The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[In these lectures I would like to give a picture of the theosophical world view that is completely free of any dogmatics, by trying to show what is peculiar to our own spiritual life by looking at phenomena of it.]

Those who know how strongly I have resisted anything propagandistic, any kind of propaganda, will also know how strongly I have opposed the view that Theosophy is about importing some alien, oriental world-view into our time, and how I have emphasized that Theosophy must be life; direct, real life. If Theosophy were something that had only come into the world through the Theosophical Society, then one could indeed have very little trust in it. How could it be that humanity would have to wait thousands of years for the new gospel of Theosophy! Rather, it is the renewal of the spiritual current rooted in the human soul that we are dealing with in the Theosophical Society. But what should interest people of the present time most is to see how their favorite geniuses are completely imbued with what is called Theosophy, the theosophical worldview.

Apart from all the rest, there is one great German personality whose work, especially the work of his later life, is completely rooted in this worldview: Goethe. The combination of Goethe and theosophy may initially come as a surprise; but anyone who, like me, has been studying Goethe for more than twenty years, in particular the profound Goethean “Faust” poetry, will become more and more familiar with what I will try to explain today. Over the years, I have come across many explanations of Faust, many Faust researchers, and many attempts to penetrate the marvel of this Faustian poetry. What I will present to you has come to me alone, in the most unforced way, all by itself. In the first of the two lectures I will speak about Goethe's gospel, proceeding from Goethe's “Faust” poetry, and in the next lecture I will give some views of Goethe from this point of view. We will then try, after I have inserted a lecture on the basic concepts of theosophy, to grasp Goethe where he reveals himself to us most profoundly and is least understood: in his fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily, which one only has to understand to get a deep insight into the wisdom of the world on the one hand and into the innermost nature, into the innermost soul of Goethe on the other. In a casual way, these Goethe lectures can be followed by reflections on the great initiates of all times and on Ibsen. I will then try to insert a lecture on the significance of Siegfried, Parzival and Lohengrin.

Goethe was a theosophist by nature, by the innermost meaning of his life. Above all, he was a theosophist because he never accepted any limits to his understanding, any limits to his knowledge and work, but was deeply imbued with the idea that there is no human point of view from which we cannot advance to a higher one, from which the world reveals itself not only in a broader context but also in a more meaningful way. Goethe's entire makeup was determined by the world view we are discussing here. His world view assumed that man stands in a deeply related relationship to the rest of the world and that this rest of the world is not merely material, not merely outwardly physical, but equally spiritual, that a divine, creative, active spirit expresses itself in the whole world. This, one could say, is pantheism. But pantheism assumes that an indeterminate divine essence spreads throughout the world and also animates man. The theosophical world view, however, assumes that it is not an indeterminate, incomprehensible essence, but a spiritual essence to which we can ascend more and more, and that we can enter into a relationship with this spiritual essence; [ascend to a living relationship with the great God].

Goethe was suited to this kind of relationship by his very nature. Even as a seven-year-old boy, he sought out the god. He built an altar with plants and stones and incense on top, took a burning glass, and when the first rays of the rising sun shone in through the window, he collected the sunbeams so that they ignited the incense. Thus this compilation was an altar for him, on which he performed a service to nature, a service to the gods. [He wanted to ignite a sacrificial service from the fire of nature], so innate was this world view for him. When he then got to know more and more about the world itself in Leipzig and delved into the individual sciences, an insight came to him that is entirely theosophical. He tells us about it in “Poetry and Truth”. He says: “When we survey the various religions and philosophies of the world, we find something in common everywhere, a common core of truth. Wherever religion, philosophy, or worldview has emerged, whether in mythical-allegorical or philosophical form, everywhere man seeks to find the connection between his lower self and the deepest part of his soul, which is called the divine and through which he can gain a connection with the divine itself. Thus the wise of all times have shown the pendulum swing between the lower and the higher self, and we see how this is expressed in fairy tales, myths and legends; it can be found everywhere.

When Goethe himself passed the threshold of death after his studies in Leipzig and had returned to Frankfurt, he devoted himself to mystical studies. You can read in “Poetry and Truth” what kind of impact Goethe had from that time, and what emerged in him when he had become thoroughly familiar with natural science during his time in Strasbourg. This is expressed in no better way than in the fact that he decided to express the whole human urge for wisdom and for oneness with the divine nature in a great poem, the “Faust” poem. In doing so, he draws on the world of legends through which the late Middle Ages suggested the contrast between the old and the new era.

Faust is the kind of person who wants to free themselves from all tradition, from the basic ideas of the Middle Ages, and to penetrate from their own breast to a higher knowledge. Goethe did not let Faust perish, as the sixteenth century still did, but rather he redeemed him through the power of his own striving soul. In doing so, he placed the entire problem on a new footing, so that even today we must feel every word of this poem as an expression of our own thoughts and feelings. I will discuss some of the details in the following lectures. For now, I must lead you directly into what this is about.

First of all, after Goethe had presented Faust as a striving human being in his youth and brought his “Faust” poetry with him to Weimar, and had risen to a purer knowledge and worldview, he placed his “Faust” on a new foundation in the 1890s. At the beginning of Faust we find the Prologue in Heaven. Here Goethe wants to show us what his Faust epic is about. He wants to tell us nothing other than this: human destiny is not determined only in this physical world, it is determined in higher, spiritual worlds. If you remember my lectures this winter, I said at the time: the physical world that surrounds us is not the only world; there are higher worlds, the world of the soul or the astral world and what we call the devachanic world, the spiritual world, heaven. That which undergoes a struggle in the outer world is not only significant for the outer world, but is a reflection of forces from the supersensible worlds. When we penetrate into the soul world, we enter into a world of colorful existence. The astral world can be perceived by those whose spiritual senses are open as a world glowing with colors, of a beauty and sublimity, but also of a dreadfulness and cruelty that are never found in our physical world. The devachanic world can be described as a sounding one. The Pythagorean music of the spheres can truly be heard by those whose spiritual ears are open; it is not merely an allegory, but a reality.

It is therefore extremely interesting that Goethe, quite appropriately, I would say using a technical term of the mystic or theosophist, describes this world of Devachan in his “Prologue in Heaven”. The planets and the sun are endowed with souls. Goethe speaks appropriately in the sense of mysticism; so he must also express that he finds that sound in this world. And so he really does begin this “Prologue in Heaven”:

The sun resounds in the ancient way
In brother spheres of competitive song,
And its prescribed journey
It completes with a thunderclap.

The sun does not sound in the physical sense, and anyone who says that it is only an image is saying a superficiality. You can see where Faust, having gone through the purification, is to be raised to Devachan, how precisely Goethe speaks of this devachanic world:

For spiritual ears the new day is already born

Here Goethe speaks of spiritual ears, of the sounds of the spiritual world. We describe it not in the form of poetic images, but in the language of theosophical science. In the “Prologue in Heaven,” almost every word can be interpreted in a way that is consistent with our worldview. In this, we see an important principle of human existence. You all know about the law of karma. You know that when a person passes through the gate of death, they take with them the experiences they have had in this world, and that they then take the fruits of this world with them in such a way that they extract, so to speak, something eternal from this earthly world. Because his thoughts are a reflection of the spiritual world, he can take the fruits with him into the spiritual world. It is entirely in keeping with the law of karma when God calls out to the angels:

And what floats in fluctuating appearance
Attach it with lasting thoughts.

Of course, anyone who wants to can say that these are poetic images. But anyone who, like Goethe, not only dealt with mysticism practically for decades before writing these things, but also became thoroughly acquainted with medieval mysticism, knows that Goethe drew these things from mystical thinking and perception. We know that the theosophical worldview traces its basis back to the great sages, to higher spiritual individuals who have already reached the level that the average person will only rise to in the future. These great sages are the great teachers of humanity. It has been criticized that Theosophy speaks of such unknown sages. Goethe also speaks of such unknown sages when Faust, imbued with the vanity of knowledge in the first monologue, wants to grasp the source of life and has already glimpsed a reflection of divine life.

Only now do I recognize what the wise man says:
'The spiritual world is not closed;
Your mind is closed, your heart is dead!
Rise up, disciple, and bathe unflinchingly
The earthly breast in the dawn!'

This is an expression that occurs in the mystics of all times. Jakob Böhme called the work with which he began his mystical career “Aurora”. Goethe puts “dawn” in quotation marks. He expresses something that he knew from his practical mysticism as an inner experience, not a general phrase, a general saying; he speaks entirely in the technical mystical sense.

If we take a look at Faust, what do we see in the first part? You know that we distinguish between a lower self, the self that experiences the world through the doors of the senses and, purified through many paths, finally ascends to the higher self. If you read through the first part, you will find a description of the struggle of the lower self of man with the surrounding world. Faust must first pass this struggle before he can come to the truly mystical realization within himself. From the very beginning, he strives for this realization. And again, we are faced with some sentences that only those familiar with the theosophical worldview can understand. When Faust recognizes his connection with the higher self, he turns to the earth spirit. This is a masterpiece of the description of the soul's life; [the astral body of the earth, spiritually wrought and woven from the fruits of the immortal soul's garment].

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge and surge, weaving to and fro! Birth and grave, an eternal sea, a changing weaving, a glowing life, so I create at the whirring loom of time and weave the living garment of the Godhead.

This description, especially the last line, is very meaningful for every mystic. It expresses how the soul, from the earlier experiences of this self, works and weaves a form that remains eternal.

Faust must turn away like a timid, twisted worm. He is not yet mature enough to penetrate to the sources of life. He must guide his self through the world by the hand of the tempter Mephistopheles. Goethe gives this a form in the sense of ancient Hebrew mysticism. “Mephis” means “corrupter”, and “Tophel” means “liar”. These are the forces and entities that are always present in the world as obstacles. While man strives forward, they hold him back, and in the moral world they become the tempters. The tempter is Mephistopheles. He leads Faust through the regions of the lower self, through all kinds of experiences of our lower self.

We see how Faust is unsatisfied by the science of the mind. The highest learning can be no more than an occupation with the sensory world. He is then led through passion and so on to purification. Faust now wants to approach the spirit from whom he had to turn away. He encounters this spirit again in the scene “Forest and Cave”. He can now address the spirit in such a way that he can express a fundamental belief, as you can find it in any theosophical book. It appeals to him that this spirit can show him that in all beings we find our brothers, as we are connected to all, and that when we find our kinship with all brothers, we find our own divine self. In a beautiful way, Goethe describes in images the ascent of man in his knowledge.

Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me everything,
why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
turn thy face to me in the fire.
Gavest me the glorious nature for my kingdom,
the strength to feel and enjoy it. You do not allow cold, astonished visitors, you grant me the privilege of looking into their deep chests, as into the bosom of a friend. You lead the line of the living before me, and teach me to know my brothers in the silent bush, in air and water.

It is wonderful that Goethe led his Faust to this confession of looking into one's own self. After going through a series of temptations, Faust, who in his lower self sees the transience of life, gains insight into the possibility of truly recognizing the higher self.

Faust, after having been deeply crushed by the misfortunes of life, is now to be led up to higher levels. Before that, he only experienced what can be experienced by the lower egoism. Now he works at the imperial court for the lower self of others. In the midst of this work, in the midst of the transience of the world, Faust is brought to an immediate mystical point of view. Goethe himself rejected the view that the second part of “Faust” is anything other than the purest expression of truly mystical soul life. He was asked by a friend whether he wanted to end his “Faust” as he wrote in the first part:

A good man in his dark urges
Is well aware of the right path.

Oh no, replied Goethe, Faust ends in old age, and in old age one becomes a mystic. But that would be enlightenment. Once Goethe had attained a worldview that allowed a free view into the spiritual world, he could no longer let Faust end in the sense of the Enlightenment. So in 1827, he said to Eckermann about the second part of Faust: I have conceived Faust in such a way that the images are also interesting, dramatic for the mind. Everyone can take pleasure in the images. But for the initiate, there is something quite different in my “Faust”. You will see that many a riddle is hidden in it. Although Goethe did not include anything inscrutable in the second part of “Faust”, there is something that cannot be found for the superficial mind.

At court, the emperor demands that Paris and Helen appear before everyone. We are confronted with a problem that takes us beyond the physical world. Goethe captures it in its deepest sense. Faust must descend to the “mothers”. The scholars have interpreted many things into it. For those who are endowed with mystical knowledge, it is clear what is meant here. In all mysticism, the highest soul of the world has always been described as something feminine. This is quite appropriate, because what man calls knowledge, higher life, arises in his soul when he allows himself to be fertilized by the forces that work in the universe. Knowledge is a fertilization process; that is why all mysticism has sought the eternal in the feminine, in the “mothers”. The theosophical world view sees the highest that the human soul can achieve in the higher, upper trinity, in Sanskrit: Manas, Budhi, Atman; spirit self, life spirit and actual spirit of man. This higher trinity must be developed in man if he is to come to true self-knowledge. But then he attains the connection with the eternal sources of existence. Goethe indicates that this is a trinity by having the tripod set up among the mothers, with fire flowing out of it. Mysticism knows this fire as the primal matter. Faust can use it to bring up the spiritual essence of Paris and Helen. The spiritual essence is not above or below, which is why Mephistopheles says:

Sink then! I could also say: rise!

This shows how that which is eternal, brought up by Paris and Helena, is brought up from the soul-spiritual world.

But in order for man to rise to this pure spiritual level, it is crucial that he is so far purified that the desires of the body, the lower qualities of the soul and the instincts are purified, that man no longer craves this highest spiritual, but that he relates to this highest in a selfless way. When Faust brings it up, he demands it passionately, and that causes an explosion. Faust still needs to be purified and cleansed. He must learn the secret of how human nature is structured, how the three members of body, soul and spirit work together to form a whole. Established psychology only recognizes body and soul. It is a science that has stopped at two-thirds of the human being because it does not recognize the threefold nature of the human being. School psychology may feel very learned, but to anyone who sees through things, it is the most amateurish thing imaginable. Faust is meant to recognize how body, soul and spirit connect, this deep secret of human nature. At this point, we can eavesdrop on Goethe at his most profound, as he has become a complete mystic, as he has immersed himself in the knowledge that is also found in our theosophical textbooks.

First, Faust is to get to know the soul. This is presented to us in a peculiar but appropriate way, by leading Faust back to the laboratory where he was before and where the homunculus is now being created. This homunculus is nothing other than an image of the human soul. And it is wonderfully understandable every word, if you touch the homunculus as a soul without a body, as a soul that has not yet incarnated. The homunculus

does not lack spiritual qualities,
But it is all too lacking in the tangible and practical.

When the soul is free of the body, when it appears without the covers of physicality, then it is clairvoyant, not dependent on seeing through the senses. It sees into the innermost part of human nature. It does not just perceive what has an external color, sounds in external tones, but it perceives the impulses, the most intimate thoughts of the person. This is something that can be perceived clairvoyantly, the extra-physical world. Goethe lets the homunculus be clairvoyant. The entire dream of Faust is described by the homunculus, who sees into the depths of the human soul. We can go through the entire second part of “Faust” in this way: the soul is expressed in the homunculus.

The third part of the human being, the body, is that which has developed from the most imperfect to the most perfect, not only in the sense of natural science, but also in the sense of mysticism. But mysticism does not just look at how the physical has developed from the most imperfect to the most perfect, as modern science does. Mysticism also shows how the physical has developed through the mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, and finally to the human being. The body has developed along this path until it has become capable of connecting with the soul. In the second part of Faust, Goethe presents this gradual development of the physical body in magnificent images. He has the homunculus Mephisto and Faust led to the fields of the 'Classical Walpurgis Night'. There he is brought together with Proteus, who guides the transformation of the physical form, and with the wise men Thales and Anaxagoras, who know how the physical transformations take place. It is shown how this homunculus, as a soul, can acquire a body by living through all the kingdoms of nature. It must begin at the bottom, with the mineral kingdom, and then slowly move on to the higher realms. Goethe describes in a wonderful way how this embodiment rises from the mineral kingdom to the plant kingdom. Goethe coined an expression to describe this so wonderfully vividly:

It grunet so

- the plant structure!

Only at a certain stage of development, what is called sex life, that this connects with all the formative forces that were present earlier. Goethe expresses this by letting Eros connect with the homunculus struggling for design at this stage. This is how Goethe described how the soul is structured until it is ready to receive the spirit. We have reached the end of the second act of the second part of Faust. Faust has learned the secret of how the three parts of human nature are connected: the immortal, the eternal, which is in the realm of the “mothers”, the soul and the body. This is how a person can incarnate. This is how that which also lived physically in the external world and belonged to times long past, Helen, can also incarnate again. We meet her again at the beginning of the third act. She has incarnated, Helen is standing before Faust in the flesh. Thus Faust has passed through mystical knowledge, he has experienced the secret of becoming human.

I have said that in every mysticism the soul in man is presented as something feminine. Then the struggle for the higher, the striving for the higher is expressed precisely in Faust's striving for Helena. Faust unites with Helena. This is initially the symbolic expression of an inner experience. Faust seeks the higher, and there the spiritual is born. Poetry expresses this symbolically through the union of the soul's masculine and feminine, whereby higher spiritual knowledge is begotten: Euphorion. Euphorion represents how the spirit in human nature comes to life in mystical moments. The mystic knows these moments. But there is one thing he still has to learn: At first, what he experiences is only a fleeting moment, only a celebratory moment in life, a moment of mystical insight; then he must return to his profession, to his everyday studies. These mystical insights are celebratory moments; but celebratory moments die quickly: Euphorion dies quickly. What follows is drawn deeply from mystical consciousness. Euphorion, after he has disappeared again into the spiritual realm, calls out to his mother Helena:

Do not leave me alone in the dark realm,
mother!

This is a voice that everyone who has experienced mystical moments has heard at some point. The spiritual always calls to the soul, the “mother”: “Do not leave me alone, seek me!” Here theory cannot speak, only direct experience can speak, in order to recognize the full depth of what is at stake here. The mystical moments of celebration are represented by Euphorion. Faust's serene worldview, in comparison with what has happened at the imperial court, now comes to light. Faust is now to be led to experience not only individual moments of celebration of mystical contemplation, for that is still an imperfect state. The perfect mystic works from the spiritual world; he works selflessly, like a messenger of the deity, as if the deity itself were creating. This is how it is with Faust when he has reached higher levels.

But Faust is not yet so far that he is above all the temptations that the lower self suffers. Nothing must speak to the mystic's senses anymore; the senses must become a gateway for the spiritual. Once again, for the last time, Faust succumbs to temptation. Something disturbs his eye, so he has the hut of Philemon and Baucis removed. That was the last external temptation; henceforth he can no longer be tempted by his senses.

But there is still something in man that appeals to his lower self, that is the memory that still clings to his lower self, that repeatedly pulls him down into this lower world. This is symbolized by the fact that worry approaches Faust. But this trial also comes from him. Faust goes blind. Now it is suggested that, by going blind, Faust becomes a seer: a bright light shines within, while it becomes dark and gloomy on the outside. He has become a mystic in the most beautiful sense, he has become a clairvoyant, he sees into the spiritual world.

Faust has gone through a struggle through the stages of the lower and higher self to the depths of the mystical worldview. This struggle between the lower and higher is a struggle between good and evil. Now, in a spirited riddle in the second part of the first act, Goethe has just hinted at how good and evil work together to allow the human fighter to pass through the middle for purification. Commentators have tried in vain to explain this line.

What is both dreaded and always welcome?
What is longed for and always chased away?
What is constantly defended?
What is harshly scolded and accused?
Whom may you not summon here?
Whom does everyone like to hear named?
What approaches your throne's steps?
What has banished itself away?

You will hardly find a solution to these riddle words in Faust commentaries. But for those who know the deeper meaning of “Faust”, they will be resolved naturally. We can go through line by line and need only say “evil” for the first line and “good” for the second, and we have the complete solution to the riddle. This is how Goethe describes the battle between good and evil in man, and he has Faust become a mystic.

Goethe can only hint at the last stages of development, and he uses mystical symbolism. Every line is deeply significant for the mystical path, the mystical stages that the mystic goes through in practical development. And then, at the end, Goethe indicates to us that this is what he really meant in the second part of “Faust”. He stood there alone when he came to this mystical realization.

If you read “Faust” in your youth, you will find a lot, later you will find more and more and even later still more. Today, I too have been able to describe only a glimpse of what is in “Faust”. The second part of “Faust” is something quite different from what was intended in the first part. The old Goethe is only understood if you take it so deeply. He knew that there were many people around him who would defend the young Goethe against the old one. In a moment of resentment, he spoke out about those who only want to accept the earlier works and what is otherwise easy to understand, saying, “Goethe has grown old.” To them he cries:

They praise Faust
And what else
In my works roars
In their favor.
The old Mick and Mack
That is very happy;
It means the pack of ragamuffins,
One would not be more!

Goethe knew that “he still was it,” also knew that he could not be understood.

In the second part of “Faust”, Goethe has hidden many secrets for the initiate who wants to hear them. And then, to suggest that he wants “Faust” to be understood in a mystical sense, he has closed the second part with the “Chorus mysticus”. There he shows us how he sees nothing in the ephemeral but a parable for the imperishable, for the eternal. That is the view of mysticism or theosophy, that what is present in the senses is only a parable for the imperishable. That which man can never attain in the sensual world, that which he strives for in the sensual world, to recognize the real meaning of life, this “inadequate” becomes an “experience” in the higher world through practical mysticism; and what cannot be described can be experienced. Then the spiritual powers slumbering in man are awakened; he not only perceives with his senses, but is led up into the higher worlds. That which is “indescribable” for the sensual world is done, now in the higher worlds. And that which the mystics of all times have called the 'feminine', the highest, that to which the lower strives, that which Goethe sought in the 'mothers', in the 'feminine', the 'eternally feminine', the highest in the human soul, that draws man upwards. This is the fundamental confession of Goethe, the mystic, which he has expressed here and which shines back on all that he has mysteriously incorporated into his “Faust”:

All that is
transient is but a parable;
The inadequate
Here it becomes an event;
The indescribable
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
Draws us on.

Eight days ago, I tried to explain Goethe's world view through his “Faust”. We saw that Goethe presents the great struggle of the universe, the spiritual universe, between good and evil, as it unfolds in man and around man, in the way it is in the sense of mysticism or what we call theosophy. We have seen that where Goethe points people to worlds beyond the sensual, he does so in such a way that we can clearly see from his expressions his intimate knowledge of what we in Theosophy hold as our conviction. We have seen this in “Prologue in Heaven” and in the way he lets the Earth Spirit speak, but also in what we can see as a reference to the spiritual world and as a juxtaposition of the lower and higher self. We have taken a closer look at the address to the Earth Spirit and seen how Goethe introduces his Faust to the world, which we have called the world of higher knowledge, by showing how the human being is composed of the physical, the soul and the spiritual. We have been able to show this by the descent of Faust to the “Mothers”, by the characteristic properties of the homunculus, which cannot be made plausible in any other way, and then by the re-humanization of Helena in the “Classical Walpurgis Night”. We have seen how he ascends to knowledge, ascends to the heights of a spiritual Montserrat, to the heights of knowledge and mystical experience, concludes with the words that he has the Chorus mysticus say, and in doing so suggests the sense in which he wants Faust to be understood.

