Erich Gutkind : as prophet of the New Age

called “World Affairs’, and in the articles which appeared on 23rd June and 21st July 1921 he drew very special attention to Erich Gutkind’s first book Siderische Geburt (Sidereal Birth), which had been published in Berlin in 1910. He referred to it as ‘a great and seraphic deed’ and as ‘a book of world-importance and radically symptomatic for the movement of our Acon’.

It is in the first instance this book which entitles Gutkind to be called a prophet. In 1937 his second book, The Absolute Collective, was published in London in translation. It is also a powerful book and develops particularly Gutkind’s vision of Socialism which in that book he calls “The People’. Though it is written in the language of Judaism, it is capable of universal application. But since the whole of Gutkind’s primal prophetic vision is contained in Siderische Geburt, I will this evening concentrate on that book. Reference will also be made to an essay called World Conquest which it is proposed to re-publish as a supplement to this lecture. Gutkind wrote that essay later and in it further developed his vision of Socialism. Siderische Geburt has never yet been published in an English translation, though several translations have been made, but World Conquest is near enough to its style and contains enough of its main themes to give the reader an idea of that great book.

In the title of this lecture Gutkind has been referred to as ‘prophet of the new age’. It would not be right to call him merely a prophet of the new age, because his perception both of the present state of mankind and of the change necessary for its future development are of central and supreme significance. At the same time, however, to call him the prophet of the new age might lead to the misunderstanding that his work is being claimed as the whole new truth for mankind, superseding all previous truths. To anyone who wishes to think and act, not in a partisan spirit, but in terms of the whole of mankind, it is not possible to maintain that any of the major visions of life ever can or should be accepted as the right one to which the whole of mankind should be converted. Each one of us experiences many different sides to his own nature; and if anyone studies profoundly with an open mind let us say Buddhism, Kabbala, Christianity and Marxism, he will experience an aspect of living truth in each. He will find that each one speaks to a different aspect of himself and evokes a response somewhere within him. These different visions of life contradict one another in many respects, just as in our

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