The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear attendees! If it is beyond doubt that we can learn something essential about the human being by observing humanity in its historical development, then it may well be said that, on the other hand, we can also learn something essential about the human soul by observing the religious life of humanity in human history. And if observations are to be made about the soul of human life, about the various religions, in the context of a cultural endeavor that is referred to as spiritual science – or as theosophy, as our time tends to call it – then it can only be done by considering the process of progress in religious life.

In the spiritual-scientific sense, we speak of a wisdom core of religions and are well aware that the religious element itself, that which can be designated as a religion, must not be confused with the wisdom core in the religions. This is the subject of Theosophy, which penetrates into the spiritual world with the opened eye of the seer.

Religious life unfolds the development of the soul through which we incline towards the spiritual world, the fire of the soul, the soul's perception of the spiritual world. This is what we have in mind. And we also have in mind what is going on in the spiritual world, what it contains. It is therefore the task of theosophy to speak about the content of wisdom. We do not want to speak about the content of the different religions, especially because even in theosophical circles misunderstandings upon misunderstandings have arisen among those who speak of a certain unity in religions.

It has become a catchword for many that the same wisdom and truth are contained indiscriminately in all religions. No attention is paid to the fact that humanity is in a state of constant development, and although human striving always includes a certain core of wisdom, one cannot speak in the abstract of unity in all religions because it is in a state of constant development.

We will start from a saying of Goethe's to further elaborate on this topic. Goethe, who knew how to grasp the essence of things in such a penetrating way, was the one who spoke of the fact that the one principle of action, which underlies the plant leaf, for example, runs through the whole plant as a unified whole. If you follow the plant up to the flower and the fruit, you will find that the leaves are formed everywhere as a unified plant organ. You find this in all the different plant forms.

But Goethe did not claim that it makes no difference whether one speaks of the green leaf or the flower leaf. Step by step, like the rungs of a ladder, the plant develops from leaf to leaf to the height of the flower.

In a similar way, we can speak of the unified core of religions, which runs from the distant past to our times, developing from the preceding to the succeeding, as in the plant from leaf to fruit. This is said by way of introduction to our topic.

If we want to look at development in a unified way, we have to go back to a very distant past to find a starting point. Everywhere we see the human being as a being that is connected to what is hidden behind the world of the senses. Therefore, we can never find the starting point if we base our search on material considerations. According to these, we would have to start from low forms of existence. We do not want to talk about this external doctrine of evolution today. It is not the one that corresponds to the results of spiritual science.

With its means, spiritual science also goes back to the distant past, but it sees not only the material, but also the spiritual and soul. While the natural scientist characterizes from the imperfect ancestral forms of man, the spiritual scientist can recognize — we can only touch on this today so as not to stray too far from our topic — that the further we go back in human development, the more we find that the soul of man shows completely different inner experiences. Man's primeval ancestor was much closer in soul and spirit to the world to which the modern man seeks to rise in his spiritual and religious feelings.

If we want to understand this relationship today, we have to recognize that prehistoric man, before he had clothed himself with the material shell, had developed as a spiritual-soul being from his spiritual-soul ancestors, that before he entered the physical world he was in the spiritual-soul world, and that in a relatively recent time he was closer to the beings from whose womb he sprang than he is at present.

The soul of the normal human being today depends on a physical and sensual environment. If it wants to recognize something, it does so through the intellect; it recognizes what the eyes can see, the ears can hear, and the hands can grasp. This external way of perceiving has only developed out of other forms of knowledge, out of a different kind of perception, out of the dark clairvoyance of primitive man. At this point, I must say something that may seem grotesque to those who have not yet delved deeply into the theosophical tenets; but what will soon become self-evident upon deeper penetration into them, as self-evident as the results of natural science.

We can go back to the area of our Earth where our ancestors lived and which science is also beginning to study, to the land that once existed between present-day Europe, Asia and Africa on the one hand and the American continent on the other, and from which the present-day Atlantic Ocean takes its name, the land of the Atlanteans, of which the Greek philosopher Plato also gives an account. We find that our ancestors lived in a form that was such that no remains could remain that paleontology could explore.

Today, when man reflects on his relationship to the outside world, we find that he lives in two sharply distinct states of consciousness. One fills his soul from morning, when he wakes up, until evening, when he falls asleep, the other from then until the next morning. The sensory impressions of the day gradually sink into the darkness of unconsciousness in the evening. In the morning, it is not at all the case that what is newly created again enables him to use the sense organs and the mind that is connected to the brain organ, but the altered form in which these are present brings with it the unconsciousness of the night and the consciousness of the day.

It was not like that for our Atlantic ancestors. It was quite different for them. When a person fell asleep at night – as I said, I am well aware that this must sound grotesque to material thinking – it was not the colorful, light-filled carpet of the sensory world that was transformed into unconsciousness, but rather the person lived themselves into a world of spiritual and soul perception, in which they had experiences. And just as people today speak of the world of the senses in minerals, plants, animals and their own kind in their environment, so did the Atlanteans speak of a spiritual world that they perceived at night. However, their perception during the day was not the same as it is today. When they woke up, everything was shrouded in mist, with objects showing few sharp contours. At that time, the consciousness of day and night was less distinct. Therefore, the word religion could not have had the same meaning for our Atlantic ancestors as it has today: the connection of the human soul with the invisible world. For them, the spiritual world was perception. The soul knew from experience: there is a spiritual world. It knew: I came from this spiritual world, descended into physical embodiment. Religion was there as an experience.

Now great upheavals occurred, not only those which science describes as the Ice Age, but which religion calls the Flood, although the truth about these events is much less accurately described in the former than in the latter. The face of the earth changed little by little. Europe, Asia and Africa on the one hand, and America on the other, developed.

Today we will only consider the stream of emigration that is of interest to our topic, which moved from west to east, gradually populating Europe, Asia, Africa and America, and creating the post-Atlantic cultures. Through leading personalities, the most valuable part of the Atlantic culture was established, in a completely different form than today's history teaches. Spiritual research shows us how the best was brought by great leaders to the center of Asia, from which the various colonies that underlie the various post-Atlantic cultures emanated.

The first major cultural influence went to northern India. The best of the traditions of those insights into the spiritual world, which were experiences of the Atlanteans, were given to the post-Atlantean population in the way that the individual peoples needed it. It was significant, highly developed people who founded the culture in India. We call these great founders the ancient Rishis, and we speak with tremendous reverence of these holy Indian Rishis.

But now, in order to get an idea of what they taught in times that preceded all Indian writing, we have to have some concept of the mood of this people. We speak of the ancient times of Indian culture. You may know that wonderful works of culture, full of the greatest wisdom and poetry, have been preserved in the Vedas. They are wonderfully beautiful, but they are only a faint echo of what the holy rishis originally taught; for only spiritual science can teach that. We have an echo of it in the Vedas, beautiful enough, but it does not come close to what the first great post-Atlantic teachers of humanity taught. What was the mood of the Indian people, these post-Atlantic people who had moved to India?

Those people who had most clearly preserved the memory of what could be experienced in the Atlantic period with the soul of a different nature had gone to India, the memory that man had reached into the spiritual world and had his real home there. This idea was lost when man was driven out into the physical world. There he had acquired logical thinking, but he had had to give up the old clairvoyance. Only the memory remained; with this in their soul these people looked at the surrounding physical world. The basic feeling was therefore that they had to leave the old clairvoyance. They looked up at the magnificent starry sky, at the sun, at the moon; the old Indian looked at the mountains, the blue vault of heaven, everything that makes up the beauty of the physical world, and at first none of this seemed to him to be a substitute for what the soul had once experienced in the spiritual realm. “Truth,” said the old Indian to himself, ‘exists only in the spiritual world; here in all the glories of the sensual world there is only Maya, only a veil that weaves itself over the spiritual world.’

Then it was natural for him when the Rishis came and told him that if man develops the potential of a spiritual eye or spiritual ear that is present in his soul, he can see into the spiritual world again. This development, which is similar to the appearance of light through an operation for those born blind, this development of the spiritual organs was called yoga development. This is what the holy rishis pointed out. They were the comforters of ancient India. They brought comfort from Maya and illusion.

This was the first religious wisdom in the post-Atlantean era. We must point out one particular point: the ancient holy rishis said: Even if you look at the starry sky, at the sun and moon, at the mountains and forests, everything is spiritual behind them. There are spiritual depths and spiritual beings behind them; only the spiritual eye and spiritual ear can perceive them. In death, man enters this spiritual world; but in the future, as they already taught, something of what is hidden behind all that is material and visible to our eyes will also appear within this material world, and will work as the forces through which all material things on earth can become visible. Beyond what we can tell, beyond the seven Rishis, there was still another entity; in ancient India it was called Vishva Karman. The old Rishis pointed to it by saying: “Look up at the sun, and in the light and rays flowing down, you see the source of all earthly growth.” Just as it is with man, that what you see with your eyes is only his physical body, the expression of an invisible, hidden within him, so in the whole world the physical is the expression of everything superphysical. With the light of the sun, spiritual energy also penetrates the earth. The outer physical garment is the sun of the spiritual, of Vishva Karman. There will come a time - so they said to the intimate disciples - when this central being of the sun will show itself in a completely different form. That was what grew out of the Indian mood.

Let us now turn to the second period of post-Atlantean culture, to ancient Persian culture. What is called historical in this context is only a later echo. In much earlier times, there was already something there that could connect people to the spiritual world. These Persian people had very different needs from the Indian people. The Indian culture was introspective and turned its gaze away from the world of the senses; it had no interest in the achievements of the senses. But it was the mission of the Persian people to conquer these. The first race to take an interest in the external world was the ancient Persian people, on whom the historical one is based. If the Indian culture had remained alone, we might have received wonderful achievements in... /gap; but all that industry and trade have gained for the good of humanity would not have come to us. This was the real mission of the Persians. They were the first to lay hands on the physical earth; the first traces of agriculture appeared.

These people also needed another proclamation. It received the same through that great individuality who is called Zarathustra or Zoroaster. We do not mean the personality that history designates and, in its manner, applies to a series of similar personalities following one another, and relatively late ascribes to the historical Zoroaster. Also... /gap] already names this leader of Persian culture 5000 years before the Trojan War. But we have to look even further back for this second founder of the post-Atlantic culture, who works for it just as the Rishis worked for the first. Only he had to speak quite differently. The Persian people had in their soul an inclination towards the physical world, therefore they were also exposed to its temptations and inclined to consider the external sensual as the only thing, not recognizing that behind it there is also a spiritual.

The ancient Persian people had little of the traditions that the Indian people possessed. Zarathustra also had to speak of the Sun in a similar way to the Rishis, of the Sun behind which is the Vishva Karman; but it had to be done much more vividly. He told them something like this: In that which appears to you as sunlight, there lives something that also lives in you as the excellent, that which you sense in the soul as your own inner being. The sun is the garment of a being of which there is something similar in your own life. — This inner essence of the physical was called the aura, and that which, as spirit, underlies the physical sun, he called the great aura, or Ahura Mazdao, from which the name Ormuzd was then derived. This is the god who lives in the sun and of whom an image lives in the human soul. Zarathustra pointed to him as the helper of man. When man lays hands on the physical world, cultivates it, draws fruit from it and gains nourishment from it, Ormuzd is the helper. He is your helper – this is how Zarathustra characterized the great sun spirit for his followers; and the spirit that deceives people, so to speak, about the fact that there is a spiritual aspect behind this material world, that incites people not to believe in it, he called the enemy of man: Ahriman, that is the opponent of the great sun aura.

In this way, he pointed out that a spiritual underlies all that is sensual. He pointed out that man is placed in the midst of this battle between light and darkness; that man is called to be a servant of the spirit of light by transforming the earth into an image of spiritual wisdom. He pointed to the physical world as something that not only hid but proclaimed the spiritual world. Zarathustra taught: But you must not seek for the spirit that is your helper only behind the world of sense; it is contained in all sense-world and when the time is ripe for it to show itself, to become manifest in a way that man can grasp and visualize, then it will appear. That was his teaching and he proclaimed it with wonderful words. Only a stammering is it, what one of it about so rendered:

I will speak, listen and hear me, you who long for it from far and near; I will speak, because he will be revealed in days to come. No longer shall the false teacher instill deception into the souls of men, the evil one who has confessed bad faith with his mouth. I will speak of that which is highest in the world, that which has taught Vishva Karman, the greatest of mankind. And he who does not want to hear my words will experience evil when in the course of time the spiritual will be proclaimed on earth.

We then come to the later post-Atlantean cultures and proceed to the third post-Atlantean – the Egyptian culture, in the time in which the ancient Egyptian culture flourishes. Today, we can only give a very small excerpt of it in terms of its spiritual and psychological content. For this culture, the question arose religiously: How does the individual soul that dwells in us, that has arisen from the spiritual and psychological home, relate to the spiritual that permeates the world?

In ancient times, man still partially reached into the spiritual world; now, however, man increasingly prefers to gain what external culture brings, and so we see in the third cultural epoch, in the Chaldean-Babylonian-Assyrian on the one hand and in the Egyptian on the other, how a further conquest of the physical world took place. We see how man no longer looked up at the starry sky to say: Maya lives in this one and behind the stars the actual spiritual, the Brahman —, but now people looked carefully at the course of the stars, and a wonderful science arose. In the movement of the stars, in their figures, man recognized an external realization of the intentions of the spiritual beings. Man gained interest in the sensory world in order to experience the divine through it. Now the sensory world had become the physiognomic expression of the divine for him. Thus, with geometry, the earth was also conquered. From the spiritual heights, man penetrated more and more into the sensory world with his knowledge. As a result, he became increasingly estranged from the spiritual world. The consequence was that completely different views had to arise about the connection between man and the spiritual.

The relationship between the human soul and the spiritual world is depicted in the Egyptian religion in the Osirissage. This recounts that Osiris ruled in the world. However, he was too good for his rule to remain on earth, so he was overcome by his hostile brother Typhon and placed in the coffin. His wife Isis could no longer save him and instead raised his son Horus. Osiris ascended into the spiritual world. The legend thus reports: This divine figure once lived on earth as a companion of men, but then had to withdraw into the spiritual world. This world was then given a kind of representative in the child Horus. — The ancient Egyptian was told that when he passed through the gate of death, he would not only be united with Osiris, but his soul itself would become Osirian, itself an Osiris, woven together with him. Man becomes spiritualized, becomes Osirian himself. If man had to say to himself: I belong with my innermost being to the spiritual world —, then he had to say to himself again: veiled is my connection with the spiritual world; but when it is taken from me, the veil, then I will be reunited with the spiritual world; because when the attempt was made with Osiris to put him in a box, he was transported to the spiritual world.

The Egyptian was aware that a Divine-Spiritual being lived in his soul, and that he could only be united with it after death. Only then would he become Osiris himself. The being that will be united with you as Osiris cannot take shape in this world, but it will take shape one day and exist in the physical world.

Thus we see in this third epoch how the prophecy continues. What the Rishis indicated to the Indians as Vishva Karman, what Zarathustra indicated to the Persians as Ahura Mazdao, that saw in Osiris the confessor of the Egyptian religion and predicted that this being would one day appear.

Let us now take a look at the fourth epoch, the Greco-Latin or Greco-Roman epoch. The conquest of the physical world goes even further there. Man has come so far that he is able to form a kind of marriage between what is experienced in the spirit and what becomes an event in the outer physical world. We see this in art, which is something for humanity, which is a reflection of the spiritual in all parts of matter at the same time. In Greek art, we see the spiritual connected to the external material as in a marriage. The greatness of the Greek temple is based on this. It is the direct imprint of what lived in the soul of the people of that time.

We can understand this principle of Greek art by observing the difference between a Greek temple and a Gothic cathedral. What is the difference? A lonely building, with the image of a god, far and wide no people, and yet a complete totality. This is how we find the Greek temple; its architecture speaks to us, and we say: It is the house of the god who dwells within, even when there are no people there. No people are needed in this temple.

With the Gothic church it is quite different. This is not meant as a criticism; each thing is in the right proportion to its purpose. With its pointed arches, its entire composition is only complete when the faithful multitude is inside. That is part of it. Such a comparison can truly symbolize how that marriage in Greek art between matter and spirit has been consummated.

And if we look at the Roman world, we see how the individual personality expresses the learning of the value of the physical world. And we can go even further back, to the Greek polis, to see how the concept of citizenship arose, which actually only comes to full expression in the Roman world and which can only be clearly recognized by going back comparatively to what the ancient Indian felt. While for him what was in the physical world was only a shadow of the real world and reality only existed in union with Brahman, just as for the Egyptian with Osiris - the Roman wanted to stand firmly in this physical world by feeling like a citizen.

An ancient Indian could never have understood a deity dwelling in the physical body, because the physical world was a shadow image of the spiritual one for him. The human personality only became fully understandable in the fourth epoch; therefore the predestined entity could only enter at this time. It was none other than the Christ, of whom the Rishis had spoken as the Vishva Karman, who at that time was only comprehensible in the spiritual world and who, in the epoch in which the physical world was most conquered, was realized here as a human being among humans.

This was prepared by the fact that people were sharply reminded of what constitutes the innermost nature of the person who actualizes such an entity. Hence the words: “If you do not believe Moses and the prophets...” (John 5:46-47, Luke 16:31). And anyone who understands John knows that in the “I am that I am” (Ex 3:14), the “ejeh asher ejeh” of Moses, nothing else should be proclaimed as the Christ, not should be talk not of the God of Yahweh, but of the prediction of the Christ: You shall acknowledge a God who can be grasped in the sensual world, who lives and weaves in everything around you, in lightning and thunder, in plants and minerals, in the whole world around you — If you want something that can be understood by you, how it lives and weaves, then you have to listen to that peculiar sound where the soul speaks to itself: “I am,” then you have to listen to your ego - that is the best expression at the same time for the image of the Godhead. What lives in every human being also lives as the all-pervading God; this also appeared in the greatest human being who walked the earth, the Christ. This divine essence appeared in the fourth cultural epoch.

Thus we see how the wisdom of the religions weaves and strives forward, like the leaf to the petal that holds the fruit, so we see that what the ancient Rishis taught is becoming more and more mature until it appears as the fruit in the man of God who walks the earth; and we see the necessity of progress in it. We see how, in certain respects, Christianity does indeed contain the same as the other religions; how it contains the unified, but again in a different form. Therefore, he is wrong who says that it depends on the same teaching being in it as in the other religions. As long as it depends on the content of the teaching, one can say that. But where the spiritual world-view is proclaimed as a teaching, as the ancient Rishis had to do, as Zarathustra and the leaders of the Egyptian Hermes religion, the leaders of the mysterious mysteries did, we have the same thing that we also prove in the commandments of Christ, yes! But to recognize that which the other religions only spoke of, that this is the Christ; to understand, to grasp a spiritual phenomenon as a personality, to understand the Christ, not just the teaching, that is what makes Christianity different.

When religions speak of the Logos that can be taught, Christianity must speak of the human Logos who has become the bearer of the religion. What previously could only be taught was now lived. The life itself of this teaching is the essence of Christianity. So those religious leaders could say of themselves: “I am the goal and the way.” Those leaders, a Zarathustra, a Moses could have said: “I am the way and the truth” — but only Christ could say: “I am the way, the truth and the life.” (John 14:6)

The wisdom at the core of all religions has become fruit in Christianity and thus seed. As we have now sought the origin of Christianity in the religions, tomorrow we want to talk about the future of Christianity, because it is as true that it contains the fruit of all other religions as it is that it contains the seed for a great development, because although almost two millennia have passed since the appearance of the personality of Christ on earth, we are only at the beginning of Christianity.

Thus we see how, in our age, people have gradually sought a connection with the Divine-Spiritual and look into what all peoples have felt to be the wisdom core of their religion. We recognize why this contains the power and strength that gives people the hope of achieving their goal.

Anyone who looks into the spiritual life of people in this way dares to add to the words of a great poet, Goethe's beautiful words:

Soul of man, how art thou like the water, Fate of man, how art thou like the wind,

evoking the idea that the life of the soul surges up and down like the waves of water whipped by the wind.

But he who contemplates the power that is in the life that flows through men adds: it is true that the wind whips the waves; but it is also true that the wind, the air, is permeated by light, and the light-filled air contains the element that conjures all sprouting life out of the earth. It is true that water, permeated by warmth, is driven up and becomes a cloud and comes down again as rain.

Man's soul is like water. It comes from heaven and rises to heaven. But it is also true that the blessing of prosperity comes from the fact that water, permeated by fire, has a blessing effect, and that in the same way, man's soul can be aglow with that fire of the ego, which feels akin to the light that rules through destiny and is comparable to the wisdom that permeates the world. Then the world of the soul will be filled with the feeling of divine wisdom. Thus the soul is something that may indeed fluctuate up and down, but is certain of its destiny and of its inner strength.

My dear attendees! There are certain circles in our present time that claim to be grounded in the latest science and then try to look at Christianity from this point of view, especially in terms of what it could still be for today's people, especially for people in the future. Today, however, we shall not be speaking of these considerations, which sometimes lead to a complete negation, to an obliteration of the Christian conviction, but we shall be considering Christianity from the standpoint of spiritual science or theosophy, as this spiritual research has come to be called, with a view to its effectiveness in the future.

Yesterday we tried to consider the religious development of humanity; today this consideration should culminate in seeing the various religious currents developing and reaching a kind of climax in what is called the Christ impulse.

The misunderstanding that Theosophy is to be understood as a new religion, or as a religion at all, cannot be dispelled often enough. It should be seen as a tool for understanding religions, for seeking the essence in the successive religions. In relation to Christianity, too, spiritual science takes on the role of a tool for understanding it in its full significance.

However, it comes to a different conclusion than that of a negation. That which has emerged as the fruit of religious development has been the most powerful earthly impulse. And the deeper theosophy delves into its inner core, the more it must come to the realization that, despite almost 2,000 years of development of historical Christianity in feeling, sentiment, and interest, Christian development is just beginning within the unfolding of the earth, and that Christianity has within it forces and impulses that point to a broad earthly perspective. This should be the content of our reflection today.

To do this, we will now have to talk about the essence of Christianity. Much of what is distinctive and fundamental, much would have to be said if the whole scope is to be outlined only very briefly, with the intention of one of the characteristic properties of this impulse coming before our soul, which can particularly illustrate this principle.

It is best characterized by the words that describe the contrast between the old law and the new freedom that came into Christianity through the Pauline law. Superficially, this can be characterized as follows: humanity, in its millennia-long development, has gradually become ripe for an ever more intense shaping of its inwardness. In all peoples in earlier stages of development, one finds that the sense of self, the sense of independence, has come very slowly and gradually. Therefore, the basic impulse of Christianity has not always been present in humanity, as it occurred at the beginning of our time. Today's human being can no longer become aware that the way he perceives himself as an independent being, as a being with his own impulses, is something that has only emerged. Among all peoples, however, we have such a starting point that the individual does not feel himself to be an individuality in this intense way, but as a member of a tribe, a people or some other community. Every person of every nation felt this way; he did not say “I” to himself as every person does today. Rather, he said “I” to the whole group, to the whole community, the tribe, the people, as the finger would say “I” to our whole organism, not to itself, if it could speak, would have to consider itself as an organ of a soul-I.

You can still feel this when you read that unique and wonderful product of history, Tacitus' “Germania”. There you can read how the Cheruscan, the Cheruler, knew and felt himself more as a member of his tribe than as an independent ego.

The human soul is only gradually becoming centralized; that is why we also find that in that great culture that prepared for Christianity, within the Hebrew culture, Moses wanted to say something very special with the words: “I and Father Abraham are one”, something with which he pointed to the progenitor of the whole people. For the ancient Hebrew believer, the word meant a great deal: “I and Father Abraham are one.” The blood that flowed from the progenitor of the people was something by which the individual felt supported; he looked in awe and reverence to the source from which he and the other people flowed. It was as if there were a common self, a group self, hinted at in the reference to the father Abraham. I am immersed in it; in the stream of blood flowing down through the generations, I feel as if I am in a continuous one, while in my being between birth and death everything is transient.

What was felt as one in a whole became more and more relaxed, and the result of this was love; and this was therefore connected to feeling one with the whole. What was akin was drawn from person to person. During the education on earth, man should develop more and more in love, and so we see how the individual is more and more separated from the whole. If it had remained only with this separation, if another impulse had not also come into the development of mankind, what would have become of it?

Even within the old Hebrew confession, it was necessary to regulate human coexistence by external commandments, which would have drifted apart more and more if the ego had increasingly separated itself from its whole. The Christ impulse fell into this development of humanity. People no longer reckoned with the old blood ties; they reckoned with the human being as an ego-being. Therefore, Christ substituted for the old Hebrew saying, “I and Father Abraham are one,” the significant saying, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30); that which lives in me as an I-being is not only one with an earthly being linked to me by blood ties, but one with a spiritual being.

There is a spiritual essence that underlies all physical existence, and every single ego is also one with this essence. Independently of our other connections, each of us has gained a connection with the spiritual Father principle of the universe.

Before Abraham was, the “I am” was (John 8:58),

that is, there is something in man that is eternal, immortal, that was there in each of us before anything visible was there; before Abraham was there, this spiritual was there.

In every individual ego is a source of activity, of action, of understanding of the world. This had to arise in every human being. When the individual is drawn to seek his connection with the Christ, the human being must be given the opportunity to replace the old love with a new love, a spiritual love that is independent of all blood ties, a love that arises from every soul and goes from every soul to every soul.

Through Christ, a new impulse entered into the development of the earth. When this impulse has fully come to life, it will bring love into every soul and enable every soul to find the right relationship to the world, the right love for people. And it is precisely in this sense, in this respect, that we are at the beginning of Christianity. Through this process of coming to life, every ego becomes freer and freer. Paul said:

We must not understand this Christianity in such a way that the old is repealed by the new freedom, by that love, which is a spiritual one; the new love does not want to take something, not dissolve, not destroy the old, but keep the old and still add something new, it should not impoverish the old, but enrich it. The love of one human soul for another is added to blood and kinship ties. This new love, which will ultimately embrace all people when the earth reaches its goal, is the Christ impulse. It is the impulse of the earth-embracing brotherhood and therefore at the same time the content of all that man can conquer on earth.

When Christ appeared, the remnants of ancient wisdom existed; the connoisseurs of religious secrets had a goal. And we find it wonderfully expressed in the early Christian period, when all those equipped with ancient wisdom approach to give expression to Christianity. How did they conceive the relationship between what could be known from the old creeds and Christ Himself? Something quite extraordinary appeared in the Christian being of Jesus of Nazareth. In what the Rishis called Vishva Karman, in what Zarathustra referred to as Ahura-Mazdao, and again in the Egyptian Hermes teaching, where it is said: When the soul passes through the gate of death, it becomes one with Osiris, in that which points to becoming one with Osiris – in all of this, reference is made to the one great being that appeared in the Jesus of Nazareth. And the old sages had the mood in their minds: we must use everything that the old founders of religions have said in order to understand this unique phenomenon.

In that circle, for example, they called Gnosticism whatever was needed to bring together all human perceptions in order to comprehend the Christ. It was far, far removed from today's negating science, which seeks to grasp the uniqueness of the Christ appearance in trivial terms of material life. This was roughly the kind of education that the first Christian teachers gave to the confessors: that no wisdom can reach high enough to comprehend the Christ appearance. This mood also speaks from the Pauline letters and lasts until the fourth and fifth centuries with those who understand Christianity, not with those who corrupt it. What could be taught in this way came into the world as the first fruit of Christianity.

Then came the great phenomena of the Middle Ages. Of course, one could also enumerate the dark sides. But today we want to point out the greatness in the development of the Middle Ages; for the other falls away from the tree of development, the great continues to grow.

What the Christ was, is shown to us in the first stage. In the second stage, the Central European peoples enter into Christianity. A new time begins for Christianity. There we see that much-maligned science of the Middle Ages, which, as a real science, starts from a very definite principle, which one should not mistake. It has the feeling that filled Christianity at the beginning, that the figure of Christ is in harmony with the entire supersensible world in its individual manifestations. The Christian scholars of the Middle Ages regarded it as their task to apply all human ingenuity to understanding what happened in Palestine and how it relates to the entire supersensible world.

An enormous amount of thought has been given to how Christ is connected to the spiritual world and how the other spiritual entities that lie behind this physical world are connected to him, how the good and bad sides of human nature are present in them. So much acumen has been applied to it that modern times consider it far too astute and regard everything that has been applied to it as a scholastic construct, as a fine exercise of the human mind applied to an object that one has accepted as a revelation and to which one should not apply reason. Today, philosophy is so proud to appeal to this intellect and does not go along with this insubstantial scholastic web, and it is regarded as something overcome, which such Christian science of the Middle Ages was. Let us take a moment to consider a point of view – which does not really need to be – to see what is meant by scholastic contemplation. Let us say that it is not at all important to know how Christ relates to the spiritual world, and let us look only at the one thing that cannot be denied historically: that the educated people of the Middle Ages did turn their minds to these problems in the most ingenious way. No matter whether the mind was applied to worthy or unworthy problems, it was educated in the process, educated in something that would not otherwise have developed into human abilities. Let us ask: What has become of it? We see how the intellect of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was able to initiate the modern progress of the material world. For those who are not caught up in prejudice, it is clear that everything we have of much-admired modern science, practice and culture is due to the intellect trained through the Middle Ages. Why was Copernicus able to think so well, to move this intellect so well that he gained the new view of the heavenly bodies? Because the strength of the intellect emerged from this school. Let us now ask: where did the spirit of Kepler, the ingenuity of Galileo, the reformatory power of Giordano Bruno come from? If we look at what these minds have been able to achieve, we find that their powers have been ignited by the Christian development of the Middle Ages.