What Goethe expressed here is not a figment of his imagination, nor is it meant in a merely poetic sense, because Goethe has always seen the expression of secret natural laws in art, which he expressed at another time as follows: Art should be based on the deepest foundations of knowledge. There is no doubt that if we follow Goethe to the height of his life, if we look up and look up to the spiritual worlds, then we will be able to demonstrate a continuous increase to truly mystical heights in Goethe himself. Last time, I already pointed out that the direction of Goethe's gaze to the spiritual was not only in his nature, but was already present when he had already established a world view for himself, when he tried to make clear to himself when he entered Weimar, how things in nature are connected, when he sought a spiritual essence that underlies all nature. Last time I already spoke about the “Nature” hymn that he wrote in Weimar. In it, he addresses nature directly, but in such a way that it becomes a direct expression of a spiritual essence for him. You can see from every word in this prose hymn that he addresses nature as a being of a spiritual nature. In the book “On Natural Science” in General, he says about nature:

Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by it, unable to step out of it or to get deeper into it. Uninvited and unwarned, she takes us into the cycle of her dance and carries us away with her until we are tired and fall out of her arms [...] She has thought and is constantly pondering; but not as a human being, but as nature[...] She has no language or speech, but she creates tongues and hearts through which she feels and speaks [...] I did not speak of her. No, what is true and what is false, she has spoken it all. Everything is her fault, everything is her merit.

Thus he places himself in this nature, which he has conceived entirely spiritually, and speaks of nature as the external expression of a spiritual essence. Since Goethe addressed nature in this way, he was bound to ascend. For this is how he presents the physical incarnation: He imagines that the soul is above nature. It is true that it belongs to the great whole of the world, and he therefore also speaks of a higher nature. But by speaking of the lower nature, of the various changes, of the metamorphoses of nature, he builds the world view in the sense of the mystical. To give an example, I mention Paracelsus. Without him, Goethe is inconceivable. Through Paracelsus, Goethe is more understandable. I do not want to claim that Paracelsus' teachings can be adopted wholesale. Do not think that I want to speak in favor of those who today want to speak again as Paracelsus spoke. But we could still learn an infinite amount from such a highly chosen spirit. Goethe also learned an infinite amount from him. Just one word to show how Goethe strove in the spirit of Paracelsus: Paracelsus places himself before the true essence of man, soul and spirit, embodying himself in the archetypes of nature, in the mineral kingdom, plant kingdom, animal kingdom, where it is expressed in a one-sided way, in order to finally express itself in the most versatile way in man. In the various minerals, plants and animals, letters have been created with which the great All-Spirit has ultimately written the human being. This shows the depth of Paracelsus' insight into the human being. When Goethe sets out to study the development of the world's creatures from the imperfect to the perfect, he expresses himself in a similar way to Paracelsus. Every day, Frau von Stein received answers to questions about how his thoughts were maturing. Once, when he thought he was on the trail of a particularly important discovery, he said to her, “My spelling has helped me.” He meant that he had tried to get to know the plants and animals, which, like Paracelsus, were letters for him in solving the great mystery that man represents for man. In this way, Goethe wanted to proceed from the beginning of his study of nature, in order to seek the great spiritual connection in all beings. So, from the outset, he sought what he called the “primordial plant”, which was said to live in all plants and which, in essence, is the spirit of plant existence. Then he rose to the “primordial animal” and sought to prove the “primordial animal” in the animals. Metamorphosis of Plants and Metamorphosis of Animals – you only need to read them to have the most beautiful theosophical treatise on plants and animals you could ever find. It was precisely this attitude that led Goethe, soon after his arrival in Weimar, to an important scientific discovery. Until the time when Goethe became involved in the study of nature, the fact that humans are superior to animals had to be found in the existence of special individual organs. That humans differ in their physical constitution from the higher animals, however, was already addressed by Herder in his “History of Humanity”. Herder was Goethe's teacher to a significant extent. It was said at that time: All higher animals have the upper incisors in a special intermaxillary bone. Only humans do not have such an intermaxillary bone. Goethe said: The difference between humans and other beings is of a spiritual-mental nature. But the difference cannot be found in such a detail, which is why humans must also have an intermaxillary bone. Researchers have long resisted recognizing this discovery by Goethe. But today it is taken for granted that the discovery is based on a full fact. So even then, Goethe made this great scientific discovery out of his own convictions. In Italy, he studied the plant and animal world with the aim of finding ways and means of gaining an overview of these beings. In his Metamorphosis of Plants and Animals, he produced a masterpiece in this regard. The idea that Goethe carried out is an idea that can already be found on a large scale in Giordano Bruno. Giordano Bruno, for example, as is to be expected of anyone who truly sees into the depths of nature and the universe, is one of those who assumes that humans go through various incarnations, who assumes that humans have often been here before and will often return. The body of man, as we see it before us, shows us how soul and spirit expand in space. And when man dies, soul and spirit contract, they become, as it were, punctual, in order to expand again and then contract again. Thus existence alternates between expansion and contraction. Man ascends by becoming more and more perfect with each new expansion, only to contract again and pass through the purely spiritual realm. These thoughts were conceived by Giordano Bruno and were extended by Goethe to include plant and animal life. The whole metamorphosis shows us that the plant consists of the flower and the root in contraction and unfolding. This can also be found in Swedenborg's books, where he noted down the fundamental discoveries he made, which then bore fruit in Goethe and come to us again through him. Now some scholars from the Nordic academies have joined forces to publish Swedenborg's writings, and it remains to be seen how much science in all fields of natural science can be found in Swedenborg. Goethe studied Swedenborg, and there is an interesting doctoral dissertation from the University of Berlin by Hans Schlieper, in which the connection between the writings of Goethe and Swedenborg is demonstrated. If you want to gain insight into how Swedenborg developed these ideas, then you need only read Emerson's “The Representatives of the Human Race” and look up the article on Swedenborg. There you will find the ideas that bore such extraordinary fruit in Goethe. But you will also find that the various kingdoms of nature must ultimately find their culmination in the human being, that ultimately it must be shown how the soul emerges from the small world in order to find its unity in the larger world, in the cosmos. Schiller also expressed this in a magnificent way. In his correspondence with Goethe, Schiller writes on August 23, 1794:

For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have been observing the course of your mind and have noted the path you have set out on with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary in nature, but you seek it by the most difficult route, which any weaker force would do well to avoid. You take all of nature together to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the explanation for the individual. From the simple organization, you ascend, step by step, to the more complicated ones, to finally build the most complicated of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature. By recreating it, as it were, you seek to penetrate its hidden technology. A great and truly heroic idea that amply demonstrates how your mind holds the rich totality of its ideas together in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would be enough for such a goal, but even just embarking on such a path is worth more than any other ending – and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad between Pythia and immortality.

I could read on, and you would find that every single word of Schiller is aptly applied to Goethe. Goethe himself spoke beautifully about the relationship between man as a microcosm and the rest of nature, showing with tremendous power of words how not a single detail but the whole spirit of nature lives in man, how this whole spirit comes to the realization of itself. Whoever remembers the beautiful words spoken by the German mystics will know, among others, the saying: “The Godhead lives in man, and in man God has created an organ to behold Himself.” In his book on Winckelmann, Goethe says, where he speaks of antiquity:

When the healthy nature of man works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when the harmonious comfort gives him a pure, free delight - then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult as if it had reached its goal and would admire the summit of its own becoming and being.

What does Goethe say here that is different from what he presents in his “Faust” as the transition of all realms through nature? Goethe was never satisfied with the materialistic view of nature. And when Holbach had created a particularly crass expression in this regard, he opposed him as a young man. Goethe says about it, he [had] found nothing in it but a barren speculation, but not a real explanation of nature. Furthermore, matter was supposed to have existed from eternity, and from eternity it was supposed to have been in motion, and through this motion it was supposed to have produced the phenomena of existence. Thus Goethe dismissed materialism. Goethe always strove to find harmony between what he calls spiritual nature and what the incorporation of spiritual nature represents. Therefore, he was a follower of the doctrine that sees the embodiment of the spirit in our physicality, in the outer forms of nature. Goethe held this point of view throughout his life and elevated this point of view to ever clearer forms. Now, however, this point of view requires something else. It requires that we recognize that the human being is not complete. The realms of perfection must continue beyond the human being. This is the theosophical worldview. Thus, as Theosophists, we do not take the view that the human being is somehow complete. But just as there are also more imperfect beings, we also recognize that we have more perfect and more imperfect human brothers, and that there are some who have progressed far beyond the measure of other people. These are the great teachers who endeavor to lead people up to ever higher and higher worlds. This is a realm from the lowest beings to the gods. We recognize that man will one day rise to divinity, and we already recognize an order today that begins with the lower spirits and does not end until physical existence is exhausted and we look up to heights and beings that fill the gap between human beings and beings that humans only have an inkling of. In this sense, that he looked up to higher spiritual entities, Goethe spoke his poem from the first Weimar period, the well-known poem “The Divine”:

Noble be man,
Helpful and good!
For that alone
Distinguishes him
From all beings
We know.
Hail to the unknown Higher beings We intuit! Man shall be like them! His example teach us Those believe.

This is the poem in which Goethe spoke of the stages of ascent to higher beings. Those who have heard the theosophical lectures here before will know that in theosophy we recognize an unbroken succession of beings, from today's average human being to the higher beings, that we know that among us there are brothers who have reached high levels, who are our teachers, but who have withdrawn from the hustle and bustle of people because they need to have freedom. Only a number of disciples are able to see them. Those who rise to the fervor of deep truths, to a corresponding realization, which must be a free one, can hear these elevated human individualities. Goethe then speaks of these higher individualities. I only need to quote the poem “Symbolum”. In it, he speaks of the holy awe that must permeate us in the face of the truth and the spiritual world. Goethe is therefore speaking here of the voices of the spirits and the masters. This will show you the profound agreement between Goethe and what we call the theosophical world view. Now I would also like to show you that such an agreement really goes very far in Goethe. You know that in the theosophical world view we speak of the fact that human beings do not only have a physical body. This physical body is a subordinate body of the human being. Then we have the etheric double body. This can be seen by those whose psychic organs are open. It can be seen when the physical body is subtracted. Then the same space that the human being occupies is filled by the etheric body. It looks like the color of a peach blossom. Then comes the astral body, the expression of feelings, instincts, desires and passions. The Theosophical worldview calls this body “kama-rupa.” These three superimposed bodies are spoken of today. It is said that there is a parallel in our physical nature. The so-called occultist says that the physical body has an external parallel in what we call solid bodies, that what we call the etheric body has a similarity to the liquid, and that the astral body has a sensual parallel in everything that appears gaseous and airy. Everything that takes shape in the life of the senses and the life of the instincts is referred to as an image of the astral body. In mystical form, we speak of a deity that creates these formations. This is nothing other than 'Kama'. When studying cloud formations, Goethe spoke, entirely in line with this world view, of the fact that for him, too, the expression of the formation of water reveals an image of the soul, a KamaRupa:

When the deity Camarupa, high and holy,

Gathers the folds of the veil, disperses them,
Delights in the changing forms,
Now freezes, then vanishes like a dream,
we marvel and hardly believe our eyes;

With the exception of the term “Camarupa”, you can rediscover Goethe's theosophical worldview. The question now is: How is Goethe connected to what we really call the theosophical movement and how it was not created only by the Theosophical Society. The Theosophical Society merely popularizes the old theosophical teachings that have always been present. Before 1875, the principle was strictly adhered to that the theosophical teachings must be secret, that only those who profess very specific prerequisites and conditions can learn them. In my magazine Luzifer-Gnosis, you will find something discussed that can lead you to higher things. In earlier times, the theosophical teachings were only practiced in the narrowest of circles, in the so-called secret schools. Only those who had attained certain degrees could receive certain teachings. A certain degree of secrets was only imparted to a person when he had attained certain degrees. The most important society was that of the Rosicrucians, a top secret society. Whatever you find about it in books, you can call a hoax, as far as I'm concerned. What can be found in literature and what is accessible to scholarship is not Rosicrucianism. The brothers only knew each other. At the top were twelve initiates. Only the thirteenth was the leader. The outer symbol was the cross with roses. The society had, despite being a secret society, a great influence on the course of intellectual development. In the time when materialism did not yet dominate the major circles, a very great intellectual influence could still be exercised. The Rosicrucian Society is the one whose tradition and inner significance Goethe also knew. He became acquainted with it at an early stage. During the time when he was staying in Frankfurt after a very serious illness during his studies in Leipzig, he was initiated into the secrets of the Rosicrucians by a certain personage. More and more, this mysticism became absorbed in Goethe. Now he wanted to express what he had to say in this regard in a very profound poem. At the time he wrote this poem, he proved himself to be a practical mystic in that he understood life as practical mysticism. Only under certain conditions was he taught the most intimate things. Mrs. von Stein was one of his intimates. He could not imagine this connection any differently, as if he had already belonged to her in a previous life. That is the important thing. Not the dogma of reincarnation; the main thing is to understand life from this point of view. So Goethe once said, to make clear to himself his deep connection, his relationship with Mrs. von Stein: In times gone by, you were surely once my sister or my wife. That is the way he interprets reincarnation here and in other ways. Of course, Goethe regards this as his secret. He speaks of it only to his intimates. That is why you can quote some things from Goethe that seem to contradict him. You can also find this with other mystics. We know that this is the case. Now Goethe has expressed something of an ascent, of a spiritual order in the Rosicrucians in the aforementioned poem. This poem has become so dear to Mrs. von Stein that it is called “The Secrets”. It was never finished. The greatness of the poem should have been much more extensive. He might have been able to express himself if it had had as many verses as there are days in a year. But he did express the following clearly: firstly, this basic idea and, secondly, the view that a kernel of truth can be found in all religions, that all great religions contain a basic teaching, the so-called wisdom religion, and that the various wisdom religions are embodied in individual great initiates who are connected to one another in a brotherhood, that they differ according to their inclinations, the nature of the country and so on. Brahmanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, the teachings of Hermes, Judaism, Christianity; they all contain a common core of truth. They are different because those who truly grasp the human being in his spiritual essence know that it is not a matter of implementing an abstract dogma, but that one must speak to each person in his own way. You only have to possess the core of truth, then you can clothe it in the customs of every country. You will find that our theosophical teachings have rebuilt the ancient teachings of the rishis within the Hindu religion, just as they have in Europe. Even in a form that will again be able to withstand science. So we can speak to every people in their own language. But a common core of truth lives in all these languages. This was also the view of the Rosicrucians, as expressed by Goethe in the poem “The Mysteries”. You will see how much mysticism and theosophy lives in Goethe when we consider his secret revelations in the fairy tale of the green snake and the beautiful lily. But now let us look at this Rosicrucian coloring in his poem, which has remained a fragment. Goethe knows that there will not be many who will be able to understand this poem “The Mysteries”. He also knows that this poem contains so much that no one should dare to believe that they can fully understand it. But he expresses it clearly that he allows us to see into his deepest soul:

A wondrous song is prepared for you;
Listen gladly, and summon everyone!
The path is laid through mountains and valleys;
Here the view is restricted, there it is free again,
And when the path gently slips into the bushes,
do not think that it is a mistake;
We want, when we have climbed enough,
to reach our goal at the right time.

Then he shows how Brother Mark walks to a lonely monastery. In this live twelve hermits, the initiates, led by the thirteenth, whom Goethe calls Humanus, who encompasses all of them. In each of these twelve, one of the great world religions is embodied. Depending on the diversity of countries and times, the different religions are different, and in each of the initiates, each of the religions is different. In a college, however, they work for all of humanity. The leader Humanus is called that because he is such a late incarnation that the highest truth and knowledge is expressed in him in a peculiar way. Those people who are in relatively early incarnations, who have not yet undergone many embodiments, receive the lessons of life and ascend to such an extent that they carry the deepest core of truth within them as a matter of course. Then they do not need to study in the new incarnation, then they are such — through certain signs of their birth this is symbolically foretold — that they, as must be said of the great initiated of humanity, radiate the wisdom of the world. One such incarnation is Humanus. After he has spread the spirit around him in his environment, he ascends to higher spheres. Brother Markus is another such incarnation. When he appeared, Goethe said of him that he gave the impression, for higher reasons, that a higher wisdom must come into the world. Brother Markus appears to be simple. But he is a late iteration of human existence. At the same moment, as Goethe says, Brother Markus is led into the brother lodge, where the twelve are united, when Humanus is allowed to leave the twelve, where only his spirit remains in them, where the spirit ascends to the higher spheres. Brother Markus takes his place. This is the government of humanity that Goethe wanted to depict here.

He sees the emblem gloriously erected,
Which stands for the consolation and hope of the world,
To which many thousands of minds are bound,
To which many thousands of hearts have fervently prayed,
Which destroys the power of bitter death,
Which waves over so many victorious banners:
A fountain of refreshment permeates the weary limbs, He sees the cross and lowers his eyes.

From the very beginning, this poem shows us how Goethe has the spiritual guidance of humanity carried out by the twelve. Thirty years later, a number of students approached him with the request that he provide some explanations. He also tried to say something about this poem. I will only mention a few things to you. He spoke entirely in the theosophical sense:

In order to confess the further intention, indeed the plan in general and thus also the purpose of the poem, I reveal that the reader should be guided through a kind of ideal Montserrat and, after taking his way through the different regions of the mountain, rock and cliff heights, occasionally return to wide and happy plains. Each of the knightly monks would have been visited in his home and, through the climatic and national differences, it would have been learned that the most excellent men from all corners of the earth might gather here, where each of them would quietly worship God in his own way.

Now he shows us how Brother Mark is led into the forecourt. Goethe did not live to depict the actual interior. But then we are shown who Brother Humanus is:

And if you ask me what is the name of the one chosen,
Whom the eye of caution chose?
Whom I often praise, but never enough,
On whom so many incredible things happened?
Humanus is the name of the saint, the wise man,
The best man I have seen with my own eyes:
And his gender, as the princes call it,
You should also know along with his ancestors.

He also shows here how such a leader has risen to such heights. The lower self must have sacrificed itself. We will see this in the sacrifice of the serpent when we speak of the “fairytale”. But here we see how the leader of the twelve chosen ones saves his higher self, his soul. How he has gone through this dying and becoming, and has not remained a dull guest on the dark earth, but has awakened the God-man in himself. He tells us clearly and distinctly that he sees this higher self as a feminine. To save it, the lower self must be killed. In the beautiful symbolism of the poem “The Secrets”, Goethe describes the upward development of a being like the thirteenth. He expresses it like this:

As the third man, I tell more and more freely,
How a spirit of the mother promised him early on,
And how a star at his baptism celebration
shone more brilliantly in the evening sky,
and how a vulture with outstretched wings
settled in the courtyard among the doves;
not striking fiercely and, as usual, doing harm,
he seemed to gently invite them to unity.
Then he modestly kept from telling us
how, as a child, he overcame the adders
Which he found entwined around his sister's arm,
Tightly wound around the sleeping girl.
The nurse fled, leaving the infant lying;
He strangled the snake with a sure hand:
The mother came and saw with joyful trembling
Her son's deeds and her daughter's life.

The sister is the innermost part of the soul, the same as the eternal feminine that draws us in. The adder is what must be shed. He adds the following explanation to the symbolum:

When nature has elevated a person,
It is no wonder that he succeeds in many things;
We must praise the power of the Creator in him,
Who brings weak clay to such honor:
But when a man, when a man, in the hardest test of life,
Conquers himself;
Then we can show him to others with joy
And say: 'That is he, that is his own!'

When the God-man is born in the soul, then all power rushes forward into the distance:

For all power rushes forward into the distance,
To live and work here and there;
On the other hand, from every side, the stream
Of the world narrows and hinders and sweeps us along:
In this inner storm and outer strife,
The spirit hears a word that is hard to understand:
'From the power that binds all beings, Man frees himself who overcomes himself.'

Medieval Christianity has the three wise men from the East represent the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa. Just as such things are linked to great truths in esotericism, so too is the illusion that one king is a Moor, the second a European and the third an Oriental. The three wise men from the East are connected with great cosmic truths. Just a fortnight ago, we said that Theosophy would restore to man direct perception, a correct understanding of what happens in the course of a year, so that changes show us how our spirit coincides with cosmic events.

Just as we do not see merely a physical movement when a human eye looks at us, but rightly draw conclusions about the inner state of a human soul from the outer gaze of the eye, so the theosophist realizes that in every thunder and lightning, in every breath of air, in every sunrise and sunset, only the physical expression of spiritual entities is to be sought. And just as everyday events give beings a sense of the beings behind them, so the regularly recurring phenomena of the year reveal the deeds of a divine spirit that works according to law. We see how the power of the sun grows more and more from spring onwards, how the sun regains its power from the shortest days, how it awakens the veiled life of the earth and lets it sprout anew, how the power of the sun is expressed in external deeds. From a certain day on, the power of the sun decreases again, the days become shorter and shorter. When the least physical power of the sun reaches us, life withdraws below the surface of the earth. Man can feel and experience that behind all the deeds of outer nature stands the spiritual creation of spiritual beings.

If he penetrates even deeper, the teachings that were cultivated within the mysteries tell him that not only does this take place, but that with the increasing solar power, the activity of the solar beings decreases, that at the time when the external solar power is weakest, another power increases. In the shortest time, another, a spiritual power is strongest. When the darkness is at its greatest, there is a light during the course of the year that shines most brightly; the traditions of the mysteries have always expressed this. Christmas is connected with the deep wisdom of the world. All legends tell us that the gods sleep at midday. There are regions where the churches are open all day, only closed at noon; this is based on the same premise. What Christian humanity celebrates as Christmas can only be understood from the mystery teaching. The disciple was shown the sun and the moon, as they alternate in their normal course. They were especially pointed out to the fact that during the night the earth itself veils the sunlight. At Christmas, in the deepest silence, the disciple is shown a transparent earth through which the sun can be seen. “To see the sun at midnight” is the ancient custom of Christmas. Those for whom matter is no obstacle can see through the earth to the sun on the other side, namely the sun beings. Contrary to the tradition that the gods sleep at noon, it was believed that the gods watch at midnight, because at midnight the spiritual light can be seen best. This should be done with particular solemnity at Christmas. We can understand that this has continued to have an effect into our time, since Christmas is in this season. Esoteric Christianity also sees a body in the sun, and just as man is not content to merely observe the body physically, so the Christian is aware that through the sun the body of a spiritual entity becomes visible and that Christ is the head of spiritual entities.

Now the physical fact that the moon reflects sunlight is an expression of a spiritual fact that underlies the physical one. Even in the Hebrew era, people said: Before the power of Christ works and creates in the earth itself, it works in an indirect way. The Jewish law before Christ was the spiritual background of the moon. As long as the people of the Earth were immature and not ready to receive the power of Christ, they had to receive the reflected light of the moon. Through Moses we received the law; the law was spiritual sunlight in the reflection of the moon. Initiates could see the power of Christ through the Earth at Christmas. With the coming of Christ into the Earth, the spiritual power of the Sun united with the power of the Earth, and that is the origin of the Christian Christmas. It celebrates the moment in the evolution of the Earth when man has matured to receive the inner sun, and now man should be able to see through the transparent Earth. What used to be a mystery festival became Christian Christmas. Now man should also feel the power of Christ in the daytime and in the Earth, not only in the sun. This says a great deal. People sensed the spiritual sunlight in the reflections of different religions and world views. These religions and world views represent the three wise men of the Orient. Now the time has come when the sun penetrates the earth as a unified force, when one should sense the basic power in all religions.

Then the religions arrive, led by a star, the star of Christmas. Only the wise men are shown the transparent sun, which is the star of Bethlehem itself and has led them to where Christ appears in the flesh. They bring gold, that is, their wisdom, which has taken on different forms; now the star has arrived that unites them. Frankincense is the symbol of reverence for the power that brings peace in all human deeds, opinions and questions; myrrh is the symbol of immortality, for the spiritual power of the sun. Through beholding through the earth, the disciple receives the realization, the inner guarantee of the soul's immortality. Furthermore, myrrh signifies resurrection and preservation. The establishment of Christmas on the shortest day — it has been moved slightly — is not an arbitrary act, but an expression of human development. The Christian tradition knows what a profound fact underlies this. During the midday hour the gods sleep, while at midnight the gods are awake. What works externally, physically, is indicated by the myth through the figure of John, namely, the physical power of the sun alongside the direct power of Christ. When the sun is at its strongest, the spirit is at its strongest. John's birthday is when the sun is at its strongest: I must decrease, but he will increase. From summer towards winter, the physical power of the sun, like John, decreases, and the spiritual sun, like Christ, increases. Those who work in the sense of the esoteric Christ have felt this idea of peace and harmony.

