Death as Metamorphosis of Life – consisting of seven lectures given in various cities, mostly in 1918 – movingly and with great spiritual maturity and rare emotional intensity, expresses Rudolf Steiner’s wisdom, insight, and compassion.

Several lectures deal primarily with aspects of life after death. The first describes the three realms after earthly life: that of intense, surging sensation (sympathy and antipathy); that of the ebb and flow of will impulses that stream into the human sphere, affecting in increasingly wider circles human life on earth (karmic relationships, animal existence); and that of the spiritual hierarchies. As Steiner says: “As I see it, my primary mission these days is to make people aware again, with the help of such ideas, that the dead are working and contributing to human development”.

The following lectures amplify this mission in different ways, explicitly and implicitly. At stake is the need to understand that we are spiritual beings and live in perpetual interaction with the spiritual world – not only the dead, but also with Christ and angelic worlds. These realities, along with the presence of the dead, permeate this book.

The final two lectures make this explicit with a clarion call to awake to the demands of human evolution, which the entire spiritual world is working for – freedom and love, which in turn requires our work with the angels and with Christ to overcome egotism, the sole obstacle to the spirituality of the future.

Death as Metamorphosis of Life is a translation from the German of Der Tod als Lebenswandlung (GA182).