The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This is the 7th of 10 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Berlin between 24 January and 20 April, 1918. (No. 67 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961). The title of this series of lectures is: The Eternal in the Human Soul, Immortality and Freedom. They were published in German as: Das Ewig in der Menschenseele. Unsterblichkeit und Freheit.

Everyone who is to some extent eager for knowledge and has realised how useful a true understanding of reality can be to human life desires to familiarise himself with the content of Spiritual Science as presented here. On the other hand, its methods for the attainment of knowledge are often irksome, because Spiritual Science is bound to show that the ordinary faculties of cognition—including those applied in orthodox science—cannot lead deeply into the spiritual life; and to be obliged to turn to different sources of knowledge is not an easy matter. True, if the study of Spiritual Science is free from preconceived notions and ideas, it will become more and more evident that ordinary, healthy human reason—provided it really gets to grips with life—is capable of grasping what Spiritual Science has to offer. But people are not willing, above all in the case of Spiritual Science, to apply this healthy human reason and ordinary knowledge of life, because they do not want to turn to something that can be achieved only through actual development of the soul. Although the facts presented by Spiritual Science can be investigated only by the methods to be described here, once the facts have been investigated they can be grasped by healthy human reason and ordinary experience. But because a certain mental laziness makes people hesitate to penetrate into Spiritual Science, even those who at the present time have an urge to know something about it prefer to turn to sources more in line with the methods applied in the laboratories, dissection-rooms and other institutions of modern science. And so in order to acquire a certain insight into the spiritual life, people who cannot bring themselves to approach Spiritual Science itself often prefer to concern themselves with abnormal phenomena of human life to be observed in the outer world of the senses. These people believe that the study of certain abnormal phenomena will elucidate certain riddles of existence. That is why Spiritual Science is so repeatedly and so mistakenly associated with endeavours to gain knowledge of spiritual reality by investigating all kinds of abnormal, borderline regions of human life.¹

For this reason I must also speak of borderline regions which through their very abnormality point to certain secrets of existence but can only really be understood through Spiritual Science and without it are bound to lead to countless fallacies about the true nature of spiritual life. The vast range, the interest and enigmatic character of the borderline region of which I shall speak is to some extent known to everyone, for it points to certain connections between external life and its hidden foundations. I am referring to man's life of dream. Starting from this life of dream it will be necessary also to consider other borderline regions of existence whose phenomena, if experienced in an abnormal way, might induce the belief that they lead a man to the foundations of life. I shall therefore also speak of the phenomena of hallucination, of visionary life and of somnambulism and mediumship, as far as this is possible in the framework of a single lecture.

Anyone who would have these borderline regions of human life explained in the light of Spiritual Science must bear in mind those essentials of genuine spiritual investigation through which they can be elucidated. From the range of what has been described in previous lectures I want therefore to select certain matters which will provide a basis for study of the phenomena in question. Spiritual Science must depend upon development of forces of the human soul which lie hidden in the everyday consciousness and also in the consciousness with which ordinary science works. As I have indicated, through certain exercises, certain procedures carried out purely in the life of soul and having nothing whatever to do with anything of a bodily nature, the human soul is able to evoke powers otherwise slumbering within it and so to gain insight into the true spiritual life. I must now briefly describe the essential preliminaries which enable the soul to make itself independent of the bodily element in acts of super-sensible cognition.

I have said in previous lectures that the attitude to be adopted to spiritual reality must differ from that adopted to external physical reality. Above all it must be remembered that what is experienced in the spiritual world by the soul when free from the body, cannot, like an ordinary mental picture, pass over into the memory in the actual form in which it is experienced. Whatever is experienced in the spiritual world must be experienced each time anew, just as an outer, physical reality must be confronted anew when it is actually in front of us and not merely remembered. Anyone who believes he can have genuine spiritual experience in the form of mental pictures which he can remember just as he remembers those arising in everyday life, does not know the spiritual in its reality. When, as is possible, a man subsequently recollects spiritual experiences, this is due to the capacity to bring such experiences into his ordinary consciousness, just as in,the case of perceptions of some outer, physical reality. Then the pictures can be recollected. But he must learn to distinguish between this recollection of mental pictures formed by himself and a direct experience of a spiritual happening, a direct encounter with a spiritual being. A special characteristic of body-free experience, therefore, is that it does not immediately penetrate into the memory.

Another characteristic is that when, in other circumstances, a man practises in order to be able to achieve something, the exercises enable him to do this more easily and with greater skill. In the domain of spiritual knowledge, strangely enough, the opposite is the case. The oftener a man has a certain spiritual experience, the more difficult it is for the soul to induce in itself the condition where this same spiritual experience is again possible. It is therefore also necessary to know the methods by which a spiritual experience can again become accessible, because it does not allow itself to be repeated in the same way.

The third characteristic is that genuine spiritual experiences pass so rapidly before the soul that alert presence of mind is required to capture them. Otherwise a happening passes so quickly that it has already gone by the time attention is directed to it. A man must learn to be master of situations in life where it is impossible to procrastinate and reflect upon what decision to take, but where decision must be rapid and sure. This alert presence of mind is essential if spiritual experiences are to be held in the field of attention. I mention these characteristics of spiritual experience because they at once show the great difference between an experience in the spiritual world and an experience in the outer, physical world of the senses and how little justification there is for people who know nothing to insist that the spiritual investigator simply brings ideas and concepts acquired from the outer world of the senses as reminiscences into some kind of imaginary spiritual world. Anyone who really knows something about the characteristics of the spiritual world, knows too that it differs so entirely from the world of the senses that nothing can be imported into it from the latter, but that the development of special faculties is essential before the spirit can confront spiritual reality.

Certain other conditions must also be fulfilled by one who wishes to be capable of genuine spiritual investigation. The first condition is that the soul must be immune as far as possible from inner passivity. A man who likes to give himself up dreamily to life, to make himself ‘passive’, as the saying goes, in order that in a dreamlike, mystical state the revelations of spiritual reality may flow into him—such a man is ill-adapted to penetrate into the spiritual world. For it must be emphasised that in the realm of true spiritual life the Lord does not give to his own in sleep! On the contrary, what makes a man fit to penetrate into the spiritual world is vigour and activity of mind, zeal in following trains of thoughts, in establishing connections between thoughts seemingly remote from each other, quickness in grasping chains of ideas, a certain love of inner, spiritual activity. This quality is indispensable for genuine spiritual investigation. Mediumistic tendencies and a talent for genuine spiritual knowledge are as different as night from day.

Another condition is that in his life of soul a genuine spiritual investigator must to the greatest possible extent be proof against suggestion, against allowing himself to be influenced by suggestion; he must confront the things of external life too with a discriminating, sceptical attitude of mind. A person who prefers to be told by others what he ought to do, who is glad not to have to arrange his life according to his own independent judgment and decisions, is not very suitable for spiritual investigation. Anyone who knows how great a role is played by suggestion in normal everyday life, also realises how difficult it is to combat the general tendency to succumb to it. Think only to what extent, in public life particularly, people allow things to be suggested to them, how few efforts they make to create in their own souls the conditions for independence of judgment and for governing their affairs by their own will. Those who study the findings of spiritual research because their healthy intelligence makes them desire relationship with the spiritual world are very often accused of blind belief in the investigator. But the fact is that blindly credulous adherents are anything but welcome to an investigator who tries to penetrate with conscious vision into the spiritual world. A society composed of credulous followers would be the caricature of a society suitable for the cultivation of spiritual knowledge. The genuine spiritual investigator will find, to his joy, that sooner or later those who come close to him develop independence of judgment and a certain inner freedom also in regard to himself, that they do not adhere to him blindly, under the influence of suggestion, but because of common interest in the spiritual world.

I shall speak now of yet another characteristic which can elucidate the relation of spiritual reality to physical reality and the attitude to be adopted by the human soul to the spiritual world. It is very often said that the spiritual investigator takes with him from the physical world of sense preconceived ideas which he then uses to describe some imagined spiritual world. But as I have already said, genuine experience of the spiritual world takes a different form each time. We may be quite sure that what we experience in the spiritual world always proves to be different from anything we previously believed. For this reason it is clear that the spiritual world can be reached only when the soul has been made fit for the experience of it. There is no question of carrying reminiscences of the physical world into an imaginary world. But there is something else which—paradoxical as it seems—will be confirmed by decades of experience of the things of the spiritual world. It is that however highly trained a person may be in body-free cognition, however well practised in seeing into the spiritual world, when he contemplates a particular being or happening—especially a happening which indicates a relationship between the spiritual world and outer, physical reality—he will very often find that his first experience is false. Hence the spiritual investigator acquires the caution which leads him to anticipate that the first experience will be misleading. Then, as he perseveres, it becomes evident to him why he was on the false track, and by comparing what is subsequently correct with what was formerly fallacy, he finally recognises the truth of the matter in question. As a rule, therefore, a genuine spiritual investigator will not communicate his findings to his fellow-men until a long time has elapsed since particular researches were made, because he knows that above all in the realm of the spiritual life, delusion and error have to be encountered and overcome in order finally to recognise the truth. This delusion and error are due to the fact that in investigating the spiritual life we take our start from the material world; we bring our powers of judgment, our mode of perception, from the material world into the spiritual world. At first we are always inclined to apply what we have thus carried into the spiritual world—hence the erroneous conclusions. But the very fact of having to realise each time anew how different the attitude adopted to spiritual things must be from that adopted to physical things, enables us for the first time to perceive the intimate characteristics of spiritual experience. It certainly seems paradoxical as compared with ordinary, everyday experience. But one who is able to look into the spiritual world knows, firstly, that the eternal, immortal essence of the human soul cannot come to conscious expression in the ordinary experiences connected with the body; the immortal essence of the soul is concealed, because here, in physical life, through his bodily constitution, a man can acquire knowledge of the physical only. That is why it is so necessary for the spiritual investigator to emphasise unambiguously that knowledge of the spiritual is acquired outside the body. The moment the body is in any way involved in the acquisition of such knowledge, this knowledge is falsified, even when remembrance—which is preserved in the body—plays a part.

Another outcome of a real grasp of the spiritual life is the knowledge that a man expels himself from the spiritual world to which the eternal core of the human soul belongs, when he surrenders his free will in any way and under the sway of coercion or suggestion allows what is in his soul to come to expression through his body in actions or even only through speech—that is to say, when anything that comes to expression through his body has not been mediated through the will. One fundamental condition for experiencing the spiritual world, therefore, is to recognise that the bodily functions must play no part in this knowledge. The other fundamental condition is that a man must make every effort to ensure that whatever he accomplishes through his body is the outcome of his own power of judgment, of the free resolve of his own will.

I was obliged to speak first of these conditions because they provide the basis for studying the abnormal provinces of the life of soul which we shall be considering. In true spirit-knowledge, what otherwise remains unconscious is revealed and this revelation sheds light upon the eternal, essentially free, core of being in the human soul. It is therefore possible to compare what is thus revealed with abnormal manifestations of the life of soul. The upsurging and ebbing world of dream which beats against human consciousness rather than actually passing into it, cannot really be counted among these abnormal manifestations. The world of dream has become the subject of much scientific and philosophical research, although it cannot be said that the methods applied with such brilliance in natural science are particularly suited to penetrate into the real nature of this borderline province of human life. The same may be said of the contention that thinking must be in strict keeping with that of natural science and surrender completely to the conceptions arising from it. Although, understandably enough, modern people claim to be free from any tendency to believe in authority, they are very inclined, under certain conditions, to do so. Whenever somebody who is publicly reputed to be a great thinker produces a bulky volume dealing with the investigation of abnormal psychic phenomena, numbers of people who really do not understand much about the subject, praise the book to the skies, and then, as a matter of course, our contemporaries, while disclaiming belief in authority, accept it as a reliable basis.

Among philosophical treatises on the life of dream, I want to refer particularly to a book on dream-phantasy by Johannes Volkelt, a German scholar of brilliant intelligence and at present Professor of Philosophy and Education at Leipzig University. He wrote the book in 1875, before he had reached professorial status. Even today this really valuable book is still held against him and is doubtless responsible for the fact that he is still only an Assistant Professor. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the very significant Swabian aestheticist, wrote a fine treatise about Volkelt's book. But academic prejudices, which during recent decades have led to a definite view of what is or is not ‘scientific’, are to blame for the fact that what might have been inaugurated, even if only meagrely, by that book, lies fallow and is obscured by current prejudices which prevent any real penetration into the life of dream.

In the framework of one short lecture I can give little more than a sketch, but I want for all that to speak of particular points in such a way that they can be illumined by Spiritual Science.

Everyone is familiar with the external characteristics of the upsurging and ebbing life of pictures arising in dreams. I shall speak of a few of these characteristics only. The dream arises as the result of some definite instigation. Firstly, there are dreams which have been instigated by the senses. A dream may arise because a clock is ticking away beside us. In certain circumstances the pendulum-beats become the trampling of horses, or perhaps something else. Certain sense-images, therefore, are found in the dream. I lay particular stress on this, for dream-experience bases itself upon numerous impressions received by the outer senses. But what works upon the outer senses never works in the dream in the same form as in the ordinary waking life of day. The sense-impression is always transformed into symbolism—a transformation that is actually brought about by the life of soul.

Such dreams occur very frequently. Johannes Volkelt narrates the following in his book. A schoolmaster dreams that he is giving a lesson; he expects a pupil to answer ‘ja’ to a question. But instead of answering ‘ja.’ the pupil answers, ‘jo’—which may well be a source of irritation to the teacher. He repeats the question and now the pupil does not answer ‘jo’, but ‘j-o’, whereupon the whole class begins to shout ‘fire-jo!’ The teacher wakes up as the fire-engine is racing past and the people are shouting, ‘fire-jo!’ The impression made upon the senses has been symbolised into the complicated action of the dream.

Here is another example given by Volkelt—wherever possible I shall only quote examples actually recorded in literature. A Swabian woman dreams that she is visiting her sister in a large town. The sister is the wife of a clergyman. The two sisters are in church listening to the sermon. The clergyman starts in a perfectly decorous way but suddenly seems to get wings and begins to crow like a cock. One sister says to the other: ‘What a very peculiar way to preach!’ And the sister replies: ‘The Consistory Court has decreed that this is how sermons are to be preached.’ Then the woman wakes up and hears a cock crowing outside. The crowing of the cock which would otherwise have been heard simply as such, has been transformed in this way in the soul; everything else has grouped itself around the crowing. These are examples of dreams instigated by the senses.

But dreams can also be due to inner stimuli, and again it is not the stimuli as such which appear, but the sense-image which has been transformed, cast into symbolism, by the soul. For example, someone dreams of a very hot stove; he wakes up with his heart thumping. Dreams of flying which occur very frequently, are due, as a rule, to some kind of abnormal process taking place in the lungs during sleep. Hundreds of such examples could be quoted and the different categories of dreams enumerated at great length. Although we cannot enter exhaustively into the deeper aspects of sleep, I want still to speak of certain points.

Literature offers no evidence of particular success in discovering elements in the human soul capable of showing what is actually going on in the soul when bringing about such transformations of the outer stimuli of dreams. But the question of paramount interest is this. What, in reality, is it in the soul that causes such different imagery to be connected with an outer stimulus, or also with a memory-picture emerging from the darkness of sleep? Here it must be said that what is actually working in the dream is not the faculty which in ordinary waking life enables man to link one mental picture to another. I could give you hundreds of examples which would prove what I can illustrate now only by one, for the sake of comparison. Think of the following. A woman dreams that she has to cook for her husband—sometimes an arduous duty for a housewife. She dreams that she has made one suggestion after another to him. To the first suggestion he answers: ‘I don't want that!’ To the second suggestion ‘I don't want that either!’ To the third suggestion: ‘Don't for heaven's sake inflict that upon me!’ And so it goes on. In the dream the woman is very miserable about all this and then an idea occurs to her. ‘There is a pickled grandmother on the floor; she is rather tough, but what about cooking her for you tomorrow?’ That too is a dream actually recorded in literature! Nobody who knows anything about the subject will doubt that the dream took such a form. You will at once say to yourselves : Anxiety is at the bottom of it. Something has happened to make the woman anxious. The mood of anxiety—which need not have anything whatever to do with the idea of the cooking and the rest—is transformed into a dream-picture of this kind. The picture is merely a clothing for the mood of anxiety. But during sleep the soul needs this picture in order to throw off the mood of anxiety. Just as you laughed about the pickled grandmother, so does the soul devise this grotesquely comic image as an adjunct to the other content of the dream, in order to overcome the anxiety and to induce an ironic, humorous mood. An oscillation, an alternation of moods can always be perceived in dreams and—like the pendulum of a clock—a swing between tension and relaxation, between anxiety and cheerfulness, and so on. What is of paramount importance in man's life of feeling is always the decisive factor in the structure assumed by the pictures of dream. From this point of view, therefore, the dream takes shape in order that certain tensions in the soul may be overcome. The picture which, as such, has no special significance, is born from this need to lead tension over to relaxation, relaxation over to tension. The soul conjures before itself something that can be an imaginative indication of the real gist of the matter.

Examination of the whole range of the life of dream brings to light two peculiar features which must be particularly borne in mind. The one is that what is usually called logic plays no part in dreams. The dream has a rule entirely different from that of ordinary logic for the way in which it passes from one object to the other. Naturally you will be able to insist that many dreams take a perfectly logical course. But this is only apparently the case, as everyone who can observe these things intimately, knows. If dream-pictures present themselves in logical sequence, the reason is not that you yourself produce this sequence during the dream but that you are placing side by side, mental images which you have already connected together logically at some time or which have been so connected by some agency in life. In such a case, logic in the dream is reminiscence; the logic has been imported into the dream; the action of the dream does not in itself proceed according to the rules of ordinary logic.

It can always be perceived that a deeper, more intimate element of soul underlies the action of the dream. For example—I am quoting something that actually happened. Someone dreams that he must go to see a friend and he knows that this friend will scold him for some reason. He dreams that he gets to the door of the friend's house, but at that moment the whole situation changes. On entering the house he comes into a cellar in which there are savage beasts intent upon devouring him. Then it occurs to him that he has a lot of pins at home and that they spurt fluids which will be able to kill these beasts. He finds then that he has the pins with him and he spurts the fluids at the savage animals. They suddenly change into little puppies which he feels he want to pat.—This is a typical course taken by a dream and you can see that here again it is a matter of the tension caused by the anxiety as to what the friend is going to say—the anxiety takes expression as the savage beasts—being relaxed as a result of the soul having brought about the transformation of the wild beasts into lovable puppies. Obviously, something quite other than logic is in evidence here.—And anyone who is familiar with examples of dreams knows that the following has often happened. Before going to bed, someone has made efforts to solve a problem, but has failed. Then, in a dream, as he says, he discovers the solution and can write it down in the morning when he wakes up. His story is quite correct but those who cannot rightly investigate such things will always misunderstand them. It must not be thought that the actual solution was found in the dream. What was found in the dream and is then thought to have been remembered, is something quite different. It is something that need have very little logic about it, but produces in the soul the beneficial effect of tension being led over to relaxation. Before going to sleep the man was in a state of tension because he could not solve the problem. He brooded and brooded; something was amiss with him. He was healed by the form taken by his dream and was therefore able to solve the problem when he woke up.

Moral judgment is also silent in dreams. It is well known that in dream a man may commit all kinds of misdeeds of which he would be ashamed in waking life. It can be argued that conscience begins to stir in dream, that it often makes itself felt in a very remarkable way. Think only of the dreams contained in Shakespeare's plays—poets generally have a good reason for such things—and you will find that they might appear to suggest that moral reproaches make themselves particularly conspicuous through dreams. Again this is an inexact observation. What is true is that in the dream we are snatched away from the faculty of ordinary moral judgment which in connection with human beings in outer life we must and can exercise. If the dream seems to present moral ideas and moral reproaches in concrete pictures, this is not due to the fact that as dreamers we form moral judgments, but that when we act morally the soul feels a certain inner satisfaction; we are inwardly gratified about something to which we can give moral assent. It is this state of satisfaction, not the moral judgment, that presents itself to the soul in the dream. Neither logic or moral judgment play any part at all in dreams. If the search for truth is sincere it is essential to set to work with far greater exactitude and depth than is usual in life and in science too. Such matters elude the crude methods usually applied. It is extremely significant that neither logic or moral judgment gain admittance into the world of dream.

I want to speak of still another characteristic of the dream which even when considered from the external point of view, indicates how the soul, when it dreams, is related to the world. This relation can, it is true, be fully clarified only by Spiritual Science. Anyone who studies the sleeping human being will be able to say, even from the external standpoint, that in sleep the human being is shut off alike from the experiences arising from his own life and also from the environment. Spiritual Science does of course make it clear that when man falls asleep he passes as a being of soul and spirit into the spiritual world and on waking is again united with his body. It is not necessary to take this into consideration at the moment, but simply to keep clearly in mind what can also be apparent to ordinary consciousness. The human being is shut off from his environment, and what rises out of his body into his ordinary consciousness is also stilled during sleep. Pictures do indeed surge up and fade away in dreams but their actual relation to the external world is not changed; the form assumed by the pictures is such that this relation remains as it was. The relation to the external world, that which as bald environment giving contour to the outer impressions, approaches man as he opens his senses during waking life—this does not penetrate into the dream. Impressions can indeed be made upon a man, but the characteristics of what the senses make out of those impressions are absent. The soul puts an emblem, a symbol, in the place of the ordinary, bald impression. Therefore the actual relation to the outer world does not change. This could be corroborated in countless cases. In the normal dream the human being is as shut off from the external world as he is in normal sleep; he is also shut off from his own body. What rises up from his bodily nature does not come to direct expression as is the case when he is united in the normal way with his body. If, for example, someone's feet get overheated because of a too warm covering, he would be aware in the ordinary waking state that his feet are too hot. In the dream he is not aware of it in this form, but he thinks he is walking on burning coal or something of the kind. Again it is a matter of transformation brought about by the soul.

Attempts to explain the nature of dream simply by using methods and sources available to external science will always be in vain, because there is nothing with which the dream can truly be compared. It occurs in the ordinary world as a kind of miraculous happening. That is the essential point. The spiritual investigator alone is in the position of being able to compare the dream with something else. And why? It is because he himself knows what is revealed to him when he is able to penetrate into the spiritual world. He realises that the ordinary logic holding good for explanations of the outer life of sense, no longer avails. Those who rise into the spiritual world must be capable of expressing in images what is experienced in that world. That is why I have called the first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world, ‘Imaginative Cognition’. At that stage it is realised that the images themselves are not the reality but that through the images the reality is brought to expression. These images must, of course, be shaped in accordance with the true laws revealed by the spiritual world and not be the outcome of arbitrary phantasy. The spiritual investigator learns to know—quite apart from the physical world of sense—how one idea or mental picture is related to another, how images are given shape. This first stage of knowledge of the spiritual world is then capable of being compared with the unconscious activity at work in dreams. There a comparison is possible, and moreover something else comes to light as well.

A man who makes real progress in knowledge of the spiritual world gradually begins to experience that his dreams themselves are changing. They become more and more rational, and crazy images such as that of the pickled grandmother and the like gradually turn into pictures which have real meaning; the whole life of dream becomes charged with meaning. In this way the spiritual investigator comes to know the peculiar nature of the relation between the life of dream and the kind of life he must adopt in the interests of spiritual investigation. This puts him in the position of being able to say what it is in the soul that is actually doing the dreaming. For he comes to know something besides, namely, the condition of soul in which he finds himself while experiencing the pictures and ideas of genuine Imagination. He knows that with his soul he is then within the spiritual world. When this particular condition of the life of soul is experienced, it can be compared with the condition of the soul in dreams. This scrupulous comparison reveals that what is actually dreaming in the soul, what is active in the soul while the chaotic actions of dreams are in play, is the spiritual, eternal core of man's being. When he dreams, man is in the world to which he belongs as a being of spirit-and-soul.

That is what emerges as the one result of spiritual investigation. I will characterise the other by telling you about a personal experience. Not long ago, after a lecture I had given in Zürich on the subject of the life of dream and cognate matters, I was told that several listeners who, on the basis of training in what is called Analytical Psychology or Psycho-Analysis, wanted to be considered particularly clever, were saying after my lecture: ‘That man is still labouring under mistaken notions which those of us who are schooled in Psycho-Analysis have long since outgrown. He believes that dream-life should be taken as something real, whereas we know that it is merely a symbolic form of the life of the psyche.’—I shall not go further into the subject of Psycho-Analysis today but simply remark that this ‘cleverness’ is based upon gross misunderstanding. For under no circumstances will a genuine spiritual investigator take what presents itself in dreams as reality in the actual form in which it is there presented. Unlike the psycho-analysts, he does not take even the course of the dream as being directly symbolic; he knows that the gist of the matter is something entirely different. Anyone who is familiar with dreams knows that ten or even more people may tell of dreams with utterly different contents, yet the underlying state of affairs is the same in all of them. One man will say that in his dream he was climbing a mountain and on reaching the top had a delightful surprise; another says that he was walking through a dark passage and came to a door which opened quite unexpectedly; a third will speak of something else. In the course they take the dreams have no outer resemblance whatever, yet they originate from an identical experience, namely tension and relaxation which are symbolised in different pictures at different times. What is of essential importance, therefore, is not the factual reality of the dream, not even its symbolism as the psycho-analysts maintain, but its inner dramatic action. From the sequence of the meaningless pictures we must be able to recognise this dramatic action, for that is the reality in which the soul with its spiritual core of being is living while it dreams. This is an entirely different reality from what is expressed in the pictures presented in the dream. There you have the gist of the matter. The dream therefore points to deep subconscious and unconscious grounds of the life of soul. But the pictures unfolded by the dream are only a clothing of what is actually being experienced in the course of it.

Again and again I must emphasise that as far as I am concerned there is no question whatever of wishing to revive ancient notions in any domain. The antecedents of what is said here are not derived from any medieval or so-called oriental occult science, as was the case with Blavatsky and with others who draw upon all kinds of obscure sources. Whatever is said here is based on the consciousness that it can hold its own in the face of modern scientific judgment. If an opportunity for proving this were to occur, it could certainly be used. Spiritual Science is presented with full consciousness of the fact that we are living in the scientific age, with full cognisance of what natural science is able to say about the riddles of existence, but with full cognisance, too, of what it is not able to say about the regions of the spiritual life.

Where do the pictures which form the course of the dream, originate? It is like this. A man who is really free from his body in spiritual experience has the spiritual world before him with its happenings and its beings, whereas the dreamer has not yet awakened his consciousness to the degree where this is possible for him. His soul resorts to the reminiscences of ordinary life and the dream arises when the soul impacts the body. The dream is not experienced in the body but it is caused by the impact of the soul with the body. Hence the things which constitute the course of his life present themselves to the dreamer, but grouped in such a way that they bring to expression the inner tendencies of which I have spoken. In reality, therefore, the dream is experienced by a man's own essential being of soul-and-spirit. But it is not the Eternal that is experienced; what is experienced is the Temporal. It is the Eternal that is consciously active in the dream; but this activity is mediated by the Transitory, the Transient. The essential point is that in the dream the Eternal is experiencing the Temporal, the Transitory—the content of life.

I have now briefly explained the nature of dream as viewed in the light of Spiritual Science and why it is that the content of the dream is not an expression of what is actually going on in the soul when relaxation follows tension and tension follows relaxation. In the life of dream the soul is in the world of the Eternal, free from the body. But what enters into the consciousness as the clothing of this experience arises from the connection with the ordinary circumstances of life.

I pass now to the second borderline region of the life of soul where manifestations of the unconscious may occur in the form of hallucinations, visions and the like.² Even philosophers capable of sound judgment, such as Eduard von Hartmann for example, whose powers of discrimination and discernment I rate exceedingly highly, have been led to the mistaken belief—because they could not grasp the nature of the dream from the standpoint of Spiritual Science—that what comes as a picture before the soul in dream is really identical with a picture arising as an hallucination or vision. But these phenomena are essentially different from each other. Because the genuine spiritual investigator knows what condition of soul is present when he stands within the spiritual world and can compare this with the condition of the soul prevailing in dream, he is able to assess the meaning of certain peculiarities of the life of dream, for example, the absence of logic. The spiritual investigator knows that sensory experience is not without significance but that equally with body-free experience between death and a new birth it has its meaning and purpose in the life of man. It is precisely in our intercourse with the outer, material world that we can assimilate the logic streaming into the soul from that world. The spiritual investigator knows too that moral judgment comes to direct expression in physical life, in the experiences arising from civilisation. Genuine Spiritual Science will never lead to escapism or false asceticism but rather to a full appreciation of physical life, because logic, the capacity for moral judgment and moral impulses, are inculcated into the soul through its contact with the outer world during physical life.

In point of fact the dream passes only slightly into the abnormal life of soul. Spiritual Science shows that the soul is free from the body in dream, that the experiences of dream are independent of bodily experiences; they are separated from the link with the outer world that is present in waking life. In the dream, man is actually free from his body. Is this also the case in hallucinations, in visionary experiences? No, it is not! Hallucinations and visions are due precisely to abnormalities of the physical body. Visionary, hallucinatory activity in the life of soul can never occur independently of bodily experiences. Something in the body must always be disturbed or diseased, must be functioning improperly or too feebly, thus preventing a man from entering into the full connection that is present when he is using his nerves and senses in such a way that in experiencing himself, he is also experiencing the outer world. If an organ connected in any way with the faculty of cognition is diseased or too weak, a phenomenon such as an hallucination or a vision may arise: it resembles spiritual experience but is fundamentally different from it. Whereas in spiritual experience a man must be free from the body, this hallucinatory, visionary life sets in because something is either diseased or functioning too feebly in the body. Now what really lies at the bottom of hallucinations and visions? The ordinary process of ideation (Vorstellen) taking place normally in sensory life succeeds in being independent of those forces in the human organism which cause growth in childhood, bring about the inner functions of the body—metabolism, digestion, and so forth. I cannot speak in greater detail today of how that which as a bodily function underlies the normal life of ideation arises through part of the organism being lifted out of the sphere of purely animal life, of the processes of growth, digestion, metabolism and so forth. The basis of the normal life connected with the nerves is that a kind of soul-organism develops like a parasite out of the process of digestion, metabolism, etc. Now when, owing to particularly abnormal conditions, some organ of cognition is so affected that this soul-organism does not work through itself alone but that the bodily organ with its animal functions is working as well—this is due to disease or weakness of the organ concerned—the result is that the man does not devote himself to mental life independently of the forces of growth, digestion and metabolism, but that hallucinations and visions arise. What is organic activity in the vision ought really to be promoting growth, bringing about digestion and the distribution of the more delicate processes of metabolism. What happens in this condition is that animal functions are surging upwards into the soul-organism.