This poem is so great, the deepest trait of Christianity, of esoteric Christianity, lies in it. A pilgrim is sent to the monastery with a special mission. Twelve individuals are found there, with a thirteenth at the top. Brother Mark is led through many regions and his character is described to us. This is deeply significant, we are told, which forms external intellectual power, education and training. Brother Markus comes close to his goal after many wanderings. He strives for serious wisdom training. [That lonely, strange wanderer does not possess the science of the mind, but he does possess wisdom that speaks as if from children's lips. It is the wisdom that speaks through the transformed science. He speaks from the naive feeling of his wisdom, and it does indeed sound as if it comes from children's lips.] We must again take re-embodiment as our starting point. A person who has learned much in a previous life, who has a world of ideas and content for contemplation, will then be re-embodied. These ideas do not have to appear in the form of ideas. He seeks serious training in wisdom. [His wisdom is a mature and transformed knowledge from previous embodiments. He has not learned much new knowledge in his present incarnation, but he has accumulated wisdom from previous lives.] Now it is love, kindness, compassion, and

Brother Mark appears not as a sage who has learned much, but as a mature sage who has learned in previous incarnations; whose wisdom has become gold. At the entrance to the monastery, which he enters, he encounters a strange symbol that is supposed to represent the meaning of life to him: a cross entwined with red roses. He sees the sign of the cross, professed by so many people, entwined with roses. Note the wording in this sentence, it is a password of the Rosicrucian:

Who has joined roses to the cross?

[This may suggest that Goethe was a Rosicrucian initiate. The cross represents the three lower bodies of man, the physical, the etheric and the astral body. In his life, man should overcome those qualities of these three bodies that have come to him from outside. They should be transformed within him through his ego.] By the fact that his own ego can say to itself “I am”, he transforms these three bodies. [For he who does not have this dying and becoming remains only a dull guest on the dark earth. The lower bodies are represented in the black cross.] Man transforms these lower powers and qualities, not as a form of self-mortification, but as instruments of his own ego, purified, cleansed, transformed into powers of his own ego. He kills what was originally in him and lets it rise again as a young, fresh power – his higher ego, which is the ruler over the lower powers. The mortified bodies – the black cross – in the mortified original Tree of Life as three representatives and a fourth: sprouting life. [The four beams of the cross are made of the wood of the cypress, the cedar, the palm and the olive tree, and they touch at one point.] Cypress is the physical body, palm is the etheric body and cedar is the astral body, which has been overcome; olive tree, which permeates the three lower bodies as with ointment, as with oil, as that which rejuvenates and gives birth again.

[Esoteric Christianity sees in the rosary on the cross the Christ Jesus, through whom the lower nature in man is purified and raised to a higher level.

When man looks at the sprouting life, not yet penetrated by passions. still asleep, only a dim consciousness, is plant green. Where it rises up to the I in the astral body, where the I expresses itself, there the green plant sap becomes red blood. [Red blood, the color of roses, is the symbol of the I. As long as the green plant sap still wells up through the leaves, it announces to us the pure, chaste plant substance. The penetration of the body with passions, desires, instincts causes the emergence of red blood. In man, the pure plant substance has been permeated with desires and passions. Thus man has bought his higher consciousness, through which he perceives as he perceives today: by permeating the plant substance with desires and passions. He will purify his ego again, he will regain the chastity of the plant. [In the course of time, the ego must gradually restore the pure plant substance. Thus, man with his red blood must, as it were, become pure plant substance again. As long as this remains green, it sleeps.] In the future, the red blood will no longer be the expression of his lower instincts and desires, but of his higher self. The red roses on the cross signify both the color of our blood and our pure plant nature. It creates myth-forming power similar to wisdom. In the power that emanates from Christ, the ego is led upwards to become pure, chaste plant substance again. In the red flower we see the purified, refined ego. There is a beautiful old myth: the bee, as it goes to the red rose to suck, so it went to Christ Jesus to suck from the wound. [The devil hates red roses the most!] He wants the blood in the fist. He hates the purified blood that has returned to the red rose.

In the poem, we have twelve representatives of different religions united in the leading, great brotherhood of humanity. [A thirteenth leads them because he overlooks and encompasses all the individual religions] in order to flow out from here into the whole world. Just as the three kings come to the harmony in Bethlehem, so the twelve send their spiritual rays out into the world. And one leads. We see here the threefold higher nature of man, the rays emanating from one point.

Markus is admitted to the monastery and he is united with the eleven to become twelve.

[Brother Markus receives the deepest instruction in the monastery. The poem characterizes the thirteenth, the leader of the assembly.] The thirteenth is presented in his essence as one who is exalted in his soul, in his heart the various confessions of the world are balanced. [At his birth a star shone, signifying the spiritual sun that he had seen at his initiation. It is the same star that shone for the Magi from the East at the birth of Jesus Christ.] A vulture comes down and dwells peacefully among the doves. Peace is the atmosphere that spread at the birth of this person. A strange saga is told about him in his youth: as a boy, he overcame the vipers, that is the lower nature of his being. In previous lives, he had acquired the strength to overcome himself. The viper was wrapped around his sister's arm. This sister signifies his etheric body, which in the case of males is female] — You know that the etheric body in the male sex is female, that is, always in the opposite sex. The astral body wraps itself around this — the adder, the snake, and he overcomes this, which wraps itself around his sister — around his etheric body. The boy practices obedience in the outer world. At first he submits to what the parental home demands with a certain humility and devotion. He is now allowed to go out into the world, and finally, by the right of his birth, he may take the lead in the order. [By the right of his birth he is placed at the head of his order, which is something deeply significant.] The twelve represent the different religions of humanity. Each of them [experiences a moment in its development when it feels it has come closest to the truth]. Each has something special to tell, as a special relation to the thirteenth. [On this point, the twelve are particularly close to the thirteenth.]

At an important moment, Markus enters the monastery: the thirteenth is preparing to leave the monastery to enter a higher level. [The thirteenth of the old men wants to ascend to the highest region of the mystical. He no longer needs to undergo physical embodiment. To do this, the twelve others should mature so that they can then manage without the thirteenth.

There are thirteen chairs in the hall, symbolizing the spiritual work of the thirteen, and Brother Markus is shown around. The task of each is symbolically depicted in a sign above the chair. Above the chair of the thirteenth is the cross of roses. The thirteenth, Humanus, is a mediator for harmony and peace, which are differentiated in the world. The various religious denominations, which are in conflict, find each other here at a higher level, so that the power is not lost, but flows out into the world. To the right and left of the chair is the fire-colored dragon. [The fire dragon is the lower astral nature that must be overcome; and the hand in the bear's jaws means the ego of the human being, which is embraced by the lower, destructive nature, but through which stage one must pass as a mystic. We also find the meaning of this symbol with the war god of Central Europe, with the hand in the jaws of the wolf. This symbolizes the time when the word was sunk into man's inner being. The power of the word through which man develops. Here [the deep meaning is expressed that work must be done]. Because many a person looks at what is being done that is more important than the physical work for the overall development of humanity. What is done from the spiritual centers is invisible. The twelve have experienced the joys and sorrows of life, and now they are gathered for a different kind of work – another door is closed by a curtain. [The twelve men no longer work here in a physical way, but in a higher spiritual way. Through their own perfection, they are working at the same time on the further development of humanity.]

Mark is received in the forecourt and waits to enter the innermost part. Brother Markus has only gained a glimpse into the astral realm, but there is a hint that in due course he will also get to know the spiritual world. At first he saw only images and colors of it. The spiritual worlds, on the other hand, resound in the spiritual tone, in harmonies of the sound of the spheres. After his sleep, he hears three blows and in between a light flute sound. This is to be regarded as a symbol of the harmony of the spheres. Furthermore, he senses the gradual awakening of the threefold higher nature of man. Thus he is initiated to finally become a member of the higher cosmic world himself. Only then does he actually feel accepted into the great cosmic sound. The birth of the higher man through the power of the roses takes place, [symbolically represented by the three youths. They signify the birth of the three higher parts of the human being. The power of Christ brings us up to the true self as the highest level of mystical-spiritual development]. The greatest bliss that a person can achieve is Manas, Budhi, Atma. Through this, he becomes a member of the great cosmic secrets of the development of the earth.

Today, on New Year's Eve, our greetings go from soul to soul, from heart to heart, and when we embrace these impulses, our greetings contain something of the goals of the world principle. One year follows another in the steady progression of time. Reflections such as today's should fill us and remind us that not only years go and come, but that these are stages, to ever higher and higher ascent of the individual and of all humanity. We feel that this is not repetition of the same, but ascent with goals within life with the true, genuine perfection of humanity. Let us let our souls be filled with these reflections and thus feel the impulse of the genuine New Year's greeting, which is struck in our souls by the Christ principle, as a greeting that embraces all humanity.

We want to help each other to ascend, we greet each other at every turn of the year. We want to work together, in theosophical brotherhood, to ascend the path of human perfection. Then the sound of the New Year's Eve bells will contain something of the harmony of the spheres. There are customs and traditions, and when we connect the soul with these customs and with the sound of the New Year's Eve bells, we say: We want to be helpers to each other in the forward climb of humanity to its highest goals.

We will be hearing more about Goethe's dramatic fragment “Pandora” today. If I wanted to tell you everything there is to know about it, I would have to give several lectures. [With this work by Goethe in particular, it will only ever be possible to make a few remarks about how the poet experienced this figure of Pandora as living forces within himself.] I can only gently hint at the meaning of the individual figures that the poet sensed within himself, as it were, as living forces. Those who immerse themselves in the drama from this perspective will get an inkling that it could not be otherwise than that the forces in question were at work in the poet's soul itself. In the last lecture we saw how Goethe contrasted the two figures of Prometheus and Epimetheus in a powerful way. [Creative powers were in the pre-earthly time, spiritual powers, these two figures, as the poet has portrayed them as human beings.] Already in individual words of the drama one can even feel that creative powers lived in Goethe. Spiritual powers had taken the place of human powers, so to speak, such as originate from the pre-earthly moon-period. You can imagine that those beings, the Angeloi, passed through their stage of humanity under quite different conditions. To pass through the stage as we are passing through it today, requires conditions such as now prevail on earth. They also had to go through a completely different state of consciousness than we have now. But it would be quite difficult to describe the peculiar storms of consciousness that those beings who lived on the old moon and completed their stage of human development there went through. [It was a very peculiar form of consciousness that those beings had as human beings on the old moon. At that time, man had only a dim awareness of images. Those beings who were then human beings certainly had a higher level of consciousness than we do, and this present consciousness of ours cannot be compared with the former consciousness of the moon. [The consciousness of these beings on the old moon is recorded in the consciousness of the beings who then remained above.] It was also an awareness of objects, but at a much higher level. If those entities on the old moon had held on to their consciousness and brought it with them into earthly conditions, they would not have been able to live there at all. That is why those beings had to withdraw to a higher sphere when the actual development of the earth began. They had to renounce, so to speak, the development of the earth. If they had not done so, they would not have been able to see the earthly conditions on earth at all. They would have experienced only what was still present in them as an inheritance from the old lunar conditions. Nor would they have been able to intervene in the course of earthly events. They owe the fact that they were really able to intervene to the circumstance that they renounced the fruits of earthly development and remained on a higher level. Their consciousness had radically changed into a reflective consciousness. If the Elohim had not remained above but had descended to the earth, they would have become Epimetheus natures. Man still retains a part of what he had become on a higher level. This part of his development manifests itself everywhere in his life. Man is subject, as it were, to the tragedy of seeing things afterwards that would have turned out differently if he had been able to see them beforehand.

It has long been known, for example, that Ibsen, who is revered today as a great poet, failed his school-leaving exam. This is just one case of a strange occurrence. Or you just need to let the grandiose example of the irony of the university teachers' day sink in, and you will see that this epimetheic moment is not an isolated case. Should high school students be supported sympathetically or not? Those professors confessed that they had no means of recognizing the gifts of such people.

This epimetheic element is what humans have inherited from the Elohim. But now humans have also conquered the other side, namely the possibility of ascending more or less in the foresight that receives impulses from what one already grasps as the future. In school, this case is rarely represented, as you know from experience. This Promethean moment could only slowly flow into our being, and the Epimethean gradually dries up. [Through the Promethean element, we now have two currents. One that is slowly drying up, the Epimethean, and one that is slowly rising, the Promethean.] In the former ability, however, people have not yet come very far today. But these two intellectual currents are essential for us. [As an example of how this slowly ascending current will shape itself in humanity, it is shown how there are already things today that people can objectively face without personal emotions:] In science, solar and lunar eclipses can be calculated in advance. Man is therefore Promethean in relation to mathematical things. Here, passion is silent and only truth speaks. In everything mathematical, therefore, foresight is possible. Mathematics is the clear, unambiguous and luminous beginning of the Promethean element. This had to develop at a certain pace, and this was brought about by the fact that the leader of this element did not descend to our earth too early. By the highest directive, he had to wait until the conditions were such that he could descend as Prometheus. The Prometheus of whom the myth speaks descended to men too early; therefore, by divine directive, he was chained to the rock. He knew the secret that another would come after him, who would then be the true Prometheus. Prometheus also knew the secret that Zeus would one day be overthrown. But the Prometheus who gradually allows the impulse of foresight to work in humanity is the Christ. (Christ is also the one who then overthrows Zeus.) Prometheus keeps his secret from Zeus, who had him chained to a rock in the Caucasus. (In the present, the two work together.)

Thus, Goethe's drama is at the center of everything we know about world development. One element brings one forward, the other connects one with that which is to be brought forward.

[So we can say: Yes], there is a being who descended to the people, which one must let enter more and more into his soul, [that is the Christ]. Only one must take time for it and always remember what can still come from above. But another part of humanity will take its time to accept the Christ, and will receive him more as a gift from above, where those beings who have not become Epimetheus remain. Thus, what the human being is allowed to receive within himself must merge with what comes from higher realms. In these words, Pandora's story comes to an end!

So you see how deep the shafts are from which we have to draw the feelings in order to understand such poetry. Only the theosophical school of thought teaches us to understand the greatest treasures of humanity correctly. But this movement also shows us that what truly leads forward lies with the gods in the spiritual world, from whence it must be fetched in order to connect it with what lies dormant in the human soul.

What the poets bring us is a gift from above, and with it we must connect what we have within ourselves. The poet gives us the Epimethean, and we in turn bring him the Promethean element from spiritual science. [People who take up Theosophy will become Prometheans. Epimetheans are those who want to be blessed from above. The Promethean element must have become the property of humanity if, three thousand years from now, Maitreya Buddha is to appear on Earth.]

The social question, which is to occupy us today, did not, as will immediately become clear for everyone, arise out of a mere idea or out of the undoubted need of a few people, but is a question that confronts us with facts as strongly and clearly today as ever. One who looks around just a little in the surrounding world will know what a distinct language these facts speak. It could well be that someone who does not want to hear this language of the facts will find out in the not too distant future that he has closed his ears too long to what was necessarily going on. With regard to the social question, the human being of the present is standing within the battle that is at times still playing itself out under the surface of our social order. One who wants to say, more or less precisely, how the social battle has increased in extent and violence doesn't need to go any further into externals, he needs only to draw attention to the violent workers' movement on the occasion of the work stoppage at Crimmitschau, to the miners' strike on the occasion of the lockout of the electrical workers, and, in sum, to what is going on in Eastern Europe.¹ In all this we will have to discern the social question being lived out.

The reproach has often been addressed to Theosophy that it has a number of dreamers among its followers, that it seeks to work only in those areas to which one retreats from the great common questions of the time, where one wants to linger in leisurely contemplation of the human soul, and so they say: Theosophists are a few people who have nothing particular to do, who in an egoistical way want to retreat into the self and cultivate it in the manner of Theosophy. One easily makes the reproach to Theosophy that it wants to stand apart from the great battle of the day, from what touches humanity in the present time. The Theosophist should be setting this right again and again. He should ever and again point out that wherever there is something to investigate and think regarding warranted human affairs in the present, there the Theosophists must be, that he must have a clear heart and clear thinking, that he must not lose himself in some cloudy utopia, but rather must stand within the everyday, helping and caring.

And this other reproach can also easily be made: that Theosophy is touted as a universal cure for all the evils and injuries of the present. That also is otherwise. To be sure, it is claimed that Theosophy, the Theosophical movement, has something to do with all that must prepare itself in the present for a salutary future, but not like a mastering, not as a universal cure do we extol Theosophy; rather we only want to show that with it something so comprehensive is given that without it today we cannot progress in the mosl essential things that we should be concerned about, and that all speculation and reforming must remain half- baked unless the human being approaches the matter with the Theosophical view. The doctrines of thinkers about grand encompassing cosmic connections, about the universal law of world destiny and world events occupy us, in the inner circles of our Theosophical movement, not merely so we can gaze at the starry vastness at leisure, but rather because we know that these laws we are studying and which are active in the great world-all are also active in the human heart, in the soul, and in fact give this soul the capacity really to see into the life of the immediate present. We are sort of like an engineer who absorbs himself for years in his technical studies, but not in order to engage in contemplations of the mysteries of the calculus and marvel at them; rather we seek the laws which we then apply to human life, as the engineer builds bridges and applies the laws to reality.

There is also something here that is universal and widespread and opens up a further horizon. Who would dare to present thinking as a universal remedy, even though this thinking is necessary for what can happen in the cosmos? Theosophy is no dead matter, no dead theory. No, it is something life-awakening. It is not a matter of the concepts, the ideas, that we take on. What is told here does not have the intention of dealing with the ideas as such, nor the intention of developing interesting notions about hidden facts, but rather, what is here passed before the human soul has a very special quality. Non-Theosophists may believe it or not, but one who has occupied himself with it knows that what I am about to say is correct in practice. One that has applied himself to how, in Theosophy, the world and life are considered will notice his life of the senses and of soul becoming something different from what they were before. He learns to think in another way and will observe human circumstances in a more unbiased way than previously.

We have a distant future in mind when we speak of awakening higher powers through inner development. But for the near future we also keep an eye on the life that we can bring about through Theosophical development: that is, the possibility of coming to a comprehensive, clear, and unbiased assessment of the human situations immediately surrounding us. Our culture, with all the scientific character which it has developed up to now, has come up with theories that are impotent regarding life. The Theosophical world-view will not produce such impotent theories. It will teach mankind thinking, awaken thinking forces in mankind that are not powerless regarding reality, but will empower us to take hold of human evolution itself, to take hold of the immediate conduct of life.

Let me bring in a little symptom that will further clarify what I mean to say. Recently a clear example in the political field was provided by a Prussian government councilor who went on leave to find work in America, to take part in and get to know conditions there.² A state councilman is normally called upon to be active in human evolution. Taken in a higher sense, it is his duty and obligation to let something live in his heart that corresponds to real conditions and not merely to theories. And if he has nothing that chimes with the conditions, then his theory is impotent. This man, who for years previously had been called upon to deal with the human element, got to know the human element himself. Of course what I am saying entails not the least reproach against the individual man. This deed is to the highest degree honorable and bold, and admirable. But what he has written is a symptom of what is urgent. It shows the discrepancy in his orientation toward the world and toward workers. Here are just a few words from his book As a Worker in America [4th edition, Berlin 1905, p.31] { Bracketed statements [ ] are insertions by the German editor.}: “How often, earlier on, when I saw a healthy man begging, did I ask, with moral indignation, why doesn't the lout go to work? Now I knew why. In theory things look different from practice; even the most unappetizing aspects of the national economy are easy enough to handle at your desk.”

There is no greater mark of poverty than when someone who is called upon to participate says that the theory which he had doesn't agree with the conditions. Here's the point at which one can take hold of the matter, just as logic enables people to think at all, and just as no one can become a mathematician without manipulating logic, just so no one can develop the power of practical thinking without Theosophy. Look at the national economy that is overwhelming our developmental [free] market. If you set about looking into things with healthy, comprehensive thinking, Theosophical thinking, you will find that things that are supposed to be guideposts, emanating perhaps from university professors or party leaders, are gray theory suitable for being dealt with at the desk, but are useless when one is facing reality. Such things reveal themselves, for instance, at congresses. One just has to look more closely. Congresses in general bear this character. If those who busy themselves would care to descend into practical life, they would soon find that they are capable of nothing. Merely gazing at life doesn't do it. Nor can someone who judges from the standpoint of today's customary culture pass judgment on the women's question or the social question, nor can someone judge who merely looks at things, for nothing is done by that either.

Now if you were to ask this gentleman who wrote these words, What can lead to an improvement?, then you would find that he has only learned how it looks; but how things should be done, that is a different question altogether. It is also not a question that can be answered in an hour or a day. It can't be answered at all by theoretical debate. No Theosophist worthy of the name will say to you: I have this program for the social question, for the women's question, for the vivisection question, or about the care of animals and so forth, rather he will say: Put people who are Theosophists into the institutions dealing with all these questions, set such people in professorial chairs of national economy; then they will have the ability to develop the thinking which will lead to making the single branches of their activity into guideposts in the realm of public life. As long as this is not the case, people in this realm will be charlatans and will have to witness the world collapsing around them, and how this idle circumlocution in congresses shows itself in its uselessness.

I say this not out of fanaticism, rather from what in every Theosophist is a real Theosophical attitude, real Theosophical thinking. Theosophical thinking develops clarity about the various realms of life, a clear, objective view of the forces and powers working in the world. To look at the matter rightly, that is what Theosophical life enables you to do. Therefore Theosophy is not a panacea in the ordinary sense, rather it is the foundation of contemporary life.

After these introductory words let us give a few indications about what has given our social question, as it arises from the facts, its special stamp. Whoever wants to see what will happen must know the laws of becoming, may not have gray theories, must know the laws of the becoming of humanity. We cannot find these laws through some sort of abstract science. Theosophy does not proceed abstractly. It proceeds from clear contemplative thinking. And so let me indicate with at least a few words how the life of today has shaped itself, how this life today has come to be. One who looks more closely at life will realize that some self-knowledge also belongs in these realms in order to see clearly. First I will picture the outer facts, then I will say a few things concerning what it is actually all about.

Every one of us knows what the human being needs in order to live. We all have an idea of what food and clothing we need. A few figures will tell us how much the majority has of all these. All we need to do in this regard is to examine the tax structure. It has been told over and over, but we can bring it to mind again and again. In Prussia, someone who has an income of less than 900 marks pays no taxes. One can very easily check how many people in Prussia have an income of less than 800 or 900 marks. That's 21 million people. Ninety five percent of the total population have less than 3,000 marks income. Take England. Only those who have an income over 150 pounds are taxed. [...] You see, we have most ample figures that speak of how many people have what one must have as absolute necessity.

Look at statistics. They speak a distinct language. But what has that to do with our self-knowledge? A lot. For it is a matter of gaining the right standpoint for ourselves regarding these facts. And in this connection people let themselves miss out a great deal on what is right. What are people around us doing? What is the cause of their receiving this low income? It is what we give them for what they do for us. We are now making no distinction between workers and non-workers, between proletariat and non- proletariat. For if one makes this distinction, then the matter is already entirely false. And that is the mistake of all our national economic considerations, that one does not proceed from self-knowledge, but rather from theory.

[The following sentences of the transcript reveal a few discrepancies, so that the original wording cannot be reconstructed. By the gist of it, Rudolf Steiner most likely described how every person lives from the products that another has produced. Even for someone out of work, whose means of livelihood are insufficient, products are produced. Even the seamstress working for starvation wages wears clothes that have been produced in turn for a starvation wage. Compare the paragraphs written in the same year in the essay “Spiritual Science and the Social Question,” in Lucifer Gnosis.]