What, then, has modern science brought us? Where does today's industry get the possibility to shape itself in its power elements as it is? What has modern trade and commerce brought? It is the thought forms that underlie everything, and they have grown out of the Christian education of the Middle Ages.

We may rightly stand in awe before a technical wonder such as the Gotthard tunnel. Who built it? We ask, not according to outward appearances, but according to the inner essence, for those who built it were guided by those who understand such things. But what must one understand in order to be able to create such a wonder? One must understand what a mind like Leibniz's has laid the foundation for this science. By finding this way of calculating, by incorporating it into all of modern thought, did he not help build the Gotthard Tunnel and all of modern culture? Where else but in the lonely room of the thinker does all this come from? Imagine Leibniz without the entire education of the Middle Ages! If you want to think in real terms; the abilities for all modern culture, insofar as they are intellectual, owe their development to the point in time when Christianity became established in the Central European world.

At first, so to speak, it is spoken to those who are contemporaries, the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, of what is physically present, then of what memory has preserved. Then what has developed as an ability emancipates itself and founds all of modern culture.

But we have only come to ourselves with this. We see, however, that Christianity is, in a sense, internalizing itself, moving into people; first as something external that is unthinkable without someone pointing to Jesus of Nazareth, who lived and died in Palestine. It is said that one cannot prove or come close to him through reason. Attention is drawn to facts, to people who have laid their hands on the wounds. Care is taken to point this out, and to those who still sat at the feet of the apostles, who have had the appearance of Christ. — This gradually disappears and gradually moves into the interior.

With Nicholas of Cusa and in science up to Copernicus, up to Galileo and Kepler, everywhere we find that the human intellect is considered capable of grasping what has happened. And further on, we see how the ability, the keen sense that developed in the Christian object, breaks free and becomes modern thinking, the way of life of our new science.

And let us ask: Where is the arsenal of the sharpness of thought and criticism that enabled, for example, David Friedrich Strauß to fight Christianity so strongly? Where is the arsenal of the acumen that gave rise to the whole of biblical criticism? The Christian development itself is the arsenal for these thoughts. Even the critics who turn against Christianity owe their abilities to Christian development. If you take the modern point of view, you will deny it, but for those who actually go through the development, this development becomes proof that cannot be stronger.

Among all the forces that developed and brought the power and splendor of our culture, something else developed that Christianity was to carry even further into the human interior, into the depths of the human soul. In the middle of the Middle Ages, in people like Johannes Tauler, Meister Eckhart and Angelus Silesius, we see this. We see how these people speak of a Christian manifestation that is no longer based on external facts, nor on memories, nor does it appeal to the intellect, but to the deepest part of the human being: the human ego, by their fervor point out that the Christ impulse can flare up in every ego, that which Paul himself so significantly presented as the Christ in man (Gal 2:20); it can flare up in each and every individual.

We are entering a phase that can prepare a new era for the future. Master Eckhart particularly pointed to the human ego that can experience the Christ within itself. But with such minds, we cannot merely speak of an inner, abstract Christ. Yes, it would suit our moderns to say: We do not care about the outer historical Christ. If he is born within, what do we care about the historical Christ! It is thoughtless to say that he could exist within without the outer Christ.

We need only call another thought before our soul. How often is it repeated today in the subjective school of philosophy: Without the eye, there is no light. Certainly, the blind are not born seeing. Without the eye, the world around us would be colorless; without the ear, there would be no sounds for us. But now let us consider the other side of the matter, the very simple fact that appears again and again when such things are mentioned. There are animals with eyes; they change their way of life, moving into dark caves. There they do not need to see; the eyes atrophy. Other organs become strong, which they need. Only rudiments of the eyes remain. The eyes are reduced by the absence of light.

Likewise, the eyes were only formed in the course of evolution. That is why Goethe, who saw deeply into these things, says: The eye has been formed in the light for the light. From indifferent organs, the light has gradually formed the eye. Once upon a time in prehistoric times, man was such an organism that there were indifferent points; through the light, the eye has been brought out of it. That is why the same Goethe, who spoke the beautiful word:

If the eye were not sunlike, the sun could not behold it,

Just as there is a light-sensitive power in the eye, so in the soul there is a power that is sensitive to Christ, the power that can perceive the mystical Christ. But how can it develop further in the world? — in the historical Christ! For the mystical development of Christ, He had to be there as an objective entity, as the historical Christ. He had to be there first as the historical Christ, because only from the objective spiritual power does the power come from which the Christ-sensation can come, from which the Christ-experience arises.

Just as the eye perceives sunlight, so the Christ-experience is formed through Christ Himself. When the time comes for the Christ-experience to enter into the evolution of the earth, this experience of Christ in the I will be led more and more to the realization of the great historical figure of Christ. He will be experienced as the eye experiences light. This great ideal now stands before us, and it is through this that I can best point to the future of Christianity.

Let us first look back at the foundation of Christianity. How did it come about? Critics like to refer to the first three gospels to see the Christ in human form because it embarrasses them to look up to the higher, the unattainable. But let us look at the one who has seen the Christ in his true form. Who could know best? — Who has experienced it! — We do not want to disparage the first three Gospels, certainly not.

But let us look further. Did what Saul experienced in Palestine turn him into Paul? Only the event of Damascus (Acts 22:6-8), through which he was transported out of the sensual world, enabled him to experience that this Being, who walked, was crucified and died in Palestine, is real. That the same One who bled on the cross can be found by the spiritual eye is what transformed Saul into Paul.

No one who does not truly appreciate the fact that only the Christ is recognized through supersensible perception and knowledge, through beholding into the spiritual world, can comprehend him. The one who develops the slumbering spiritual eyes and ears can do so. In Paul's case, it happened as if by grace, as if by premature birth, that he was called to see into the spiritual world and to see the Christ who lives there.

This is what will be understood again after the internalization of Christianity to the extent that Christianity will be experienced again. Theosophy or spiritual science is nothing other than the knowledge and message of what can be experienced in the spiritual world. What the spiritual researchers see in the spiritual world is put into words, taught. In the spiritual world, Paul once found the Christ, and in the spiritual world, all true theosophy will find the Christ.

If spiritual science has a future, if it penetrates to the hearts and feelings of people, then it will open up this world to them. And so, like a spiritual fluid, the whole world will be permeated by the Christ-being, that being which is at the same time the historical being, and so imperishable! Only little by little can our time fulfill what Christianity has as an impulse: the whole truth, the whole power and whole love of the Christ.

Only gradually can this be absorbed by the human being. But the more the human ego lets the Christ speak through it in its actions, loves and wills, the more it will learn to do so. We envision the time when peace in people, when the Christ principle has been established, as an ideal. The more people in whom it occurs, the more light the impulse brings into each individual, and the more people have the ability to let brotherly love enter the world. Always preach brotherly love! If the practical principle is not there, it is like preaching to the stove; just burn nicely, dear stove, and do not put any fuel in it. No matter how much you preach, it will not get warm. But if you put wood in and light it, then you don't need to say much. It is the same with people: however much you preach about brotherly love – you can't preach morality in that way – give the soul fuel, put the positive into the soul, which can be kindled by contemplating the great Christ-soul, and the spiritual bond will flow from every soul from person to person. In this way you establish brotherhood by making accessible to every soul what the Christ principle is in its essentiality; if we understand Christianity in its spiritual principles, if we take up the Christ in our soul, we bring about that future which we have in mind as the true goal of the earth.

In Christianity we can find much of what it has already given to humanity; but much more we can find. The deeper we shine a light into it, the more can be brought out. It is greater than anything we can teach today. True are the words that the creator of Christianity has said:

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.

Therefore, we can consider Christianity as a living source, as something that always has something new to teach. If we discover Christianity as Paul discovered it, we recognize the word:

I am with you always.

Let us learn from the Christ who is with us always!

If we immerse ourselves in the spiritual development of the earth, we will find him in all time; then we can learn from the same one who lived on earth, who can still be seen today as a living being in the spiritual world, who for all time on earth has given a principle that can always be found, from which everyone can always learn and always find it. This is the significance of Christianity for all future on earth.

In a lecture given here on September 13, Dr. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin spoke of the so-called Theosophical movement, which seeks to realize the noblest ideals of contemporary man by founding a brotherhood that cultivates in its midst the knowledge of the highest goods of life and of the spiritual worlds. “Overcoming materialism from a new perspective” was the topic. And the content of the speech opened up a view into higher worlds, which people are only unwilling to hear about as long as they do not know that one can ascend to these worlds in an equally scientific and unprejudiced way, as an astronomer does, for example, to the world of the stars. We have spoken here of a world view that can satisfy all honest seekers of truth, from the simplest, most untrained person to the most conscientious scholar. And it is not something arbitrary that is to be imposed on man here, but rather something for which countless people today are striving, for which they long in the deep conflict that is increasingly emerging between faith and science. These things, which appear only as fantasy and speculation as long as one has not penetrated deeply enough into them, give true peace of mind and the sure comfort of the heart. The truth about what is immortal and divine in the nature of man must indeed be regarded as eternal; but each age needs a special proclamation. We have become doubters and unbelievers in many ways due to modern science, to which we owe our great achievements; Theosophy dispels all doubts because it is both science and religion. That is why it has spread to almost all civilized countries on earth in the thirty years since such a movement has existed.

The speaker tied in with simple, universally understandable things and showed that one does not have to remain doubtful before the highest mysteries of existence, but that there is knowledge about that which lies beyond the world of the senses. We are dealing here with a movement that is truly capable of contributing to the ennoblement and elevation of human existence, and which will only be misunderstood and avoided as long as it has not been sufficiently studied.

Report in the “National-Zeitung”, September 20, 1905

Overcoming materialism from a new perspective. Last Wednesday, Mr. Rudolf Steiner from Berlin gave a lecture on this topic at the Rebleutengunft, in which he characterized the tasks and goals of the theosophical movement that has been spreading across almost all cultural countries on earth for 30 years.

The speaker began with a description of the spiritual struggles that beset the modern human being when, in an honest search for the truth about the highest goods of life and the spirit, he is confronted with the conflict between religion and science. Theosophy unites people who want to bring about a true reconciliation of these contradictions. There is knowledge of the spiritual foundations of the world and of man, of the divine causes and the eternal goal of the soul, and by attaining this knowledge, man attains peace within himself, a genuine harmonious way of life. One can, in the full sense of the word, stand on the ground of today's science and, through what is called here Theosophy, arrive at satisfying ideas about the immortal part of human nature. Truth is eternal, but each age needs a special way of approaching that truth. Theosophy is the striving for truth that corresponds to our time. The theosophist does not proclaim his teachings as a new dogma, but in the realization that truth is present in every human soul, that the divine spark only needs to be brought out to have an enlightening and revealing effect. Those people who want to unite in such an unprejudiced way find in the theosophical movement a brotherhood of humanity that, built on universal love for humanity, bases humanity on knowledge. Regardless of the religion or philosophy one may otherwise follow, in this movement one can come together to engage in the most unbiased search for truth. The speaker shared some of the theosophical wisdom about the higher worlds, and the audience could see that they really do find within the indicated aspirations what every human being thirsts for today when his gaze reaches beyond the everyday and the transitory.

The riddle of our existence is as old as thinking humanity itself, and not only has it been posed at all times, but also among all peoples. But there are also moments in every single human life when we look up to something higher, something mysterious. In particular, one big question is posed again and again by thinking humanity, namely, the question of the meaning and significance of our existence. In fact, one could say that all other riddles ultimately boil down to this one question about the meaning of the universe. And deep down inside every single person lies the emotional desire to receive an answer to this question. But it is not only our ignorance of such lofty things as the movement of the stars or the origin of our existence that drives us to ask questions; often, more mundane things do so to an even greater extent; indeed, there are times in life when everything becomes a mystery , why we are afflicted with sorrow and pain, why we are born into a lower class, while others are born into the most favorable conditions of life, why we suffer while others do not, although we lead a seemingly blameless life. Yes, it is especially difficult for us to understand that we are deprived of the necessities of life, although our fellow human beings have seemingly entered into existence with just as few merits and are now richly blessed with the most diverse goods.

In addition to the big existential questions, however, there are still questions in life, the solutions to which should not only satisfy our minds and ingenuity, but should also pour into our hearts like comfort and reassurance, filling our souls with a harmonious mood that truly understands life. Of course, not only the mind should have a say in the objective solution of the existential questions. For according to the monistic world view, which assumes that both spirit and mind flow from the same source of existence, both also demand consideration.

There have always been great epochs in the development of mankind when the attempts to solve the questions of existence have brought peace to troubled souls. Religions, in their own way, provide such solutions to the big questions; but they mainly take into account only one side of the human being, that is, they satisfy more only the mind, but not the reasoning intellect as well.

For some time now, something has been emerging in our culture that seems like a conflict between those religious solutions that were sacred to many people and meant truth to them, and what science teaches.

Even children are confronted with such questions in a worrying way. They are introduced to the teachings of the origin and destiny of man in great religious images, but at the same time they also absorb the teachings of popular science, they hear about the development of man and all living things through purely natural forces.

The consequences that arise for a young soul can be of two kinds: either such a person becomes dulled to all higher things, enthusiasm for the questions of the meaning of life and existence fades away, or he takes the side of science and deliberately begins to trample on religious truths from his supposedly superior point of view.

There have been many attempts to resolve this conflict. Almost every day brings us new evidence of how people here and there are striving to shed light on the riddles of existence, even if these personal attempts do not directly promote scientific insight.

But another attempt at a solution has been gaining ground with ever greater force in recent decades. Although it has crept quietly and modestly into our culture, it has already brought peace and quiet to thousands upon thousands of minds. What distinguishes this approach from all others is that it does not apply only to the narrow confines of a single nation, but rather its followers are scattered across the globe, belonging to the most diverse nations and religions.

This attempt to solve the riddle of existence has been made by spiritual science. It tells us: Man perceives the world of the senses around us, but that is not all, as material science believes, for which everything that lies beyond sensory perception is transcendental.

For spiritual science, the human being is a creature in the process of development. The word development seems so familiar to us; how could it not, being the magic word of a large range of recent scientific fields. However, spiritual science takes this word in a different sense than natural science does.

If our senses have limits to our knowledge, it is because we have developed to a certain point. Where we are in our development is the limit of our knowledge. But we can develop further and higher with the necessary seriousness and inner clarity. Our senses are not complete from the beginning either; they are the products of long periods of development. The eye, this marvelously complicated organ, has been conjured out of the most primitive beginning, similar to the ear, which may have originally been nothing more than a simple static apparatus.

Similarly, abilities can still develop in the human soul that can then reveal to us what is still hidden today under impenetrable veils. This spiritual vision may be just as great an experience for a person as physical vision is for a blind person. For the blind man there is only a world of touch and sounds around him. The world of light and colors do exist in themselves, but he does not perceive any of them, so for him they are nothing. It is the same with the spiritual organs of perception. Those who lack the ability to perceive in this higher way perceive nothing of these higher worlds. However, this does not mean that there can be no development and rebirth of the soul, that one can go beyond the limits of the ordinary mind and see new worlds around oneself. In this sense, spiritual science seeks to solve the questions of existence and the riddles of the world.

For some, of course, what spiritual science has to say seems ridiculous because there is absolutely no convincing evidence for them, the undeveloped. But for those who work with these things, the matter is different. It is, moreover, a well-known fact that many things that have subsequently moved people deeply were ridiculed and scorned when they first appeared.

From this point of view, let us now discuss the great mystery of existence, which is about the nature of man, during life and after death, which thus asks about the fate of the soul.

For spiritual science, the study of the human being is much more difficult than it is for material science to study the human being, whom it merely knows. It sees the whole of man's being in his mere physical body. For spiritual science, on the other hand, this corporeality of man is only part of his entire being. The physical body is the part of man that can be perceived by our senses. It is constructed from the seemingly lifeless material of the nature around us. However, spiritual science knows other higher elements of human nature in addition to this physical body.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the last third of the twentieth century, anyone who dared to talk about such things was considered a fool. Today, however, opinions and views on this subject have changed somewhat. At the beginning of the nineteenth and at the end of the eighteenth century, people still spoke of a life force, which was understood to be something quite different from something that exists according to purely mechanical laws.

In the purely materialistic theory, however, it was thought that life meant merely a suitable interaction of physical forces.

Today, there are again some researchers who, on the basis of facts, have come to the conclusion that there is more to human life than just physical matter and forces. In earlier centuries and millennia, such things were researched by the secret sciences. There is a significant amount of literature about these secret researches, where one can find more detailed information.

The second link of the human being is called the life or etheric body. This is not to be understood as something like a structure consisting of that hypothetical physical ether, but the correct view of it can be gained through the following consideration: a crystal can exist in itself through its physical and chemical forces; for a living being, however, these alone are no longer sufficient. As soon as life has left it, the individual parts of the physical body disintegrate because they are composed of an impossible mixture. What now holds them together is precisely the life body. This is the vehicle of growth and reproduction.

The third link is the astral body, the carrier of desire and suffering, of joy and pain, of passion and instinct. It encompasses the lower soul life of the human being, as well as the lower imaginative life of everyday life.

The fourth aspect of the human being is the I, which distinguishes humans from all other earthly creatures. The etheric body is shared with plants and animals, the astral body only with the animal world. The fourth aspect, on the other hand, is, as I said, not shared with any other earthly creature. More deeply-oriented natures have always felt this I as something very special. “I” is now a very strange name, which one could not say like any other name of an object, but everyone can only say “I” to themselves. This name can never reach our ears from the outside if it is to be a designation of ourselves.

All deeper religions, and these are those based on spiritual science, know that when the soul utters that name “I”, then, as it were, God speaks in it. That is why this name was already called the unpronounceable name of God in Hebrew antiquity, which can only sound in the innermost soul. Jean Paul recounts in his biography that sublime moment of his own birth of the ego; at that moment he looked into the holy of holies of his being.

Every occult school since the most ancient times has held that man consists of at least these four elements, which work and weave together. From this point of view, the threads will also reveal themselves to us, through which we can come closer to solving the mystery of human existence.

Only the cultivated and highly developed human being can become aware of these four elements. The “savage” and the average European differ only in that the former unconditionally follows his instincts and passions, while the latter knows that they must not be followed. The I has begun to purify the astral body in the latter. Here, therefore, the astral body is divided into a part influenced by the I and one that is given over to desires.

But the I works not only on the astral body, but also on the etheric or life body. All earthly impressions that pass by quickly are changes in the etheric body for spiritual research. He who has brought about profound and lasting changes in his etheric body, for example, has improved his memory, has achieved a great deal. The greatest impulses for working in the etheric body are artistic and religious perceptions, for they most essentially ennoble the etheric body. On an even higher level, there is even a transformation of the physical body.

The differences between these individual stages only become really clear when we consider sleep and death. The former can be described as the younger brother of the latter.

Notion of the nature of sleep: During sleep, changes occur in the human being. When asleep, only the physical body and the etheric body of the sleeper lie in bed; however, the astral body and the ego are loosened. Instincts, desires and passions, feelings and sensations sink down into unconscious darkness during sleep. All qualities that are carried by the etheric body are active or at least present in a sleeping person. How can we understand the nature of the dying person and the dead? The difference between sleep and death lies in the fact that in sleep the I and the astral body are lifted out of the physical body, while in death the etheric body also separates from the physical body, leaving the latter behind as a dead corpse, which chemically represents an impossible mixture.

However, it does happen that shortly after death, the etheric and physical bodies remain together. In such moments, the whole of life between birth and death stands before consciousness like a great image.

Some people are able to describe such moments in their lives, especially if they have once been in great danger. Here, in a brief moment, what applies to all people after death occurs. Only through the physical body is the narrowness of consciousness formed. The etheric body is the carrier of memory, which is precisely what is restricted and limited in the physical body. In that moment, however, memory expands wonderfully.

The etheric body then detaches itself from the physical body as a second corpse gradually dies, only to completely dissolve in its sphere after some time. But the essence of his life remains in the human being. This essence lives and works in him and consists of the memory tableau of life. He takes this with him on his journey after life. Then the moment also arrives when those parts of the astral body dissolve that have not been processed by the ego.

Now comes a fact that can be proved just as logically as any biological law, but which few people think about properly and thoroughly, namely that the human, immortal individuality, consisting of the ego and the life essence, finds a new opportunity to enter this earthly life. The spiritual research of all times and also today's theosophy teach reincarnation.

The essence that lives in a person today has often been on earth before and will return again and again, although not always in the same external form.

Every person has the opportunity and the strength to develop through the work of their own self. This results in a refinement of the etheric body and an increase in the life essence as abilities and innate qualities. The more often a person has gone through such a life and the better they have applied such a life, the more noble their powers and aspirations will become.

Spiritual science leads man beyond spiritual superstition, while all materialistic science tends to lead to superstition because it strives to explain the imperfect from the imperfect. More and more we should strive to take as much as possible of the imperishable with us into the superphysical realm.

The ego core goes through many lives of man and rises ever higher to God. Originally, the soul also comes from divinity. Comparison with the bee that returns to the beehive laden with honey: [The old Greek wisdom says in reference to this, the human soul resembles a bee that flies out to collect honey. It flies out of the bosom of the deity and gathers the honey of experience in life, which it then carries back to the deity.] Thus, the causes of our current existence lie in previous states of existence. Ultimately, there is no suffering that is not karmically balanced before the end of the last life.

From such points of view, strength and consolation for life arise! Thus one can endure pain because one has the consciousness that a balance will take place sooner or later. One's deeds are no longer fruitless, but they all have their importance and meaning.

Karma is the name given to activities that have been transformed into fixed qualities. This law prevails throughout nature.

From such perspectives, the riddles of existence are revealed. The solutions are also answers for the mind. This is how we feel the great truths, which lead us from the transitory to the immortal, to the eternal!

Dear attendees!

It was in the late summer of 1831 – that is, [not quite] a year before Goethe's death – that the great poet sealed a package. The contents of this package were to remain untouched until after his death.

What Goethe sealed at the time was the conclusion of his great life's work, the second part of his “Faust” as it is presented to us today. And the words that Goethe spoke to one of his friends when he had completed this great work of poetry sound significant. He said: “My life's work is now complete, and basically it doesn't matter what I do now and whether I do anything at all.

It is a peculiar feeling that must creep into our soul when we see such a personality arrive at the height of life and at the same time in the evening of life, and when such a feeling passes through the soul of this personality. This statement by Goethe implies that our poet feels something deeply inwardly concluded in his life's work: he feels, so to speak, that he has brought to an end and to a goal something that he had been working on for a long, long time – not years, but decades! And when we consider that the work in which he has invested his highest ideals and views of life has been completed, then we must attach a very special importance to such a work – such a rich, meaningful life that can speak of itself with such inner harmony and with the consciousness of having reached a goal [that he has given the world what he had to give, that is the deep meaning]. To have given to humanity the best you have to say! [With this great poet, we can understand how his work grows with development, becoming richer and richer.]

We can get an impression of what that means if we put ourselves back into the poet's life, into that time when he, in September of the year 1783, in Ilmenau, carved into a [wooden wall] the words:

Over all the hills
There is peace,
In all the treetops
You can barely feel
A breath;
The little birds are silent in the forest.
Just wait, soon
You too will rest.

Even if we have to understand such a poem based on the situation and perhaps have to remember that it was born in such a moment of inspiration as Goethe had – it was evening – out of the evening mood, we can still say that these words, so full of meaning, were written out of Goethe's mood at the time, out of that mood of heavy worries of the inner life, when heavy riddles weighed on his soul.

It was at the end of his life, when he was back at the place where he had written these words. He reread them in old age, and with tears of emotion he looked back to this youthful mood. What lies between two such moments in Goethe's life! What ultimately lies in Goethe's life between the time when he began to invest all his thirst for knowledge as a yearning for the ideals of life in the youthful [first parts of] Faust, and the moment shortly before his death, which brings this work to a close! Oh, it is very peculiar that we can follow several steps in this work of the poet's, where it shows us how it grows and grows with the poet's personality. Even when he arrived in Weimar in his [mid] seventies, he brought with him certain parts of his “Faust”. That was the first form in which he expressed his life ideals and riddles. This version was not available in print for a long time – it was preserved until the nineteenth century, when it was found in the estate of a Weimar court lady. Rediscovered when the archives were opened, the “Faust” was printed as a fragment in 1790. [From then on, the “Faust” grew more and more.]

Today, my task is to characterize this mighty poem from the outside and thus create the conditions for tomorrow's lecture, which will delve deeper into the profound secrets. There has been much talk about the incomprehensibility of the second part. In response to this, I would simply like to raise the question: Do you believe that a personality such as Goethe, at the end of his life, is as easy to understand as he was in his earlier years? Should we not rather endeavor to penetrate with all our might into what he had to say in his old age?

We have three versions of Faust: first, the youthful Faust, which is called the first part. This is available to us in the manuscript that was found in the Weimar estate of the aforementioned court lady. The second version dates from 1790. And the third appeared in 1808. This is the form in which the first part of “Faust” is now available to us. From then until the 1820s, Goethe did not think about continuing his “Faust.” [We will see what the reasons for this were.] For Goethe, the problem was too great to simply bring it to a conclusion. It was only in 1820, when he was at the height of his powers, that the poet took up the work again and completed it with energy and strength in the last year of his life. Oh, in Goethe we have a person who is already confronted with the greatest issues of life in his youth, but at the same time a personality who, from decade to decade, was able to look into his own soul and say: Now you have come a step further.

And when we see how far above us this ever-striving personality stands, must we not be inspired to follow the steps he took between the first and second parts of his “Faust”? [Truly, there is a tremendous difference between the stages of the first part of “Faust” and between the first and second parts.] If we first consider the figure that could have been printed in 1775, we would see a personal work in which Goethe's most intimate yearning and striving have been incorporated. Everything that Goethe has felt in terms of mystery and profound experience has been poured into this work.

Then we find that “Fragment” that first came to our attention in 1790. There we find a remarkable difference compared to the first one: Goethe is already more serene. What first comes to us as a personality with an individual touch and nuance is more elevated into the impersonal and serene. We feel more that what is being discussed concerns not only Goethe in his youth, but also all of us to a greater or lesser extent.

And if we then consider the figure from 1808, we find that he [“Faust”] has moved more from the human into the superhuman, into a sphere where the powers of heaven fight for man and man is placed in the struggle between good and evil – expressed in particular in the “Prologue in Heaven”. In the first part, we see the striving of the Goethe soul to participate as a human being, but in 1808 we see him placed in the whole of humanity, his perspective broadened from the human-personal to a grand tableau of the world.

But in the inner character we find that the first part contains something that Goethe himself, in the age of life, feels as something personal and unclear, not as something universally human. Those who delve into it find something theoretical in it: the way a person speaks when faced with things unknown to him, of which he has only a presentiment. The second part – however strange this may sound in view of our usual preconceptions – is a realistic work, flowing from the most fundamental experiences after he could say of himself that he had arrived at a satisfactory solution to all the questions of life. [In this respect the second part is raised even higher above the personal level]. Therefore, if we understand him correctly, Faust fills us with the same satisfaction as all literary works of which we can say: here an artistic individuality has struggled to speak to all people, to inner peace, to inner harmony.

How Goethe allowed the content of “Faust” to flow out of his innermost being can help us understand why the first part is more theoretical and the second more realistic in the way it recounts Goethe's experiences of what he experienced.

If we want to find Goethe in his “Faust”, we have to realize that the goal was contained in his disposition from childhood on. That is why it is so significant that seven-year-old Goethe already felt unsatisfied as a boy [from what his environment told him] about the great underpinnings of life. Of course, he cannot express it then, only feel and sense it; but he feels in the direction that he was later able to present in such sharp contours. And so we find that one day he is looking for an expression for his feelings about the divine: He takes a music stand and places on it everything he can find of natural products in his father's collection of natural objects. He has erected a kind of altar for himself, and through the products of nature he allows the creator, the creative spirit behind it all, to speak to him. For the seven-year-old boy intended to make an offering to the god he was seeking. And on top of it he places a small incense stick, and he takes a burning glass, collects the rays of the rising sun with the burning glass and ignites the small incense stick. He has made a sacrifice to his god at the very source of nature. [This is the direction of Goethe's soul, his striving towards the sources of life.] In his memoirs, he himself says that as a boy he wanted to sacrifice to the deity. This urge remained in his soul and was expressed in all his later endeavors.

Thus we see him, when he was supposed to be studying law as a student in Leipzig, mainly occupied with what he could take from the natural science of the time; and in all other sciences and knowledge of life he looks around, just as he had looked around at the end of the sixties [of the seventeenth century] in all knowledge. But he does not seek [individual insights] as one otherwise [as a young student] sought under the constraints of circumstances. He sought to blaze a trail to insights of all kinds; he strove [for a general knowledge of the spiritual source of humanity], thereafter, what was then expressed in abstract terms, in sober, dry observations of external life impressions, that he sought to connect with the innermost longings and needs of his soul: the insights should bring him enlightenment about the riddles of life. The knowledge of the time was not suited for this purpose.

Everything that came to him was connected in Goethe with his very individual quest, with all the questions that arose in him about the infinite. And his life, even in his youth, was such as to point him to the spiritual and eternal. But that which was so suited to deepen his whole life from youth on was particularly expressed in various events of his life.

