Steiner’s Vaccine Against the Soul Prophecy during Red October 1917
When I first saw this Steiner quote circulating online without a reference, I thought it must be bunk. But, when I came across it again today, I thought I would try to source it.
To my surprise, it appears that Steiner did make such a prediction. But, what’s even more unsettling is that he wrote it during the “Red October” of 1917, otherwise known historically as the “Bolshevik Revolution.”
The following are relevant excerpts from The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness (Bristol: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1993; GA 177), p. 85.
October 7, 1917
“The time will come – and it may not be far off – when quite different tendencies will come up at a congress like the one held in 1912 and people will say: It is pathological for people to even think in terms of spirit and soul. ‘Sound’ people will speak of nothing but the body. It will be considered a sign of illness for anyone to arrive at the idea of any such thing as a spirit or a soul. People who think like that will be considered to be sick and – you can be quite sure of it – a medicine will be found for this. . . . The soul will be made non-existent with the aid of a drug. Taking a ‘sound point of view,’ people will invent a vaccine to influence the organism as early as possible, preferably as soon as it is born, so that this human body never even gets the idea that there is a soul and spirit.”
“. . . the heirs of modern materialism will look for the vaccine to make the body ‘healthy,’ that is, make its constitution such that this body no longer talks of such rubbish as soul and spirit, but takes a ‘sound’ view of the forces which live in engines and in chemistry and let planets and suns arise from nebulae in the cosmos. Materialistic physicians will be asked to drive the souls out of humanity.”
October 27, 1917
199-200 – “. . . the spirits of darkness are now among us. . . .
“. . . I have told you that the spirits of darkness are going to inspire their human hosts, in whom they will be dwelling, to find a vaccine that will drive all inclination toward spirituality out of people’s souls when they are still very young, and this will happen in a roundabout way through the living body. Today, bodies are vaccinated against one thing and another; in future, children will be vaccinated with a substance which it will certainly be possible to produce, and this will make them immune, so that they do not develop foolish inclinations connected with spiritual life – ‘foolish’ here, or course, in the eyes of materialists.
“. . . a way will finally be found to vaccinate bodies so that these bodies will not allow the inclination toward spiritual ideas to develop and all their lives people will believe only in the physical world they perceive with the senses. Out of impulses which the medical profession gained from presumption – oh, I beg your pardon, from the consumption [tuberculosis] they themselves suffered – people are now vaccinated against consumption, and in the same way they will be vaccinated against any inclination toward spirituality. This is merely to give you a particularly striking example of many things which will come in the near and more distant future in this field – the aim being to bring confusion into the impulses which want to stream down to earth after the victory of the [Michaelic] spirits of light [in 1879].”
https://paam.wildapricot.org/resources/Pictures/07%20RS-Traditional%20Childhood%20Illnesses%20and%20Vaccines.pdf
The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness: Steiner, Rudolf, Meuss, Anna: 9781855840102: Amazon: Books