, especially by C. W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant, there was much talk of the power of enlargement and reduction as a faculty of etheric clairvoyance that needed to be specially trained, mostly in connection with the description of clairvoyant investigations of atoms. Annie Besant had spoken and written about this on several occasions in 1905. A study published jointly by the two in 1895 on “Occult Chemistry” had also been reissued at that time. A copy can be found in the Rudolf Steiner Library. Rudolf Steiner rejected this type of representation as materialistic spiritualism, just as he rejected scientific atomism as the basis of a worldview, because even in this theosophical literature, atoms were regarded as the fundamental principle of existence instead of being recognized as the results and mediators of concrete spiritual effects.

[ 8 ] For the same reason, he did not speak of a merely external technique of etheric enlargement and reduction, but of the fact that, starting in our 20th century, etheric clairvoyance would slowly and gradually emerge as a new natural ability of human beings, enabling them to perceive Christ reappearing in the ether. ^{5See “The Event of the Christ Appearance in the Ethereal World,” Bibl. No. 118, GA 1977.} Then there will also be chemists and physicists who will no longer teach that there are only material atoms, but that matter is structured in the sense that “Christ has gradually arranged it.”^{6See “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity” (chap. II), Bibl. No. 15, GA 1974.}

[ 9 ] The fact that the suggestion that in future times it will be possible to build with atoms refers to the mastery of the etheric, living forces, becomes clear from the lecture of January 2, 1906 (in this volume). In a lecture given somewhat later (Munich, December 4, 1907, contained in GA 98), this is once again clearly stated when it says:

[ 10 ] “... Once human beings have worked on themselves to the point where they have reached the first stage of clairvoyance, then the life of plants and the laws of life will be as clear to them as the laws of the mineral world are to us now.”

[ 11 ] If you assemble a machine or build a house, these are constructed according to the laws of the mineral world. A machine is built according to the laws of the mineral world, but we cannot build a plant in the same way. If you want to have a plant, you must leave this work to the beings that underlie nature. Later, it will be possible to produce plants in the laboratory, but only when this becomes a sacrament, a sacred act for human beings. All creation of living beings will only be permitted to humans when they are so serious and purified that the laboratory table becomes an altar to them. Before that, not the slightest detail of how living beings are put together will be revealed. In other words, the ego as a knowing entity lives in the mineral kingdom and will ascend to the plant kingdom, where it will learn to understand it just as it understands the mineral kingdom today. Later, it will also learn to understand the laws of the animal kingdom and then those of the human kingdom. All people will learn to understand the inner life of plants, animals, and human beings; these are the prospects for the future. What one truly understands, one can also represent, for example, a clock. Today's human being will never be able to represent anything from living nature without the help of the beings behind nature, as long as it is not a sacramental act for him.”

—Hella Wiesberger