Only two of these will be mentioned here: During a serious illness, he felt close to death. Yes, death stood at his bedside in his early youth. He was touched by this event in his life by the transience of all externals, and his soul was also directed outwardly to the pursuit of the immortal.

Anyone who follows Goethe's life at the time will see how this event deepened his life. He was suited to encounter very special [intellectual circles] in Frankfurt. And the personalities who, in the most eminent sense, direct the soul towards investigating [the riddles of life], the spirit and the sources of existence, who have worked their way out of the traditional moods of religion, who ask: Where are the limits of our knowledge? How much do we have to leave to mere religious traditions and how much to our own insight? [Those who do not ask about the limits of knowledge, about the limits of science and revelation] did not feel at home with those who were Goethe's friends at the time.

Meanwhile, a different mood prevailed among those in the midst of whom stood the sincere Fräulein von Klettenberg, whom Goethe later immortalized in his “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul.” In this circle, people said to each other: There is something in the human soul that can be developed, that can mature ever higher and higher. Man is not always mature enough to recognize the highest, but forces slumber in his soul that he can develop [that can be brought out if one strives and works on himself. One then acquires inner spiritual powers that are otherwise not present in the soul]. And what he cannot achieve, no matter how humanly he tries, he can achieve if he develops powers that cannot be achieved in ordinary life. The content of this circle of friends was the development of the soul; because it was their conviction that there is something in the soul that remains unconscious, or let's say subconscious, in ordinary life. [In ordinary life, people are unconcerned about the mysterious powers that are there.] If a person lives in such a way that he devotes himself only to sensory perception, and processes this sensory perception only with the intellect, he does not approach the sources of life, he passes by the hidden powers of the soul, which he can develop and work on. And when a person has brought himself to a higher level of development, then he penetrates deeper into what is hidden behind the objects. Then the spiritual, the eternal, the imperishable comes to meet him. Such was the mood of these friends.

So you can see that these people had a different attitude to the question of the immortality of the human soul than many people have in their lives, where they often refrain from seeking insight into what is eternal in nature or in art, or leave it to traditional lore. It was not so with these friends. They said to themselves: There is something immortal out there in nature, and there are forces that are in the human organization as they are out there in nature. What is transitory and shows itself to be transitory on the outside is also transitory within the human being. And if we only see our powers with this transitory, then the immortal will never reveal itself. But in the hidden depths of the soul lie deeper powers of the human being, powers that are covered as if by a veil because the human being only gives some to the outer sense perceptions and the mind that combines them. Through such powers, which are purified and which give objective knowledge [of the eternal] [in the same way as the intellect gives it for the sensual world], we must purify the senses and try to distract them from the transitory. That is what they said to themselves: When I connect with the eternal in my own soul, then I stand spiritually face to face with the immortal, then I have brought it out of myself, then nothing can take away the certainty of immortality, then I am connected with the spirit in my own breast, which comes from the Spirit of God just as sense things come from the outer belonging and harmony.

Goethe felt a deep kinship with these souls. But there was much that was unclear in these souls. What I have now explained with certain words was expressed by them more in the form of intuitions, of unexpressed feelings of the soul; it was expressed more in certain soul gestures than in sharply outlined insights.

It was into this society that young Goethe came. And this society had a certain preference for a certain kind of writing that emerged from a medieval knowledge that had already passed away. Writings that expressed the way in which one sought to approach the great secrets of human nature. Goethe also came into contact with these writings, and we can see what the basic mood of his heart was when we see him searching in these medieval writings with an unceasing thirst for knowledge, in order to find means to develop the hidden forces of his soul that would finally lead to the knowledge of the immortal. One such work was that of Valentinus Basilius and Theophrastus Paracelsus, [Welling's “Opus macrocabalisticum et theosophicum”, but especially Kirchweger's “Aurea catena Homeri”], which he himself calls cabalistic-theosophical.

What do these writings contain that a person with a modern attitude at the time would delve into such writings as if a modern-day Haeckelian or other modern educated person would occupy themselves with the strange writings of Eliphas Levy? [If an ordinary person delved into them at the time, they would consider these writings to be pure nonsense, a flight of fancy.] And that is exactly how it was in those days: a modern person would feel that it was pure nonsense, that only a fantasist could devote himself to such things. One can understand this attitude, then and now. From a certain point of view, it can be recognized as a justified attitude. One need not be surprised that someone who is not far enough along in the development of his soul can only see pure nonsense in it. Goethe found more than mere nonsense in it. But some of it was pure nonsense. It still belonged to the time before the invention of printing, when everything was still written by hand; to the time when science had not yet been enriched by what Galileo and Kepler had taught. In those days, people sought to understand nature in a completely different way. If we want to characterize the way in which people wanted to approach the source in that time before the great achievements of natural science, we have to say that before that time, people sought to enter into nature and the world with everything that was in their soul, to enter into nature and the world with everything in his soul, not only with his intellect; but to purify his will and feeling in such a way that he also recognizes objectively with his feeling in the same way that mathematical knowledge searches. [Something that today's man can hardly imagine. In the same way, desire can become a power of knowledge. But for that, man must change it; he must work on it; he must purify and purify it of all selfish feelings. In the same way, the will can be elevated to a power of knowledge. But for that, man must not leave feeling, sensation and desire as they are – he must work on them!

The circle of friends around Goethe knew how to work on it. While the mind can be left as it is, because it is already as one can leave it, [one must reshape feeling, emotion, will and desire so that they become powers of knowledge]. Only through this work can one extract the hidden abilities of the soul that give man a knowledge of the eternal. The intellect, which is conveniently left alone, can only provide enlightenment about the transitory. This kind of knowledge through will and feelings had been more neglected [compared to intellectual knowledge at the time], even in Goethe's youth. On the other hand, what was gained through external sensory perception and the intellect prevailed, as is also the case today. But Goethe knew the limits of sensory-intellectual knowledge. [So he could not really find his way around in these writings, which, since they were written by latecomers who no longer had their own knowledge, contained a lot of nonsense.] His soul received nourishment from these books, although he could not understand them. They contained much that was pure nonsense, but anyone who could see beyond that to what was more deeply contained in these writings could feel that there was knowledge lying dormant within them. And this is what Goethe felt: the realization that does not aim to take the world as it is, but to develop the soul, to shape it, to bring up the forces that lie dormant within it. (He now wants to develop the ability to grasp these within himself.)

In these writings, Goethe found strange figures that only a fool can find pleasing today. But there is something else behind these things; I will mention just one example. In that writing, “Aurea catena Homeri,” which made a particular impression on him, you will find a strange figure: two dragons. One formed at the top as a semicircle. It is full of life and gives the impression of a good being. Below, entwined with it, is a shriveled, dried-up dragon, which appears as a symbol of evil. The two are entwined in a circle. Within the circle are two triangles: one point facing upwards and the signs for the individual planets of our solar system at the corners.

How fascinated Goethe's soul must have been by such a sign, for what is experienced in the soul in relation to this sign does not leave the soul untouched. Inner soul forces stirred when he looked at this sign: what otherwise only served human needs, what will and desire is, stirred like the urge for knowledge. He felt something that is necessary for the knowledge of such writings.

If someone wants to say: Of course, if you just want to talk about the tasteless stuff, you show that you have no knowledge of science, such as philosophy and other sciences. This objection can be understood, even if one says: In our knowledge, we should see what is there in truth. What this fantastic stuff depicts does not depict truth. Those who speak in this way are absolutely right. But they do not know what is important! What matters is the impression that these images make on the soul; that they are precisely those that bring out what otherwise lies deep within the soul, that they have creative power for the soul. And Goethe felt how this sign affected him: “It affects your will,” he felt. It draws forces from your soul that connect with the universe. He felt that. But he felt something else as well, something terrible for him at the time. He was confronted with all these things, felt that they could trigger something in the soul, felt that they could work — but he did not feel the strength within himself to be able to let this something take effect. He only felt that they concealed something

and I cannot understand what I can sense there.

[He sensed something in them like the spirit of the world, but he cannot understand it through his education and his previous life.] It was terribly shattering for Goethe's soul when he sensed something like connections with higher soul forces, sensed what could flow out of this “Aurea catena Homeri”, and yet had to say to himself: You are not yet mature, you cannot penetrate the secrets of the world, your powers of knowledge have not yet matured. But he longed to follow such a path of knowledge. And so he came to other signs, to a symbol that represented not only the great world but also the working of the spirit on earth. He felt closer to it, but still was not able to extract the forces from the earth. Now we feel how what he experienced flowed into Faust. There he focuses on the title page of the 'Aurea catena Homeri'. It shows him how the forces go from planet to planet, how their inner relationship is indicated with human desires, [it draws them up to good, down to evil], in the forms of coiled dragons, with the triangles, one point of which is directed upwards. A few pages further on, he sees the picture that shows “heavenly powers ascending and descending”. There he must turn away, for he did not feel his powers ripe to understand this.

Now read the passage in Goethe's “Faust” that shows that you cannot grasp anything from ordinary knowledge, from scientific knowledge, nothing that is experienced in the depths of the soul:

There I stand now, I poor fool, And am as wise as before!

That was the mood when Goethe left Leipzig.

There he sought a different path in Frankfurt, as he expresses so beautifully in Faust. He opened the book of Nostradamus and saw the sign of the macrocosm. [There he sees the working of nature before his soul, he sees:]

How everything is woven into a whole,
One within the other, working and living!
How heavenly powers rise up and down
And pass each other the golden buckets!
With wings that smell of blessing
From heaven through the earth they penetrate,
Harmoniously resounding through the universe!

This is a beautiful and wonderful description of what so fascinated Goethe. This is how he expresses what he feels when he sees the sign of the first spirit. Then he turns to the sign that only concerns the processes that take place on earth. He sees the sign of the earth spirit. Again it fascinates him. Before, he felt the stirring of the powers that are otherwise expressed as interest and feeling for objects. These powers should now develop in the earth spirit sign in such a way that they become powers of knowledge. Try to imagine the powers that come into question as powers of knowledge for the soul; first the objective powers of the mind, the powers of thinking. These are easy to access. But then the powers of feeling and perception, which can only be purified in the described way and can be awakened by the signs that evoke the spiritual world. Now Goethe had unlocked such a sign, and now he felt that he was not yet ripe for it. He did not feel ripe to understand the powers of perception that connect only with the earth either. Not ripe!

Now something rises in his soul. But at first only terror and fear, which are reflected to us where “Faust” turns away from the earth spirit, whom he calls “terrible face”, and whereupon the earth spirit then says to him:

You resemble the spirit you understand, not me!

Thus Goethe's insights are reflected in the first part of “Faust”. But Goethe was not a personality who could necessarily remain a “fearfully cringing worm”; he was a personality who was powerful enough to strive on. What did the personality say to itself? It did not speak like other personalities who believe that they are seekers of knowledge and say: There are limits to knowledge. It is easy and comfortable to dismiss all this as nonsense. No! Goethe said to himself: I am not yet ready for this! That is something we can learn from Goethe: he said to himself, “You are not ready yet; you must first begin to work on yourself in order to mature to what is possible for the soul.” [Now he worked on himself to get ahead.] To achieve this, he now immersed himself in life in order to get to know life and people and science in all its aspects. And we see this when, after his time in Frankfurt, he comes to Strasbourg, looks around at nature, in order to grasp the things that he, as a seven-year-old boy, placed on his father's music stand, in order to get to know the divine-spiritual forces of being through their knowledge. But not only the divine-spiritual forces of what is formed externally in nature, but also of human life and its manifold forms. And now we can already see how he has the favorable opportunity to get to know all the ups and downs of the human soul, the human soul in its infinite kindness and love – but also in all its malicious, spiteful and harmful qualities, with all its longings, torments and sacrifices. [He experienced the greatest satisfaction, but also tormenting doubts, in the souls of people.] There he met the great personality of Herder in Strasbourg, a personality who strove throughout her entire life to come close to the sources of life, who also felt that the powers of her soul were not ripe. A terrible mood was in Herder's soul at that very moment, when, despite his titanic urge for knowledge, he loses courage and says to himself, [You cannot strive higher]. One's own inability is a general human inability. Herder was close to such moods, such moods had gained control in him and caused a lifestyle that was harsh and rejecting – only bearable for a soul like Goethe's, which was benevolent. Goethe had recognized the greatness of Herder's soul. And no matter how much Herder might have belittled him, Goethe knew that he was in the presence of greatness. And Goethe had a great soul, great enough not to pay attention to the unimportant when faced with the important. When he climbed the stairs of the Gasthof zum Heiligen Geist and unexpectedly saw this personality, who Herder introduced in a somewhat brusque manner – with his coat fluttering, his coat-tails criss-crossed in his pockets – Goethe sensed at a single glance that this personality was Herder, and he said: “You are Herder.” From that moment on, his respect for him increased.

Deep ideas lived in Herder, as we can find them, for example, in his treatise “Ideas for a Philosophy of the History of Humanity”. But all this was not enough for him. Then Goethe got to know a tremendous striving that was on the verge of collapsing, and was held down by it. But Goethe had already learned from another personality the inadequacy of the ordinary mind: from his friend Merck. Of him, even the most well-meaning woman, Goethe's mother, said: “He can never leave Mephisto at home; he finds fault with everything.” Goethe saw these personalities, and he saw in them something that in turn had a significant effect on his soul: that they had particularly developed what he himself had in his own soul. As in a mirror, he saw his soul, himself! He saw the intellect into which error and superstition of the outer world creep. He sought to comprehend the spirit of the earth, which he has spoken in “Faust”:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down,
weaving back and forth!
Birth and death,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I create at the whirring loom of time,
And work the living garment of the Godhead.

He had tried out of inner urge to grasp the spirit and soul that spoke to him in the forces of life, in the images of the “Aurea catena Homeri.” But he had also felt that he was not yet ready to soar to these heights of the mind. He had now realized why: because there was still too much of the sensual interests in him. Now he knew that the spirit to which he still resembled too much was the most evil, the Mephisto spirit.

You resemble the spirit you understand,

the Earth Spirit could speak, who saw the Mephistophelian in Goethe's soul.

Now a good part of the idea for Faust shone forth in Goethe: Why can't human beings, in their ordinary feelings and perceptions, achieve the same kind of clear insight as they do in their thinking? Why are desire and perception not as powerful as the powers of thought? Because there are forces at work within us that are not ourselves, but which have an effect on us. The forces that we embrace with our actions and desires, according to both ancient and new spiritual science, are the forces of Lucifer, and these bring our desires down to such a level that they cannot become an objective power of knowledge in this life. This is how Lucifer works.

But there is also another kind of force that makes us act, that our minds gain real knowledge when we direct our perception to this world. These are the forces that were first characterized by Zarathustra as ahrimanic. Thus the Ahrimanic forces, which are imbued with desire and would penetrate to the macrocosm, work in us. [They prevent feeling from becoming a power of knowledge in relation to the earth, just as the Luciferic spirits prevent desire from rising to cosmic knowledge.] The Luciferic entities work in us.

Goethe sensed what clouds the human gaze and leads to error, what is called the forces of Ahriman. For Ahriman is the same as what we are accustomed to calling Mephistopheles, after the one who characterizes human behavior as lying: from the Hebrew “Mephis” is liar and “tofel” is ruin. It means the same thing that Zarathustra calls Ahriman. But Mephisto does not mean Lucifer. He is the power that leads man to lie, to see outer life in deceptive forms, not in truth.

All these forces are at work where man passes through life and is led by his interests to see life in its deceptive forms.

Goethe, despite his most sincere efforts, could not penetrate to the sources of truth at that time because he still had too much of the Mephistopheles in him – You resemble the Mephistopheles, not me! And so [in the “Urfaust” immediately after the earth spirit] Mephisto appears suddenly, as if shot out of a pistol. [Sudden because Goethe only sensed the context, did not clearly recognize it.] Another deeply moving secret of the soul.

Thus we see how Goethe pours into “Faust,” as it were, what he experiences, how he tries to depict how Mephisto guides him to take pleasure in such stale stuff as in Auerbach's cellar, in many of the externalities of life, which he must call banal from a higher point of view. But this Mephisto leads him to something else as well. If we follow Goethe from Strasbourg to the time when he had passed the bar exam, a little later, we find two qualities that must have brought a deep and searching soul into strange conflicts. The first one comes to us when we seek him out as a legal scholar. He was not very good at the positive knowledge of the law, [he only knew a few legal paragraphs]. But when it was a matter of quickly grasping some case and penetrating it in no time, he was one of the very first, still admired today by experts who follow his processes. [He was a practical man who quickly found his way in practical life with his mind.] He is proof against the outrageous statement that those who seek access to the spiritual life must be impractical people in life. Goethe sought access to the spiritual worlds to the highest degree and at the same time was an eminently practical person compared to all those who are impractical because they are untalented. Some young poets think that it is part of being absorbed in the intellectual life that you have to be an impractical person. Such people are only talented up to a certain point. No one would ever dispute the special talent that Goethe showed in writing his “Iphigenia”. On his desk lay the lists for the recruitment of recruits. While the recruits were being drafted, he wrote the verses for his “Iphigenia” in between. That was a whole human being! Penetrating into the spiritual world never prevents one from finding one's way into the practical world. Goethe felt he was a practical person.

But he also felt this: when he was consulting with himself one day, he had to say something to himself that made a deep impression on his soul. There are many, many things in which you have not been at your own height in your life – and above all: you have become guilty! The self-knowledge: You have become guilty – in the face of such cases as the Frankfurt poet experienced in Sesenheim, in the face of the struggle of the most violent passions that confronted him there in Friederike. He also knew that they did not fit together, that he would be paralyzed in all his striving if he had sought a connection with her. But he knew that through the way he behaved, he had become guilty, knew that Mephisto had led him; as we are led by Mephisto when, instead of being led into clear circumstances, we are led into error and deception.

Goethe felt completely and in his deepest innermost being, because he grasped all these questions at their center, that this in the human soul, which guides everything in the human soul, that [this Mephistophelian power] can lead it far, to completely different self-confessions than what he had to clothe in words: You have become guilty. He knew that when these Mephistophelian forces intrude into the striving for knowledge, they can make a charlatan out of a person in the face of higher striving for knowledge! There he stood with his soul before something monstrous; there he stood [before a tremendous abyss] that he said to himself: You must go beyond what only the mind can experience, you must call upon the powers of feeling and emotion for knowledge, [those that Mephistopheles pulls down], but there is still something of Mephisto living in you. Another self lives in you besides. Only now did he clearly recognize a figure of the sixteenth century who [has interested and frightened so many people], who has instilled fear and horror in people. Now the “Faust” of the sixteenth century became clear to him. How did he become clear to him? We take a deep look into Goethe's psychological self-knowledge when we research it. Goethe said to himself, as many people could still say today: Man cannot help but seek access to the forces that transcend the sensual. That is why, in our time, which does so little for the deepest needs of the soul, we have so many currents that emanate from such people who seek access to the spiritual currents, to the spiritual foundations of the soul.

The first thing [that is necessary] for a person to find access [to the spiritual world] without harm, to purify and cleanse his soul, is that he free himself from everything that is now called, in Goethe's sense, Mephistophelian forces, from the merely negating, criticizing endeavors [that are directed only at the things of the outer world]. This is not easy; Goethe himself shows how difficult it is by being bound to Mephisto as to a spirit that makes up part of his soul.

If man listens to this Mephisto in him, then he does not tell his fellow human beings the truth, but rather what the Mephistophelian element, reinforced by the Luciferian element, incites him to, leading to arrogance, ambition, pride, charlatanry.

Truly, a very fine cobweb separates the charlatan from the true spiritual researcher. This can also be seen today. Theosophy or other spiritual movements arise because they correspond to the longing of our world. But it is not easy to become a messenger of the spirit.

If the researcher is not free from these Mephistophelean forces, then he is not a real researcher, but a charlatan who incites vanity in the field of knowledge. — Here a fine sense is really necessary to distinguish between noble striving for higher knowledge and charlatanry. And it is difficult for the one who does not penetrate deeply into the spiritual life to distinguish the charlatan from the spiritual researcher. This danger also exists in Theosophy. It is not easy to satisfy the longings. He who wants to penetrate into the spiritual world is in danger of falling into charlatanry. It is therefore only too understandable when the charlatan and the spiritual researcher are confused. The reproach of the outer world is only too justified: “One cannot distinguish the charlatan from the true spiritual researcher”. This, which can confront us so vividly in life, confronted Goethe in his soul. The Mephistophelean brings you so close in an entity, as it is to Faust, whom people fear, of whom one can say that he has united with the devil, has fallen prey to the forces that lead to lies and deception. And now the question arose in Goethe's soul: How can man save himself from the danger of charlatanry, so that Mephisto does not lead him down into the abyss? Thus the Faust question had become a matter of the heart for Goethe.

The first thing a person must say to himself when this question arises in his soul is: [You must become simple and humble]. You have to go through something, where you look for the individual thing in you; from the smallest experience, from the smallest observation, to find the divine in every single experience. Goethe embarked on this path. On this path we see him wandering through Italy, modestly, humbly collecting all the details. In the inconspicuous coltsfoot, he seeks to clarify the different effects of plant forms, [observing the difference in its appearance here and elsewhere]. We see him hurrying from picture to picture, from work of art to work of art, in an intimate, selfless way. Although he has read Spinoza at home to uplift himself, he does not dwell on it because he is humble. [He goes to the works of art and says to himself,] When I look at them, I know that the ancients created like nature, by raising forces to a higher level. There is necessity in this, there is God. He does not seek to build a worldview in a rush, from thing to thing, humbly seeking the smallest thing in order to modestly seek the divine-spiritual in the smallest thing. [Perhaps you sometimes find it inconvenient when someone who talks about spiritual science speaks of details.] The human quest for knowledge is not modest enough, does not want to go from detail to detail, wants to go straight up; one would like to span the whole world at once with one word. For example, in the theosophical movement, emphasis is placed on going from detail to detail in each step, so it is sometimes said, “I want to go straight to the highest levels of the Logos,” although the person in question does not understand more about the Logos than that the word “Logos” is composed of five letters. (Above all, modesty is needed; Goethe achieved this necessary modesty).

Goethe learns from detail to detail. That was what Goethe did. In doing so, he achieved the purity and refinement that he had after he had been on this path for a while, so that he can now speak in a different way about [his encounter with those spiritual forces like the earth spirit, from whom he had previously turned away, curled up in terror like “a timid worm curled up in terror”], of his encounter with the earth spirit, who experiences what is happening on the earth. At that time he had to listen to:

You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me!

The spirit had appeared to him out of the fire. So now, after he had gone from piece of nature to piece of nature through modesty, through prudent research, so that he could incorporate the piece he wrote in Italy into “Faust,” now he addressed this spirit of the earth differently, as characterized in that beautiful monologue in “Forest and Cave”:

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
turn thy face to me in fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature of a kingdom,
strength to feel, to enjoy. Not
coldly marvelling visit thou only allowest,
allow me to look into her deep chest
As into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water know.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce toppling neighbor branches
And crushing neighbor trunks,
And the hill muffled hollow thunders,
Then you lead me to the safe cave, show me
Then myself, and my own chest,
Secret deep wonders open up.

That was the progress Goethe had made through his endeavors. Now, after he had humbly followed in nature's footsteps step by step, he no longer felt like a sluggard of knowledge, and closer to the spirit that had previously rejected him. Now he was allowed to look into his soul with a different kind of satisfaction and bliss. What he had once sought to grasp in a single flight, he had now recognized in the most diligent study of detail. He had ascended in humility. Now he was face to face with the spirit that lives not only as an earth-spirit in the outer world, but also lives in the human soul. It led him to the secure cave within, to self-knowledge. He had gained a view of nature that now really allows the spirit to recognize nature:

You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in the air and water.

Now he had ascended – albeit always with the powers that had triggered his Frankfurt aspirations back then – but he had ascended in humility. And now what lived in his own soul presented itself to him as the eternal, the immortal. With what he was able to connect, after he recognized this “spirit of the earth” in the outer world, the spirit led him to self-knowledge. Now he felt ready to find within himself the strength that he had previously sought by storming. And so we learn from the great Goethe how we, with him, should mature in the depths, carefully and humbly, and say: This cannot affect our soul now, but it wants to wait patiently and let it mature. Those who do so will say: It is good that you have done so, and have also opened up many things, because that had to mature in you first and then flourish. We can learn from Goethe: faith in the development of the human soul, faith in the necessity of maturing, so that we can believe in the immortality of the eternal, [so that we gradually grow into the spiritual world];

At the time when he found a cave in his inner soul in which the secrets of his own heart were revealed, he did not believe he was finished, but strove ever higher. And we will see how “Faust”, which appeared in fragment form in 1790, rises ever higher.

At that time, much of what he experienced was only external. But more and more, he connected with the experiences of the inner soul: he penetrated into the mystical. [After Goethe had seen the living earth spirit in the outer world, he also found his inner strength: “And the deep shafts of my own spirit open up” - the Goethe of 1790 strives deeper and deeper. Humbly and modestly, he looks up.] Thus he came to feel intensely in his deepest soul: There is something immortal, and the human soul can recognize it because it can recognize in itself that which is immortal. That was the testament that he left behind, sealed, in the completion of his “Faust”; which was expressed in the final words:

All that is transitory is but a parable.

Not long before the completion of the second part of his “Faust,” Goethe told his faithful Eckermann that he had taken great care to ensure that this work, in particular, met theatrical and artistic standards so that those who merely wanted to enjoy it with their senses would get their money's worth. And Goethe himself adds that those who are initiated into the secrets will indeed find the deeper meaning behind these images.

But everything is sensual and, conceived for the theater, will catch everyone's eye. And that's all I wanted. If it's just that the crowd of spectators enjoys the appearance; at the same time, the initiate will not miss the higher meaning, as is the case with The Magic Flute and other things.

This, my honored audience, can be an indication of how justified it is to look for deeper secrets in this, Goethe's most mature work. And he himself knew that not everyone could easily succeed in understanding these deep secrets. For another time he said to Eckermann:

I will confide something to you that will help you in many ways and will benefit you for the rest of your life. My works cannot become popular; anyone who thinks or strives for this is mistaken. They are not written for the masses, but only for individual people who want and seek something similar and who are moving in similar directions.

However, on the path that we characterized here yesterday, which Goethe himself had to ascend from decade to decade to a certain human perfection, only a few can follow; and if everyone had to go through this lengthy path of life in spirit, then the understanders of the second part of “Faust” would indeed be few and far between. But through theosophy, which seeks to penetrate into the depths of life, there is the possibility that the soul first summons its innermost powers in order to see spiritually what it can see with the senses. When man penetrates into the results of spiritual research, he certainly arrives at a quicker understanding of what personalities of such rich content as Goethe have to say.

Yesterday we saw how Goethe ascended to perfection, as the stages of this appear to us in his “Faust”. We also pointed out that the first part of Faust was actually only published in its completed form in 1808. We pointed out what a personal, individual work Faust was at first and how it becomes more and more impersonal, talking more and more about matters of the human soul that are more or less meaningful to every human being.

In this way, Goethe removes his Faust from the narrow confines of the individual and into the struggle of the objective powers of the world. That is why he has to organize what you know as “Prologue in Heaven”. There it is not only the inner powers of the soul, but the objective world spirits, which are behind the worlds, that begin their contest for the soul of Faust. There [Goethe shows us how deeply he has penetrated in understanding that it is a mistake] when man regards himself as a separate being; how it is an illusion. Our finger does not do that. It would say to itself: the moment I am cut off, I am no longer a finger. If it wanted to succumb to the same delusion as a human being, it would disintegrate. It would disintegrate if it could walk around on our body – cut off. A human being can walk around on the earth, which is why he succumbs to the delusion of being a separate being. If only he would devote himself with all his soul to the fact that he can no longer live physically just a few miles above the earth, he would not give himself over to this delusion, would feel how the forces not only of the physical but also of the spiritual world play into his own soul. For Goethe, this happened visibly from decade to decade. Thus the powers of the human soul grew into world powers. And in his poetry, he shows us the representatives of the good spirits confronting the representatives of the evil spirits. And it seems to him, Goethe, that man is not just a “fearfully cringing worm”, but someone who understands how, from millennium to millennium, human affairs go through the process of becoming earthly and take hold of the individual human being. Hence the marvelous similarity to the old Biblical record where he has God say to Mephistopheles: “Do you know Faust?” — Mephistopheles: “The doctor?” — The Lord says: “My servant,” as we find it again in the Old Testament Book of Job, where Satan appears before the Lord and the Lord asks him:

Have you taken care of my servant Job?

[Now it seems to us that not just any human being appears to us in Faust; now Goethe appears to us as one who understands how, from stage to stage, human affairs pass through the evolution of the world.] Thus, as Goethe matured, Faust gradually became a world poem. It could only become one because Goethe, through his own development, was able to experience more and more in his inner life how the forces that he had sensed back then in Frankfurt could really be there, developing out of the depths of the soul. In his restless striving, he finally brought them out of himself. And so he knew that man can look into the supersensible world, that there are spiritual eyes as there are sensory eyes, that there are spiritual ears as there are sensory ears.

As early as 1808, he speaks as one knowing about all the things that were still closed to him when he first stood before the Earth Spirit: He speaks as one knowing about the phenomenon that the Pythagorean school recognizes under the name “music of the spheres”. [There, the soul foundations appear to man as harmonies. It is not music, but it is something that can be compared to it, something real that becomes the inspiration of the soul.

