Broken Vessels by Rudolf Steiner

Author:Rudolf Steiner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Anthroposophic Press

This man lived again in our age, in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in this incarnation (which in a wider sense belongs to our own time) he was born as an extremely fearful person, so that he chained dogs to himself. One could say this was now a symptom of illness, this abnormal relation to animals. It did have an aspect of disease about it through the fact that he did not develop any special love for the dogs, only a feeling that he had to have them near him. It is clearly fantastic, the way he related himself to them. It reveals an inner karmic compulsion from an earlier life.

At the same time in this incarnation the man is extremely talented, carrying over from his earlier life everything he had experienced of the oriental spiritual teachings, as well as his own religious devotion. This is not just a feeling in him: it becomes his life practice. In the course of this life he develops not only an astonishing capacity for spiritual fantasy, but the ability to put into poetic form correct visionary images that come to him in a matter-of-fact way. His poetry is about ordinary physical human life into which elemental spiritual beings constantly play. He is a distinguished poet. Moreover one may truly say he is the dramatist whom we Europeans would compare most seriously with Shakespeare. He is Ferdinand Raimund7 — with his fantastic personality, his giant talent — whose dramatic poems show how he has brought from earlier incarnations his ability to portray spiritual things, to put spiritual happenings into human life. One need only look at Der Alpenkönig und der Memchenfeind ("The King of the Alps and the Misanthrope") to be able to liken him to Shakespeare. First of all, he is an important actor; this comes from his impulse to bring both trivialities and non-trivialities from spiritual realms to the stage. On the stage he is an incomparable actor, full of humor; in life he is completely overwhelmed by the consequences of the animal torture that he formerly perpetrated. Genius and a pathological condition are thoroughly mixed in him: the genius impelling him to create with soul-spiritual dramatic instinct and Shakespearean power, the pathological condition impelling him to inject a fantastic element into his external life.

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