Proceedings Colloquium on World History - Waldorf Research Institute

Symptoms
John Wulsin
1. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Emerson
I might just add a footnote to David Sloan’s comments on Wordsworth,
Coleridge, and Emerson. They both deliberately turned their ears to the living
speech of (all kinds) of people around them, as a source for poetry. They
both turned their eyes (and other senses) to nature in a way that both drew on
the life-forces of nature for the shaping forces of their poetry, and, as David
said, in the process, worked to heal the rift between subject and object. For
the first time ever, the author of an epic poem, “The Prelude,” chooses as his
subject, not some distant, royal hero in a journey or battle in vast lands, but
himself, the active subject writing the poem, the journey of the becoming
poet in the man. The subject turns from outer to inner, from external to
reflexive.
2. Thespis
When he stepped forth from the fifty-member dithyramb-chorus and
spoke the first monologue, it became possible for audience and actor/novitiates
to experience an individual, then with Aeschylus two individuals, then
with Sophocles three individuals, speaking and exploring riddles of destiny.
What a profound effect on the members of the polis, of all levels of society, to
become in time more able to do the equivalent themselves.
3. The Destruction of the Knights Templar, 1307-1314
Rudolf Steiner spoke of how the Templars were the last to bear the
experience of the spiritual sun-nature of gold, so that their extinction left
humanity with the elementally materialistic relationship to the materials of
the earth. The destruction of the Templars seems to be a symptom of a general
driving underground of esoteric streams and impulses, perhaps largely
over the ensuing 600 years, through the Kali Yuga. How have some of those
influenced exoteric events during the seven hundred years? What seeds of the
“destroyed” plant have surfaced this past century in various forms?
4. Martin Luther, and company
What has it meant, for almost 500 years, for so many “protestants” to feel the
freedom to read the Bible themselves and experience their own relationship
to God, without being dependent on the priest? Let us remember that only
since Vatican II (1962), have Catholics been allowed to read the Bible themselves.
That’s in our lifetime.
5. Newton
Without any of the detail of the scene Douglas Gerwin described,
regardless of the many dimensions of Newton’s interests and “discoveries,” he
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