Dear friends,

I wanted to write something with the occasion of Rudolf Steiner’s 100 years commemoration and the Voice of Conscience stopped me by asking: “What could you possibly say that wasn’t said before in these 100 years? What newness can you bring with yourself, from your own creativity, efforts and processes of life”? I had to long reflect on this question as this is the most important question, and it currently challenges my entire life. “Are you able to “create”, to really create out of Anthroposophy?” Maybe one thing I could have said then that I haven’t heard before is regarding the relationship between the cosmic personality of Aristotle – Thomas D’Aquino – Rudolf Steiner and John – Christian Rozenkreutz – Saint Germain (Master CR). I would have said that this relation is in its own nature similar to the relation between the eternal personality of Jeshua ben Pandira and Master Buddha. This is really something to reflect on: the cosmic role of the one who was once Rudolf Steiner as a candidate to becoming a new Bodhisattva.

But the thoughts piercing my heart each time are the thoughts of the destruction of the Anthroposophical Society that went loose after Rudolf Steiner’s death. In a sense, when Rudolf Steiner left the Earth, he took Anthroposophia with him in the Spiritual World and the Anthroposophical Society in his grave.

At the beginning of the year, I read “Ita Wegman and Anthroposophy. A conversation with Emanuel Zeylmans” (2012) by Wolfgang Weirauch. In this book-interview, Zeylmans offers other details about Ita Wegman’s biography (“Who was Ita Wegman?” Vol. 1-4) and also about his own biography as the biographer of both Ita Wegman and his father, how he struggled to write the Ita Wegman biography, how he begged for the sources to different Anthroposophists keeping things in their homes under silence and protecting letters, journals, etc. I only borrowed the book and had to send it back shortly, so I do not have the exact quotations/references; therefore, you need to read the book yourself to get beyond my interpretations or failings in exact memory.

But there are some things that stayed with me from that book, to which I would like to add others regarding the tragic history of the Anthroposophical Society and to offer some reflections that I hope you can find new. One of the most incredible things Zeylmans observed is that he wrote his father’s (Willem Zeylmans van Emmichoven) biography in 3 months and Ita Wegman’s biography in 12 years. When I read that, my mind started to make a comparison between an old soul and a young soul, a complex biography full of riddles and a biography clear to one’s eyes. Yes, there are together in the Anthroposophical Society old souls and younger souls. Sometimes, it is impossible to differentiate between them, and the only thing actually helping is the observation that some events of life can be interpreted simply and others are hidden, occulted, and rather complex. Simplicity of life itself, simplicity in the sense of the possibility of interpreting one’s life events in a liniar manner (not simplicity of their soul or spirit), is a form of recognising younger souls. Older souls are complex in karmic events and exterior dramas, and younger souls are complex innerly, in personal dramas.

The second is related to the soap opera, according to which Marie Steiner and Ita Wegman reconciliated before their deaths, thus saving the karma of the Anthroposophical Society. Sergej Prokofieff himself suggested that in his early book, The Occult Meaning of Forgiveness, but to his defence I must say that when he wrote the book, the Goetheanum hadn’t opened for public many of the things that could only be opened after some important personalities passed the threshold. Yes, after the war, people sealed the spoken words with silence and hid the written words under the bed. Mysticism veiled the lives of old Anthroposophists. Both Ita Wegman and Marie Steiner had devoted people around them, people who venerated the Initiate and Teacher, Rudolf Steiner, and who couldn’t cope with his loss. These people who, due to their own spiritual insufficiencies, were not ready to find spiritual independence within Anthroposophy (to stand on their own feet, so to speak), turned to the members of the Council and projected all the devotion they gave in the past to Rudolf Steiner on these personalities who were not Initiates. Therefore, each one of the members of the Council ended up with masses of supporters, and when they went against each other, spiritual wars started. This breaking of the walls of the spiritual vase they were supposed to protect, the spiritual core of the Movement united with the Anthroposophical Society, the Council, allowed the infiltration of the Nazis into the Anthroposophical Society. Thus, from 1933 to 1935 and onwards, active Nazis were already put in the positions to destabilise the Anthroposophical Society and to be fair, they didn’t even have to do much because most of the work was already done by the hatred of each other.

