Proceedings Colloquium on World History - Waldorf Research Institute

86
This may sound rather like a joke. But it could be very well proved
that our whole pathological and anatomical science is a quite exact repetition
of the Egyptian cult of the dead. Even our surgery is not unrelated to
it; only fortunately for us it is directed to the preservation of the living. An
operation in a modern operating theater has all the character of a religious
rite.
One can even understand something that is really a weakness of our
modem pathology, namely that it tries to explain the living body, and its
diseases, from the changes which can be observed in the dead body. That
also is a repetition of the science of mummification. Now let us look at
another cultural repetition. I once studied that most interesting coincidence
that all Darwin’s philosophical ideas had already been in existence in the
Arabian philosophy of the Middle Ages.
Dieterici, a well-known Professor of oriental history in Berlin, has
written a very striking book called Darwinism in the Eleventh Century. He
shows there that all the main ideas—natural selection, the struggle for
existence, evolution from the simpler to the more complex animals, the
evolution from the anthropoids and other animals up to man—can all be
found among the Arabian philosophers. The same thing may be discovered—
if one is sufficiently observant—in respect of nearly all modem scientific
theories about physics, chemistry, and so on, for instance that sound, light,
etc., consist of waves; certain definite atomistic ideas (the Greek atomists
only developed a faint general idea of it; all our principal chemical processes
such as distillation, extraction, and scientific isolations of substances,
and how to understand all these things theoretically are found in Arabian
experimental science. One should really investigate to what an extent Lord
Bacon of Verulam, who is considered the father of natural science, deve1ops
this repetition in his natural philosophy. In the case of Arabism it is more
the theories of scientific research which are repeated m our modem time, in
the case of the Egyptians, it is more their actual practices that reappear.
We could explain this tact by saying that large groups of persons reincarnate
together, and that what they have acquired in earlier times is carried
on again under later and changed conditions.
Perhaps it may be permitted to bring forward another example, but
this time of a more personal character. Everybody knows about Lawrence
of Arabia. As a boy (he was born in Carnarvon in Wales) he had only one
special hobby, which was to study the medieval fortifications of a certain
epoch. He found them in Wales. As a student he traveled to France; and
then made a trip to Syria and Arabia in order to study them more closely. It
was the fortifications of the Crusaders of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
that interested him most. On this trip it became evident that he was
perfectly well able to live among the Bedouins as one of themselves. Later,
his whole work was based on these studies; and he even said that his plan
for taking Palestine and Syria with the help of the Arabs was based entirely
on the lines which had been followed by the Crusaders. He was, of course,
helped enormously by his earlier studies.