Steiner's “Spider Lectures” & the World Wide Web

Following on from Bob Bryden's final thought of how electricity touches everybody, I'm reminded of how the librarian at Emerson College (when I was “back there in seminary school” in 1975) suggested I look into what she called Steiner's “Spider lectures”. I never did look at them but from what little she told me about them, I wonder, looking back, whether in some sense they prefigured or foreshadowed what we now know and share as “the world-wide web”. Now, that's something that really does touch a lot of people, and it touches them deeply. If anyone out there knows more about these lectures, please feel free to add some comments! And yes, Jim, I'm looking at you.

The reference library was my favourite hangout at Emerson College and I'd often spend my evenings there, plowing through back issues of obscure and antique anthroposophical journals – stuff from the likes of Kolisko and W. J. Stein. But I wasn't the only one. Betsy was often there too. Betsy was from New England, where she had finished a degree in divinity or religious studies at Princeton. And there was another guy there too who'd graduated from some military academy in the states. I've forgotten his name.

Following on the subject of rock and roll, I remember insisting that Betsy sing the Linda Ronstadt/Stone Ponies tune “Different Drum” for me, accompanied by her guitar, even though I knew that wasn't at all what she would have had to say to me. And I'd often join her in a rousing rendition of David Bowie's “Suffragette City”, which was also my choice of song and which I wanted to sing just because it seemed like such an edgy thing to sing in that setting. Yeah, we did this in the reference library, late at night when there was no one else around. I know, as confessions go, it's pretty lame.