Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

tal plains, rising gradually for more than a thousand miles from the vastMissouri-Mississippi River Basin to the foothills of the Rockies, grow everdrier as they rise, annual rainfall dwindling to some ten to twenty inchesper year, sufficient only to sustain dryland agriculture and grazing withoutartificial irrigation. The continent, one might say, led the western-creepingtide of pioneers from the green and fertile Eastern coastal regions, acrossthe Appalachians, into the rich prairie lands of the heartland, ever onwardtoward the mountains, into a realm of death-in-nature where the earth’smineral and magnetic forces became ever more pronounced and powerful.At the same time, the wagon trains found themselves exposed to attack notonly by native Indian tribes, but also by the violent storms that raged downfrom the North, unbroken by east-west mountain barriers, and by tropicalhurricanes and waves of humid heat sucked up from the Gulf of Mexico.Thus the pioneers, stemming originally from European stock, weredrawn deeper and deeper into a continent that led them geographically intoregions of intensifying mineralization, of subterranean, death-related forcesfrom below, and climatically, into greater and greater aridity, into continentalextremes of heat and cold, and into wind-swept unobstructed exposure toArctic and tropical gales from north and south. This is the outer picture,familiar to all who know North America either from direct experience orfrom study, to which spiritual-scientific research adds a knowledge of thesupersensible or subsensible forces that grow increasingly strong as onemoves westward. These forces, as we know, are connected with the mysteryof the human Double, described by Rudolf Steiner in his Saint Gallen lectureon “Geographic Medicine” and in other places. The Ahrimanic Double, asSteiner characterizes it, is connected with—empowered, one might say—bythe electromagnetic forces within the earth, which intensify toward the West.It is not within the scope of this article to enter into a detailed discussion ofthe Double, except to point out that the struggle to know one’s Double andto transform it belongs especially to a Western incarnation and constitutespart of its special challenge and its opportunity.There is less and less “cultural cushion,” as one might call it, to “breakone’s fall” as one moves westward. For the inwardly sensitive, spirituallysearching soul on the North American continent, life becomes, in a literalsense, a “life and death affair,” where there is no comfortable middle groundto fall back on as one struggles to find oneself and to awake. Knowledgeof the Ahrimanic double, who seeks to stay with its human counterpartthrough the experience of death, certainly helps us to understand much ofthe tragedy of contemporary Western experience––its violence, its fascination267