Swan’s Wings

Swan’s Wings: A Spiritual Autobiography; Part I, Childhood and Youth; by Judith von Halle (not yet translated from the German)

Review by Michael Vode

During Passiontide of 2005, Judith von Halle received the stigmata and has since composed approximately twenty meditative texts, many devolving on previously unresearched, Christ-ensouled, historical phenomena. Since she has revealed very little of her private life, this book comes as a surprise.

The experiences cover an inner and outer life, and despite trials and tribulations, they reveal glimpses into a continuously ardent and searching soul-life, except for two painful periods of interruption. Her honesty and powers of discernment convey spiritual subtleties and distinctions that invite extended contemplation on the part of the reader. The discrete sections, not divided into chapters, interweave to convey the continuity of a lifespan. This preview of a four-hundred-page book will offer a decidedly partial overview of Judith von Halle’s experiences and insights.

The book opens dramatically. While at her grandparent’s house, the two-year-old is startled when a man bursts into the house to tell of raging fire across town. The shock awakens her not only to her earthly personality, but to the reality of a higher I-consciousness. She recognizes that the fire that distresses her is not the present one, and she also recognizes that her higher consciousness has the knowledge that she currently cannot access. This early experience begins her quest to answer this burning question.

As a young girl, Judith already perceived the etheric in the plant world as well as the etheric and astral bodies of humans. As a child she coined the word “Lebenszauberkraft” for the etheric, a word which evoked the divine power of the emanation she perceived. When in her twenties she came across Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophy, she realized that his term “etheric body” corresponded to her coined word. She felt nourished by the pure beauty of this kingdom—in contrast to so much of the artificial, man-made world around her. She was disturbed by the monstrous astral apparition that accompanied a loss of temper, but uplifted by the beauteous aura of an adult she sometimes beheld who cultivated a life of restraint and magnanimity. She regretted the absence of such a person close to her in her own life.

Even as a small child Judith realized that no one she knew had experiences similar to her own. The true “world of reality” she had come to prize—as opposed to the “day-theatre-world” of ordinary perception—was perceived by others as sheer fantasy. As a consequence, she had to endure conflicts with oblivious adult authority. Fortunately, the discovery of classical music at this time opened up “a land of unlimited possibility, comfort, good fortune, and a bit of home.” Music was a bridge to the supersensible world’s creative majesty. As an eight-year-old she listened on a Walkman to a range of music from the medieval through the Romantic period. Her immersion impelled her to research the relevant historical periods, and the research enhanced both her enjoyment and understanding.

At the age of ten she had a revelation. Wide awake just past the threshold of sleep, she was aware of an exalted spiritual presence. She “knew with certainty” that this Being was “Christus” (a Greek word she had never heard). She felt a reality outside of time: the simultaneity of all questions and answers, with all desires and wishes stilled. In heart-consciousness she immediately grasped Alpha and Omega, the meaning of the Beginning and the End.

The Ground of Being drew close, centering on a concealed question embedded in her everyday consciousness, but corresponding to a trace of memory that the core of her being had at one time “known.” But her understanding of it would be as if for the first time. In this indescribably stately sphere, the Son of God directed her gaze to an image: gathered around “Him” were a large band of other human beings, and she stood among these, “His” many children. He remained at one with them, “protecting under us, above us, and with us” in a way “as can be among human beings.” In this moment, she received the blessed quietus of all longing and privation. She realized that every human being is unconditionally regarded with utmost selfless devotion in a way that far transcends human love, all of them mattering equally and all with the potential to awaken to this reality. She saw that all are meant to develop a higher I-consciousness so that they may begin to contribute to the emergence of a universal brotherhood-sisterhood.

Throughout her youth no one spoke of a similar experience. But as an adult she became convinced that everyone has received, however subtly, a potentially life-altering spiritual gift. When she attended a Christian school for her later grammar school years, she was disappointed in the religious instruction. With the German cultural, spiritual heritage of “Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, or Hegel,” she wondered whether what is most essential in their work is lost with a denial of the spiritual world in our day. This position calls to mind two other insights about the modern world voiced in other parts of the book: 1) the near total loss of poetic imagination in a leisure-less western society that has denied its need for the beautiful; 2) the two “ground evils” of our day: the ridicule of and scorn for acquiring spiritual knowledge and for cultivating ethical impulses.

A year or two after her first nighttime encounter, she had a kind of follow-up, nighttime experience that evolved into a years-long schooling. Just past the threshold of sleep, she was faced by hideous creatures, and the shock returned her to ordinary consciousness. After a few nights, however, she confronted these creatures, and as a result her consciousness expanded. She realized the deformed figures embodied her own weaknesses that were lodged in her etheric and astral bodies. After the initial distress, she soon accepted that she had work on herself to do.

