Rudolf Steiner's Vision for the Future - Anthroposophical Society in ...

Though he does not acknowledge Barfield as a major in-
fluence or a mentor of any kind, Jeremy Naydler is within
the Barfield compass. The same fascination with traditional
ways of perceiving that engaged Barfield characterizes The
Future of the Ancient World.
If we have moved beyond the past, why should ancient
ways of seeing things be any more than a curiosity? The answer,
for Naydler, is that the past still exists as the unconscious
potential of the present. To ignore it is not merely to miss
out on something that can delight and instruct us, but to
deny the fullness of our own humanity.
Although the diverse themes of this book cling to a single
thread, there is a good deal of repetition as Naydler draws
out that thread. The Future of the Ancient World is something
like a museum of the evolution of consciousness, rescuing
vestiges of the past from oblivion or contempt. The book is
a collection of twelve lectures given over a period of more
than ten years. For that reason, in the form of a single text it
is often repetitive and lacks a certain degree of coherence.
Part one is a loose collection of essays entitled “Beyond
What the Eyes Can See.” In “The Restitution of the Ear,”
Naydler traces the dominance of the visual sense and visual
metaphors since the time of the Greeks, contrasting it with
the predominance of aural perception and linguistic focus in
Sumerian and Egyptian times. Naydler’s aim is not to denigrate
the sense of sight, but to challenge its exclusivity, which
has led to a spectator consciousness that inevitably reduces,
in Martin Buber’s terms, “thou” to “it.” The exclusivity of
vision, he finds, tends to produce a world of “surfaces,” while
“the mode of listening” opens us up to interior dimensions
of reality and invites participation in them.
In “The Heart of the Lily,” Naydler turns to medieval
herbals, and questions why the botanists of that time who
drew the flower were far more interested in a plant’s “virtue”
or healing power than its physical details. With the coming
of the Renaissance, and particularly the development of the
microscope, externalities became more important, and focus
shifted from a universal to a contingent perception of the
lily. Naydler shows that the older, pre-Renaissance drawings
of the lily could reveal an interior realm where subject and
object meet. In that meeting place, we may reach the heart
of the lily.
Why should we now care about the sometimes crudely
humanized portrayals of the winds and weather in ancient
times, or about the elaborate systems of elemental correspondences
that pervaded the Middle Ages and Renaissance? Isn’t
the passage from animistic presuppositions to precise
measurements justified both epistemologically and practically?
In “The Soul of the Weather,” Naydler urges us to keep
our minds open to the possibility that older descriptions of
weather involving the numinous activities of spiritual agencies
arose out of heightened awareness, not credulity and
delusion. Naydler credits Aristotle with the observation that
the different depths of experience possible to human beings
“bear directly on the extent to which ‘what’ is experienced
reveals about the fullness of its nature.” In “The Reality That
Is Not There,” Naydler connects the idea of “non-locational
space”—where plants disappear seasonally, where our dreams
take place, where the dead go, for example —with Henry
Corbin’s mundus imaginalis, or “imaginal world.” As Corbin
puts it, spiritual realty is not “in” anything, but rather “contains”
material reality. How do we connect, or reconnect, to
it? For Naydler, one way is through an “active stillness” that
leads us to the threshold of a reality that is altogether beyond
our own personal strivings. A second way is to practice what
Carl Jung called “living the symbolic life,” where we may find
our connection to a dream imagery that forms its own language—a
coherent, universal world of symbolic picturing in
which archetypal beings move. Or, we can practice the kind
of perception that Blake called looking “through” rather than
merely “with” the eye. While Naydler does not identify it as
such here, he is surely urging us to a Goethean practice of
realizing the archetypes of nature, that is, of perceiving
holistically rather than analytically.
Part two, “Deepening Our Foundations: The Gods and
Ancient Egypt,” is devoted to the texture of Egyptian life,
which fascinates Naydler on a host of levels, including the
fact that it predates the Judeo-Greek paradigms of logic,
abstraction, and “literal solidity.” The esoteric heart of Egypt
is the image. In the rich and strange stories and pictures of
Egyptian polytheism, Naydler finds a level of reality deeper
than what was assumed in the archetypal projections of
Jung’s early writings. Those projections were confined to the
mind; the Egyptian works contain a trans-psychic depth that
first issue 2011 • 55