Life is not by any means sublimated in hallucinations and visions; on the contrary it is far rather permeated by the animal functions which do not, in other circumstances, extend into the soul-organism. What ought to be serving quite different processes is carried up into those of cognition, of mental perception. Hence hallucinations and visions are always an expression of the fact that something is not in order in the human being. True, what makes its appearance is a manifestation of the spiritual, but one of which Spiritual Science cannot make use; for Spiritual Science can make use only of what is experienced independently of the body.

You now see what an utter lack of foundation there is for the very general misconception that Spiritual Science acquires its knowledge through visions, hallucinations and the like. On the contrary, Spiritual Science shows that these states are always connected in some way with abnormalities in the body and that they must play no part whatever in its findings. Neither are hallucinations and visions ever identical in character with the pictures of dreams. The pictures of dreams arise outside the body and are only mirrored in it; hallucinations and visions arise because some bodily organ so to speak leaves a space free. If it were functioning normally the man would stand firmly in the physical world with healthy senses. But because a space is left free, the spiritual-eternal element which ought to remain invisible in the bodily organism comes to light through it. This condition is not merely a physical illness, it is a psychical abnormality, something that can only cloud and falsify the pictures from the spiritual world. Hence the fact that pictures arise when some bodily function is weakened, need cause no surprise. For how do sense-pictures come into being? They come into being because the forces which promote metabolism, digestion and the like in the normal way, are toned down and assert themselves in the soul-organism in a different form. If, then, these forces are toned down in the human being to a greater extent than is proper, abnormal consciousness is the result. The sense-pictures we have in normal consciousness are conditioned by bodily life that has been toned down to the normal extent. If the weakening is excessive, something that originates entirely from this improper condition makes its appearance. It can therefore be said that hallucinations and visions represent a striving that has been obstructed. As the human being develops from childhood to mature age, he is really striving to penetrate into his bodily organism. He endeavours so to develop his nature of spirit-and-soul that the body becomes the instrument for soul-activity. This is obstructed when something in the body is unhealthy. When the human being develops in such a way that his body becomes his servant, he grows into physical independence, into his egoity in the world of the senses, into the amount of egoism that is necessary to make him a self-based being, able to fulfil his destination as man. This egoism must of course be mingled with the necessary selflessness. The important thing is that a man shall permeate his life with the forces of his Ego. If certain obstructions make him incapable of doing so, his search for the requisite amount of egoism takes an abnormal path. This comes to expression in hallucinations and visions which are always due to the fact that through his bodily constitution a man cannot acquire the due amount of egoism necessary to his life.

To the borderline regions of the life of soul also belong the conditions produced when catalepsy or coma have led to somnambulism—which is akin to mediumship. Just as man's organism of thinking—I say expressly ‘organism of thinking’, not ‘mechanism of thinking’—must be constituted in a certain way to prevent the disorder I have just characterised as hallucination and vision from taking effect, so too the mechanism of the will—here I say ‘mechanism’—must be constituted in a certain way for normal life in the world of the senses. Just as the organism of thinking can bring about hallucinations and visions as manifestations of abnormal soul-life, so the will can be undermined when its mechanism is disturbed, quashed or paralysed in catalepsy, coma, or mediumship. True, if the spirit is not working upon it, the body is not able directly to evoke the will, but it is able, when certain organs are put out of action, when the mechanism of the will is brought to a standstill, to enfeeble the will, whereas the spiritual investigator, as I said at the beginning, can stand firmly in the spiritual world because his will works in full consciousness upon his body. If the body is paralysed in respect of the will, it quashes, suppresses, this will; man is then lifted away from the world to which he belongs as a being of spirit-and-soul, as a being of eternity, and is cast into the physical environment which is, of course, also permeated with spiritual forces and entities. He is then thrust out of his real world into the element of spirit which unceasingly pervades and weaves through the physical. This is the case in somnambulism, this is the case in mediumship.

Those who in the sense indicated at the beginning of this lecture adopt an easy-going attitude where Spiritual Science is concerned, would like to investigate the spiritual world in the same way. But such people cannot reach the true spiritual world which guarantees eternal life for the soul; they can work only with what permeates and pervades the physical environment. What is working in the somnambulist, in the medium, works in the normal human being too, but differently. This may indeed sound strange, but it is nevertheless a finding of Spiritual Science. What is really working in the medium, in the somnambulist? In ordinary life we have a certain moral link with other human beings; we act out of moral impulses. I said that these moral impulses are generated by way of the physical body. We perform acts in the field of external civilisation, we learn to write, to read, we learn what the human will inculcates as a spiritual element into the outer physical world. With the forces employed by our soul in the activity of learning to read, of assimilating other cultural endowments, of entering into moral relationships with the world—with all these forces the soul of the somnambulist or the medium is connected in an abnormal way. This activity which is otherwise exercised only in the moral domain, in the domain of the cultural life, is transferred directly into the bodily constitution of the medium or the somnambulist; this is possible because the consciousness has been lowered and the soul disconnected. Whereas in normal life the human being is in contact with the surrounding world solely through his senses, in the case of the somnambulist and the medium, the whole man comes into connection, through his will-mechanism, with the surrounding world. This makes it possible for influences from a distance to take effect; a thought can also work into the distance and distant vistas—both spatial and temporal—can arise. But in most of these cases, what penetrates into the human organism is the spiritual element which pervades the physical world to which we belong as physical men, it is the spiritual element belonging to the cultural and moral life. But it penetrates in such a way that the soul is disconnected from the organism. Hence what is made manifest through the medium or the somnambulist does not lead to the being of spirit-and-soul in man but is simply a caricature of the workings of the spiritual upon man's bodily nature. Whereas in normal life the soul itself must be the intermediary between the truly spiritual and the body, in these abnormal states the spiritual is working directly on the body—but only in the sense I have described. The result is that with his consciousness disconnected, such a man becomes a kind of automaton; only those elements which belong externally to cultural or moral life are expressing themselves in him. From this it will be clear to you that, although it is disguised and masked in the most diverse way, what is to all appearances the spiritual does come to expression through mediumship and somnambulism, but only provided certain combinatory factors and associations are present; these cannot be discussed here because it would lead us too far afield. The essentials which come to expression in this way originate from the physical environment. Men who stand firmly on the ground of natural science but do not outgrow its established notions, would like to penetrate into the spiritual world to which the eternal core of man's being belongs, by taking to their aid the phenomena of somnambulism and mediumship. But this leads to countless fallacies and errors.

I shall now speak of one recent example. It is of great interest because it is characteristic of this whole domain. Here we have a scientist very highly esteemed in his own country, a scientist well versed in all the niceties of scientific methods and who therefore does not by any means go carelessly to work when he approaches these matters. I am referring to Sir Oliver Lodge, the celebrated English scientist. It is a very remarkable case, one that is connected with the present catastrophic events. Lodge was always attracted to the question of how a link could be established between the outer, physical world and the world to which man belongs when he has passed through the gate of death. But he wanted to remain firmly on a scientific foundation.—This attitude is of course characteristic of people who are not willing to have anything to do with the methods of Spiritual Science.—Lodge had a son who was serving on the French Front during the war, and one day the father received a strange letter from America. This letter informed Lodge that his son was facing great danger, but that the spirit of Myers—who had died ten years previously—would hold a protecting hand over the young man while the danger threatened. Frederick Myers had been President of the Society for Psychical Research; he had been occupied deeply with the study of super-sensible matters and Lodge and his family knew him well. It could therefore be presumed—if it is in any way accepted that a connection is possible between some happening in the super-sensible world and human life—that Myers would certainly hold a protecting hand over young Lodge when danger was looming before him. But the letter was extremely ambiguous—as letters of such a kind are always wont to be. Obviously young Lodge might be in danger, but he might also be saved from it, and then the writer of the letter would be able to say: ‘Did I not receive through a medium a message to the effect that Myers is protecting Lodge's son? Through the help of Myers the boy has been saved from the danger of death.’ But if the boy had been killed, the writer of the letter would equally well be able to say: ‘Myers is protecting him in the other world.’ If a third eventuality were possible, the letter could have been interpreted in that sense too.—It does not do to be unsceptical if we wish to get at the real truth of these matters.—Naturally, Lodge did not attach particular weight to the communication, for he was well aware that such things are capable of many interpretations.—The son was killed. Then his father received a second message to the effect that Myers was indeed protecting his son in the other world, and that there were people in England who would provide proof of it.—Certain ways of organising such matters do exist.—There were several mediums who were received into the circle of Sir Oliver Lodge's family—most of whom were sceptics. Manifestations of all kinds took place and Lodge has described them in detail in a bulky volume which is extremely interesting for many reasons. The phenomena there described do not, for the most part, differ greatly from others that have been put on record and there was no need for any particular excitement about them—nor indeed was any shown. Lodge would not have thought it worth while to describe these manifestations if something else had not happened. Because he was familiar with all the devices used in the scientific mode of research, in this instance too he set to work like a chemist making investigations in a laboratory and used every conceivable precautionary measure in order to establish the facts without possibility of dispute. People feel therefore that this book makes it possible to form a real judgment about the case in point, for Lodge describes it as a scientist would do.

Among all kinds of other cases he describes the one that may be regarded as a veritable experimentum crucis, and it caused a tremendous stir. Even the most incredulous journalists—and journalists are usually sceptical, whether or not always from well-founded judgment I could not say—were impressed by this crucial test case. The circumstances were as follows : A medium who claimed to be in communication with the soul of Myers as well as with the soul of Lodge's son, said that a fortnight before the latter was killed at the French Front, he had been photographed together with a number of his companions, and the photograph was minutely described—the placing of the officers, how young Lodge was sitting in the front row, how he was holding his hands, and so forth. It was then said that several photographs had been taken and that the grouping had altered slightly while this was being done. The different grouping was also indicated with the same precision—the position of young Lodge's hands and arms had changed, he was inclining towards the man next him, and so forth. An exact description was given of this photograph too. Now the photographs were not in England; nobody—neither the medium, nor any of the family, nor Sir Oliver Lodge himself—had seen them. It could only be assumed that the medium was rambling in imagination when describing the photographs. But lo and behold, after fourteen days these photographs arrived and tallied exactly with what the medium had said. That this was an experimentum crucis for Lodge and those intimately concerned, cannot be wondered at; and it is here that the real interest of the book lies. A genuine spiritual investigator will not, of course, be taken in—as in a certain respect Lodge himself was taken in—because the scrupulously exact presentation enables him to form an independent, objective judgment.

How comes it that a man who is not willing to penetrate into the spiritual world by means of true spiritual investigation does nevertheless find on such a path something that convinces him of the influx of a spiritual world? The genuine spiritual investigator would not be brought to a like conviction, because he knows what has actually happened in this case. Moreover he will be astonished that such a man as Lodge, in spite of his experience in scientific research, is an out and out amateur in these matters.

Anyone who has only a superficial acquaintance with these phenomena, perhaps by no means through independent vision but simply from literature, knows that in somnambulists and mediums there is a connection with the environment in the sense I have described, that the whole man is as it were transformed into sense-organs—with the result that automatic pre-visions in time arise. These pre-visions are always due to a sick or enfeebled life of soul. They have nothing to do with the world to which man belongs with the immortal part of his being; they have to do with what is spiritual in the physical sense-environment, especially with what the will of man brings to pass there. Just because Lodge describes conscientiously it becomes quite evident that the medium simply had a pre-vision, that he ‘saw’ the photographs a fortnight before they arrived in England. This may seem miraculous enough but these are quite ordinary phenomena. At all events this is not, as Lodge thinks, a proof that Myers was protecting his son. It may have been so, of course, but it would have to be investigated in research carried out in a body-free condition.

When there is unwillingness to take the path of Spiritual Science the temptations and allurements even for those who are conscientious researchers and confront such phenomena cautiously and critically, are very great. What can be learnt through these abnormal manifestations, whereby man is made into an automaton, must never become the content of a true science of the super-sensible world to which the eternal part of man's being belongs.

A great deal that might still be added would show in the same way how these borderline regions of man's life of soul point to something which, although it too rests in the realm of the Unconscious, can never reveal to man that which, in that same realm, is of the greatest significance of all—namely the spiritual world to which man belongs with the free, immortal part of his being. Among all these manifestations the life of dream alone remains within the sphere of the normal, because in dream the human being is not experiencing through the bodily constitution but through the spirit-and-soul; as a being of spirit-and-soul he strikes up against the body and the physical experiences. Hence in respect of the life of dream too, man is able to exercise correctives and to give it its right place in the rest of life; whereas in the case of what he experiences through his body in the way of hallucinations, visions, manifestations of somnambulism and mediumship he is not able to do this with his normal powers of discrimination.

In the next lecture we will go more deeply into something which in the course of cultural development brings constant blessing and upliftment to human life, namely ART. In dream, man experiences the spiritual world in such a way that as the result of impact with the bodily constitution, sense-images take shape. The experiences which arise in a true artist and in one who finds delight and inspiration in Art, also lie in regions beyond those of merely physical experience. True Art is brought from the super-sensible into the sense-regions of life, but in this case the process of clothing the experiences in pictures is not an unconscious one. Just as in the dreamer the soul's actual experience remains in the unconscious but reveals itself through what the soul—again unconsciously—adds as clothing to the experience itself, so the super-sensible experience of the artist and of the one who finds delight in a work of art, is brought into the sense-world. But in this case the clothing with the picture, with the Imagination which, arising from external life, gives the super-sensible experience a place in the sense-world, is consciously achieved. The gist of the next lecture will be that Art is in very truth a messenger from a super-sensible world, that delight in Art is a power which lifts the soul to the super-sensible world by way of sensory form, through sense-imagery.

And now to sum up what has been said today. It is true that man is led towards the region of spirit when he confronts these abnormal manifestations; for it is the spiritual world that shines into the life of man even if he is experiencing it in an abnormal way. But these abnormal manifestations may never be induced artificially, any more than pathological states may be induced for the purpose of acquiring knowledge.

What is it that remains from all these manifestations and phenomena as a vital admonition? It is that man shall find the way to true experience of the spiritual. We have heard that in the light of Spiritual Science the realm of dream is saved from the suspicion of being one of pathological experience—although naturally there may now and again be slight tendencies towards it. But when it is realised that through the seemingly chaotic life of dream man is admonished to find the path into the true spiritual world, the significance of such study becomes evident. A great world-riddle is knocking here at the door of human life. This world-riddle is the dream with its strange pictures in which logic and moral judgment are lacking but which are a definite signpost to the spiritual world itself. Hence we can find ourselves in agreement with what is said by the clear-sighted aestheticist and philosopher Vischer in his critique of Volkelt's book:

‘When the dream with all its rich meagreness, its meagre richness, with its ingenious stupidity and stupid ingeniousness, is contemplated in its unconscious creative activity, it will be recognised that it does nevertheless point to what is spiritual in the human being and can be sought after.’
And Vischer is also right when he says:

‘A man who believes that this spirit-realm of dream is not worthy to be a matter for genuine investigation, merely shows that he has not much spirit in him.’

The realm of dream is an admonition to man to seek for the spiritual world, and the aim of Spiritual Science is to fulfil this admonition. Whereas in the life of dream there can be pictures of the transitory only, for all that the soul's eternal core of being is active there, through spiritual-scientific knowledge it is possible for the soul also to be filled with pictures that give expression to the spiritual reality corresponding to its own inherent nature, thereby pointing to its allotted place in the world of spiritual reality as the senses point to its allotted place in the physical world.

REFERENCES (among many others):

Lecture-Courses by Rudolf Steiner.

True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. New edition, 1969.

Cosmic and Human Metamorphoses. Lecture One.

The Occult Movement in the 19th Century (typescript).

History of Spiritism, Hypnotism and Somnambulism.

• 1. See True and False Paths in Spiritual Investigations. Eleven lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in Torquay, August, 1924. See also references below.

• 2. See references below.

The courses have covered a long road of historical development. I have tried to present the course of human development from an historical phenomenon that we follow to the point that is called the Middle Ages; series of nations with state institutions have passed by, and we will pick up where things are in completely different circumstances.

The transition from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages is one of the most significant transitions in the world. Therefore, we want to review the highlights of this development again. We have discussed the magnificent Indian culture, which can be proven to have been historically advanced through writing and documents that amaze Europeans. Once we have realized that it is a people of contemplation, of deep inner life, other interesting points are revealed to us in other peoples. In Egypt, we see a civilization of a different character, and we stand in awe of its culture, which has achieved incredible things in mathematics and technology – engineering of great sophistication and based on different principles. We see the buildings of Lake Moeris, which held back Egypt's water to irrigate the land at certain points to make it fertile. Today, everything must be calculated in detail; in those days it was based on intuition, direct insight. We need only think of the beaver dam, which builds at an angle that the engineer had to recognize as the best. This instinct was developed to the point where it became what we call intuition. So human development does not mean that we have developed from the primitive, but if some of us have achieved something new, much of what was previously higher has been lost.

Let us move on to Babylonia and Assyria. Much of what these people also knew has been lost, despite our geometry. We can no longer hold on to the concept of a straight line of development. Then we came to the Persian people with their remarkable culture; if we remember how a young Persian was educated, we will assess the different picture that the world could have. Speaking the truth. Symptomatically, the innermost part of his being emerged from this people. That a person was inwardly stable was for the Persian when he was unified with his flowing words. What later became law: Yes, yes – no, no (Matthew 5:37), was education here.

A belt begins in Persia, and spreading across Europe, it encompasses the peoples from whom the Roman-Greek culture was replaced. — While art and powerful ideas were developing in Greece and what we call the Roman citizen existed on the Italian peninsula, various peoples lived in the north of Europe. For Rome, this means that the Nordic specter, the Cimbrian terror, in Italy something is emerging in the development of humanity that has never been seen before: to call the difference between [Romans and Greeks] — to simply call the bourgeoisie, which brings personal prowess to its highest peak. This is a new development that we did not have before. We never had any reason to look into the family in Greece – we were only interested in the polis – and so what we call law today, which is essentially based on the family context, is poorly developed. We have seen how this penetrated into the most isolated conditions of the people in ancient Rome; often a boy could not read or write, but he knew the twelve table laws. A Roman sense of dogmatism emerged from this, the direct living force that connected the Romans with their legal principles was lost and became abstract. This Roman legal form had spread throughout the world, but had lost its life. —Officials, the heads of individual districts, dioceses, were the shadow, the shell of the former life and Caesar the abstract, intellectual summary of what used to live in Roman hearts. We saw how Christian life poured into this shell, into this skin, how the vast Roman Empire ultimately had none of the things that had originally made up its greatness. All the cults, Greek, Phoenician, Egyptian, could be experienced there, and this whole chaos of peoples was held together by externally grafted Roman laws. Only one thing united, was equally widespread... /gap] a proletariat suffering terribly under the pressure, and the fact that at the bottom was what was united only by the bond of common pressure, of suffering, made that this Christianity spread with tremendous rapidity. Because it does not care about differences, but about the unity of suffering... /gap] and that is why this living life that came from the East poured into this skin.

And so the Roman emperors used this to save... /gap] but could not save because this people were at the gates.

Let us look at these peoples, who had the strength – the living life of the Christians at that time.

In ancient times, there lived... /gap] peoples whose culture can hardly be imagined today. Only a few remnants have survived by pouring their blood into later components, partly into those like [in] the Balkans. — These ancient peoples — their culture emerges from various finds, trumpet-like instruments that produce a strange harmony. The art of metalworking and an understanding of the sound of the instruments. Something of this was in the peoples on whom the external culture of the Roman Empire was built; there was something of this in the old Etruscan culture – and then in northern regions, in Danube regions. Celtic people – from this center, the entire cultural situation of Europe was dominated; they had a high spiritual maturity, an Illyrian and musical disposition, energy and an entrepreneurial spirit – actually a moving element in European culture. – A cultural ferment that clings to the limbs but does not become historical. He had to be there when he wasn't there, it didn't stay, spread across Spain, France. In the north of Italy there were always those in whom Celtic blood flowed. What made the Romans great was their sense of personality, their legal system based on agriculture – not present in others, and poets like Man... come from the north, like Horace from the south, where Greeks [were] –- everything that is great, if not from the law, is from outside...

The culture of the land the Romans conquered in Spain and Gaul was influenced by Celticism... /gap] A culture that disappeared again because he had to be there in person, this people of the Celts, who had a powerful influence, was attached to blood... /gap] It did not die out, but it does not work through tradition, but still today through its blood. For it can be proven that wherever important cultural influences occurred, they came from those who had Celtic blood in their veins, Shakespeare, demonstrably Robespierre... /gap>

This was a source of conflict for the country, which was always stirring and liberating and had an important mission at this point in time.

A people moved into this country that must have gone through difficult fates – we do not meet them... /gap] with such an intellectual culture, but with one that shows that this people had developed character traits that distinguish them significantly from others. Europe has undergone many glaciations. Once there were hot, tropical times there, then the great ice ages. Undoubtedly the ancestors of the Germanic peoples went through the last great glaciation, and under this influence something developed that is different in skull structure... /gap]

A primitive people more than the other European peoples. The Celt was active and energetic, where he personally applied, agitator in the finest style and therefore somewhat outgrown by nature, - the Romans loved what nourishes them, was intertwined with their agriculture. - The ancient Teuton loved nature, where he found it, was a wanderer who, as such, could enjoy nature. He loved nature, not a certain ancestral territory, had grown together with nature and therefore had a way of life that corresponded to it. Life in village communities in communism, which can be broken open again in the same way. The ancient Germans were engaged in cattle breeding and hunting. These people pushed into the areas formerly inhabited by the Celts, settled in areas as far as Russia, and broke up into a myriad of tribes. Freedom was innate in a sense, but depended on defending it with weapons. Somewhere in the north, there was an island where a festival was celebrated every year and a goddess appeared who was shown off in front of everyone. The connection with nature is evident. And we see how nature services are established everywhere. There is much talk of sacred oaks. But this was a misinterpretation of a word. However, the Celts gave their religion to the Germanic tribes, who were in league with nature. Druids were called oaks. The priest was revered. This shows what a driving element the Celtic people were. — When the Romans extended their rule in Spain, they had to deal with a mixed population that was attached to the Celts... / gap. The Germans had settled in the middle of Europe. At first the Romans met them in the areas of present-day Carinthia, Marius the Cimmerian. Then in France, then they broke into Italy, Cimbri terror. They were joined by Teutons and constant clashes since then. We see how they are beaten back by the Cheruscan Armin.

The Roman form of government had been imbued with Christianity, but the Roman Empire was unable to spread Christianity throughout the world as a people. Something else had to be introduced into that which had absorbed the shell of Roman culture: the strength of a people with an organizing effect.

The task of truly living in Europe, what the Romans had absorbed, was given to the northern peoples, and at first it was the Celts again. So we see the old cultures now replaced by their own rule. The Roman form of government remains only in the church's rule, in the pontificate. Into this body of state the moral-ethical life of Christianity is poured, the power of the northern peoples – Rome gave the form. Celtic agitation brought life forward. The messengers came from England and Ireland. Thus new peoples enter into the old. The inheritance of what has emerged from the most diverse currents is still contained, and if we understand how we have become, we understand how we have to look into the future. Only when we understand what we live in can we continue to build. Thus we will understand how we come to the views, to the material goods under which we live today, which make up our joys and sufferings. Goethe said, the power... /gap>

Law and rights are inherited in eternal illness.

When we consider what, as it were, is the shadow... [gap]

What you have inherited from your fathers, Acquire it to possess it.

Transform yourself, and history will be our teacher.

We must infuse our reflections on the present with what we have learned from the past. Thus we become masters of our history and learn from history how we should work to ennoble our race. Man is the only being that must forge his own destiny, and therefore he must understand it.

When we have acquired our ideals, we will...

[Gap]

Only those who learn to conquer it every day deserve freedom and life.

When the patriarchs are spoken of and their age is given in huge numbers, then we have to understand that these so-called patriarchs must be seen as representatives of tribes. The Bible students had been doing this for a long time, but they did not know what was actually behind it. If we now remember the lecture “Blood is a Special Juice”, we find a special application of the word “consciousness”. Those who firmly believe that there is development must also admit that everything is in development, including consciousness. The consciousness that we have today was not always there; it developed out of another consciousness that was dim and dream-like, that lived in images in people. This kind of consciousness, which was dull and clairvoyant at the same time, was dependent on a very specific fact. In those days, people lived in small communities. All nations, in whose distant origin we delve, show the same thing. The further back we go in the history of civilization, the smaller the communities of people become. It was considered immoral to marry outside of these small communities. It was only later that this principle of close marriage was interrupted by the principle of distant marriage, and it is with this interruption that the development of the dim consciousness to the present rational consciousness begins. In the members of those ancient tribes a very different memory lived; what the father and grandfather experienced lived in the son as if he himself had experienced it. The ancestral powers passed down through the blood of these tribes, which were united in close blood ties, to such an extent that the descendant remembered the events of his ancestors as if he had experienced them himself; that was in the blood, which rolled through generations. The son remembered and said: I have experienced this - what father and grandfather, etc., had experienced. As long as this I - this tribal I - was preserved, one spoke of the same entity with the same name. It is Adam, the continuous I of Adam, it refers to what is inherited through many generations from Adam, not the person of Adam.

Likewise, we must understand the passage where it says, “Enoch, the man of God, disappeared from the earth.” (Genesis 5:24) This does not mean that he dissolved into vapor and mist, but “Enoch” means one of those common “I”. This is dissolved by him becoming the man of God, that is, the one who devotes himself to the spirit, who gives up having offspring, who devotes himself in a kind of asceticism and therefore disappears, since he does not live on in the son and has given what runs in the blood.

Those who believe in the Bible today have no real idea of what the relationship to the Bible was in ancient times. For the ancients, the Bible was the “Word of God”; they knew that those who wrote it were initiates inspired by divine wisdom, and the more they believed that only truth could come from the divine spirit, the more each word of the Bible was sacred to them as the outpouring of that divine spirit, which revealed itself to them through these inspired men. For today's man, it is difficult to put oneself in this reverent frame of mind, which did not criticize this inspired wisdom at all.

It is only natural to see that the modern man must criticize, but we ask ourselves: How is it possible that through the centuries truly not stupid minds, who had these books in their hands, did not also criticize, why they did not also, for example, subject the differences that the four gospels show to this criticism? Are we to imagine that those few who had the Bible in their hands before the invention of printing did not see what today's critics see and from which they draw doubts about the authenticity of the Gospels? They saw these differences, but they knew how they came about. They knew that at this momentous historical moment, in the founding of Christianity, the sequence of initiation had been drawn down onto the physical plane and completed in the Mystery of Golgotha. From then on, the “Son of Man” could undergo this on the physical plane, that is, the one who had developed the consciousness of the general in himself. The Son of Man brought the secret of initiation into the physical world, and the life of these initiates had to be described in such a way that it was a reflection of the old canon of initiation in the old mystery schools, the old temple sites. This canon of initiation was fixed in this area in one way, in another area in another, but you can see the initiation mode of the old initiation schools shining through it.

The physical life of Christ Jesus, as described in the four Gospels, really did unfold as the life of a disciple in the ancient mystery schools; we see in the four Gospels only the various forms of the initiation canon as it was established by the different schools of initiation. There are small deviations, but one whole, one single stream runs through all four. The Jesus Christ, the only Son of Man, presents this mighty sentence in the physical life, living it in the physical body: that life conquers death! What the initiate experiences in his etheric body, Jesus Christ experiences on the physical plane. The symbol has become outer reality, has become an historical fact. In these three days, in which the Christ is dead, spiritual science sees carried out onto the physical plane that which the initiate experienced in the depths of the crypts. When he then awakened to life in his physical body again, when he, having returned from the spiritual worlds, was able to bear witness to their reality, when he had become a proclaimer of the spiritual worlds, then, in the exuberance of these high and holy feelings, the words that Christ Jesus also spoke on Golgotha broke free from his soul: “My God, my God, how have you glorified me!” — “Eli, eli, lama...” (Matthew 27:46, cf. Psalm 22:1; Mark 15:34) The word “forsaken” is not to be used; it is an incorrect translation. These words, “My God, My God, how have You glorified Me!” were the words of each one when he awoke from this three-day sleep, when he had experienced that life in the spirit conquers death.

The principle of initiation before Christ was different from today's. Only the chosen were admitted to the mysteries, from which the schools on the one hand and the churches on the other later developed. The teachings were oral, and in the mystery schools, once admitted, the student was subjected to a very special rhythm of life, which he had to integrate into his life. This rhythm, given in the ancient initiation canon, was fixed and unchangeable; as fixed and sure as the course of the sun, as surely as that, a disciple walked the path of life. These disciples were called solar heroes when they had reached a certain degree; and this life of a disciple, that is what the Christ Jesus carried out onto the physical plane, and that is described in the four Gospels.

There is a certain organ in man that contains the Christ potential; through this organ, man enters into direct relationship with the Christ. The Christ consciousness is created by the historical Christ. Just as the eye beholds light, so does this organ behold the Christ, but the historical Christ has created the Christ possibility, the possibility that man, through this organ, may come into direct touch with the Christ.

When the human body was not yet the carrier of a soul, as long as it was still inanimate, it was, like the earth it inhabited, still quite differently formed. It had an organ within itself that still exists today as the swim bladder of fish. Man did not walk upright at that time; he moved forward by floating and swimming. He carried this organ within him, which has remained with the fish that have not developed further; in man it was transformed into lungs. This gave him the ability to breathe in and process air. We still find gill breathing in the embryonic development of man. This point in time, when the lungs capture oxygen from the air, is also the moment of ensoulment. This, expressed in terms of feeling and perception, is illustrated in the monumental words: “And God breathed into the man the breath of life, and he became a living soul.” (Genesis 2:7) That is to say, man inhaled the divine soul.

The ancients still felt every breath as a soul, hence the legends and myths that see in the air the body of the deity that has ensouled man. In all ancient forms of religion we find this clothed in images. It had to be clothed in images for humanity at that time, because if the great spiritual leaders of humanity had expressed these truths in the form in which they are expressed today, they would not have been understood; they had to speak in images. Everything, absolutely everything, is in a state of development, including consciousness! The form of imparting truths that was valid for the earlier dim consciousness of man was the pictorial one, so in the old religious documents the I also appears at the same time as the blowing, the one blowing in the air. This is the truth that individualizes itself in the breathing process. This is the same as Wotan, the one riding in the air stream, the one blowing.

