Foreword to the Seventh Edition (2001)

This edition is appearing simultaneously with a new edition of its companion volume by Herbert Witzenmann The Just Price – World Economy as Social Organics on the eve of a visit to England to launch the fourth, British edition of Werner Greub's How The Grail Sites Were Found – Wolfram von Eschenbach and the Reality of the Grail in the Rudolf Steiner House on October 26, 2001. North American editions all of these three books were presented this summer in the Rudolf Steiner Library in Ghent, NY and were also referred to in my talk to members of the Anthroposophical Society in Montreal, Canada on the evening of September 10. In my foreword to the British edition of How The Grail Sites Were Found I have tried to reflect on the disaster that befell the United States the following morning and that is threatening to engulf the whole world in a war, if the armed conflict cannot be contained; here I will simply repeat a paragraph  from the introduction to the series of social-esthetic studies entitled "Creating an Overworld" that Herbert Witzenmann wrote back in 1984 and that can be found on the following pages in this booklet, a text that has only gained a greater actuality and urgency in view of this man-made catastrophe:

"If our world does not substitute its superstition of utilitarianism for enthusiasm for beauty, it will encircle itself with an ever higher – and hence more and more in danger of collapsing – robot-gigantism, and at the same time undermine itself with the horror of modern dreariness. The only practical approach is the aesthetic one. He who counters that life must be lived before it can be draped with the blossoms of beauty may put up with the answer that it would be more consequent to depart from such a senseless life that debases itself in yielding to its fascination of fear and greed, instead of grasping its spur in its dignity."

It drives home that the overworld is not a physical one that towers high up into the clouds, but an interlocking human one that connects hearts and minds, body, mind and soul; everything else is a means to this end, not the end in itself. Without a new overworld, built with the modern science of the Grail, the underworld of the anti-Grail forces will stand nothing in its way.

Robert Jan Kelder,

Amsterdam, October 24, 2001

Update 2011: In a response to 9/11 the Willehalm Institute published earlier this year the book 9/11: The Accusation – Bringing the Guilty to Justice by Slobodan R. Mitric (available at Amazon as book and Kindle Edition; see also: 911 - The Accusation.