And if in our emotions and perceptions we are able to feel a certain pain over the fact that the clothes we have on have been produced for a starvation wage, then we are looking deep into the heart of the question. When in all this you think over what you wear in the way of clothing, what you put in your mouth for nourishment, where it comes from, only then will you grasp the social question in all its depth. Not through speculation, but rather through a living contemplation does one get an insight into what it is all about.

It isn't right when they say that today's misery, even if we could portray it in its direst colors, is greater than it was in former centuries. That is not the case. We would decisively be committing a falsification of objective reality. Just try to study conditions objectively in the city of Cologne today and 120 years ago, and you will see that much has gotten better. And even so we have the social question. We have it because human beings have gone through yet another evolution, and this is because in large measure they have come to thinking, to self-consciousness, and because their needs have greatly changed. And there, if we study the question thus, we are indeed of necessity directed toward the broad contexts that arise for us in world history if we are not, like the modern researcher, too shortsighted. In order to judge these things it is necessary to get to know the great laws of life. What has brought it about that social affairs have taken this shape? It is the manner and method which the human spirit has taken on. Look back to the time of the French Revolution. At that time they demanded something else. It was a question tending more toward the juridical that brought out the ideal of Liberty - Equality - Fraternity. The French revolutionary heroes in Western Europe called for Liberty. Those now battling in Eastern Europe call for bread. It is simply two sides of the same coin, two different demands of human beings who have learned to put such questions because their souls have undergone a transformation.

This transformation of the soul we have to study more closely. We must study and understand why the souls of the great masses of human beings today—and this will spread over the centuries—have come to these demands. At this point the Theosophical world conception comes in with practical application, underpinning our comprehension. Only someone who understands the case is qualified to judge it. The only one who is able to look into the soul is one who, in the great world framework, sees what is going on in this soul. And only one who understands something of the laws of the soul is able to effect something in souls and lead into the future.

A small side remark: The sciences of today, biology, Darwinism, Haeckelianism, [The worldview of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), German naturalist and philosopher.] have brought us great ideas. So also the idea that each living entity, in the first stages of its existence, even in its germinal state, recapitulates the forms of life that have previously been gone through out in nature. This brief recapitulation of the various stages occurs also in that being which includes them all, climbing higher on the ladder of evolution than all others: the human being. Assume that a spirit had consciousness at a time before there were any human beings, then he would have had to know not only what had already happened, but he would also—by contrast—have had to form a picture of future evolution. He would have had to form a picture for the future out of the animal condition of that time. Only the human being, who in his germinal configuration recapitulates the preceding conditions, can show us what to do. It is the doing that must pass beyond all knowing. No knowing occupies itself with anything but what was. But if we want to work into the future, we have to do things that haven't been there yet. The great laws that are to be realized in the future show us this. In a certain way everything that is to come about in the future has already been there in the past, namely through intuition. A spirit who had intervened at that time would have had to have had intuition in order to be able to find out about the hidden laws of existence that apply to the past and the future. That is why Theosophy cultivates intuition. That is what reaches out beyond the mere physical experience of the world. Theosophy looks for the laws that are to be cognized by intuition and which lead us into the future of the human race. [For a characterization of intuition as used by Steiner, see, for example, his essays from 1905, The Stages of Higher Knowledge.]

One of these great world laws that can be a guide for us is the law of reincarnation. First, it renders understandable for us how, in higher spiritual realms, what obtains as law is nothing else but what Darwin and Haeckel have intimated. It renders comprehensible why this or that was felt as a need in any given age. One who steeps himself in this knows the last time in which there was life thirsting for universal freedom, when human beings took up impulses for which they should be calling today. The ones who today call for liberty and equality—I say this with the same objective certainty with which the natural scientist has spoken about the physical—all those souls who today cry for liberty and equality have learned it at another stage of their existence, in an earlier incarnation. The greatest needs of the human being of today were embodied in the early time of Christianity, in the first Christian centuries. All human beings have taken up this press for equality, before which the human being of today stands in spiritual life. Christianity brought the message of equality before God. In times prior to that, there had been no such equality.

I do not say what I have just said in a derogatory way, I say it with the same sober objectivity with which I would speak of any scientific problem. If one considers the actual soul and everything which creates outward inequalities, the same soul that once took to itself as an impulse “they are equal before God and before mankind”—when one considers the actual soul—finds that everything that determines outward inequality has no meaning for contemporary life. When the grave closes over us we will all be and become equal. What the soul has taken up lives on in the soul and emerges in a different form. If we consider cultural progress from the perspective of the macrocosm we come to tremendous implications regarding education. I have already drawn attention to what this pedagogy on earth was like in pre-Christian times. Let us look back into Egyptian times. A large number of people there were occupied with work, the difficulty of which a man of today can no longer estimate. They labored willingly. And why? Because they knew that this life is one among many. Each one said to himself: The one who is in charge of my work is like the person I will be sometime. This life must be compensated in different incarnations, for it directs itself out of this knowledge.

Linked with this is the law of karma. What I have experienced in one life is either deserved or will be compensated for in later times. If it had merely gone on like that, however, then the human being would have overlooked the kingdom of the earth. This one life would not have been important to him. In that regard Christianity took measures for education in order to have this life between birth and death be of importance to him. It is merely illusory when Christianity deviates from that, for it has pointed strongly to the beyond; it has even made eternal punishment and eternal bliss a function of one life. Whoever believes that the one life is of primary importance learns to take this life seriously. It pivots around the truths that are suitable for the human being, and it is suitable for the human being to be raised in the idea of this one earth life. Such were the two tasks: education for the importance of earthly life between birth and death, and, on the other hand, that outside this earthly life everyone is equal before God. This earthly life has been bearable only by being so considered that all are equal before God. Whoever looks at it that way will observe, in the development of mankind since the rise of Christianity, a descent into the physical world. More and more the human being feels committed to physical existence. Through this he transferred the importance of the rule of the equality before God more and more to equality in material existence itself.

That picture should not be misunderstood. The soul that 1800 years ago was accustomed to claiming equality for the beyond now brings the impulse for equality with it, but in connection with what is important today: “equality before Mammon.” Please do not see a criticism or anything pejorative in this, rather the objective confirmation of a cosmic law of the developing soul. One must study the course of time this way. Then one will understand that only one thing will again bring about in this soul a change in direction, an ascent, namely if we get the soul who is calling for equality back into the beyond. Toward the beyond we looked up, from the here-and-now we looked out. Today, due to this impulse, the soul is turned back upon itself. Today it seeks the same thing in the here-and-now. If it is to find an ascent again, it must find the spirit in the present, the inwardness, in the soul element itself. That is what the Theosophical world movement is striving for: to prepare the soul for the third stage, [The German “drei Stadien” translates to “three stages.” We suggest this represents a stenographic error and take the liberty of correcting it for the sake of clarity.] because it is filled with God, filled with divine wisdom, and will thereby again know how to place itself in the world, so that it will again find the harmony between itself and the surrounding world.

Such thoughts have value in giving direction. We can't bring this about from one day to the next. But we also cannot consider only our individual deeds. Every deed must stand under some influence. Then it becomes practical, then it is something, then it is no gray theory, rather immediate life, because we are looking into the workings of the soul.

Our national economists and our social theorists today so often say: the human being is only the product of outer circumstances. The human being has come to this because he has lived in these or those outer conditions. Thus speaks, for example, in earnest, social democracy, saying that the human being becomes what the environment makes of him, that because he has become a proletarian worker, due to the entire development of industry, he has also become one in his soul, the way he has evolved through just these conditions. The human being is a product of circumstances. We can often hear that. Let us study the conditions themselves, let us consider what is round about us, what we are most dependent on. Are we dependent merely on nature? No! We notice what we are dependent on only when we stand starving in front of the bakery and have nothing in our pockets to buy anything with.

All these conditions are made and put into effect in turn by human beings. The spirit that is evolving through history has brought these conditions about. People have thought up, out of concern for their own welfare, sometimes only shortly before, what obtains today; they simply insert it. Thus the one who thinks people are dependent on circumstances is reasoning in a circle, because the circumstances were brought about by people. If we picture this to ourselves we must say: it isn't a matter of the circumstances, rather we have to look at how the circumstances have come to be. It is idle to insist on saying: the human being is dependent on his circumstances. In fifty years the human being will also be dependent on the conditions that surround him. You can concede to every social democrat [Social Democracy is “a political theory advocating the use of democratic means to achieve a gradual transition from capitalism to socialism.” American Heritage Dictionary, 1992. Social Democrat (with capitals) refers to a member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Germany, which was founded in the late 19th century.] that the human being is dependent on circumstances, but on those that we cause today, that emanate from our disposition, from our soul. We create the social conditions! And what will live then will be the crystallized perceptions and feelings that we put out into the world today.

This shows us what it is all about: that one must learn the laws under which the world is evolving. It cannot be a matter of science, rather it can only be an intuition of what we must contribute as law. This comes directly out of a perception that seems most fantastic to most people, but which is much clearer and more objective than much of the fantastic fantasy of our scientists. One that can tell what lives in the soul and then crystallizes outwardly, can also, out of the wisdom, out of the divine in the soul, tell what an individual can spread out into the world and what is proper for humanity.

If in the future you want to have such circumstances around you, if you want to have it set up that way, as an institution which will satisfy people, about which people will be able to say: “That's it—we want to live under these conditions,” then you must first pour humanity into these conditions, so that humanity will stream out of them again. The deepest humanity, the deepest soul-inwardness must first stream out of our own hearts into the world. Then the world will be an image of the soul, and in this soul there will be an image of the world. This will be able to satisfy people again. Therefore the human being cannot expect anything from all those quackeries in the social area that are perpetrated by looking at outer circumstances. These outer circumstances are made by human beings; they are nothing else but human souls which have streamed outwards. The first things that have to be worked over, what we have to take up first as the social question, are the souls of today, which produce the environment of tomorrow. You can see how better conditions stream into the environment if only you would study it. Again and again I have had to hear from social politicians: Make the conditions better and human beings will become better. Just let these people study what individual sects, developing themselves cut off from world evolution pursue as soul culture, just let them study what the latter contribute to the shaping of outer conditions. If human beings realize that the improvement of conditions depends on themselves, if they acquire Theosophical knowledge, and if they cognize the first fundamental principle to establish the kernel of a universal brotherhood [Refers to the first fundamental principle of the Theosophical Society: “To form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste or color.”] and develop it in themselves as a social feeling for the surrounding world, then the actual social is possible, and one is prepared for what will happen in the near future.

Our entire national economy today lives under false premises. Therefore our theories are mostly false because they proceed from assumptions entirely different from those that arise out of the human being and from humanity. One starts with production, or one believes one can achieve something with the development of compensation. All thinking moves in this direction. To be sure, an improvement will not occur immediately with a change in thinking. But it will occur when the direction is changed. Moreover, our proletariat has no inkling about what is here in question. What it demands is more pay and shorter hours. Take a look at the worker in any particular sector, say the electric sector, which has been unionized in order, through this collective, to get better pay and working conditions. What does he want with these better working conditions? He wants a different relation regarding compensation to take place between him and his employer. That's all he wants. The conditions of production don't change. All that happens is that the worker gets higher wages [...]. That's all that happens. If s just a shift in capital.

But that doesn't really change anything much at all, because if one gets more pay today, food will be more expensive tomorrow. It is not at all possible to bring about any kind of improvement for the future in this way. This ongoing endeavor is based on false thinking. There it's a matter of production and consumption. Here a great comprehensive worldwide law about work applies. One has to know this. Certain people who are used to thinking in today's national-economic terms will say perhaps that I am placing a foggy brain in front of them. One who has worked his way through to Theosophy has, as a rule, gone through today's thinking. Theosophy should be active in us as a life impulse. But as every thought will draw into us and stimulate every action in us, just so this also should stimulate us. We needn't think that we can realize it right away. Also, the government councilor who doesn't live in gray theories can look at life entirely differently. He doesn't need to travel to America in order to get the idea that someone who doesn't have any work has to be a lazy lout. In the course of time work has greatly changed its form.

Take a look at ancient Greece. What was work in those days? The worker stood in an entirely different relation to his master. At that time work was slavery. The worker could be compelled by force to work. What he received from his master was his living. But his master took the proceeds of the work; it had nothing whatever to do with the particular relation of the worker to his master. He had to work; moreover, he was maintained under precarious conditions; he was not compensated for the things he did. There we have labor under duress, without pay.

[A] commodity is the result of something other than directly compensated work. Thus its value also has nothing to do with what is to be paid in wages. Look at today's situation. Today we have jobs for which the worker is partly compensated—partly. What they bring in flows as profit into the pockets of the entrepreneur. Thus work is partly compensated. What, thereby, has the worker himself become? He invests his labor power into this work. In Greece, when one was confronting a unit of work, it was a product of slavery. Today's commodity involves something entirely different. Today the luxury that I receive is crystallized labor for which the worker is compensated. If we ponder this we will find that a half freedom has taken over from the old slavery. A contractual relation has taken its place. In that way labor has become a commodity in the figure of the laborer. So we have labor that is half compelled and half voluntary. And the course of evolution is in the direction of completely voluntary work. This path no one will change or reject. Just as the Greek laborer did his work under the compulsion of his master and a present laborer works under the compulsion of wages, just so in the future only freedom will obtain. Labor and compensation will in future be completely separated.

That will constitute the health of social conditions in the future. You can see it already today. Work will be a voluntary performance out of the recognition of necessity, out of the realization that it must be done. People perform it because they look at the person and see that he needs work done for him. What was labor in antiquity? It was tribute, it was performed because it had to be performed. And what is the labor of the present time? It is based on self-interest, on the compulsion that egoism exerts on us. Because we want to exist, we want labor to be paid for. We work for our own sake, for the sake of our pay. In the future we will work for our fellow human beings, because they need what we can provide. That's what we will work for. We will clothe our fellow men, we will give them what they need—in completely free activity. From this, compensation must be completely separated. Labor in the past was tribute, in the future it will be sacrifice. It has nothing to do with self-interest, nothing to do with compensation. If I base my labor on consumer demand, with regard to what humanity needs, I stand in a free relation to labor, and my work is a sacrifice for humanity. Then I will work with all my powers, because I love humanity and want to place my capacities at its disposal.

That has to be possible, and is possible only when one's living is separated from one's labor. And that is going to happen in the future. No one will be the owner of the products of labor. People must be educated for voluntary work, one for all and all for one. Everyone has to act accordingly. If you were to found a small community today in which everyone throws all one's income into a common bank account and everyone works at whatever he can do, then one's living is not dependent on what work one can do, but rather this living is effected out of the common consumption. This brings about a greater freedom than the coordination of pay with production does. If that happens, we will gain a direction which corresponds with needs. Already today this can flow into every law, every decree. Of course, not absolutely, but approximately. Already today one can organize factories in the right way. But that demands healthy, clear, sober thinking in the sense of Theosophy. If such things penetrate into human souls, then something will be able to live again in these human souls. And the way the one determines the other, just so this life of the human soul will also determine that the outer arrangements will be a mirror picture of it, so that our labor will be a sacrificial offering—and no longer self-interest—so that what controls the relations with the outer world is not compensation, but rather what is in us. What we have in our power to do, we offer to humanity. If we can't do much, then we can't offer much; if we have a lot, then we offer a lot.

We must know that every activity is a cause of endless effects and that we may allow nothing that is in our soul to go unused. We will be making every offering out of our soul if we completely renounce any pay that can accrue to us from external conditions. Not for our own sake, not for the sake of our welfare, but rather for the sake of necessity. We want to firm up the soul through the law of its own inner being, so that it learns to place its powers at the disposal of the whole from points of view other than the law of wages and self-interest. There have been thinkers who in some connection have already thought thus. In the first half of the 19th century there have been thinkers who have brought this feature of a grand soul-based contemplation of cosmic law. Is this feature not a sanctification of labor? Isn't it so that we can lay it on the altar of humanity?

Thus labor becomes anything but a burden. It becomes something into which we place what is most sacred for us, our compassion for humanity, and then we can say: Labor is sacred because it is a sacrifice for mankind.

Now there have been people who in the first half of the nineteenth century spoke of “sacred industry.” Saint Simon was one of those who had an inkling of the great ideas of the future.³ Whoever studies his writings will, if one deepens them in the theosophical sense, gain endlessly much for our time. Saint Simon spoke in a rudimentary way, but of a type of living together, as in an association. He has projected associations into which the single individuals deposited tribute, and thus existence became independent. He had great ideas about the development of humanity, and discovered several things. He said: The human races correspond to a planned development, and souls make their appearance one after the other and work their way upwards. That's the way to regard the development of humanity, for then one comes to the correct view. He also speaks of a planetary spirit that changes itself into other planets on which humanity will live. In short, here is a national economist whose works you can read and who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. You read his work like a Theosophical book.

Today the palingenesis [continued rebirth, metempsychosis] of soul existence can be proved. Whoever acknowledges Haeckel will also have to acknowledge reincarnation if one carries Haeckel's ideas further. Fourier⁴ also thought in this way. You can find in him a primitive Theosophy. Thus for one who looks at things the way they are, Theosophy's first major principle for our social life—to establish the kernel of a universal brotherhood—is the only thing that can propagate healthy conditions in the environment. This view of the Theosophists is not impractical, rather it is more practical than the view of all those social theorists (you'll have to admit this if you apply these theories to life), and only someone like that will say, with good old Kolb: Studying theories of national economy is no burden. Only if Theosophy comes to be heard in debates on the social question can a healthy way of looking at it, a healthy thinking come into it. So it is necessary for someone who wants to see and hear in this area to come to terms with Theosophy.

For the Theosophists two things are clear, not out of fanaticism, but rather out of a knowledge that comes from looking at life: it is possible to stick with gray theory and relegate the matter to people who will later have to admit that at the desk it looks different from what it turns out to be in life out there. Then one will have to wait a long time, and what must come will come anyway. In the end, living theory will have to intervene in life—one can hear it already today—already today one can argue about what Theosophy has to say about the social question. Then one can't hear just one lecture, rather one has to deal with Theosophy in its entirety. From it one will derive the gift, the ability, in a healthy way to view life from top to bottom in its most secret and intimate forces, then healing and blessing can soon come into our social order.

Let us achieve in ourselves, as much as we can, what should happen. The reshaping of labor, working not for pay, is a sacrifice. Then we will have done our duty, then we will have regarded life in a healthy way. Or else we will keep looking at the world with gray theories, alien to life. Then it could turn out that future humanity could say: Questions were raised. When these questions were there to be raised, when recovery in a good way was possible, that was just when they did not want to study them. Goethe once said: “Revolutions are entirely impossible if the rulers do their duty.” He knew who was to blame for revolution.⁵ Let us try to consider what the history of the future can say about our present. You have seen what time has wrought, until the earth was drenched with blood, and how the time has raised the most burning questions in an even more frightful way.

• 1. Crimmitschau strikes: Among the numerous work stoppages in the first years of the 20th century, the strike of the textile workers of Crimmitschau, from 7 August 1903 to 17 January 1904, stands out especially because the management reacted to the strike of 600 textile workers in five factories with an unprecedented mass lockout: they locked out the entire work force. Subsequently, in Crimmitschau, with a population of 23,000, around 8,000 textile workers and 1500 who worked at home stood in conflict with a management that was obviously intensifying its measures against the workers. For details on this strike see F. Deppe et al., Geschichte der deutschen Gewerkschaftsbewegung (History of the German Trade Union Movement), Cologne, 1978, p.77f.
  
  Miners' strike: A further high point in the strike movement was the miners' strike in the Ruhr from December 1904 to 9 February 1905, at the center of which stood the demands for am eight-hour day, higher pay, better worker protection, and recognition of the workers organizations. For this also see the portrayal of F. Deppe et al. op cit. p. 78f. what's going on in Eastern Europe: On 22 August 1905, “bloody Sunday,” in Petersburg, peaceful demonstrators were shot down by the military. The strike wave now turned into revolutionary unrest that soon spread over all of Russia. In the fall of 1905 the socialistically organized workers called for a general strike and, with the participation of Bolsheviks, Menscheviks, social revolutionaries and independents, formed the first Soviet (Council).
• 2. a Prussian government councillor, Alfred Kolb: Rudolf Steiner also deals with him in the essay “Spiritual Science and the Social Question” in Lucifer Gnosis, GA Bibl. No. 134, and in the Hamburg lecture of the same name of 2 March 1908 in Die Welträtsel und die Anthroposophie (Anthroposophy and the Riddle of the World), Bn/GA Bibl. No. 54.
• 3. Saint Simon (Claude Henri de Rouvroy), 1760-1825: social reformer. Lettres d'un habitant de Geneve a ses contemporains (1803) (Letters of an Inhabitant of Geneva to his Contemporaries), Réorganisations de la societi europtenne (1814) (The Reorganization of European Society); Le nouveau christianisme (1825) (The New Christianity). Also see A. Voigt, Die sozialen Utopien, Leipzig, 1906 (Social Utopias). This book is also to be found in Rudolf Steiner's private library (Archives of the Rudolf Steiner Estate Administration) and contains numerous underlinings by him concerning Saint Simon. See p,107ff.
• 4. Fourier, François Marie Charles, 1772–1837; Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales (1808) (Theory of Four Movements and General Destinies), Lenouveau monde industrielet sociétair (1829) (The New Industrial and Societal World). See A. Voigt op.cit. p. 95ff.
• 5. Goethe once said: Literally it says: “I was also completely convinced that any great revolution is never the fault of the people, rather of the government. Revolutions are altogether impossible as long as governments are continually just and continually vigilant, so that they anticipate them with timely reforms and don't hold back until what is necessary is compelled from the bottom up” (Eckermann, 4 January 1824).

Today, allow me to shed some light on a very current topic that touches the immediate present from the point of view of Theosophy. The fact that it is possible for such a question, such a movement that directly engages cultural life, to be placed in the light of our worldview is demonstrated by a small piece of evidence from the last few days that is extraordinarily significant in several respects. It shows that practical people in particular recognize the need to deepen our culture through the theosophical worldview, and that on the other hand, in the broadest circles, theosophy is still something that seems quite unknown.

Last Sunday, a very strange article appeared in the “Tag”, on whose political content I do not want to go into at all, about Russia, Japan and peace, by Carl Peters. You can think what you want about the name Carl Peters; no one will dispute that he is one of the great practitioners of our day. In this article, he talks about the differences in the perception of the peace between Japan and Russia within the two countries. He mentions the manifesto with which this peace was proclaimed to the people in Russia, which contains the words that God may give his great blessing to these people, and for the development of Russia in the future. He then mentions the proclamation of peace to Russia. [The Mikado says in his peace manifesto]: The result of the war is due to the kind souls of our ancestors. Now that peace and quiet have been secured, we call upon the great ancestors to enable us to pass the fruits on to our descendants. The Emperor of Japan visits the temple to bring the news of the conclusion of peace to the imperial ancestors. ... [space] I am quoting this because of the words the author of the article says about it. He says: “The two have this in common, that they appeal to a spiritual fate in the world process.” The difference is that, according to the East Asian view, it is not a victory of the material. The Japanese view is more pantheistic, the Christian view more [monotheistic]. Which one is right cannot be determined by rational arguments. I would like to add the following remark: The Japanese are a [sober, almost mathematical] nation, so I do not assume that what we can believe plays a major role for them. If they assume an influence on earthly fate, it is based not on faith but on knowledge. I would like to suspect that High and East Asia possess certain spiritual knowledge that the highly developed West can only dream of. If they are able and willing to introduce such knowledge into our more or less flattening culture, they would provide us with ideal values that go far beyond what we can offer them. ... [space]

It is not what is contained in these words that we want to examine. The fact that they have been spoken by a so-called [practitioner] is what we want to put at the top of our consideration. Two things strike us. One is that the necessity for a spiritual deepening of our culture is pointed out in such harsh words [about forces that do not live in the material world], and on the other hand, reference is made to East Asia and the hope is expressed that our flattening culture should receive a refreshment from the East, in that the hope is expressed that these knowers can offer us more than we can offer them with our culture. The fact that one can know something about the forces emanating from people who no longer live in earthly existence is taken very seriously here by a man of the world.