Before its embodiment, the soul was sexless; here too, a development has taken place. Every spiritual researcher looks at this development. Before there were men and women, the God who unites both sexes within himself arose within the spiritual world order. This is the reason why the creation of man is told twice in the first chapters of Genesis. Once male-female (Gen 1:27), that is the divine spiritual man, who is neither male nor female, but unites the powers of both sexes in himself, and then the creation of man down on the physical plane; it says: Man came into being as a male-female being (Gen 1:27), not as Luther writes: “a little man and a little woman”.

The new instrument guides humanity towards a common bond that is more comprehensive than the bond of love. In the past there was a tribal ego, then, after long-distance marriage occurred, the same developed into a national consciousness, a national ego. Now, in humanity, there is a tendency to expand the national consciousness, which lies within this national ego, into that which holds all humanity together, into a brotherhood. To prepare this brotherhood, this blood brotherhood, which is independent of the blood that runs through the veins, that is the mission of Christianity. The old God, Jahve, the one who blows, who gave the ego, the one God who lives in the individual consciousness, will develop to recognize something common in all people, this human consciousness, that is the Christ consciousness! This encompasses an ego that will embrace all of humanity in one consciousness. There is a sentence that expresses this: “If anyone does not give up father, mother, son, or brother, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26; Matthew 19:29) Christianity prepares for an all-encompassing human brotherhood; we must not understand this in an everyday, trivial sense.

We may call Jehovah the people-god who splits up humanity into separate peoples; Jahve also means the blowing of the breath with which the I-spirit enters into man, but in Christ, the Son of Man, as whom he designates himself – that that is, not the son of a man or of a family, but of all mankind. In Christ we see him who prepares the universal world-alliance of love; and as Yahweh pours a part of his humanity into man, so the Christ pours a part of his being into humanity from now on. This essence lived in supreme glory in Jesus of Nazareth. He was the most highly initiated of all, and therefore He could say, “Before Abraham was, I am,” or rather, “I am to be.” (John 8:58) In such words lies the esoteric teaching of Christianity, which is meant to live as a power in outer Christianity.

How did it come about that the Son of Man was embodied in a personality? To explain this question, I will describe to you what prophecy means and how the Mystery of Golgotha emerged from it. In the beginning there were only a few initiates, prophets. To initiate means to develop those higher abilities in man that lead him up into the higher worlds and allow him to experience their truths for himself. All spiritual realities that they see and experience there will one day descend to the physical plane. A prophet can ascend to the spiritual plane, he can see what is there, and so he can say what will later descend to the physical plane. That is prophecy!

The old prophets proclaimed the coming of the Son of Man, that is, they foresaw in the spiritual worlds the preparation of that which later became a physical fact at the momentous time when the Christ appeared on the physical plane. The Son of Man brought down to the physical plane that which had previously been in the spiritual worlds, the brotherhood of man, which is to unite people in love, independently of the bonds of blood. And in the blood that flowed from the wounds at Golgotha, there flowed out that which was superfluous, overcome, selfish in human blood; this blood was sacrificed on the cross. That is the mystery of Golgotha. Human blood sacrificed itself to purify the blood of human egoism. This purification of the blood from the ego took place at Golgotha.

If we compare the meaning of the first three gospels, we find that a certain mood underlies them all. The Gospel of Luke points to the initiation school of the Essenes and therapists, which is why we find a certain social character in his parables.

Report in the “Hamburger Fremdenblatt”, 3rd supplement, November 10, 1904

Theosophical Society. At the public meeting held on Monday in the Patriotisches Haus, Dr. phil. Rudolf Steiner of Berlin spoke on the subject: “What can the modern human find in Theosophy?”

The lecturer assumed that Theosophy is based on the spiritual experience of the human being. This goes beyond mere external sensory appearance to an understanding of life, soul and spirit. In the realm of sensory appearance, there is emergence and decay, birth and death. Things, people, nations, even world systems arise and pass away. But life is constantly renewing itself in new forms. The individual plant form dies; its life is reborn in a new plant. In the realm of the soul, this life appears on a higher level. The outer appearance of a person is an expression of the constantly renewing soul life. An unbiased pursuit of this thought leads to the view of reincarnation or re-embodiment. The speaker then moved on to the consideration of the spirit, showing that the creations that arise from the activity of a being do indeed pass away, but that this activity itself continues to work as a cause. In its activity, the spirit is immortal. It becomes ever more perfect and more perfect, because its abilities arise from its work. From this arises the law of 'karma', of cause and effect in the spiritual world. And from this law, in connection with the idea of reincarnation, follows the moral teaching of the theosophical worldview. What drives the soul to action in the first place is desire. This expresses the soul's inclination towards the external world of phenomena. But the spirit transforms desire into love. An activity that arises from the spirit is a loving one. Since every activity lives on in its effect, a law of moral compensation is given with “karma”. The deed that a person accomplishes in a certain period of time, the experience that he has, are the consequences of earlier deeds and experiences and in turn become the causes of later ones. A continuous thread of moral concatenation must be spun from re-embodiment to re-embodiment in the life of the soul. The theosophical view of life builds its principles of the most general philanthropy, fraternity and tolerance on these great world laws. Its moral laws are the eternal laws of the general life that permeates the world.

The lecture, which was received with great applause by the numerous audience, was followed by a lengthy discussion and questions. The next lecture by Dr. Steiner, “World Law and Human Destiny,” will take place on December 12 at the Patriotisches Haus.

Dear attendees! Today I will speak about a very difficult, I would almost say, concerning topic: the evolution of a planet, especially in relation to the evolution of our own planet in the theosophical sense. And perhaps more than in any other of these lectures, it will be necessary today to appeal to the full impartiality of the audience. For such a way of looking at things, as one is currently almost solely accustomed to – that is, to deal with such a question as that of planetary development in a material, purely physical sense – what Theosophy has to say will, of course, have to appear quite fantastic.

Furthermore, the scope of what we have to discuss today is very broad. And the field of research involved is so remote that it is of course quite impossible for me to speak to you today in detail – in a short lecture – about the way in which such insights are gained. It is quite impossible for me to give you a derivation of what I have to say. I will only be able to relate and point out what would require many, many lectures, or even books, to be discussed in detail. I will not even be able to present the subject to you as it presents itself to the so-called occultist or secret researcher, but I will have to resort to comparisons and analogies.

I would ask you to bear in mind that the way in which I will treat the subject today is not the same way in which the secret researcher or occultist arrives at these results. Today, if any simile is used, it is only to make it possible to make oneself understood at all. The insights themselves are gained from quite different sources. And when we discuss inner development in detail in one of the next lectures, we will also learn something about the sources from which such insights as today's are drawn.

In the sense of the theosophical world view, man is – and I was able to mention this to you just now, also in connection with lectures from the last few weeks – an evolving being, a being in the process of development.

He sees a future perspective that entitles him to say that there is something spiritual, a spark of divinity, or better said, a resting place, a divine seed, in his breast. The human being of the future will be quite different from what he is today. Now the objection may be raised: How can man know what he will be in the future? He can know because he already carries the potential, the germ of the future within himself. The purpose of self-knowledge is none other than to study the potential and germs that still lie deeply hidden in the human breast today, in order to see what man can become in the future. In this way, man can see into his own future.

On the other hand, all higher beings – you know from earlier lectures that Theosophy speaks of higher beings than human beings – all divine beings are, for the theosophical worldview, entities that are similar to human beings, who have gone through their development at a similar level, albeit on different planes. One could say that the gods also served their time in humanity in earlier epochs. They were human and have already become what man will become in the future. Thus, in the theosophical world view, divine spiritual beings have advanced beyond the stage of humanity.

Man has not yet risen to the level of divinity. In this sense, we must place man in a whole sequence of entities. Then we will have created the conditions for being able to observe planetary development in the sense of spiritual research. It should be emphasized that this spiritual research, when understood in the right sense, in no way contradicts the sensual scientific research of our days, just as it does not contradict when an anatomist anatomically examines the corpse of a great artist and registers his anatomical results . Neither does it contradict what an art historian has to say about these artists, nor does what the materialist has to say about the moon, sun and earth contradict what Theosophy has to say about these heavenly bodies. The two things can coexist quite harmoniously. And even if the materially oriented researcher, from the standpoint of his conceit of infallibility, confronts the results of spiritual research with brusqueness, we must still say that such opposition is no less possible than the opposition of the anatomist who dissects a corpse and finds something to object to in what an art historian says about this person.

This said, if we look up at the heavenly bodies, where we see not only material things but also, in these things, the expression of spiritual beings, we will also find the expression for man in the thought that Goethe hinted at in “Faust” when he characterized the earth spirit:

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

Those who cannot rise to the realization that it is a reality to speak of the spirit of Mercury and the spirit of the Sun, and that what the eye sees and what we can explore with our instruments to what is spoken in theosophy is exactly the same as the external bodies of man to his soul, for such people the theosophical results will be spoken in vain.

When there was more conscious spiritual research in scholarship than there is today, the names given to our celestial bodies, especially those belonging to our solar system, were meant in a completely different sense. The old names Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, etc. did not just refer to the material bodies; in these material bodies they saw the bodies of spiritual beings. And the names applied to the spiritual entities, so that originally Mercury was the name for the planetary spirit of Mercury. The same applies to the Moon, Sun, Mars, Venus, etc. This is a prerequisite that we must adhere to if we want to understand what I have just said.

First of all, let me describe the meaning of the earth's development in a comparison. Imagine going back to an earlier point in our Earth's development, to the point in time that our natural science must also assume: namely, to the point in time before man set foot on Earth. Our natural science certainly indicates such a point in time when the various other lower beings were present in manifold forms, and a point in time when man essentially entered this Earthly development in his present form, as a sensual-real being. Don't get worked up about the form. It should mean nothing other than that if we go back in scientific research, we will find a point in time when man was not yet there.

Let us look at the earth as it presents itself at this point in time. We have the point in time when man could not have changed anything about this earth in any way. Nothing at all had been worked on by man on this earth. Because he was not there at all yet. So we have to say: the point in time we are talking about now presents us with the earth as it was prepared by the forces of nature. But for man to be able to intervene with his own cultural work – spiritually and religiously speaking – it would be as if I had to say: the earth has been handed over to man out of the hand of the gods, without human intervention.

Now, human beings are beginning to work on the earth step by step. If we follow purely historical research, we learn that this teaches us how man first began to work the earth with primitive tools. We imagine how he carried stones to both sides of the Nile and how the pyramids were formed. We look back even further, to the time when people created the first cultural works using simple flint tools. As we move forward, we see how humans increasingly came to control the forces of nature. It is then clear to us that the things we see today would not be there if human minds and hands had not worked. Let us try to imagine a time when no human hand or mind had yet worked. Try to understand what the things around you are. They are the result of natural forces, but also the result of human labor. So we look back to the point in time when human labor began.

Now let us look up to our time, when human labor has changed this planet. Let us compare the surface of our earth with the surface of yore. We put ourselves in the place of an observer who is outside our earth and compares these two points in time and can then say: This is the earth without human intervention, and then on the other hand, this is what human labor has done. This human work can continue. It will increasingly transform the Earth planet. In your mind, you can at least imagine the later stage of Earth's development, where again an unbiased observer looks at this Earth planet, but now in such a way that, when he looks at it from the outside, it would seem to him as if you were looking at this room. There is nothing here that is merely a natural phenomenon. You will find nothing of the original forces, such as they are a flowing in the open. It is all artificially constructed. So you could imagine a point in the earth's development where everything that can be transformed by human hands has actually been transformed by human hands in such a way that the observer would see an earth transformed into a work of art. Of course, nature would have to be transformed even more by human labor and conquered by humans.

But there is no reason why we should not think that electricity and other forces of nature that have been put at the service of humans, and indeed much more significant forces of the earth, can be put at the service of human culture. In the present development, we see the earth as having arrived at a goal. We do our work in such a way that man does it with this goal in mind. If we could not intervene in the growth of plants, if it were not as it has happened, we could not become master of the forces of the origin of higher living beings, but only the inanimate, mineral nature could be completely transformed, so that the form of the planet would be the result of its work at the final goal of the earth planet.

Now let us look back again to the point in time when human work had not yet begun. The theosophical worldview does not view anything that already existed or was already developed in any other way. Everything that has come into being and developed has come about in a similar way to these processes, which I have been able to hint at comparatively. The beings, of whom I have said that they have ascended from men to gods, and whom men regard as the higher ones, they did their work at that time. Just as a younger being will receive the earth planet from the hands of men when the earth has reached its goal and will then be able to continue working on it, so man received this planet from the hands of the gods. What he found, the gods had brought into being, exactly in the same way and form as man brought the earth into being. Such was the mere development of nature before there was any culture on this earth, before a simple man, with simple tools or, let us say, with his hands, somehow touched the earth, the earth was the work of the gods. From that point on, man has taken over the work of the gods in his own way.

Let us look at the matter from a different point of view, from the point of view of knowledge. Man seeks to explore what is around him, he seeks to think about what is in the world in terms of thought. I have often used the comparison: if there were no water in this glass, I could not scoop any out. All our thoughts, when we reflect on the world, have their meaning. If they are to have a meaning for the world, then they must be within the world. Of course, it would be quite ridiculous to want to think about a world in which no thoughts are embodied. When man reflects on the world and arrives at thoughts about the world, the world must have been built according to these thoughts. When man now investigates the laws and arrives at natural laws, what are these natural laws for him, which express themselves in thoughts? Nothing other than what man draws from them, similar to how he draws water from a glass. And just as the watchmaker has formed the watch according to his thoughts, and another, without knowing the watchmaker, can disassemble the watch better afterwards, so man comes and dissects the world afterwards. He does not need to know the one who put the thoughts into it. And it would be strange to say: No watchmaker put the thoughts into the watch mechanism.

More recent science has so often said: We do not need any spiritual authors of the world. Science has finally led us to understand this world in a purely mechanical way and to understand how the individual parts interlock. So we don't need a creator. — That's just as clever as claiming that because you understand how to take a watch apart, you don't need to assume a watchmaker. The fact that the world can be explained mechanically is no proof that it was not originally built according to thoughts. When we see nature in its natural forces and deduce the laws from them, for philosophy these natural forces are the expression of the original thoughts of the gods and the work of men in art, these are thoughts of a later work of the same kind as the work of the gods in nature outside. When the theosophist contemplates a rock, a crystal, or even a plant — although this is more difficult — he says to himself: All these have been created in the same way in spirit, like a machine, a work of art, like a work of art by a painter or musician. Only the latter are more recent products of the human spirit, which is a God in the making, while the former are the product of the mature spirit of God, which has long since surpassed the level of man. This is the spirit.

Now let us look at the matter in more detail. If we look at man as he is and lives today, and if we go back only a little in history, we learn that everything around us has been created relatively recently and that centuries ago man worked with very different, more primitive means of culture. And if we go further back, these means of culture become more and more primitive, and cultural history shows us that people living in the earliest times made knives and tools out of stone. So we come to a primitive man on earth who, in relation to everything that is the result of intellectual culture today, was still very far behind. The mind of the human being whom today's science likes to call prehistoric man was very primitive. We can see, then, that the ability to understand developed and took shape during this time. In this way, we ourselves trace the development of the mind. Further research into humanity in cultural history does not go any further.

But now spiritual research begins, theosophical research. It speaks in the most serious sense of the development, of the development of everything that exists in our environment. Just as the intellect has gradually developed, which at the beginning could only create very primitive means of culture such as flint knives and so on, grinding grain between two millstones, so the intellect was not only primitive, but it was not there at all. The intellect, this intellectuality has developed. Based on spiritual facts, just as our science is based on material facts, intellectuality begins to follow the things that cultural history speaks of. Cultural history extracts from the layers of the earth what it finds. Man evidently had a completely different facial expression. His brain was the tool of the spirit, which was not yet as developed as it later became. But from there we go back to even more distant primeval times. And what I have mentioned before, I have to bring up again here to make everything a whole. We come back to human ancestors who, however, cannot be shown in geology, who did not yet make tools, who did not yet have what we call intellectual power, but who had other mental abilities instead. From material natural science you know that the Earth has not always looked the same as it does today, that it has undergone continuous changes in its shape, that where there is land today there used to be sea, and where there is sea today there used to be land. The theosophical worldview speaks of facts that even the scientist at least hypothetically admits. The part of the earth's surface that is now occupied by the Atlantic Ocean, which lies between Europe, Africa and America, was once land. This is a fact for spiritual research. Arldt's treatise on Atlantis only provides information about the animal and plant world. Theosophical research, however, speaks of the human form. The intellect had not yet developed at that time; other spiritual abilities were decisive then.

You can get a rough idea of how this came about. When seeing animals migrate into dark caves, they lose their faces. Other powers develop. Strength declines. Thus, in general, in the course of development, we find that with the development of one faculty, the other must gradually recede. Thus, with the development of the mind, of intellectuality, other spiritual powers that man had in times gone by recede.

A certain kind of clairvoyance, a dim, dark clairvoyance, was an outstanding spiritual power among the population of ancient Atlantis. These were people whose forebrain was not yet developed. That was the case with the Atlantic people, whose forebrains were not developed; they were not intellectual, but they were endowed with a certain clairvoyance. They had not yet developed reflection. Therefore, [the Atlantic man] could not have any culture. He could not make knives and axes for himself, he simply lived in a completely different way, but he was clairvoyant in a certain respect. His consciousness was so developed that he could not only perceive in his surroundings that which the senses convey, that which enters the human soul through the gates of the senses, but his soul was able to perceive even more of the soul, albeit in a very shadowed way. When he came near another person, he not only perceived what the person looked like, not only perceived what the person saw, but he could vividly perceive what moral qualities the other person had. He could perceive the soul, the inner being, the instincts, the passions and desires with a completely different kind of mind. If he came near a person who had wild desires, he had something else; today we would call it hallucinations. Colorful images arose in him of what lived in that being. So a completely different perception was present in those times. This is roughly how we have characterized the Atlantean population.

Another practical activity was also linked to this cognitive activity. You can read more about these things in my magazine “Lucifer - Gnosis”, in the essays of “13”. There it is described how people worked in those days. They had no tools, but just as they were clairvoyant, they were also endowed with a certain magical power. They were able to do what people today can no longer do. They were able to promote the growth of a plant, to make it grow faster. I could tell you many other things, but I think that is enough, for it could be taken in the most serious way. You see, however, that we are looking back here to a point in our earth's development that had a very different human being. But you must bear in mind that a different being, at the center of such a development, also requires a very different environment.

If we explore the Earth itself in these ancient times, then this Earth is also quite different. The distribution of water, fog, clouds, and air that we have around the Earth today did not yet exist in ancient Atlantis. It was quite different. The air was, so to speak, almost saturated with water. We did not have to deal with such a distribution of water in the air as we do today, but with a perpetual misty air. When Germanic mythology speaks of a 'fog home', it is a memory of ancient Atlantis with its foggy air. It was only in the later process of our earth's formation that what we have in our environment today emerged. Only with this environment was the progression of sensory and intellectual development possible. Thus we look back on a different formation of man and the earth planet. In certain respects, we can regard man as divine in a spiritual sense, but he differs considerably from the spirituality of our time. The spirituality of that time has receded. But the recognition that built the mind has emerged in our time. It has pushed the other back.

There will indeed come a time when people will unite the two: self-aware intellectual knowledge with withdrawn clairvoyance. This is what is already emerging in clairvoyance as a prophecy of later epochs. The Atlanteans were not so significantly different from people today, but they were different in some ways. If I may express myself crudely and trivially, I would say that they were not yet embodied in such dense matter, they were not yet as hardened in their matter as they have been since that time. Just as you follow the animals and come up to the cartilaginous fish and bony fish, as you come to beings that are embodied in less dense matter, we also had people who had a finer organism that they then knew how to control more.

The naturalist [Lord Kelvin] takes us back to such times – albeit hypothetically. The naturalist has calculated when the earth must have been in a state that did not yet allow for life on earth. According to the amount of heat that it still loses today and that it must have possessed in the past, it must once have been so warm that creatures such as plants, animals and humans that live on it today could not have lived then. Whether this hypothesis is more or less well-founded, it is certainly ingenious and based on good foundations. It is calculated that 30 million years ago the Earth was in a state in which there was no plant kingdom, no animal kingdom and no human kingdom. These were in a completely different state from planetary beings.

Let us trace them back to a state that is more and more fluid and more and more finely material. So, what man carries as a physical body was not yet present at that time. If you hold on to the idea that I have put before you, then you will be able to visualize and imagine how the human spiritual part could have lived at that time, as well as how what is spiritual and soulful in the animal and plant world could have lived on this planet before it emerged in plants, animals and humans. We follow man from the stage when he was physically softer and then even softer, to states that appear gelatinous compared to our present flesh and further back ethereal and even earlier spiritual, so that we find him, by looking into the past, always spiritualized. This is how we have to look at all beings.

We come back to an Earth planet that in its form does not yet represent a solid skeleton for our Earth, but a soft mass of mist. If you now look further at the beings that we have traced back, we find the Earth planet by no means as material as science presents it. We find it still fluid where plant, animal and human forms have appeared. But we also find it already populated by beings in a spiritual state. Thus we see how the earth continues to develop.

I would like to make clear by means of a comparison what is of course somewhat difficult to grasp. Consider today's hard coal. You dig it out of the earth. Today it is lifeless. If you look back millions of years into the past, this coal was still within extensive forests. These forests with their undergrowth perished, were covered by the earth and transformed over millions of years into what we dig out as coal. This is the dead body of former plant formations. The plant has become stone.

So much for the external material point of view. For spiritual research, something else arises. The spiritual researcher sees how the living becomes dead, how a stone has become from the living. But spiritual research says: every stone - whether you take a rock crystal or any other rock - everything has come into being in a similar way to coal. Nothing living has come from something dead. Just as a plant would not grow out of coal, something living has never come from something dead. It is the other way around: the dead has come from the living. But what we have around us in the way of stones and rocks and crystals is nothing other than fossilized life. The inanimate emerged from the animate. Thus the earth was once a body that had nothing inanimate about it. The inanimate, the rock, is only a later phase, a precipitation from the animate. And the question is already wrongly posed if someone wants to explore how the animate arises from the inanimate, because only the inanimate arises from the animate.

When you look at a gelatinous lower animal, as we think of them in terms of materialistic science, when you imagine how their individual limbs are differentiated and how man, however, has developed out of an undifferentiated, uniform body, and how then from such a being, beings with cartilage and beings with bones arose, whose skeleton is a kind of petrification – so the whole skeleton of the earth is petrified, crystallized, it is what life has left behind. If we follow this in relation to another form of our earth, with ever thinner and thinner matter, we find: everything changes, the inanimate ceases. This thin matter is at the same time a living one. And finally – continue the same thought, I only need to hint at it – then you come back even further to times when you can find the even higher truth that just as the inanimate later arose from the animate, the material-animate arose from the spiritual in the first place. Just as the inanimate is not the origin of life, so too is mere life not the origin of spirit, but spirit is the origin of life.

However, in a remotely similar way, we have to imagine that our earth was once a spiritual being, and that life developed out of this spiritual being through a kind of hardening, just as the living later developed out of the lifeless. And so we trace the earth back to the state where it was a spiritual being. Man's soul was present in a completely different way. As we trace man further and further back, it becomes apparent that he had very different abilities, clairvoyant abilities. However, the further back we trace him, the more his independence disappears. We find him in absolute dependence as a part of the divine beings that form this earth in its original state. Thus we look back to an original state of the earth, in which man was a member of the gods, had not yet separated himself from the general divine existence, is a member of their organism, as your hand is a member of your organism.

Thus man forms a part of this spiritually conceived state of the earth; we have traced back the earth planet. Now go through again with me what is happening now in this planet Earth. We must now imagine that first the spiritual separates and leaves behind a living thing, hardens into a living thing and animates a spiritual, so that we now have an Earth that consists of spirit and matter. And the living thing is linked to a mineral and dead thing. Man is a true dual being; when we follow him, we must follow how, on the one hand, the physical organism has developed and, on the other hand, a spiritual element has developed. This spirit was originally contained in the spirit-earth. However, the spirit must be thought of in a completely different direction of development than the body. Compare: When you see the body, it appears, according to its external structure, as the perfect embodiment of this external sensual being. In terms of its spirit, it appears in such a way that we see a magnificent, powerful future. Our mental and spiritual qualities appear to us only as an inclination. This will make the idea plausible that we are dealing with two directions of development on our earth.

First of all, we have to observe the initial state of our earth. It develops in such a way that, up to a certain point in time, minerals, plants and animals and the human form, this being of sense, have separated out. This leads us to the point in time when they become the bearers of spirit. Then they are fertilized by a part that has not been absorbed into the matter that was formed earlier. Let us make a comparison. If someone comes to you and says: Here I have water. That is a certain substance, and I will cool this water in one part, so that ice floes arise. — If someone said: The ice is also water, only in a different form, so we would have to admit that. But if someone would come and wanted to say: It is ice and not water, that would be nonsense. So we can also say: Matter is nothing else but spirit. It is to spirit as ice is to water; it is spirit condensed, hardened, crystallized, if you will.

Let us follow the spiritual state of the earth up to a certain point in time. Then the spirit transforms itself into this material form. People, animals, plants and minerals arise. That is the point in time that I characterized earlier, the point in time when no human being has yet worked on this earth out of inner impulse. The being of feeling was there, just as the ice is in the water. Imagine the ice in the middle, but there is still water around it. As soon as man had reached the necessary perfection as a being of sense, he was given the opportunity to receive the spiritual spark and to be enlivened by it. He received the divine spark from the spiritual. Man had reached a certain level of development in terms of the senses. He is a real witness of the spirit and begins as a small god to continue the work of the earlier gods as his cultural work.

So you can imagine the development of a planet from the spirit to life and from there to the inanimate. The highest living being is fertilized by the spirit and the further work of the spiritual up to its peculiarity through matter. There we have a planet before us. Now you will ask: This Earth planet, where did it get the possibility to crystallize out of itself precisely this mineral kingdom with crystals formed in such a way, with plants, animals and human beings formed in such a way? — If something is to crystallize in the glass, then the forces that can accomplish the crystallization must prevail in this form.

Within the theosophical worldview, we know that every person has an eternal, imperishable core of being that did not come into being at the moment of birth. We know the doctrine of repeated lives on earth. We know that people have certain destinies for the simple reason that in past lives on earth, each person has prepared everything for himself. We have been given an account of the development of the soul in various earthly lives in various lectures, and we have seen that this life comes between two incarnations. Man is nothing other than the re-embodiment of a previous human being. We know this from the doctrine of re-embodiment and karma.

In a universal sense, we are dealing with an incarnation of the planets themselves. Just as the person who does not believe in spiritual miracles, but in spiritual natural facts, does not allow the soul of the person to arise out of nothing, just as little did the scholars of the 17th century allow earthworms to arise out of the river mud. So it is nothing more than the spiritual-soul developing only out of the spiritual-soul. This is certain from the experience of earlier developmental facts. Likewise, we have to consider the fact that the earth is now excavating such plants, animals and human forms out of itself. We have to look for the cause in earlier embodiments of our earth. Just as there is an interim period between two human incarnations, there is an interim period between two planetary incarnations. Just as we speak of people, of incarnations, so we speak of planets, of “Manvantars”. Thus we see that the earth is a re-incarnated planet from the past, and between two such planets there is an interval, a “Pralaya”. So we look back to a different state in which this earth was not yet such a planet as it is today, but we look back to an imperfect state of our earth. Just as a person in today's incarnation has abilities and powers that he has acquired from events and experiences in life, so the Earth as a whole has evolved from previous incarnations in order to get to know the regular formations of minerals, plants and animals. So we have our present planet and a predecessor. A few more words about this predecessor. What were the obvious characteristics of this predecessor? Spiritual research can trace them exactly, but I do not want to present them to you today because they seem to be plucked out of thin air. What abilities did it acquire to bring people so far that they could be fertilized by a spirit? Up to that point, man had been a kind of higher animal, he had come close to the point where development begins. I can only hint at the rest. To understand the progress that has taken place from an earlier planet to our present one, we have to realize the real meaning of the development of the earth. Occultism tells us that this meaning is as follows. The occultist knows that the spirit of the earth's development is love, and the spirit of the previous one is wisdom. In our stages of development, love is expressed, and in the earlier ones, wisdom. You can also understand this comparatively. If you understand it, you will find that our entire material earthly structure is embodied wisdom. Look at the rock crystal. You have to study, apply reason, to understand, you have to calculate. The spirit that you draw out must have been put in. Natural scientists have not yet come to understand these forms. The further we penetrate, the more we will understand that we are not dealing with unwisdom, but with wisdom. If you see a human thigh bone, look at it through a microscope. You will not find a compact mass. You will find fine beams, more beautiful than the best house. Because everything is stretched out there so that the greatest load can be carried with the least expenditure of energy. If a beam is placed at a certain angle, material can be saved. Here the miracle is performed.

The anatomist knows how the miracle of the human heart moves us, and that it is more perfect than what man develops in his soul today. These are passions, desires. No matter how he purifies them, they are not like the miracle of the heart. Man drinks coffee, tea, beer and thereby inhibits or stimulates the activity of the heart. You can trace a structure full of wisdom through the entire development of the earth. This is what has developed as a material framework. We look back on a framework that was nothing more than the basis for a new incarnation. Everything that was built as a framework was determined at that time. What is happening on earth now is the result of the passions, instincts and desires that were aroused and caused then. Look at an uncivilized 'Negro'; his soul blindly follows instincts, passions. There are no moral concepts. Man devours his fellow man. Gradually, the soul purifies itself. But wise is the basic structure, which is so imperfect in its passions. When the earth's development began again, it shaped the previously acquired basic structure again. What should happen on this earth is the purification of instincts, passions and instincts. Everything has been created, including the wise structure of how instincts and drives, moral concepts and so on, religious creativity and the sense of a soul arise from our earth. Thus, piece by piece, they originate from the earlier elementary states, like the wisdom of the structure of our basic framework.

Do not believe that out of nothing, this or that, the thigh or the heart, is formed out of nothing and thus becomes the bearer of passions and morals. To come from blind drives and instincts to the purity of moral wisdom, this wisdom of the basic structure had to grow out of long experience. This heart had to develop out of the experiences of the earlier planetary spirit. So the wisdom that underlies the basic structure of our earth is the experience of an earlier planetary incarnation of the earth spirit. On earth we have a different purpose. Here, wisdom is not experienced, here what has been wisely built up is instilled, instilled - the ennobling of drives, desires and passions. The beings ennoble themselves by living in an external relationship to each other. This external relationship of the earthly world is egoism, as it exists in all beings. It is love. This tendency of the development of love is just as much the meaning of the development of the earth as the development towards wisdom was the meaning of the predecessor of the development of the earth. When the development of the earth has reached its goal, then everything that is still egoism in man and in other beings today will have been transformed into love.

