'Whether souls have returned in physical incarnations as Platonists, as Aristotelians, as pupils of Chartres, as members of the Dominican Order, as Templars, as Cathars, or whether these souls accompany us as spiritual beings, a stream of spiritual continuity that begins in the Middle Ages flows through human history.'- Manfred Schmidt-Brabant. Why do people today look back to the Middle Ages with such interest? Do those times have anything to do with the present? In this enlightening series of lectures, Manfred Schmidt-Brabant and Virginia Sease suggest that our sense of selfhood depends on whether we can create a true relationship to the present age. But to do this we need to understand the spiritual roots of our time. These roots, they indicate, are present in the Middle Ages.The impulses that originate from that time continue to stream into modern times, helping to determine our thinking, feeling and actions. Even the biography of Europe is largely determined by what people of the Middle Ages thought, endured, believed and fought over. All of this emerges today in the consciousness of the individual and in the fabric of our communities. To aid our comprehension of this critical period, the authors embark on a broad historical survey of the culture and history - both exoteric and esoteric - of the Middle Ages. Their journey takes in King Arthur and the Celtic Mysteries; Francis of Assisi, the Franciscans and the School of Chartres; Thomas Aquinas, Averroes and the Dominicans; Cabbala and Jewish Mysticism; heretics and the Cathars; Templar secrets; spiritual Alchemy and Gothic architecture; Columbus and the Mysteries of America; and, the Consciousness Soul and the historical Figure of Faust.

In two related studies, Peter Selg tracks the groundbreaking of first Goetheanum from September 20, 1913, in the context of the so-called Michael movement, the primary active pulse brought by Rudolf Steiner in 1924 that explicitly indicates the anthroposophic movement and its formal society. The author shows the fundamental importance of this beginning in Dornach. He illuminates the fateful goal of the "School of Spiritual Science" with Rudolf Steiner's karma lectures, not only providentially in sense that it involved individualities, but also with regard to the future progress of human civilization. This monograph builds on Peter Selg's book Rudolf Steiner's Foundation Stone Meditation: And the Destruction of the Twentieth Century and Sergei O. Prokofieff's Rudolf Steiner's Sculptural Group: A Revelation of the Spiritual Purpose of Humanity and the Earth. Originally published in German as Grundstein zur Zukunft. Vom Schicksal der Michael-Gemeinschaft by Verlag des Ita Wegman Instituts, 2013.