Sympneumata By Laurence Oliphant

NOTE: This post features Custom EPUB, PDF and IMAGES for DOWNLOAD. ALL PARTS OF THIS BOOK ARE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN SYMPNEUMATA OR EVOLUTIONARY FORCES NOW ACTIVE IN MAN EDITED BY LAURENCE OLIPHANT MDCCCLXXXV — 1885 — Look up, O man, again, the skies attune A holiest cadence; thou shalt know full soon Its purport, and the time draws on apace. The pregnant thoughts that fill the eternal space Are bursting, and their sweet contents now pour A spring libation on the minds that soar Beyond the worn conceptions of the past;— This, the good wine, He kept until the last. The Riddle of Laurence Oliphant Based on the Lectures of Rudolf Steiner In the spiritual history of the nineteenth century, few figures appear as enigmatic or as symptomatic of their time as Laurence Oliphant. To anyone who studies him, Oliphant seems a personification of his age—a man of brilliant cleverness, a world-traveled diplomat, and a Member of Parliament who was always found in the “thick of things,” from the Crimean War to the furthest reaches of Japan and China. Yet, behind this facade of a successful man of the world, lay a deep-seated urge to solve the great problems of existence—a spirit “trying to get out of its skin” to bridge the gap between a lost world and a spiritual home. According to the spiritual-scientific research of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the key to understanding Oliphant’s extraordinary character lies in the deep currents of karmic history, beginning with a very early incarnation during the time of the Roman Emperor Augustus. There, we find this same individuality living as the famous Roman poet Ovid. The thread connecting these two lives is woven through the themes of brilliance, sudden isolation, and profound inner suffering. Just as Ovid was once in the very midst of the most brilliant social life of his time before being suddenly banished to the Black Sea—a historical riddle that resulted in the melancholy beauty of his later poetry—so too do we see Oliphant oscillate between worldly influence and a self-imposed spiritual exile. This inner drive was further refined during a 12th-century incarnation as a man closely connected with the Crusades who ultimately withdrew into a life of deep contemplation and asceticism. He carried into his modern incarnation the cleverness and capacity for observation that defined Ovid’s poetry, but these faculties were now directed toward the search for a new spiritual path. This persistent “soul-tone” or “soul-habit,” eventually led him to sacrifice his fortune and social standing to follow the “prophet” Thomas Lake Harris, engaging in the most menial labor as a stable-boy in a search that often led through difficult and painful trials. It is within this context of tragic seeking that we find Oliphant’s most remarkable contribution: the book Sympneumata . Representing a significant attempt to bring the spiritual into physical life during a transition between evolutionary ages; the work posits that the human being is an incomplete “torso.” Oliphant reveals that a human only becomes complete when finding their “spiritual counterpart”—an “other half” that resides in the spiritual world. The inspiration for this work was born from the unique spiritual-physiological constitution of his wife, Alice Oliphant. A woman of profound insight, Alice possessed a special way of breathing, drawing in a refined, spiritual substance from her environment that allowed the spiritual world to work directly into the physical plane. Under the influence of this “specific breathing,” Oliphant produced writings on Genesis that remain among the most remarkable occult commentaries of that era. However, the tragedy of Oliphant’s life was that he remained a prisoner of his time, his seeking often held back by a materialistic education that resulted in a “distorted, caricatured mysticism.” When Alice died, the bridge to the spiritual world was severed and his ability to write ceased almost immediately. Ultimately, Oliphant’s biography stands as a striking example of how the forces of earlier lives—from the exiled Roman poet to the contemplative Crusader—work into a later one, manifesting in a soul caught between the dying echoes of the past and the ripening of a new age. Note: Appended to the end is a chapter-by-chapter summary called, A REPORT OF THE CONTENTS OF A WORK BY LAWRENCE OLIPHANT By Sara Carr Upton, from The Journal of Speculative Philosophy , Vol. 21, No. 1 (January, 1887), pp. 82-105 (24 pages) — EDITOR, 2026