And the next incarnation will carry love within it, just as the earth carried wisdom within it. Thus an original planet that acquires wisdom passes into everything that people accomplish here in the development of the earth into an embodied love. When we look into the future, it means a perspective view, a view to the fact that man deifies himself and makes himself the bearer of love, in order to then give it back to his successor, and to whom he will belong again as a higher being, like the higher developed beings who presided over the development of the earth and still preside over it today.

Now I can only add what real occultism has to say about the outer presentation of this meaning of development. Just as something always has to be discarded when a higher development takes place, so it is with today's plants. Originally they did not exist in this form. They can only flourish on soil that is mineral; they can grow out of it. If we are talking about a life that was originally mere and about the fact that the mineral aspect has only gradually emerged, then our present-day plants were not present in the original life, but other plant forms were. These plant forms have, on the one hand, developed in relation to the mineral kingdom and, on the other hand, further developed into the present-day plant kingdom, which will not live without the mineral kingdom. That is the meaning of higher development: it is based on something. The plant has pressed down part of the mineral kingdom on which it stands. The animal kingdom has excreted the plant kingdom and feeds on it. The plant kingdom assimilates the carbon dioxide that humans exhale and exhale oxygen, which humans need. If you look into the human world itself, you can see that man, as master of the outer world, can only live on the basis of the 13th chapter of the Gospel of John, where Christ Jesus shows that he is aware that a higher being can only rise on the basis of a lower one, just as a plant can only rise on mineral soil, an animal on vegetable soil. Everything is helpful and healing on the soil of the apostles. Hence the great gratitude expressed in the parable of the washing of the feet. The spirit is at the same time the origin of this soil, but the substantiality of the soil must always be withdrawn so that something finer and younger can develop on it.

Thus the later form that spirituality took could only develop by excluding matter. Just as the original life expelled the mineral kingdom, so the moon was also expelled. Thus the matter of the moon is to be regarded as the rejected brother of the development of the earth, which was united with it in its earlier planetary existence. The moon has been cast off and still has a spiritual connection to the earth. It is necessary for this earth as the mineral kingdom is for the plant kingdom, as the plant kingdom is for the animal kingdom.

If we go further back, we will not only see the earth united with the moon, with what the secret researchers have called the moon, today's moon is only the cast-out corpse. It is similar with the sun. I have been able to show you a perspective of how the theosophical view looks at planetary development. The planets as they appear to us in the sky today present themselves in a certain relationship for the theosophical research. What is the sun today, what is the moon today, has emerged in the course of development. They represent other phases of development. If you look back to your own origin and source, you will be able to say to the child: This represents my own development. In a sense, the occultists see the planets in this way, so that they appear as childhood stages compared to the development of the earth. Other planets appear as those that have reached the stage in which the earth is today much earlier.

Thus, occultists present this development in such a way that they place the seven planets in a series that has a relationship in its individual links, as it is expressed in the successive stages of human development. Just as this represents that which can also stand side by side, so for the secret researcher this side by side is represented in that which each individual can also go through, namely: this development through forms that are preserved in the planets neighboring the earth. This is expressed by the science of secret in mnemonic signs. These are the names of the days of the week. “Cheap philosophy” — many will object. In the seven days of the week, the planets represent their own development on Earth. We have to start from Saturday. The development of Mars takes place on Earth. Secret research calls the development of Mercury the development in which man intervenes and which will persist until the end of the development. So this is how it corresponds:

Saturday: Saturn,
Sunday: the Sun
Monday: the Moon
Tuesday: Mars
Wednesday: Mercury
Thursday: Jupiter
Friday: Venus

Thus, in the names of the days of the week in the most diverse languages, you have a marker for planetary development everywhere.

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I was only able to follow this development for a short distance, namely from the Earth to the Moon. So you can see that and how meaning and significance is added to this development through theosophical research. Those who not only have a feeling for our research, but also for the deeper forces, for the forces in development, have always understood that the earth comes from a development and progresses to a further development, that it is the planet that represents the stage of development of love, and that wisdom develops through love into a higher form. The next thing that surrounds us is the floods of the development of the earth planet, which present themselves as a tendency towards love.

One of the great minds sensed this in a poem when he wanted to express the meaning of the earth's development, when he looked up at the next goal of the earth's development, when he looked up at what man cannot look beyond. Then it appeared to him like a glance of the divine spirit, like a circle in which the infinity of the divine spirit can express itself. It seems as if the development of humanity, the whole meaning of planetary development, can express itself in the small spirit of the earth. But the spirit of the earth reveals to him what its essence is, what has become of earlier forces, and what will be transformed into later forces. And if I speak from the human point of view, the meaning of planetary development appears to us as development towards love. This is also expressed by Dante, the great thinker and poet, in the words:

The orbiting that was received in you
showed itself, like reflected light,
when I observed it for a while all around,
seemed to me in itself, in its own coloring
painted with our image,
which is why my gaze was completely absorbed in it.
Just as the geometrician becomes completely absorbed
in measuring out the compass and, pondering,
cannot find the principle he needs:
so it was with me at that new sight.
I wanted to see how the image related to the circle
and how it fitted into it;
but for this, not only my own wings were not enough,
my spirit was not struck by lightning,
which brought it what it longed for.
Here the power of the lofty imagination broke,
but already my desire and will moved,
like a wheel that drives the same revolution,
love that moves the sun and stars.

[What we are dealing with today has been called the question of all questions. What could touch man more deeply, if the question is only framed broadly enough – touch him more deeply, from a certain point of view – than reflecting on his origin, on his descent, because] everyone probably has an inkling that this question includes much of what alone can enlighten man about his true nature, about his destiny and about the nature of his life in general.

Now, however, from the point of view from which we are to speak to you today about human descent, it is difficult to make ourselves understood even to our contemporaries, if they are not already somehow prepared for it through spiritual science, because compared to what is being put forward from many sides today about the descent or origin of man, what we have to say in this our meditation will seem as if it were spoken in a completely, completely different language; and given the great interest that is shown in this question today, and given the public suggestion — we may perhaps call it that — which is not true science, but many of the catchwords that have been taken from this science and which today dominate many minds, with all this, much of what is presented today will perhaps seem to some even more than what was already said in the last three lectures [of this series] much more like a mere reverie, like a fantasy. When two such fundamentally different things confront each other as what a world view that is more materialistically colored — the word does not need to be pressed — has to say about the origin of man and what spiritual science, as we are considering it here, has to present, when two such different things confront each other, then, then, above all, one must first of all bring one thing to mind. Anyone who has familiarized themselves with the concepts and ideas that dominate our popular literature when the origin of man is discussed and it is claimed that this origin of man is spoken of in the way it must be according to scientific facts; [if you are confronted with this] when you have read your way into popular [or, for that matter, more or less scientific literature, one must still bear in mind that the concepts and ideas that someone adopts are not always based entirely on real contemplation, on real observation, but on authority, which is adopted in a, one might say, mysterious, mystical way – and this word is used in the worst sense – [by what is once popular], by what once has prestige.

And it must be realized that it is extremely difficult for those who have become accustomed to thinking in the direction that confronts them to bring the ideas they have once accepted into any kind of acceptable relationship with ideas of a different nature [that are put forward, for example, from the perspective of spiritual science]. Therefore, anyone who speaks about this question from the point of view of spiritual science today has no illusions about the fact that he could easily be understood by all those who have surrendered their habitual ways of thinking, by what is commonly accepted and seemingly based on the solid facts of science. That would certainly be an illusion. Nevertheless, from this spiritual-scientific point of view, what is to be said must be said, especially today, for little by little these ideas will find their way into the minds of all those who can free themselves from the [thought habits] just mentioned. This should be stated in advance so that it is not believed that the humanities scholar only indulges in such illusions, that he can conquer those who live in strict scientific ideas in flight, or that it cannot happen, [that one confronts such ideas], and say from their point of view, that what he has presented is pure nonsense, [pure folly]. As a rule, he is able to present the arguments put forward by the opponents of the former very easily himself. The deception then mostly lies with those who approach it from a spiritual scientific point of view and believe that its arguments could contain anything new for him.

Thus, we may well consider this subject [from the standpoint of spiritual science] without prejudice, given this assumption. Monistic thinking takes the easy way out by posing the question in materialistic terms, using a curious logic... Our natural science, which has been equipped with such admirable progress in the course of the 19th century – and no one but the humanities scholar can marvel at this progress in natural science – our natural science has, among many other things, also broadened the human view of the sum of living beings that live around us today and that lived on this earth in earlier epochs of the earth's development. We find their remains more or less preserved in the layers of our earth, where we once found creatures that were little like us. And a kind of religion, a kind of belief, that has been built on this scientific fact, has concluded from the contemplation, from the appropriate contemplation of what the world shows around us today, if we look at the layers of the earth to search for pre-worldly beings. This confession has turned it into a kind of theory of evolution that contains an extraordinary amount of interesting, important and also correct information.

But we can characterize the logical error that this theory of evolution makes with a few words – and we must characterize it [in this way] – and it is precisely when we start from this point that we will gather the material for thought in order to present that [being] to our minds, which can be said from the point of view of spiritual science. Science shows us [today] the perfect being alongside imperfect life. If we examine the layers of our earth, science shows us a series of [apparently] imperfect living creatures [to seemingly perfect beings], so that we can say: It is obvious to the human eye that one living creature is imperfect and the other is perfect.

Now, due to circumstances and facts [that we do not want to explain here], a remarkable logical conclusion has been drawn from this.

Let us consider this conclusion in its simplest, logical, sober form: the perfect has arisen from the imperfect. By making a comparison, we can make this conclusion clear to ourselves and then ask ourselves whether it is possible. Let us assume that we see two people next to each other, one with a genius for hard work, who has developed great diligence in life and has achieved something respectable. If we take another person next to him, we see a different person who has few abilities, who was also lazy and lethargic and has achieved nothing of note. Now we hear that these two are related. How they are related is something we should think about first, because that is the question in relation to the so-called developmental problem. When we look at the beings around us, we see that humans, with their various organs, are similar to lower forms of life, so-called imperfect ones. We see that humans have a slightly different structure, but basically the same bones as lower creatures. We could cite numerous other reasons that could lead us to the conclusion that we must assume a relationship. But what this relationship is like has not been established by facts, but inferred. No one should entertain the belief that the origin of the higher from the lower has been established; it has been inferred.

So if we know that they [the two people standing opposite each other] are related, [if we] can determine that from something, can we then conclude that [the one who has the genius and who was hardworking and achieved something decent comes] from [the other who was lazy and careless and did not improve]? Anyone who reflects a little will be able to realize how unnatural such a conclusion would be, and how easily he could be set right in his thinking if it were shown to him that the one as well as the other person descended from the same parents, that the one has only developed upward to his industriousness, but the other has declined, has developed downward. It is extremely trivial, [what I see], and it could seem as if an admirable theory that prevails in the world today should be refuted [by an /illegible/ triviality].

Unfortunately, however, [if we look closely] this logical blunder is [made] because it is known that the higher organism is related, [and it is] concluded that the higher one descends from the lower one – [by thinking that one could say that the more highly developed human descends from the lower, lazy human].

Now let us expand this little reflection to include, say, different peoples living side by side, a lower-developed people and a higher-developed people. Today, we have become accustomed to thinking that a higher-developed people with significant spiritual education [and cultural achievements] has developed from a state in which a lower-developed people finds itself today. Exactly the same conclusion as one would draw if one were to place these two people next to each other today. It is possible that one could be corrected if one were to research the facts, just as spiritual science is able to show that it is not the case that the spiritually higher educated people descend from the lower, but that] on the contrary, there is a common descent [of the two], that one that is spiritually more highly developed has developed in one direction and the other in the direction of decline. So that when we examine the ancestry, we are led up to a common primal people, not to the one that lives next to the other today, but to a common one. Since both live side by side, [they descend equally from the primal people]. Only one has developed upwards, the other downwards [in a certain respect].

Let us look at this in a little more detail, [so that our minds can form certain concrete ideas in the process]. You all know that when the European immigrants first moved to the American continent, they encountered an indigenous people [there], a people who are believed [in natural historical thinking] to represent earlier stages of the present peoples. From a European point of view, they were certainly at a low level of civilization back then, but if you take such an absolute point of view, you can go very wrong in your judgment. Let's imagine a scene to illustrate this. The Europeans have not always managed things so well. They have not always chosen the best means to exterminate the free man. One of the last chiefs [of the free people] who came from the areas from which [the Native Americans] were expelled in North America [was one of the last] to face a European conqueror, a leader of a European culture. The inhabitants of America had been deprived of their lands, including the tribe to which that Indian chief belonged. [The scene took place not so long ago.] The people had been promised land for what was taken from them, and it had not been kept.

The leader of the “redskins” stood opposite the leader of the Europeans. We have preserved a speech that the leader of the Native Americans addressed to the Europeans who had defeated his tribe and had not given them any land. I cannot even give you a literal translation of this speech, only the gist of it, what it contains. This is roughly what the chief said to the European: “Yes, you Europeans, you promised us other land for the land whose soil is covered by the corpses of our free brothers, you did not give us other land. That is because the pale man believes in different things than the free man. The pale man has strange magic tools, where little magic creatures are on them, he looks into them and sees what is right for him, he sees what is true and what is false. - The chief once saw the books and thought the letters were such magic creatures, [magic spirits that cause the Europeans to take such measures]. The free man does not believe in such spirits; the free man does not read what is written in such books of spells; the free man goes out and hears how the water rushes and how the trees rustle in the forest and he understands that. Because the Great Spirit speaks to him through the rushing of the water and the rustling of the trees. He always speaks the truth, and because you do not know the Great Spirit, who speaks the truth in the rushing of the water and the rustling of the trees, that is why you behave in this way. The pale man can never understand the free man, otherwise he would not trample with his weapons on the earth, which covers the bones of our brothers and which will one day take revenge on the pale ones!

What interests us about this strange speech by the free man, however, is the reference to the Great Spirit, whom he suspected everywhere. In the rustling of the trees, [in the trickling of the springs], even in thunder and lightning, [in all natural phenomena] the [divine] great spirit spoke to him. What is remarkable about this “savage” population is [this monotheistic religion], this remoteness from all superstition in their fundamental religious belief, which shines through the many superstitions that were present. You really don't need to go very far with your logic before you can see that those who were conquered by the Europeans, from whom the Europeans do not descend, but both [the European and the American population] descend from a common people, who must have had a wonderful natural religion. That will be a hypothesis if one stands on the standpoint of the sense-physical facts; that is a certainty if one [researches spiritually with the methods that we will talk about in the next lectures, especially in the second-next one, which is about initiation]. The American population, which had declined in certain respects, had lost its original purity and developed in another direction [towards a lower level]; the European, from his point of view, developed in the opposite direction. This gives us a concept of development that shows us very, very different perspectives than the simple concept of development that people are so keen to present to us as the only possible one. We see how this development is not at all simple, how we must assume earlier states of existence from which today's emerged, how that which today lives as imperfect in the imperfect appears to be a branch-off that develops towards imperfection. If we could go back in time to the distant past, we would find peoples who are the ancestors of the European [population] as well as those of the conquered American Indians. The path of development went so that a straight development [direction] led to the present-day developed population. But those who did not keep up, who did not absorb what could have led to perfection, came to a decline. The others are not descended from them, but descended from a common ancestor, others have progressed. [They are not merely /uncertain reading] lagging behind on a different point of view, but] because they lagged behind, they now show a state that was never present in ancient times. Because [they were] unable to develop further, [they] regressed.

We can now extend this concept to all living things. If we extend it in this way, we go back to the mammals that are closer to humans. Any simple theory of evolution would assume that the higher mammals were the ancestors of man. Today, this notion of man's very brutal descent from apes has been somewhat dropped, but the line of thought is still based on what appears to be different. If we imagine the relationship between humans and higher apes using this concept, we will say: Today's apes may descend from that original being that existed in the distant past and to which humans have evolved, but they have remained at [an older point of view], and therefore, in their present state, [in their present form] do not represent the ancestors of mankind, but the degenerate creation [that has wanted to hold on to an old form; that has corrupted itself]. Therefore, when today's man looks at this ape, he sees it with the mind, [then] it appears to him as a caricature of his own being, not at all as an ancestor, [and anyone with such feelings experiences it] as a kind of embarrassment... [illegible] when the original characteristics of man are corrupted.

[And so, step by step, we descend from higher to much lower creatures. In the remote past, we come to ancestors of man, whom we must not seek in creatures similar to present-day humans – the further back we go, the more dissimilar they become to the creatures that exist today. They are quite differently shaped]; from those ancestors of man, as a retarded and therefore declining entity, the lower mammals and other lower creatures descend. If we go back to the simplest creatures, [those that live today, consisting of one cell, from which one would also like to derive man,] then we would have to say that, yes, these creatures are undoubtedly related to man. But in the distant past, when man had an ancestor [from whom even these simple single-celled organisms descended, man looked quite different, his ancestor was a completely different being: The simplest organisms are the ones that are furthest behind and therefore the furthest from the original form of [the human being]. This is because they branched off earliest and, since humans have perfected themselves, have undergone a decline, [taken a direction of decline, and are the ones that are furthest from the original form].

Now let us look at this original form of man himself from the point of view of spiritual science. [There we have to take a look at the essence of man, as we have already frequently done.] We cannot look at [man] from the point of view of spiritual science in the simple way that we look at the physical body in material science.

[In what material science regards as the only thing, the human body, only one limb of the human being is based – this is only briefly hinted at – which has the same forces and materials as the seemingly inanimate matter – but science sees this body only be composed of these substances and forces in such an implicit way that these substances and forces could not maintain their form, as the material maintains its form], if the human physical body were not permeated and imbued with the second part of its being, the etheric or life body. This etheric or life body is for the spiritual scientist - [as already shown here last week] - a reality, a higher reality than the physical body, for it is the shaper and creator of the physical body. This etheric body or life body, which is a constant fighter against the dissolution of the physical body, because the moment the etheric body separates from the physical body, death occurs, and the physical body becomes a corpse. This etheric or life body is shared by humans and all other living beings, plants and animals. The third [link is called the astral body in spiritual science for good reasons]. The astral body is the carrier of lust and suffering, of joy and pain, of all instincts, drives, passions, ideas and feelings, of all that lives in the human being. This astral body is the third link of the human being. It has more in common only with the animal world, no longer with the plant world. [Then we already mentioned eight days ago] the fourth link of the human being, through which man is the crown of earthly creation, that which we could say is designated in the German language by the only name that differs from all other names, the name of our ego. The ego name, when you think about it, indicates the essence of the [ego]. [But first turn to] Fichte, [who said]:

Most people would much rather consider themselves a
piece of lava in the moon than an ego.

This ego can only be called from within itself. The name 'I' can never reach my ear if it denotes my own self; that can only be designated by the name 'I' from within. This has been discovered and recognized by those who study spiritual science: here is the actual sanctuary, the innermost link of human nature, to which nothing else of earthly things has access, but where human divine essence penetrates to one. [Man's divine essence announces itself in the ego.] By letting the little word “I” sound to itself, the soul speaks to itself what [religion] refers to as the God in man. This fourth link [of the human essence] is no longer shared by man with other beings, but is for himself and is thus the crown of earthly creation. ... /Illegible words]

[Thus, we initially have the human being as a tetrad before us, and anyone who speaks from a so-called monistic point of view would therefore not only want to accuse this spiritual-scientific view of dualism, which has been used to is done with it, but] then he should also reproach the dualism of the person who says that water consists of oxygen and hydrogen. If it is a mistake to look for light in its primary colors, only the one who does not think of dissecting the thing into its individual parts, or who claims of the individual that it is the comprehensive one, is a monist.]

Only he is a monist who does not think of dissecting the thing into its own members or of claiming that a single member is the whole. Then the word monism becomes a buzzword that does not take into account the facts. [But after all, people work with buzzwords today, not with facts.]

Now we can only understand the origin and descent of man if we consider the relationships between these elements of human beings in the present-day individual. We must distinguish between the two essentially different states in which we encounter man, waking and sleeping. These are two fundamentally different states. It was a remarkable fact when Du Bois-Reymond, [the naturalist], said [and it has already been pointed out in the first of these lectures] at the Leipzig Naturalists' Assembly: 'If one were to examine everything that goes on in the human physical body, all these [complicated movements and] processes, one could indeed investigate how hydrogen and oxygen and carbon and nitrogen [move in such a way, but one could examine all this], but one would never be able to explain the simplest fact of consciousness from these movements: “I feel red”, “I smell the scent of roses”. And likewise, even if someone were to see all the movements with the most wonderful instruments, he would only see movement, but not the soul processes, “I see red and feel the scent of roses”.

It is the worst materialistic superstition, and basically very interesting, that even on scientific ground it has been pointed out [although he has made significant blunders] that the fact of consciousness of the simplest sensation can never be explained from the facts of the physical body. We can understand the sleeping person, but never the waking one. Why? When a person sleeps, all these facts seem to sink into an indeterminate abyss, and because that is missing, we can understand what remains. Du Bois-Reymond, who is himself a materialist, rightly found the fact of life inexplicable.

To make this clear, let us consider the difference between the waking and the sleeping human being. In the waking body, we have the astral human being connected to the physical and etheric bodies. In the sleeping person, on the other hand, we have separated the astral body, detached it from the physical body [and from the etheric body. The difference between being awake and sleeping is that the astral body is separated from the physical and etheric bodies during sleep, but is connected to the physical and etheric bodies when we are awake.]

However, if you imagine purely in material and spatial terms that a kind of material cloud [as the astral body] emerges from the physical body, you still have a rather materialistic idea.

The human being, as he is today in his development, is just not able to perceive his physical organs [during sleep]; when the astral body reconnects with the physical body in the morning upon waking, [he can then perceive the physical surroundings through the eyes and ears]. What perceives is not your physical body, but the I with the astral body, which moves into its physical body in the morning. Physical organs are the instruments of this I equipped with a physical body. Therefore, no one would think of saying, “my brain feels a color, sees a friend,” but rather, everyone correctly says, “I see a friend,” “I perceive a color,” and so on.

When we consider the fact that today, when we are asleep, the human being, his I and his astral body are outside the physical and etheric body, then those who ask – [then we have to ask ourselves]: Where is the I [with the astral body] then? That is also somewhere in another world, in a world that belongs to the supersensible worlds. What does that mean? Where is this supersensible world? Those who oppose spiritual science imagine that spiritual science imagines this supersensible world to be in a beyond. Here it is, all around us!

And how does spiritual science imagine this supersensible world? Not any differently than [one has to imagine] colors and light for the blind. Imagine that you have a congenitally blind person below you. That which is around you, colors and light, is also around him, but he does not see it. For him, the world is what he can feel; for him, the world is [as for you, the world is the world of light and colors]. But if we could operate on this man born blind at this moment, so that he would see, out of the darkness that was around him, the lights and colors would light up, [and the world that was not there for him before. Why is it there now? We see that he has now formed it out of the physical.]

There are as many worlds in infinity as a being has organs to perceive them. [We will see in later lectures that] man, as he once had the disposition in primeval times to the eyes, which at that time could not yet see, but became seeing in the course of development, that all men have the disposition to what is called in spiritual science with Goethe, “the spiritual ears, the spiritual eyes”. Spiritual eyes and ears are present in man as a predisposition and can be developed. This is the purpose of spiritual science, that it gives people the methods to be able to enter the state that is related to the blind-born, [who can be] operated on, [to the world of colors and light, and] of course someone who knows nothing about it should not decide anything about such a world, [but] the only thing that can be said is that this is there, what can be perceived. And it is not only people of the future who can perceive these higher worlds that are around us, but these methods can be applied to people of the present.

People of the present know as a fact, as a primal form, that one can relate to the [higher] worlds as the blind are born [to the world of colors and light]. By awakening the spiritual ears and eyes, new worlds can arise that are around us. In this world and in no other is the human ego and the astral body when they are separated at night from the physical and etheric bodies. As long as a person's spiritual ears and eyes are not awakened, he cannot see [in this spiritual world], so consciousness fades away. But then, when spiritual eyes and ears are awakened, he can see.

But never can [may] perception decide on existence. [Otherwise a blind man could say to a seeing man who says he sees color and light: You are a fool, I see nothing at all]. Existence does not coincide with truth.

Now we ask ourselves the further question: What does this astral body do during the night and what is its business? [Is it unemployed?] This astral body is indeed busy during the night. When you work from morning till evening or let impressions of the outside world affect you through your senses, then something is going on [continually within you], and that is the fatigue, the wearing down of the forces of the physical body. Why is a healthy sleep so healthy? Because the astral body works [during the night on the removal of fatigue, of worn-out substances], on the restoration of the worn-out forces. What the astral body has done, you feel [in the morning as] a refreshment [even if you do not know how it works].

So this astral body works throughout the night, but how is it able to work in the physical body? It is able to do so because it is now not within but outside the physical body. An astral human body that is outside the physical body can work on that body. The one that is in the body has to make use of the organs of the physical body [to perceive the physical environment] and cannot restore [the worn physical body] from within it. Therefore, for all beings that have their astral body within them during wakefulness, it is necessary that the waking state alternates with the sleeping state.

When death occurs, what happens then? What does not happen during our entire life. Then not only the astral separates from the physical, but also the etheric body from the physical. [When you have the sleeping body in front of you, the physical and etheric bodies are in perfect connection in bed, the astral body is lifted out.] If you have the corpse in front of you, then the etheric body has been lifted out. Therefore, the physical and chemical substances now follow their own laws, [the body can no longer hold together] - and here we have set out the fact of death and the fact of sleeping and waking. Only when we know these are we able to understand the primitive conditions of man, then we can take a look at the origin of man.

Let us now take up our concept again. [I cannot talk about all the details today, but only give a sketch of human origin]. Let us go back to a distant past. We find a human ancestor.

But what did he look like? Quite different from today's man. Everything, absolutely everything in humanity has developed, including the conditions of sleeping and waking. They have only become what they are today, were quite different in times gone by. Spiritual science indicates that the distribution of sleep and waking as it is today only occurred relatively late [in the development of the earth]; the rule of sleep was quite different in the distant past. Man slept much longer, [was in an unconscious state, that is,] his astral body was much longer outside the physical body than it is today. And because it had the opportunity to be out longer and the waking state was shorter, this astral body had little to do with mending [the physical body]. The fatigue was not so great.

Today the night state is filled with mending [the physical body]. We only see something in our dreams, like fragments from the unconscious state. In ancient times of the distant past, not all of the work of the [astral body] had to be used to repair the physical body. Therefore, [even if it was dull and dim], this [astral] body [with the ego] was clairvoyant to a certain extent. In a way, this astral body, which was not so intimately connected to the physical and etheric bodies, could see into its surroundings. It saw what was around it in the spiritual world. However, what was it like, [looking into the world here? What is left behind?] There is dreaming. But dreaming is something that is only a very weak, [corrupted] echo of an [ancient], dim clairvoyance of all humanity, just as we have certain organs in us that used to have their function, [for example, certain] muscles near the ear. [Those beings in the animal kingdom that have remained at this level still have these muscles to move their ears.] Such organs, [which today have no function but which had a function in earlier stages of development], are called atavisms. One such atavism is dreaming. In the distant past, in the distant past of humanity, it was not what it is today, but something that brought man into real contact with his surroundings. As strange as it may seem to materialistic thinkers, I would like to give you an [unreadable] and describe a little [how it was] back then. In those ancient times, when man was in that half-asleep state, he could not perceive man in the way that he [could perceive the external natures, but he perceived] what lived in the soul of [other] people. When he – [the other] – was awake and thinking bad thoughts, then he [perceived this evil feeling, it] rose [like a kind of luminous body] for the consciousness at that time as a process of perception, a color image for the state of mind of the other.

In this way, people perceived the spiritual in their environment. [Of course, for materialistic thinkers this is something quite foolish. But the reasons that can be given against it are well known to the spiritual researchers themselves. So: Man was predisposed to be able to perceive in dreams. But it does not matter what one dreams; if a dream reflects reality, then it is real perception. [But if it is perceived in a dream, it is not yet bad. ... We have to imagine these ancient dreams as a much more vital state, showing a spiritual world around man that also exists today, but which he can no longer see because he has lost the ancient clairvoyance, but will learn to see again in the future.

Now we have described this person from the distant past. His astral body was essentially [more powerful], more substantial, more alive than it is now. Man has acquired this [external sensory] perception through his prolonged dwelling in the physical body. [But there is an original state of man in which the astral body was more outside the physical and etheric bodies than it is today.]

Let us realize what the astral body can still do in the physical body under certain circumstances, even today. It cannot do much today, but it can do something. When you feel a sense of shame in your soul and you blush, the blushing is a purely physical process, and what is it the result of? Of a process in the astral body.

The impression that caused the feeling of shame – [a reality of the imagination, an emotional reality] – has caused a feeling in the astral body [and] this feeling [has driven the blood to the surface, causing the blush of shame to appear here]. You can see how the blood could be set in motion by processes in the astral body through one process or another. [Today, there is very little that the astral body can do, but in the past it had great power.] In ancient times, the relationship between the astral body and the physical body was quite different. Not only could the astral body control the physical body in the minor way in which it [illegible] encountered the blood, but it had the ability to transform this physical body itself in terms of its form. At that time, when the astral body was still outside, [he had] not only the task of [removing the physical substances of] fatigue, but [illegible] that clairvoyant ability could [re-form the physical body].

Today [man] has a different forehead. [Certain animals still have that forehead formation and [illegible] formation corrupted. Man] has pushed it forward through forces that were in this astral body. [We can visualize what pushed this human forehead forward.] It was only when man learned to walk upright and move upright that he learned to imagine and feel the starry sky, that which is above, in a certain way. The animal, with its eyes directed downwards or straight ahead, does not have these impressions. When [humans] began to measure the space between the stars, namely at the time when humans had clairvoyant vision, [what was absorbed there] pushed the forehead forward, causing the brain to develop into the kind of convolutions that humans have today in terms of their abilities. This astral body is the creator of our forebrain and helped create [the anterior brain] [in adaptation to the external world]. Thus we can literally see how the astral body helped create the physical body.