It is very strange that on the one hand the necessity is so emphasized, and on the other hand at the same time there is no awareness that for thirty years there has been a movement in Europe that is not working from the remnants of an older people whose spiritual consciousness cannot be at its full height today, but that, I say, there has been a spiritual movement in Europe itself for thirty years, as there is Theosophy. This is completely forgotten; and no consideration is given to the fact that we may be called upon here to establish this spiritual culture in a completely different way than those East Asian peoples. The whole thing is a throwing of light on the one hand, after the longing for spirituality, for knowledge of the spiritual world, and on the other hand, I would like to say, a superficial conception of our own European aspirations.

More than any other question, what has been touched on here may interest us when discussing the women's issue. The theosophical movement can in no way be suspected of treating this matter in any reactionary way. Simply the way it has developed would flatly contradict such an assertion. Women have been among the best founders and collaborators of the theosophical movement from the very beginning. Yes, the actual founder of the Theosophical Society – Helena Petrovna Blavatsky – was a woman. And in terms of the sum of knowledge contained in the works of this woman, nothing that has been given in the cultural works of the last few centuries can match it.

You don't have to believe it. If you seriously immerse yourself in what this woman has given, then the conviction grows that what has just been said is a truth. And Annie Besant, her successor – another woman – has understood in a quite extraordinary way how to combine modern science, modern thinking, and a progressive outlook on life with the theosophical ethos and the theosophical movement in general.

Within the Theosophical Society, men and women work together. Never, in any way, does one have the feeling within the Society that gender plays any role in this. Yes, from one side, which has not grasped the Theosophical movement in its deepest essence, this movement has been called a feminine one; partly because it was founded by a woman, partly because perhaps now in the majority women work in the movement. This fact protects us above all from the prejudice that we could understand this matter in some kind of retrogressive, hostile sense.

But the theosophist is called upon to consider all these things in the light of spirituality, in the light of the highest spiritual culture. He must also do this with regard to this matter. Above all, we will notice that this women's issue, as it now presents itself to us, is a product of our modern world view, our modern thinking and feeling. The way it presents itself to us today would not have been possible a hundred years ago. Insofar as Theosophy is always concerned with clearly and distinctly understanding the spirit of humanity in different epochs, we will also have to clearly understand how this women's issue in particular has emerged from our culture. Theosophy is less concerned with criticizing and more with understanding in all directions. Therefore, it will be less programmatic about this issue of women's rights, but will rather have to explore what the cause of this issue is.

We do not get to the bottom of this issue as easily as we do with others. This is because Theosophy leads us deep into human nature. And this is more diverse and complicated than one might think. While the modern man could easily ignore the distinction between man and woman, the theosophist must look at this difference from the depth of human nature and ask himself whether, despite this difference, the peculiar cooperation that has emerged within the Theosophical Society could also benefit larger cultural circles, perhaps even give rise to a general world view on this question in the present day.

If we look back over time, we find that the perception of women, both of themselves and of the perception they had of the opposite sex, has changed greatly over time. Likewise, the external institutions within which the two sexes have lived have changed significantly. If we look at this superficially, we will not arrive at the real cause and basis. It is known that in the beginning of the time into which not history, but prehistory leads us, the woman played a substantially different role. It is known that patriarchy, the “father family”, with its peculiarly constituted inheritance law and other social institutions, arose from an original “mother family” - matriarchy, that woman had a privileged position with regard to matters relating to the offspring, such as inheritance law and so on.

The theosophist must ask himself: how is such a thing connected with the original spiritual forces of the world? This brings us to the discussion of a fact that has been touched on here several times, but which we must apply to this particular case. The basis of all human life in its historical development on earth is a natural one, one that has developed from an [instinctive] disposition to conscious, clear thinking, to conscious, clear institutions created by the intellect and certain moral concepts.

The original bonds of humanity had arisen from nature. Blood relationship was the original one. Institutions that created moral concepts are later placed in the place of ancient blood relationship.

The materialist sees nothing but the raw force of nature in this blood relationship. But anyone who has a spiritual worldview knows that what is expressed as instinct, what comes to the fore as drive, what is expressed as blood relationship, can all be traced back to spiritual forces, to spiritual beings that stand behind the sensual existence. Just as man today, more or less consciously, directs the social order, so originally the devas [or dhyans], divine powers, directed the context of humanity, [they ordered human conditions].

This working out of a spiritual basis, which is still unconscious to man, appears as drive and instinct. The bearer of this original instinct, based on spiritual essence, was woman. The ancient myths and legends of the peoples bear witness to this fact. [From the theosophical point of view this is easily provable, but this view can also be proved purely intellectually.] Only one thing needs to be mentioned. If you look at the images that go back to the earliest stages of human existence, you will have found in these images the tradition of an original female basis for the entire human race. The Greeks depicted their Zeus with a female bust.

The theosophical worldview takes us back to the very beginning of time, as far back as we can trace time on Earth, to those times when there was no gender separation, to those times of which we cannot speak in detail today, to those times when the sexes were not divided between two different individuals, but were united. Those familiar with scientific research will know that even natural science points to a being from prehistoric times that was not single-sex but two-sex. In this regard, I draw attention to the Darwinian Oskar Schmidt. Theosophy speaks of that time in which the pictorially represented prehistoric man was a fact. He was more inclined towards the female sex.

A little thought can make this clear. Reproduction was tied to the female sex at all times. That which was there as a basis was also expressed in the external social context. In the early days, this natural basis was translated into a kind of moral worldview, in terms of social institutions, rights and institutions.

That the spiritual power of man was particularly concentrated in woman, is shown to us even by the view that we find in Tacitus, where woman is seen as a prophetess, [called to proclaim from the spiritual world what will happen in the future – Velleda, Alruna –] who has to proclaim whether right or wrong exists, whether something should be undertaken or not. We find such views among various peoples. The fact that the spiritual, too, where it appears at the beginning of our times, where it appears as something new, as something wise, is rooted in the same natural foundation, emerges from such facts.

And now something else: Go back to the earliest times of religious world view, and you will find a common trait in all peoples that is connected with this natural basis of the human race, and on the other hand with the consciousness from which the oldest institutions and the thoughts and aspirations of humanity have developed. In sexual symbols, in images that are connected to this natural basis, the culture and religion of different peoples is expressed in very specific times. These are naive but beautiful and magnificent times when people, in sweet simplicity and naivety, associated nothing low or frivolous with these sexual symbols, where procreation was a power of nature and was symbolized in the woman, who showed herself in various forms of expression like the divine creation for them. There have been attempts to revive these views from a so-called sexual religion. There is no right to do it the way it was done. For the current basis of feeling is not such that one can feel one's way back to that original and unblemished state that was associated with these symbols, so that the way these old things are discussed today has something offensive about it for the connoisseur.

Only slowly and gradually did those institutions, those states of consciousness that are linked to the female origin of the human race, change into a different order, an order that, to put it briefly, was made by man, by the man who has broken away from this natural foundation, by the man who has nothing to do with the visible progress in the human race.

It is only through the law, through legal regulation, that the right of the man is introduced into the original right based on blood relationship, taken from the female point of view. Thus we see that it is only on this original basis of a religious world view, which starts from the generative powers of nature, that what we encounter in the remnants of ancient peoples, [Mongolian ancient tribes] as ancestral culture, develops. A power that worked directly was revered in woman.

Then, in place of the wise and the soothsayers, and in place of the veneration of the directly present female, there arises what is called the cult of the ancestors, the veneration of deceased members of the people who have rendered outstanding services for the good of the whole — male ancestors. They venerated what had an effect beyond death. You can still see this in the fact that the Mikado brings the message of peace and war to the graves of his ancestors. So we see the transition from female culture to male culture.

The conquest of institutions that have been linked to women by nature since time immemorial through reason and the thinking of man is slow and gradual. But something else is connected with this, something that I cannot better describe than as the transition from a primeval conservatism to an idealism that is gradually emerging in the world.

You can follow this in those periods of world development in which those old religious cultures of which I have spoken developed. These go back either to times when the divine-creative could be seen in the power of creation, or to times when it had long since died but still continued to work as something present. These cultures build on something in the past. At first, we find in world development those that build on humanity's starting point, that point to the old, to what has come from before, to what has been sacred since time immemorial, to nature, to the ancestors. This is the starting point of the human race, and gradually this view changes into a completely different one. In all peoples who have provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you will find the veneration of the ancestors in the veneration of the prophets, the veneration of those who proclaim the future. In all the peoples who provided the starting points for the culture to which we ourselves belong, you find, instead of ancestor worship, the worship of the prophets, the worship of those who proclaim the future, those who hold up the high ideals to the people. Primitive conservatism gradually gives way to idealism. The focus turns from the past to the future, even among the people from whom Christianity itself emerged. The prophets were the real great personalities, and hand in hand with them goes a detachment from the natural, from mere blood relationship, from all that points to the foundations of our race.

We see the tremendous depth of human development when we look at this turnaround. That which is connected with the relationship between the sexes, which is the subject of much discussion among anthropologists and others today, the so-called sense of shame, was not present at the starting point of our culture. [What was connected with the creation of man was not hidden; it was something natural, self-evident.] It only emerged at the time when a characterized change took place as a necessity. Where the power of nature gave way to reason and ideals, people began to cover what was considered to be a remnant of the natural foundations of the human race.

Take a closer look at this point. What is man ashamed of? Consider this feeling of shame in other areas. Everywhere you will find that man is ashamed when something is done by him in such a way that he actually more or less recognizes the demand that he could have done it better, that it is actually not right the way he did it. We can say something quite similar about the feeling of shame in general. It is there and refers to something that comes from ancient times and can be overcome, and which is as it should not be if we look to the future.

Here human instinct, human perception, points to something that the theosophical world view presents as realized in the distant future. Today I must point out that the development of humanity through the sexes is only a transitional stage, that just as humanity has emerged from the union of the two sexes in one individual, humanity is again heading for a state in which there are again not two, but only one sex. Thus you see our present development through the theosophical world view placed in a distant past and a distant future that are similar, that resemble each other in certain ways.

We can perceive how this fact is reflected in the most intimate expressions of the human race. Take a look at ancient artistic or semi-artistic representations of the divine creative power, at the way the ancient Egyptians associated it with the service of Isis, and compare it with the peculiar trait that emanates from Raphael's Madonna. What is natural, what is connected with the power of creation, can be seen to have been expressed in a semi-artistic way in ancient times. This creative power is shyly veiled in a Raphael Madonna, and we encounter a completely different, higher moment: love, a spiritual relationship that takes the place of the old natural relationship. The mother with the child, bathed in the magic of love. And the spiritual is expressed, as for example in the Sistine Madonna, in the protruding angel heads. The creative power is hinted at as a spiritual echo. There you see a great universal truth sensed by the artist.

The religions themselves take this path. Ascetic religions, such religions that are escapist, are not at the starting point of humanity. They only emerge at the time when the indicated change has taken place. It is magnificent and powerful in the times when this change is being prepared. The saviors in human development are mythically depicted as immaculately conceived. You have this with Buddha and with the other saviors of humanity and finally in the Christian religion itself. In religion, the original natural foundation is developed into the most sacred.

[Again, compare the Egyptian Isis service with these spiritualized religions.] This is wonderfully indicated in the transformation of Egypt, with the ideal and the spiritualized perception at the starting point of our era. Then you will feel this transformation in all humanity. That is why the theosophical world view is clear about the fact that the natural basis from which the human race originated is the external physiognomic expression of a spiritual being. This spiritual essence is the same that man will approach again in a conscious way in the future.

If we bear in mind that we are progressing from the spirit in its natural form to the spirit in its immediate form, then we will understand many things better that have taken place in the course of sexual development. Above all, we will better understand what I mentioned earlier: the replacement of ancient female institutions and female foundations by a male culture, in which we still live today. The natural basis was to be suppressed. At first it could only be suppressed in the area of external institutions, but otherwise it remained in place, and so we are confronted by a strange hybrid in our present-day institutions. Half of them are still based on what remains of the old natural basis with blood relationship, and half of them are steeped in human understanding, in moral institutions that have been poured over them. In our current institutions, both elements peek out in a colorful mix. [Basically, man has only whitewashed what the original natural basis of women's culture has provided him with; it shows through everything.] However, we will turn to the future with its culture and efficiency. Then this spirit will show itself in its actual, appropriate form, and in the light of a completely different view than the one that originally existed. When man originally wanted to raise himself to the Divine, when he wanted to raise his eyes to Him to whom the highest honor and worship must be paid, then he turned to the Power that is germinating and sprouting through man himself, creating naturally.

More and more, this view is changing into a completely different one, and today we are only just at the dawn of this other view. But for a select few, it has long since emerged. Three words in the wonderful, ancient Indian Vedanta wisdom already express the germ of this world view: Tat twam asi – that art thou. – And what does this mean? It means a great deal. When the Vedanta sage immersed himself in this “That thou art”, he turned to the whole great universe, he turned to everything outside of himself, to that with which he felt at one. He then said to every stone: You are of the same nature and essence as I – that thou art. Just as my hand belongs to me, so the stone belongs to a being, to which I also belong.

Everything around us is an invitation to look outside, to seek the divine in the world itself, not just to worship the spirit in the creative and generative forces that work through human nature itself. Tat twam asi is the worship of the divine spirit in all of nature, and with that, at the same time, the call to carry this divine spirit into our entire environment, to transform this environment so that the original state around us from which the human being himself has sprung will arise again.

From asexuality comes sexuality. From the male-female comes the male and the female. This difference will again submerge in the common, objective spiritual world when man will find his self in the great universe, when he will feel brotherhood and connection with the whole great universe, which has no gender, which is all the more perfect the more exalted it is above all similar differences.

When this thought lives completely so that he can permeate culture with this thought of the higher human being exalted above all gender, then the sun has risen. This is what shines for you today as the dawn of a new culture. Then the future of our culture is self-evident, the culture into which we must enter when idealism is further developed, and this culture must not carry anything in the outer world that has anything to do with gender. So we enter institutions and facilities that show us a cultural environment, a moral environment, that applies equally to men and women, that is the same for men and women.

That is the theosophical thought, and the theosophical ideal is to reorganize our institutions according to this, which have emerged [from an originally female culture that has passed through a male culture, to bring them into a higher state in which these two epochs will only exist in the Hegelian sense as dissolved moments].

This can only be in a culture that is spiritual in the best sense of the word, a culture that starts from what has nothing to do with gender differentiation. The one that is emerging in the theosophical movement is such a culture. For what does the theosophical worldview cultivate? The higher self in man, that nature and essence which has nothing at all to do with man and woman. For that in man which the theosophist looks at, that which he makes the object of his special consideration and study, the higher man, the spiritual man, appears in one embodiment as man, in another as woman. The one who lives as a man today has, like the other who lives as a woman, passed through as many male and female incarnations. Man and woman were an outward expression of the inner higher individuality, which is neither male nor female.

Thus, something that is male-female at the same time already lives in today's man, something that unites both sides. And a worldview that shows this male-female as the basis of both through the embodiments, a worldview that cultivates this, only prepares the ground on which man and woman are completely equal, not only in our legal institutions, but also in their feelings. Through “Tat twam asi” we overcome gender differences, and the cooperation between men and women in the Theosophical Society is a kind of model, a small beginning for a great, powerful culture that must develop in this direction in the future, where the two sexes will not live side by side in abstract equality, because the diversity can be greater than it is today. But what is the same is what matters. That is the external world that is formed around us.

What matters is not what we carry within us, but what lives around us outside. As long as man is selfish, as long as the whole culture is based on domination and personality, man draws the impulses for institutions from his female or male personality. But as soon as he creates what is grounded in the higher self, the inner being can be shaped as it likes, the outer world, which is reflected in the inner being, is the same. To use an image, set up two concave mirrors, a convex one next to a concave one, and place the same image in front of both. The convex mirror, the one that curves outwards, will show a different image than the concave mirror, but it is the same image in both cases. As long as there is male and female in the physical body, there will of course still be a convex and a concave mirror, but the same external world will be reflected. It must not be shaped in a one-sided way by one sex or the other.

Those who have grasped the spirit will see something infinitely higher in it. Only a materialistic view sees the spiritual as an effect of matter. The theosophist, however, comes to the conviction that all matter originates only from the spirit, that everything that is material today was once spiritual, and that everything we could observe at the starting point originates from earlier, spiritual foundations. In the same way, a future natural super-sexuality will arise from the present super-sexuality, which man himself creates. We will create our outer institutions, which we will bring into the world, to an equal extent out of the spirit of woman and man. They themselves will be the cause of the later natural effects. What man creates as asexual culture will later create a super-sexual nature.

Therefore, it was quite natural that the original culture reverted to the worship of that which was conservatively held from ancient times, to the worship of creative natural forces, to the worship of ancestors. The spirit preceded nature. Through it, nature was created. If one wanted to look up to the spirit, one had to look at the dawn of the world. But if you want to see the future, you have to work with it as a human being – in both the conscious and unconscious state. Then the prophetic view of the future takes the place of the old cult of ancestors and the worship of the family. We ourselves must prepare today what is to be in the future, what kind of external culture is to exist.

Thus a great, all-embracing cosmic horizon leads us to a solution of the women's question that opens up great perspectives for us. If today, through the theosophical worldview, the higher human nature is sought in man or woman and gender remains a completely private matter, then what is really being covered is not considered. In a sense, this is the higher development of feeling, which emerges as a sense of shame in times of transition. What used to be a shy concealment is now a holy overcoming.

This kind of reaching out and looking forward is a great and powerful ideal for the future. By developing the higher human being in man and woman, the theosophical worldview awakens such feelings in man and woman that create culture. Noble, beautiful feelings that transcend everything base must arise from this cultivation of the higher human nature. Culture originated from a kind of female foundation. And when we look back to ancient times, we can find the female generative powers revered as divine nature everywhere. This then developed into a [male] culture. Initially, we have a true antithesis to this [male] culture in today's women's movement, which can also be explained from it, [today the women's movement is a revolt against this male culture, and it is entirely justified].

But every one-sidedness in the world shows us its complement. What confronts us in external history presents itself to us ideally in a kind of counter-image. The one-sided older culture seeks a counterpart. The old feminine culture, the Isis culture, finds its ideal antithesis in the Osiris cult, which was dismembered, perished, and for which Isis longs. This is the image through which the female wants to complement herself, where a new thinking takes the place of the old culture.

Then another ideal appears in Christianity. In the beginning, Christianity had to be a masculine level of culture. But it was complemented. Just as the culture of Isis was complemented by an ideal of man, so this culture of man was complemented by an ideal of woman: in the medieval cult of Mary.

Goethe also hinted at the contrast between female and male culture in his “Faust”. “The eternal feminine draws us up,” he says in connection with the preceding verses. This is what he envisioned: higher culture will be the one in which the female counterpart of the male no longer needs to be longed for in the female and the female ideal no longer longed for in the culture of men, where the feminine no longer needs to be drawn up, but where the higher divine, the higher self, appears as the drawing force in man. This higher self, the whole human being, is what the theosophical worldview strives for. How could it not be that women are the first to understand what is now, at dawn, to be the culture of the future.

For thousands of years we have had a culture of man. Our whole culture is a male culture. Our modern justice, theology, medicine and so on are almost exclusively products of the male culture. Those who approach these things more deeply will easily find a physiological expression of the male soul. But if it is to be different now, then it is self-evident that the inspirer must be the woman. If the theosophical movement is to be understood more quickly, then it must be understood in this direction. Those who do not see it this way can call it a feminine in a pejorative sense today. But those who are clear about the fact that the great progress of culture takes place from the feminine to the masculine and from there to the masculine-feminine will find it self-evident that women can best understand this theosophical world view.

It is more difficult for a man to [free himself from the prejudices of today's culture], because he has grown up from an early age with the results of a man's culture. He should literally transform himself inwardly. He will also have to do so if he wants to be up to date. But all that is to come also prescribes for us the free interaction, the completely free cooperation of man and woman, the absolute equality in the perception of the higher self, the actual spirit of the human being.

Thus the former ideal of the eternal in man, which we encounter in the Osiris cult, and the eternal in woman, which has found a mystical formal expression in the new age and has been lived by poets and mystics, will be transformed into the ideal of the harmoniously structured human being, who is not afflicted with any one-sidedness. We can foresee a culture all around us that will bear the outer physiognomy of supersexuality. That is the task of the theosophical world view. We do not work with phrases, with words and programs, not with demands, but we seek to awaken the living life in the soul from the contemplation of the spirit, to open up the source that is self-creating. We do not just speak as Theosophists, but we indicate what, according to the nature of the facts, must develop in these souls.

So you can see from this particular question that European spiritualism, European theosophy, has something quite different to say than to reproduce the remains of old worldviews that have retained the cult of the ancestors. They have spirituality, the reference to the spiritual, but they do not have what we have as those who have to work according to ideals, not according to old habits. Spiritualism is certainly a necessity for us and it must come into the world; but not a spiritualism that carries the achievements of our culture to the graves of our ancestors – although we can understand and respect such a thing – but a spiritualism that is prophetic, that carries the best that we can develop within us to be burned for a fire that will be the beacon of our future.

It has often been emphasized here on other occasions that what is called spiritual science or, in more recent times, theosophy, that these are by no means mere theories floating in worlds far away, that theosophy does not merely seek to satisfy curiosity about higher worlds. Theosophy should not be something far-removed from the world, something unworldly. If it wants to fulfill its task, its mission, it must draw the forces and the impulses for its work from the higher worlds, and its work towards its goal and its mission must take place under the authority of these forces. Only then can it help in the further development and salvation of humanity. It would be a rather idle knowledge of the higher worlds if one did not want to apply it in practice, to life. For no one can understand life who does not know the deeper forces on which it is based. These forces do not lie on the surface; they lie hidden in the depths. Just as iron, when first seen as a substance, does not reveal that it contains electricity, which only becomes apparent when it is rubbed, so too these forces must lie dormant in iron and must first be drawn out of it. If we wanted to work on the service of progress for humanity without knowing these hidden realities, then our work could only be superficial. Beneficial work is only possible if we explore the deeper forces and entities.

Of course, we must also recognize the goals of our work. What does man work for? For the future! But nothing lies in the lap of the future that is not already present in the present. Let us look at the plant. It does not yet bear flowers or fruit. It will only produce these in the future. But the forces for these flowers and fruits already lie dormant in the plant. It already contains in an invisible form what will happen in the future. And only because people usually remember how similar plants have borne blossoms and fruits can they say that this plant will bloom in this way and not in another way, and bear fruit in this way and not in another way. But if man could see into the interior of the plant, then he could see the forces at work in the plant that will produce those flowers and those fruits.

There is something that lies in the future and that we cannot know, whose development we cannot foresee, and that is the body of the human being. What will one day be in the physical world already rests today in humanity, just as the flower and fruit already rest in the plant. If we are not able to delve into what lies dormant in the womb of humanity today, we cannot become rulers over the forces that will unfold in the future. Those who want to work on the development of humanity are thereby working on something that has not yet existed, and those who want to grasp that must descend below the surface. The theosophical worldview must take on this task and carry it out in practice.

Nowhere is the eminently practical nature of the theosophical world view more evident than in the field of child education. In the child, we have before us, so to speak, the riddle that lies hidden in the future. And every day we have to solve this riddle anew. For the child of seven is not the same child as he was at six, and he is not the same as the child of fourteen or sixteen. Only when we are in harmony with the deep forces that work in secret, only then can we approach the numerous questions in the field of education that are so burning for humanity today. Real orientation in all these questions will only be possible when the theosophical view dominates people's minds.

