Secret Knowledge & Me

By absolute chance, when I was going to be enrolled in school, it turned out I would get the same teacher my dad had endured so many years ago. We had moved house not long before I came into school age, which was seven at that time. Our new house, which was almost eighty years old, and looking like it, was walking distance from my grandparents’ house where my dad had grown up, thus placing me at the same school.

My father had not been impressed by this teacher’s abilities to pass on knowledge, or give a child a good foundation to find his Way in life. Almost three decades later, the man looked dead and empty like the husk of a fly on a window sill.

When my mum and dad asked who my teacher would be, the lady doing the initial paperwork told them it didn’t matter, since they had no choice anyway. That’s how I ended up at a Steiner school, (Waldorf School).

No one knew anything about Steiner schools in Haugesund, Norway, at the end of the 80’s. They still don’t. Few anywhere know much about the esoteric and occult spiritual science developed by the philosopher and visionary mystic Rudolf Steiner at the dawn of the 20th century. This was before the internet, so you couldn’t just google stuff. You needed someone to guide you to the knowledge and through it, a library perhaps. The books on Steiner’s work were out there, but not easy to find. It was a particular kind of secret, hidden but out there if you sought it out. This guide was not a librarian but a local architect, hew designed the local library. He was a student of Steiner’s work and held a cycle of talks for the new parents of the school called “An Introduction to Anthroposophy,” which is what Steiner dubbed his work. The word comes from the Greek Anthropos, meaning human, and Sophia meaning wisdom.

Occult Secrets

Rudolf Steiner was a doctor in philosophy. His principal philosophical work is called the Philosophy of Freedom. The individual’s development into total freedom is a central part of his work. 

The man wrote 40 books and held about 6700 lectures on every topic from education and esoteric Christianity, to bee keeping and composting, via medicine, and also developing a new style of dancing called Eurythmy, which is, amongst other things, a gestural representation and visualisation of sound, which meant that by the time I was nine I could dance my name. 

His lectures were stenographically recorded and later published. An effort which still goes on today. So far his collected works are about 330 books. The most prominent anthroposophical movements today are probably the Steiner/Waldorf Schools, and biodynamic agriculture. 

How one man can have such an output boggles the mind. His spiritual science aimed to make the occult less hidden, to bring the arcane knowledge previously taught to and understood only by initiates in occult brotherhoods and organisations, out into the world. He revealed that behind the world, beneath it, and above it there was more going on. There were secrets behind everything. 

These secrets found resonance with my mother, it became part of her life from then on. She worked in a kindergarten based on the ideas of this man for thirty years. I saw books in her bookshelf, alluring titles like Outline of an Occult Science, Four Mystery Dramas, and the Philosophy of Freedom. The ideas were around, but she he didn’t talk about it, it was secret. 

School Secrets

School was the same way. I went to a Steiner school for 14 years and nobody told me anything about Rudolf Steiner or his world view. 

The Waldorf Education is based on his ideas about human nature, particularly the needs of children through their stages of development. He held about 200 different lectures about education, most as part of lecture courses for the teachers of the first school which opened in 1919. It had about a thousand children and was situated in the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany, hence the Waldorf name. 

A foundational principle in Steiner’s philosophy is that each child, each human being, is here on earth to fulfil a task, they are on their own mission, to realise themselves. That a teacher believes a child has something special inside them and that her task, as a teacher, is to discover what that is and to nurture it is, in my opinion, a key reason for the success of this form of education.

The school puts equal emphasis on the intellectual, the artistic and the physical. We had mathematics, geography and physics, as well as painting, drawing, and sculpting, on top of that we had practical crafts, sewing, woodwork, and metal work. As they say, educate the whole human, head, heart, and hands. 

Even though they didn’t reveal anything about the science of the hidden, it was still redolent in the teachers. They had a knowing spark in their eyes. Like there was always something more to what we were doing. Be it the carving of a bowl from a piece of wood, the sewing and shaping of a pair of shoes, or moving in arcane ways to visualise a poem and making its meaning visible, there were new connections and deeper reasons to be discovered. Behind everything there were secrets to be revealed. The world was a place filled with wonder, profound and meaningful, and speckled with mystery. With the right approach and work you could discover the secrets. 