Just as the astral body today transforms only a pale face into a red face [when shame is driven into the face], so in ancient times it shaped [the brain] out of this [primordial form] [into its present form]. Those beings in our line of ancestors who acquired this ability ascend to humans. Those who did not acquire this ability do not ascend to humanity, but condense. [Thus] an earlier stage of development ossified, corrupted, [and shows itself to us in a corrupted state]. Man must never be derived from today's ape, which has never been able to let these powers of the astral body take effect on it. But now we ask, if we go back even further, then we come to an even looser connection [to the physical and ether body]. There is less and less of it [the physical and etheric body], therefore the astral body [in the etheric body] is more and more powerful [and more and more powerful] and more and more able to transform the physical body. [At that time, man was gelatinous, like the animal, which is even more gelatinous today.] When man was in a soft state, the astral body could work on him in a powerful way.

[And] so we can go further and further back, to the state where the entire astral body was outside [the physical body], [where the physical body] related to the ether body as [ the body of the snail to the physical house [of the snail] relates, where the astral body /illegible] it, as it were, switches and reworks it, like the snail on the house - the snail does not live in the fabric of the house. [So it belongs to the physical and etheric bodies, but it does not yet live in them; it works on them from the outside; and we find] states, if we go back even further, [where even] the etheric body is not yet in this intimate connection with this physical body, the etheric body is still outside the physical body, and here we come to realize that the members of human nature, [which today in the waking human being are inwardly linked together], in ancient times have joined together. They certainly have a common origin, but despite the fact that they originate from the unified primal being and the unity they form in man is a remarkable one, [they are multi-faceted]. And if we ascribe to the astral body the ability to transform the physical body, what qualities can we ascribe to the [originally] free etheric body? ... /illegible]

[The further we go back in this respect to the original properties of this body, the better we get to know the mysterious workings in development]; if we can ascribe to the astral body the [shaping and reshaping, the] transformation [and reworking of the physical body], then we must ascribe to the ether body the material creation of the physical body. What is our physical body around us today, how did it come into being? We can visualize this with an image.

[The] humanities scholar [is not able to present everything with [illegible] through images. Today, what is tangible can be presented to everyone with the help of an image, which is something that arouses more associations from a physical-materialistic point of view.

By means of comparison, we can realize how the physical body of man came into being. Today, people believe so easily that what they know as physical contains the origin of the living, but this is again [such a] habit of thought, in truth it is not so. If you [once] deal with the prejudices that today [are said to come from science but do not come from it] ... /gap] If you examine how things are, [and we then only learn the method of how to examine], then you can make clear to yourself by the following comparison how the physical body comes into being.

Take coal, it is a mineral substance today. But long ago it was plants. What is now coal was once present as [graphite-containing] plants [in mighty forests]; the organic has transformed into the inorganic, the plant has become stone, the living has become physical. If you are able to do spiritual scientific research, you can see how all stones were originally living beings. We can investigate and prove that stones, rock crystal, were plants in primeval times, just like stone coal. Just as the mineral part of us originally came to life, so too was the human physical body once separated from the etheric body. As you see today] the many coral animals that build the coral reef, the physical, [you see how they grow out of it], see how the living creatures work this physical reef out of their own body. So in a time of man [ancestor] only this etheric body was present, [the astral body, and the] physical body is out of the etheric body [through a process] like ice from the water; the etheric body is a condensation, in condensed, other form, and there we come back to the original state of humanity.

Where only the etheric body existed, there was no physical human being at all. How did the physical human being begin? There was the astral and the etheric human being, who preceded the [physical] human being. The first physical human being was a small physical inclusion, like when chalk balls split off from [an animal, you see the animal and then a small chalk ball], or [you have] a container of water here: first [a small grain of ice forms], then it increases in size [little by little].

So man's entire physical nature was not there at all. It formed in the first place [as a small, tiny thing] within the spiritual, etheric [and astral], and] what now detached itself from the etheric and astral and back, was doomed, it began to develop in a descending direction, [and became the lowest living creatures]. But what was seized by the forces of the etheric and astral bodies developed higher. [Something detached itself from the animal], step by step, until [the stage was reached where] today's man was present; he left beings everywhere in his wake, as a result of the [developmental] steps he has taken. The simplest being that one sees today, which is said to be the progenitor [of humanity], is only a side branch [of human development].

But man [as a spiritual being], as an astral being, precedes all living beings. He is the firstborn as a spiritual being. [The other beings, the imperfect beings, descend] from him [as a spiritual being], who [from the very beginning] has all the potential for the highest perfection [within himself]. So man was there as a spiritual being before he was there as a physical [being]. [So where do we come from? From the world that man does not see]; man does not see the world in which the astral, etheric bodies are at home. In there is the world from which man really comes. Therefore, what is the highest link in man originally comes from him in a mysterious way, [the astral body, the etheric body and] as the last link, the physical body. Man descends from the Divine-Spiritual, [from the spiritual man descends. Only] then do we consider the appearance and descent of man in the right light, when [we] truly [elevate ourselves to spiritual-scientific contemplation. These spiritual-scientific insights can be explained in detail in the course of winter. What now appears as a program will become clear in its details. That will become clear... The physical is born out of the spiritual. The spiritual is something that permeates everything. This has always been felt above all by those who, through their good disposition and insight, had no materialistic mind and no materialistic habits of thought. From the laws that permeate and resound through the whole world as spiritual, from such laws, man appears to spiritual researchers as originating. Thus spiritual research is based on no other point of view than Goethe's, which we have recognized as a genuine spiritual researcher and which he has expressed in the most diverse forms, including in that wonderful series of poems entitled “God and the World” [is entitled], in which there is a beautiful poem, ‘Orphic Primal Words’, of which today we are particularly interested in the first stanza, because it shows us how Goethe was aware of the facts we have been talking about today. He wants to show us how that which is spiritual in man, which comes from higher laws [than from physical laws, which are explained by external sensory facts], cannot be fragmented by the powers of the temporal, cannot be fragmented by the forces of the sensual. [This is what he wants to express when he] connects an ancient, sacred idea to [his own dismemberment]: I and spiritual people are not bound to the physical laws of the body, which they themselves have produced, built, transformed, they are eternal and unchanging in their essence, in that they transform and remodel that which they themselves [as the ego and astral body] have produced.

As on the day when you were given to the world
the sun stood in greeting of the planets
You are as ever present and eternal
[according to the law by which you came into being].
You must be so, you cannot escape it,
So said the Sibyls and the seers of old.
And no power and no time dismember
The molded form that lives and develops.

This last lecture of the winter series will be devoted to that realm in the life of the soul which has been enriched by so many of the greatest treasures that spring from man's inner life. We will consider the nature and significance of art in the evolution of mankind. Since the field is so wide, we will confine ourselves to the art of poetry, and you will understand that we have time to consider only the highest achievements of the human spirit in this realm.

Now someone might say: “The lectures this winter have been concerned with various aspects of the human soul, and their central purpose has been to seek for truth and knowledge in relation to the spiritual world—what have these studies to do with the human activities which strive, above all, to give expression to the element of beauty?” And in our time it would be easy to take the view that everything connected with truth and cognition should be kept far, far apart from the aims of artistic work. A widely prevalent belief today is that science in all its branches must be subject to strict rules of logic and experiment, whereas artistic work follows the spontaneous promptings of the heart and the imagination. Many of our contemporaries, accordingly, would say that truth and beauty have nothing in common. And yet, the great leaders in the realm of artistic creation have always felt that true art should flow from the same deep sources in the being of man as do knowledge and cognition.

To take one example, only, we will turn to Goethe, a seeker both for beauty and for truth. As a young man he strove by all possible means to acquire knowledge of the world and to find answers to the great riddles of existence. Before the time of his journey to Italy, which was to take him to a country enshrining longed-for ideals, he had pursued his search for truth, together with his Weimar friends, by studying, for example, the philosopher Spinoza,⁵⁹ who sought to find a uniform substance in all the phenomena of life. Spinoza's dissertations on the idea of God made a deep impression on Goethe. Together with Merck⁶⁰ and other friends he believed he could hear in Spinoza something like a voice which spoke through all surrounding phenomena and seemed to give intimations concerning the sources of existence—an idea which could appease in some way his Faustian aspirations. But Goethe's soul was too richly endowed for him to gain from a conceptual analysis of Spinoza's works a satisfying picture of truth and knowledge. What he felt about this, and what his heart longed for, will emerge most clearly if we accompany him on his travels in Italy where he beheld great works of art and caught in them an echo of the art of antiquity. In their presence he experienced the feeling he had hoped in vain to draw from the ideas of Spinoza. Thus he wrote to his friends in Weimar: “One thing is certain: the ancient artists had as much knowledge of Nature, and as sure an idea of what can be represented and of how it should be done, as Homer himself. Unfortunately, works of art of the highest order are all too few. But when one contemplates them, one's only desire is to get to know them rightly and then to depart in peace. These supreme works of art have been created by men as the highest products of Nature in accordance with true natural laws. Everything arbitrary or merely fanciful falls away; there is necessity, there is God.”⁶¹

Goethe believed he could discern that the great artists who had created works of art of this high order had drawn them out of their souls in accordance with the same laws that Nature herself had followed. This can mean only that in Goethe's view of the laws of Nature, which operate in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, are raised to a new level and gain new strength in the human soul, so that they come to full expression in the soul's creative powers. Goethe felt that in these works of art the laws of Nature were operative again and thus he wrote to his Weimar friends: “Everything arbitrary or merely fanciful falls away; there is necessity, there is God.” At such moments, Goethe's heart is stirred by the recognition that art in its highest manifestations comes from the same sources as do knowledge and cognition, and we realise how deeply Goethe felt this to be true when he declares: “Beauty is a manifestation of Nature's secret laws, which would otherwise remain forever hidden.”⁶² Thus Goethe sees in art a revelation of Nature's laws, which in its own language confirms the findings of cognition in other fields of investigation. If now we turn from Goethe to a modern personality who also sought to invest art with a mission and to bestow on mankind, through art, something related to the sources of existence—if we turn to Richard Wagner, we find in his writings, where he tries to clarify for himself the nature and significance of artistic creation, many similar indications of the inner relationships between truth and beauty, cognition and art. In writing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, he says that these sounds convey something like a revelation from another world something quite different from anything we can grasp in merely rational or logical terms.⁶³

Of these revelations through art, one thing at least can be said with certainty. They act upon the soul with convincing power and permeate our feeling with a conviction of their truth, in face of which all merely rational or logical considerations are powerless.

Again, in writing about symphonic music, Wagner says that something resounds from it as though its instruments were an organ for revealing the feelings that went into the primal act of creation, when chaos was ordered and harmonised, long before any human heart was there to echo those feelings. Thus in the revelations of art Wagner saw a mysterious truth that could stand on an equal footing with knowledge gained by the intellect.

Something else may be added here. When we make acquaintance with great works of art in the sense of spiritual science, we feel that they communicate their own revelation concerning man's search for truth, and the spiritual scientist feels himself inwardly related to this message. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that he feels more closely related to it than he does to many of the so-called spiritual revelations that people accept so light-heartedly today.

How is it, then, that truly artistic personalities attribute to art a mission of this kind, while the spiritual scientist feels his heart so strongly drawn to these mysterious revelations of great art? We will approach an answer to this question by bringing together many things that have come before our souls during these winter lectures.

If we are to study the significance and task of art from this point of view, we must not go by human opinions or the quibblings of the intellect. We must consider the development of art in relation to the evolution of man and the world. We will let art itself speak to us of its significance for mankind.

If we wish to trace the beginnings of art, as it first appears among men in the guise of poetry, then according to ordinary ideas we have to go back very far indeed. Here we will go back only as far as the extant documents can take us. We will go back to a figure often regarded as legendary—to Homer, the originator of Greek poetry, whose work has come down to us in the two great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Whoever was the author—or authors, for we will not go into that question today—of these two poems, the remarkable thing is that both poems begin on a quite impersonal note:

Sing, O Muse, of the wrath of Achilles ...

Sing, O Muse, of much-travelled man ...

are the opening words of the second Homeric poem, the Odyssey. The author thus wishes to indicate that he is indebted to a higher power for his verses, and we need only a little understanding of Homer to realise that for him this higher power was not a symbol but a real, objective Being. If this invocation to the Muse means nothing to modern readers, this is because they no longer have the experiences from which a poem as impersonal as Homer's could derive. And if we are to understand this impersonal element in early Western poetry, we must ask: What preceded it? Whence did it arise?

In speaking of human evolution, we have often emphasised that in the course of millennia the powers of the human soul have changed. In the far-distant past, beyond the reach of external history but open to spiritual-scientific investigation, human souls were endowed with a primitive dreamy clairvoyance. In times before men were so deeply embedded in material existence as they came to be later on, they perceived the spiritual world as a reality all around them. We have pointed out also that the ancient clairvoyance was different from the trained, conscious clairvoyance that can be attained today, for this is bound up with the existence of a firm centre in the life of the soul, whereby a man takes hold of himself as an ego. This ego-feeling, as we now have it after its gradual development through long ages, was not present in the far-distant past. But for this very reason, because man lacked this inner centre, his spiritual senses were open and with his dreamy, ego-less clairvoyance he looked into the spiritual world from which his true inner being had emerged in the primal past. Powerful pictures, like dream-pictures, of the forces behind our physical existence came before his soul. In this spiritual world he saw his gods, he saw the actions and events that were played out among them. And present-day research is quite wrong in supposing that the sagas of the gods, found in various forms in different countries, were the product merely of popular fantasy. If it is thought that in the remote past the human soul functioned just as it does today, except that it was more prone to imagine things, including the imaginary gods of the sagas that is sheer fantasy and it is those who believe it who are imagining things. For people in that remote past, the events described in their mythologies were realities. Myths, sagas, even fairy-tales and legends, were born from a primeval faculty in the human soul. This is connected with the fact that man had not yet acquired the firm central point in his soul which now enables him to live within himself and in possession of himself. In the far past he could not shut himself up in his ego, within the narrow boundaries of his soul, separated from his environment, as he came to do later on. He lived in his environment, feeling that he belonged to it, whereas a modern man feels that he stands apart from it. And just as man today can feel in his bodily organism the inflow and outflow of the physical strength he needs to sustain his life, so primeval man, with his clairvoyant consciousness, was aware of spiritual forces flowing in and out of him, so that he lived in inward reciprocity with the forces of the great world; and he could say: “When something takes place in my soul, when I think, feel or will, I am not a separate being. I am open to forces from the beings who come before my inward sight. By sending their forces into me, they stimulate me to think and feel and will. “That was the experience of man when he was still embedded in the spiritual world. He felt that spiritual powers were active in his thinking, and that when he accomplished anything, divine-spiritual powers had poured into him their willing and their purpose. In those primeval times, man felt himself to be a vessel through which spiritual powers expressed themselves.

Here we are looking back to a period far away in the past, but this period extended, through all sorts of intermediate stages, right up to the time of Homer. It is not difficult to discern how Homer was giving continued expression to the primeval consciousness of mankind: we need only look at some features of the Iliad. Homer describes a great armed struggle between the Greeks and the Trojans, but how does he do this? What did the struggle signify for the Greeks of that time?

Although Homer may not start out from this aspect, there was more in this struggle than the antagonism generated by the passions, desires and ideas which stem from the human ego. Was it merely the personal and tribal emotions of Trojans and Greeks that clashed in this fighting? No! The legend which provides a connecting link between primeval and Homeric consciousness tells how three goddesses, Hera, Pallas Athene and Aphrodite, competed at a festival for the prize of beauty, and how a human connoisseur of beauty, Paris, son of the king of Troy, was appointed to judge the contest. Paris gave the prize to Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world for his wife. The woman was Helen, wife of king Menelaus of Sparta. In order to gain possession of Helen, Paris had to abduct her by force. In revenge for this outrage, the Greeks armed themselves for war against the Trojans, whose country lay on the far side of the Aegean sea, and it was there that the struggle was fought out.

Why did human passions flare up in this way, and why did all the events described by Homer's Muse take place? Were they merely physical events in the human world? No. Through the consciousness of the Greeks we see depicted the antagonism of the goddesses behind the strife of men. A Greek of that time could have said: “I cannot find in the physical world the causes which have brought human beings into violent conflict. I must look up to a higher realm, where the gods and their powers are set against one another.” The divine powers, as they were seen at the time in the images which we have just described, were actively involved in human conflicts. Thus we see the first great work of poetic art, Homer's Iliad, growing out of the primeval consciousness of mankind. In Homer we find presented in metrical form, from the standpoint of a later consciousness, an echo of the clairvoyant vision which came naturally to primeval humanity. And it is precisely in this Homeric period that we must look for the first time when clairvoyant consciousness came to an end for the Greek people, and only an echo of it remained.

A primeval man would have said: “I can see my gods battling in the spiritual world, which lies open to my clairvoyant consciousness.” In Homeric times this was no longer possible, but a living memory of it endured. And just as primeval man had felt inspired by the divine worlds wherein he had his being, so the author of the Homeric epics felt the same divine forces holding sway in his soul. Hence he could say: “The Muse that inspires me inwardly is speaking.” Thus the Homeric poems are directly connected with primeval myths, if these are rightly understood. From this point of view, we can see arising in Homer's poetic imagination something like a substitute for the old clairvoyance. The ruling cosmic powers withdrew direct clairvoyant vision from man, and gave him, instead, something that could live similarly in the soul and could endow it with formative power. Poetic imagination is compensation for the loss of ancient clairvoyance.

Now let us recall something else. In the lecture on Conscience we saw that the withdrawal of the old clairvoyance occurred in quite different ways and at different times in various countries. In the East the old clairvoyance persisted up to a relatively late date. Over towards the West, among the peoples of Europe, clairvoyant faculties were less widely present. In the latter peoples, a strong ego-feeling came to the fore while other soul-powers and faculties were still relatively undeveloped. This ego-feeling emerged in the most varied ways in different parts of Europe—differently between North and West, and notably different in the South. In pre-Christian times it developed most intensively in Sicily and Italy. While in the East men remained for a long time without an ego-feeling, in these regions of Europe there were people in whom the ego-feeling was particularly strong because they had lost the old clairvoyance. In the proportion that the spiritual world withdraws externally from man does his inward ego-feeling light up.

Hence there was bound to be a great difference at certain times between the souls of the Asiatic peoples and the souls living in the parts of Europe we are concerned with here. Over there in Asia we see how the cosmic mysteries still rise before the soul in great dream-pictures, and how man can witness the deeds of the gods as they unroll externally before his spiritual eye. And in that, which such a man can relate, we can discern something like a primeval account of the spiritual facts underlying the world. When the old clairvoyance was succeeded in Asia by the substitute for it, imagination, this gave rise especially to visionary symbols in picture form.

Among the Western peoples, in Italy and Sicily, a different faculty, arising from a firmly-grounded ego, produced a kind of excess of strength, an enthusiasm that broke forth from the soul, unaccompanied by any direct spiritual vision but inspired by a longing to reach up to things unseen. Here, therefore, we find no recounting of the deeds of the gods, for these were no longer evident. But when with ardent devotion, expressed in speech and song, the soul aspired to the heights it could only long for, primitive prayer and chant were born, addressed to powers which could not now be seen after the waning of old clairvoyant consciousness.

In Greece, the intermediate country, the two worlds meet. There we find men who are stimulated from both sides. Pictorial vision comes from the East; from the West comes the enthusiasm which inspires devotional hymns to the unseen divine-spiritual powers. This intermingling of the two streams in Greek culture made possible a continuation from Homeric poetry, which we can locate in the 8th or 9th century B.C., to the works of Aeschylus, three or four hundred years later.

Aeschylus comes before us as a personality who was certainly not open to the full power of Eastern vision, the convincing power we find in Homer as an echo of the old clairvoyant vision of the deeds of the gods and their effect on mankind. This echo was always very weak, and in Aeschylus so weak that he came to feel a kind of unbelief in the pictorial visions of the world of the gods that ancient clairvoyance had brought to men. Homer, we find, knew very well that human consciousness had once been open to these visions of the divine-spiritual powers which stand behind the interplay of human passions and emotions in the physical world. Homer, accordingly, does not describe merely a human conflict. Zeus and Apollo intervene where human passions are involved, and their influence is apparent in the course of events. The gods are a reality which the poet brings into his poem.

How different it all is with Aeschylus. The stream of influence from the West, with its emphasis on the human ego and the inward isolation of the human soul, had a particularly strong effect on him. For this reason he was the first dramatist to portray man as acting from out of his ego and beginning to release his consciousness from the inflow of divine powers. In Aeschylus, in place of the gods we find in Homer, the independent man of action appears, though still at an initial stage. As a dramatist, Aeschylus puts this kind of man at the centre of things. The epic had to emerge under the influence of the pictorial imagination that came from the East, while Western influence, with its emphasis on the personal ego, gave rise to drama, wherein the man of action is the central character.

Let us take, for example, Orestes, who is guilty of matricide and as a consequence sees the Furies. Yes, that is still Homer: things do not pass away so quickly. Aeschylus is still aware that the gods were once visible in picture form, but he is very near to giving up that belief. It is characteristic that Apollo, who in Homer acts with full power, incites Orestes to kill his mother, but after this no longer has right on his side. The human ego begins to stir in Orestes, and we are shown that it gains the upper hand. The verdict goes against Apollo, he is repudiated, and we see that his power over Orestes is no longer complete. Aeschylus was thus the right and proper poet to dramatise the figure of Prometheus, the divine hero who titanically opposes the might of the gods and represents the liberation of mankind from them.

Thus we see how the awakening ego-feeling from the West mingles in the soul of Aeschylus with memories of the pictorial imagination of the East, and how from this conjunction drama was born. And it is decidedly interesting to find that tradition wonderfully confirms the findings derived entirely from spiritual-scientific research.

One remarkable tradition partly acquits Aeschylus of the charge that he had betrayed certain secrets of the Mysteries; he replied that he could not have done so, for he had not been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries. It certainly never was his intention to present anything derived from temple secrets, from which Homer's poems had originated. In fact, he stood somewhat apart from the Mysteries. On the other hand, the story goes that at Syracuse, in Sicily, he had gained knowledge of secrets connected with the emergence of the human ego. This emergence took a particular form in regions where the Orphic devotees cultivated the older form of ode, the hymn, addressed to the divine-spiritual worlds that could no more be seen but only aspired to. In this way art took a step forward. We see it emerging naturally from ancient truths and finding its way to the human ego. Inasmuch as man, after living predominantly in the outer world, took possession of his own inner life, the figures in the Homeric poems became the dramatic characters of Aeschylus; and so, side by side with the epic, drama arose.

Thus we see primeval truths living on in another form in art, and the achievements of ancient clairvoyance reproduced by poetic imagination. And whatever was preserved from ancient times by art was applied to the human personality, to the ego becoming aware of itself.

Now we will take an immense step forward in time—on to the 13th and 14th centuries of the Christian era. Here we encounter the great mediaeval personality who leads us so impressively to the region which the human ego can reach when, by its own endeavours, it ascends to the divine-spiritual world. We come to Dante, whose Divine Comedy (1472) was read and re-read by Goethe. It affected him so strongly that when an acquaintance sent him a new translation of it, he wrote his thanks to the sender in verse:

Great gratitude is due to him
Who brings us freshly to this book once more,
The book which in a glorious manner makes us cease
All our searchings and complaints.⁶⁴

How did art progress from Aeschylus to Dante? How does Dante bring before us a divine-spiritual world once again? How does Dante lead us through its three stages, Inferno, Purgatory and Heaven—the worlds which lie behind our physical existence?

Here we can see how the fundamental spiritual impulse that guides human evolution has continued to work in the same direction. Aeschylus, quite clearly, is still in touch with spiritual powers. Prometheus is confronted by the gods, Zeus, Hermes and so on, and this applies also to Agamemnon. In all this we can discern an echo of the ancient clairvoyance. With Dante it is quite different. He shows us how, solely through immersing himself in his own soul, developing the forces slumbering there and overcoming all the obstacles to this development, he was able, as he says, in “the middle of life”—which means his thirty-fifth year—to gaze into the spiritual world. Where as men endowed with the old clairvoyance directed their gaze to their spiritual environment, and whereas Aeschylus still reckoned with the old divinities, in Dante we see a poet who goes down into his own soul and remains entirely within his personality and its inner secrets. By pursuing this path of personal development he enters the spiritual world, and is thus able to present it in the powerful pictures we find in the Divine Comedy. Here the soul of Dante is quite alone with his personality; he is not concerned with external revelations. No one can imagine that Dante could have taken over from tradition the findings of the old clairvoyance. Dante relies on the inner development that was possible in the Middle Ages, with the strength of human personality as its only aid; and he brings before us in visionary pictures something often emphasised here—that a man has to master everything that clouds or darkens his clairvoyant sight. Whereas the Greeks still saw realities in the spiritual world, Dante here sees pictures only—pictures of the soul-forces which have to be overcome. Such are those lower forces of the sentient soul, the intellectual soul and the consciousness soul which tend to hold the ego back from higher stages of development. The good, opposite forces were already indicated by Plato: wisdom for the consciousness soul, self-reliant courage for the intellectual soul, moderation for the sentient-soul. When the ego goes through a development which enlists these good forces, it comes gradually to higher soul experience which lead into the spiritual world; but the hindrances must first be overcome.

Moderation works against intemperance and greed, and Dante shows how this shadow-side of the sentient soul can be met and mastered.

He depicts it as a she-wolf. We are then shown how the shadow-side of the intellectual soul, senseless aggression, depicted as a lion, can be overcome by its corresponding virtue, self-reliant courage. Finally we come to wisdom, the virtue of the consciousness soul. Wisdom which fails to strive towards the heights, but applies itself to the world in the form of mere shrewdness and cunning, is pictured as a lynx. The “lynx-eyes” are not the eyes of wisdom, able to gaze into the spiritual world, but eyes focused only on the world of the senses. After Dante has shown how he guards against the forces which hinder inner development, he describes how he ascends into the world which lies behind physical existence.

In Dante we have a man who relies upon himself, searches within himself, and draws from out of himself the forces which lead into the spiritual world. With him, poetry takes closer hold of the human soul and becomes more intimately related to the human ego. Homer's characters are woven into the doings of the divine-spiritual powers, as indeed Homer felt himself to be, so that he says: “Let the Muse sing the story I have to tell.” Dante, alone with his soul, knows that the forces which will lead him into the spiritual world must be drawn from within himself. We can see how it becomes less and less possible for imagination to depend on external influences. A small fact will show that on this point we are concerned not with mere opinions but with forces deeply rooted in the human soul. Gottlieb Friedrich Klopstock⁶⁵ was a deeply religious man and a profounder spirit even than Homer. He wished to write a sacred epic poem, with the conscious intention of doing for modern times what Homer did for antiquity. He sought to revive Homer's manner, but without being untrue to himself. Hence he could not say, “Sing for me, O Muse,” but had to open his Messias with the words: “Sing, immortal soul, of the redemption of sinful man.” Thus we see how progress in artistic creation does indeed occur among men.

Now let us take a further giant stride over several centuries, from Dante to another great poet, Shakespeare. Here again we see a remarkable step forward in the sense of a progression. We are not concerned with criticism of Shakespeare or with setting one poet above another, but solely with facts that point to a necessary, legitimate advance.

What was it about Dante that specially impressed us? He stands there by himself, with his own revelations of the spiritual world, and describes the great experience that came to him from within his own soul. Can you imagine that Dante would have given so effective expression to the truth as he saw it if he had described his visions five or six times over in various ways? Do you not feel that the world into which Dante has transposed himself is such that it can be described once only? That is indeed what Dante did. The world he describes is the world of one man at the moment when he feels himself to be at one with what the spiritual world is for him. Hence we must say: Dante immerses himself in the element of human personality, and in such a way that it remains his own. And he sets himself to traverse this human-personal aspect from all sides.

Shakespeare, on the other hand, creates an abundance of all possible characters—a Lear, Hamlet, Cordelia, Desdemona; but we have no direct perception of anything divine behind these characters, when the spiritual eye beholds them in the physical world, with their purely human qualities and impulses. We look only for what comes directly from their souls in the form of thinking, feeling and willing. They are all distinct individuals, but can we recognise Shakespeare himself in them, in the way that Dante is always Dante when he immerses himself in his own personality? No—Shakespeare has taken another step forward. He penetrates still further into the personal element, but not only into one personality but into a wide variety of personalities. Shakespeare denies himself whenever he describes Lear, Hamlet and so on; he is never tempted into presenting his own ideas, for as Shakespeare he is completely blotted out; he lives entirely in the various characters he creates. The experiences described by Dante are those of one person; Shakespeare shows us impulses arising from the inner ego in the widest diversity of characters. Dante's starting-point is human personality; he remains within it and from there he explores the spiritual world. Shakespeare has gone a step further: he, too, starts from his own personality and slips into the individuals he portrays; he is wholly immersed in them. It is not his own soul-life that he dramatises, but the lives of the characters in the outer world that he presents on the stage, and they are all depicted as independent persons with their own motives and aims.

Thus we can see here, again, how the evolution of art proceeds. Having originated in the remote past, when human consciousness was devoid of ego-feeling, with Dante, art reached the stage of embracing individual man, so that the ego itself became a world. With Shakespeare, it expanded so far that other egos became the poet's world. For this step to be possible, art had to leave the spiritual heights from which it had sprung and descend into the actualities of physical existence. And this is just what we can see happening when we pass on from Dante to Shakespeare. Let us try to compare Dante and Shakespeare from this point of view.

Superficial critics may reproach Dante for being a didactic poet. Anyone who understands Dante and can respond to the whole range and richness of his work will feel that his greatness derives precisely from the fact that all the wisdom and philosophy of the Middle Ages speak from his soul. And for the development of such a soul, endowed with Dante's poetic power, the totality of mediaeval wisdom was a necessary foundation. Its influence worked first on Dante's soul and was again evident, later on, in the expansion of his personality into a world. We cannot properly understand or appreciate Dante's poetic creation unless we are familiar with the heights of mediaeval spiritual life. Only then can we come to appreciate the depths and subtleties of his achievement.

Certainly, Dante took one step downwards. He sought to bring the spiritual down to lower levels, and this he did by writing in the vernacular, not in Latin as some of his predecessors had done. He ascends to the loftiest heights of spiritual life, but descends into the physical world as far as the vernacular of his place and time.

Shakespeare descends still further. The origin of his great poetic characters is nowadays the subject of all sorts of fanciful speculation, but if we are to understand this descent of poetry into the everyday world—still often looked down on by the highly placed—we must bear in mind the following facts.