Today we want to take a closer look at the mission that Theosophy has in modern culture in relation to educational issues. To do this, it is necessary that we know the whole structure of human nature. We know that, in the sense of spiritual science, man is a complex being. For those who look more deeply, the material body is only part of the human being. This physical body combines the same substances that are present in the natural world. In the human body, they are combined in a highly complex interaction. Science tells us: When we look at a machine, we see the effect of the materials of which it is composed; but when we look at a living being, we see not a mere structure of dead materials, but a body that is permeated by life, which regulates the physical forces and brings them to life.

This life was described by an earlier science as “life force”. But today's materialistic science claims that there is no “life force”, that substances develop life within themselves. In recent times, however, people have been moving away from this point of view. It is seen that one does not get very far with this theory, that one must indeed reckon with some kind of life-force to explain the living. But even in this sense of the newer natural sciences, the theosophical view does not speak when it speaks of the second link in the human being, the etheric or life body. It is not concerned with mere theorizing, it does not speculate, but its way is to develop the higher vision in man himself. Just as other beings are only present in the world for man if he has the organs to perceive these beings, just as he perceives light and color only if he has the eye for it, just as he perceives sounds only perceives sounds only if he possesses the ear for them, so for man the higher beings are only present if he has developed organs within himself to perceive them through the training that has often been mentioned here.

If there were a man who had no eyes but organs to perceive electricity, for example, if such a man could see the forces at work that ignite the light here in the room, that play back and forth outside in the telegraphic lines, how very different the world would appear to such a person! With each new sense, new worlds arise for man, and slumbering within him lie the senses that make the higher worlds perceptible to him. They can be developed. No one can justifiably assert that such worlds cannot exist. It would be the same if he were to say that there are no higher worlds because he cannot see them. It would be the same as if a blind man were to say about color that it does not exist because he cannot perceive it.

But if a person has developed through schooling, then the etheric body is an experience for him; he can then see it. In its size, it is almost the same as the physical body. One often imagines the etheric body as consisting of a finer substance, a kind of mist, but that does not correspond to reality. Rather, it consists of forces and currents of a spiritual nature that interact.

The third link, the astral body, differs from the etheric body in that, while in the latter the forces of growth, reproduction and so on are at work, it is the essence of the astral body to feel and to be conscious. The astral body is the carrier of pleasure and suffering, of desires and passions.

Beyond these three members is what makes man the crown of earthly creation: the self-aware ego, the center of the human being, the innermost power in man. So when we have a fully developed human being before us, we have a structure of four members before us.

But you can only understand how to act as an educator if you understand this structure of the human being correctly, if you know that it does not play the same role in a newly born child as in a child of seven or fourteen years, if you know that the development of these links is different at each age level of the adolescent. Only when you know all this can you solve the puzzle that the child presents to us day after day. And we learn to understand all of this best when we start from the assumption that we see how the human being lives before birth.

Before the child is born, we have enclosed the child's physical body, enclosed in the mother's body. Nothing can reach the child without passing through the mother's body. No ray of light, no external influence reaches the child directly. It rests enclosed in another body; one physical body rests in another. Birth consists of the physical mother's shell being shed. But in this moment, from a spiritual point of view, not the whole human being is born, but only the physical body. The second birth takes place gradually, not in a single moment like the physical one. It essentially takes place when the child changes teeth. At this point, something similar happens in the spiritual realm to what happens in the physical birth.

Up to the age of seven, the child is surrounded by an etheric shell, just as it was surrounded by a physical shell before the physical birth, the womb. And so one could say: up to the age of seven, the child is surrounded by an etheric mother. Just as one cannot get to the child before the physical birth other than through the mother's body, one can no more get to the child's actual etheric body before the age of seven. And just as one must care for the mother before the physical birth if one wants to care for the child, so too, in order to care for and develop the child's etheric body, one must, until the seventh year, keep away everything that could harm it and give it everything that can promote its development. In the seventh year, the etheric covering is pushed back, the etheric body of the human being is born, very similar to the physical birth of the physical body.

And later on there is a third birth, the birth of the astral body. When the human being has shed his etheric cover in the seventh year, he has not yet fully developed his astral body; to the spiritual seer's eye he is still surrounded by an outer astral cover. He is wrapped in this until he reaches sexual maturity; then it is also shed: the actual astral body of the human being is born.

The educator must know all this. He must know about the physical, etheric and astral birth of the human being, because the individual educational epochs are based on this. He must know that just as it would be nonsensical to want to reach the physical child in the mother's body, it is also nonsensical to want to reach something that concerns the etheric body through education up to the age of seven, or something that concerns the astral body until sexual maturity. The limbs of the human being are the carriers of very special soul forces. The physical body is the carrier of the physical sense organs; the etheric body is initially the carrier of the growth and reproduction forces. But that is not all, because all these different bodies are worked on from within by the human ego. This works from the inside. And so the bodies of the human being are particularly related to the soul forces. The ether body is the carrier of memory, of all lasting habits and inclinations, of temperament.

We find concepts of the intellect, images of external objects and so on in the astral body. But when the image is also a symbol, a parable, when it rises to artistic imagination, when it becomes productive in the soul, then the etheric body is the carrier. What we call judgment, criticism, intellectual activity depends on the astral body.

If we know all this, then we will be able to apply it in relation to the emergence of these limbs in the course of the child's development. If we know that the etheric body is enclosed until the seventh year, we also know that until then we must not act on what the properties of this etheric body are. Only when it is released by the second birth may we educate it. There is a saying that can spread light and should be the basic principle for the education of a child up to the age of seven. Aristotle expresses this saying when he says: 'Man is the imitator of animals'. Imitation is what characterizes the child up to the age of seven. The child must see what it is supposed to learn, it must see and hear it. There must be something in its environment that is intended to have an effect on the child. It should not be taught overnight, but rather it should be shown and exemplified what it is supposed to imitate.

Exemplarity and imitation are the two magic words for a child up to seven years of age. What kind of teachings you give them, what principles you have, is not important, only what you do in the presence of the child. That alone is important. The example is what is actually effective. What the child is to acquire must be introduced into the physical world. One should avoid, as far as possible, allowing something into the child that the child should not imitate. A thousand good teachings are of no use to a child of this age; the child should imitate what it experiences with its physical body in the physical world. A little story will show you how far this imitation can go. A child of five years, who had been well-educated until then, suddenly took money from his parents' cash box. They were extremely upset. The child stole and gave the money to another child. The parents could not understand how their child came to steal. The explanation is simple. The child saw how the parents took money from the cash box and simply imitated them.

We can see from this how far we must go to avoid anything we do not want our children to imitate when it is also allowed to adults. Anyone who observes a little sees that children copy writing – like signs, without understanding the meaning. The meaning of what is written can only be conveyed to the child when the etheric body is born; but it can imitate the writing before that. Learning to write should begin by having the child first copy the shapes of the letters. Later, one can then explain to him what he can already do.

Today, far too much emphasis is placed on the fact that meaning should be involved in everything that is taught to the child. But it is far more important to ensure that the child's entire environment is set up in such a way that the external forces surrounding the child have an awakening and life-promoting effect on its etheric body. — In doing so, we recall Goethe's words: The eye is formed by light for light. The animal that is forced to live in dark caves gradually loses its eyesight and becomes blind. Light has a creative and formative effect on the eye. The forces of nature create organs and develop them. A human being is not yet complete when he is born. Every ray of light continues to have a formative effect on the eye. And so everything in the child's environment can have the effect of awakening life or stunting it.

Here spiritual science shines through to the smallest details. For example, it is not unimportant whether the child's surroundings are red or blue. The same color is by no means suitable for a lively, perhaps even nervous, child as for one that is quiet or even apathetic. Blue is the right color for the latter, red for the former. Thus, even clothing can have a beneficial or debilitating effect on the child. In this way, it is influenced right down to the brain and heart, these instruments of the soul. It depends on the child's environment whether these organs dry up or mature into liveliness, whether they develop slowly and sluggishly or whether they are awakened to active life.

Education has to ensure that what is an indicator of inner prosperity is taken into account: pleasure and joy. These are not there for nothing; they should not be suppressed, especially not in childhood. They should not be suppressed, but ennobled. Thus, for example, the body's need for a particular kind of nourishment is indicated by the fact that one has a desire for it. In this way the body indicates that it needs it in order to thrive. Everything that gives pleasure, that arouses interest, has the effect of creating organs. The organs are brought to life by this, and regulated.

But if a child becomes bored, then you kill something, you have a weakening effect on your organs; and that is very bad. Because what has not been developed by the age of seven is lost forever. The whole direction, the growth tendency is indeed given by then. One might try – or rather, one had better not try – to test the truth of these assertions of spiritual science by, for instance, giving one child a lot of eggs to eat and another very few. The latter child will show remarkably healthy instincts for what his body needs as nourishment; the former, on the other hand, will not. This is because an excessive amount of egg white extinguishes healthy nourishment instincts.

So it is in the seventh year that the child's etheric body is born. The body that is the carrier of habits, temperament, memory, is freed. All these qualities must be cultivated in the period up to sexual maturity. This is the epoch in which one approaches the child with the subject matter of learning. For this time, not only what is present in the physical world applies. Imitation is the magic word up to the age of seven; there is now also a guiding principle for the period from the change of teeth to sexual maturity: imitation and authority. Just as the child imitated before, so now, to use a saying of Goethe's, it must choose its hero and follow him on his path up to Mount Olympus. If you expound the most beautiful moral principles or pass harsh judgments in front of the child, you will find that such teachings are of no use to the child. However, if you place a personality in the child's environment as an authority, then it has an effect. Not moral principles, but embodied morality should be given to the child. The soul and conscience of the child are not developed by mere teaching, but by the child saying to itself when it sees such a personality: What he does is right. And it learns to look up with reverence to such a personality.

Nothing is more beneficial for later life than reverence cultivated in childhood, nothing more fruitful for the whole of life. When a child hears about someone who is a person to whom everyone looks up with reverence, and then sees this person for the first time and feels a shiver of awe run through his heart, too, then that is a wonderful basis for education. Respect and authority, these words must gain resonance if one wants to have a firm basis for education.

The child can only properly follow principles if it has previously seen them embodied in a person. Only then do the principles become second nature, or rather part of the etheric body. They remain in the memory. Anything missed during this time remains missed for life. To exercise the memory, the child must also absorb a great deal of material; he can then later permeate it with his own judgment; now he must first practice the memory. Later he must have material in order to be able to judge it. It is bad for the developing human being to be called upon to criticize too early. First it must get to know the world, must learn from great historical examples, must feel reverence. One must paint for the child in words and pictures what great personalities have achieved. The pictorial imagination must be cultivated in this period.

In this respect, the current materialistic way of thinking is in a sorry state. One must compare two things. Up to the age of seven, only the physical organs are developed, then the character and temperament; and we have seen how education can have the effect of awakening or stifling life. A child that is healthy in body and soul will always prefer a toy that it has created itself to a finished, beautiful and complicated thing. His rag doll, which has been given eyes, nose and mouth by ink blots, will be a dearer toy to him than the most beautiful doll bought. Why? Because when the child looks at his beloved rag doll, he has to do something, because he has to complement what he has in front of him through his imagination and power of imagination. The imagination must work, otherwise it withers away.

There is a great difference between letting a child develop by putting together artificial structures from individual parts and having something alive in front of you. There will come a time when people will no longer worship the construction kit. Truly, the occultist should not become sentimental, but here is a point where he is tempted to become so. He sees the materialistic way of thinking developing in the tender, childlike growing human being and knows that it comes from having put together dead individual things into a dead whole in the nursery. Just as the building blocks produce a lifeless thing, so the materialistic point of view achieves a lifeless world development. The materialist's brain has atrophied; it cannot be led to the living, cannot be pointed to it.

Therefore, give the child something alive, so that his brain may be awakened to life. Give him the simple toys of the country fair, where, for example, two figures set the blacksmith's hammer in motion, or a picture book in which figures pulled on strings can move. That is much better, that is alive. That is much more beneficial for the child than if he puts together dead things from dead things. There the child sees life, there it seeks the reason for the movement. This is how the child's soul develops. — All the pain in the world is deposited on the soul of the spiritual researcher when he has to see how the wrong things are brought into the child's environment. The spiritual researcher sees the forces in the organs of the developing human being wither and know: they are permanently withered.

In the period after the child's second dentition, what the etheric body is the carrier of begins to develop: a lasting stock of habits. If you want to cultivate calmness, security, simplicity and straightforwardness in the child, a personality with these character traits must walk before him as a living human being until the age of fourteen to sixteen. He must learn to develop these qualities by observing them in others. But the etheric body is also the carrier of all artistic powers. We must realize what should be given to the child artistically during this period. If the child's taste is spoiled during this time by bad pictures and so on, then it remains spoiled. From the age of seven, the child is also receptive to comparison. In this respect, there is the greatest lack of understanding in our time. For example, research is being done into the meaning of children's songs. Meaning should underlie everything. But children's songs, such as “Fly, little beetle, fly!... Your mother is in Pommerland” — that is, in Kinderland — they don't want to have any meaning at all; they are partly symbols, partly they should just give euphony.

The point is that from the age of seven, sound and color are transformed from the sensual into the meaningful. Our materialistic age is not exactly suited to this. It is not inclined to make itself understood allegorically. If, for example, you want to show the emergence of the butterfly from the chrysalis as a symbol for the emergence of the soul from the body, you yourself must also believe in such a parable as reality. Who really does that today? You may say to yourself half pityingly, the child with his still undeveloped mind cannot yet grasp what I mean, so I will make it clear to him in a symbolic way. But if you delve into the spirit of things, then such a parable is a profound mysterious process; then what the doll and the butterfly show us in a subordinate sphere is the same process that is repeated at a higher level when the soul emerges from the body.

If we realize this, if we feel it vividly, if we take this process not just as a comparison but as a pictorial expression of a higher truth, then the power of this idea flows into the child's soul. Everywhere, in everything, the educator should see a parable for the eternal and pour the power of this parable into the child's soul. Only then will he be able to work fruitfully. And this is not just the affair of some specially gifted or chosen person, but every educator can work in this way, every educator can impart these things from soul to soul and thus awaken productive life in the etheric body of the child.

With the time of sexual maturity, the last cover is then removed. Only now has the time come for the child to awaken to criticism and discernment, only now can abstract teachings be given, not before. And it is wrong to lead a person to their own judgment earlier than this. It is essential for the period between the ages of seven and fourteen that religious ideas also be brought to life. Religious education is just as essential for this period as the right physical environment was for the previous period. The child should not just hear about what is in the worlds beyond, but faith should be implanted in him as a matter of course.

But nothing is worse than calling a person to judgment before the astral body has awakened. First he should learn to worship, then to judge. First he should possess a great deal of memory knowledge before penetrating it with his mind. But to call him to judgment and confession before he can distinguish is the greatest corruption. First he should be imbued with a sense of authority, only then can one appeal to his judgment. It is not there before; it has not yet developed. It only develops in the years before and after sexual maturity. It is therefore grotesque when young people of eighteen appear and give their judgments, and even write thick books in which they want to overturn what has been created over thousands of years. In this respect, much will be able to change through spiritual science. Through right education, judgment can be formed and guided in the right way.

On the whole and in particular, it should be shown how one can become the right educator through a deeper knowledge of the development of the individual members of the human being. If someone says that one cannot know about this, then it must be answered: Just try educating people in this way, in the sense of these three births, and you will find the proofs of the theosophical truths in life and in practice. It is not a matter of formulating theories or principles, but of putting them into practice. The principles are good that prove beneficial in life, that, when applied in life, bear witness to their influence on culture in a beneficial way. What promotes culture, what awakens life, that is true. When the teachings that relate to the supernatural are applied, one will receive the proof of their truth. It will be recognized that Theosophy is something eminently practical, that it is not foreign and far removed from life, but that it is full of life and awakens life, that it gives strength and security to the human being. And what is more important than this in the education of a child? Education should bring down into the visible, into the sensory, what lies hidden in the supersensible. Therein lies the key to what happens in the childhood of the human being. The full significance of the question of education arises when we realize that every human being is a mystery that we as educators must solve by truly delving into their inner being.

Answer to question

Question: A spirit of contradiction in children?

Answer: The best way to counteract and eradicate this is to let the child achieve what it wants to achieve through this spirit of contradiction, so that the child experiences that what has been achieved is wrong and that it is harming itself by doing so. By forbidding, instructing and so on, little is achieved, and in most cases even more contradiction is provoked. The child learns best through its own experience.

Question: How can we explain the influence of colors on children?

Answer: Take the following example: If you look at a white surface with red squares on it, and then after a while look at an empty white surface, you will find that the squares that you previously saw as red now appear green to your eye on the empty white surface. The red that one was looking at has turned into green in the person. Green is now a soothing, calming color. Even the overly lively, nervous child, who has a lot of red in his environment, transforms this red into soothing, calming green.

Question: A spirit of contradiction in children?

Answer: It is so harmful to young people because it leads to impoverishment in later years. People then have no understanding for certain things. One can only judge about what one has experienced oneself. The power of judgment, summoned up too early, puts a stop to the whole broad reality of life. Life becomes impoverished; because only those who know can judge. Hence the rapidly impoverishing writers of our time.

Question: The sexual question: Should we educate children?

Answer: The question that is now so often asked in discussions about whether to explain sexual processes to children is often answered: I do not want to and must not tell the child any untruths. Well, one should not tell the child an untruth, one should tell him the whole truth, but a truth that lies in a completely different area than in the banal description of the physical processes of conception and birth. Our ancestors did not tell their children untruths when they said to them: “Your mother is in Pommerland, fly, little beetle, fly!” Pommerland is the land of children, the land of the soul's home. There is also a spiritual aspect to “flying”. People knew more than people today, they knew about the spiritual processes that take place at the physical birth of a child, they knew that these processes are more important, that birth is not just a physical act. And in this sense, we should also speak to children today when the question of the origin of man arises for them. We should tell them in the most beautiful poetic images about the soul that descends to give birth, we should fill their soul with images full of spiritual beauty and purity, holiness and reverence. We cannot reach high enough, we cannot be poetic enough when we place these images in their souls. And when the time comes when, with sexual maturity, the physical processes of conception and birth also become clear to them, these will appear to children only as what they are, as the inessential. Their soul, filled with high, sacred, awe-inspiring images and ideas, will regard the birth of the body as a more trivial matter.

These are the greatest riddles of existence, where sympathy, antipathy and all sorts of other feelings so easily cloud the view. As far as human thinking reaches, this question has always been thought of. When the spiritual researcher looks at what has been thought, said and researched in this regard by those who take the modern point of view, a point of view that is already over 200 years old, he finds that scholars and non-scholars, the educated and the uneducated, have very peculiar views on the character traits of women and men.

Lombroso's description of woman caused a particularly great stir. He attributes to woman a sense of devotion that permeates the entire female character. Others, in turn, emphasize the feeling of domination and rule in woman: the most important thing in woman's character, as history has shown, is the desire to rule. Two judgments are juxtaposed here. A completely different direction attributes humility and gentleness to the woman's character, and energy to the man's. Others claim that the woman's basic character is patience. Finally, a neurologist describes the female as a pathological nature: “On the Physiological Imbecility of Women”. Some describe the woman as a conservative, Hippel as a revolutionary element in history.

But perhaps it is not reasonable to ask the question at all. Let us limit ourselves to the objective observation of the facts. There are similarities between men and women that are actually much more similar than between men and men or women and women. If you look at life from this point of view, what stands out to you the most, what stands out to you in the strongest way? The female or male character – or other qualities that have nothing to do with male or female characteristics? And is it not perhaps a sign of higher education to be able to recognize that we can also look at a person of the opposite sex and consider them in terms of qualities that have nothing to do with their gender?

Is it justified to attach such great importance to gender in human relationships, as is the case today, or is it not perhaps one of the many consequences of materialism that gender characteristics are given such a prominent role today?

Let us look at the matter objectively! Those who consider human beings only from the external, sensual point of view have only the external in mind. But there is also a supersensible. If we were to turn to the invisible, then perhaps something could arise that stands highly exalted above mere sexual relations. For the one who observes with all the powers of the soul, it is clear that the great importance attached to sexuality, which would like to make everything else devour these sexual relations, is the result of the materialistic way of thinking of our age.

Let us see where the truth about the masculine and the feminine lies! Spiritual science sees many members in the human being: the physical body and the etheric body fight against the disintegration of the human being, the astral body against overwork. The plant, which has no astral body, does not tire either. The astral body is the constant fighter against fatigue; sleep is called upon to remove the fatigue of the etheric and physical bodies. We are confronted here with an extraordinarily important fact!

It is easy to laugh and find it grotesque when naming what is at stake here, but on the other hand it is something that has a deep, deep significance for the knowledge of the true human being and of life on earth. Every human being, whether man or woman, consists of the four elements, but now we have a strange contrast in human nature: the physical body of man is male, the physical body of woman is female; but it is different with the so-called ether or life body: in man the ether body is female, in woman it is male, so that each sex continually carries the other within itself.

As I said, however grotesque this may appear to those who know nothing of these facts, it is all the more enlightening for those who are aware of these things. How profoundly significant this is for many, many phenomena in our everyday and social lives. When we look at the individual human being, can we not see the beautiful harmony of masculine qualities, harmonized by his feminine qualities coming from his etheric body, and vice versa in women? Why is it that the strongest men in particular have certain feminine qualities in certain respects? Or do we not also see heroic qualities in women? Are they not qualities that they develop in war, for example? This fact, which is an ancient spiritual one, is sensed by some people, but how they utilize it is quite characteristic of our materialistic age.

Perhaps most people know that an unhappy young man's book – Weininger's book “Sex and Character” – made a big impact not only because it contains many paradoxes, but also because of the fate of the unfortunate author, who soon after the book was published took his own life. No matter how capable one is, one cannot have judgment at such a young age; one must have patience to form an opinion on these matters. It is not for nothing that the great poet Dante says that he reached the middle of life at the age of 35. Before the age of 35, it is not at all possible to have a sound judgment on this important matter. Well, this Weininger had some inkling of the dual nature of every human being, of the masculinity of women and the femininity of men. However, he conceived this in a materialistic sense, quite literally, by seeking twofold substantiality in every germ cell, a male and a female character in every cell! Thus the visible had to contain the invisible in a mysterious way! One can hardly imagine anything more grotesque! Because he knew nothing of the etheric body, he attributes the invisible to the visible! He does not know that there are higher links, and so he tries to characterize people as falling into two categories: male and female. This leads Weininger to the conclusion that there is a certain difference between the female and the male: the female is physical, and the male is spiritual. He draws the conclusion that women do not have an ego or individuality, personality or freedom, character or will! But then he must also deny the same to the other half! Then he attributes half of this to every woman and takes it away from every man! This is what happens when one wants to apply materialistic theories directly in practice.

Let us now consider other human qualities, for example, the I! Let us look at the sleeping person. When we have a sleeping person in front of us, then all sentient life sinks down into an indefinite darkness; the physical and life bodies remain in bed; from this, the astral body rises with the I. It is in this spiritual world. If we now consider this astral body and the ego in relation to gender, what then emerges? Only spiritual science can provide information here. What we call man and woman here in this world in the physical world and also in the world to which our ether body belongs is not recognized by the astral body, and not by the ego. Masculine and feminine remain connected to the physical and etheric bodies when the person is alive, and without the sexual the person is in a state of sleep, in his actual home, in the so-called astral and spiritual worlds: initially, neither feminine nor masculine is the human astral body and the I.

Now we ask ourselves: Is there nothing at all in this astral world, where we are at night, that corresponds to gender? Here lies a great and significant mystery that man must understand if he dares to make a judgment about it at all! The question is this: What is there in the world that is in the same space as we are here, in a world that we call astral or spiritual, that corresponds to the masculine and the feminine of physical nature? After all, bear in mind that this spiritual or astral world is not in a cloud cuckoo land, but around us. If we now ask what corresponds to the opposition of male and female in this world, we find two essential words that penetrate deep, deep into our soul. If we understand them correctly, they can solve many, many secrets of the astral world.