It is only recently that people started to observe and call these things out. For instance, Peter Selg following Uwe Werner observed this in some of his books, such as “Spiritual Resistance. Ita Wegman 1933-1935”. From Peter Selg and Uwe Werner, we find out about the actions of Roman Boos. This man wrote, with Marie Steiner’s approval, an Arian biography of Rudolf Steiner, and his lectures focused on decontextualising Anthroposophy to fit the Nazi agenda were attended by the National Socialist Party’s chief justice. His “work” is one of the reasons why even today people outside Anthroposophy, without throughoutly studing Anthroposophy, think Rudolf Steiner was a Nazi although Rudolf Steiner died in 1925 and his Michaelic cosmopolitanism beats the cosmopolitanism of any of the most modern and democratic people of today. It was Roman Boos the one who wrote the longest letter against Ita Wegman and read it at the General Meeting in 1934, the famous General Meeting that was a preamble to the exclusion of the two members of the Council and the two national branches.

Roman Boos accused Ita Wegman and her circles of “anal mysticism” and “anal esotericism.” Here, I would like to point out something: When someone speaks, and moreover when they write, there is their normal voice that is reproduced again in the audience. But sometimes, like in Lord of the Rings, as well as in the Mystery Dramas, another voice can be heard, although not by everyone, of whom the speaker is unaware. This is the voice of Ahriman. Ahriman takes the discourse as the double voice. In this particular case, through the voice of the Nazi enthusiast Roman Boos, the double voice hinted at Rudolf Steiner’s hemorrhoidal disease before his death and at his doctor (many thanks to Richard Cooper for his diligent observation). Ahriman was mocking Rudolf Steiner’s death, and so many of his faithful disciples, including his life companion, didn’t recognise it.

Everything that happened in the Anthroposophical Society in 1933-1935 was working precisely after a Nazi agenda. The result was that the opponent nationalities and races were removed from the Anthroposophical Society, although always invoking other reasons. Emmichoven believed that the Memorandum that led to the expulsion was written by Ahriman himself. He had to observe, however, that this was done with the participation of the other three members of the Council.

Returning to the famous letters, the real story Emmichoven reports is this: After Marie Steiner published the call for forgiveness in 1943, a copy of the publication was handed to Ita Wegman with the suggestion that Marie Steiner hinted directly at her. In her heart, Ita Wegman wanted to believe that, in her lucid mind, however, the facts were just not there. So she was reluctant to write back in the beginning. In this time, because karma always has another agenda, she received a letter from a member who previously voted for her expulsion, now asking for her forgiveness. When receiving this letter, she decided to write back to Marie Steiner. Now, Emmichoven refrained in the official biography of Ita Wegman from also writing about Marie Steiner’s reaction to the letter. There, he only refers to Ita Wegman’s reaction to Marie Steiner’s article. However, in this interview, he says that according to witnesses, when receiving the letter, Marie Steiner had said nervously: “This Wegman never understood anything!” And when she received the news of Ita Wegman’s death shortly after, she was shocked.

The shocking death of one’s opponent in Anthroposophy is something karmic that deserves the highest attention. Previously to Marie Steiner – Ita Wegman saga, it happened to Walter Johannes Stein in relation to Carl Unger. Imagine this: One day, you storm against a man, your opponent, the next day he gets shot to death. Shocking, no? We must never suppose that one has sentenced the other to death occultly because this way, we create a fake causality between life events. But we can observe that if no real reconciliation intervenes in the time approved by karma, one of the two is simply “called up” by the higher Michaelic council. Also, we must not interpret the death that occurred as righteous, meaning that it doesn’t mean that this is proof that Ita Wegman or Carl Unger just because they died immediately were righteous. The reality is that when this happens, both parties trigger their death, and it is not important who dies first. They both had already jeopardised their higher mission on Earth whenever this happened. I could observe this in the last years with examples around me. Yes, we can trigger each other’s death by not solving the karma of our conflict. It happens when karma binds two people by hate, and it’s only solved when both of them unbind the old and form a new connection. As Michaelites, we are called to bring justice in our karma. When we fail to do this, we wander on Earth without actually living. It is my impression that this was Marie Steiner’s case after 1943, and Emmichoven thinks that she was removed from the Michaelic esoteric council.

And this, my friends, was Ahriman’s mockery to Rudolf Steiner’s death, the fact that the closest disciples and collaborators of the eternal individuality of Aristotle – Thomas D’Aquino – Rudolf Steiner, couldn’t do by the end of their lives what stays today at the core of a Michaelic life: restauring one’s karma by bringing justice to karmic relations.

I recognise you

I AM

Alexandra Vasilache