We must picture a small theatre in what was then a suburb of London, where plays were produced by actors who, except for Shakespeare, would not be rated highly today. Who went to this theatre? The lower orders. It was more fashionable in those days to patronise cockfights and other similar spectacles than to go to this theatre, where people ate and drank and threw eggshells to mark their disapproval and overflowed on to the stage itself, so that the players acted in the midst of their audience. Thus it was before a very low-class London public that these plays were first performed, although many people today fondly imagine that from the first they were acclaimed in the highest circles of cultural life. At best, unmarried sons, who allowed themselves to visit certain obscure resorts in disguise, would go now and then to this theatre, but for respectable people it would have been highly improper. Hence we can see that poetry came down into a realm of the most unsophisticated feelings.

Nothing human was alien to the genius who stood behind Shakespeare's plays and the characters in them. So it happened—in respect even of external details—that art, after having been a narrow stream flowing on high levels, descended into the world of ordinary humanity and broadened into a wide stream running through the midst of everyday life. And anyone who looks more deeply into this will see how necessary it was that a lofty spiritual stream should be brought down to lower levels in order that such vital figures as Shakespeare's highly individual characters should appear.

Now we will move on to times nearer our own—to Goethe. We will try to connect him with his own creation—the figure of Faust, in whom were embodied all his ideals, endeavours and renunciations during the sixty years he worked on his masterpiece. Everything he experienced in his innermost soul in the course of his rich life, while he climbed from stage to stage of knowledge in his search for higher answers to the riddles of the world—all this is merged in the figure of Faust that we encounter today. What sort of figure is he in the context of Goethe's poetic drama?

Of Dante we can say that what he describes is portrayed as the fruit of his own vision. Goethe had no such vision: he makes no claim to having had a special revelation at a particularly solemn time, as Dante does with regard to the Divine Comedy. Everywhere in Faust Goethe shows that he has worked inwardly on what he presents. And whereas the experiences that came to Dante could be described only in his own one-sided way, Goethe's experiences were no less individual but they were translated into the objective character of Faust. Dante gives us his most intimate personal experience; Goethe, too, had personal experiences, but the actions and sufferings of Faust are not those of Goethe's life. They are free poetic transformation of what Goethe had experienced in his own soul. While Dante can be identified with his Divine Comedy, it would take almost a literary historian to identify Goethe with Faust. Faust is an individual character, but we cannot imagine that an array of Faust-like figures could have been created, as numerous as the characters created by Shakespeare. The ego depicted by Goethe in his Faust can be created once only. Besides Hamlet, Shakespeare created Lear, Othello, and so on. Goethe, it is true, also wrote Tasso and Iphigenia, but the difference between them and Faust is obvious. Faust is not Goethe; fundamentally he is every-man. He embodies Goethe's deepest longings, but as a poetic figure his is entirely detached from Goethe's own personality. Dante brings before us the vision of one man, himself; Faust is a character who in a certain sense lives in each one of us. This marks a further advance for poetry up to Goethe.

Shakespeare could create characters so individualised that he immersed himself in them and enabled each one of them to speak with a distinctive voice. Goethe creates in Faust an individualised figure, but Faust is not a single individual; he is every-man. Shakespeare entered into the soul-natures of Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Cordelia and so on. Goethe entered into the highest human element in all men. Hence he creates a representative character relevant to all men. And this character detaches himself from Goethe's personality as a poet, and stands before us as a real objective figure in the outer world.

Here is a further advance of art along the path we have outlined. Starting from the direct spiritual perception of a higher world, art takes hold of man's inner life to an ever-increasing degree. It does so most intimately when—as with Dante—a man is dealing with himself alone. In Shakespeare's plays the ego goes out from this inwardness and enters other souls. With Goethe, the ego goes out and immerses itself in the soul-life of every-man, typified by Faust. And because the ego is able to go out from itself and understand other souls only if it develops its own soul-powers and sinks itself in another's spirituality, so it is in line with the continued advance in artistic creation that Goethe should have been led to depict not only physical acts and experiences in the outer world, but also the spiritual events that everyone can experience if he opens his ego to the spiritual world.

Poetry came from the spiritual world and entered the human ego; with Dante it took hold of the ego at the deepest level of the inner life. With Goethe we see the ego going forth from itself again and finding its way to the spiritual world.

The spiritual experiences of ancient humanity are reflected in the Iliad and the Odyssey; and in Goethe's Faust the spiritual world comes forth again and stands before man. That is how we should respond to the great final tableau in Faust, where man, after having descended into the depths, works his way up again by developing his inner forces until the spiritual world stands open to him once more. It is like a chorus of primal tones, but ever-renewed in ever-advancing forms. From the imperishable spiritual world resounds the imagination, bestowed on man as a substitute for spiritual vision and given form in the perishable creations of human genius. Out of the imperishable were born the perishable poetic figures created by Homer and Aeschylus. Once more poetry ascends from the perishable to the imperishable, and in the mystical chorus at the very end of Faust we hear:

Everything transient is but a parable ...⁶⁶

And so, as Goethe shows us, the power of man's spirit ascends from the physical world into the spiritual world again.

We have seen artistic consciousness advance with great strides through the world and in representative poets. Art emerges from the spiritual, its original source of knowledge. Spiritual vision withdraws more and more in proportion as the sense-world commands ever-wider attention, thereby stimulating the development of the ego. Human consciousness follows the course of world evolution and so has to make the journey from the spiritual world to the world of the ego and the senses. If man were to study the world of the senses only through the eyes of external science, he would come to understand it only intellectually in scientific terms. But in place of clairvoyance, when this passes away, he is granted imagination, which creates for him a kind of shadowy reflection of what he can no longer perceive. Imagination has had to follow the same path as man, entering eventually into his self-awareness, as with Dante. But the threads that link humanity to the spiritual world can never break, not even when art descends into the isolation of the human ego. Man takes imagination with him on his way; and when Faust appears, we see the spiritual world created anew out of imagination.

Thus Goethe's Faust stands at the beginning of an epoch during which man is to re-enter the spiritual world where art originated. And so the mission of art, for all those who cannot reach the spiritual world through higher training, is to spin the threads that will link the spirituality of the far-distant past with the spirituality of the future. Art has indeed already advanced so far that it can give a view of the spiritual world in imagination, as in the second part of Faust. Here we have an intimation that man in his evolution is at the point when he must learn to develop the powers which will enable him to re-enter the spiritual world and to gain conscious knowledge of it. Moreover, having led man towards the spiritual world with the aid of imagination, art has prepared the way for spiritual science, which presupposes clear vision of the spiritual world, based on full ego-consciousness. To point the way towards that world—the world that human beings long for, as we have seen in the examples drawn from the realm of art—that is the task of spiritual science, and it has been the task also of this winter's lectures.

Thus we see how great artists can be justified in feeling that reflections of the spiritual world are what they have to give to mankind. And the mission of art is to mediate these revelations during the time when direct revelations of the spiritual world were no longer possible. So Goethe could say of the works of the old artists: “There is necessity, there is God!” They bring to light the hidden laws of nature which would otherwise never be found. And so could Richard Wagner say that in the music of the Ninth Symphony he could hear revelations of another world—a world which a mainly intellectual consciousness can never reach. The great artists have felt that they are bearers of the spirit, the original source of everything human, from the past, through the present, into the future. And so with deep understanding we can agree with words spoken by a poet who felt himself to be an artist: “The dignity of mankind is given into your hands.”⁶⁷

In this way we have tried to describe the nature and mission of art in the course of human evolution, and to show that art is not as separate from man's sense of truth as people today may lightly suppose. On the contrary, Goethe was right when he refused to speak of the idea of truth and the idea of beauty as separate ideas. There is, he said, one idea, that of the necessary workings of the divine-spiritual in the world, and truth and beauty are two revelations of it.

Everywhere among poets and other artists we find agreement with the thought that the spiritual foundations of human existence find utterance in art: or there are artists with deeper feelings who will tell you that art makes it possible for them to believe that their work carries a message to mankind from the spiritual world. And so, even when artists are most personal in expression, they feel that their art is raised to a universal human level, and that in a true sense they speak for humanity when the characters and revelations of their art give effect to the words spoken by Goethe's Mystical Chorus:

Everything transient is but a parable ...

And on the strength of our spiritual-scientific considerations we may add: Art is called upon to transfuse the transient and the perishable with the light of the eternal, the imperishable. That is the mission of art.

• 59. Baruch Spinoza, 1632–1677. For Goethe's relationship to Spinoza cf. Goethe's description in Dichtung und Wahrheit, Part III Book 14.
• 60. Johann Heinrich Merck, 1741–1791. Writer.
• 61. See Italienische Reise, Rome, 6th September 1787.
• 62. See Goethe, “Sprüche in Prosa”, in: Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, ed. Rudolf Steiner, reprint Dornach 1975, vol. V, p. 495.
• 63. Cf. “Beethoven,” 1870, in vol. XI of Wagner's Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen.
• 64. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Zahme Xenien VIII, dated 23rd July 1824.
• 65. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, 1724–1803. He concluded his “Messias” in 1773.
• 66. Concluding lines to Goethe's Faust (Faust II, 1. 12, 104ff.).
• 67. Friedrich von Schiller in the poem “Die Künstler”.

This lecture is also known as Spiritual Science and Language. It appears as lecture 2 of 9 in the lecture series: Metamorphoses of the Soul, Paths of Experience – 2. The original German is included in: Metamorphosen des Seelenlebens. Pfade der Seelen Erlebnisse. Zweiter Teil (#59 in the Bibliographical Survey, 1961.)

It is fascinating to study from the point of view of Spiritual Science the different ways in which the being of man expresses itself,—that is to say Spiritual Science in our sense of the term. We can obtain a general survey of human life in its different phases and aspects by studying them as we have done in the course of these lectures.

To-day we shall consider the expression of the spirit of man in speech, and in the next lecture, under the title of ‘Laughter and Weeping,’ an aspect of man’s power of expression which is indeed bound up with speech and yet fundamentally different from it.

The whole being of man, his whole significance and dignity, is bound up with speech. Our innermost life, all our feelings and will-impulses flow out from us, linking us to our fellow-men through speech which enables us to expand and radiate into our environment. On the other hand, those who dare to penetrate into the inner life of some great individuality may feel that human speech is a kind of tyrant that exercises its power over the inner life. We are indeed aware, if we are only willing to admit it, that word and speech can only inadequately express the feelings, the thoughts, and all the intimate and individual colouring of everything that passes through the soul. We also realise that our own native language compels us to a definite kind of thinking. Do we not all realise how dependent our thinking is upon our speech? In more senses than one our concepts attach themselves to words, and an imperfectly developed man may easily mistake the word, or what the word infuses into him, for the concept. This is why so many people are incapable of building up a conceptual world of their own transcending what is imparted by the words current around them. We must surely realise that the character of a whole people speaking a common language is in a certain sense dependent on that language. Anyone who studies the more intimate connections between the characteristics of race and speech knows to what an extent the way a man is able to express the content of his soul in sound reacts upon the strength and weakness of his character, upon his temperament, indeed upon his whole outlook on life. Those who have knowledge will be able to learn a great deal about the character of a people from the configuration of their particular speech or language. Since, however, a language is common to a whole people, the individual is dependent on the community and on its average level. The individual is subject, as it were, to the tyranny and power of the community. But when we realise how our individual spiritual life on the one hand, and the common spiritual life on the other, are expressed in speech, the so-called ‘Mystery of Speech’ assumes great significance.

It is certainly possible to understand something of the life of the soul by observing how a man expresses himself in words. The mystery of speech and its origin and development through the different epochs has always been a problem in certain domains of Science, but it cannot be said that specialists in our age have been very successful in fathoming this mystery. To-day, therefore, we shall try in a somewhat aphoristic manner, to throw light on the development of speech and its connection with the human being, from the point of view of Spiritual Science.

What at first seems so mysterious when we designate an object or a process by a word, is how the particular sound-combination in the word or sentence is related to what comes forth from us, and how it expresses the phenomenon as a word. External Science has made many attempts to bring the most varied experiences together in different combinations, but this mode of observation has been felt to be unsatisfactory. There is one question which is really so simple, and yet so difficult to answer: how was it that man, confronted with something in the external world, produced, as from out of himself, an echo of the particular object or process in a definite sound?

Some people thought this question quite simple. They imagined, for instance, that speech-formation took its start from the fact that man heard some external sound, either produced by animals, or caused by the impact of one object against another, and that he then imitated the sound through the inner faculty of speech, like a child, who, hearing the ‘bow-wow’ of a dog, imitates this sound and calls the dog ‘bow-wow.’ Word-formation of this kind may be called ‘onomatopoeia,’ an imitation of the sound. This kind of imitation was the basis of the original sound and word formation,—at least so it was stated by those who regarded the matter from this particular point of view. The question is of course still unanswered as to how man comes to give names to dumb entities from which no sound proceeds. How does he ascend from the sound uttered by an animal or caused by an occurrence which can be heard, to one which cannot? Max Müller, the famous Philologist, ridiculed this, calling it the ‘bow-wow’ theory, because he realised what an unsatisfactory piece of speculation it was. He advanced another theory in its place which his opponents in turn called ‘mystical,’ though they used the word in an unjustifiable sense. Max Müller really means that every single thing contains something of the nature of sound within itself; everything has sound in a certain sense, not only a glass we let fall, or a bell we strike, but every single thing. Man’s capacity to set up a relationship between his soul and the inner sound-essence of the object calls forth in the soul the power to express this inner sound-essence; the inner essence of the bell is expressed in some way when we ‘feel again’ its tone in the ‘ding-dong.’ Max Müller's opponents ridiculed him in return by calling his the ‘ding-dong’ theory. However many more combinations of this kind we might care to enumerate,—and they have been evolved with great diligence,—we should find that the attempts to characterise in this external way what man causes to resound like an echo from his soul to meet the essence of things, must always be unsatisfactory. We must, in effect, penetrate more deeply into the whole inner being of man.

According to Spiritual Science man is a highly complex being. As he stands before us he has in the first place his physical body, which contains substances which are also found in the mineral world. As a second, higher member he has the etheric, or life body. Then he has the member which is the vehicle of joy and suffering, pleasure and pain, instinct, desire and passion,—the astral body. This astral body is, to Spiritual Science, as real a part of man's constitution as anything the eyes can see and the hands touch. The fourth member of the human being has been spoken of as the bearer of the Ego, and man's evolution, at its present stage, consists in working, from his Ego outwards, as it were, at the transformation of the other three members of his being. It has also been indicated that in a far-off future the human Ego will have transformed these three members to such an extent that nothing will remain of what Nature, or the spiritual powers existing in Nature, have made of them.

The astral body, the vehicle of pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, of all ebbing and flowing ideas, feelings and perceptions, came into existence in the first place without our co-operation,—that is to say, without the activity of our Ego. The Ego works upon the astral body, purifying and refining it, gaining mastery over its qualities and activities. If the Ego has worked but little on the astral body, man is the slave of his instincts and desires. If, however, the Ego has refined the instincts and desires into virtues, has co-ordinated phantasmal thinking by the guiding threads of logic, a portion of the astral body is transformed. Whereas formerly it was not worked upon by the Ego, it has become a product of the Ego. When the Ego carries out this work consciously,—as it is beginning to do in human evolution to-day,—we call the part of the astral body which has been consciously transformed from out of the Ego, ‘Spirit Self,’ or ‘Manas,’ to use a term of Oriental Philosophy. When the Ego works in a different and more intense way, not only upon the astral body, but also upon the etheric body, we call the part of the etheric body which has been thus transmuted the ‘Life Spirit’ or ‘Budhi’ in Eastern terminology. And finally, although this belongs to the far-off future, when the Ego has become so strong that it transmutes the physical body and regulates its laws,—in such a way that the Ego is everywhere controlling all that lives in the physical body,—we give the name of ‘Spirit Man’ to that part of the physical body thus under the rulership of the Ego; and since this work begins with a regulation of the breathing process, the oriental term is ‘Atman,’ from which the German ‘atmen’ (to breathe) is derived.

In the first place, then, we have man as a fourfold being, consisting of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. And just as we may speak of three of the members of our being as being products of the past, so may we speak of three other members which as a result of the work of the Ego will gradually unfold in the future. Thus we speak of a sevenfold nature of the human being, adding Spirit Self, Life Spirit and Spirit Man to physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. But although we regard these three higher principles as belonging to a far-off future of human evolution, it must be said that in a certain sense man is preparing for them even to-day. Man will only begin consciously to transform the physical, etheric and astral bodies by means of the Ego in a distant future, but unconsciously, that is to say, without full consciousness, the dim activity of the Ego has already transformed these three members. A certain result has indeed already been achieved.

Those inner members of man's being mentioned in previous lectures could only have come into existence because the work of the Ego upon the astral body has resulted in the development of the sentient soul as a kind of inner reflection of the sentient body. The sentient body conveys what we call ‘enjoyment’ (Genuss) and this is reflected in the inner soul-being as the desires we ascribe to the soul. (Sentient body and astral body are the same thing so far as man is concerned; without the sentient body there could be no ‘enjoyment.’) Thus astral body, and transformed astral body, or sentient soul, belong together in the same sense as enjoyment and desires. The Ego has also worked on the etheric body in the past. What it has unfolded there has brought about the fact that in his inner being man bears the intellectual, or mind-soul. The intellectual soul, which is also the bearer of the memory, is connected with a subconscious process of transformation of the etheric body proceeding from the Ego. And finally, the Ego has in past ages already worked at the transformation of the physical body in order that man may exist in his present form. The product of this is called the consciousness soul, through which man acquires knowledge of the things of the outer world. In this sense too, therefore, we may speak of the sevenfold human being: the three soul members, sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul have arisen as the result of a preparatory, subconscious. Ego activity. But here the Ego has worked unconsciously or subconsciously, upon its sheaths.

Now we must ask: are not these three members, physical body, etheric body and astral body complicated entities? It is a most marvellous structure, this physical body of man! Closer examination would show that it contains far more than the mere portion which has been elaborated by the Ego into the consciousness soul, and which may be called the physical vehicle of the consciousness soul. Again, the etheric body is much more complicated than the vehicle of the intellectual or mind soul, and the astral body more complicated than the vehicle of the sentient soul. These elements are poor in comparison with what was already in existence before man possessed an Ego. Therefore Spiritual Science teaches us that in a primordial past the first germ of man's physical body was brought into existence by Spiritual Beings. To this was added the etheric body, then the astral body, and finally the Ego. The physical body of man has thus passed through four evolutionary stages. First of all the physical body existed in direct correspondence with the spiritual world, then it was elaborated, permeated and interwoven with the etheric body, and grew more complicated. Then it was permeated by the astral body and grew more complicated still. Then the Ego was added, and only when the Ego had worked on the physical body was a portion transformed into the vehicle of so-called ‘human consciousness,’ the faculty by which man acquires a knowledge of the external world. But this physical body has to do a great deal more than create a knowledge of the external world through the senses and brain. It has to carry out a number of activities lying at the basis of consciousness but taking their course entirely outside the region of the brain. And so it is with the etheric and astral bodies.

When we realise that all around us in the external world is Spirit, that Spirit is at the basis of everything material, etheric, astral, we must say: just as the Ego itself, as a spiritual being works from within outwards while man's evolution proceeds in the three members of his being, so must Spiritual Beings, or spiritual activities, if you will, have worked upon his physical, etheric and astral bodies before the Ego asserted itself and elaborated a further fragment of what had already been prepared. Here we look back to past ages when an activity proceeding from without inwards was exercised upon the astral, etheric and physical bodies, just as now the Ego works from within outwards upon these three members. Thus it must be said that spiritual creation, spiritual activity has been at work on our sheaths, imparting form, movement, shape and so on before the Ego was able to take root therein. We must speak of the existence of spiritual activities in human beings preceding the activity of the Ego. We bear within us spiritual activities which are necessary preliminaries to those of the Ego and which were in operation before the Ego could intervene. Let us then for the moment eliminate all that has been elaborated by the Ego from the three members of our being (sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul) and consider the structure, inner movement and activity of the sheaths of the human being. Before the activity of the Ego, a spiritual activity was exercised upon us. Therefore in Spiritual Science we say that in man as he is to-day we have to do with an individual soul, with a soul permeated by an Ego which makes each single human being into an individuality complete in itself. We say that before man became this complete Ego-being, he was the product of a ‘Group-Soul,’ of a soul essence, just as we speak of Group-Souls to-day in the animal world. The individual soul in the human being is, in the animal kingdom, at the basis of a whole family or species. A whole animal species has one common animal Group-Soul. In man, the Soul is individualised.

Thus before man became an individual soul, another soul worked in the three members of his being. This other soul—which we can only learn to know to-day through Spiritual Science—is the predecessor of our own Ego. This predecessor of the Ego, man's Group- or Species-Soul which gave over to the Ego the three members it had already elaborated, physical body, etheric body, astral body, in order that the Ego might further work upon them,—this Group-Soul similarly transformed, developed and regulated the three bodies from its inner centre. And the last activity which worked upon the human being before the bestowal of the Ego, the last influences immediately preceding the birth of the Ego, are to-day expressed in human speech. If, therefore, we take our start from our life of consciousness, intelligence and feeling, and look back to what has preceded this inner life, we are led to a soul activity as yet unpermeated by the Ego, the result of which is to-day expressed in speech.

Now let us consider this fourfold being of ours, and what lies at its foundation. How is it expressed outwardly in the physical body? The physical body of a plant has a different appearance from that of a man. Why is this so? It is because the plant possesses only physical body and etheric body, whereas in the physical body of man astral body and Ego are working as well. And what is inwardly working there correspondingly forms and transforms the physical. What is it, then, that has worked in man's physical body in such a way that it has become permeated by an etheric or life body?

The system of veins and glands is, in the human being and also in the animal, the outer physical expression of the etheric or life body; that is to say, the etheric body is the architect or moulder of the system of veins and glands. The astral body, again, moulds the nervous system. Therefore it is only correct to speak of a nervous system in the case of beings possessing an astral body.

And what is the expression of the Ego in man? It is the blood system, and, in the human being, the blood which is under the influence of the inner, vital warmth. Everything that the Ego brings about in man, if it is to be moulded into the physical body, proceeds by way of the blood. Therefore it is that blood is such ‘a very peculiar fluid.’ When the Ego has elaborated the sentient soul, intellectual soul and consciousness soul, all that it is able to shape and fashion can only penetrate to the physical body by way of the blood. The blood is the medium for all the activities of astral body and Ego.

Nobody will doubt, even if he only observes human life superficially, that as man works from his Ego in the consciousness soul, intellectual soul and sentient soul, he is also transforming and changing the physical body. The facial expression is surely an elaboration of what is working and living in the inner being. And is there anyone who would not admit that the inner activity of thought, if it lays hold of the whole soul, has a transforming effect on the brain, throughout the course of human life? Our brain adapts itself to our thinking; it is an instrument that moulds itself according to the requirements of our thinking. But, if we observe to what extent man is to-day able to mould his external being artistically from out of his Ego, we shall see that it is indeed very little. We can accomplish very little through the blood by setting it in movement from the “inner warmth.” The Spiritual Beings, whose activity preceded the activity of the Ego could do much more. They had a more effective medium at their disposal, and under their influence, man's form was so moulded that it has become, on the whole, an expression of what these Spiritual Beings made of him. What was the medium in which they worked? It was the air. Just as we work in the inner warmth, making our blood pulsate and thus bringing it to activity within our own form,—so did these Spiritual Beings work with regard to the air. Our true human form is the result of the work of these Beings upon us through the medium of the air.

It may appear strange to say that spiritual activities worked upon man through the air in a far-off past. I have already said that we should not understand our own inner life of soul and spirit if we were to conceive of it merely as so many concepts and ideas, if we did not know that it has been bestowed by the whole external world. Anyone who stated that concepts and ideas arise within man, even though there may be no ideas in the external world, might just as well say that he can obtain water from an empty glass. Our concepts would be so much froth if they were anything else than what is living in the objects outside us and the laws within them. The elements brought to life in the soul are drawn from the world around us. We may say, therefore, that everything around us in the material world is permeated and woven through by Spiritual Beings. However strange it may appear, the air around us is not merely the substance revealed by Chemistry; spiritual beings, spiritual activities are working within it. Through the blood warmth proceeding from the Ego (for that is the essential point), we can to a very small extent mould our physical body. The spiritual beings preceding the Ego performed mighty things in the outer form of our physical body through the medium of the air. That is the important thing.

It is the form of the larynx, and all that is connected with it, that makes us man. This marvellous organ and its relation to the other instruments of speech has been elaborated artistically out of the spiritual element of the air. Goethe said so beautifully in speaking of the eye: “The eye has formed itself from the light, for the light.” To say in the sense of Schopenhauer that “without an eye sensitive to the light, the impression of the light would not exist for us,” is only half a truth. The other half is that we should have no eyes if the light, in a primordial past, had not plastically elaborated the eye from undifferentiated organs. In the light, therefore, we must not merely see the abstract essence described to-day by Physical Science as light; we have to seek in the light the hidden essence that is able to create an eye.

In another sphere, it is the same thing as if we were to say that the air is permeated and ensouled by a Being who at a certain epoch was able to mould in man the highly artistic organ of the larynx and all that is related to it. All the rest of the human form,—down to the smallest details,—has been so formed and plastically moulded that at the present stage man is, so to speak, a further elaboration of his organs of speech. The organs of speech are fundamental to the human form. Hence, it is speech that raises man above the animal. The Spiritual Being whom we call the “Spirit of the Air,” has indeed worked in and moulded the animal nature, but the activity did not reach the point of development of a speech organism such as is possessed by man. With the exception, for example, of what has been elaborated unconsciously by the Ego in the brain and in the perfecting of the senses,—everything, that is, except the products of Ego activity,—has proceeded from a higher activity preceding that of the human Ego, whose purpose it was to create man's body out of a further elaboration of his organs of speech. There is no time now to explain why the birds, for instance, in spite of their perfection of song, have remained at a stage where their form cannot, be an expression of the organs of speech.

So far, then, as the instruments of speech are concerned, man was already inwardly organised before he arrived at the stage of thinking, feeling and willing as he does to-day. These latter processes are connected with the Ego. We can now understand that the higher Spiritual activities, having created the astral, etheric and physical bodies through the influences of the air, could only so mould the physical body that it ultimately became a kind of appendage of man's instruments of speech. When man had been thus presented with an organ responding to the so-called “Spirit of the Air” (in the same sense as the eye responds to the spiritual essence of the light), his Ego could project into this organ its own functions of intelligence, consciousness and feeling. A threefold subconscious activity,—an activity in the physical, etheric and astral bodies precedes the activity of the Ego. A keystone for the understanding of this is our knowledge that it was due to the “Group-soul,” which has, of course, worked upon the animal also, but imperfectly. This must be taken into consideration in our study of the spiritual activity in the astral body preceding that of the Ego. In such a study, we must eliminate any conception of the Ego itself, but bear in mind all that has been brought about by the Group-Ego from mysterious depths of being. Desire and enjoyment, in an imperfect, chaotic condition, confront each other in the astral body. Desire could become a soul-quality, could be transformed into an inner faculty, because it already had a precursor in the astral body of man.

Similarly, the capacity for the formation of pictures, a symbol-creating faculty, inheres, in the etheric body, confronting outer stimuli. A distinction must be made between this pre-Ego activity of the etheric body and the Ego activity itself. When the Ego is functioning as intellectual soul, it seeks, at the present stage of human development, to present as Truth what is the most faithful image of external objects. Anything that does not correspond to outer objects is said to be ‘untrue.’ The spiritual activities preceding the operations of the Ego did not function in this way; they were more symbolical, picture-like, more or less like a dream. We may dream, for instance, that a shot is fired, and on waking find that a chair beside the bed has fallen down. The outer event and impression (the falling chair) are transformed in the dream into a sense image, the shot. The spiritual beings preceding the Ego “symbolised,” and this is what we ourselves do when we rise to higher spiritual activity through Initiation. At that stage, we try, but with full consciousness, to work our way from the merely abstract outer world into a symbolising, imaginative activity.

These spiritual beings worked yet further on the human physical body, making man into an expression of the correspondence between outer happenings or facts, and imitation. In the child, for instance, we find imitation when the other members of the soul are as yet but little developed. Imitation is a process belonging to the subconscious essence of man's nature. Therefore, early education should be based on imitation, for it exists as a natural impulse in the human being before the Ego begins to regulate the inner activities of soul. The impulse to imitate in presence of outer activities, in the physical body, the symbolising process in the etheric body in response to outer stimuli, and the so-called correspondence between desire and enjoyment in the astral body,—all these things must be thought of as elaborated through the agency of the air. Their plastic, artistic impression has been worked into the larynx and the whole apparatus of speech. The Beings who preceded the Ego, then, formed and moulded man in this threefold sense, and thus the air can come to expression in the human being.

When we study the faculty of speech in the true sense we must ask: is speech the “tone” that we produce? No, it is not. Our Ego sets in movement, and gives form to what has been moulded and incorporated in us through the air. Just as we set the eye in movement in order to receive the light that is working externally (the eye itself is there for the reception of light), so, within ourselves, from out of the Ego, those organs which have been elaborated from the spiritual essence of the air are set in movement; and then we must wait until the spirit of the air itself sounds back to us as the echo of our own “air activity,”—the tone. We do not produce the tone any more than the single parts of a flute produce the tone. We produce from our own being, the activity which the Ego is able to develop by using the organs which have been elaborated from out the spirit of the air. Then it must be left to the spirit of the air to set the air in movement again, by means of the same activity which has produced the organs. Thus the word sounds forth.

Human speech is founded on the threefold correspondence, of which I have spoken. But what is it that must correspond? Upon what has imitation to be based in the physical body? Imitation in the physical body must be based upon the fact that, in the movements of our vocal organs, we imitate the outer activities and objects which we perceive and which make an impression upon us; that we produce the echo of what we have in the first place heard echoing as tone, imitating through the physical body the thing that has made an external impression upon us. The painter imitates a scene which is made up of quite other elements than colour and canvas, light and shade. Just as the painter imitates by manipulating light and shade, so do we imitate what comes to us from outside, by setting our organs in movement, imitatively,—organs which have been elaborated out of the element of the air. What we bring forth in the sound, is therefore an actual imitation of the essential being of things. Our consonants and vowels are nothing but reflections and imitations of impressions from outside.

In the etheric body, we have a picture-forming, symbolising activity. Hence we can understand that although the earliest beginnings of our speech arose through imitation, a development took place in that the process tore itself loose, as it were, from the external impressions, and was then further elaborated. In symbolism,—as in the dream,—the etheric body elaborates something that no longer resembles the outer impressions, and the continued operation of the sound, consists in this. First of all, the etheric body works upon something that is mere imitation; this mere imitation is transformed by it, and becomes an independent process. So that what we have inwardly elaborated, corresponds only in a symbolical sense, as sense-imagery, to the outer impressions. Our activity is no longer merely imitative.

