Rudolf Steiner himself did not just comment critically about the out-of-hand ‘fear of bacilli’ or the ‘obsession with hygiene’ as ‘modern superstition, ’ but also warned about the dangerous reality of ‘pathogens of the worst kind’ that could become ‘destroyers of human life’ and bring with ‘dreadful epidemics.’
This volume gathers a collection of essays on the medical, sociopolitical, and spiritual dimensions of the Covid crisis, written by Peter Selg between Easter and Pentecost 2020. He offers these essays as a means of orientation and of explorations (in Paul Celan’s meaning). The author emphasizes in his preface, however, that representatives of Anthroposophy nevertheless have an obligation to speak out on the subject:
If they silence or censor themselves because they do not want to seem in any way negative as a result of their critical reflections, or because even ‘before corona’ they quickly became the target of various accusations, they lose nothing less than the justification for their existence, their inner identity and credibility, as well as their ‘historical conscience’–the crucial meaning of which Rudolf Steiner pointed to time and again and not without reason.
C O N T E N T S:
Foreword
The Mystery of the Earth Where Are the Sources of Life to Be Found? No Standing Still Perspectives on Epidemic Infectious Diseases in the Work of Rudolf Steiner A Medicalized Society? The Difficult Way to the Whitsun Path
Appendices
Paris and the Fifth Gospel (2019)
The Mystery of the Earth (1929), by Ita Wegman
Notes
This book was originally published in German as Mysterium der Erde. Aufsatze zur Corona-Zeit (Verlag des Ita Wegman Instituts, Arlesheim, Switzerland, 2020). An earlier English translation of the essay A Medicalized Society? (translated by Thomas O'Keefe and Charles Gunn) first appeared in Deepening Anthroposophy, no. 9.1. In this volume, that translation has been revised.
