Preface @ xi
Psychic Research, which falsely accused her of lying and of faking the
supernatural. Steiner had his extraorhnarily aesthetic anthroposophical
headquarters in Dornach, Switzerland-its details personally designed,
carved, and hand-painted by Steiner under the guidance of spiritual in-
sight-burned to the ground, they say, by a Catholic priest who was
jealous of the brilliance of Steiner's exegesis of Christian doctrine.
What their opponents had against these pioneers of the occult was
their effort to make comprehensible to the West the ancient wisdom of
the East, an endeavor that threatened, and std threatens, to shatter es-
tablished beliefs and the careers that rest upon them.
But now that the shamanic side of the nature spirit story is duly
being accepted for its surprising integrity and coherence, is it not time
to put aside residual skepticism about the occult tradition?
Although I approach the subject as a reporter, relaying extraordi-
nary information described by clairvoyants--data that sometimes does
indeed defy credulity-in the end I find their evidence so compelling
and so rational that even though not myself clairvoyant, I now tend to
subscribe to their conviction that to resolve the evils and problems of
this world we must all learn to commune with the world of nature
spirits and the angelic hierarchies from which they derive. To achieve
this goal, Rudolf Steiner mapped out, by the early 192os, the required
steps for a modern initiation into the wisdom of the ancient mysteries,
an initiation in essence identical with those found in the shamanic tra-
dition. But even if one does not reach that exalted goal in this life, ac-
cess to the information inevitably changes one's approach to living. It
has changed mine radically.
Walking through the woods, I do not see the spirits, but I sense
them all around me, and I no longer feel alone. My communion with
plants, no longer metaphorical, is actual as I consciously breathe in life
from their leaves and return the gift transmuted by my lungs, aware
that sylph and undine have transmuted those leaves from sunlight. I
feel chez moi, at home in the world, and apply the lessons imparted by
Merlin to young King Arthur as taught me by my English master,
T. H.White, when I was a boy at school: Be that pike! Be that hawk!
Be that oak!