Finally, there is a third element,—desire, emotion, everything that lives inwardly. This expresses itself in the astral body, and works in such a way, that it gives further form to the tone. These inner experiences stream from within outwards into the tone. Sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain, desire, wish,—all these things flow into it, and impart to it a subjective element. First there is the process of mere imitation. This is further developed as speech symbolism in the tone- or word-picture that has become an independent entity, and this is now again transformed by being permeated with man's inner experiences of sorrow and joy, pleasure and pain, horror, fright and so forth. It must always be an outer correspondence that first wrests itself from the soul, in the tone. But when the soul expresses its experiences, and allows them to sound forth, as it were, it has first to seek for the corresponding outer experience. The third element, then, where pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, horror and so on, express themselves inwardly, psychically, in the tone, has first to seek for its correspondence. In imitation there is an after-copy of the external impression; the inner tone-picture, the symbol that has arisen, is the next development; but what man allows to sound forth, merely from inner joy, pain, and so on, would only be a radiation or emanation to which nothing could correspond.

When children learn to speak, we can continually observe the correspondence between outer being and inner experience. The child begins to translate something it feels into sound. When it cries “Mamma,” “Papa,” this is nothing but an inner transfusion of emotion into sound, the externalisation of an inward element. When the child expresses itself thus, its mother comes to it and the child notices that an outer occurrence corresponds to the expression of joy poured into the sound “Mamma.” Naturally, the child does not ask how it happens that in this case its mother comes to it. The inner experience of joy, or pain, associates itself with the outer impression. This is the third way in which speech operates.

It may therefore be said that speech has arisen just as much from without, inwards, through imitation, as through the association of external reality with the expression of the inner being. What has led to the formation of the words “Mamma,” “Papa,” from the expression of the inner being, which feels satisfaction when the mother comes, occurs in innumerable cases. Wherever the human being perceives that something happens as the result of an inner utterance, the expression of the inner being unites itself with the external fact.

All this takes place without the co-operation of the Ego. The Ego only later takes over this activity. Thus we can see how an activity, preceding that of the Ego, worked at the configuration which lies at the basis of man's faculty of expression in speech. And because the Ego makes its entrance after the foundations for speech have already been created, speech, in turn, accommodates itself to the nature of the Ego. As a result, utterances corresponding to the sentient body are permeated with the sentient soul; the pictures and symbols corresponding to the etheric body are permeated with the intellectual soul. Man pours into the sound what he experiences in the intellectual soul, and this was at first, mere imitation. Thus, do those elements of our speech, which are reproductions of inner experiences of the soul, come gradually into existence.

In order, therefore, to understand the essential nature of speech, we must realise that there lives within us, something that was active before the Ego, and any of its activities were there; into this, the Ego afterwards poured what it is able to elaborate. We must not demand that speech shall exactly correspond to what originates in the Ego, to all the spirituality and intimacies of our individual being. Speech can never be the direct expression of the Ego. The activity of the spirit of speech, is of a symbolical nature in the etheric body, imitative in the physical body. All this in conjunction with what is elaborated by the spirit of speech, from out the sentient soul,—for it projects the inner experiences from that domain, in such a way that we have in the sound an emanation of the inner life,—justifies us in saying that speech has not been elaborated by the methods of the conscious Ego, as we know it to-day. The development of speech, is indeed, only comparable to artistic activity. We cannot demand that speech shall be an exact copy of what it intends to present, any more than we can demand that the artist's imitation shall correspond to reality. Speech only reproduces the external, in the sense in which the artist's picture reproduces it. Before man was a self-conscious spirit, in the modern sense, an artist, working as the spirit of speech, was active. This is a somewhat figurative way of speaking, but it expresses the truth. It is a subconscious activity that has produced the speaking human being, as a work of art. By analogy, speech must be conceived of as a work of art, but we must not forget, that each work of art can only be understood within the scope of that particular art. Speech itself, therefore, must necessarily impose certain limits upon us. If this were taken into consideration, a pedantic effort, like Fritz Mauthner's ‘Critique of Speech,’ would have been impossible from the very outset. In that work, the critique of speech is built upon entirely false premises. When we examine human languages, says Mauthner, we find that they by no means, correctly reproduce the objective reality of things. Yes, but are they intended to do so? Is there any possibility of their doing so? No; no more than it is possible for the picture to reproduce external reality by the colours, lights and shades, on the canvas. The spirit of speech underlying this activity of man, must be conceived in an artistic sense.

It has only been possible to speak of these things in bare outline. But when we know that an Artist, who moulds speech, is at work in humanity, we shall understand that however different the single languages may be, artistic power has been at work in them all. When this ‘spirit of speech,’ as we will now call the being working through the air, has manifested at a comparatively low stage in man, its action has been like that of the atomistic spirit, which would build up everything out of the single particles. It is then possible to build up a language where a whole sentence is composed of single sound-pictures.

When in the Chinese language, for instance, we find the sounds ‘Shi’ and ‘King,’ we have two ‘atoms’ of speech formation, the one syllable ‘Shi,’ or song, and ‘King,’ book. Putting the two sound-pictures together—‘Shi-King,’ we should have the German ‘Liederbuch’ (English, Song-Book). This ‘atomising’ process results in something that is conceived of as one whole, ‘Song-Book.’ That is a small example of how the Chinese language gives form to concepts and ideas.

If we elaborate what has been said to-day, we can understand how to study the spirit of so marvelously constructed a language as the Semitic, for instance. The foundation of the Semitic language lies in certain tone-pictures, consisting really, only of consonants. Into these tone-pictures, vowels are inserted. If, for the mere sake of example we take the consonants q—t—l, and insert an ‘ a ’ and again ‘ a ’, we obtain the word ‘qatal’ (German, töten, to kill), whereas the word consisting of consonants only is the mere imitation of an external sound impression.

This is a remarkable permeation, for ‘qatal,’ to kill, has come into existence as a sound picture, through the fact that the outer happening or event has been imitated by the organs of speech; that is the original sound picture. The soul elaborates this, by adding something that can only be an inner experience. The sound picture is further developed and the killing referred to a subject. Fundamentally speaking, the whole Semitic language has been built up in this way. The working together of the different elements of speech-formation is expressed in the whole construction of the Semitic language, in the symbolising element that is pre-eminently active. The activity of the spirit of speech in the etheric body is revealed in the characteristics of the Semitic language, where all the single, imitated sound-pictures are elaborated and transformed into sense images by the insertion of vowels. All words in the Semitic language are fundamentally so formed, that they are related to the external world, as sense images.

In contrast to this, the elements in the Indo-Germanic languages are stimulated more by the inner expression of the astral body, of the inner being. The astral body is already bound up with consciousness. When man confronts the outer world, he distinguishes himself from it. When he confronts the outer world, from the point of view of the etheric body, he mingles, and is one with it. Only when objects are reflected in the consciousness, does he distinguish himself from them. This activity of the astral body, with its wholly inward experience, is wonderfully expressed in the Indo-Germanic languages—in contrast to the Semitic—in that they include the verb ‘to be,’—the affirmation of what is there without our co-operation. This is possible because man distinguishes himself from what causes the outer impression. If, therefore, a Semitic language wants to express ‘God is good,’ it is not directly possible. The word ‘is’, which expresses existence, cannot be rendered, because it is derived from the antithesis of astral body, and external world. The etheric body, simply presents things. Therefore, in the Semitic language, we should have to say ‘God the Good.’ The confronting of subject and object is not expressed. In these Indo-Germanic languages there is differentiation from the outer world; they contain the element of a tapestry of perceptions spread out over the external world. These in turn, react on the human being, strengthening and giving support to the quality of ‘inwardness,’ that is to say, all that may be spoken of as the predisposition to build up strong individuality, a strong Ego.

It may seem to many of you that I have only been able to give unsatisfactory indications, but it would be necessary to speak for a fortnight if a detailed exposition of speech were to be given. Only those who have heard many such lectures, and have entered into the spirit of them, will realise that a stimulus such as has been given to-day is not without justification.

The only intention has been to show that it is possible to acquire a conception of speech and language in the sense of Spiritual Science, and this leads us to realise that speech can only be understood with the artistic sense which must first have been developed. All learning will be shipwrecked if it is not willing to recreate what the ‘artist of speech’ has moulded in man before the Ego was able to work within him. Only the artistic sense can understand the mysteries of speech; the artistic sense alone can recreate. Learned abstractions can never make a work of art intelligible. Only those ideas which are able fruitfully to recreate what the artist has expressed with other media,—colour, tone, and so on,—can shed light on a work of art. Artistic feeling alone can understand the artist; artists of speech alone can understand the creative Spiritual element in the origin of speech. This is one thing that Spiritual Science has to accomplish with regard to the domain of speech.

The other thing has its bearing in practical life itself. When we understand how speech has proceeded from an inner, prehuman artist, we shall also realise that when we want to speak or express through speech, something that claims to be authoritative, this artistic sense must be allowed to come into play. There is not much realisation of this in our modern age, when there is so little living feeling for speech. To-day, if a man can speak at all, he imagines that he is at liberty to express everything. What should be realised is that we must recreate in the soul a direct connection between what we wish to express in speech, and how we express it. The artist of speech, ‘in all domains’ must be reawakened within us. To-day, people are satisfied with any form that is given to what they want to say. How many people realise that the artistic feeling for speech and language is necessary in every description or thesis? This, however, is absolutely essential in the domain of Spiritual Science. Examine any genuine writings in the sphere of Spiritual Science and you will find that a true Spiritual Scientist has tried to mould each sentence artistically; he does not place a verb arbitrarily at the beginning or end. You will find that every sentence is a ‘birth ‘ because it must be experienced, not merely as thought, but inwardly in the soul, as actual form. If you follow the coherence of what is written, you will find that in three consecutive sentences, the middle one is not merely an appendage of the first, and the third of the second. The third sentence is already there in germ, before the second is built up, because the force of the middle sentence must depend on what has remained of the force in the first, and this must in turn pass over to the third. In Spiritual Science, one cannot create without the artistic feeling for language. Nothing else is of any use. The essential point is to free ourselves from being slavishly chained to the words, and this cannot happen if we imagine that any word can express a thought, for our speech formation is then already at fault. Words which are coined wholly for the world of sense, can never adequately express super-sensible facts. Those who ask, ‘how can one describe the etheric or astral body concretely by a word,’ have understood nothing at all of these things. Only that man has understood who says to himself, ‘I will experience what the etheric body really is from the one aspect before I allow myself to write a single page about it, and I will realise that it is a question of artistic imagery. Then I will describe it from the other three aspects.’ In such a case, we have the matter presented from four different aspects, so that the presentations given through language are really artistic imagery. If this is not realised, we shall have nothing but abstractions and an emaciated repetition of what is already known. Hence, development in Spiritual Science will always be bound up with a development of an inner understanding of the plastic forces of speech. In this sense Spiritual Science will work fruitfully upon our present atrocious style of speech which reveals no indication of the nature of artistic power. If it were otherwise, so many people who can really hardly speak or write, would not rush into literary activity. People have long ago lost the realisation that prose writing, for instance, is a much higher activity than writing verse, only, of course, the prose that is written to-day is of a much lower order.

Spiritual Science is there to impart, in every domain, the stimulus connected with the deepest spheres of human life. In this sense, Spiritual Science will fulfil the dreams of the greatest men. It will be able to conquer the super-sensible worlds through thought, and so to pour out the thoughts into sound pictures that speech can again become an instrument for communicating the vision of the soul in super-sensible worlds. Then Spiritual Science will fulfil, in ever-increasing measure, a saying relating to this important region of man's inner being: ‘Immeasurably deep is thought, and its winged instrument is the word.’

Medieval mysticism prepared the way for spiritual science; prayer prepared for medieval mysticism. Today the essence of prayer has been misunderstood. Prayer is intended to produce the divine spark, the special life of the soul. For this, we must understand both the soul and the soul in relation to the future set before us by world wisdom.

In my recent lecture on mysticism I spoke of the particular form of mystic absorption that appeared in the Middle Ages between the time of Meister Eckhart and that of Angelus Silesius. This type of mysticism is distinguished by the fact that the mystic seeks to become free of all the experiences aroused in his soul by the external world. He seeks to acquire the feeling that proves to him that, even when everything of the everyday world is removed from his soul and it withdraws into itself, a world of its own still remains within it. This world always exists but is outshone by the experiences that work so powerfully on man from without. Thus, it generally appears as a light so faint that most men do not even notice it. The mystic usually calls it “the spark.” Yet, he feels sure that it can be fanned to a mighty flame that will illumine the source and foundation of existence leading man along the path of his soul to the knowledge of his origin. This may, indeed, be called “knowledge of God.”

In the same lecture we saw how medieval mystics held that this spark, constituted as it is at the moment, must grow by itself. In contrast, we pointed out that modern spiritual research calls for a conscious and controlled development of these inner soul forces, so that they can rise to higher forms of knowledge, designated the imaginative, the inspirational and the intuitive. This medieval absorption is thus the beginning of true higher spiritual research that does indeed seek the spirit through the development of the inner being but, through the method of approach, is led beyond it to the source and foundation of the existence of all facts and phenomena, and of our own souls as well. Mysticism, therefore, appeared as a sort of first step to true spiritual investigation. If we have the ability to sink ourselves in the fervor of a Meister Eckhart, to recognize what an immeasurable force of spiritual knowledge it brought to Johannes Tauler, to see how deeply Valentin Weigel or Jacob Boehme were initiated into the secrets of existence by all that they attained through such absorption even though they passed beyond it, or to understand what an Angelus Silesius became through its means, how he was enabled not only to gain an illuminating insight into the great laws of spiritual order but also to utter with glowing rapturous beauty all sorts of sayings about world secrets, we shall then be able to realize the depth and force of this medieval mysticism and to see what an enormous help it can be to anyone who wants to tread the path of spiritual investigation.

Medieval mysticism thus appears to us, particularly as the result of that lecture, as a great and wonderful preparatory school for spiritual research. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? After all, our own object is simply to develop the spark of which the mystics spoke through its own inner forces. They believed that they might surrender themselves in the peace of their souls to the little glimmering spark, so that it might begin to burn ever more brilliantly of itself. Spiritual science, however, is convinced that, for the growth of the spark, we must use the capacities and forces that are placed under our control by the wisdom of the world.

This mystical attitude, then, is a good preparation and guide for spiritual science, and the soul activity that may in the true sense be called prayer is a preparation for this medieval absorption. Just as the mystic is enabled to attain a state of absorption because he has, even though unconsciously, trained his soul to have the right temper for such mysticism, so if we want to work our way through to this absorption, treading a path that shall end there, we shall find a preparation in true prayer.

In the development of the last centuries, even from a spiritual aspect, the essence of prayer has been misunderstood in many ways by various spiritual currents or thought. Thus, it will be difficult for us to get a true understanding of it. If we remember, however, that the last centuries have been associated particularly with the appearance of egoistic currents of spiritual thought that have laid hold of all sorts of people, we shall not be surprised to find that prayer has been dragged down among the egoistic wishes and desires of men. In fact, prayer can hardly be more misunderstood than when it is permeated with some form of egoism. In this study we shall try to consider prayer entirely and without prejudice from the point of view of spiritual science.

To get some preliminary understanding of prayer we might say that, while the mystic assumes the existence in his soul of some spark that his mystical absorption can brighten and illuminate, prayer is intended to produce that spark and special life of the soul. Whatever leads to prayer displays its efficacy just in this stirring of the soul, so that, if it lives there, even though hidden, we either gradually discover the spark, or else we kindle it. To study the need for, and the essence of, prayer, we shall have to enter on a description of soul depths of which the words of Heraclitus are only too true: “You can never fathom the boundaries of the soul even though you tread every path, so all-embracing is it.” Thus, even if in prayer we seek only for the secrets of the soul, it is true that these inmost feelings that are stirred in prayer teach even the simplest of us something of the infinite expanses of soul life.

We must comprehend this soul as it lives in us and carries us forward in life somewhat as follows. This soul that is in process of living evolution does not merely come from the past and progress into the future, but at every moment of its life it carries within itself something of the past and, indeed, also of the future. The actual moment in which we are living is penetrated by both the effects of the past and the effects that come from the future. Anyone who can see deeply into the life of the soul will feel that there are two streams continually meeting in it, one rising from the past, the other from the future.

Possibly in other spheres of life it might seem mere folly to talk of the approach of the events of the future. It is, after all, easy to say that the events of the future do not yet exist, thus preventing us from saying that what will happen tomorrow approaches us. But it is possible to say that what happened in the past stretches its effects into the present—a standpoint that is easy enough to establish. Who would dispute that our lives today are the result of our lives yesterday, or that we are today under the influence of our activity or idleness of yesterday or the day before? No one will deny the penetration of the present by the past. Yet, we ought no more to deny the reality of the future since we can see in the soul the reality of such intrusion of future events before they happen. There is, for example, such a thing as fear or anxiety of something that is to happen tomorrow. Is that not a sort of feeling or perception that we direct to an as yet unknown future? Every moment the soul experiences fear or anxiety it shows by the reality of its feelings that it reckons not only with the effects of the past but also that it vividly allows for what is coming to it from the future. These are, of course, trivial indications. They will show, however, that even a casual observation of the soul contradicts the logical abstractions that proclaim the future can have no effect because it does not exist. This is proved in living reality when we study immediate soul life.

In our souls, then, the past and the future unite and produce there, as everyone who observes himself would admit, a sort of whirlpool comparable to the confluence of two streams. Observation of what lives in our souls from the past shows that they come into being under the impression of our experiences of the past. The way in which we have used those past experiences has made us what we are, and we bear within us the legacy of our past doing, feeling and thinking. We are what we have become. If we look back from today's standpoint to our past experiences, particularly those in which we were ourselves concerned in their actual happening and in the judgment of them, if we allow our memory to play over the past, we shall be driven to a judgment of ourselves. We shall realize that today we have attained a certain quality of character. With that as our basis we shall find we are not in agreement with a good deal that happened in our pasts because we have acquired the capacity to be opposed to, even ashamed of, some past actions.

If we thus measure our pasts against the present, we shall come to the conviction that there is something within us that is far richer, far more significant than what we have made of ourselves by our will, consciousness and individual forces. If there were not something stretching beyond what we have made of ourselves, we should be unable to reproach ourselves or even to know ourselves. There must, then, be something within us greater than all that we have employed to form ourselves from the past. If we allow such a judgment to be transformed into a feeling, we shall be able to observe what is known and visible to us in our past deeds and experiences. This will lie as clearly before us as memory can make it. Then we shall be able to compare this clear vision with our souls, and we shall see there something bigger seeking to work itself out, urging us to set ourselves face to face with ourselves and to judge ourselves from the standpoint of the present. In short, we shall feel something projecting beyond ourselves when we observe the stream flowing into the soul from the past. This sense of something greater is the first glimmer of the inner feeling of God within us, a feeling that there is something within us that is greater than our own will. So we are enabled to see something leading beyond our limited egos to a divine spiritual ego. Such is the impression of an observation of the past that has been transformed into feeling and perception.

What is the message, then, of what we may call the stream of the future, when we transform it into feeling and perception? This speaks even more emphatically and definitely to us. In looking back over the past, our feelings assert themselves in the form of a judgment of rejection, of regret or shame, but only after the event. In relation to the future, however, we deal at once with the feelings of fear and anxiety, hope and joy, but the actual events to which these feelings refer are not yet existent. We cannot see through to them and it is thus easier in this case to transform the idea into a feeling, something the soul does of itself. As it can, in relation to the future, give no more than the feeling of reality, these feelings exist as something born from an unknown stream of which we know only that it may have different effects and bring different hopes. If we can transform into a right feeling what comes so surely to us from the lap of the future, and if we experience its course into our souls and the way in which our own perceptions meet it, we shall realize how our souls are always being kindled anew by the experiences approaching from the future. Here, above all, we feel how our souls can become richer and more comprehensive. Even now in the present we can know that in the future our souls will have an infinitely richer and mightier content. We feel ourselves akin to the future. We must feel it. We must feel our souls to be equal to everything the future can give.

Such an observation of the streaming together of the future and the past into the present will show us how the life of the soul grows beyond itself. When, in looking back over the past, the soul observes the important things that play on it and of which it does not feel itself to be equal, we shall understand how it can unfold a basic attitude and feeling in relation to the outcome of the past. When the soul, whether in judgment or in shame and regret, feels something great flow into itself out of the stream of the past, it creates within itself what we may call a devotion toward the divine. This devotion toward the divine that looks down upon us from the past and that we can imagine as something acting upon us, although our consciousness cannot take it in, is produced by one of two forms of prayer that lead to an intimacy with God. If the soul surrenders itself in inmost calm to these feelings about the past, it will begin to wish that the mightier thing it left unused and that has not permeated its ego may become present in it. The soul will know that if it were possessed of this greatness, it would be different, but the divine did not belong fully to its inner life and that is why it has failed so to form itself that it can approve of all that it is. When the soul experiences this, it can overcome the feeling by asking itself clearly how it can make truly part of itself what has lived unconsciously in all its actions and experiences, how it can draw into itself this unknown that its ego has failed to grasp. When the soul holds this attitude, either in feeling or in word and idea, we have the prayer to the past and thus seek to approach the divine through one of the ways of devotion.

Another attitude is held toward the divine gleam shining through the approaches of the future. To distinguish it from the one with which we have just been dealing, let us ask once again what it is that leads to prayer as regards the past. It is that we have remained imperfect even though we can feel something divine shining into us. We have not developed and unfolded all the capacities and forces that might have flowed to us, and we feel all the defects that make us less than the divine shining into us. What is it, then, coming to us from the future that makes us defective in similar fashion and restricts our ascent to the spiritual?

We have only to remember that feelings and sensations, fear and anxiety of the unknown future, gnaw at our souls. Is there anything that can pour some certainty about the future into our souls? It is what we may call the feeling of devoted acceptance of what enters our souls from the hidden future, and it can only work properly if it arises as an attitude of prayer. Let us avoid misunderstanding. We are not praising what here or there is considered to be acceptance, but a definite form, an acceptance of what the future can bring forth. If we look to the future with fear and anxiety, we strangle our development and hamper the free unfolding of our soul forces. Nothing so obstructs this development as anxiety about what may come to the soul from the future. Only actual experience, however, can judge the results of the right feeling of acceptance of the future. What does such devoted acceptance mean?

In its ideal form it would be the sort of soul attitude that would assure us that no matter what might come, no matter what the next hour or day might bring, were it unknown to us, we could not alter it by fear or anxiety. We should wait for it, therefore, in complete inner peace and utter tranquillity.

This experience, resulting from devoted acceptance of future events, means that anyone who can thus calmly and quietly meet the future and can yet prevent his energy and activity from suffering in any way, is able to develop his soul forces most intensively and freely. It is as if hindrance after hindrance falls away as his soul is gradually pervaded by this feeling of acceptance of the events that approach from the future.

This feeling, however, cannot be produced in our souls by some edict or arbitrary decision lacking foundation. It is the result of this second form of prayer that is directed to the future and the course of events, pervaded by wisdom, within it. To give ourselves up to the divine wisdom of events, to be certain in our thoughts, feelings and impulses that what will be must be and that it will have its good effects somewhere, to call forth this feeling in the soul and to live it in our words and ideas is the second form of prayer, the prayer of devoted acceptance.

It is from these feelings that we must acquire the impulses to what is called prayer. The soul possesses the urge, and fundamentally it attains the attitude of prayer when it raises itself even only a little above the immediate present. The attitude of prayer, we might say, is the upward gaze of the soul from the transitory present into the eternal that embraces past, present and future. Because to live looking upward from the present is so essential, Goethe has Faust speak these great and significant lines to Mephistopheles:

Were I to say the pleasing present should remain,
And that is what I truly meant ...

This is, if ever I could be satisfied with living merely for the moment,

Then you may throw me into chains,
And I will gladly seal my doom.

We might say, then, that it is the attitude of prayer for which Faust begs in order to escape the fetters of his companion.

Prayer leads to the observation of the limited ego that has worked from the past into the present. Upon examination, we see how much more there is in us than we have put to actual use. It also leads us to the study of the future, showing how much more can flow from the future into the ego than it has comprehended in the present. Every prayer must coincide with one of these attitudes. If we take this to be the spirit of prayer, and prayer as the expression of this spirit, we shall find in every prayer the force to lead us beyond ourselves. Prayer that is born in this way is nothing else than the kindling of the power that seeks to pass beyond what our ego is at the moment. As soon as the ego is seized by this striving, it already has this power of development. When the past has taught us that we have more within us than we have ever used, our prayer is a cry to the divine to come to us and fill us with its power. When we have reached this knowledge by our own feelings and perception, prayer becomes the source of further development. It is thus one of the means of developing the ego.

When we live in anxiety over what the future may bring, still lacking that submissiveness that prayer can give when it is directed to our future destiny, we can do something similar. By means of prayer we realize that the future is set before us by world wisdom. If we surrender ourselves to this feeling, we produce something quite different than we do when we meet coming events with fear and anxiety. These only restrict our development, pushing back from our souls what the future can give us. If, however, we meet the future with submissiveness and devotion, we draw near to it in fruitful hope and make it possible for it to enter our souls. Thus, submission, which seems to make us small, is a powerful force carrying us forward toward the future, enriching our souls and bringing our development to a higher level.

So we see prayer as an active force within us. We can also see in it a cause drawing with it as immediate effects the growth and evolution of our egos. We need not expect external results. We know that by prayer we have put within our souls what we may call a force of warmth and light—light because we free the soul in regard to what is coming to us from the future and prepare it to assimilate what the obscure future may bring; warmth because it helps to realize that even though in the past we have failed to bring the divine within us to full development, we have now permeated our feelings and sensations with it so that it can really work within us. The attitude of prayer that we attain from our feeling of the past produces the inner warmth of soul of which all those speak who can understand prayer in its true being. The effect of light appears in those who know the feeling of submission in prayer.

With this view of prayer we shall not be surprised that, in devotion to prayer, the greatest mystics found the best training for what they were seeking in mystic contemplation. They guided their souls by means of prayer to the point where they were able to ignite the spark previously mentioned. It is just the study of the past that can give us the deep intimacy that comes over us in true prayer. Experience and living in the external world really estrange us from ourselves, just as in the past they prevented the unknown and more powerful ego from coming to the surface. We are given over to external impressions, wasting our energies in the variety of external life, thereby upsetting our composure. It is this that prevented the higher and stronger divine force from unfolding in us. Now, when we unfold it in such deep intimacy with God, we no longer feel ourselves given over to the dissipating effects of the external world. Rather are we filled with that wonderful and ineffable warmth, as with an inner blessedness, that we really may call divine. It is the heat in the cosmos that appears in higher beings as physical inner warmth and it originally created the higher beings; the lower beings, of course, have the same body temperature as their surroundings. As this physical heat interiorizes a being, so the psychic warmth, born of prayer, can make a soul that is losing itself in externalities collect itself in inwardness. In prayer we are warmed in the feeling of God. We not only feel warmth but we find ourselves intimately within ourselves.

When we approach the external world, however, we always find it confused with what has been called “the dark lap of the future.” Upon close observation we always find that there is a germ of the future in whatever we touch of the outer world. We are continually thrust back when we still feel fear of what may befall us, and the world is like a veil before us. If we develop this feeling of submission in regard to all that may come to us from the future, we shall find that we meet everything in the external world with the same certainty and hope. This we have gained from our submissiveness. We know that in everything it is the wisdom of the world that shines before us. As a rule, in everything that comes to meet us, we see a darkness that passes into our feelings. Through our submission, however, we now see how the feeling arises in us that all the wisdom of the world shines through what we long for and desire as the highest. Thus, it is hope for illumination of the entire world that comes to us in the devotions of prayer. When darkness encloses us within ourselves and narrowness and confusion surround us even in the physical, when we stand in the gloom and black of night, we feel when morning comes and we meet the light as though set beyond ourselves. Yet this is not in such a way that we should lose ourselves, but as though we could transfer into the real world all our soul's truest longing and highest aims. Surrender to the world, estranging us from ourselves, is overcome by the warmth of prayer uniting us with ourselves. Then, too, the warmth of prayer becomes a light. We pass beyond ourselves and know that when now we unite with and behold the outer world, we are no longer disturbed and estranged by it. What is best in our souls flows from it and we are united with what radiates toward us from the external world.

These two types of prayer can be better comprehended in pictures than in ideas. Consider, for instance, the Old Testament story of Jacob and the bitter nocturnal struggle that seared his soul. It is as if we ourselves were given over to the manifoldness of the world in which our souls at first were lost and could not find themselves. When the striving to find ourselves begins, the struggle between the lower and higher egos follows. Feelings surge up and down, but we can work our way through this turmoil by prayer. As illustrated in the story of Jacob, the moment finally will come when, as the morning sun shines upon us, the inner struggle of our souls during the night is leveled out in harmony. That is really the effect of prayer in the human soul.

To think of prayer in this way is to be free of all superstition. It brings out the best in us and works within us immediately as a force. Prayer in this light is preliminary to mysticism, just as mystic contemplation is itself preliminary to what we know as spiritual investigation. From this discussion it should now be clear that, as has so often been emphasized, we continually err if we think we can find the divine, or God, in ourselves by mystic thought. This has been a common mistake of many mystics, and even of ordinary Christians in the Middle Ages, because at that period the attitude to prayer began to be permeated with an egoism that impels the soul to concentration on an ever-increasing inner perfection. It is fundamentally an echo of such an egoistic desire for inner perfection that impels a misguided theosophy today to assert that, if we will only turn aside from everything external, we can find God within ourselves.

We have seen that there are two types of prayer, one leading to an inner warmth, the other leading through a feeling of submission out again into the world to illumination and true knowledge. When we think of prayer in this way, we soon see that the knowledge acquired through ordinary intelligence is unfruitful compared to this other knowledge. When we come to realize the attitude of prayer, we become aware of the soul's withdrawal into itself, thus releasing it from the multiple world in which it has been dissipated. It gathers itself together and lives enclosed in itself, a complete self-being living above the momentary and what comes to it from the past and future.