There, the opposition of life and death, of destruction and development, corresponds to the sexual opposition.

This polar contrast corresponds to it! Two elemental forces are indicated, which go through the whole cosmos and must be there. If man wants to understand here, only the horrors and all the peculiar feelings that are associated with the words death and life in man must cease! He must see the great significance of death and life! Goethe said: “Nature has invented death in order to have many lives!”

What does death mean for a person? Spiritual science shows us that a person does not just die this death once, but that they go through it repeatedly! This life is a repetition of many lives that have preceded it, and many follow the present one, in the alternation between birth and death. And each embodiment means progress for the person in some respect: with each embodiment, the person rises higher. At that time, when the Earth planet emerged from the darkness of life, man first came into the stages of existence in which he now is, into his first physical embodiment, into his first earthly existence. His limbs were imperfect, his ego was a slave to the astral body. Man would never ascend to the higher stages of development if he did not pass through death. Only that can make him ascend.

He had to destroy this body, but what remained for the person from the first form of embodiment? What he had heard and seen went into the spiritual world from which he had come, and now he builds the foundation for his second embodiment in this spiritual world. If he remained in the first, he could never use what one has conquered here in the spiritual world as a creator.

So one must always pass through death again, and an image of death is the solidification of form, the hardening of form. Consider what is called life and death out in nature, look at the tree! How does it approach death? It becomes woody, it dries up. And so it is with everything that must succumb to death! You can follow it in your own human life! You can see very clearly in a person an ascending line of life up to the middle of life, where more and more of the forces developed in the previous incarnation come out, and then the descending line in old age, a hardening. Compacted matter is deposited in various places and so on. Here on this earth, every life is subject to hardening, and hardening is the sister of death.

But hardening is nothing other than that which one side presents, the form, the figure. Imagine life being taken out of a person – what remains? Figure! Study a wonderful picture of life, and what remains is only a picture without life, which you admire, for example, in the great, significant Zeus, and so on. There you have the form, the work of art without life, the image of life, but not filled with life. The form eternally strives to emancipate itself from life, and this emancipation of the form can be seen in the astral world at every moment, there it is what the seer perceives as the image, as the rigid image of life, as the dead form of life. It is a power, like positive magnetism, like electricity; and so this form leads through the astral world.

If it seeks to embody itself here in the physical world, it is beauty! The opposite poles constantly repel each other, push and push, every form that arises is immediately dissolved and transformed into a new one, an eternal metamorphosis. This is brought about by the other pole; it is that which confronts man in the night: will, energy. Form and beauty are the two phenomena here in the physical world, and they surround us in the astral as death and life. Form comes and goes, and life is eternal. The principle of dissolution and that of crystallization are eternally at work. These are two fundamental forces, and in man the images of these two fundamental forces must prevail: the pure astral body is surrounded by death and life in the astral world, and when it enters this world of day, of waking, it is absorbed by the physical body and the etheric body.

The female aspect of the human being is the image of the form, of that which on the astral plane is continually seeking to shape everything into existence; the male aspect of the human being is the image of that which continually seeks to shape everything into something eternal.

In this physical world, the relationship between death and life is determined. What are two poles on the astral plane – death and life, is here an ongoing struggle. The image of all physical life is embodied in the female form - when the progressive principle triumphs, death comes. Here, man's life is determined as dividing between birth and death, in the feminine, which is the image of the formed, of that which pushes towards the solid, that wants to become permanent. If only the feminine were to work, then the human being would have the tendency to live in the physical body for as long as possible, to remain in the form. Through the influence of the masculine, death is instilled into the form. This is the secret of the work between man and woman – through this, life and death are judged in the relationship between the feminine and the masculine. The feminine gives us life, and the masculine limits this life, sets death against life. Thus that which in ordinary life is called an expression of love touches directly on the mystery of death. As a sign of this, beings exist that, in the moment when they love and bring forth a new being, also depart from this world with death.

Thus we have come, as they say in spiritual science, to the edge of a great mystery. The mingling, and what is connected with it, death, shows us the possibility that the sexual antagonism – male and female – is only a specialty, only something special of a great antagonism. We see this antagonism arising on the astral plane as eternally changing life – powerful will and formed beauty. Sexual polarity is a special case. There is a law in the world that is much more significant than sexual polarity. Such laws are present in all worlds, and they work their way down into this world of ours. If people only knew about the most important riddles of existence, they would see that these laws are there, for their consequences are there in the ordinary world. There is the same measure of the masculine and the feminine on earth, of great cosmic forces flowing through the world. Man is immersed in many worlds, and whether a male or a female child is born somewhere does not depend on the parents, but on the forces that are outside of them.

Imagine, for example, two vessels; one filled with a red liquid and the other with a blue liquid. If you immerse any object in the vessel with the blue liquid, that object must come out blue, and vice versa. It is the same with the sexuality of human beings.

The physiologists are doing good research; if they are unable to see and investigate more than what their eyes can see, the secret will never be revealed to them.

Remember the words: In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage. (Matt. 22,30; Mark 12,25; Luke 20,35f.) Therefore man, by his nature, which is neither male nor female, reaches into the higher world, thereby transcending the opposition between male and female, and each of us carries, in addition to our own, a super-male or super-female nature, through which we stand face to face with another human being. The more the higher part of us develops, the more we can stand face to face with another human being in this way.

Theosophy is not about preaching asceticism, not about deadening the senses, but about allowing the feminine and the masculine to flow through and permeate everything. Spiritual science is called upon to bring this back to consciousness in people, and that will be the future coexistence of men and women longed for by the best of men today, when people will be aware of what stands above gender, what carries the highest interests and connects man and woman in itself. Then it will be impossible for the relationship between man and woman to resemble a struggle. And the spiritual-scientific current will be one that will flow through the development of humanity and take hold of people. Then the time will come when people will no longer talk idly and in clichés about whether there is a difference between men and women. The difference cannot be denied in many respects, because we are firmly on this physical plane: if we are a man, we are in the male physical body; if we are a woman, we are in the female physical body. This gives the shading to our outer existence; but when we recognize that we have an innermost core of being, then we will accept this shading with joy, for it gives us the delightful diversity and multiplicity. And precisely when we understand how to find the eternal, the essence, then we can also rejoice in the temporal. Then a great, practical perspective opens up and we see how spiritual science can intervene in life, in art, education and so on. We see that spiritual science is not a gray theory, but a living weaving and working. Those who take it up permeate their whole being with it and ennoble, beautify and uplift the relationships of people, which express themselves in the generations of humanity, by bringing them into harmony, into a collaboration for the great progress and forward movement of the human race.

We will talk here about those forms of illness and their manifestations that are connected with our soul life and can only be properly understood in the light of spiritual science. Many disease phenomena depend on an unhealthy soul life.

(Example of a gentleman and a lady whom Dr. Steiner once met on the train. They lacked nothing but the strong will to be healthy.

Instead of castles and monasteries, you meet sanatoriums today. Description of a visit to such a sanatorium: The patients are often not really sick at all, but there was a seriously ill person there, namely the doctor in charge, who was suffering from a severe nervous disease.

It is often very important not to believe in certain symptoms of illnesses, even if they are present as such.

The etheric body and the physical body are products of the astral body. There are still some final after-effects of how the spiritual manifests itself in the physical body. We know the fact that our mouths water when certain feelings come over us. This proves the great influence of feelings on physical processes, especially on

It is similar when we turn pale with fear or blush with shame. Feelings are mental processes, but they have a direct effect on blood circulation.

Mere intellectual, sober ideas are often the seeds of many other ideas. Formative images, accompanied by feelings, must arise in our soul life if the body is to function in a healthy way. A merely rational, sober world view can have a very corrupting effect on the physical body. That is why it is so very important to have a correct world view. Then one also experiences the bliss of finding and inventing.

A large part of today's disease dispositions is based on an incorrect world view that has developed among the last generations. In earlier times, people still knew how important it is, even for physical well-being, when a person arouses appropriate feelings within himself. The tragedies of the ancient Greeks, for example, still had this healing power. Even the catharsis in the old, healthy aesthetics had, one might say, a medicinal purpose. There is a profound effect of the spirit on all that is alive. Even comedy, with the image of Auguste Clown falling from one foolishness into another, can have a healing effect in relation to this foolishness. Certain performances have a strangely suggestive effect on people.

If, in the face of such a wide diversity of phenomena, the necessary knowledge and insight into these things is lacking, a terrible discord is often caused by the abundance of impressions and by what the human being can inwardly process from them. Many people cannot cope with such a diversity of phenomena. But this is the cause of all hysterical phenomena.

Our time cannot stand still with its questions. Those who live only in empty abstractions never stop questioning because they are unable to fill these empty specters with content. The nonsensical drive for causality is also a basis for the development of hypochondria, which can have a profound effect on the body.

Hysteria is based on an inwardness that is too small and too weak in the face of an overwhelming external world with an immense diversity.

People who are unable to bring themselves into a harmoniously ordered relationship with the world are increasingly pushed back onto their own selves, and this failure to connect with the world gives rise to the phenomenon called hypochondria. It is essential that people should be able to arrive at a great and comprehensive understanding of the world, which ultimately only spiritual science can give them in this scope. Only then do we rediscover ideas, feelings and perceptions within us that have the right effect on our organism and result in the recovery of the body.

All those states of anxiety then disappear because they only arise from erroneous ideas about our environment. Ultimately, good health can only be brought about by a worldview that understands how to integrate the human being harmoniously into the course of the world.

Think of the mystical coordination of microcosm and macrocosm. Finally, a quote from Goethe's “Secrets”:

From the force that binds all beings,
Freed the man who overcomes himself.

Dear attendees! The riddles of [nature] first approach man insofar as he is a cognizant being and insofar as he has to implement his knowledge in practical life. The riddles of the soul are different. If knowledge is necessary above all for orientation in the world, if we find ourselves in a world that does not want to be illuminated for us through knowledge, so to speak spiritually as in a dark room, then it must be said: the riddles of the soul are those that are experienced directly, but in a way that very many people have no adequate conception of. Today, there is much talk about the unconscious and subconscious life of the soul. However, since we have hardly enough ways to gain more precise ideas about this subconscious life of the soul — as this very evening is intended to show — it is also the case that the profound influence of the soul's riddle on the human being cannot be sufficiently appreciated from the direct consciousness of the present and from what is recognized science in this present. Doubts about those things that are intimately and closely related to the longings and hopes of the human soul life not only bring the person a sense of instability of the soul, they not only rob him of the security of the soul life, they not only take away the strength to find and maintain his position in life in a moral and social sense, but they intervene in the entire inner constitution of the human organism's life as a whole. What is at issue here cannot be fully understood unless one knows that in the deeper layers of the soul there are forces that are initially unknown to the human being – and yet they work in the same way as the conscious forces, but – one might say – they dig deeper into the whole of human nature.

It seems at first to be a small thing when a person has to give in to doubt about one or other question, for there are indeed enough reasons for doubt regarding the great riddles of the world that can only be solved in the course of a long time. But doubt itself, when it takes root in the most intimate life of the soul, when, as it were, the soul must continually eke out its existence, not consciously, but unconsciously - if the expression may be permitted - tormented by doubt, then this doubt eats so deeply into the organism that it also gradually attacks physical health. For what emanates from the soul does not immediately interfere with physical life. But what gnaws at the soul in this way over a long period of time, little by little and again and again and again, and especially in such a way that it does not fully come to consciousness, ultimately undermines physical health and thus actually the whole existence of the person. For this reason, the whole area of these soul mysteries, especially in recent times, has once again entered the field of vision of even earnestly striving scientists.

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, wants to work strictly on the basis of the most serious scientific conscientiousness and methodology that could only be developed in the course of the last four to five centuries, especially in the nineteenth century, in scientific research. However, since Anthroposophy wants to deal with what the deepest longings, the most earnest hopes and the strongest forces and sources of life of the human soul are, Anthroposophy concerns every human being – and one might say – it is therefore in its nature to address not only the individual field of science, but all people. One can also see how simple, healthy human understanding, if it is not occupied by one or the other prejudice, can certainly find the path to understanding anthroposophical research methods. I spoke about this in the two lectures that I recently gave here in the Philharmonie. Today, my presentation will focus on the riddles of the soul.

These soul mysteries have also recently been brought before the scientific forum with great intensity. This natural science, which, where it is justified, is fully recognized by anthroposophy, and which rightly points out again and again its great triumphs for knowledge and for life in the most recent times, this natural science has, especially in the present day, forced serious thinkers, I might say, to face the riddles of the soul. Scientific research is concerned, after all, primarily with that which is given to man sensually and which can be traced back to its laws through observation and experiment and through the combining mind. But what this scientific research has increasingly lost sight of in recent times is the human being himself. Natural science methods are and will always be applied to the outer human nature, the physical organization of the human being. In the extension of these methods to the great questions of the soul life, anthroposophy must find that these natural science methods do not remain true to themselves, even with great researchers. For this reason, I would like to begin by pointing out the way in which the present-day natural sciences in particular often approach the riddles of the soul, and how anthroposophical research must nevertheless take a negative view of this approach because, as I emphasized in the previous lectures, — must proceed more strictly and critically in the supersensible, in the realm of soul and spiritual life, out of scientific conscientiousness, than one proceeds on the natural science side when questions of soul and spiritual life are to be considered.

I would like to start with an example to show how natural science believes it can approach the riddles of the soul, and how anthroposophy has to approach these riddles in a completely different way. I would like to draw attention to a work that has recently made a great impression in certain circles because it deals with the soul riddle right up to the human question of immortality and breathes a thoroughly scientific spirit. It is the work in which Oliver Lodge wrote about what he was supposedly able to learn about his son Raymond's soul through mediumistic art after his son's death. One may cite this attempt by Oliver Lodge, which is considered a failure for anthroposophy, to penetrate into the soul life up to the question of immortality, because anyone who is familiar with the scientific conscientiousness of natural research will see on every page of I would like to say, can see in every page of this extensive book by Oliver Lodge how the strict methods of natural science are observed, how everything that the natural scientist is accustomed to using in the laboratory or in the physics cabinet is seemingly applied here to the study of the soul. I would like to mention only the experiment that was most striking, and that was almost a kind of “experimentum crucis” for many.

Oliver Lodge, with the help of a medium, allegedly received messages from the soul of his son Raymond Lodge, who died in the war. Among these messages was one of particular significance. As Oliver Lodge believed, the soul of his son made the revelation to him through the medium that Raymond Lodge had had his photograph taken with other comrades a fortnight before his death, that a group picture had been taken, that the photographer had taken two pictures in succession and that the way Raymond Lodge was sitting was slightly different in the first and second pictures. Nobody knew anything about this picture when the medium brought the message that was supposedly coming from Raymond Lodge's soul. Oliver Lodge's family did not know anything. The picture had been taken in France and had not yet arrived in England when the corresponding seance took place. Nevertheless, the matter had been described in full detail by the medium. To the strict naturalist Oliver Lodge, it seemed as if this experiment undoubtedly established that the soul of his deceased son himself had spoken. For who could know anything about what was completely unknown at the place where the experiment was carried out. All sources of error, as we know them from physical research, for example, were carefully excluded. Therefore, the impression of this experiment, as it was described in the detailed book, was extraordinarily striking, even for unbiased readers. And yet, although a strict natural scientist speaks here with observation of all scientific certainty, anthroposophy must point out that its kind of research into the supersensible must be more critical than such a scientific method driven into the soul realm. For ultimately, what has been said here is nothing more than lay opinion regarding soul research.

There are simply abnormal powers and abilities in the human organism, and in certain borderline fields modern science has much to do with such abnormal abilities. Anthroposophy, however, has nothing to do with these abnormal abilities, but only with the further development of the normal human faculty of knowledge into the supersensible realm. It is possible to know how abnormal faculties can work, how it is actually possible that through special — and these are always actually morbid predispositions of the human being, which however mediumship presupposes —, how through such predispositions the conditions of sensory experience can be broken through in certain cases, how space can be overcome, but also how time can be overcome, and how it is a certainly established result that through such abnormal, pathological abilities, the person sees, for example, how he falls from a horse during a ride that is to take place in a fortnight. If the foresight is correct, the event occurs despite all the precautions taken to avert it. Such experiences are verified results; however, they are not based on the normal cognitive abilities of humans, but on abnormal abilities.

But if Oliver Lodge now thinks that some supersensible world has spoken to him, then it must be pointed out that in this case nothing more needs to be present than that the medium has had such foresight. The two photographs did indeed arrive in England later, and Oliver Lodge's eyes rested on them. The later seeing of the photographs can be seen and described through the medium's abnormal abilities based on such foresight. So in this case we are dealing with nothing more than the development of abnormal abilities that do not look into a supersensible realm, but only see what is happening in the ordinary physical world. These abilities can only do this: break through the conditions of space and time that are otherwise given to our sensory abilities.

I only mentioned this example in the introduction to point out how critical anthroposophy is, despite the fact that it points in the strictest sense to the path that really leads into the supersensible realm and shows us how the eternal core of the human being is connected to the eternal in the cosmos, and how the individual, everyday event in the life of the soul can be taken as a starting point for the great questions of birth and death, of immortality and the unborn. Although anthroposophy seeks such paths to the supersensible in the strictest sense, it must nevertheless critically reject that which, in imitation of abnormal human abilities, can only deal with that which after all only takes place in the sense realm. Anyone who understands the significance of such criticism for anthroposophy will not want to see anthroposophy in the light of those misunderstandings in which it is still seen today by many who only deal with it superficially. But the whole of anthroposophy's research methods is based on the need to apply scientific methodology to the most intimate inner soul life. It must awaken slumbering abilities in the soul, and it awakens them — not through any fantastic or mystical methods, but through systematic schooling, as I have described it — at least on a trial basis — in the two lectures already mentioned. But it would be easier for present-day humanity to form an unbiased judgment on such questions if people were willing to educate themselves about how differently people throughout the world want to ground their vision and also their faith from the intimate foundations of their soul life. I would like to point out just two polar opposites, so to speak, when it comes to characterizing the diverse abilities of people around the world.

In this way, the differences between the West and the East in terms of their understanding of the soul are particularly apparent. As a representative spirit of the West, I would like to cite Herbert Spencer, who has indeed gained such tremendous, if unjustified, influence on the way of thinking of the newer view of nature. Where Herbert Spencer talks about education, he also talks about the goal of educating the human being, and in doing so, he gives us the opportunity to really look into how he feels about the riddles of the soul.

I will only briefly present what he implies: Even if we educate people to be good citizens, to be efficient members of human society, to be efficient professionals, the most important thing in education is what enables people to educate others. The parental vocation is the highest in education. And on this occasion, it is particularly interesting to see the reasons Herbert Spencer gives for this view. He says that the highest goal in human life is to produce the next generation, the offspring. Therefore, the highest goal of education is to raise the next generation. No criticism of Herbert Spencer's assertion is intended here. One can make this claim if one is completely on the ground that wants to scientifically justify more or less everything that is valid in human life, only on the ground of external sensory perception, external natural science.

But the polar opposite of this view is presented to us by a thinker of the East who was particularly significant in his work in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Russian thinker Vladimir Solovyov. He turns his gaze to the riddle of the human soul from a completely different angle, so to speak. He says that human life has value only if, on the one hand, it sets itself the goal of perfecting itself in the truth; without this goal, human life would be worthless. But it would also be worthless if man did not partake of immortality, because, in Solowjow's opinion, a striving for perfection that could somehow be abandoned to destruction would be the greatest deception that the universe could perpetrate on a human being. Therefore, he demands that man strive for perfection in the truth and partake of immortality for the highest soul riddles, and on this occasion he speaks again in a very characteristic way – like the polar opposite of Herbert Spencer – by says: How dreary and desolate existence would be if it had to be exhausted only in the succession of generations that are produced one after the other, if the wheel of existence would run in such a uniform manner.

We see, then, that in the West and in the East, two representative human thinkers express themselves in opposite senses about the same area. It can be said that when Herbert Spencer deals with spiritual questions, he looks entirely at the external nature and only applies to the human soul what, in his opinion, can be accepted according to the pattern of recognized scientific conclusions and judgments. Solowjow demands the opposite, and that from the depths of the human soul. He demands something as the goal of human development that is also based on the succession of generations, but which goes far beyond what, in his opinion, would exist in a uniform course of the same wheel, which would only ever turn in history.

Now, one seems to me to be as imperfect as the other. In Herbert Spencer we see how a thinker cannot rise, I might say, from the depths of natural science to the heights of the riddle of the soul. In Solowjew we see how from mystical depths there emerges the indefinite, very mystical-sounding demand for immortality, but how here, too, there is absolutely no way to arrive at real knowledge in this field. And perhaps it may be said, especially in the present time, that if one looks impartially at these two sides and is sincerely and honestly devoted to what has emerged as the highest flowering of Central European, of German intellectual life, that the deepening that is necessary here in relation to the riddle of the soul must be found precisely in this German intellectual life.

This, ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to say first to show that one must indeed have ideas about the way in which people in the nineteenth century wanted to approach the riddles of the soul, how, so to speak, the soul are today's burning questions, and how the peculiarities of intellectual life in the most diverse regions of the earth present obstacles and hindrances to finding completely unimpeded paths into the regions in which the eternal of the human soul is rooted. At first, the human being appears to us as a unified being. And this is fully justified. But in this unified being, we must seek out the forms of reality that have entered into it. The way in which anthroposophy attempts to do this is often challenged by those who call themselves abstract monists or the like. Anthroposophy does not in any way offend against a justified monism. For no one denies that there is a unified activity in water when one shows how oxygen and hydrogen are effectively present in water. Nor does one deny what we encounter as a unified human nature when one conscientiously searches scientifically for the forms of reality that converge in human nature. But these forms of reality converge in a mysterious way. We see, when we devote ourselves to our external sensory observations and deepen these through recognized science, through physiology, biology and so on, the external physical corporeality of the human being. On the other hand, we see how the soul reveals itself out of this physical corporeality, how it permeates the physical corporeality, enlivens it and allows the spirit to flow into it.

But only when we realize, in an unbiased way, how these different forms of reality – the physical, the soul, and the spiritual – work together in the unified human being, can we hope to approach a solution to the riddle of the soul. Of course, I am not saying that the riddles of the soul can be definitively solved by anthroposophy today, but one can hope to point out the path to the solution. And again and again one is pointed to the two ends of physical earthly existence that approach man so mysteriously, when the great riddles of the soul come before one's eyes. One is pointed to birth and death. Let us first consider these physical ends of human life, and then ascend into the supersensible realm.

What the outer physical body of man is, we basically only see in its very own form in the corpse before us. Therefore, it is actually quite correct what many naturalists have said: that the characteristic of death is actually the presence of the corpse. This is also true for death. But if you look at what you are facing in the corpse without prejudice, it is characteristic enough for the whole human being.

Du Bois-Reymond believed – as he stated in his famous lecture “On the Limits of Natural Knowledge” – that the human being, as a conscious, waking being, is not transparent to his own knowledge, that this knowledge reaches certain limits when it comes to human consciousness. From the movements that the matter in our nervous system undergoes, we cannot understand — du Bois-Reymond said — how we feel: “I see red, I hear organ tones, I smell the scent of roses.” But du Bois-Reymond thought that ordinary natural science could be used to understand the sleeping person, in whom consciousness has dawned, and thus precisely that which, in his opinion, is unfathomable for ordinary natural knowledge. No! But through that in which natural science is great today, the sleeping person can be understood just as little as the plant. What pervades a being as life can only be seen in supersensible knowledge, in supersensible contemplation, as I have characterized it in my writings 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and 'Occult Science: An Outline' and in the two lectures already mentioned. What pervades man as a sleeping being, as invigoratingly as a plant, cannot be known through ordinary natural science. Here, man is only accessible as a physical being after he has died. And when he has died and lies before us as a corpse, we see how he begins to follow quite different laws from those he followed from birth or conception to death.