Magical Secrets

My dad is a magician, but after I was born he took a break from conjuring and performing. Like most kids I thought my dad could do anything. Fix the car, build a house, he had built two by that stage, or re-solder your cassette player after you spilt a glass of milk into it, frying its circuits. Normal dad things. But there was more to my dad. My mind was blown when I was seven and saw him perform for the first time. It was at a fancy dress party. Right about the time I started school. Dad was busy renovating our dilapidated house on top of the Pretzel Hill. That was our address, 14 Pretzel Hill. My dad performed his magic dressed up as a hobo, it was fancy dress. I don’t remember much, but I remember him doing a magic trick were he poured three different coloured drinks from the same bottle after stuffing silk handkerchiefs with corresponding colours into the neck of the bottle first. 

He had things on his little table that I had never seen before, including a bunch of feather flowers. Strange objects one never sees, except in the hands of magicians. He picked me as a volunteer and when he asked me if we had ever met before I had been instructed to answer, “No, Dad!” That might have been my first stage laugh.

My dad also went to the “An Introduction to Anthroposophy” course, but he did not get bitten by the occult bug. Perhaps because he already had his own secret knowledge. The seed of which was planted in him, not by a mystic visionary, but from his Great Uncle, who went by the stage name Certini. With a name like that it does not take Sherlock Holmes to work out the type of stage craft he was engaged in. A magician of the old majestic type. Shiny top hat, tails, white gloves, manipulating cigarettes, coins, and cards to the soundtrack of tango recorded from scratchy 78 records. A master of sleight of hand. Noted by him placing fourth in Manipulation at FISM, the world championship of magic, in Brussels in 1967. 

So, in short he was the kind of uncle who, at parties, if pushed, could pull endless coins from the ears and noses of the younger family members. (I think these kinds of uncles, with their endless card tricks or magical party pieces, are to blame for both the love many of us have for magic and the dislike others experience with the thought of it.) It was from him my father learnt his first secrets which started his life long love affair with magic and secrets. 

The secrets of conjuring are of a particular type, you must swear on the pain of death not to reveal any secrets to a lay person, uninitiated, yet you can access them all in a magic shop. There are a lot of magic books. David Copperfield, a fellow resident of Las Vegas, has a private magic library containing more than 15,000 volumes on the illustrious art. Many of these are available at your local magic dealer. So for a reasonable investment you can learn pretty much any secret magic has to offer. 

It’s the same way with Steiner’s secrets. If you seek them you will find them. All that’s required is the will to do so and the tenacity and time to dig into it. These days Steiner’s complete works, Gesamtausgabe, are available for free online in both German and English. The secrets are out there. Of course with thousands of esoteric lectures and thousands of magic books, where do you start? This is where a mentor, like Great Uncle Certini, makes all the difference.

Effect & Method

If we break down magic into its simplest form we can say that each conjuring trick is happening on two levels simultaneously. It’s the levels of effect and method. 

The effect is what the spectator sees, this part includes something the spectator experiences as incompatible with their view of how the world works. It lets them experience something impossible. Like a Great Uncle showing his hand empty and then pulling a coin from your ear, even though you could swear you didn’t keep any coins there. 

The method is the secret behind the effect that allows the effect to happen. It’s the secret move, the sleight of hand, which created the illusion of the impossible happening right before your eyes or behind your ears. In our case it’s the very particular way the Great Uncle held his hand when he showed it empty. This way of hiding something is what magicians call palming. Palming is a magical secret used as a method for many illusions.

There is an almost endless amounts of methods in magic. That means endless secrets. Sleight of hand is just one possibility, mechanical contraptions and devious devices which look so innocuous and innocent everyday you would never think they had built in secret features to aid a magician in his Craft. In many cases you don’t even notice them, so that when you later recount the miracle you witnessed you neglect mentioning that the coins were briefly put on a plate or into a champagne cooler, thereby strengthening the effect in the retelling. Give or take a thousand years and you have a miracle.

On the level of method there is, further, an entire field of magic knowledge on psychological and physical tactics which can be employed to enhance the effect and conceal the method. This whole area is often referred to as misdirection. (Don’t ask a magician to show you the Way, he will misdirect you.)

The experience of the effect is the point of the magic, its the reason there are methods. There are of course a million magic nerds who might beg to differ. Card slingers, and sleight of hand enthusiasts are often so interested in the methods they forget the effect. In truth the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle, both as important as each other. Preoccupation with secrets is to be expected. This is, after all, the unique domain of magicians. If you hang around with magicians, online or in the analog real world, a lot of conversations revolve around methods for achieving the impossible. It’s all about the secrets.

Each effect could potentially be achieved with several different methods; a crafty device could slide the coin up and down his sleeve, a false pass could make a spectator think the coin was put from one hand into the other when it wasn’t. 

