Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

tries to “make something of them.” Rudolf Steiner saw this latent attributeand spoke to it when he advised that it was through the arts that spiritualscience could best be received in America. And, in this regard, it is interestingto note that the first Americans to meet anthroposophy in Europe andto bring knowledge of it back to the United States in the decade before thefirst World War were all musicians, young singers, almost all women, whowent to Berlin to further their careers and were led by various paths to meetRudolf Steiner in the Mottstrasse. And when one of these young singers—Gracia Ricardo—introduced her former New York vocal teacher to RudolfSteiner’s work in 1910, it was his studio in Carnegie Hall that became thefirst group meeting room on the North American continent. And in thepioneer years that followed, it was primarily artists who took up the workof spiritual science and planted the first seeds of a new spiritual culture inthe rock-bound soil of Manhattan Island, and on the West Coast in SantaBarbara and Los Angeles. One thinks of Irene Brown, the painter, and herartist-cousin, William Scott Pyle, to whom we owe the great curtain with itsmotifs from Goethe’s Fairy Tale, which greets us as we await the openingscene of Rudolf Steiner’s first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation, in theGoetheanum; one remembers Henry Monges, the architect; Arvia MacKaye,the young sculptress, Henri and Eileen Zay, musicians, and, very specially,Lucy Van der Pals Neuscheller, the pioneer eurythmist, who succeeded formany years in the 1920s and 1930s in bringing about each Friday evening aeurythmy recital in the studio in New York City! In this regard, it is well toremember also that it was to Edith Maryon, the sculptress and English artist,that Rudolf Steiner entrusted the Section of the Visual Arts at the ChristmasFoundation Meeting, even though he knew well that she was very ill and,in all likelihood, might not live. In the dreadful night of the burning of theFirst Goetheanum, Rudolf Steiner is reported to have said to Walter JohannesStein that it was not so much the destruction of ten years of work that wasthe tragedy, but that men and women from the West would no longer meetspiritual reality in outer sense-perceptible form!Now another aspect. The North American, in whom, perhaps, naturehas concentrated her purest Westernism, inhabits a continent whose mountainspine forms the north-south axis of the earth’s mountain cross. Stretchingfrom Alaska to the tip of South America, the Rocky Mountain–Andeschain divides the eastern coast and central plains from the Pacific-facingfar western regions, and between the Rockies and the Sierras one finds theAmerican deserts—Mojave, Death Valley, the Salton Sea and the Great SaltLake with its extraordinary concentration of mineral salts. The continen-266