On a subsequent night, she felt a spiritual entity waiting for her attention. The cognition of this angelic presence was feeling-drenched, and its feeling was steeped in thought. It rayed out a patient, loving solicitude, an altruistic warmth and wisdom. The name she gave for her guardian angel was “the honorworthy Light.” Her angel discerned her thoughts and feelings without intruding on her innermost life. It called for a re-orientation of her thinking and feeling and for a new form of communication through “innermost turning to oneself” that she called “heart speaking.” On some nights her angel was accompanied by helpers who enabled her to reach a higher level of consciousness. She was joyously astonished when her teacher revealed higher beings who knew her from previous ages. She received instruction on “the complex Mysterium of the human being, the history and seemingly inexhaustible coherences of the world, and the relationship of the human being to the earth and to the spiritual world.” Sometimes she was encouraged to experience for herself the lesson to be learned, and after-wards she was questioned as to its meaning. She learned to know “the inner principle of the world or reality, the structure of the Spirit-organism.”

She came to understand that whatever she learned represented only a part of the whole divine perspective, that the “world of reality” was membered in “high and wide spheres.” Each night was a kind of probation. If she was not properly attentive, her spiritual gaze was turned away although the forbearance of her angel never diminished. The guided experience entailed “an intuitive, higher thinking.” Without the good fortune of a confidante, Judith kept a notebook of her inner life, and although she eventually disposed of most of the notebooks, she includes revealing excerpts.

In mid-adolescence, she felt oppressed by contemporary mores and culture, with little in common with classmates. The rock music her peers adored seemed “blasphemous” to her. While she longed for “nourishment, creativity, and exchange,” with a “heart full of joy, compassion, piety, and love,” “despair over the ignorance of humans regarding the world of reality overwhelmed her,” and her childhood religiosity vanished. At night, she would often curl up in a corner and weep, questioning why God had opened her eyes to beauty and reality when no one else seemed to value them. But attendance in a semester-long foreign exchange program in America enabled her to gain perspective.

At a German-American school she found the atmosphere welcoming and students and teachers engaging. Immersed in Goethe’s William Meister’s Years of Apprenticeship, she felt Goethe alongside her, as if dueling with him over what she perceived as a missing spiritual component in this work. In Goethe’s Faust, however, she found “the true Meister.” Her supersensible capacity revived, and throughout her seventeenth to twenty-first years, her earthly thinking united with her spiritual striving. Asked to give an overview of a major philosopher, she felt drawn to Aristotle, and reading his Metaphysics she experienced a remarkable phenomenon: an ascent to “the timeless sphere” in which the concepts arose before their presentation in a discursive mode. She discerned in Shakespeare’s plays “a master of higher psychology,” while the sonnets disclosed “the English Sprachgeist” or spirit of language.

With the onset of her thirteenth year of school, however, the course of her life became threatened by a cloud of uncertainty and eventually of near despair. The architecture school that she attended was a “huge disappointment.” Her fellow students seemed satisfied with a status quo entirely lacking in an imagination for “a creative, alternative lifestyle” or “artistic-aesthetic ideals.” She began to question why she even had an inner life guided by an angel. Her will became stunted.

She found herself stewing in the front of a television, numbed by the banality of “talk shows, scripted reality shows, family sitcoms” and the like. Who had contrived this “abyss of horror”? She lost touch with her lifelong aspiration to live in unison with other human I-Beings and came to abhor the world, oblivious to her own fall into it. She lay in bed awaiting death from a broken heart.

One night, however, she summoned a power of concentration that enabled her to identify the hidden cause of her lapse. She looked beyond her “despair and bitterness” toward “the blindness and crudeness of the world” to “a power that wanted to estrange her from the world, with its cold claw” that gripped her heart—to a cynical power that reduced the earth to a dead realm of abstract laws devoid of soul and spirit. It had prevented her from clear thinking in tandem with creative will-impulses. With the vestige of will remaining in her, however, she said to herself, “If you do not gather yourself, you will never be free. Not only will your body and soul die, but you will also kill your spirit! The life of your true being that God lovingly wrought and abundantly blessed will wither.” She would enact a new resolve.

The world came to meet her. At another school she found the approach “unconventional, spontaneous, creative, and incredibly stimulating.” She identified strongly with the “joy of devotion” of one of her professors and they developed a rapport. One day she came across a mantra from the Calendar of the Soul and felt transported into its world of trust. Her professor eventually introduced her to Rudolf Steiner’s Theosophy, Occult Science, and The Philosophy of Freedom. They were immediately accessible to her. Although she realized that Steiner’s experiences far transcended her own, she at long last felt confirmed in her innermost life. She had found a spiritual path she could wholeheartedly embrace.

In the book’s afterword, the author speaks of various reasons for publishing a book that lays bare crucial facets of a “personal, intimate inner life.” Receptive readers will find that there is much to glean between the lines of this spiritual autobiography. Judith von Halle has taken great pains, and gratefulness for the considerable risks taken seems more than fitting.

Michael Vode is a teacher in New York City. Active in the New York Branch, he is a member of the School for Spiritual Science.