But as the human corpse approaches its dissolution, it follows the same laws that we see in the natural world and that we understand through ordinary science. So that in what happens to the human corpse, we have before us what man would be if he were not permeated, as a corporeal-physical being, by a spiritual-soul element that must snatch him from death, from dissolution, in every moment of life. For the laws of nature that we fathom with ordinary natural science dissolve the human organism, and what holds it together must therefore follow different principles.

Thus, we get to know the human being in his or her physical body, when it is detached from the soul and spirit. The laws that are effective there must be effective in the human being throughout his or her life on earth, because they are the laws of the physical, chemical existence of the substances and forces that the human physical body contains. They are now overcome in the opposite direction by what is in the human being besides these substances and physical forces. But if one wants to get to know the human physical body in its purest form, then one must seek it out in the corpse. There the human being is completely surrendered to external physical nature, and there one can see how he carries this physical organization within him in whatever way.

Now, in the books and lectures mentioned, I have pointed out that there are dormant forces in the human soul that can be awakened, just as forces are gradually awakened in the soul of a child as it lives in a dream-like soul life. If only human beings had the intellectual humility to say to themselves one day: You were once a very small child with a dream-like soul life that poured into your physical being; education and life have brought out of the depths of your thought, feeling and will, which you have today for orienting yourself in the world and for knowing yourself, and which, above all, has led to the triumphs of recognized science, especially natural science. But can we not assume that, when one has everything that life and education and inherited traits can give one, one nevertheless, at some point in one's mature life, presupposes soul abilities - if I want to express myself scientifically - as 'latent' in the soul?

Can we not say that at any given moment in our lives we can take our own soul life into our own hands and continue it from the point where we left off? Only practice can prove that this is possible. But the practice of anthroposophical research also shows this. I would like to mention only briefly that it is through inner soul exercises that such dormant abilities are awakened in people. These soul exercises, which relate primarily to the life of imagination and thought, consist of meditation, of systematically regulating concentration on very specific conceptual complexes. What do we achieve when we strengthen and energize our souls in the way described in the books mentioned?

Just as a muscle, when used, strengthens through use, so our soul abilities are also strengthened and invigorated in a very specific way when such soul exercises are done by a person with perseverance over a long period of time. And if I am to characterize how people come to such abilities in the normal way, I would like to say: When we, as honest people, look at our thoughts and how they develop from our outer perception and from the phenomena of life, then we can only say: It happens in us in such a way that we would have to confess: “It thinks in us.” For the fact that I think, it announces itself to an unbiased self-examination: we notice how “it” thinks in us. And we refer this thinking back to ourselves by seeing thinking revealed through our body and say, “I think,” while for ordinary consciousness and for ordinary science we should actually only express, “It thinks in us.” But when we strengthen the soul life through appropriate meditation and concentration exercises, then we really come to the inner consciousness that may express, “I think.”

For then thinking breaks away from what the physical organization is. I know how many paradoxes are expressed for today's consciousness with such a sentence. But here again, anthroposophy, with its research, which is a vivid one, proceeds with great caution and criticism. Anthroposophy is well aware of how ordinary thinking is bound to the physical organization of the human being. It does not present itself in an amateurish or dilettantic way. It agrees with those who study the central organ of the nervous system, the brain, and show us how this or that part of the human soul abilities turns out when this or that part of the brain is removed. Anthroposophy also examines how memory and the ability to remember are connected to the physical organism. And that is why it comes to the conclusion – which some may even misunderstand as a kind of materialism – that for the whole ordinary soul, the physical body is the absolute basis. But then, when appropriate meditation and concentration exercises are done and when the thinking is strengthened, the thinking as soul life breaks away from the physical organization, only then does the soul appear as an independent entity. Then the human being knows: “I think,” and in this “I think” he knows that thinking now proceeds as an independent process, purely soul-spiritual, no longer conditioned, no longer dependent on the bodily organization.

And in addition to the thought exercises, will exercises are added. Again, I would like to characterize only in principle how these will exercises lead to a very specific goal. One might say: Just as it is unjustified to say to ordinary thinking, “I think,” so it should be clear on the other hand that man, insofar as his own will flows into action, faces a real unknown. Take just the simplest volition, for example, raising an arm or a hand: First you have the thought of raising the arm or hand. This thought, however, is clearly in consciousness. But then something completely indeterminate comes, like what is experienced in consciousness as the goal of the action, flows down into the physical organism and asserts itself there as a volitional impulse. For in the end you see only the result of this volitional impulse: the raised hand, the raised arm. We see the beginning and the end of the whole process, the middle is shrouded in complete darkness.

As Anthroposophy develops its vision, it recognizes a similarity between what constantly comes about in the waking day life of the will and what thinking shows as peculiar between falling asleep and waking up. That which lies in between the thought of the goal and the thought that then states the achievement of the goal in the will, is something that stands before the soul just as the life of the soul that takes place between falling asleep and waking up. Anyone who, with the strengthened consciousness that can be achieved through meditation and concentration, observes how sleep approaches a person and how waking up happens again, knows that there is something positive in the process of inducing sleep. Not only does the physical body of the person enter into a different stage , but that in fact the soul and spirit carry out a positive action in falling asleep and waking up, that positive, only unconscious experiences take place in sleep, which are absolutely the same as those experiences that lie between the goal of an action and the thought that states the achievement of an action. So we are actually pursuing the achievement of an action into the waking life of the day when we pursue the will of consciousness in the ordinary life of the day. The exercises of the anthroposophical researcher are intended to penetrate into this darkness, where the will takes place in the ordinary life of the soul, if one does the exercises that I like to suggest on such occasions. There are many exercises, but I will now only mention those that are characteristic because they represent something fundamental.

Whereas otherwise, for example, the sequence of external facts is presented in the order in which they occur, the usual way to begin is to present this process in reverse, so that, for example, one feels a melody backwards or presents a five-act drama backwards in small sections, the fifth act first to the first or, as can be particularly fruitful for everyone, to imagine the course of one's daily life running backwards in pictures in the evening, so that if one has gone down a staircase, one goes up the stairs from bottom to top, from the lowest step to the highest. This causes the will, which lives in thought, to break away from the external world of facts and also from the human being's own physical interior.

So that, as on the one hand, through meditation and concentration, thinking becomes independent, free, and unfolds through these exercises of the will, now the will becomes something that is independent of the organism. While the ordinary will of man, in so far as it is dependent on instincts, drives, desires and emotions that have their basis in the body, while this will also has its basis in the body, it is made independent of physical body through such exercises of will.

And just as the human being, by making his thinking independent of his physical body, is able to look beyond birth and conception into his prenatal existence, and to see the soul and spiritual eternal in that existence as it was in a soul and spiritual world before descending into the physical existence in order to unite with a physical body, how, therefore, through the strengthening of the life of thought, the soul existence can be seen before birth or conception, so the image of what the human being will become after passing through the gate of death also arises through the will being trained. By creating certain aids for the will, which can thus be detached from the body, this will becomes more and more able to penetrate into the external objective existence free of the body.

A good training of the will, for example, is to walk alongside oneself critically, as it were, like a second personality, in relation to one's actions, deeds and moral motives, so that one can objectively view one's own actions as one would otherwise objectively view another person. In this way, one steel one's willpower inwardly so that it becomes independent of all corporeality.

This help is still very useful: I only need to describe how a person is always different after certain periods of time. We all know how we have changed after a decade in our overall state of mind and life. But what has made us different is life itself. Life has taken us into its great school, given us different or altered soul experiences, taken away certain habits, given us others, and so on. We are more or less passively surrendered to life when it is a matter of transformation, of metamorphosis of our own soul or bodily constitution. But if you take what is at work in your moral habits and motives into your own hands, for example by saying to yourself: You have a habit, you want to change it and make it completely different, or something similar, and if you practice it enough, especially if you set goals that run over time, then you will achieve more and more of what is the independence of the will from the physical body of the human being. But through this, something is developed into a power of cognition, of which one rightly says that it, as it is in ordinary life, should not become a power of cognition, and I know very well what speaks against the application of this power, as it is in ordinary life, as a power of cognition. But it should not be used in this way in anthroposophy either; it should be transformed. It should undergo a metamorphosis on a supersensible level.

It is love, the ability to love. In ordinary life, this ability to love is also bound to the physical organism. By doing such exercises of the will as I have indicated, and by inwardly freeing the will from the physical body, the human being becomes able to give himself completely to an external objective. But this is not a sensual objective, it is a spiritual objective. What has happened to man through such exercises, I can characterize as follows. But I ask you not to misunderstand what I give as a characteristic. It is meant in the very real sense, but meant for the further development of man's normal abilities, not for ordinary consciousness.

Take the human eye. It is relatively independent, integrated as a kind of independent organism into the human organism as a whole to a certain degree. We can use the eye appropriately in the service of our entire humanity by being fully transparent within ourselves. I would like to say in a figurative sense: the eye serves us because it is selflessly integrated into our organism. If the eye becomes cloudy, for example if its vitreous body becomes cloudy, if some kind of cataract occurs and it becomes filled with its own matter, then the possibility of looking out into the physical world of the senses through the eye also ceases. Now it is certainly not to be maintained that our physical organism, for example, can be compared to a diseased eye filled with its own substance in the ordinary course of life. But for higher knowledge it is. Precisely what makes it a healthy organism in ordinary physical life also makes it incapable of serving the human being to penetrate into higher, supersensible worlds in ordinary life. If, on the other hand, we do such exercises of the will as I have indicated, in order to penetrate what would otherwise remain dark in the will, then we also make the whole human organism transparent in a spiritual-soul way, so to speak, making it into a sense organ, an overall sense, a total sense. And by thus making the whole human organism as selfless in a certain respect as the eye is in the human organism for external seeing, we enable the human organism to look into the supersensible spiritual world in order to place itself in it. For these exercises, of which I have spoken, make the human organism transparent.

For ordinary consciousness, the ordinary human organism is indeed an obstacle to higher knowledge. It is the tool for ordinary life, for placing oneself in the ordinary world. But the human being can only place himself in the physical world by penetrating into this physical body with his spiritual soul. In a sense, this physical body is opaque. When it becomes transparent in the way indicated, we look out into the spiritual world. But by also tearing the will away from the physical body in this way, an image of death as it really is for the human being as a whole enters into our knowledge. By learning to recognize how we can remain in consciousness as human beings, independent of our physical bodies, and with our will power reaching into the future, we gain an insight into what happens to the soul and spirit of the human being when the corpse is taken up by the external forces and laws of nature. We gain a picture of the soul and spirit that frees itself from the body when the physical body of a person succumbs to death.

As you can see, dear attendees, anthroposophy cannot philosophically speculate or mystically fantasize about human immortality in some frivolous way. It must show step by step how the human being, in a systematic inner development, ascends to a state of insight that enables him, for example, to truly recognize what passes through birth and death as the spiritual-soul, eternal core of the human being, untouched by the physical body. And now we can say how that which, as a corpse after death, succumbs to the external laws of nature as physical corporeality relates to what can be attained as spiritual-soul in meditative or in will development. The path taken by anthroposophical knowledge and life is the opposite of that taken by the human being when, as a physical personality, he passes through death. Death unites the human being with physical-sensory reality, as we can see through it with our intellectual knowledge. What is experienced as an exercise in anthroposophical research methods unites the soul with the spiritual by tearing it away from the physical-bodily in terms of both thought and will. And by tearing the will and the thought away from the physical body, the mind, the sensation and the feeling, which is at the center of the soul's life and the most intimate of the soul's life, is also torn away from the physical body. One learns to recognize what can escape from death, and one learns to recognize it by simultaneously learning to understand what death actually means in human life under such conditions.

I have pointed out that the forces we find at work in the corpse are always present in the human being between birth and death, or between conception and death. The other forces I have spoken of, which are used in supersensible knowledge for the immediate spiritual-soul life that goes into eternity, are always present as the counterforces to those forces that become visible in the corpse at death, so that life is a continuous struggle between these two kinds of forces. And man, with his mind, which stands in the middle between thought and will, thereby takes part in this struggle and sees how the forces at work in the corpse are continually subject to a certain kind of decay. Why is that so? Well, the thinking of ordinary consciousness, being present between birth and death, turns to those forces that are at work in the corpse. You only need to remember the following – I could draw on much evidence from the depths of anthroposophy, but for today it may suffice if I merely point it out.

Whenever the sprouting and sprouted organic life that lives in nutrition takes over and develops particularly when the person remains asleep, whenever the constructive life that we develop particularly in childhood, where we have to shape our organism plastically, then the conscious thought life recedes. In the physical organism, the conscious thought life does not turn to the constructive forces, but to the destructive ones, to the dying forces, to those forces that only appear summarily, highly increased in a single moment, in human death. One would like to say: What appears in death in the highest degree, lives in us continually, and if it did not live in us, then ordinary human thinking would not be able to develop. This ordinary thinking turns to the forces that are always dying in us, to the destructive forces that age us in the second half of life by getting the upper hand against the forces that are also always present in us and rejuvenate us. These rejuvenating forces are active in our will and in the subconscious realm of thinking. But while ordinary cognition deals with the destructive forces, supersensible cognition, as striven for by anthroposophy, turns cognition precisely towards the opposite pole.

By making the human organism into a sense organ in a higher sense, as already indicated, man can make transparent what would otherwise be dormant, asleep, in the will, and can thus look into the spiritual world and get to know that which he cannot see in the state of sleep because of our own organism being opaque. This volition in the spiritual world becomes transparent, and we then look at the thinking of ordinary consciousness by learning to recognize the invigorating thinking that builds up the human being and works in from a spiritual world, by taking over what the human being receives through birth from the forces of heredity. What the human being receives in this way as growth forces can be applied as observing forces in observation and in experiment, while the physical experiment must turn to the dying forces. Thus we see birth and death continually at work in human nature. And by seeing death not only in that one moment of human life, but by seeing it spread in its individual [basic elements] over the whole of earthly existence, we confront it with what constantly fights this death and what, when we see through it, shows how the human being lives in an eternal existence that passes through birth and death unchanging, imperishable, one might say.

Anthroposophy seeks to follow the individual everyday events of the soul life — ordinary thinking, which it feels connected with the forces of dying, and ordinary willing, which it feels connected with the forces of building and growing — in such a way that, in their further pursuit, ways can be found to solve the great soul riddle of human immortality. I would like to say: The soul being is inwardly illuminated in terms of knowledge when we can add to what we have in ordinary soul life only as a reflection of sensory knowledge, in this way, supersensible knowledge. In ordinary life we carry the immortal soul within us, but this immortal soul is only filled with what it receives from external impressions. Even our memories are ultimately only reminiscences of external impressions, even when these external impressions have been taken up and transformed by the will and the mind. And even what ordinary mysticism often mistakes for a revelation proves to be only a reflection of the external physical-sensual existence for an unbiased knowledge. Man bears within himself the immortal, but he must first become conscious of the deeper reasons for this nature of his own in supersensible beholding, by transforming his whole cognitive faculty.

Then he penetrates through the gates that show the paths to the actual great riddles of the soul. In this respect, one can distinguish three levels of consciousness. And in these three levels of consciousness, all three of which can live in man, the path that man must take if he wants to solve the riddles of the soul is clearly shown. We shall disregard for the moment the very dull state of sleep, which is a kind of unconscious consciousness. But emerging from this unconscious state of sleep, as from the depths of a sea, are dreams, which are no less remarkable in their symbolism when they are considered quite impartially, as they sometimes appear to us, to mention just one example, as a visualization of conscience. One need only recall how, in a dream, when one has, for example, committed a sin of omission against a friend, this sin of omission emerges like a visualized conscience. One could point out many things in this regard.

But if one looks with an unbiased eye at what is present in this dream life, one must say: This dream life mocks everything that puts the human being into existence in an orienting way in the waking day life, through which alone he can fruitfully place himself into the world between birth and death. Where does this come from? Precisely those who see through the fact that man is present as a spiritual-soul being during sleep and that his consciousness is only subdued, will, when studying the dream life, be able to observe this sporadic flashing of consciousness in the dream in such a way that man then, with his spiritual soul, only comes to the periphery of the physical, that he does not yet fully enter the physical sphere when he wakes up or, when dreams accompany his falling asleep, step out of it.

When a person lives with their soul and spirit on the periphery of their physical body and this physical body faces them like a dark entity, then dreams burdened with arbitrariness arise. And when the human being's physical organization proves to be too weak to, I would say, fully absorb the soul and spirit into its own organization, to permeate itself with it and to permeate it with itself, then the spiritual-soul experience of dreams continues into the physical organism, where it becomes hallucinatory, visionary, mediumistic life, the kind of life that is easily suggestible, and so on. Yes, it is precisely those formations that arise when what should remain only on the periphery of the physical body as dream-like formations, as dream-like soul experiences, submerge too deeply into the physical organism that occur as pathological manifestations of the soul life. This leads those riddles of the soul life that are connected to the hallucinatory, visionary or medial life towards a solution. Anthroposophy must take a negative view of precisely these phenomena if they are to assert themselves in such a way that something of the spiritual world can really be recognized through them. But when the human being, with his soul and spirit, not only hovers on the periphery of the physical, but when he completely submerges himself in his physical body so that the two become one, when the arbitrary life of the dream the dream images are permeated by the forces of the orientation lines, which are formed from the laws of the full physical body with the outer physical nature, then the healthy, waking day life enters. Then what the physical human organization is has become one with the spiritual-soul in its dying and building powers; then they work together as one.

But the human being, who lives in his spiritual-soul, works through the instrument of the physical body, which gives him orientation in the physical-sensory world. When, through the exercises described, the human being not only becomes completely one with his physical body in his spiritual and mental being, but, beyond that, the whole physical organism of the human being becomes a sense organ, then the third state of consciousness occurs - supersensible consciousness. Then the ordinary waking consciousness of the day relates to supersensible consciousness in the same way that a dream relates to the waking life of the day. In approaching the riddles of the soul, we can distinguish between the darker consciousness of the dream, the lighter consciousness of the waking day, and the supersensible consciousness. It is the last that leads us into the eternal depths of the human soul, to the questions of our pre-birth and our immortality. Even those riddles that point to the morbid side of psychic life can be solved by comparing their phenomena in an appropriate way with what can develop in a healthy way as supersensible knowledge.

I have thus attempted to show what supersensible knowledge can achieve in relation to solving the riddles of the soul. The possibility of developing such supersensible knowledge, as I have described it, is only available today, after humanity has passed through the scientific age and has been able to obtain the corresponding knowledge through the conscientiously developed, serious, scientific methods. Therefore, the safest way to proceed in the field of supersensible knowledge is not to be a layman or a dilettante in the field of natural science, but to have learned how to really research in the field of natural science, and to leave to natural science what is its own, and then to leave to the spiritual what belongs to it.

But in earlier times, people always had some kind of idea of how to penetrate the hidden depths of the soul life, which today is achieved by strengthening the soul life. People spoke of a threshold that must be crossed if one wants to penetrate into the real soul life, and they spoke of how one can speak of crossing this threshold through an intuitive consciousness. But there were also very characteristic ways of speaking about how this knowledge of the supersensible is a healing process. The human striving for health in intimate community was found to be connected with this permeation with supersensible knowledge. Now, in relation to the soul life and its riddles, one will learn again that a process of healing is indeed taking place through the fulfillment with supersensible knowledge. To understand this, one does not need to be a psychologist oneself, just as one does not need to be a painter oneself to appreciate a picture. Just as one will be able to appreciate a picture if one has been raised healthily, so will the one who has been educated correctly in terms of common sense be able to understand what the anthroposophist says and judge whether it is healthy or unhealthy for a person. One can verify through common sense what the anthroposophist claims, and one will feel nothing in it, by taking it in, other than something that connects with the whole soul of man in a healing way, which above all supplies man with the forces that give him moral and social support and lead him to what can give moral impulses from the spiritual world.

For this reason, I was obliged to speak of supersensible forces as early as the beginning of the 1890s in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, where I presented as moral intuition those forces under whose influence man becomes a morally free being, so that what is to be gained through anthroposophical knowledge already exists in a presentiment in our moral life and in our ordinary consciousness. And by inwardly opening our cognitive powers to the forces that live in it, we equip ourselves with currents that have healing powers and give our lives support. In this way, anthroposophical knowledge does not give man theoretical views, but something that flows into his entire existence, connecting the reality of external nature with the inner moral world, so that these two no longer fall apart into two. And anyone who has ever stood before the full extent of the soul questions that arise here will also understand how one can strive for a knowledge of the soul, as spoken of here.

If someone today is honestly grounded in natural science, then he looks to an origin of the earth – even if the Kant-Laplace theory is modified today – from which physical existence emerges from a pure physical nebula gas ball, and from this later emerged what constitutes the higher natural kingdoms and also man. And today's physics shows how the end of the earth will one day be concluded in the heat of death, how through a great corpse that will be buried, which man perceives as the content of his human dignity, his human value and his moral value. Through these scientific ideas, man today gets an idea of the arbitrariness of the sensual-physical world, because the sensual powers necessarily give rise to forms of appearance, in contrast to which the moral world would have to be abandoned to decay if the powers assumed by science were to have exclusive validity.

But if we look at the world in such a way that we do not turn to the ordinary powers of thought, to the powers of dying, to which intellectual knowledge turns, because it is bound to the powers of dying and with these powers can only grasp the dead, inanimate nature, but if we point to the immortal, living nature of the world's existence, by rising from the ordinary knowledge of the soul to that knowledge of the soul that is given to supersensible vision, then our soul is anchored in an immortal world existence, and only then is a prospect of a true solution of the soul's riddles opened up. If someone now wanted to say: But this anthroposophy lacks the secure foundation of external knowledge of facts, because it only wants to build on what has been developed from the inner life of the soul. So anyone who sees through everything that I have only been able to hint at today will still say to themselves: Such an objection is like the one that someone would make who said: Everything must stand on firm ground so that it does not fall. That is of course true for things that stand on the earth. If, on the other hand, we look out into space, it would be foolish to ask: What does the earth rest on, what does the moon rest on, what do the other bodies of the universe rest on? They simply have their support in their mutually interacting forces; they support each other.

And one must recognize how what anthroposophy undertakes to achieve actually characterizes the world from the most diverse perspectives and thus supports each other. Until one has grasped the cosmic aspect of anthroposophical knowledge in this way, one will always think that it is unfounded, just as one could foolishly think that the earth is unfounded because it does not rest on a firm foundation in the universe, as every other body does rest on a foundation. Sensory knowledge and intellectual knowledge must rest on a foundation. But that which is developed out of the soul in the manner indicated bears itself, in that it seeks to penetrate from the most diverse sides into the supersensible realm of existence and thereby also prepares the way for the real, vital solution of the soul riddles.

Thus we can say: just as the soul riddles are connected with the processes of recovery and illness of the whole human being, so too must the processes of recovery lie in the penetration of the knowledge of the supersensible human nature, in the knowledge of the true immortality of the human being. In its own way, the most recent period would have to restore the instinctive knowledge of earlier times.

Words of truth do indeed come up from the depths of man's older striving, but modern times cannot strive for knowledge in the same way as earlier times. Natural science has taught us to strive for knowledge in a different way with regard to human existence and natural existence. And just as knowledge is sought in the natural realm, so too in the supersensible realm, not in the manner of nebulous mysticism, but with a clear development of the powers of knowledge into the eternal. But when this happens, then the modern man, who has found support in life in the face of the riddles of the soul's life, may speak again as the ancient Greek once did: “When you leave the body and ascend to the free ether, you will be an immortal god, having escaped death!”