When the soul draws from the depths what lies dormant there, the inner tones appear to it as harmonies, as something that is heard with spiritual ears.

It is what is expressed in inspiration. Then the human being feels what this spiritual music is. Then he no longer looks through external vision and admires the appearance of light, but then the soul feels that something behind it is inspired. This is what Goethe expresses in the prologue:

The sun sounds in the old way.

And may those who believe that they are standing on the ground of realistic aesthetics say: the poet allows himself such images. A poet like Goethe, who only gives what he has experienced, does not write nonsense, as in the external realistic sense, when speaking of the sounding sun. He speaks of it only when he has experienced it as something spiritual and real, when he knows that such a resounding exists for the human being who enters into the higher spheres of existence. Therefore, he sticks with this image when he lets Faust ascend to a real insight into the foundations of this world (after the impetuosity and sin of the first part). When Faust, at the beginning of the second part, is to look deeper into the spiritual world, we read the words:

Hark! listen to the storm of the hours!
For the ears of the spirit
The new day is already being born.
Rock gates creak and clatter,
Phoebus' wheels roll and clatter,
Light brings a mighty roar!
It trumpets, it trompets,
Eyes blink and ears are amazed,
the unheard do not hear.

Goethe already presents his Faust as someone who listens to the deeper essence of things. And Goethe truly expresses that he wants to say that “Faust” has ascended from the point of view where he longed for these things but could not grasp them. There he had only one certainty:

The spiritual world is not closed;
a sense is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, bathe, disciple, undaunted,
the earthly breast in the dawn!

But the “timidly coiled worm” was then far from bathing the “earthly breast in the morning dawn”.

In the second part, we see how Faust awakens; and how wonderfully described it is, how he bathes in the dawn, how revelation comes to him from the very foundation of things! Such is the inward artistic consistency of Goethe in the continuation of his “Faust.” And Faust is now to be introduced to the great world, to learn to recognize in it all that comes from the Mephistophelian power. Since man is a part of the whole human essence, the power that - as we have characterized - creeps into the human soul and permeates it with deception and lies, will also show itself [not only where man is alone with himself, but also where] man creates without having raised himself above the ordinariness of existence. Therefore, Faust must be led from the small world to the imperial court, must be led to where the great world destinies are decided for his time. It must be shown how the power of Mephisto also leads from error to error there. Therefore, Faust appears with Mephisto at the imperial court. He intervenes in world-historical events. With exquisite humor and precisely for that reason, Goethe describes the scene of Mephisto's hand in the invention of paper money. In the history of literature, it has hardly ever been described with such delicate humor how these forces intervene in world history. There is also this Mephisto in it.

People have often scoffed at the masquerade that is enacted in the second part. If one could take the time to interpret each individual figure from Goethe's mind, one would see how every thought is realized down to the smallest detail, and each would show us the way in which the powers play into everything. [They show us the reflection of Mephistophelean power.] This can be shown in a palpably realistic way. That is why Goethe shows it in a masque. There Goethe showed how the Mephistophelian powers work. He wants to take this even further, showing how Faust and Mephisto relate to each other by moving forward, awakening more and more of the slumbering powers of his soul. He wants to show at court that not only the outwardly sensual appears in the masque plays [but also the ancient, not belonging to the sensual present]: one demands to see the ancient figures of Paris and Helen. There we are led out of a realm that belongs to the sensual present into something that is not in the present in any sense.

But Goethe shows very clearly that he has insight into the conditions of existence. He knows that there is not only something transient but also something eternal in human life, and that something of what has lived as a human being in times as old as can be is present in the world: that the spirit can be found in the spiritual world. And in his picture, Goethe wants to tell us that those people who connect with their own eternal in the soul can penetrate into the realm that lies beyond what eyes can see and ears can hear. [This spiritual realm is not theoretical.] This realm is an experience for those who prepare themselves in an appropriate way. [It is] very real. And it was there for Goethe too, very present.

However, this realm differs quite significantly for the student from what the eyes can see outside. Let us first point out one difference between the two worlds: in our world, things appear with sharp contours, so that we have, so to speak, quite a bit of time to get an idea of how things are. It is different when the soul enters the spiritual world. Then a realm appears to us that shows us the entities that are there in continuous transformation. Just as our feelings change from moment to moment in our own soul, and our passions change from hour to hour, so in the spiritual world there is a continuous transformation.

Formation, transformation,
eternal sense's eternal entertainment,

as Goethe [characterizes it]. He knows that the sensual is born, crystallized out of the spiritual [world], which lies behind our world. He seeks an understandable expression for what the soul sees behind this sensory world. He found the expression.

He had once read in Plutarch. He read about the city that was in the possession of the Carthaginians and that Nicias was supposed to win back for the Romans. Therefore, the Carthaginians considered him a traitor and he was to be imprisoned. As Plutarch recounts, he then behaved as if he were possessed; he ran through the streets shouting: “The Mothers, the Mothers are pursuing me!” Thereupon no one dared to lay a hand on him. The expression ‘the Mothers’ made a special impression on the ancients. ‘The Mothers’ were goddesses who were supposed to represent those powers of the soul that were to lead into the spiritual world, to crystallize out of it like a crystal from the mother liquor. Therefore, Goethe found the name and called this realm ‘the realm of the Mothers’.

What then remains of Paris and Helen after their earthly personalities have sunk into the realm of decay? In the realm of the supersensible world, in the realm of the Mothers. Therefore, if Faust is to bring forth what is demanded of him, he must bring forth the immortal and imperishable in Paris and Helen. To do so, he must descend into the realm of the Mothers. He knows that this realm of the mothers exists and that he can find the immortal in human beings there. But how does he get there? He has not yet banished all Mephistophelian forces from himself; so Mephistopheles must give him advice on how to find the entrance, how to get from the outer world into the realm of the mothers. At his stage of development, Faust cannot yet enter the spiritual realm, although he is certain of its existence. Mephisto belongs to the spiritual world, but is not in fact an externally visible being. He rules in the sensual world, but does not belong to it. Therefore, he has understanding and even the key to lead Faust there; but he does not know what it looks like there. Where he rules, there is no understanding for the supersensible world. Mephisto is the power that presents the external world to us as an illusion: He rules in the realistic world. [This Mephistophelian power also rules today in the materialistic mindset. The error that the material world is the only true one is an influence of Mephisto, who prevents the soul from recognizing the reign of the supernatural. Realism is therefore only possible if Mephisto rules in the soul. And he can only go as far as the external material man can come. But he provides the key to the supernatural world, but can only come to the gate himself. [Thus one can go far through the outer science, up to the gate of the supersensible world, but one cannot enter through it.] Because he has no sense for the supersensible forces, Mephisto only delivers the key. This allows Faust to enter the realm of the mothers. For anyone who experiences the realm that is behind our sensory world, this is an appropriate representation.

And now the dialogue between Faust and Mephistopheles unfolds, which shows how far Goethe was able to penetrate into the relationship between the sensual and the supersensible world. Mephisto describes the realm of the mothers, where the eternal beings of Paris and Helen are, in such a way that he says: You may swim across the sea as far as you like, you see the sun, moon and stars moving; but when you enter the realm that you now want to enter, you see nothing, space seems empty to you, time seems empty. Mephistopheles sees nothing in the realm of the mothers, just as materialism sees nothing where the supernatural world is. But Faust replies to Mephistopheles, as always the spiritual researcher does to the materialist:

In your nothingness, I hope to find the all.

Thus the two stand facing each other: the eternal question of materialism and that world view that seeks to penetrate the supersensible – formulated in this dialogue. Faust even suggests that precisely because Mephisto is the power we characterized yesterday, he must also lead to lies and deception with regard to the supersensible world, and so Goethe has Faust say to Mephisto:

You speak as the first of all mystagogues,
who has ever deceived faithful neophytes
Only the other way around.

I have shown how easily one becomes entangled in error and lies when entering the spiritual world while still embraced by Mephisto, how one becomes a charlatan instead of a spiritual researcher. How justified, therefore, is the fear wherever the charlatan is near the spiritual researcher. Faust calls him a “mystagogue,” because the term used for the leader of the Eleusinian mysteries is rightly used for the charlatan who, without having made the journey, wants to point the way to the spiritual world. [This is the charlatanry that is only separated from the noblest spiritual research by a fine cobweb.] So Faust calls the mystagogue, who speaks of error from the spiritual powers that he cannot recognize – only the other way around, you speak, he says to Mephisto. While they speak of the many things they have seen, you speak of nothing. Mephisto speaks in the opposite, lying way to the spiritual world, just like those deceitful mystagogues. He speaks of it as a nothingness; they fantasize about some kind of spiritual world.

Goethe expresses himself so precisely because he speaks from the innermost experience. But that is why he also shows us what is necessary to penetrate into this world. One can, of course, if one penetrates unworthily – if one has not yet banished from one's soul everything that works as selfishness and egoism – one can indeed see many things in the spiritual world and penetrate, as Faust is now penetrating; but Goethe wants to make it clear that he is not yet inwardly mature, wants to show how difficult the path is to rid the soul of all Mephistophelean influences, wants to show how selfish passions still prevail in Faust. To be worthy, one needs a soul completely cleansed of selfishness. In Faust, personal passion still asserts itself. He wants to possess Helena for himself; but in that moment, the apparition becomes a danger to him. Even his consciousness becomes clouded – the [Helena] figure disappears into the realm of mothers.

Faust must seek another way to free himself from Mephistophelean powers, must develop his soul in such a way that he does not want to conquer the spiritual world at a double march [as in the first part]. [And even not at a single step, as he now entered the spiritual mother realm, he is not allowed to enter there.] He must conquer it in slow inner soul life, so that he follows step by step the inner spiritual conditions. If he really wants to go to Helena, then he must first himself attain full knowledge of how one can ascend again when one has descended, and must look into the secrets of how man really comes into existence. [He must look into those processes that accompany man's entry into life.]

Here, Theosophy shows that it is justified to present man as a threefold being. [How man consists of three bodies: the physical body, the soul body and the spiritual body. He who truly looks into the spiritual world with dignity sees how these three parts of man are combined.] And there, first of all, what we can see with our eyes and hear with our ears presents itself: his physicality. Then his soul shows itself. Thereupon spiritual science structures further and higher up. Today we are only interested in the spirit; so these three: body, soul, spirit. These three are here together. But anyone who looks into the spiritual world must know how they are structured out of the supersensible, these three. Only when it is shown how the immortal spirit of Helena unites with a soul and the connection from soul to body takes place, only then can Faust approach Helena, who is re-entering humanity, [then he is worthy for the spiritual world]. And from this man can see – for spiritual research shows him, but what Goethe knew: the view of the re-embodiment of the innermost human being.

It may seem quite strange when people today speak with certainty of the fact that Goethe had the idea of re-embodiment. But it is indeed the case that what lives in us returns not once, but often and often. Gradually, our time is approaching what will once be of the greatest satisfaction to our time, what will give the greatest satisfaction [where this idea, which will give people the greatest comfort, will appear to them as truth, where it will become popular. Truths only come gradually]. In Goethe's time, people had to lock such truths deep within their souls, for this and another reason: because they knew how infinitely many-faceted and ambiguous truth is [as soon as we approach the spiritual world], and how human words are so easily suited to present this truth with outlines that are too sharp. Therefore, Goethe could not but express in hints what lived in the depths of his soul. He expressed it in the second part of “Faust”. In his “Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years” he also expresses what man's innermost being is, the reappearance to be of use to one's great-grandchildren in this world:

[...] we hope that such an entelechy,

that is, the innermost essence of man,

will not leave our solar system entirely, but, when it has reached the boundary of it, will long to return in order to have an influence on earthly life and well-being again for the benefit of our great-grandchildren].

He does say it with great significance, but he hides his deepest conviction because people were not yet ready for [this idea, which will gradually and consistently emerge from natural science as well].

He expressed this idea poetically in the second part of Faust. He shows that there is a part of the human being that must join with, or be added to, the physical part in order to place the whole person in the sensory world: that there is a soul. And he was familiar with the term for this, which stands between spirit and body. The old terminology recognized it. In medieval literature it was called the “little man” in the big man, the same as what is called “purusha” in Indian literature, the little being that permeates the human being in countless personalities. It is the soul, not yet the spirit. Therefore, one who has not yet risen to the spirit can also penetrate to this soul. [To symbolically conceal this, Goethe has Wagner, who

greedily digs for treasure and is happy when he finds earthworms,

find the homunculus.

Goethe speaks very precisely, much more precisely than people are accustomed to reading. It should be explicitly pointed out that [with the homunculus] one is not dealing with something that belongs to the sensory world, but rather something that is added to it. Therefore, he coins a special image for the creation of the homunculus. All coming into being is called a creation. Here he coins a word himself, [as he had already done in “Faust” for the man striving beyond himself in the earth spirit scene, the word “superman” (Übermensch)]: “Überzeugung” (Über-zeugung) and means by Über-zeugung what extends beyond the ordinary man. That is what the scene with Wagner is about. Read the passage:

It will! The masses are stirring more clearly,
the conviction of the true, the true.

[Read what is usually written about this in the commentaries.] Goethe wanted to point out that the creation of the soul is a conviction. Such writings, which arise from inspiration, must be read carefully; they stand up to scrutiny.

[So now we have the soul.] Helena is to appear to Faust on earth. Faust wants to have her in his possession on earth. We only have the soul of Helena in the Homunculus. This soul must first unite with the body before the spirit can enter.

Now it is shown how the physical is stored in the soul. For this purpose, the homunculus must be guided into a world where it is known how the soul can be incorporated.

[He is not lacking in spiritual qualities,

— Spiritually, it is used in a trivial, soul-like way.

But it is used too much in a tangible, efficient way. So far, the glass alone gives it weight, but he would like to be more embodied.

He should be embodied by taking the natural path of how man develops; developing himself in the sense of the wisdom taught by Thales, for example. This leads him to Proteus. He must be taught and led to where the elements prevail, so that they can integrate into his soul. [He must be led into the classical Walpurgis Night, where the elements prevail, so that his soul can integrate into them.] Thales advises him

to start creation from the beginning

— to go through it —, and advises the homunculus to start with the mineral kingdom, then continue through the plant kingdom. [This is how he comes to Anaxagoras first. Then he seeks to classify the laws of the plant kingdom.] Goethe finds an expression for going through the plant kingdom:

It grunts so.

This describes the soul's passage through the plant element;

until you reach man, you have time,

it is said. [From the beginning, through the kingdoms of nature, the homunculus must embody himself.

The whole process that takes place on Walpurgis Night is the incorporation of the physical body into the soul, so that at the end we have before us the connection between the soul and the body. The soul or homunculus is characterized in such a way that when Faust, [still paralyzed by Helena], is lying in bed, he has a dream. The homunculus can look into the dream of “Faust” and describe the events. [Because he still belongs to the soul world, he could see him.] Every word in the second part of “Faust” could be a clue for the soul to merge with the body. Once this connection is made, the spirit that was present in previous embodiments can be absorbed. [At the end of the second act, the soul is connected to the body.] In the third act, the reincarnation of Helen appears to us, [after Faust had recognized in full detail how body, soul and spirit are joined together]. Now Faust has her before him as he can have her before him as an external human being.

At the same time, however, this poem shows us how Faust's soul forces are increasingly stirring. [When the mighty event of reincarnation presents itself to him, so that he recognizes it, his soul forces grow.] The characteristic of such a poem is that, alongside what is shown externally, there is an inner soul experience at the same time. By recognizing and seeing, his soul forces grow. What unfolds becomes a process of developing his soul. He makes mystical progress. We are presented with a mirror image of what Faust experiences in his soul.

From the union between Faust and Helena, Euphorion is born, the child of Faust and Helena. The aim is to show how Faust's soul has entered into a marriage, as it were, with the spiritual world. By increasing its powers, the soul feels something like a spiritual marriage. And what then arises in him appears to him as an image of the external spiritual world. [The soul feels supersensible knowledge as a child of itself with the universe. Thus Euphorion is like an image of mystical inner knowledge.]

Thus we are shown an image of the spiritual experience of Faust himself. [And at the same time, the stage at which Faust now stands is to be indicated]. He has not yet reached the stage of one who can permanently hold on to his supersensible experience; he can only catch certain glimpses of the spiritual world, then he must return to ordinary external life. And this is the experience of the developing mystic. [In a moment of celebration, the spiritual world opens up to him.] He knows how the descent from spiritual experiences affects the soul, knows that mood of the soul when what was knowledge sinks again and the soul calls for it. This is echoed in the words of Euphorion, who dies young and cries out [from the realm of shadows]:

Let me in the dark realm,
Mother, not alone!

That is the mood that our soul feels: it must, according to its insights, which have once again disappeared.

In a wonderful way, Goethe describes in the events what can appear as an inner soul experience of man as he progresses into the spiritual world. But Faust must go further when what he experiences fades away again. [The soul must regain what it once saw.] This is shown in the fact that the veil and the dress of Helen remain behind for him, Faust. Thus, such a personality retains only the memory of the spiritual experience. Faust must go further. These steps, too, are fully characterized by Goethe. First, it is shown how difficult it is – even for someone who has gained deeper insights into the spiritual – to guard against what still works in the world as the last Mephistophelian forces: Faust becomes a military leader in the [fourth] act, to accomplish a humane deed. He is not yet so far advanced that he can lead purely spiritual forces into the field. The Mephistophelian still mingles with what is around him. [It is not yet possible to see through what forces are leading Faust into the world.] Here the armor from old armories is presented. [Not only the natural, but also history], the historical appears here. The path that a person has to take to mature and to face nature is long. When contemplating nature, the powers of deception can interfere. [Yes, you can go very far with knowledge of nature and history]. The Mephistophelian powers interfere with what is presented as armor. We do not face the phenomena with pure knowledge, the fourth act should also show that.

Faust must be purified more and more, that he may be freed from all that still adheres to our desires of Mephistophelian power. That is difficult. It is the fact that he does not see them that makes it so difficult for man to free himself from these powers. [Again and again, things approach us in which Mephisto is hidden.] Faust does not yet see how the elements that can lead to deception are mixed into the actions of the mountain people. As long as we cannot see into these powers, we cannot free ourselves from them. We must bring it to the point where we are face to face with Mephisto in the flesh. Then he appears in the form in which he is depicted in all religious documents, then he appears as the tempter. Then we know what has power over us. Thus Mephisto must present himself to Faust as tempter, must emerge from unconsciousness into consciousness. Only then does Faust know what Mephistophelian power is. He must confront that power as a tempter. Goethe also indicates that in the course of his supersensible development, Faust confronts Mephisto in the form of the tempter, in that he lets him say:

But, that I may at last speak quite understandably,
Didst thou not favor anything on our surface?
In immeasurable expanses thou overlooked
The realms of the world and their glories.
But, insatiable as thou art,
Didst thou not feel any desire?

The Riches of the World and their Splendor: In the same sense as he speaks in the Gospels, Goethe has Faust face the tempter and be offered the glories of the world. [Man wants to possess them as long as the Mephistophelian power has power in him.] Man must renounce what things are. [That too is only possible in stages.] Faust learns to renounce. He has come so far that he rejects these glories [as immediate possessions; he takes them as a fief, not because he wants to possess them, but because he wants to make them fruitful]. He wants a piece of land that he can win from the sea; he wants

to stand on free ground with a free people,

wants to realize:

Action is everything.

He wants to work selflessly, not for his personal possessions, not for his own selfishness. This is the answer he gives to Mephisto, who offers him

the riches of the world and its glories.

He rejects it, even in the form of a small piece of land.

But [only one step on the way to shedding selfishness has been taken, and there is still something selfish about him]. He cannot yet renounce the unobstructed view. He still wants what he wants from the sea to appear free before his external gaze. The hut of Philemon and Baucis hinders him from this free view. This is a sign that he has not yet overcome the last stage of selfishness. But for Mephisto to once again make such a mistake, [the last remnant of Mephistophelian power must intervene in him, so to speak]: it is he who burns down the hut belonging to the old people.

Now Faust encounters something that even the advanced student knows from experience. [He falls prey to a final danger.] [He who can renounce sensual possessions but not yet miss the view.] The things of the outside world cannot harm him; not harm, want, guilt. He is freed from the fetters of these things. But that which is the last to depart from our soul and which clings until the last remnant of selfishness has vanished, that is worry. He will not be rid of it until the last remnant of selfishness has vanished. Worry! There is a far, far higher form of it, a far, far more heavenly form than the one we encounter in ordinary life. When a person tosses and turns in bed at night and cannot sleep because of worry, [this is also a sign that he has not entered the spiritual world, where he should be at night]. In the symbol, it appears: how he is not allowed into the spiritual world, the higher power of worry. Worry exists as long as he is chained to the sensual world. Man can find the key and block his way down from the spiritual world into the sensual world. If he has not yet separated himself from everything in the sensual world, then worry creeps into his life. [It blocks his access to the spiritual world. And so it happens to Faust as well.] Then it also shows that man still has something to overcome in his nature. Goethe expresses this by making Faust physically blind. Now he can no longer express this selfishness, outwardly he has gone blind. But

inside a bright light shines

– a brighter one. Now Faust is ready to enter the spiritual world.

Because Goethe knew these secrets, he spoke the word at the sealing of his package, which contained the second part of “Faust,” which contains Goethe's testament to humanity. He was satisfied because he could say to himself: I have expressed the abilities that I brought with me into this life as much as I could in this incarnation. He had come so far. Since most people will find it difficult to understand this word of the inner soul-becoming of man, from physical to spiritual vision and the possibilities that the soul must go through to ascend to such spiritual vision, Goethe had to depict in pictures what can only be expressed in words today: what he knew about the secrets of existence, about the supersensible powers of the soul life.

Now he had so much of what he desired during the Frankfurt period. But he could only present it to humanity in images because he knew how few words are suitable to express it. Because first people have to shape their words — as spiritual science is now trying to do — to express the tremendous content of the supersensible world.

Goethe was aware of the soul's inner progress. He expressed it in images. If we understand the term “mystical” correctly, this experience of the soul is called the “mystical life”. And because Goethe expresses this mystical life in his mighty testament to humanity, he allows what he has to offer humanity to fade away in the “Chorus mysticus”. That the soul has dormant powers within it, through which it can become aware of the eternal. For Goethe, this substantiates the saying that everything sensual in the world is an image, a parable for the immortal. What Goethe felt, that it is difficult to characterize the comprehensive things of the soul with words, he wanted to suggest by depicting in images what people cannot grasp. He presents what cannot be described, only seen, as an inner deed of the soul, in a very realistic way. What can be illustrated for the outer senses is done here in the second part of “Faust”. [Everything that is transient is only a parable for the immortal, everything sensual only an image for the supersensible. He felt that it is difficult to describe these transcendental phenomena in their fleeting movements with words. What is inadequate for ordinary life, he made an event in “Faust”.

The soul is certain that such a realm exists and that it can work its way up. It feels that it is something like a feminine that allows itself to be fertilized by the spiritual masculine forces of the universe. When it unites with all such creative forces of the universe, it feels itself to be the eternal feminine in relation to these forces. It is a sin against the great nature of Goethe to accept profane explanations of this sentence. [The eternal feminine of the soul allows herself to be fertilized by the cosmic forces in a cosmic marriage.] What the fertilizing of the universe brings forth is the feminine, that is what Goethe wants to say. This is what is presented to us only through experiences, what he himself has experienced - what man can experience in his mystical experiences. [Only when we have fully understood and experienced Goethe's Faust do those words resound powerfully in our ears.] Goethe's “Faust” ends with the mystical choir depicting this experience. [What a person can achieve in mystical development through spiritual research is summarized in the magnificent sentences that apply to every striving soul.

All that is transitory Is but a parable The inadequate, Here it becomes an event; The indescribable, Here it is done;

Dear attendees! When spiritual science sets itself the task of penetrating into the spiritual world that lies behind our sensual world – the world that we perceive with our senses and can understand with the mind that is connected to our brain – then this spiritual science seeks to gain strength and confidence for human life from the spiritual world in which the origin of man itself lies. And in doing so, it seeks to benefit the individual through the knowledge of what lies in the very foundations of things.

We face the spiritual world in a completely different way when we do not seek the sources of spiritual life in general, not only for our knowledge, but when we are, so to speak, dealing with the redemption of the spirit, the real spirit behind material existence, and when it can become the task of this real spirit to help it, so to speak, to break through the physical-material. How often do we not stand before the developing human being, the human being whom we see as having to work the spirit out of the hidden depths of his being, so to speak, from early childhood, the spirit that takes more and more possession of the physical limbs and the spiritual-soul abilities that are bound to the outer instrument of the body. When we as educators are dealing with this real spirit, which rests in the mystery of the human being itself and which is to be brought out, we are dealing with a still higher sense of seeking the spirit than with mere knowledge, which we seek, so to speak, as a satisfaction for the longing of our soul.

Now today the spiritual researcher is in a special position when he wants to observe the developing human being – this developing human being who gradually reveals his talents and abilities and demands that we devote ourselves to him educationally. The spiritual researcher is in a special position when faced with the developing human being because he must immediately point out one of the great facts of spiritual science with regard to this real life of the spirit, which today by no means enjoys the special favor of the educated world. This fact should be apparent to the attentive observer of life when he sees how, from the first moment of human existence, the spiritual rests, as it were, in the deep layers of the human being, how it then, from day to day, from week to week, from year to year, that he must literally see this working out in the ever-more-detailed physiognomy, gestures, movements of the individual limbs and abilities that lie deeper within the human being. We see what is working its way from hidden depths to the surface in the growing human being, and we must ask ourselves: where do we find the origin of these predispositions, these abilities that are slowly emerging? And in regard to this search, the man of today is by no means inclined to approach the facts to which spiritual research must point. We have referred to this fact in various ways. Today it is to be used only as a basis for our actual consideration. On a higher level, this fact is a repetition of another fact that has not been known for very long in the development of mankind.

I have often pointed out – oh, human memory is generally very short in this regard – that in the 17th century not only laymen but also learned naturalists were convinced that matter, mud for example, could develop animals, fish and the like out of itself, without a germ of life having been placed in this mud – out of itself. It was a tremendous turning point for science when in the 17th century – just think, only in the 17th century! – the great naturalist Francesco Redi first put forward the proposition that opened up new, worldwide vistas for scientific knowledge: Living things can only come from living things. If you believe, he said, that living creatures can arise from river mud, then you have not examined it closely enough, otherwise you would have found that the source of life lies in the germ and that this germ only draws matter to itself in order to emerge. It is often the case with truths, as it was with Francesco Redi. He only narrowly escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno, because he too was considered a heretic. Today we can go from the most radical Haeckelians to Haeckel's opponents: within certain limits, the sentence “Living things can only come from living things” is recognized everywhere. It is taken for granted. That is the fate of great truths. First they are considered heresies, then, after some time, taken for granted. People then cannot understand how anyone could ever have believed otherwise.

The task of spiritual science today is to advocate this principle at a higher level. It is an inaccurate observation to say that what struggles into existence in the developing human being as something mysterious and expresses itself more and more distinctly in gestures and facial features comes merely from the inherited traits of the father and mother and so on. If one proceeds scientifically, this cannot be explained from these inherited traits any more than the emergence of the earthworm from the matter of the river mud can be assumed without an earthworm germ. Today, spiritual science shows that for human life, what comes into existence as the core of a human being through birth must be traced back to another, a completely soul-like existence, in which its spiritual and soul germ lies. And just as the earthworm germ draws upon external physical substance to increase in size, so too, in the human being, this spiritual-soul germ draws upon the qualities and powers of the parents and ancestors to develop with their help.

We must trace back the spiritual-soul to the spiritual-soul. We must trace the soul that exists in man back to a soul germ, just as we must trace the spiritual that develops in man back to a spiritual germ. And by accepting this, it leads us to the fact of repeated earthly lives, which today not only annoys so many people, but is felt by many people as a dream or a fantasy, as something quite abominable. The doctrine of repeated earthly lives tells us that the life we are now living, in which our abilities and qualities unfold, is a repetition of earlier earthly lives and the basis of later lives. The stages of life in which we are enveloped in the physical body are interchanged with other forms of existence, in order to bring into the spiritual life what we have taken in during the present life, what we have gone through in the school of life life, and then, after this has happened, to enter again into a new physical existence, in which a germ of life again draws from the substance what it needs in terms of qualities and abilities in order to live itself into a body.

We can therefore say: We look spiritually when we see the human being emerging from the mysterious foundations of his existence, to a spiritual-soul core of being that unfolds according to his previous life and develops in the present existence by drawing on the inherited characteristics of father and mother and their ancestors. This is another truth that will slowly become part of human education. Today, of course, they no longer burn heretics, but people still say that those who claim such things know nothing about exact science, whereas spiritual science is based on the most exact science of all. They are branded as heretics in the way that heretics are branded today. But the truth of reincarnation will become established and accepted, and will no longer be questioned by people capable of judgment, but will be taken for granted.

Thus, we must look back from what appears in a child as developing abilities to what a person has acquired in previous lives on earth and expresses in this life. If we consider present-day science, we must say that a certain lack of clarity prevails everywhere, in all fields. Science believes it need only point to what comes from the father and mother, from grandparents and so on, and is happy if it can show that the qualities that are expressed here or there were also present in this or that way in the father or grandfather.

