This new edition has been revised and updated in Montreal after my
public talk and slide show in the staid Atwater Library on September 6, where
the second edition of Werner Greub’s How The Grail Sites Were Found was
presented – to a small but attentive audience consisting largely of anthroposophists
– and a talk on September 10 at the first, joined member’s meeting of the
English and French branches of the new (Fall) season of the Anthroposophical
Society in Montreal.
The topic on which I was asked to speak for the members meeting
was Social Organics as a Grail Impulse for the 21st Century.
I began by saying that it is not we – the handful assembled in these quarters
on Rue St Jacques near the corner of St Laurent, or the 50.000 or so
anthroposophists around the world in general, who are in any position to change
the world for the better – but that it is anthroposophy, or the science of the
Grail, that can certainly do that. As a point of departure I then quoted Walter
Johannes Stein, author of The Ninth Century – World History in the Light of
The Holy Grail, referring to the three historic grades of chivalry: the
first and second being the grades of faith (related to Peter), hope (James),
while the third is charity or love (John).
In his (not translated) work Temple and Grail, the Dutch anthroposophist
Willem Frederik Veltman writes: “This grade of John can only be realized today
and has to do with a world economy based on a truly Christian love. But for the
time being, the world economy as a world power is still developing in an
opposite direction.”[1]
I then offered a series of steps to try to not only better
understand this third grade of love, but also to implement it as social
organics: in the Anthroposophical Society as well as in the world at large
[through the reformation of the world economy based on Rudolf Steiner’s Course
by the same title). In order to show that this is part of the on-going task of
a [modern] Grail knight I then referred to the first slide during my public
lecture showing the Grail poet-knight Wolfram von Eschenbach with his
coat-of-arms: the two opposing P’s (the Hebrew letter ‘diresh’) symbolizing two
divine principles of good and evil, light and darkness that need to be kept in
balance through a middle, third force separating them [the Christ principle] and
putting and keeping them in their proper place. It is thus not a question of
the one destroying the other; without the darkness we would have no color;
without opposites we would have no development. I ended by listing a series of
steps leading in that direction, in which each and everyone could make his or
her contribution.
Robert J. Kelder
Montreal, September 2001
[1] Quoted from “Instead of a Foreword – A Challenge to
Joint Research” to Werner Greub’s From Grail Christianity to Rudolf
Steiner’s Anthroposophy, Willehalm Institute Press, Amsterdam, 2001, p. 8.
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