The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner
1909–1916 Survey
With the year 1909 began the second period of seven years in the life of the Movement inaugurated by Rudolf Steiner. It was marked by far-reaching changes shaped by destiny and by new and destiny-forming inpulses and decisive acts of his own. The time-organism of such a life-course does not run smoothly in a continuous metamorphosis. It leads also in definite rhythmic phases of development to stages which, in one step, open up new realms of life and new tasks, calling for quick decisions, which again call for fresh spheres of influence and therewith call upon the Helping Powers in the background.
The transition from the first to the second seven-year period in the life of a spiritual Movement under the leadership of an exceptional personality is, therefore, according to spiritual laws governing organic life, not to be comprehended simply as a gradual continuation of what is past, and yet it is not without reference to its early stages. A second seven-year period does not succeed a previous one in the sudden fashion of a revolving stage, replacing one scene with the next. Rather is it to be compared with the due processes of seasonal crop-rotation under the skilled hands of a wise farmer.
The second seven-year period brought, in the first place, three such stages of development. In the field of science, the dawn of the new epoch is seen in the appearance in 1909 of the work Occult Science—an Outline, in which Dr. Steiner published the fundamental exposition of a spiritual-scientific cosmogony, of the evolution of the world and of humanity. In the field of art, instead of the presentation of works out of the ancient Mysteries, four new Mystery Dramas were written by Rudolf Steiner himself and produced in subsequent years. Their spiritual and religious origin in the substance of Christian initiation was brought home to his listeners in the Gospel lecture cycles of 1909–1912. In the social field, the Anthroposophical Society was founded on the very groundwork of Anthroposophy itself, and this Society became the first step toward the General Anthroposophical Society, founded in 1923, at the end of the third epoch of seven years, and after years of trial and maturing. With this final institution, Rudolf Steiner himself united.
Just as in the life of a growing child, in its second seven-year period, the course of life hitherto lived in the framework of the family turns into a new phase in which the knowledge to be won is brought to fruition in the first place by artistic methods, so in the second phase of this spiritual Movement Rudolf Steiner’s artistic creations threw light upon the entire activity of this epoch. As he once said later, the whole of Anthroposophy is contained in the four Mystery Dramas in artistic form, and whoever allows this germ to unfold in his soul can arrive at the same state of fruition as is born out of the power of knowledge on a different soil. Thus through his activity science, art, and religion were once again brought into that higher unity which had been cultivated by the Mysteries of the ancients, but they were now received, experienced, and applied at a new level of consciousness suited to our time.