Let us look at the whole situation of what crystallizes out of the center of the human being, brought over from a previous existence; let us look at the relationship of this core to the inherited traits. When we consider everything that the human being brings into existence in terms of qualities and talents, we can see two factually related facts in the human soul. The first is what occurs in a person in terms of both mental qualities and abilities – the majority of mental qualities and abilities are independent of each other in some respect, so that one does not depend on the other. This is shown by the simple fact that someone can be very musical and yet have no aptitude for mathematics or any other field of science. An ability can shine in our soul without our being able to say that other abilities are present with it. In this respect, the individual abilities are independent of each other. But the same is also the case with regard to the [mental] qualities. A person can have a certain pride alongside other quite pleasant qualities of the soul. And again, pride is not dependent on the other qualities. That is one thing when we want to take a look at the human soul.

The second fact is that the abilities and qualities that a person has in his soul are held together by a certain center that we call the ego and that they are either in harmony or disharmony with each other. All the abilities and qualities that work together through the ego are, to a certain extent, independent of each other and work together through the fact that each person has a special core of being. If we keep to these two facts, we can, with healthy observation of life, get a clear view of how the qualities and abilities of parents and ancestors are inherited by children and descendants. The individual qualities and abilities really do appear to come from the ancestors to the descendants. On the one hand, it shows us that if a boy is haughty, he has inherited this haughtiness from his mother; another is musical, we find the same disposition in his father or in his mother. But the way in which he processes the qualities, how he relates them, we see clearly depends on his own core of being. And the more closely we examine this human life, the more the nature of this dependence becomes apparent. We can best understand this if we say: the individual qualities – pride, humility, compassionate heart and so on – are inherited by the human being from his ancestors, including the talents, but the way in which he combines them in his soul leads back to his earlier existence, to his spiritual and soul essence with all that has been achieved by his soul in his earlier existence. We can then see much more clearly how the conditions are when we observe this peculiar way of working with the inherited traits. I should also mention that the laws of heredity are laws that cannot be investigated by spiritual science in the same way as physical and chemical laws can. Therefore, I ask you to bear in mind that it is not an objection to a law of spiritual science if it is said: Yes, if you look into life, it shows that heredity does not happen in the way it has been said here. But we must take the laws as physical laws are taken. For example, physics teaches that the path traversed by a thrown stone represents a parabola; the stone falls in a parabola. But the resistance of the air causes the path of the thrown stone not to be an exact parabola. If someone comes and says that the path of the thrown stone does not form a parabola, that is not correct. The physical law is valid, and we only have the possibility of arriving at an understanding of the stone's trajectory by accepting a general law. And if someone says, “Yes, but the stone flies to the side, a gust of wind has blown it away,” the presence of the wind does not contradict the physical law as such. In this sense, the laws of spiritual science are to be taken; they can be modified by the circumstances, but they still apply in such a way that we can only understand the processes through these laws if we know them. Let us now consider the human being in terms of his characteristics, by dividing the human soul itself into two areas, which can clearly be distinguished from one another in human life. Wherever you look in human life, you will find clear distinctions everywhere. One area can be described as the area of interests that a person has, where their attention, sympathy and antipathy, their affects, drives and passions are directed. This area of the nature of will and affect is one area. The other is the area that can be called the intellectual, the rational, that is, the way in which a person forms ideas, whether he is rich or poor in concepts and images, whether these are flexible, whether a person can form symbols or whether he is unimaginative, whether he has the intellectual elements for one area or the other. These two areas should initially be distinguished in the developing human being. With the same precision with which we gain physical laws through healthy observation of life, we can find laws for these two areas that reveal the connection between the ancestors and the descendants.

We see that everything concerning the sphere of interests, affections, sympathy and antipathy, passions, that is, the instinctive direction of man, can always be traced back only to paternal inheritance, whereas that which concerns the formation of the elements of intellect, of the rational, can be traced back to maternal inheritance. Such laws result from a faithful observation of life. Of course, it is not possible to go into the hundreds of cases that could easily be cited from a healthy observation of life. It can only be pointed out that life everywhere confirms that we get the intellectual and imaginative side from our mother's side, and the spirited element, the interest in whether we are lively or casual or apathetic, comes more from our father's side.

I cannot go into general confirmatory considerations at this point, but can only illustrate what has been said with examples. One great example needs to be mentioned: Goethe, who characterized himself so beautifully in the words:

From my father I have the stature,
the serious conduct of life,
from my mother the cheerful disposition
and the desire to tell stories.

We can find this in hundreds of cases when we observe world history or life. And because a faithful observation of life confirms these words everywhere, they make life appear so full of light.

But we still approach the subject far too abstractly when we look at life only in general terms. I said that in general the intellectual element can be traced back to inheritance from the mother's side. But it is not that simple. Instead, the qualities that are inherited undergo a transformation by metamorphosing. Spiritual science is still not fully recognized today, otherwise people would already be able to see how much it can benefit the natural sciences. It is instructive enough to observe how one natural force is transformed into another, for example heat into electricity, but spiritual science transfers this way of observing to other areas as well, and it will say that, for example, in the field of inheritance, one can only get to the bottom of it if one considers the transformation of characteristics.

And here it can be seen how maternal and paternal qualities enter into relationships when they are passed on to the children. We see how maternal qualities, when they are passed on, tend to pass over to the sons. If we look at the soul qualities in the mother, we can say: These soul qualities tend to pass over to the sons, but they tend to change in the process. What is basic [in soul terms] in the mother, she may not be able to develop into particular abilities because she lacks the organs. After all, you need the appropriate predispositions to do so. While the mother has to remain within the narrowest circle with her soul stirrings, we see how, in the sons, the mother's predispositions, as it were, shoot into the physical realm one step further, so that the same predispositions arise again in the son. And the son then shows us in his abilities, through which he can work in the world, what was predisposed in the soul of the mother. The mother has it as a soul disposition; the son has it in such a way that he can let it flow into the physical organs in order to carry it out into the world, in order to bring it to the world in the form of achievements. We see the soul qualities of the mother transformed in the sons right down to the physical level.

So we have the sentence: the soul qualities of the mother have the tendency to move into the physical organs of the sons and to confront us in turn in the soul forces bound to these organs. It only takes a healthy look at life and at the general development of humanity to find this confirmed. We can look to Goethe again, or to other personalities, for example, Hebbel. This peculiar natural dramatist Hebbel, who was never able to communicate with his father, had a great poetic gift; he shows us this gift in such a way that he had the simple primitive ability for it from his mother, who was just a simple bricklayer's wife. We can follow this in his diary entries. And this gift is manifested in him in such a way that the spiritual nature of the mother has been transformed into an organ system, descended into the physical system of the son, where it manifests itself in this way.

The remarkable thing, however, is that faithful observation of life reveals the opposite tendency in the paternal qualities, which have become more integrated into the physical, which rest more in the whole personality, including the physical predispositions. The qualities of the father tend to ascend by one degree in the daughter and to appear in the soul of the daughter as transformed into spiritual-soul qualities. Thus, something that is sober and pedantic in the father appears lovable in the daughter's soul.

I would like to give a brief example of how this relationship manifested itself in Goethe. One can point out that in fact the old Frau Rat Goethe had the art of storytelling in her soul; she had all the mobility, the imaginative gift, and we see how this particular type of gift was expressed in her circle of friends. We see how this type of gift was highly developed in the son, to the point of becoming a basic predisposition, so that it led to world-shaking facts. On the other hand, we see the father, the old Goethe. Anyone who, like me, has spent more than thirty years studying Goethe and everything related to him will not be misunderstood in a superficial way when he characterizes him as saying: “From my father I have the stature, the serious conduct of life.” The son takes over this character foundation from his father without transformation.

The old Goethe is a thoroughly sober, alert, honest man, even great within certain limits, but a man who, I might say, by the very way he comes across as a personality, cannot get along in life, cannot achieve anything worthwhile; he cannot get a proper position in the Frankfurt Council, he stops halfway. His character affects even his physical abilities. Let us now imagine this translated into the soul: how would it confront us in the soul - this stopping halfway, this never-ending? It would be possible for it to appear in the soul in such a way that it has the need on the one hand to join others, but never wants to make up its mind and repeatedly shies away from a decision. Here we have, as soul qualities, what we encounter as intellectual sobriety in the character of Goethe. But we can also have sobriety before us in its sentimental, soul-like transformation. It is easy to find where the outer qualities of the old Goethe live on in the soul: in Goethe's sister Cornelia, who, however, died young. In her, we see the entire soul qualities as a transformation of the qualities of the old Goethe. And now we also understand why Goethe, who received the external qualities from his father but what really mattered to him, what his greatness was based on, from his mother, could not really get along with his father, how the two repelled each other. In his sister, however, these qualities – transformed into kindness, passion and slight vanity – had such an effect that she became a dear companion for him, in whom the [qualities of the father], transformed into the soul, stood beside him. The whole way in which Goethe's life in his parents' house presents itself to us shows how precisely the abilities tied to active organ systems pass from father to daughter.

One could also point out that not only the father, but the entire paternal ancestry comes into consideration, and likewise on the other side the maternal. We see how Goethe repeats the sunny imagination and mystical character of his maternal ancestors – transformed into higher gifts. And in the nature of his sister, whom Goethe esteemed so highly and of whom he had to say that she lacked faith, hope and love, for she was a problematic nature who also withered away early, we see the paternal ancestry. But here we must think of these qualities, which were active in the sister, as having been transformed from the physical into the soul. We know, of course, that one of Goethe's uncles turned out to be a good-for-nothing. He was such a person that one must say of him that he had no head for anything and therefore could achieve nothing. We see the entire dilettantishness of this ancestry, which only in Goethe's father attained a certain greatness, transposed into the soul in the problematic nature of Goethe's sister.

If one wanted to, one could find mothers throughout history who transfer what they have in their souls into the physical traits of their sons. That is why mothers are so often depicted, so that we may understand the sons. Thus, in the fourth book of Maccabees, the mother of the seven sons who were killed is depicted precisely in her peculiar state of mind, which in the sons manifests itself as a stage-lowered, physical predisposition. In order to appreciate this fact, one must proceed according to laws, just as one would when investigating the dynamic force of a gust of wind. And here it can often be shown that the aptitude of a son, with all its intimacy, can be traced back to the nature of the soul struggles of the mother. Perhaps there are few cases as interesting as the relationship that the soul of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's mother had - through her character, through her sad fate - to the whole way of her son's poetry. And when we consider how closely Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was bound to his mother's personality, we see in the wonderfully noble, unassuming religiosity, in the delicate way of facing life, and in the full comprehension of tragic situations, what remained of the mother's soul.

In this way one could cite hundreds of great minds in history and intellectual life and of people we know in our ordinary daily lives and everywhere one would find this law confirmed. One can therefore say that what one is as a father tends to appear in the soul of the daughter and what one is as a mother in the disposition of the sons. A light spreads over numerous life circumstances when we survey this law; and much becomes understandable to us about the connection and the motives of different people.

What does spiritual research tell us about inheritance? It tells us that it would be a mistake to look only for inherited traits in a person. Rather, we have to go back, alongside all inherited characteristics, to the central spiritual-soul core of the human being, which comes from previous lives and integrates and incorporates the characteristics it finds, just as the earthworm germ integrates the external substance, absorbs this substance and enlarges itself according to its own nature. Thus we see in the human core of being that which is drawn in, as if by magnetic forces, into a family where the qualities in the father and other ancestors are suitable for this soul core, so that through the appropriate blending of these qualities and their transformation, the soul can express what its own inner being is. A soul that has acquired the ability in past lives, let us say, to achieve something poetic, for which it needs the gift of imagination, is attracted to a mother who has the gift of storytelling - the gift of thinking in images and, with a slight mobility of soul, transforming these images. But when this ability is passed down from mother to son, there is a tendency to carry these qualities down into the physical, and the spiritual and soul core must blend what it finds in the way of predispositions. The father's character traits are carried up into the soul, into the souls of the daughters, where they are transformed, but when they appear directly in the sons, they are not transformed.

We have to look at more complicated relationships if we want to explain the connection between how the actual human core being is attracted to the qualities of certain persons who then become its parents, and how this core being then mixes and harmonizes these qualities so that it can live out its own essence in them. Spiritual science, however, not only sees what is mixed and transformed from the qualities and dispositions of the ancestors, but it also directs our attention to the spiritual essence that we see coming into existence and must trace back to earlier forms of existence in which it has acquired what enables it to mix the qualities and dispositions that it can receive in the line of inheritance.

Now one could say that spiritual science is extremely easy to refute; one need only apply the most trivial concepts and it can be refuted with the greatest of ease. In an afterword to the small pamphlet “Theosophy and Christianity”, I myself pointed out how easy it is to refute certain presentations of Theosophy if one is determined to start from the prejudices of the present day. The examples given there could easily be multiplied. Regarding what are regarded as hereditary traits, Theosophy must point out the human individuality. It must say: The healthy human mind has the same interest in each individual human individuality, in each spiritual-soul essence of the human being, as it has in the animal in the species, in an animal species. We show the same interest in every single human being as we do, for example, in the lion species. We are as interested in human individuality as we are in animal species. You only have to misunderstand this sentence, or, if it is written, not read it properly, to refute it with tremendous ease.

Someone may object: But what do these spiritual researchers claim? They seem to be unaware that you can just as easily write the biography of a dog or a cat with all their individual characteristics as you can of a human being; you can also list all the differences between the individual animals. It is extremely easy to cite such a thing against spiritual science. But it has never been claimed that this is not possible with spiritual science. I myself was in a school class where a teacher tried to write the biography of a steel spring. You can transfer everything. But one thing can be said: the interest we show for an individual cat and so on is not the same interest as the one we show for a fellow human being. The interest we take in an individual of a species of animal can even be greater than the interest we have for an individual human being. But it is a different interest, not the same; it arises from different psychological roots. Spiritual science requires that the concepts be clearly defined. If someone does not do this, then they can put forward the kind of refutations that can be found on the street. We are dealing with a spiritual-soul core in the human being, and spiritual science does not merely trace this back to the parents and their ancestors, but says: He draws the qualities of these parents to himself, just as the earthworm germ draws the substance it needs for its growth. Now one can ask of spiritual science: Is there something that proves, and that from the human course of life, that such a spiritual-soul core of being actually exists? From the observation of the individual human life, it will be difficult to distinguish between what is nature of the cover and what is the core of the being. Regarding the individual human being, we take the view that the interaction of the covers and the core of the being unfolds gradually. We cannot easily distinguish this in the individual human being, but if we look at a larger, broader basis, at the human being in general, we see that people are very different from one another in terms of their development. Let us assume that this information from spiritual science is correct. Then, for example, there is a core of being in a person that goes back to a life in which this person acquired a strong individuality. Such an essential core will have a lot of trouble overcoming the resistance that the inherited traits present to it. It will have a lot of trouble developing these traits in such a way that they correspond to its spiritual abilities. It takes a long time for a strong essential core to integrate and develop the abilities that come from heredity. On the other hand, a spiritual core that has not yet acquired many abilities of its own will easily blend in with the characteristics of heredity.

This means that people who are stronger individuals, who have a strong inner core and who come from a previous life with a wealth of inner substance, are only slowly able to overcome the resistance that comes from heredity. And here we recall the fact that great minds are not so-called child prodigies, but that teachers often mistake them for the opposite. We only have to think of Alexander von Humboldt, who was considered stupid in his youth. His essential core simply took a long time to bring out the abilities resting within him. A rich core of being had come over to him, and it had a long time to do before it had reworked the characteristics of heredity according to the content of his soul. But through this soul content, which has long worked on the characteristics of heredity, something is also achieved that can achieve great things in humanity. On the other hand, we see souls that, so to speak, bring little with them from previous lives. They will quickly find their way into their new shells and will easily develop the characteristics of heredity. These are the prodigies who seem to be the most talented in the first years of life, but then very soon cease to be so.

Let us assume that the spiritual core of the being has to work its way through what is offered to it from the outside. It only takes a clear, correct observation of life to recognize that physical characteristics in particular are based on heredity. We can see the form of inheritance in the fingerprints. On the other hand, that which is seated as a germ in the soul will be all the less explainable by overcoming the inherited traits through external means, the more the qualities in question have their seat in the interior of the soul. This is why that which belongs to the subjective realm of the soul, the talents for music, mathematics, and so on, appear in the earliest years, as the numerous cases of child prodigies prove. On the other hand, talents that require more inheritance to be overcome will emerge later. In short, everything that comes to us in the course of a proper observation of life proves that a core essence of the human being emerges from all that seeks to envelop us as inherited traits. If we observe people carefully, we can see how the greatest individualities very slowly overcome the resistance of the outer human will. We do not want to focus on these facts today, but they can be seen among the greatest individuals.

I would like to remind you once again of Goethe. If we really understand his greatness, we can see in him how he stands before us as an old Goethe at the full height of life, at the height of art and wisdom; we can see that he has used his whole life to carve out his individuality against the opposing forces. And only the short-sighted could say [about Goethe's late works] that Goethe has grown old. Today, when judging great personalities, we can observe the tendency to exaggerate them in relation to their youth and to belittle them in relation to old age. We can even hear it said that the works of old age are old, dull things, and that those of youth are fresh. A book is being published today in which the true poets, the true individualities, are presented to readers from their youthful works.

People do not really consider that it is perhaps only through their own peculiarity that they are able to understand youth better. They would do better to go along with the individuality in question and not assume that the individuality has become duller in old age. This has already happened to Goethe during his lifetime. People have read the first part of his “Faust” and said: There is bubbling youthfulness in it; but what Goethe wrote in his old age is such that one must be lenient with the aging. But anyone who looks at what Goethe presents with this understanding will say: There, in the first part of “Faust,” Goethe's full individuality has not yet emerged; we see how he is still working his way through, and we see how this strong individuality, which educates itself throughout its entire life, works its way through the resistance of its covers. This is why Goethe says of the critics of his “Faust”:

There they praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars,
In their favor;
The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
The scum thinks,
One would no longer be!

Anyone who is familiar with the development of human nature knows that the stronger the individuality is, the longer it takes to work through.

We can already see a difference between what is the innermost core of our being, the origin of which we have to look for somewhere else, and what is the outer shell that joins this core of our being. We see this difference particularly when we look at the relationship between parents and children. Throughout life, the human being is in a kind of development. This development is an ascending and a descending one. The former includes the time up to the thirtieth, fortieth, fiftieth year, when the core of our being works from within, so that what we go through in pain and suffering becomes life experience and expresses itself in our physicality, in our expressions and gestures. In these stages of life we always see the inner core of the being working on the outer shells and finally shaping them plastically, so that we can speak of the fact that, in an ascending line, the human being becomes more and more similar to his inner core. If we look at a person in their fortieth year and consider the physiognomy that they have been working on for forty years, we can say that the outer appearance is more similar to the inner being than it was in the twentieth year, when it was still inside, still a mere ability, and striving out from the inside out. Thus, in the physical body, a person is more similar to himself in later life than in earlier life. He is more similar to himself in the fortieth year than in the twentieth. This explains an important fact of life, which in turn appears important for many external facts. What is this fact, and why is there such a difference [between the different ages]?

For the observer of life, there is a difference between children of younger parents and those born later in marriage. Only those who are not observers of life do not notice this difference. The core of a child's being, who has moved into a young couple, will find little resistance in its shells because the parents have not yet worked much into their physicality. The individuality will be able to work more into their shells; they do not yet find such a plastic expression of the qualities in them that reproduce themselves in the line of inheritance. Therefore, we can say that children conceived by young parents are better able to shape the whole person from their own individuality. Children born later in a marriage are those whose own core of being is weaker and are therefore drawn to very specific traits that father or mother have imprinted. Thus we see that children born later generally bear more of their father and mother than those born earlier, because the qualities that go into inheritance have already become pronounced in the parents' bodies. We see how the work of the parents on themselves shows in different ways in the children. Strong individualities, which are less similar to the parents, are the children born of the dawn of a young marriage. Less strong individualities, which are more similar to the parents, are those born to older couples.

Spiritual science throws light on such facts in the same way that natural science throws light on natural facts. And if we have this law, we have the means to educate people in a way that is practical for life. Then we acquire a very specific attitude. Anyone who, as a teacher of children, acquires this attitude flowing from spiritual science always says to himself: You must look at what has come into existence through birth and is working its way out more and more like a sacred puzzle to be solved; it is something that comes from previous lives. To do this, you have to look at the ancestry, where the characteristics come from. From this there arises for the educational eye that harmony of will and ability, that sense of responsibility towards the developing human being as a sacred riddle to be solved. When we absorb such wisdom, which places us in this way with the pupil, then that seriousness is imprinted in us, which - without theorizing - finds the educational tact to really solve the riddle in each particular case. In each individual case, we have to act in accordance with this sense of tact in order to properly inspire the mind. We then take leave of the popular phrases of pedagogy.

Which phrase can be heard more often today than that: You have to educate the individuality of the human being. You must educate individually, not in a stereotyped way, and you must not do anything that would contradict the individuality. But anyone who truly observes life wonders: what exactly is individual education? This word remains a mere phrase as long as one does not know how the core of a being relates to what surrounds it. That is why what is said about individual education is just empty words. In most cases, we are unable to do much with them. We have to educate in the way that the demands of practical life arise. We have to realize that we cannot get by with these empty words, but that we have to say: we have to educate from what is assessed. Above all, we are called upon to give the human being what makes him a useful member of human society. He must be able to do what is demanded within certain circles of people, what his time and circumstances demand of him. The phrase of individuality must not shake this demand. Those who see how spiritual science understands the connection between the human being and the whole world are not at all powerless in the face of life's demands. It may be necessary, for example, that a son who has this or that quality takes this or that position in life; family circumstances demand it. Anyone who really looks into the laws of things knows that people are not so one-sided that it can be said that they are only useful for this or that. They can be made useful if not only one side is developed. People are more versatile than is usually assumed. And anyone who really looks through the combination of inherited traits to the spiritual and psychological core of the being is able to connect the various extraordinarily instructive processes with what presents itself as a real process to the spiritual researcher. If one seeks what the individuality of the pupil is, then the practical demands of life make it necessary to look at individuality differently than it is usually viewed in a stereotyped way. It must be said that anyone who allows themselves to be inspired by spiritual-scientific knowledge will, as if flowing into their entire attitude, acquire a fine sense of tact and not only a sense of responsibility, but also all the skills they need to do the right thing at the appropriate moment. It is quite remarkable that whenever you make such assumptions, you always know what to do at the right moment. To give an example: A child [was given to me to educate] who was denied all talents because he had developed in a strange way up to the age of eleven, so that one could say: “Nothing will come of this rascal; he has not even learned to read and write properly!” When this child was entrusted to me and I began to have a certain influence over him, I could say: “All this is only deceptive appearance.” The only difficulty was to break through the outer shell in order to reveal the inner core of the child's being. The core of the being had to be uncovered. Twenty years have passed since that time, and it has been shown that it was as I said. In a short time it was possible to help the spiritual core of the being to break through and to prove what has been said here.

Thus, the study of the developing human being shows how necessary it is not to remain with the outer, physical body alone, but to look through to the spiritual, which is everywhere behind the sensual and which we can see if we acquire the ability to do so. It is important for our knowledge in this direction as well if we can acquire concepts and ideas such as those found in spiritual science.

It is important for our practical lives that we believe in the spirit and seek it behind physical matter; this becomes clear to us when we stand before the developing human being and have to solve the real puzzle in education of how the spirit pours into physical matter. Spiritual science is there not only to talk about the three concepts of body, soul and spirit in a theoretical way, but to fertilize practical life in such a way that a direct result can be achieved through proper education.

When we look at the human being in this way, then, by participating in his development through education, the human soul is imbued with the high truth of the human being's mission in his earthly existence. Then we feel something of the fact that, although we human beings are fully immersed in the physical-sensual world, we are called upon to bring into this physical-sensual world that which we can draw from the spirit. From this realization, we can say: We are surrounded by physical and sensory phenomena; but behind them stands the active spirit. In the developing human being, we encounter the physical human being in indeterminate talents and indeterminate physiognomy, but at the same time we encounter the spirit, which has to struggle through physical matter and which we have to help to come into existence in the physical world from an enigmatic state. Wherever we look at our practical life's work, man is called upon to impress spirit on matter. The words in which we may summarize today's reflection are true everywhere. The spirit struggling for existence also shows us the truth that can be said with these words:

It presses to the human sense
From the depths of the world, full of mystery
The material abundance.
It flows into human souls
From the heights of the world, full of content
The spirit's clarifying light.
They meet in the human heart
To a wisdom-filled reality.

Dear attendees,

Of the many visitors to the Goetheanum in Dornach, which can be reached from Basel by conventional means of transport in less than an hour, many ask: What are the tasks of this Goetheanum? What goals does it want to serve? Well, ladies and gentlemen, if one had to speak of these goals and tasks of the Goetheanum without any connection to the great, serious tasks of our time, it would hardly be worthwhile to speak about them in public. But this Goetheanum in Dornach does want to be connected in its tasks with the great tasks of humanity in the present day. And it is this connection that I would like to speak about today, at least in a few words.

Those who not only see the Goetheanum from the outside, but get to know the way of life there a little, will be able to notice that two human activities, which otherwise occur quite separately in life, are thoroughly connected there, and perhaps the external signature of this Goetheanum initially experiences its characteristics through this.

We organized courses for the School of Spiritual Science last fall. I already mentioned them in my previous lecture. During these courses, representatives of the most diverse specialized sciences expressed themselves about the ways in which their individual specialized sciences could be enriched by what could be brought into them from the spiritual science cultivated at the Goetheanum. So science has been cultivated there, but science in the sense of spiritual science. Besides that, however, one can see how artistic natures and artistic people have been working on this Goetheanum for years, and the whole building has come about in its present, not yet completed forms through these artistic people. And one could see how this fall, the individual scientists and also personalities from practical life spoke from one spirit, which was absolutely the same as that from which the artistic people have given this building its forms, its images and so on for years. That is what makes this building, the Goetheanum in Dornach, so unique: everything that has been artistically worked on is inspired by the same spirit as everything that is to be scientifically achieved there. This unified spirit of science and art is what characterizes the Goetheanum in the first place.

But there is a third element, too, that unites with this. All those who have spoken there about the most diverse scientific questions, as well as about the most diverse branches of practical life, and all those who have been working artistically for years and now, they are deeply imbued in their minds with the fact that what they speak, what they work, what they somehow accomplish is in some way connected with the great tasks of the human being. Everything that is to be thought on a large scale, and everything that is to be achieved in detail, may well be said to have a kind of religious spirit. Not some obscure sectarian movement, as the detractors of the Dornach building say, is what drives its essence, but what is being driven, it is driven out of a serious scientific spirit, but in such a way that this serious scientific spirit can become so alive at the same time that it can express itself artistically. And that which expresses itself scientifically and artistically from two completely different sides carries, at the same time, not in a sectarian sense, not even in some limited confessional sense, but in the very general human sense, a kind of religious devotion, a kind of religious veneration for the thing to which one devotes oneself.

But we can go even deeper, my dear audience, and we can hear this unity of work in Dornach. We can see how, admittedly, in other forms, in other ways, science is spoken in a way that is different from that which is otherwise the case in our educational institutions. And the scientific language is spoken in such a way that, for example, the individual sciences enter into a dialogue with each other, mutually illuminating and clarifying each other, so that the narrow-minded spirit of specialization and of specialized science recedes before what is to be striven for by all the individual sciences together as the general human. Speaking scientifically, I would like to say it is spoken from a different tone.

And if you then walk around the building, if you look at the building inside, at the painting and the sculpture, and ask yourself: in what style was this building erected? Then you won't get the usual answer. When you usually walk into an educational institution, you hear this or that science presented from its particular, specialized point of view. You then look at the building. You ask: in which style was it built? You get the answer: in the Renaissance style, in the antique style, in the Gothic style and the like. You cannot get such an answer in relation to the architectural style of the Goetheanum in Dornach. The only answer that can be given is that the Goetheanum in Dornach was built in the same style in all its individual forms, and that this is reflected in the work being done there in the various sciences. The same spirit from which scientific life springs is the same spirit that is embodied in the forms. Dornach has its own architectural style, and everything that meets the visitor when he enters the building through the portal on one side, looks around at the forms that surround him, and then listens to the word that is to reveal to him what science is being practised here, is one.

This unity – esteemed attendees – is what characterizes Dornach. And with that, this Goetheanum in Dornach certainly presents itself as a contradiction, but I believe that the world will gradually realize that it is a beneficial contradiction to the disunity of our present life, this life, from which the individual activities and the individual ways of thinking and looking at things come from the most diverse angles, mutually feuding and certainly not growing together into a harmonious unity. For it is precisely this that is so disastrous in our time, that the individual activities that arise from the most diverse [specialized areas] of our lives cannot somehow come together to form a harmonious whole. When you look at things this way, it may initially seem as if this Goetheanum in Dornach should, so to speak, be a kind of model for the way in which the individual activities of life should work together harmoniously. However, my dear audience, it does not want to be just a kind of model, it wants to be a place, this Goetheanum, in which and from which work is done in such a way that this harmony can also enter into the tasks of our time and that a rising life can arise from the declining life that threatens us.