To make things more complicated the Great Uncle might know three different ways to palm. Three different methods of showing his hand empty, whilst hiding a coin in it. Each palm allowing him to show his hand empty in a different way. Then in a routine he might nest his secrets, giving you the impression he is doing the same thing three times. Whilst in reality performing the same effect three times but using three different method. He pulls three coins out from your ear. Each time he shows you his hand empty, each subsequent palming annulling the weakness of the previous palm. One palm only allows him to show you the back of his hand before he plucks the coin from your ear. He points out you might have thought he had it in his palm. He shows you his palm whilst using a palm that hides the coin on the back of the hand. Finally with a sequence of moves he shows you the front and the back empty before pulling the last coin from your ear, blowing your mind in the process. In this way the three different methods, palms, helps building up the complete experience of impossibility, raising it to the level of miraculous.

Between Two Kinds of Secrets

I grew up with conjuring and esoteric secrets. The nature of each could hardly be more different. They are from different ends of a spectrum.

The conjuring secrets are, in a way, doomed to disappoint. For with conjuring it is the effect which is the beautiful thing, not the secret. A rose levitating only to disappear in a flash of smoke, as a sad love song plays, is beautiful and symbolic. A black elastic snatching the flower up a sleeve as an enema bulb filled with stale cigarette smoke hidden in a sweaty armpit and squeezed at the right time is neither beautiful nor symbolic.

With the esoteric western tradition it is often the opposite. Steiners secrets tells you connections and importance of things you often did not think of as a thing. He beautifully ascribes meaning to the world. His secrets can feel so very beautiful, uniting and elucidating, if sometimes only on a mythical level. Take Steiner’s thoughts on the role of the baby teeth falling out as a marker for children being ready for school, as this is currently happening for my daughter.

The child’s job for the first seven years is playing, and along the way gaining mastery of all thing physical. Uprightness, balance, walking, speaking, singing, hand-eye coordination, jumping, running, tumbling, small motor skills, and eating habits being some of them. All things involved with their little bodies finding their Way in the world. As the teeth become wobbly and fall out it shows, according to Steiner, that they have reached the completion of one stage of their physical development and are ready for the next. Welcoming more academic learning around letters, numbers and the like.  Steiner explains that, in the first seven years, a child’s body is transforming from expressing the inherited characteristics of the mother and father to one that represents the full personality of the child. The teeth falling out is a sign of a new being coming into view. More than the sum of its part.

“Receive the children in reverence, educate them with love, and send them forth in freedom,” Steiner said. It’s simple and resonant. Yet, the occult secrets can easily become indistinguishable from mumbo jumbo. 

I sample both kinds of secrets, each stimulating a different passion in me. One kind is open and expanding, stimulating creativity. The other kind is my bread and butter, my bullshit detector, keeping my feet on the ground so I’m not swept away by gods with clay feet. 

In anthroposophical terms: The two kinds of secrets are my Lucifer and Ahriman whilst I balance between them like the Christ figure of Steiner’s sculpture, Die Holzplastic.

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The building which my childhood school was housed in had been a fancy restaurant before it was bought and transformed by the Steiner School pioneers. It is spectacularly situated on a large hill overlooking the town. This gave the restaurant stunning views of the frequently rough North Sea and on a good day you could see all the way out to the island of Utsira, the smallest municipality in Norway, 18km off the coast, perhaps whilst enjoying a Campari and soda. From this beautiful view came the name of the place, Bellevue. 

It had been quite the place, good food, great drinks, it had a massive seawater fish tank where you could see the cod and flounder swim about before you ate them. It also had a beautiful stage area, for music and entertainment. Some time in the sixties a young man, a teenager, regularly entertained the dinner guests with magic. That young man was my dad. More than two decades before it became my school my Dad displayed his effects, but did not reveal any of his secrets. At least that’s what he claims these days. 

The school taught me how to read, do trigonometry, to measure landscapes and make maps, I spent the whole of my last year, from when I was 17 until I was 18, writing a thesis on Norse Mythology, trying to figure out how these often funny stories could have been the religious and cultural underpinnings of the Nordic people. I bound it myself and, book under arm, I walked out of the school in a shirt I had sewn myself and shoes I had made, convinced the world was full of secrets of all kinds. There were methods behind the effects. There were things to learn about great connections beneath the seeming chaos of biology, earth science and architectural history. I was 18, I knew just enough to feel like I knew everything, and whatever secrets had escaped me I was convinced I would pick them up along the Way.

Santini’s Magic Show anno 1987.