To understand this, however, we need to take a closer look at the way in which modern civilization has developed over the last three to four centuries. The two most significant characteristics of this civilization – I have often emphasized them in lectures that I have been privileged to give here at the same place, and today I want to emphasize them again from a certain point of view – these two most significant characteristics are that, for three to four hundred years, a scientific life, especially a natural scientific life, has emerged in the development of humanity, which has become dominant for the broadest circles in relation to feeling, willing, and in relation to way of thinking. One should not deceive oneself about this! Of course, many people today are firmly attached to old confessional traditions or the like with their views and also act out of impulses that arise from these traditional confessions. But more and more has spread, especially in the course of the nineteenth century and in the first two decades of this twentieth century, that which has flowed from the authority of modern scientific life.

What man thinks today about the structure of the world, about what lives and moves in the various kingdoms of nature, and finally about himself, is expressed by what he regards as the authoritative science. And within certain denominations, they have endeavored to strictly separate so-called belief from science because they wanted to save something for the soul that goes beyond the acceptance of this science. But because they did not dare to extract anything from this science itself that could also say something about the eternal in the soul, about the higher meaning, about the supersensible meaning of human life, they wanted to found, so to speak, a place in the soul to which science has no access, from which they did not want to elicit that which speaks about the highest matters of the soul. They wanted to secure the place of faith so that they could at least assume something about this eternal aspect of the soul, this supersensible aspect of the human being, which science is not allowed to assume or which science describes as something beyond its limits.

But this is not intended to say the slightest thing against the tremendous progress of this science in recent centuries. For — my dear audience — spiritual science, as it is represented here, does not dare to use any kind of superstitious grounds to bring anything against science as such, but it recognizes in the fullest sense of the word what this scientific development of the last centuries has brought. It appreciates what has been achieved by science through observation of the external world in connection with experimentation and in connection with the combining intellect. And the spiritual science meant here should not be confused with all the dilettantism that arises from mystical or other backgrounds, which also want to satisfy human souls, which only oppose science because they have never come into any kind of contact with it. The spiritual science represented here fully takes into account — even if it miscalculates in some respects — it fully takes into account the progress of modern science, and it absolutely wants to follow a path that yields to nothing in terms of the strictness of the method, the conscientiousness of the way of thinking of modern science.

But, my dear attendees, anyone who engages with this modern science in all its various fields, and with all that it has brought, will ultimately come to a very specific conclusion – a conclusion that is no less significant because it, in a sense, justifies skepticism.

You see, esteemed attendees, I myself have been met with much hostility for the reason that, before I turned to what I had to say on the basis of anthroposophical knowledge, I tried to express myself in purely scientific works in a wide variety of fields. I did this because I believe that today a higher world view should not offer itself to the world at all without first justifying itself by having looked around in the most diverse scientific fields. But when one delves into these various scientific fields, one says to oneself: Nevertheless, we have not only developed the external methods of observation in a conscientious way, not only advanced the combining mind and the art of experimentation, but have also come to everything that the armed senses provide us through the telescope, through the microscope, through the X-ray apparatus, through the spectral apparatus and so on, and so on – even though we have developed all this, indeed precisely because we have developed all this, the riddles of life and the world have not diminished for us, but increased. And anyone who approaches this scientific development of recent times with an open mind knows that, basically, with every glance through the telescope, through the microscope, with every result of the X-ray apparatus or the spectroscope, it is not actually solutions to what we call the riddles of life and humanity, but new questions and ever new riddles, and that with each such result, the human soul must increasingly ask for something that can at least to some extent provide the solution to such riddles. Thus, it is not really solutions that have presented themselves to the triumphs of modern science, but new life puzzles and new questions have arisen, and those who engage in the scientific life of the present with an open mind are particularly confronted with these to a greater extent. This is on the one hand, in terms of the stream of knowledge; the development on this side has brought us a sum of new riddles, new questions. But we can also look around us on the other side and find what the last centuries have brought, if we look at it impartially, in a special light. It is fair to say that what science has given us has also shown us practical results. It has brought us our modern technology, and we may say: Most of what surrounds us today at every turn in life, all that technology has brought us in such significant advances, all of it is a result of the last few centuries and it is basically derived from the results of modern science. Technology has become part of life, and life has become highly dependent on technology. In a sense, can we not also say that, just as scientific development has presented us with puzzles and questions on the other side, so too does modern technological progress present us with puzzles and questions in relation to technology?

We are basically in the middle of these puzzles and questions, because when we look at the great advances in technology, we have to say to ourselves: Yes, they are there, and people also live in a life that is dominated by this technology. But this technology has not yet found its way to the people, otherwise we would not have today, among us, something that is so burning — my dear audience —, which in the broadest sense is called the social question. People have learned to adjust their machines. But what has been brought to us by the machines is not the solution to the questions of life in the fullest sense of the word. Instead, the greatest question of life flows out of it: How should this human life be shaped in social terms so that people, who have to work – as they once worked without machines – now have to work with modern technology, so that these people come together in full understanding in social life? Just as questions and puzzles of knowledge have been posed for us by the development of modern science, so modern technology, which has emerged from this scientific development, has posed the great question for us: How should life be organized so that people can find the possibility of a dignified existence within a life permeated by technology? So one could say: Both the theoretical and practical questions of life have actually emerged from modern civilization. And today we are not in the position of having fully developed solutions, neither theoretical and intuitive solutions nor practical solutions, but we are faced everywhere with questions, with puzzles that pile up, that make demands on people that can no longer be ignored.

This, ladies and gentlemen, must be felt in all its vibrancy if we are to do justice to the tasks that the Goetheanum in Dornach presents. For one can say: Those who are connected with the founding and expansion of this Goetheanum are precisely those people who feel this burning on the one hand of knowledge, on the other hand of the life questions in modern times, and who want to contribute what is possible for people to such life tasks as they present themselves can be tackled.

On the one hand, we see how people offer simplistic solutions: a person like Haeckel, in his “World Riddles”, offered simplistic solutions, while all he had to offer was a pile of new riddles. And people who believe that they are grounded in practical life also believe that, for example, the relations of production bring forth human life relationships. We keep hearing it emphasized from the Social Democratic program that it is the relations of production that have created life, that have created the form of life.

Now, my dear attendees, precisely when we look at the issue of modern technology, we can see that the production conditions that have been created by this modern technology have not brought about the form of life that goes with them. If they had brought it about, we would not have a social question.

In view of this, we must ask: what then actually characterizes this modern life? After all, it depends on the human being finding a way to relate to life that is informed by what he or she can understand, feel, want, and do as a human being. It is easy to say that today it is a matter of economic issues, that people must rise above the question of bread above all.

Now, my dear audience, there is no way to get beyond this bread issue other than by utilizing what the earth offers man in the right way for humanity and putting it into circulation. But what has to be done to achieve this cannot be done otherwise than through what man can feel, do and want, and with which man can place himself in the world. Basically, it is the world view, it is the inner spiritual ability of the human being that alone can provide a remedy even in the very most extreme economic questions. Therefore, we must look to that which can inwardly spiritualize the soul of the human being, which can drive the human being to a fruitful will, to that which can underlie a human understanding if we want to take a proper look at the great questions of the present, at the tasks of our time. Here one must say: that which is striven for at the Goetheanum in Dornach, and which to a certain extent is visible in the work being done outside, may perhaps inspire some people to reflect on the position of the human being in the course of human development.

I said earlier – esteemed attendees – that in Dornach one can see how scientific questions are discussed in a spirit that is at the same time the same spirit in which artistic natures have worked at the Goetheanum itself in terms of its external architecture, sculpture, and pictorial art. And I said that there is not only a certain unity between what is being done scientifically out there and what is being created artistically, but that there is also a certain religious mood that runs through both the scientific and the artistic work. Those who really immerse themselves in this Goetheanum in Dornach will find that there is a certain unity between three human modes of revelation of the inner being of this human being - between science, religion and art. Of course, I am not talking about — and I would like to emphasize this — the founding of a new religion in Dornach. That is not at all what it is about. Rather, it is solely about the fact that what is created in science and art is at the same time imbued with a religious spirit.

My dear attendees! This modern civilization, which I have just characterized in other ways, is characterized by the fact that science, religion and art have increasingly fallen apart in it. It is the peculiarity of the modern mind that it wants to cultivate science for a completely different reason than that which is the content of religious life, and in turn, it wants nothing to do with the unity of science and art. Those views have basically faded away, of which Goethe still had some – the Goetheanum takes its name from him, perhaps for precisely the reasons I have just mentioned – faded away is that was still in Goethe's views, that science should be cultivated on the one hand by pursuing that which lies in the current of truth, but that art should also be created out of the same spirit.

It is well known that Goethe was also interested in science throughout his life. He studied in detail how plants develop their various forms and how animals are organically created through metamorphosis; he was involved in other sciences. In all of this, he had an artistic eye. He conceived of the artistic in such a way that, by grasping with the soul that which he can also penetrate scientifically, he then shapes it inwardly, so that that which he, on the one hand, makes his own without form, scientifically, takes shape within him, so that he can create the work of art from it. Goethe thought [of an intimate relationship] between the truth that should prevail in science and the truth that should prevail in art. These things have almost completely faded away today, and that is precisely because modern civilization is absolutely intent on regarding science, religion and art as three different fields that arise from different foundations of human life and that actually have nothing to do with each other.

This was not the case at the starting point of human development. From what we have today, it is extremely difficult for us to recognize this starting point. At the starting point of human development, it was the case that people had a special, different kind of knowledge — not the kind of knowledge that is particularly valued today, which only applies to external natural things and observes these external natural things with the armed human senses — that they combined with the ordinary human mind. No, at the starting point of human knowledge was the ability to combine everything that the eyes observe and that can be combined by the mind with a certain spiritual vision of things, a seeing through of the external world, so that, along with what the senses perceive and what the mind can combine, the inner spiritual entities, the inner essence of things, can also be revealed to the mind's eye.

And [in] that which man at the starting point of his development, and still for centuries to come – to which we can look back as not really that far back – into that knowledge which man acquired, was so imbued with spiritual substance that he perceived this spiritual substance, which came to him from science itself, at the same time as the divine-spiritual in nature, in everything, everything. He did not know a science for itself and something that was to be given to him spiritually through faith, but he knew a science that at the same time provided the observation of external nature and also that which underlies his natural things and his whole life as a spiritual being. In what science gave him, he knew the divine at the same time, so that science for him became at the same time the revealer of that which he could worship from the innermost part of his mind. That which his reason grasped appeared to his soul in such a way that he could worship it religiously at the same time. If we go back to those places that were both places of learning and places of worship in ancient times – to the mystery schools – we find that what was revealed there through science was at the same time the message of what permeates the world divinely. So that what the word of science expressed gave at the same time what human worship of the gods recalled.

And one can go further. That which was offered in this regard, on the one hand, as knowledge, and, on the other hand, as something that also engaged the human emotional life, so that man could satisfy his need to worship his divine through what he was allowed to know, was given to him in such a way that it was not abstract and passive, giving him mere head knowledge, so to speak, only allowing himself to be thought of, but it was given in such a way that it was full of life, that it intervened in his life in the same way as, say, external circumstances intervene in his life, some friendship, some other circumstances that permeate the whole person. Our present knowledge can leave us so cold that we go to laboratories to do research; when we are outside, we no longer occupy ourselves. Life is something separate from this research. Or we sit down at the table and pursue some kind of science. We pursue it as long as we sit at the table. Then life takes place outside.

But this life takes up the whole person. This life demands more than just mental effort. We have to throw ourselves into it with our whole personality. Concepts that can only be experienced in the laboratory today, that can only be experienced at the reading table and so on, concepts that only occupy the head, that only occupy reason and understanding, did not exist in the old places of learning. There were concepts that, like living forces, took hold of the whole person, like life itself, so that everything that was technology, and above all art, emerged from these ideas at the same time. One had acquired ideas through knowledge, through which one satisfied one's need for knowledge. At the same time, there was something in these ideas to which the mind and the feelings could surrender in adoration. The will was permeated by that which came to one, so that the will could pour it into external matter, that it could create technique in ordinary life, art in the elevated life. And in the cultic acts, there was nothing else to be done at the places of worship except to create something artistic and technical, full of life, out of that which was the content of knowledge and religion. Human knowledge, human feeling of reverence for the divine in the world, human creativity, they were one. Humanity could not have developed further into the forms of civilization into which it necessarily had to develop if life had remained uncomprehended. It is an enrichment of life that what was, so to speak, an undifferentiated unity at the starting point of humanity - and even in times like those that underlay older Greek civilization - has developed. It was absolutely necessary for humanity to go beyond these uncomprehended contents of civilization, to particularly develop a scientific field, a religious field, and an artistic field. But what has emerged as a result, ladies and gentlemen?

We have gradually acquired a religious field that we, as I said, want to save from the onslaughts of modern science, which are accepted by all people and are being accepted more and more by those who have not yet accepted them today. More and more, the longing has arisen to establish, alongside these demands and onslaughts of modern science, a field of faith in which science should not have a say, in which one should enlighten oneself about the most intimate, innermost, and most sacred matters of the human soul. And suddenly we have science, which does not want to say anything because it claims that it cannot say anything about the eternal, about the supersensible of the human soul, and faith, which certainly wants to say something, wants to reveal something reveal about this eternal, about this supersensible of the human soul, but which shrinks from giving that which it accepts any such significance as external science gives to its statements. One can define, one can somehow characterize such a separation. But in the long run one cannot live under such a separation, for the believing mind must feel constrained in the long run when science appears on the one hand and expounds its judgment with its claim to certainty over a certain field, and when the truth of faith wants to assert itself as a special way to the truth, which is precisely to provide information about the most important thing for the human soul.

Today we still do not see clearly in this area, and that is why we keep trying to justify this separation of science and faith. But humanity suffers from it. And what it suffers from this side often takes place in the subconscious. But it does not emerge in its original form into human life. As a result, the human being's own intellectual development is also restricted; he is driven to make judgments that are not sufficiently secure in life; he becomes jaded in his judgment. And if we ask today: Why do we so often find mere routine in practical life where clear insight and a realistic sense are needed? Why have we brought ourselves into such terrible, catastrophic times in practical life, in economic life? Then we have to say: Yes, that is where something comes into play that human judgment is unable to do. We just don't see the connection with something else.

For those who see the big picture, the fact that we have not developed such foresight in our external economic and practical lives, that our judgments in other words have become so short-sighted in this practical life that they have brought us social chaos, stems from the fact that we have by limiting our scientific judgment to that which can only be observed externally and combined with the intellect, and blunting this judgment when it comes to the most important matters of the soul, to the supersensible, the eternal part of the soul. The fact that we are brought up in school in such a way that we are not allowed to apply what we have been scientifically educated in to the understanding of the soul forms such a judgment in us that we then also have short-circuited thoughts when we are supposed to think economically, and this results in catastrophes.

And so we live today in the terrible tragedy that theorists, that representatives of religious denominations repeatedly and repeatedly declaim that the truths of faith must be kept separate from scientific truths, that this plays into our pedagogy, into our didactics. It must be recognized – and I address this to those present – that this is breeding the human shortsightedness that, I would say, subconsciously impacts practical judgment, the same shortsightedness that then also led us into the chaos of economic life. We must recognize these inner connections, for it is man himself who is decisive for life, not external economic conditions, not external institutions, but man alone is decisive for the external life. If a person is educated in the wrong direction in one area of practical life, it is the same in other areas. And if, on the one hand, a person is driven to a dullness of judgment, this dullness of judgment will be especially evident in practical areas where he is supposed to be insightful, where he is supposed to see through the world.

And again, my dear audience, the artistic at the starting point of humanity, I have just tried to characterize it, it was the case that man grasped the supersensible with the sensual at the same time, and that he gave the sensual forms from his grasp of the supersensible in art their character. Thus art revealed itself from the same source from which science and religion originated. Goethe sensed something of this connection when he spoke his remarkable, meaningful words:

He who possesses science and art, also has religion.
He who possesses neither, may have religion.

But such views and feelings have actually completely disappeared today, and that is why we have arrived at a situation in art where, on the one hand, we have fallen into pure naturalism, making imitation of nature the only thing we strive for. And since in more recent times people have grown tired of this imitation, since they finally realized that with this imitation of nature, with this mere naturalism, basically nothing can be offered that in any way surpasses nature - because after all when someone is merely naturalistic, one must say that one still prefers to look at nature rather than at what he merely wants to imitate, because as far as nature goes, one cannot go in art if one merely wants to imitate. Once this had been recognized, people now sought - and this is quite understandable and even justified from a certain point of view - people now sought from within, in expressionism and in all kinds of other currents, they sought to capture in color and form that which is not in nature but which the human being can experience in his or her inner being, somehow in color and form. This is a quest that is, once again, something that represents a task for our time, also in the artistic fields.

So we see that, to a certain extent, art, too, has gone astray by separating itself from the other areas of human spiritual striving. But this differentiation had to occur – I said it before – otherwise human civilization would not have been able to progress. But today we are again living in a time when that which has separated from each other is having such an effect in the separation that, as man lets it affect him, this man begins to tear himself apart. We gradually came to live as a human race in a science that teaches us about the outer world in a wonderful way, but which, as we penetrate into it, alienates us from precisely that which we need if we want to be enlightened about our own soul. And we have come to a religious life that, I would say, had to create its own realm of truth because it did not dare to summon science itself to penetrate the transcendental through the same means it uses to penetrate the sensual. And art turned to nature or turns to all kinds of random human experiences in Impressionism, Expressionism, Naturalism and so on, and so on, in order to have its independent position. But then one surrenders to this art.

One must, so to speak, split and cleave that which is a unity in man: thinking, feeling and willing. That which lives externally, by acting on man, divides man. Today we have definitely reached a point in human development where man has lost himself in such a way that the various most important, essential branches of knowledge of his activity - the scientific, the religious and the artistic branches - have diverged to such an extent that he is no longer able to hold them together.

Do you see, dear attendees, this is what someone must feel who, on the one hand, has an unbiased mind to see through the right tendencies of the civilization of our time, and on the other hand, has a heart and an understanding for what is missing in our time in practical, economic, spiritual, educational and training terms, and what has brought us to the brink of disaster. Anyone who has a real heart for the hardship and misery of our time, and on the other hand can look impartially at how human souls are divided, will see a connection between the two, because they see that what has taken on catastrophic forms in life today stems from the fact that people are divided within and do not know how to place themselves in life.

Spiritual science, as one of the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach, faces this. This spiritual science speaks of it - and I have often presented the details in these lectures here. Today I would like to refer to these lectures and only point them out, but you can also find them in my writings “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science” and so on, explained in detail. This spiritual science, as it is to be cultivated in Dornach, as it is to be gradually incorporated into civilization through the Goetheanum, it speaks of the fact that there is not only such knowledge as that which adheres to external sensory observation, to the arming of the external senses - telescope, microscope and so on, and to the combining mind, but that man bears within himself abilities which are latent, hidden, in ordinary life, in ordinary science, which can be brought down by the means which I have indicated in the writings mentioned and presented here in the earlier [lectures]. This spiritual science speaks of how ordinary, objective, external knowledge can work its way through to a higher knowledge: imagination, inspiration, intuition in the deeper sense. This spiritual science speaks of various levels of knowledge that in turn lead into the supersensible, that carry knowledge itself up into the supersensible realm.

And if one develops such methods of knowledge in this way, my dear audience, then one acquires a special position in relation to modern science. Above all, this modern scientific approach has truly come a long way in the most diverse fields! Let us just think – we could also examine another field here, but let us just think of what has emerged in more recent times as the theory of evolution. We need not think of extreme materialistic Darwinism, only of the theory of development as it has been established in recent times, and how it has been conscientiously and methodically developed for the most diverse spheres. We will say: in relation to all that could be achieved, great things have been achieved. In relation to form and essence, we can indeed survey the ever more perfect from the less perfect, and we can say: at the top of this series stands the human being. We can see a connection between the human being and the other beings. We can, by surveying something like this, remain entirely in the realm of external, objective knowledge.

But, dear ladies and gentlemen, in this way the human being is not understood. This is, I would say, only one particular aspect of what I said earlier. The human being is not understood by applying the methods of modern science to nature and to the human being, as we have been accustomed to doing until today. Something else is needed for that. But if we work our way up from this ordinary knowledge, as it is cultivated today, to what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science calls the imagination, where what is otherwise only grasped in the abstract is transformed into a pictorial concept, but a pictorial concept that is neither a dream nor a fantasy, but which carries within it the certainty that one is dealing with the image of a spiritual, not a physical reality - if one has developed oneself to this imagination, to this conception of the image through the supersensible powers of knowledge, as I have described them in my book ” How to Know Higher Worlds?», then one sees, while standing cognizantly before the human being, already presented in his form: one cannot comprehend him with the means of today's science; one must let thinking pass over into quite different inner soul experiences if one wants to comprehend the human being.

One can say that a human being has so-and-so many bones, and can compare these with the number of bones of higher animals; one can count the muscles, can look at the shape of the heart, can do all this with the means of ordinary science; but then there comes a point where this ordinary science leads nowhere, where it is transformed merely inwardly in the soul life , where one must try to grasp that in the human being which can only be grasped through imagination, where one must look at the human being – even just at his form when he stands before us – and say to oneself: Yes, the human being has just as many bones as the higher animals, but these bones are raised out of certain forms, they are given other forms. One can examine the metabolism of the higher animals, and one can then look at the metabolism of the human being. If you look at it with imaginative knowledge, you will find it to be set apart, you will find that the human being has been placed in the world differently if you look at the whole thing spiritually from the point of view of imaginative knowledge.

But what happens there? What happens there is nothing less than that what is otherwise abstract intellectual and observational knowledge gradually transforms into artistic perception. Now, my dear audience, no matter how much you rail against this artistic understanding of the human being when you have gone through the whole series of animals with the means of ordinary science, you can say: Art is not something that science understands. Certainly, someone can find the most beautiful logical reasons to prove that art has nothing to do with science. Let him do so, and he will be proved right with regard to everything that he logically invents and arrives at. All those who say: 'Science, as we understand it, must not be influenced by any artistic grasp of reality' will be proved right.

But there is something else to consider, dear attendees. If reality is such that it does not yield to this kind of knowledge, if reality is such that it can only be approached through artistic comprehension, through the transition of abstract concepts into imaginative-artistic forms, then no matter how long man may debate that art has nothing to do with science, then he must admit that with his science he remains outside of reality and that if he wants to enter into this reality, he must transform this science into an artistic understanding of reality. But that is where anthroposophically oriented spiritual science leads to. Reality does not arise from those abstractions and scientific methods, not even from those who work with telescopes and microscopes, who work with X-ray machines and with spectral analysis; reality does not arise from this external nature, but only when the concepts that have been acquired in science are transformed into art at the highest level. Then one also sees the human form artistically. And it is this artistic understanding, this artistic comprehension that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science leads to.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, this is one of the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach. We do not negate what is achieved in the laboratories, in the physics institutes, in the clinic, or in the astronomical observatory. On the contrary, we want to establish such institutions, permeated by our spiritual science, so that the methods of spiritual science can be brought into them. That is what is available in the form of the Goetheanum, the central building, in Dornach. Such institutions must be affiliated to it, precisely in order that the methodology which allows spirit to be recognized from the experiments and from observation may be carried into the laboratory, into the physics institute; at the same time, that which, for example, bridges the gap between pathology and therapy in the field of medicine, where in therapy we have to take the remedies from the greater world, the macrocosm, and apply them to the human being, the microcosm.

That is what makes the Dornach method, through its strict scientific nature, lead to the artistic, by showing that when we develop the develops the powers of his soul, rises from ordinary knowledge and the science of ordinary life to imagination, one rises at the same time to where science, by remaining strictly scientific, enters into artistic comprehension. In turn, we return to what Goethe sensed in the past. In a modern sense, what was at the starting point of human development, and what had to differentiate and separate for a while in human development so that civilization could advance, but which would now shatter the human being if he did not find union again, is developed.

But we do not have to somehow glue the artistic to the scientific on the outside; symbolism or allegory is quite foreign to us, but we want to shape reality itself. We want to be scientific, much stricter than one is accustomed to in our educational institutions today. But precisely because we have the scientific method and not only want to conceive of its end, but also want to experience it, what scientific life is flows into an artistic grasp so that full reality can be grasped. And that is why we can also grasp from the spirit itself in what we outwardly present in artistic forms.

This is the aspect of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that creates the bridge between science and art, the bridge that once existed, the bridge that must be found again and that will be fruitful for all individual scientific fields, but which at the same time will lead to our soul being so stimulated by what we work on from the most diverse scientific fields soul will be so stimulated that our ideas will not remain dry, empty, abstract, pedantic, philistine ideas, but will become life in our soul, both science and art, not as an allegorical, straw-like art, but as an art that brings into this outer, sensual reality a sensual image of the supersensible, of the spiritual world.

And, dear attendees, that is how it is with inspiration. It is the next stage after imagination, as you can follow in the books mentioned. There, the spiritual that permeates the world reveals itself in the human being, not only that the images fill him as in imagination, but the spiritual itself penetrates.

He who wants to deny this spiritual aspect stands in relation to the world in a higher sense than he who wanted to claim that man does not live on the inhaled air, which he in turn wanted to release into the outside world. In this moment, man is inwardly that which was just outside of him. He processes this air inwardly; he releases it again. Just as one cannot claim that this air comes from an organism, but it is that which connects him with the whole great world, so it is with the spiritual. Man experiences something spiritual within himself. But this spiritual is such that it is related to all the rest of the world's spirituality. There is a continuous inhaling and exhaling of the spiritual in man. I can only hint at this here. It is that which becomes conscious in man when he rises to the method of knowledge of inspiration. He then experiences within himself that which is otherwise experienced as the spiritual spread throughout the whole world; it is that which he experiences in the air that is in him and is processed in him [and] the air that is outside of him. But by experiencing this inspiration, he experiences the spirituality of the world. He permeates himself within with that which, as divine-spiritual, permeates the world. What the soul is can only be grasped if it is understood as part of the spirituality of the whole world. Therefore, only inspiration can reveal to us the essence of the human soul. Just as we rise from mere outer knowledge, from mere knowledge to the artistic grasp of full reality through imagination, so we can only rise to grasp the soul through inspiration. And this inspiration is at the same time that which imbues the soul with the living knowledge it contains of its eternal character, of its eternal essence, of its supersensible essence. We do not need a special field of truth for this belief, but rather the elevation of the field of knowledge itself to inspired knowledge, which reflects the essence of our soul.

In tomorrow's lecture, I will have to speak in more detail about this relationship between the soul-spiritual, the immortal in the soul, in connection with the so-called inner nature of nature, following on from what we have discussed today. For now, I will only say that what the soul must experience as its most important thing must be taken precisely from what, in earlier times, was also a matter of religious conviction. But because today humanity has educated itself in such a way that it can only believe in a certain amount of scientific knowledge, this scientific knowledge itself must be elevated to the religious.

Thus, arising from inner knowledge itself, we have an artistic element and a religious element at the same time. This is what anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is intended to make clear to humanity. The building of the Goetheanum in Dornach is intended to be a living testimony to this, because this anthroposophically oriented spiritual science wants to convey the living spirit, not the dead, abstract spirit. That is why he gives artists the opportunity to create artistic forms out of the same spirit in their own building, and that is why, because he conveys the living spirit, not an abstract spirit, he gives the whole work a religious mood. He gives that which existed at the starting point of human development as a unity, as a scientific-religious-artistic unity.

This is what the human mind needs today if it is to play an active and active role in social life. From what one acquires for one's activity, for the inner mood of the human soul, there can then arise that which also provides an external, practical judgment. Therefore, one does not shy away from basing it on what lives in Dornach — which initially could not live naturally other than by forming the Dornach Goetheanum itself into a unity — that this that carries this out, founds something like the 'Futurum', which wants to bring the same way of judging, the same way of thinking, into practical life, in order to bring this realistic way of thinking into practical life.

Dear attendees! This Goetheanum is not just a single structure, erected to serve a quirk, to have something that is the same in its external style as what is thought, practiced and researched within, but this Goetheanum is a unified concept the reason that what underlies its origin is oriented towards that unity, towards which humanity must strive today out of its tasks of the time, because it strives towards what humanity needs in the broadest sphere of life for the recovery of social reality. The Goetheanum in Dornach is designed in this way because the way of thinking on which it is based is intended to reach into that which, through its fissures, through its lack of unity, has led to the catastrophes of the present. The Goetheanum does not want to be just a model; the Goetheanum wants to be the place where one can acquire, cognitively, artistically, creatively, religiously, emotionally, that which one needs today in order to engage with the great tasks of the time, including social tasks.

Once again it must be said: social life demands of man not only that other institutions be created. We can create as many other institutions as we like that seem paradisiacal to us; if man remains an anti-social being, if the social does not well up from the depths of his soul, then no possible social order can arise. It is man himself who is to become a social being. Then the institutions will also find each other when the human being is inwardly inspired by social impulses in the right way.

This is what we want to live in Dornach, this is what we want to give to the Goetheanum in Dornach as its tasks, not what the detractors say or what those claim who say that some obscure sect has founded some kind of home on the Dornach hill. Dornach is not based on that, but on honest observation and heartfelt compassion for the great tasks of the time, living into the great tasks of the time, both in those that are given to human knowledge, in that precisely with the great progress of science, new puzzles are given to us, that with the progress of technology, new tasks for life are given to us. Therefore, my dear audience, because one has a heart and mind for this task of knowledge, for these riddles of knowledge, for these tasks of life, riddles of life, one is connected if one really understands what is to be done with the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach. For if one looks at the matter in the right light, then one should at least strive to be able to answer the question: What are the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach? They are the tasks that are the tasks, the great tasks of modern knowledge and modern life.

This lecture is also known as The Human Soul and the World of Nature.

It will be clear, I think, from what has been said on earlier occasions that the Spiritual Science cultivated at the Goetheanum has nothing sectarian about it, nor does it set out to found a new religion. It gives full recognition to the progress of natural science in modern times, drawing indeed, in a certain sense, the ultimate necessary consequences of the whole trend and spirit of modern science. This will be particularly evident when we come to consider questions concerning our inner life and our knowledge of the world; and to-day I will ask your attention for one such specific question. It embraces a very wide realm, and all I can do here is to give a few indications towards its solution. I shall try to give these in such a way as to throw light on what we consider to be the tasks of the Goetheanum in Dornach.

The subject before us is concerned with two ideas that man can never contemplate without on the one hand feeling an intense longing awaken within him, and on the other being brought face to face with deep doubts and riddles. These two ideas are: the inner being of Nature and the inner being of the human soul.

In his knowledge man feels himself outside Nature. What would induce him to undertake the labour of cognition, were it not the hope of penetrating beyond the immediate region within which he stands in ordinary life, of entering more deeply into the Nature that presents herself in her external aspect to his senses and his intellect? It is, after all, a fact of the life of soul, and one that becomes more and more apparent the more seriously we occupy ourselves with questions of knowledge, that man feels separated from the inner being of Nature. And there remains always the question—to which one or another will have a different answer according to his outlook on the world—whether it be possible for men to enter sufficiently deeply into the being of Nature to allow him to gain some degree of satisfaction from his search. We have at the same time the feeling that whatever in the last resort can be known concerning the being of Nature is somehow also connected with what we may call the being of man's soul.

Now this question of the being of the human soul has presented itself to human cognition since very early times. We have only to recall the Apollonian saying: “Know thyself.” This saying sets forth a demand which the conscientious seeker after knowledge will feel is by no means easy of fulfillment.

We shall perhaps be able to come to a clearer idea of the tasks of the present day in this connection if we go back to earlier ages and remind ourselves of conceptions that were intimately bound up, for the men of olden times, on the one hand with the knowledge of the inner being of Nature, on the other with the self-knowledge of man. Let us then look for a little at some of these conceptions, even though they will take us into fields somewhat remote from the ordinary consciousness of to-day.

In olden times, these two aims—knowledge of Nature and knowledge of self—were associated in the mind of man with quite strange, not to say terrifying, conceptions. It was indeed not thought possible for man to continue in his ordinary way of life if he wanted to set out on the path to knowledge; for on that path he would inevitably find himself in the presence of deep uncertainties before he could come to any satisfying conviction. In our day we are not accustomed to think of the path of knowledge as something that leads us away from.the natural order of our life; it leaves us free to go forward in everyday life as before. And one must admit that the knowledge offered to us in our laboratories and observatories and clinics is not such as to throw us “right off the rails,” in the way attributed to the path of knowledge that the pupils of wisdom in early times had to tread.

They beheld a kind of abyss between what man is and can experience in ordinary life, and what he becomes and is confronted with when he penetrates into the depths of world-existence, or into the knowledge of his own being. They described how man feels the ground sink away from under his feet, so that only if he be strong enough not to succumb to giddiness of soul can he go forward at all into the field of ultimate knowledge. To tread this path of knowledge unprepared would involve man in a harder test than he is able to meet. Serious and conscientious preparation was necessary before he dare bridge the abyss. In ordinary life man is unaware of the abyss; he simply does not see it. And that, they said, is for him a blessing. Man is enveloped in a kind of blindness that protects him from being overcome by giddiness and falling headlong into the abyss. They spoke too of how man had to cross a “Threshold” in order to come into the fields of higher knowledge, and of how he must have become able to face without fear the revelations that await him at the Threshold. Again, in ordinary life man is protected from crossing the Threshold. Call it personification or what you will, in those ancient schools of wisdom they were relating real experiences when they spoke of man being protected by the “Guardian of the Threshold,” and of undergoing beyond it a time of darkness and uncertainty before ultimately attaining to a vision of reality, a “standing within” spirit-filled reality.

It is inevitable that in our day all manner of confused and hazy notions should connect themselves with such expressions as “Threshold,” “Guardian of the Threshold.” Let me say at once that mankind is undergoing evolution; nor is it only the outer cultural renditions that change and develop, but man's life of soul is changing all the time, moving onward from state to state; consequently the expressions which in olden times could be used to describe intimate processes in the life of soul, cannot bear the same meaning for present-day mankind. What man meant in olden times when he spoke of the Threshold and the Guardian of the Threshold was something different from the processes that take place in man to-day, when he resolves to go forward from ordinary knowledge to super-sensible knowledge; and it is only with a view to making more comprehensible what I shall have to say regarding these latter that I bring in a comparison with ancient conceptions.

What was it of which the men of olden times were afraid? What was it for which the pupil in the School of Wisdom had to be prepared by means of an exact and thoroughgoing discipline of the will—a discipline that should make the will strong and vigorous, able to stand firm in extremely difficult and perplexing situations in Life? Strange though it may sound, it becomes clear to us if we are able to survey the course of human evolution, that what men feared in those times was actually none other than the condition of soul which mankind in general has reached to-day. They wanted to protect the pupil from coming all unprepared to the condition of mind and soul to which we have been brought by the scientific education of the last three or four centuries. Let me illustrate this for you in a particular case.

We all accept to-day the so-called Copernican view of the universe. This view places the sun in the centre of our planetary system; the planets revolve round the sun, with the earth as a planet among the other planets. Ever since the time of Copernicus, this is the picture men have had. In earlier times, quite another picture of the world lived in the general consciousness of mankind. The earth was seen in the centre, and the sun and stars revolving round the earth. Man had, that is to say, a geocentric picture of the world. Copernicus replaced it with a heliocentric picture of the world. Man has now no longer the feeling of standing on firm ground; he sees himself being hurled through space, together with the earth, at a terrific speed. As for how it all looks to the eye, that, we are told, is a mere illusion, induced by relations of perspective and the like, to which human vision is subject.

Now, this heliocentric picture of the world already existed in earlier ages. Plutarch is a writer from whom we can learn a great deal concerning the men of olden times, and how they thought about the world. Let me read you a passage translated from his writings. Plutarch is speaking of Aristarchus of Samos, and he describes the way in which Aristarchus conceived the world. We are therefore taken back into early Greek times, into an epoch many centuries before the Middle Ages, and before Copernicus. In the opinion of Aristarchus, says Plutarch, the universe is much bigger than it looks; for Aristarchus makes the assumption that the stars and the sun do not move, but that the earth revolves round the sun as centre, while the sphere of the fixed stars, whose centre is also in the sun, is so immense that the circumference of the circle described by the earth is to the distance of the fixed stars as is the centre of a sphere to its entire surface.

We find thus in Greek times the heliocentric conception of the world; we find the very same picture as we have to-day of man's place in the planetary system and his relation to the heaven of the fixed stars. In olden times, however, this heliocentric conception of the world was a secret known only to a few, who had undergone a strict training of the will before such knowledge could be imparted to them.

It is important to grasp the significance of this fact. What is common knowledge to-day, freely spoken of by everyone, was in earlier times a wisdom known to a select few. What such a wisdom-pupil knew, for example, concerning the sun and its relation to the earth was considered a knowledge that lay “beyond the Threshold”; man must needs first cross the Threshold before he can come into those fields where the soul discovers this new relationship to the universe. The very same knowledge that our whole education renders familiar and natural to us to-day, was for them on the other side of a Threshold that must not be crossed without due preparation.

What we have shown with regard to the astronomical conception of the world could quite well be worked out for other spheres of knowledge. We should again and again find evidence of how the whole of mankind has in the course of evolution been pushed across what was for Olden times a Threshold on the path to higher knowledge. The apprehension that was felt in those times about the condition of soul evoked by such knowledge, has shown itself frequently in later centuries in the attitude of the churches, which preserve and tend to perpetuate the traditions of the past. Again and again the churches have rejected knowledge that has been attained in the progress of civilisation; and when, for example, the Roman Church refused to acknowledge the teaching of Copernicus (as it did until the year 1827), the reason was the same as [that which] in ancient times prevented the priests from giving out Mystery knowledge to the masses—namely, that the knowledge would bring man into uncertainty if he were not duly prepared beforehand.

Now it is well-known that no power on earth can withstand for long the march of progress; and we in these days have to think in an entirely new way about what one may call the “Threshold of the Spiritual World.” Spiritual Science is no “warming up” of Gnostic or other ancient teaching, but works absolutely on the principles of modern natural science, as I think will have been evident from the example we have been considering.

How was it that men of olden times feared knowledge which today is the common property of all mankind? In my book Die Ratsel der Philosophie¹, I have described the changes that have come about in man's mind and soul since early Greek times. The Greek had not a self-consciousness that was fully detached from the external world. When he thought about the world, he felt himself, so to speak, “grown together” with it; he was as closely united with it as we are to-day in the act of sense-perception. For him thought was also, in a manner speaking, sense-perception. Red, blue, G, C sharp—these are for us sense-perceptions; but thought we ourselves produce by inner activity. For the Greek this kind of inner activity did not yet exist. Just as we get red, green, G, C sharp from sense-perception, so did he get the thoughts too from the external world. He had not yet the independence that comes from the comprehension of self. Only quite gradually has the perception and understanding of the self developed to what it is to-day. Self-consciousness has grown steadily stronger in the course of time, and man has thereby detached himself from surrounding Nature. He has learned to look into himself, inwardly to comprehend himself as something that acts independently. In doing so he has placed himself over against Nature; he stands outside her, that he may then contemplate her inner being from without. And with this detachment of thought from external objective life is connected also the birth of the feeling of freedom, that sense of freedom which is in reality a product only of the last few centuries.

We have come to regard history more and more in its purely external aspect; but if we were to consider it, as we try to do in spiritual science, in a more inward way, we should discover that the experience we have to-day when we speak of “freedom” was not there for the Greek. Although we translate the corresponding word in their writings with our word “freedom,” the feeling we associate with the word was quite unknown to the Stoic, for example, and other philosophers. A careful and unbiased study of Greek times will not fail to make this clear.

I laid stress in my Philosophie der Freiheit² which was written in the early nineties, on the connection of the experience of freedom with what I called “pure thinking”—that thinking which is completely detached from the inner organic life, and which (if the expression be not misunderstood) becomes, even in ordinary life, cognition on a higher level. For when we permeate pure thinking with moral ideas and impulses—that is, with ideas and impulses that are not associated with desires, or with sympathies and antipathies, but solely with pure, loving devotion to the deed that is to be done—when we do this and allow the impulse to quicken in our soul to action, then the action we perform is truly free.

One cannot really put the question concerning freedom in the way that is frequently done, when it is asked: Is man free or unfree? All one can say is that man is on the way to freedom. By cultivating self-evolution and self-knowledge, by achieving inner liberation from his accustomed attitude of mind and soul, man is treading a path that will enable him to rise to pure thinking; and on this path he becomes increasingly free. It is thus not a matter of “either—or,” but rather of gradual approach, or, shall we say, of both. For we are at once free and unfree; unfree where we are still governed by our desires, by what rises up out of our organism, out of the life of instinct; free, on the other hand, where we have grown independent of the instinctive life, where we are able to awaken within us pure love for the deed that has been envisaged in pure thinking.

The condition of mind that leads to the experience of freedom—the condition, namely, of pure thinking, to which man is able to surrender himself—must necessarily, for present-day man, remain an ideal; an ideal, however, that is indissolubly bound up with his worth and dignity as man.

We are on the way to such an ideal, and it is natural science that has set us upon the path. In all the development of natural science in modern times—and the results of this natural science carry authority in the widest circles and tend more and more to become the groundwork of our whole education and culture—one thing stands out clearly. Study the development of natural science and you will be struck with the growing recognition of the value and importance of the thought—the thought that is elaborated by man himself inwardly. This is true in the realm of the inorganic, from physics up to astronomy, as well as in the realm of the organic, and in spite of the fact that scientists base their results everywhere on observation and experiment. And through the work he does in thinking, man develops an enhanced self-consciousness; which means, that his detachment from the inner being of Nature grows.

We can here take once more the example of Astronomy. What Copernicus did, fundamentally speaking, was to reduce to calculation the results of observation. In this way one arrives at a world system that is completely detached from man. The world systems of ancient times were not so; they were always intimately connected with the human being. Man felt himself within the world; he was part of it. In our time man is, so to speak, incidental. He sees himself hurled through universal space together with the planet Earth, and his picture of the whole structure of the world is completely divorced from himself; that which lives in his own inner being must on no account be allowed to play a part in his conception of the universe. Man becomes filled, that is to say, with a thought-content that is the means of detaching him from himself. True, he thinks his thoughts, and in thinking remains always united with his thoughts; but he thinks them in such a way that they have no sort of connection with what rises up out of his organism, out of his life of instinct. He is under necessity so to think that, although the thought remains united with him, it nevertheless wrests itself free from the human-personal in him, so that in his thoughts he becomes, in effect, completely objective.

And this experience brings man to greater consciousness of self. The strenuous efforts required for finding one's way to clear conceptions in the field of astronomy or physics or chemistry to-day, or even only for following in thought the results of others' work, are bound to lead to a strengthening of the consciousness of self.

In the ancient civilisations—and herein lies the great difference between them and our own—education was not directed to the strengthening of self-consciousness. Rather had it the tendency to make man's thinking correspond with what he saw with his eyes. So arose the Ptolemaic conception of the world, which in all essentials is a reproduction of what we perceive with the external senses. Man was not thrust so far out of himself as he is by the modern scientific outlook; hence his self-consciousness did not grow. He remained more within his body—held there, as it were, by enchantment. Consciousness of self he derived from his instincts, and from the feeling of life and vitality within him. Although in our age we have drifted into materialism, this living in the body has been overcome by the development of thinking; and the consciousness of self has grown correspondingly. The very fact that we have become materialists, and lost our awareness of the spiritual in the objects perceived by the senses, has contributed to the achievements of thought. In olden times it was feared that if a man were brought unprepared to the kind of thinking such as is necessary, for example, to grasp the heliocentric system, he would “faint” in his soul; his consciousness of self would not be strong enough to sustain him.

This accounts for the emphasis on the training of the will; for a strong and vigorous will strengthens also the consciousness of self. The preparation of the pupil in the Wisdom School was therefore directed primarily to the will, in order that he might grow strong enough to endure, beyond the Threshold, that picture of the world for which a highly-developed consciousness of self is required.

We see, then, what it was men feared in olden times for the pupil who was to be guided into the inner being of the things of the world, into the inner being of Nature. They were afraid lest he be hurt in his soul, through falling into a condition of uncertainty and darkness, a condition comparable, in the realm of soul, with physical faintness. This danger they hoped to avoid by a thoroughgoing discipline of the will. In ordinary life, they said, man must remain on this side of the realm where the dangerous knowledge is to be found; a Guardian holds him back from the region for which he is unfit, thus protecting him from being overcome by faintness of soul. And their description of the experiences the pupil had to undergo if he wanted to cross the Threshold and pass the Guardian correspond exactly to inner experiences of the soul.

It was told how, when the pupil draws near the Threshold, he immediately has a feeling of uncertainty. If he has been sufficiently prepared, he is able to stand upright in the realm which would otherwise make him giddy; he passes the Guardian of the Threshold and, by virtue of the powers of his soul, enters into the spiritual world—which the Guardian would otherwise not allow him even to behold. But he must be able also to stay in the spiritual world with full consciousness. For the tremendous experiences that await him there call for strength and not for weakness, and if he were to let go, these experiences would have a shattering effect on his whole organisation; he would suffer grievous harm.

And now the strange thing is that in course of evolution a knowledge that could be attained by pupils of the ancient Wisdom Schools only after most careful preparation has become the common property of all mankind. We stand to-day in our ordinary knowledge beyond what the men of old felt to be a Threshold. The purpose they had in view in the ancient Wisdom Schools was that the pupil, when he looked into his own inner being, should feel himself united there with the inner being of Nature. And believing that if he did so unprepared, he would sink into a kind of spiritual faintness, they would not allow him to attempt this exploration until he had received the right discipline and training. And yet in our age everyone penetrates into this region utterly unprepared!

As a matter of fact man is experiencing to-day precisely what the ancients took such care to avoid. He acquires his knowledge of Nature; and he acquires also a strong consciousness of self that enables him to stand upright amid all the knowledge that is current to-day in astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc. He imbibes this knowledge and can remain steadfast without losing his balance. Nevertheless there is a quality in his life of soul that the men of old would deeply deplore. Because in the course of evolution we have acquired thought and the feeling of freedom and a stronger selfconsciousness, therefore we do not lose ourselves when we study the results of natural science; but we do lose something, and the loss is only too manifest to-day in the soul-life of mankind everywhere.

In this matter we labour under great illusion; we dream, and we cling to our dreams, and will not let them go. I have often spoken of how natural science brings conscientious students to a recognition of the boundaries of knowledge, boundaries man cannot pass without taking his power of cognition into forbidden—nay, into impossible—regions. A very distinguished scientist of modern times has spoken of the “Ignorabimus,” reading into the word a confession that however far we go in the knowledge we acquire from sense-observation and the intellect, we never penetrate to the inner being of Nature. I here touch on a subject that at once lands us in conflict, as was felt even at a time when natural science was far less advanced than it is to-day. It was Albrecht von Haller who expressed the “Ignorabimus” in the well-known lines:

To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.
Thrice happy he
To whom she shows
Even her outer shell.

Goethe, who used constantly to hear these words on the lips of those who shared Haller's attitude towards Nature, labeled such thinkers “Philistine.” For him they are men who do not want to rouse themselves to inner activity of soul; for by dint of inner activity the soul of man can kindle a light within—a light which, shining upon the heart of Nature, shall carry the soul into her innermost being. Goethe proclaims this in forcible and trenchant manner in his poem Allerdings, quoting to begin with the words to Haller:

‘To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.’
O Philistine,
To me and mine
What use in such a speech?
We think, through every part
We enter into her heart.

Still the cry goes,
‘Thrice happy he
To whom she shows
Even her outer shell.’

For sixty years I have heard that cry;
I curse it, but secretly, silently,
Say to myself a thousand times,
Gladly she gives and she gives us all!
Nature is neither kernel nor shell,
She is both in one; she is one and all.

Look in your own heart, man, and tell
If you yourself are kernel or shell!³

Out of an instinctive feeling that was conscious and yet at the same time unconscious, Goethe rejected utterly the separation of the being of man's soul from the innermost being of Nature. He saw clearly that if the soul becomes conscious, in a healthy manner, of its own real being, then that consciousness brings with it the experience of standing within the innermost heart of Nature.

This conviction it was that kept Goethe from accepting Kant's philosophy. They make a great mistake who assert that at one time of his life Goethe came very near to the philosophy of Kant. In contradistinction to what Kant recognised as the human faculty of cognition, Goethe postulated what he called “perceptive judgment.” This means that in order to form a judgment we do not merely pass in abstract reasoning from concept to concept; rather do we use inwardly for thought the kind of beholding we use outwardly in sense perception. Goethe says he never thought about thinking; what he set himself continually to do was to behold the living element in the thought. And in this beholding of the thoughts he saw a way to unite the human soul with the very being of Nature.

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science would go further on the same path. This perceptive judgment—which, as presented by Goethe, was still in its beginnings—it sets out to develop in the direction indicated in my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. Faculties of cognition, which in ordinary life, and in the pursuit also of ordinary science, remain latent in man, are led up to “vision,” to a “new beholding.” Just as man perceives around him with the physical eye colours, or light and darkness, so with the eye of the spirit does he now behold the spiritual. By the practice of certain intimate exercises of the soul, he calls forth and develops within him powers that usually remain hidden, and so lifts himself up to a higher kind of knowledge which is able to plunge into the very heart of external Nature. You have frequently heard me speak of the successive stages of this higher knowledge, and I would like here to say a little about their evolution from a particular point of view.

We are accustomed to think of the course of our life as divided between waking and sleeping. These two conditions must, we know, alternate for us if we are to remain healthy in mind and body. How is it with us from the time of awakening to the time of falling asleep? The experiences of the soul are permeated with thoughts; the thoughts receive a certain colouring from the life of feeling; and there is also the life of will, which wells up from dim depths of our being under the guidance of the thoughts, and accomplishes deeds. In the other condition, that of sleep, we lie still; our thoughts sink into darkness; our feelings vanish and our will is inactive. The ordinary normal life of man shows these two alternating conditions. The picture is, however, incomplete; and we shall not arrive at any satisfactory idea of the nature of man if we are content to see the course of his life in this simple manner.

We take it for granted that between waking up and falling asleep we are awake. But the fact is, we are not awake in our whole being. This is overlooked, and consequently we have no true psychology; we come to no right understanding of the soul. If, ridding ourselves of all prejudice, we try to observe inwardly what we experience when we feel, We discover that our feeling life is by no means so illumined with the light of consciousness as is the life of thought and ideation. It is dim, by comparison. For a sense of self, for an experience of self, the life of feeling is undoubtedly every bit as real as—even perhaps in some ways more real than—the life of thought: but clarity, light-filled clarity, is enjoyed by thought alone. There is always something undefined about the life of feeling. Indeed, if we examine the matter carefully, comparing different conditions of soul one with another, we are led finally to the conclusion that the life which pulsates in feeling may be compared with dream life. Study the dream life of man; consider how it surges up from unknown depths of his being; how it manifests in pictures, but in pictures that are vague and indeterminate, so that one does not see all at once exactly how they are connected with external reality. Has not the life of feeling the same quality and character?

Feelings are, of course, something altogether different from dream pictures, but when we compare the degree of consciousness in both, we find it to be very much the same. The life of feeling is a kind of waking dream; the pictures that appear in the dream are here pressed down into the whole organic life. The experience is different in each case, and yet the experience is present in the soul in the same manner in both. So that in reality we are awake only in the life of ideation; in the feeling life we dream even while we are awake.

With the life of the will it is again different. We do not as a rule give much thought to the matter, but is it not so that the impulse of will arises within us without our having any clear consciousness of its origin? We have a thought; and out of the thought springs an impulse of will. Then again we see ourselves acting; and then again we have a thought about the action. But we cannot follow with consciousness what comes between. How a thought becomes an impulse for the will and shoots into my muscle-power; how the nerve registers the movement of the muscles; how, in other words, that which has been sent down into the depths of my being as thought, comes to be carried out in action, afterwards to emerge again when I perceive myself performing the action—all this lives in me in no other way than do the experiences of sleep.

In deep sleep we have in a sense lost our own being; we pass through the experiences of sleep without being aware of them; and it is the same with what comes about through the activity of the will-impulse in man. We dream in our life of feeling, and we are asleep in our willing; dreaming and sleeping are thus perpetually present in waking life. And in these unknown depths of being where the will has its origin, arises also that which we eventually gather up—focus, as it were—in consciousness of self. Man comes to a recognition of his full humanity only when he knows himself as a being that thinks and feels and wills.

Ordinary life, therefore, embraces unconscious conditions. And it is just through the life of ideation becoming separated from the rest of the soul life and lifted up into consciousness, that a way is made for the development of the experience of freedom. Here, in a sense, we divide ourselves up. We are awake in a part of ourselves, in the life of ideation, whilst in relation to another part of us we are as unconscious as we are in relation to the inner being of Nature.

It is at this point that Anthroposophical Spiritual Science steps in with its methods for attaining higher knowledge. This spiritual science is very far removed from any dreamy, obscure mysticism, nor does it support itself, like spiritualism, on external experiment. The foundation for the whole method of spiritual scientific research lies in the inner being of man himself; it can be evolved in full consciousness and will manifest the same clarity as the most exact material conceptions. The world of feeling, which generally, as we have seen, leads a kind of dream life, can become hooded with the same light that permeates thoughts and ideas—which, according to some schools of philosophy, themselves originate in the feelings. By means of exercises described in my book, How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. this lighting up of the world of feeling is brought about, with the result that the region which is usually dreamlike in character now lives in the soul as “imaginative” consciousness. The moment man gives himself up to this imaginative consciousness, something is present for him in consciousness that remains generally beneath the Threshold. He thinks pictures, knowing, however, quite well that he is not dreaming them, but that they correspond to realities.

Spiritual Science then leads on further, to “inspired” consciousness, and here we are taken into the realm of the will. Little by little, we are brought to the point of being able to behold clairvoyantly—please do not misunderstand the expression—how the whole human organisation functions when the will pulsates in it. We see what actually takes place in the muscle when the will is active. Such a knowledge is “inspired” knowledge. Man dives down into his own inner being and acquires a self-knowledge which is generally veiled from him. We come to know more of man than stands before us as “given” between birth and death. Feeling and willing being now also flooded with the light of consciousness, we can know man not only as a created being, perceiving in him that which wakes up every morning and enters again into a body ready-made; we can recognise in him also the creative power which comes down from spiritual worlds at the time of birth or conception, and itself forms and organises the body. In effect, at this further stage man comes to know his own eternal being which lives beyond birth and death; he attains to a direct beholding of the eternal and spiritual in his soul.

As man learns in this way to know himself, not merely as natural man, but as spirit, he finds that he is also now within the inner being of Nature; in the spirit of his own nature he recognises the spirit of the Nature that is all around him. And at this point a fact of deep significance is revealed—namely, that with our modern knowledge of Nature we are already standing on the other side of the Threshold, in the old sense of the word. The men of olden times believed they would lose their self-consciousness if they entered this region unprepared. We do not lose our self-consciousness, but we do lose the world.

The full clarity of thought and idea, to which man owes his consciousness of self, has been achieved by him only in modern times; and now this consciousness of self needs to be carried a step further. The men of old paid particular heed to the training of the will; we have now to press forward, as I emphasised in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity,” to pure thinking. We must develop our thinking; it must grow into Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. And this will bring us once again to a Threshold, a new Threshold into the spiritual world. We must not remain in the world that offers itself for sense-perception and leaves the inner being of Nature beyond the boundaries of knowledge. We must cross another Threshold, the Threshold that lies before our own inner being.

At this Threshold we shall no longer let our imagination run away with us and conjure up all manner of atoms and molecules to account for the impressions of colour and sound and heat; for when we come consciously to recognise, and be within, our own spirit, then we shall find we are also within the spirit of Nature. We shall learn to know Nature herself as spirit. In the region where to-day we talk of an atomistic world (we are really only postulating behind Nature a second equally material Nature), in the very region where to-day we are losing the world, we shall find the spirit. And then we shall have the right fundamental feeling towards the inner being of Nature and, also, the being of the human soul.

It is, as you see, a different attitude we have to attain from that of olden times. We must be conscious that we are living in conditions the men of old wanted to avoid. This does not mean, however, that we are in danger of losing ourselves; our world of thought has been too strongly developed for that. And if we develop the world of thought still further, then we shall also not lose what we are in danger of losing. The men of olden times were threatened with the loss of self, with a kind of faintness of the soul. We are faced with the danger of losing the world for our ego-consciousness; of being so surrounded and overborne by purely mathematical pictures of the world, purely atomistic conceptions, that we lose all sense of the “whole” world in its infinite variety and richness. In order that we may find the world again—in order, that is, that we may find the spirit in the world—we must cross what constitutes for modern man the Threshold.

We may even put it this way: if the men of olden times feared the Guardian of the Threshold, and needed to be fully prepared before they might pass him, we in our day must desire earnestly to pass the Guardian. We must long to carry knowledge of the spirit into those regions where hitherto we have relied only on external sense-perception in combination with the results of intellectual reasoning and experiment. Knowledge of the spirit must be taken into the laboratory, into the observatory and into the clinic. Wherever research is carried on, knowledge of the spirit must have place.

Otherwise, since all the results that are arrived at in such institutions come from beyond the Threshold, man is thereby cut off from the world in a manner that is dangerous for him. He feels himself in the presence of an inner being of Nature which he can never approach on an external path, which he can approach only by becoming awake in his soul and pressing forward to the immortal part of his own being. As soon, however, as he does this, he is at that moment also within the spirit of Nature. He has stepped across the Threshold that lies in his own being, and finds himself in the presence of the spiritual in Nature.

To point out to man this path is the task of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. It has to give what the other sciences cannot give. And it may rightly claim to be Goethean, for to those who say:

To Nature's heart
No living soul can reach.

Goethe replies:

Nature is neither kernel nor shell,
She is both in one, she is one and all.
Look in your own heart, man, and tell
If you yourself are kernel or shell!

We are “shell” as long as we remain in the life of ideas alone. We sever ourselves from Nature, and all we can do is to talk about her. But the man who penetrates to his own inner “kernel,” and experiences himself in the very centre of his soul—he discovers that he is at the same time in the very innermost of Nature; he is experiencing her inner being.

Such, then, is the kind of impulse that Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is ready to give to the whole of human life, and in particular to the several sciences. These several sciences need not remain the highly specialised fields that they have been hitherto; rather shall each be a contribution to that quest which man must ever follow if he would rise to a consciousness of his true dignity—the quest for the eternal in the human being. All that the individual sciences can teach to-day is still only a knowledge that looks on Nature from without. But if those who are working in them tread, as well as the outer, also the inner path of knowledge, then the knowledge acquired in the different fields can grow into a knowledge of man, a comprehensive knowledge of mankind. We need such a knowledge in our time if we are to guide the social problems of the future into paths where right and healthy solutions can be found—as I have explained in my book, “The Threefold Commonwealth.”

One who carries deeply enough in his heart the development of spiritual science will find himself continually face to face with this question of the connection between the being of man and the inner being of Nature. The specialised sciences cannot help us here; they only spread darkness over the world. The darkness is to be feared, even as the men of olden times feared the region beyond the Threshold. But it is possible for man to kindle a light that shall light up the darkness; and this light is the light that shines in the soul of man when he attains to spiritual knowledge.

• 1. The Riddles of Philosophy
• 2. Philosophy of Spiritual Activity
• 3. English translation from Goethe and Faust; an Interpretation by F. M. Stawell and G. L. Dickinson. G. Bell & Sons, 1928.

This Lecture was formerly part of GA 173 but has not been included in the new arrangement in three volumes.

Many people have the custom of celebrating every year the physical birth of that Being Who entered into earthly evolution in order to give meaning to this earthly evolution. In keeping with the task of our spiritual scientific movement, a task of which we must never cease to be aware, and in an effort to avoid falling into a merely routine celebration such as is found in many places today, it will be fitting to bring before our souls in these grave times some aspects of what is connected with the meaning of the physical birth of Christ Jesus.

We have often contemplated with the eyes of our spirit the fact that in Christ Jesus two Beings flow together to form one: the Christ-Being and the human Jesus-Being. This is something that people on earth are capable of experiencing. As Christianity has developed, there has been much conflict, much dogmatic conflict about the significance of the uniting of Christ with Jesus in the body whose physical birth we celebrate in the Christmas festival. Let us start with what we know. In Christ we recognize a cosmic, super-earthly Being, One Who came down from spiritual worlds in order to give meaning to earthly evolution by being born in a physical human being. And in the human being Jesus we recognize one who was destined, in the manner known to us, to unite as a human being with the Christ-Being, to take this Being into himself after thirty years of preparation.

Not only is much argument, much dogmatic conflict connected with the manner in which Christ united with Jesus. There is also, in the relationship of Christ to Jesus, an indication of important mysteries relating to the whole of mankind's evolution on earth. In endeavouring to pursue what has happened so far, so as to understand something about this uniting of Christ with Jesus, and in considering what must still happen in human evolution in order to bring this relationship into a proper focus, we find ourselves touching on one of the greatest mysteries of human knowledge and human life.

As the time approached when human evolution was to take into itself the Christ-Being there came about a possibility, like an inheritance from the ancient days of clairvoyant wisdom, of gaining a picture, an idea of the whole lofty stature of the Christ-Being. There existed at this time a wisdom about which people often speak today in what could be called a sacrilegious way, though they have scarcely any idea of what it represented. It was something which has now been eliminated from human evolution by certain streams which are opposed to more profound Christian revelation. This was Gnosis,¹ a wisdom into which much of the knowledge revealed to mankind by ancient, atavistic clairvoyance had flowed. Every last fragment of Gnosis, both verbal and written, had been rooted out by western dogmatic Christianity, but not until Gnosis had also endeavoured to find an answer to the question: Who is Christ?

Today there is no longer a question of returning to Gnosis for, of course, the light of Gnosis has meanwhile gone out. But the elimination of Gnosis, root and branch, though a consequence of evil, ignorance and hostility towards knowledge and wisdom sprang, nevertheless, in a way from a necessity of earthly evolution. So the accusation that anthroposophical spiritual science intends to warm up ancient Gnosis is nothing more than one of the many malevolent attacks now being made on us. This accusation is made by people who know nothing about Gnosis and, similarly, little about Anthroposophy. We do not want to warm up Gnosis, but we do want to recognize that Gnosis was something powerful, something great, for that time nineteen centuries ago when it endeavoured to give some kind of an answer to the question: Who is Christ?

The eye of the Gnostic—his spiritual eye—saw the spiritual worlds. He thought of the spiritual hierarchies arranged in a wonderful way, rank upon rank. He also saw how Christ strode down through the world of the spiritual hierarchies in order to enter into the enveloping bodies of a mortal human being. All this was revealed to the soul of the Gnostic. And this soul strove to gain a picture of how Christ came down from spiritual heights and was received on earth. You can gain an idea of the scale of these events if you imagine that everything that has come into the world since the elimination of Gnosis has been small and petty in comparison with the mighty Christ-picture of the Gnostics. The Mystery-wisdom that lies behind the Gospels is infinitely great, greater than anything that subsequent theology has been capable of finding in them. In order to understand how small and insignificant is today's customary understanding of the Christ-Being compared with that of Gnosis, you might try to immerse yourselves in the Christ-idea of the ancient Gnostics. When you place this before your soul you will grovel in the dust before the greatness of this picture of the Christ-Being Who came down from spiritual heights, spiritual distances, spiritual breadths into a human body. So, long ago, there was once amongst human beings a lofty concept of Christ. It has receded now. For all those dogmas that came into being subsequently, the creeds of Arius or Athanasius or whatever,² are trifling compared with the Gnostic concept which combined wisdom about the structure of the universe with the view of the Christ-Being. Only remnants of this great Gnostic concept of Christ remain.

This is one aspect of the relationship of Christ to Jesus, namely, that Christ came into the world at a time when the wisdom which could have comprehended Him, which had endeavoured to comprehend Him, had already been stamped out. Yet, all along, those who spoke of Gnosis as an oriental fantasy which had to be stamped out for the good of western man considered themselves good Christians. In truth, it was only the incapacity of that time, its incapacity to link earthly concepts with heavenly concepts. You really need a sense of tragedy if you want to understand human evolution.

How long was it after the event of the Mystery of Golgotha that the Temple of Jerusalem, the place of peace, was destroyed? The city of Jerusalem surrounded the Temple of Solomon. What Gnosis was as wisdom, the Temple of Solomon was as symbol. In the Temple of Solomon were symbolized all the mysteries of the universe. The purpose was that those who entered the Temple of Solomon, where they were surrounded by pictures which were mirrored in their souls, should there absorb something into their souls which only then transformed them into true human beings. The Temple of Solomon was to pour the meaning of the universe into the souls of those who were permitted to enter there. What the Temple of Solomon contained was not directly contained anywhere on the earth, for it contained everything in the way of universal mysteries that shone down into the earth out of the breadths of the cosmos.

Why was the Temple of Solomon built? My dear friends, if you had asked an ancient initiate who knew about the Temple he would have replied: So that there shall be a sign here on earth which may be seen by those powers who accompany the souls who are seeking a way into earthly bodies. Let us grasp this rightly. These ancient initiates of the Temple of Solomon knew, as they accompanied the human beings down through all the signs of the Zodiac into their earthly bodies, that they must guide special souls to those bodies which were capable of mirroring in themselves the symbols of the Temple of Solomon.

Naturally enough, this could become a reason for succumbing to arrogance. If this was not taken in with humility, with the humility of the Essenes, it became a reason for succumbing to the wisdom of the Pharisees! But the truth is as follows: The earthly eye looks up to the heavens and sees the stars. The spiritual eye of those who led souls down to the earth from the breadths of the universe was directed downwards and saw the Temple of Solomon with its symbols. It was for them a star by whose light they could accompany the souls into bodies of a calibre capable of comprehending the meaning of the Temple of Solomon. It was the star at the mid-point of the earth which shone out strongly into spiritual heights.

When Christ Jesus had come to the earth, when the Mystery of Golgotha had taken its course, then this great Mystery of Golgotha was to be mirrored in every single human soul: ‘My kingdom is not of this world!’ So the external, physical Temple of Solomon first of all lost its significance, and its destiny fulfilled itself in a tragic way. Basically, there was no one left at that time who, by mirroring all the symbols of the Temple of Solomon, could really take in the full extent of the Christ-Being. But the Christ-Being Himself had entered into earthly evolution and was now within it. This—as has so often been repeated in our circles—is the fact which matters. The Gnostics were the last stragglers of those bearers of that wisdom which was extensive and intensive enough to understand something of Christ out of man's ancient, atavistic earth-wisdom.

That is one side of the relationship between Christ and Jesus. At that time the Christ-Being could have been comprehended by Gnosis. But this was not part of the plan of evolution, although in what had been Gnosis there had been contained the full wisdom of the Christ. But now it can be said that the path taken by Christianity through the countries of the South—through Greece, Italy, Spain and so on—was suited to extinguishing more and more the knowledge of what Christ really was. Rome in decline, Rome in disintegration was destined to extinguish the understanding of Christ.

It is a remarkable thing that, on the one hand, the relationship of Christ to Jesus worked in such a way that, in Gnosis, a high concept of Christ shines out and then dies away as Christianity passes through the Roman element, and that, on the other hand, when Christianity meets the peoples coming down towards it from the North, the concept of Jesus starts to take shape. The concept of Christ has died away in the South. Then, in the North, the concept of Jesus appears, certainly not in a lofty way, but in a way that speaks to the souls of human beings; something wonderful enters human souls at the thought of how a child is born in a consecrated night, a child who will take the Christ into himself. Just as in the South the concept of Christ was inadequate, so in the North was the feeling for Jesus. Nevertheless, the feeling was such that it deeply moved people's hearts; yet, in itself, it is not fully comprehensible. You have only to compare the greatness and majesty of what Christ Jesus means for human evolution with all the sentimental trifles contained in so many poems and songs about the ‘darling infant Jesus’, which move the hearts of those who, in their egoism, believe that they are experiencing heavenly ecstasies. If you make this comparison you gain an immediate impression of something that wants to enter into life but cannot quite do so, something that combines with that other in such a way that the whole deeper meaning and significance remains in man's subconscious.

Now what is it that remains in man's subconscious while the concept of Jesus, the feeling for Jesus, the experience of Jesus rises to the surface? It is extraordinary how this happened! The understanding of Christ sank down into the subconscious and the understanding of Jesus began to glow in the subconscious. In man's subconscious, not in consciousness, which was powerless, there was to be a meeting and a balancing out of the Christ consciousness which was fading and the Jesus consciousness which was beginning to glow in the subconscious. Why did the peoples who came down from Scandinavia, from what is today northern Russia, not take up in Christianity the Christ idea which, to begin with, remained utterly unknown to them? Why did they take up the Jesus idea in Christianity? Why was it the Christmas festival which, above all, spoke to human hearts, awakening in them infinite feelings of holy tenderness? Why was this? What was there in this Europe which received from the South what was basically an utterly disfigured Christianity? What was there in this Europe that caused that idea to light up in people's hearts, that idea in which the Christmas festival with its deep, deep content of feeling is experienced?

The people had been prepared but, to a certain extent, they had forgotten what had prepared them. They had been prepared out of the ancient northern Mysteries. But they had forgotten the meaning of the ancient northern Mysteries. To discover, out of the inner meaning of the northern Mysteries, that deep secret of how the feeling for Jesus entered into European soul life it is necessary to go very far back indeed.

These northern Mysteries were founded on something utterly different from the foundation of the Mysteries of Asia Minor, the Mysteries of the South. These Mysteries of the North were founded on something that was more intimately bound up with the life of the stars, with nature, with the earth's growth forces, rather than that which was shown in the symbols of a temple. Mystery-truths are not the trifles certain mystic sects play around with today. Mystery-truths are grand and powerful impulses within human evolution. Just as we cannot find our way back today through Anthroposophy to Gnosis, to the ancient Gnostics, neither can mankind return to what the ancient Mysteries of the North once meant for human evolution. It would be a foolish misunderstanding to believe that such Mystery-truths are being revealed now because of a desire to return in some way to what lived in them. For the sake of self-knowledge it is necessary for mankind today to know what lived in such Mysteries. For what in the northern Mysteries involved the whole evolution of the universe was connected with what came from the earth, whereas the Gnostic wisdom inspired by the cosmos was connected with what took place in the far reaches of the universe. The mystery of mankind in its connection to all the mysteries of the cosmos, how it works when man enters on the physical earth into his physical existence, all this, at a certain period of earthly evolution, lay more deeply than anywhere else at the basis of these ancient northern Mysteries.

But it is necessary to go a very long way back, approximately to the third millennium BC or perhaps even further, in order to understand what lived in those souls who later took into themselves the feeling for Jesus. Just about where the peninsula of Jutland is part of Denmark today, there existed a centre from which emanated in those ancient times very important Mystery-impulses. However people may judge this with their modern understanding, I can tell you that these Mystery-impulses were connected with the fact that, in the third millennium BC in this northern region, there lived certain tribes who only considered those people to be proper residents of the earth who were born during certain weeks in winter time. This came about because the temple priests of this secret Mystery Centre on the Jutland peninsula decreed that in certain tribes, the Ingaevones³ as Tacitus called them, the sexual union of human beings must only take place during the first quarter of the year. Every sexual union outside this period decreed by the Mystery centre was taboo; and anyone not born during the season of the darkest nights, in the coldest season towards the new year, was considered by these tribes of the Ingaevones to be an inferior human being. The impulse was sent out by the Mystery centre at the time of the first full moon after the spring equinox. This was the only time when those who felt truly connected with the spiritual worlds were allowed to practise sexual union. The forces which are used up in sexual union were saved for the whole remainder of each year and thus contributed to the growing strength of the people. Therefore, they were able to develop that remarkable power of which even the dying echo so astonished Tacitus—writing a century after the Mystery of Golgotha.

In this way the tribes of the Ingaevones, and the other Germanic tribes to a lesser extent, underwent at the time of the first full moon after the spring equinox a particularly strong experience of the process of conception, not in a state of waking consciousness but through a kind of dream annunciation. They knew what this meant with regard to the connection between the mystery of man and the mysteries of heaven. A spiritual being appeared to the one who was conceiving and announced to her, as through a vision, the human being who was to come to the earth through her. There was no consciousness, only a semiconsciousness in that sphere which human souls experienced during the process of entering into physical, earthly reality. Subconsciously the people knew themselves to be ruled by gods, the Vanir.⁴ They were not fully conscious in their intellect but lived in a ‘knowing dream-consciousness’.

Practices which exist at a certain time, and are fitting for that time, often survive into later times in external symbols. In olden times the holy mystery of birth was shrouded in the subconscious, which in turn meant that all births were crowded together in a certain part of the winter season, and it was regarded as sinful if human beings were born at other times. Later on this was partly preserved, but only fragments passed over into later consciousness, fragments of which the meaning has so far remained undiscovered by any learning. Indeed, it is openly admitted that no scholar has succeeded in discovering any meaning. Fragments remain in the so-called Ertha saga. Except for a few notes, everything now known externally about the Ertha, or Nerthus saga is contained in the writings of Tacitus, who reports about it as follows:⁵

‘The Reudigni, the Aviones, the Anglii, the Varini, the Eudoses, the Suardones, and Nuithones, Germanic tribes who are fenced in by rivers or forests’—these are more or less those tribes who together constitute the Ingaevones—‘venerate Nerthus, Ertha, or Mother Earth and believe that she interposes in human affairs, and visits the nations in her chariot.’

In olden times every woman who was to give the earth a new citizen knew in her dream consciousness, through the religious worship of the Vanir, that the goddess later worshipped as Ertha or Nerthus would appear to her. This godly being was perceived as male-female rather than purely female. Only later did a corruption lead to Nerthus becoming a wholly female principle. Just as the Angel Gabriel came to Mary so, in ancient times, did Nerthus come in her chariot to those who were to give the earth a new citizen. The women who were going to give birth saw this in spirit. Later, when the Mystery-impulse in this form had long faded away, the people still celebrated the dying echo of this event in symbols. This is what Tacitus saw, and described as follows:

‘In an island of the ocean there is a sacred grove, and within it her consecrated chariot, covered over with a garment. Only one priest is permitted to touch it.’

This priest was thought of as the initiate of the Ertha Mystery.

‘He can perceive the presence of the goddess in this sacred recess, and walks by her side with the utmost reverence as she is drawn along by heifers. It is a season of rejoicing, and festivity reigns wherever she deigns to go and be received. They do not go to battle or wear arms; every weapon is under lock; only peace and quiet are known and welcomed at these times, till the goddess, weary of human intercourse, is at length restored by the same priest to her temple.’

This was exactly what the vision was like. Such ancient documents describe things really quite exactly, only people no longer understand them. ‘It is a season of rejoicing and festivity. They do not go to battle or wear arms; every weapon is under lock.’ Thus it was indeed at the season which is now our Easter time. Out of their inner soul life people believed the season of the earth's fruitfulness to have come for them too, and those souls were conceived who were later born in the season which is now our Christmas time. The season of Easter was the time for conception. This was seen as a holy mystery of the cosmos and later it was symbolized in the worship of Nerthus. All of it was shrouded in the subconscious and was not allowed to break through into consciousness. This shimmers through in what Tacitus says about this worship:

‘Only peace and quiet are known and welcomed at these times, till the goddess, weary of human intercourse, is at length restored by the same priest to her temple. Afterwards the chariot, the vestments and the divinity herself are purified in a secret lake. Slaves perform the rite, who are instantly swallowed up by its waters.’ A penalty to ensure that all who know about these matters are submerged in the night of the unconscious. ‘Thus reigns a mysterious terror and a pious ignorance concerning the nature of that which is seen only by men doomed to die.’

Everything that takes place in the world comes to have a luciferic and an ahrimanic counter-image. The practices of the Ingaevones, which fitted properly into human evolution, related to the time of the first full moon after the spring equinox. But owing to the precession of the equinox, what remained in ancient times of what had once been a dream experience took place later and later, and thus became ahrimanic. When the events of true, ancient Ertha worship had gradually moved to a time approximately four weeks later, they had become ahrimanic. It was ahrimanic because the union of the human woman with the spiritual world was sought in an unlawful way, that is, at an unlawful time. This then came to be caught and held in ‘Walpurgis Night’⁶ which falls on the night of 30 April to 1 May. This is purely the consequence of an ahrimanic time-shift. You know that a luciferic time-shift goes backwards; an ahrimanic one is the opposite, so here the equinox is shifted forwards so that the remnant from earlier times manifests later. Thus the ahrimanic, Mephistophelean reverse side of ancient Ertha worship, its reversal into something devilish, later became ‘Walpurgis Night’, which is connected with the most ancient Mysteries of which only this weak echo remains.

Much of these Mysteries lived on in the Scandinavian Mysteries.⁷ There in place of Ertha is Frigg, who in the symbolism of later ages—as spiritual science reveals—actually appears as a traitor to what really lay at the foundation.

Something else also should be mentioned in connection with the customs of these Mysteries. From the time of the spring full moon until the depths of winter the fruit ripened in the mothers' wombs. Then one such human being was the first to be born in the holy night. Among the tribes of the Ingaevones this human being, the first to be born in the holy night, was chosen to become, at the age of thirty, the leader for three years, for only three years. In most ancient times this occurred every third year. What then happened to him I might be able to tell you later on.

Careful research reveals that not only is Frigg, Frea, Frija a kind of secondary name for Nerthus, but that the name Ing, after whom the Ingaevones named themselves, is also a secondary name for Nerthus. Those connected with this Mystery centre called themselves ‘the ones who belong to the god, or goddess, Ing’: Ingaevones. In the external world only fragments remained of what was actually experienced. One of these are the words of Tacitus which I have read to you. Another fragment is the famous Anglo-Saxon rune-song⁸ consisting of only a few lines. Every student of German philology knows it but none understand its meaning:

‘Ing was first seen by the men of the East Danes. Later he went eastwards. Across the waves he strode, and his chariot followed after.’

This Anglo-Saxon rune-song contains an echo of what had happened in the ancient Mystery-custom of conception at Easter with the view to a time of birth at Christmas. What took place in this connection in the spiritual world was known, above all, on the Danish peninsula. That is why the rune song says quite rightly: ‘Ing was first seen by the men of the East Danes.’ Then came times when this ancient knowledge fell more and more into corruption, so that only echoes and symbols remained. Altogether human evolution became more suffused with what came from warmer climes. From warmer countries comes something which is unlike what comes from colder climes, where the season of the year is intimately linked with what human beings experience in their inner being. In warmer climes the seed of man was sown all the year round. Of course this happened also in the colder countries even while the old atavistic clairvoyance still existed, but it was suffused in the ancient principles. It came to the the northern regions when the Vanir were being replaced by the Aesir and when, in the southern regions, the nature Mysteries had long been replaced by the temple Mysteries. It came northwards, of course still mixed with the ancient ways, when the Vanir were being replaced by the Aesir. Just as the Vanir were connected with ‘imagining’, so were the Aesir connected with ‘being’, with being or existing in the material world which external understanding wishes to grasp. When the northern people had entered an age in which individual intelligence was beginning to develop, when the Aesir took the place of the Vanir, the Mystery-custom became corrupted. It migrated to isolated, scattered Mystery-communities in the East. One alone remained. The one in whom the whole meaning of the earth was to be renewed, the one in whom the Christ was to dwell, was chosen to unite within himself what had once been the content of the northern Mysteries.

So in contemplating in the Luke Gospel the story of how the Archangel Gabriel appears to Mary, we may seek its origin in the true visions which occurred in what was later mirrored in the Nerthus Mystery with its symbols. This had migrated over to the East. Spiritual science now reveals it and only spiritual science can find a meaning for the Anglo-Saxon rune song. For Nerthus and Ing are one and the same. And of Ing it is said: ‘Ing was first seen by the men of the East Danes. Later he went eastwards. Across the waves he strode, and his chariot followed after.’ He strode, of course, across the waves of the clouds, just as Nerthus strode across the waves of the clouds. What had been general in the colder regions became singular, a single event. It took place as a single event and as such comes to meet us again in the description in the Luke Gospel.

Now once something is there, once it has become customary and firmly anchored in the soul, then it remains there, it remains firmly in the soul. So when the people of the North received the tidings of Christianity from what had been ancient Rome in the South, these tidings were linked with old Mystery-customs which lived no longer in full consciousness but in the subconscious and were thus only dimly sensed. That is why the feeling for Jesus could be especially strongly developed there. What had lived in the old Nerthus Mystery had sunk down into the subconscious where it was still present, where it was sensed and felt.

In those distant days in the far North, when the earth was still covered in forests in which lived the aurochs and the elk, the families gathered in their snow-covered huts in the lamplight around a newborn child. They spoke of this new life and of how it brought to them the new light which the heavens had announced to them in the days of early spring. This was the ancient Christmas, the consecrated night. When they later received tidings of one who was born in the holiest hour and who was destined for great things it reminded them of another who had been the firstborn after the twelfth hour of the consecrated night. The ancient knowledge was gone, but the ancient feelings lived on when the tidings came of such a one born in distant Asia, one in whom lived the Christ Who had descended to the earth from the starry heavens.

It is our duty in the present time to understand such things more and more so that we may learn to grasp the meaning of earthly mankind's evolution. Holy Writ is filled with what is unimaginably great, not with the kind of triviality so often discussed in religious tracts. It is filled with holy truths which run through the whole of human evolution and thrill us to the marrow, flooding our hearts with wonder. All this resounds in what the gospels contain. Once spiritual science has revealed the profound background to what lives in the gospels, these gospels will become for mankind something inestimably dear and valuable. One day mankind will know why it is said in the Luke gospel:

‘And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, (because he was of the house and lineage of David): To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.’

For Him, the firstborn among those who were to find one another in the soul, the ancient Mystery-forces had migrated to the distant East from the Danish peninsula.

‘And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid.’

In the same way had Ertha, who rode through the countryside in her chariot, brought tidings of the arrival of human beings on earth in a way fitting for the ancient consciousness of the Vanir, that is, for subconscious, atavistic clairvoyance.

‘And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying,’

Saying what the Ertha priest had spoken in the ancient northern Mystery to the woman who was to conceive:

‘The revelation of the divine comes from on high in the time of peace among those who are of good will!’

As Tacitus says: ‘It is a season of rejoicing and festivity. They do not go to battle or wear arms; every weapon is under lock.’

It is to this greatness that human beings must ascend: They must look deeply into the course of human evolution. For even the Mystery of Golgotha, which gave a deeper meaning to the whole of earth evolution, only becomes fully comprehensible when it is shown how it stands within human evolution as a whole. When materialism has disappeared and people want to know, not only in the abstract but also quite concretely about their divine origin, there will once again be an understanding for the holy Mystery-truths of ancient days. Then will the interval of time be over in which Christ, though He lives on the earth, can only be minimally understood in full consciousness. For the understanding of Christ among the Gnostics faded away; and the understanding of Jesus grew only unconsciously in connection with the ancient worship of Nerthus. In the future mankind will have to bring into consciousness and bind together both these unconscious streams. Then an understanding of Christ will gain more and more prominence on the earth, and this will be the link between ancient Mystery-knowledge and a renewed great flourishing of Gnosis.

Those who take seriously the anthroposophical view of the world, and also the Movement connected with it, will see that the things it has to say to mankind are no childish games but great and serious truths. We must allow our souls to be deeply moved, because these things are meant to move us deeply.

The earth is not only a great living creature. It is also a lofty spiritual being. Just as a great human genius cannot evolve to full stature without suitable development through childhood and youth, so the Mystery of Golgotha could not have taken place, the divine could not have united with earth evolution if, in the days of earth's beginning, other divine beings had not descended in a different, though equally divine way. The revelation of the divine on high incorporated in the worship of Nerthus differed from the way it was later understood; but it existed.

The knowledge contained in this ancient wisdom is solely atavistic, yet it is infinitely higher than the materialistic world view which is today making human beings into animals as regards the level of their knowledge.

In Christianity we are concerned with a fact, not with a theory. The theory has to follow after the fact and it is important for the human consciousness that is to develop during the further course of earth evolution. But Christianity as such, the Mystery of Golgotha, exists as a fact, and it was necessary that it should enter at first into the unconscious streams. This was still possible in Asia Minor at the time when Christ united with the earth.

Shepherds, people resembling those among whom the worship of Nerthus lived, are also described in the Luke gospel. I can only sketch all this for you. If only we had more time I could show you how deeply founded are the things I have to tell you today. It is because man came down from spiritual heights that the revelation of the divine came from the heavens. It had to be expressed in this way to those who knew, from ancient wisdom, that the destiny of man is linked with what lives in the stars of the heavens. But what is to live on the earth as a result of the incarnation of Christ into a human being will have to be understood gradually. The tidings are twofold, they are in two parts: ‘The revelation of the divine from on high’ and ‘Peace to earthly souls who are of good will.’ Without this second part, Christmas, the festival of the birth of Christ is meaningless!

Not only was Christ born for mankind; mankind also crucified Him! There is a necessity for this, too, but it is no less true that mankind did crucify Christ. And it may be known that the crucifixion on the wooden cross at Golgotha was not the only crucifixion. A time must come in which the second part of the Christmas words may be understood: ‘Peace to men on earth who are of good will!’ For the negative, too, may be felt and sensed, namely, that mankind today is far removed from a proper understanding of Christ and the Christmas Mystery.

Surely it must cut us to the quick that we live in an age when mankind's longing for peace is shouted down.⁹ It is almost dishonest in these days, when mankind's longing for peace is shouted down in the way it is, to celebrate Christmas at all. Let us hope, since we are not yet confronted with the absolute worst, that a change of soul may take place so that, in place of the shouting-down of the longing for peace, there may come Christian feelings, a will for peace. If it does not, it may not be those who are striving in Europe today but, instead, others who come over from Asia who will one day take revenge for the shouting-down of the longing for peace and bring tidings of Christianity and of the Mystery of Golgotha to the ruins of European culture and spiritual life. Then the record will be indelible: At Christmas in the nineteen hundred and sixteenth year after the annunciation of peace on earth to human souls who are of good will, in the nineteen hundred and sixteenth year after the tidings of Christmas, mankind succeeded in shouting down the longing for peace!

May it not come to this! May the good spirits who work in the Christmas impulses guard Europe's unfortunate population against this!

• 1. See, among others, Rudolf Steiner Christ and the Spiritual World. The Search for the Holy Grail, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1963, Lecture One.
• 2. At the first Council of Nicaea (325) the Athanasian creed (identity of the Son with the Father) was accepted. Arius denied this identity and stressed the oneness of God the Father. He gained many supporters, especially among the Germanic tribes, and the strife between the two schools of thought dragged on throughout the fourth and fifth centuries, until Arianism lost its influence.
• 3. ‘To Mannus they assign three sons, from whose names, they say, the coast tribes are called Ingaevones; those of the interior, Herminones; all the rest Istaevones.’ Tacitus Germania, 2.
• 4. A literal translation of these two sentences reads as follows: ‘Subconsciously the people knew themselves to be ruled by gods, who were given the name ‘Wanen’ [English: Vanir], which is connected with the word ‘wahnen’ [to fancy, to imagine], that is, with that which runs its course, not in full, intellectual consciousness but in a “knowing, dream consciousness”.’ Trs.
• 5. Tacitus on the Ertha saga, Germania, 40. Translated by A J Church and W J Brodribb.
• 6. The night of 30 April to 1 May when the witches are said to gather on the Brocken in the Harz Mountains.
• 7. See Rudolf Steiner The Mission of the Individual Folk-Souls, Rudolf Steiner Press, London 1970, and also Die Julzeit und die Christfeststimmung, Dornach 1966.
• 8. The so-called song of the runic names. Twenty-second rune. See Wilhelm Grimm Über deutsche Runen (On German Runes), Göttingen 1821.
• 9. On 12 December 1916, via a speech in the Reichstag by Bethmann-Hollweg, the Central Powers offered a suggestion for peace negotiations which was rejected by the Allies. See Lecture Thirteen.