When we know this feeling, when our environment becomes breathless and silent, when only our finest thoughts and feelings hold the soul together, when perhaps even these vanish and only a basic feeling remains directed toward the God who proclaims himself from the past, and toward the God from the future, when we know this and have learned to live in this feeling, then we realize that there are moments when the soul sees that it has turned away from, and disregards, all the cleverness it created by its own thinking. What it brought into being by its thinking and feelings, the ideals to which it had been educated and grasped in its will have all been swept away. It was given over to its highest thoughts and feelings, but even these were swept away, leaving only that last basic feeling. When we have come to feel this, we know that in the same way that the wonders of nature meet us when we look upon them with cleansed and purified eyes, these new feelings of which we were hitherto unaware shine into the soul. Impulses of will and ideals formerly strange to us rise up in it, germinating fruitful seeds.

In its best sense, then, prayer can give us wisdom that we are not yet capable of acquiring by ourselves. It can give us the possibility of feeling and thinking that we cannot attain by ourselves. If we go further, it can give us a strength of will that we have previously been unable to muster. In order to feel this, it must be called up by the greatest thoughts, the most splendid ideas and impulses living in the soul. Here we must refer again to the prayers that have originated in most solemn moments and that have been handed down to us from time immemorial.

In my pamphlet on the Lord's Prayer you will find an account showing that its seven petitions embrace all the wisdom of the world. It is no real objection to tell me that there it is said that these seven petitions can only be understood by those who know the deeper sources of the universe and that simple people have no real comprehension of their depth. This is not so. In order, however, that the Lord's Prayer should have come into existence, it was necessary that the all-embracing wisdom of the world should be set down in words that may indeed be said to express the deepest secrets of man and the world. Since this is what is contained in this prayer, it works through the words even if we are far from understanding the secrets. This can be understood when we rise to the higher stages to which prayer and mysticism are the prelude. Prayer prepares us for mysticism, mysticism for meditation and concentration, and from that point on we are directed to the real work of spiritual research.

Nor is it an objection to say that we must understand a prayer if it is to have its true effect. That simply is not the case. Who understands the wisdom of a flower? Yet, we can take pleasure in it. Even though we do not penetrate all its wisdom, nevertheless the soul delights in its contemplation. Wisdom was necessary that the flower might come into being, but it is not necessary to be aware of such wisdom to take delight in the flower. For a prayer to come into existence, the wisdom of the world is necessary. That it should possess warmth and light for the soul is just as possible without understanding its wisdom as it is in the case of the flower. If a prayer did not owe its existence to such wisdom, however, it could not produce such an effect. The mere effect of a prayer shows us its depth.

If one's soul is really to develop under the influence of such a vital quality within it, it makes no difference what one's stage of development may be. A true prayer can give everyone something. Even the simplest person, who knows nothing more than the mere prayer, can still feel its effect, which calls forth the power to raise him ever higher. But whatever height we may have achieved, we are never finished with a prayer. Our souls can always be raised higher. The Lord's Prayer can be simply repeated, yet it can also call forth a mystical frame of mind and even be the subject of meditation and concentration. This is also true of other prayers.

Since the Middle Ages, however, a sort of egoism has occurred that makes prayer and the attitude of prayer impure. If we use prayer in order to become more perfect in ourselves, to descend into ourselves, as was the case with the medieval Christians and perhaps still is today—if we do not look out into the external world with the illumination we have received, then prayer can only estrange and isolate us from the world. This has happened with many of those who have used prayer as false and seclusive asceticism. They have wanted perfection, not only as the rose, which adorns itself that the garden may be fair, is perfect, but for their own sakes that they might find blessedness in their souls. When we seek God in our souls and then do not pass to the other world the power we have thus won, we find that we are in a sense punished. Thus you will find in the writings of many authors who have known only the type of prayer in which inner warmth is to be found—even in the work of Miguel Molinos—remarkable descriptions of all sorts of passions and impulses, fights, temptations and wild desires that the soul has to experience if it seeks perfection by inner prayer and complete surrender to what it understands to be God. If we approach the spiritual world by seeking God one-sidedly, if we only unfold that feeling for prayer that leads to inner warmth and excludes illumination, this neglected other side takes its revenge on us.

If I look to the past only with feelings of regret and shame, realizing that there is something great in me that I have never allowed full play, thus failing to fill myself with this greatness so that I may become perfect, then, even so, to a certain extent a feeling of perfection does still arise. But the imperfection remaining in the soul becomes a counterforce that assails us with greater vigor in the form of temptation and passion. But as soon as the soul that has found itself in inner warmth and intimacy seeks for God wherever he is revealed and thus strives for illumination, it immediately comes out of itself and escapes the narrow selfish ego. The wild temptations sink down in calm and peace. This is why it is so harmful to allow an egoistic impulse to be mixed up in prayer or mystical contemplation or meditation. If we want to find God only to keep him in our souls, we exhibit an unsound egoism that maintains itself even into our soul's highest reaches. For this, we shall be punished. Healing is to be found only when, having found God in ourselves, we pour out unselfishly into the world in thoughts, feelings and actions what we have won.

We are often told today, particularly in the ideas of a falsely understood theosophy, and we cannot be careful enough of this, that we cannot find God in the external world because he lives within us. We have only to look within ourselves in the right way and we shall find God. I have even heard someone say in flattery of his audience that we need not learn or experience anything of the great secrets of the world. If only we would look within ourselves, we would find God.

But something must be added to this before we can reach the truth. To this, which may be true enough if it is kept within proper limits, a medieval thinker gave a true answer. Let us remember that it is not untruths that are most harmful. The soul will soon uncover what is false. Most harmful are those things that are true from one aspect but when applied on false assumptions produce grave falsehoods. It is true that in a sense we seek God in ourselves. Because it is true, it is the more harmful if it is not kept within its proper limits.

This medieval thinker said, “Who would seek everywhere in the external world for a tool he needed when he knows it to be at home? He would be a fool to do so. Equally is he a fool who seeks the instrument for the knowledge of God in the outer world when it lies at home within his soul.”

Bear in mind that he uses the words tool and instrument. It is not God we seek in the soul. He is sought by an instrument that we shall not find in the external world. It is found in the soul in prayer and genuine mystical absorption, and beyond that by meditation and concentration. We must approach the kingdoms of the world with this instrument, and then we shall find God everywhere. If we have acquired the instrument, he reveals himself in all worldly realms and at all stages of being. Thus, we find the instrument in ourselves but we find God everywhere.

Such observations of prayer are not popular today. Nowadays we are asked how on earth any of our prayers could alter the course of the world, which after all is guided by laws of necessity that cannot be altered. When we want to locate a force, however, we should look for it where it really is. Today we have sought the power of prayer in the soul and have found it to exist there, thus enabling the soul to progress. If we know that it is the spirit that works in the world, not an imagined, abstract spirit but a real, perceptible spirit, and that the soul belongs to the realm of the spirit, we shall also know that material forces are not the only forces working actively in accordance with external laws of necessity. Spiritual beings also are at work in the world even though the effects of these forces and beings are not visible externally to the eye or outwardly available to knowledge. If we strengthen our spiritual lives by prayer, we need only wait for the effects. They will certainly appear. No one, however, will seek the working of spirit in the external world who has not first recognized the force of prayer to be a reality.

When once we have admitted this fact, the following experiment will give evidence to support it. Consider a period often years during which we have scorned prayer, and another period often years when we have recognized its force. Compare the two periods. We shall soon see how the course of our lives was altered under the influence of the forces that poured into the soul with prayer. Forces become visible in their working, but it is easy to deny them when we shut our eyes to their effects. Who can deny the force of prayer if he has never let its force be effective within him? Do we believe we can know the Light if we have never developed or approached it? A force that is to work in and through the soul can only be discovered by its use.

The further effects of prayer, I am willing enough to admit, cannot yet be discussed today, however unbiased the discussion might be. Thus, to understand that a community prayer in which the forces rising from a praying community flow together, has an enhanced spiritual force and therefore an intensified effect on reality, cannot be easily accepted by the ordinary consciousness of today. So we must remain content with what we have discussed as the inner being of prayer. Indeed, it is sufficient since, if we have some understanding of it, we shall rise above many of the possible objections that are so easily raised against it.

We are told, for instance, that if we compare an active man who uses his powers to help his fellow men with one who withdraws meditatively into himself and works on the forces of his soul in prayer, then idleness is the only word that can truly apply to the one who meditates. You will excuse me if on the basis of spiritual science I tell you there is another point of view. I will speak bluntly, but there is good reason for it. Anyone who knows the interrelations of modern life will maintain that many journalists would do others a better service if they were to pray and work for the perfection of their souls. Would that there were people who were convinced that it would be better to pray than to write newspaper articles. This attitude is equally applicable to many other intellectual occupations today.

Further, we shall never understand the life of man in its entirety without the force that lives in prayer and that becomes particularly clear when we look at certain departments of higher spiritual activity. For instance, is it not clear that prayer, when considered not in a one-sided egoistic sense but in the broad sense in which we have discussed it today, takes its place as an element of art? Art, of course, also expresses the opposite attitude in comedy through the humorous feeling with which it rises above what it depicts, but there is in the ode and hymn, for example, a feeling of prayer. In painting we have what might be called a “painted prayer,” and surely in a massive, majestic cathedral a prayer in stone towers heavenward.

We need only to feel these things in relation to the whole of life in order to see that prayer, looked at in the right way, can lead us from the transitory finite of this world to the infinite. This was felt especially by those such as Angelus Silesius whom I have previously mentioned who passed from prayer to mysticism. He felt that he owed the inner truth and glorious beauty, the warm intimacy and brilliant clearness of his mystical thought, shown for instance in The Cherubinean Wanderer, to the training of prayer that had worked so powerfully on his soul. In fact, following this prelude of prayer, it is the feeling of eternity that streams through and illuminates all such mysticism. Everyone who prays has an idea of this, when in prayer he comes to true inner peace and intimacy and thence again to liberation from himself. It is something that teaches us to look from the passing moment to eternity, embracing in our souls the past, present and future. Whether we know it or not, whenever we turn in prayer to those sides of life where we seek God, the feelings, thoughts, and impressions accompanying us are permeated by a sense of eternity. It dwells consciously or unconsciously in every true prayer like some divine sweetness and aroma. It lives in the following lines of Angelus Silesius, which form a fitting conclusion to our discussion.

When I leave time,
I myself am eternity.
Then I am one with God
And God is one with me.

Among the fundamental principles underlying Spiritual Science and to which your attention has been drawn in previous lectures, the most prominent is the idea of Reincarnation. According to this generally unpopular and little understood concept, it is maintained that human individuality is constrained to manifest again and again in a single personality, during its enfoldment in the course of repeated earth-lives. It has been previously pointed out that many and diverse questions are associated with this conception, and that such is the case will become more and more apparent as we proceed.

What deep meaning, we might ask, underlies the fact that the span of man’s life on earth is destined to recur, not once only, but many times, and that during each successive period between rebirth and death human individuality persists. When we study the evolution of mankind in the light of Spiritual Science, we find therein a progressive purport, a design of such nature that each age and each epoch presents in some fashion a different content, and we realize that human evolution is ever destined to maintain a definite upward trend. Thus do we become aware of a profound latent significance, when we know that the varied influences which act upon mankind are indeed potent and become absorbed over and over again by the Ego during the course of human development. A condition which is only possible because man, with all that comprises his being, is brought into contact not once alone, but recurrently, with the great living stream of evolution.

When we regard the whole evolutionary process as a rational progression, ever accompanied by fresh contents, there dawns a true comprehension of those Great Spiritual Beings who set the measure of progress. We are then able to realize the import and proper relation of these outstanding leaders, from whom have come new thoughts, experiences and impulses destined to further the advancement and progressive evolution of humanity.

During this Cycle of Lectures I shall speak of many such Spiritual Beings who have acted as guides to mankind, and at the same time bring forward and elucidate various matters connected with this subject. The first human individuality to claim our attention from such a point of view is Zarathustra, about whom, although there is much discussion in these days, little is known; for as far as external investigation goes his history is especially problematical, as it is shrouded in mystery and unrecorded in ancient documents.

When we consider the characteristics of such a personality as Zarathustra, whose gifts to mankind, as far as they are preserved for us, seem so strange to our present age, we at once realize how great is the dissimilarity in man’s whole being at different periods of earthly progress. Casual reflection might easily lead to the conclusion, that from the very beginning humanity has always had the same ideas concerning morality, the same general thoughts, feelings and conceptions as those which exist in our time. From previous lectures, however, and from others which will follow, you will know through the teachings of Spiritual Science that during man’s development great and important changes take place, especially as regards the life of the human soul, the nature of human apprehension, emotions and desires. Further, you will realize that man’s consciousness was very differently constituted in olden days; and that there is reason to believe that in the future yet other stages will be reached in which the conscious condition of mankind will vary considerably from its normal state to-day.

When we turn our attention to Zarathustra we find that we must look back over an extremely long period. According to certain modern researches, he is considered to be a contemporary of Buddha; the approximate date of his life being fixed at some six to six and a half centuries before the birth of Christianity. It is, however, a remarkable and interesting fact that other investigators of late years, after carefully studying all existing traditions concerning Zarathustra, have been driven to the conclusion that the personality concealed beneath the name of the ancient founder of Persian religion must have lived a great many centuries before the time of Buddha. Greek historians have stated over and over again that the period ascribed to Zarathustra should be put back very many, possibly five to six thousand years before the Trojan War¹

From the above, and from what has been learned through research in many directions, we can now feel certain that historical investigators will in the end be unwillingly forced to acknowledge that the claims of Grecian scholarship regarding the great antiquity of the Zarathustran era, as indicated by ancient tradition, are justly founded and must be accepted as authentic. Spiritual Science, in its statements and theories, fully concurs with the old Greek writers who already in olden days had fixed the period of the founder of Persian religion so far back in time. We have, therefore, good reason for maintaining that Zarathustra, living as he did thousands of years before the birth of Christianity, was doubtless confronted with a very different class of human consciousness from that which exists in our present age.

It has often been pointed out, and we will again refer to this matter, that in ancient times the development of human consciousness was such that the old ‘dream state’, or ‘clairvoyant condition’ (we will avoid misusing this term, as is so often done in these days), was in every way perfectly normal to man, so that his conceptions and ideas were such that he did not contemplate the world from that narrow perceptual point of view that is so prevalent to-day.

We can best picture the impressions made by the world upon the consciousness of the ancients, if we turn our thoughts to that last enduring remnant of the old clairvoyant state, namely, dream consciousness. We all know those fluctuating dream pictures that come to us at times, the most of which carry no meaning, and are so often merely suggestive of the outer world, although there may now and then intrude some higher level of conscious thought; dream visions, which in these days we find so difficult to interpret and to understand. We might say that our sleep consciousness runs its course pictorially in ever-changing scenes, and which are at the same time symbolical. For instance, many of us have had the experience that events connected with some impressive happening—say, a conflagration—have been after a time once more figuratively manifested to us in a dream. Let us now consider for a moment this other horizon of our sleeping state, where clings in truth that last remnant of a conscious condition belonging to a by-gone age in the grey and distant past.

The consciousness of the ancients was such that in reality they lived in a life of imagery. The visions which came to them were not merely indefinite unrelated creations, for they had reference to an actual outer world. In olden days primitive man was capable of intermediate conscious states, between those which prevail when we sleep and when we are awake; then it was that he lived in the presence of the Spirit-World, and the Spirit-World entered into his being. To-day this door is closed, but in those ancient times such was not the case. It was while in this intermediate condition that man became aware of visions which resembled to some extent dream pictures, but were definite in their manifestation of a spirit life and of spiritual achievement existing beyond the perceptual world. Although in the Zarathustran era, such visions had already become somewhat confused and vague, there was nevertheless still close contact with the world of spirit, therefore these ancients could say from direct observation and experience: ‘In the same way as I realize this outer physical world and this perceptual life, even so do I know that there exists another conscious condition belonging to a different region—a spiritual realm—related to that which is material, and where I do of a verity experience and observe the workings of the Divine Spirit.’

It is a fundamental principle underlying the evolution of the human race, that in no case can any one quality be developed except at the expense of some other attribute; hence it came about that from epoch to epoch, the faculty through which in olden times mankind obtained a clear inner vision of the spiritual realms became ever less and less pronounced. Our present day exact methods of thought, our power of expression, our logic, all that we regard as the most important driving forces of modern culture did not exist in the remote past. Such faculties have been acquired during later periods at the expense of the old clairvoyant consciousness, and it is now for mankind to regain and cultivate this long-lost power. Then in the future of human evolution a time will come when in addition to man’s purely physical consciousness, his intellectuality and his logic, he will again approach the condition of the ancient seer.

We must differentiate between the upward and downward tendency of human consciousness. Evolution has a deeper meaning when we realize that in the beginning man was entirely of a spiritual realm, where he lived in the soul, and that when he descended into the physical world it was ordained that he should gradually relinquish his clairvoyant power in order that he might acquire qualities born of the existing purely physical conditions; such as intellectuality and logic. When this stage in his development has run its course he will again return to the world of spirit.
Regarding the circumstances connected with these curious clairvoyant states and experiences of the ancients we have no historical record. Zarathustra lived in that same remote age, and was one of those great leading personalities who gave immense stimulus to the advancement of culture and civilization. Such guiding personalities must ever draw from the creative source that which we may term Illumination, whereby they are initiated into the higher mysteries of the world, irrespective of the standard of normal human consciousness existing in their time. Other such outstanding personalities of whom mention will be made during these lectures are: Hermes, Buddha and Moses.

Zarathustra lived at least 8000 years before the present era, and those glorious gifts to civilization which emanated from his illumined spirit have been reflected in the great cultural progress of humanity. His influence has long ago been clearly recognized, and can be detected even to this day, by all who take note of the mysterious currents underlying the whole of human evolution.

We now realize that Zarathustra belonged essentially to those Great Ones in whose souls lived a measure of the spiritual elements of truth, wisdom and perception, far surpassing the customary standard of human consciousness of their period. His mission was to proclaim to his fellow men, in that part of the world later known as the Persian Empire, those grand truths which emanated from the superperceptual regions—a world utterly beyond the apprehension of man’s normal consciousness in that dim and distant age.

If we would understand the true significance of Zarathustra’s teachings, we must remember that it was his task to present to a certain section of humanity, in an intelligible manner, a particular world aspect; while on the other hand, various movements which had been in progress among the peoples of other regions, had given a different trend to the whole sphere of man’s culture.

The personality of Zarathustra is of special interest because he lived in a territory, contiguous upon its South side to a country which was inhabited by Indian tribes, upon whom spiritual blessings flowed in quite a different manner. When we look forward from those by-gone times we find upon the selfsame soil where dwelt these ancient Indian tribes, the peoples among whom at a later period arose the poets of the Vedas. To the North, where spread the great Brahman Doctrine, is situated that region which was permeated throughout by the powerful and compelling teachings of Zarathustra. But that which he gave to the world was in many respects fundamentally different from the teachings of the great Ieaders among the Indians, whose words have lived on in the moving poetry of the Vedas, in their profound philosophy, and has reached yet an echo in that final glorious blaze of light—The Revelation of the Buddha.

We can understand the difference between that which was born of the flow of thought from Zarathustra and the teachings of the ancient Indians, when we bear in mind that we may approach the region of the superperceptual world from two sides. Already in other lectures we have spoken of the path which man must traverse in order that he may enter into the spirit realms. There are two possible methods by which he may raise the energy of his soul, and the capacities latent in his inner being, so much above their normal level that he can pass out of this perceptual into the superperceptual world. The one method is that by which man enters or retires, more and more deeply into his soul, and thus merges himself in his very essence. The other leads behind the veil which is spread around us by our material state. Man can enter the superperceptual region by both these methods.

When we experience within our very being a deepening of all values of our spiritual feelings, conceptions and ideas—in short, of our soul impulses; when in fact we creep more and more into ourselves, so that our spiritual powers become ever stronger and stronger; then can we, as it were, in some mystic way merge ourselves within and pass through all that we hold of the physical world to our actual spirit essence—the soul Ego—which Ego continues from incarnation to incarnation, and is not perishable but everlasting. When we have overcome our lusts and passions and all those experiences of the soul which are ours because we are of the body in a physical world, then can our true being pierce the surrounding veil and for ever enter the world of spirit.

On the other hand, if we develop those powers which will enable us not merely to be sensible of the outer world with its colours, tone sensations, heat and cold; and if we so strengthen our spiritual forces that we shall be aware of that which lies beyond the colours, the sound, the heat and the cold, and all those other earthly sense-perceptions which hang as a mist about us—then will the enhanced powers of our soul take us behind the enshrouding cloud and into that boundless superperceptual region which is without confine and stretches ever into the infinite.

There is one way leading to the Spirit-World which we may term the ‘Mystical Method’, and another which is properly called ‘The Method of "Spiritual Science"‘. All great spiritual personalities have followed these paths, in order to attain to those truths and revelations which it was their mission to impress upon humanity in the form of cultural progress. In primeval times man’s development was of such nature, that great revelations could only come to the people of any particular race, through one of these methods alone. But from that period on, in which the Greeks lived, that is, at the dawn of the Christian era, these two separate thought currents commingled, and became more and more one single cultural stream. When we now speak of entering the higher spheres, we understand, that he who would penetrate into the superperceptual region, develops both qualities of power in his soul. The forces necessary to the ‘Mystical Method’ are evolved within the inner being, and those essential to the course of ‘Spiritual Science’, are strengthened while man is yet conscious of the outer world. There is to-day no longer any definite separation of these two paths, as since about the time of that epoch marked by the life of the Grecian race, these two currents have run their course together—in the one, revelation comes about through a mystic merging of man’s consciousness within his very being—in the other, the veil is torn asunder by the enhanced power of his spiritual forces, and man’s awareness stretches outward into the great cosmos.

In olden times before the Grecian or Christian era, these two possible methods were in operation separately among different peoples, and we find them working in close proximity, but in divers ways, in the Indian culture which found expression among the Vedas, on the one hand, and that of Zarathustra, further North, on the other. All that we look upon with such wonder in the ancient Indian culture, and which later found expression through Buddha, was achieved by inner contemplation, and turning away from the outer world—through causing the eyes to become less sensitive to physical colours, the ears to physical sounds, and bringing about a deadening of the sense organs in general to the perceptual veil—so that the inner soul forces might be strengthened:—Thus did man press on to Brahma, there to feel himself unified with that which ever works and weaves as the Inner Spirit of the Universe,—In this way originated the teachings of the Holy Rishis, which live on in the poetry of the Vedas, in the Vedantic philosophy, and in Buddhism.

The Doctrine of Zarathustra was, however, entirely based upon the other method above-mentioned. He taught his disciples the secret of strengthening their powers of apprehension and cognition, in order that they might pass beyond the mists surrounding the outer perceptual world. He did not say to his followers, as did the Indian teachers: ‘Turn away from the colours, and from the sounds, and from all outer sense-impressions, and seek the path to the spiritual realms only through the merging of yourselves within your very souls’,—but he spoke thus:—‘Strengthen your powers of perception, in order that you may look around upon all things, the plants, the animals, that which lives in the air and in the water, upon the mountains, and in the depths of the valleys, and cast your eyes upon the world.’ We know that the disciples of the Indian mystics regarded this earth upon which we live as merely maya (illusion), and turned from it in order to attain to Brahma. On the other hand, Zarathustra counselled his followers not to draw away from the material world, but to pass outward and beyond it, so that they might say:—‘Whenever we experience perceptual manifestations in the outer physical world, we realize that therein lie concealed and beyond our sense perceptions the workings and achievements of the spirit.’

It is remarkable that the two paths should have been thus united in early Grecian times, and just because in that period true spiritual knowledge was more profound than in our day (which we are inclined to regard as so amazingly enlightened!) all things found expression in imagery, and the images gave rise to Mythology. Thus do we find these two thought currents commingled and fostered in the Grecian culture—The Mystical tending inward, and the Zarathustran outward into the great cosmos.

That such was the case becomes evident from the fact, that one of these paths was named after Dionysos, that mysterious god who was reached when man merged himself ever deeper and deeper within his inner being, there to find a questionable sub-human element, as yet unknown, and from which he first developed into man. It was this unclean and half-animal residue to which was given the name of Dionysos. On the other hand, all that comes to us when we regard our physical sense perceptions from a purely spiritual standpoint, was termed Apollo. Thus we find in ancient Greece, in the Apollo current of thought, the teaching of Zarathustra; and in the Dionysos current, the doctrine of mystical contemplation, side by side in contrast. In Greece they united and operated conjointly—the Zarathustran and the Mystical Methods, those methods which had been at their highest level, working separately, in the days of the ancient Indians.

Here we might say, that already in olden times these two thought currents were destined to commingle in the coming Grecian cults of Apollo and Dionysos, and thenceforward they would continue as one; so that in our present cultural period, when we raise ourselves to a certain spiritual understanding, we find them still unified and enduring.

It is very remarkable, and one of the many riddles which present themselves to the thinking mind, that Nietzsche in his first work, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, gave evidence of a vague suspicion that in the Grecian creeds of Dionysos and Apollo, the Mystical current meets the stream of scientific spiritual thought.

A further matter of interest lies in the fact, that Zarathustra actually taught his disciples to recognize in detail, the hidden workings of the Spirit in all material things, and from this starting-point the whole of his gifts to culture emanated. He emphasized that it was not sufficient for man merely to say:—‘There before us spreads a material world, behind which ever works and weaves the Divine Spirit.’ Such a statement might appear at first sight full of significance, it leads, however, only to a general pantheistic outlook, and means nothing more, than that some vague nebulous spirit underlies all material phenomena. Zarathustra, like all other great personalities of the past who were exalted and had direct contact with the Spirit-World, did not present these matters to his followers and the people in any such indefinite and abstract manner; he pointed out, that in the same way as individual physical happenings vary in import, so is it with the latent spiritual factor, it being sometimes of greater and sometimes of less moment. He further stated that the sun, regarded purely from the physical point of view as a member of the stellar system, is the source of all earthly phenomena, life, and activity, while concealed within is the centre of spiritual existence in so far as we are immediately concerned.

These things Zarathustra impressed earnestly and clearly upon his disciples, and, using simple words, we can picture him as addressing them somewhat as follows:—‘When you regard man, you must realize that he does not only consist of a material body—such is but an outer expression of the spirit which is within. Even as the physical covering is a manifestation in condensed and crystallized form of the true spiritual man, so is the sun which appears to us as a light-giving mass when considered as such, merely the external manifestation of an inner spiritual sun.’ In the same way as we term the human spirit element as distinguished from the physical, The Aura, to use an ancient expression, so do we call the all-embracing hidden spiritual part of the sun, The Great Aura (Aura Mazda); in contradistinction to man’s spiritual component, which is sometimes called the Little Aura.

Now, Zarathustra named all that lies hidden within and beyond man’s mere apprehension of the physical sun—‘Aura Mazda’ or ‘Ahura Mazdao’—and considered this element as important to our spiritual experiences and conditions, as is the physical sun to the wellbeing of plants and animals, and all that lives upon the face of the earth. There behind the physical sun lies the Spiritual Master—The Creator—‘Ahura Mazdao’ or ‘Aura Mazda’, and from ‘Ahura Mazdao’ came the name, ‘Ormuzd’, or, ‘The Spirit of Light’.

While the Indians mystically searched their inner being, in order to attain to Brahma—The Eternal—who shines outward as a point of light from within man’s essence, Zarathustra urged his disciples to turn their eyes upon the great periphery of existence, and pointed out that there within the body of the sun, dwells the great Solar Spirit—Ahura Mazdao—‘The Spirit of Light’. He taught them that, just in the same way as when man strives to raise his spirit to perfection, so must he ever battle against his lower passions and desires, against the delusive images suggested by possible deception and falsehood, and all those antagonistic influences within, which continually oppose his spiritual impulses. Thus must ‘Ahura Mazdao’ face the opposition of ‘The Spirit of Darkness’—‘Angra Mainyus’ or ‘Ahriman’.

We can now realize how the great Zarathustran conception could be evolved from experiences born of sensations and sense contents. Through these, Zarathustra could advance his disciples to a point where he could make clear to them that:—Within man there is a ‘Perfecting Principle’, which tells him that whatever may be his present condition this principle will work persistently within, and through it he may raise himself ever higher and higher; but at the same time there also operate impulses and inclinations, deceit and falsehood, all tending towards imperfection. This Perfecting Principle must therefore be developed and expanded, in order that the world may be destined to attain to wiser and more advanced states of perfection; it is the ‘Principle of Ahura Mazdao’, and is assailed throughout the whole world by Ahriman—‘The Spirit of Darkness’—who through imperfection and evil brings shadows into the light. By following the method above outlined, Zarathustra’s disciples were enabled to realize and to feel, that in truth each individual man is an image of the outer universe.

We must not seek the true significance of such teaching in theories, concepts and ideas; but in active vivid consciousness and in the sensations impressed when through it man realizes that he is so related to the universe that he can say:—‘As I stand here, I am a small world, and as such I am a replica of the Great Cosmos.’ Just as we have within us a principle of perfection, and another which is antagonistic, so throughout the universe is Ormuzd opposed by Ahriman. In these teachings the whole cosmos is represented as typical of a widespread human being; the forces of greatest virtue are termed Ahura Mazdao, while against these operate the powers of Angra Mainyus.

When a man realizes that he is in direct contact with the workings of the universe and the attendant physical phenomena, but can only apprehend the perceptual, then as he begins to gain spiritual experience, a feeling of awe may come over him (especially if he is materialistic in thought) when he learns through Spectrum Analysis, that the same matter which exists upon the earth is found in the most distant stars. It is the same with Zarathustranism, when man feels that his spiritual part is merged in that of the whole cosmos, and that he has indeed emanated from its great spirit. Herein lies the true significance of such a doctrine, which was not merely abstract in character, but on the contrary wholly concrete.

In this present age it is most difficult to make people understand (even when they have a certain sense for the spiritual that lies behind the perceptual) that it is necessary to a true and spiritually scientific view of the cosmos, that there be more than one central unity of spirit-power. But even as we distinguish between the separate forces in Nature, such as Heat, Light, and Chemical forces, so in the world of spirit must we recognize not merely one centralized power (whose existence is not denied) but we must differentiate between it and certain subservient uplifting forces, whose spheres of action are more circumscribed than are those of the all-embracing spirit. Thus it was that Zarathustra made a distinction between the omnipotent Ormuzd, and those spirit beings by whom he was served.

Before we turn to a consideration of these subservient spirit entities, we must draw attention to the fact that the Zarathustran theory was not a mere Dualism—a simple doctrine of two worlds—the worlds of Ormuzd and of Ahriman; but that it maintained that underlying this double flux of cosmic influence, is a definite unity—a single power—which gave birth to both The Realm of Light (Ormuzd) and to The Realm of Darkness (Ahriman). It is not easy to gain a right understanding of Zarathustra’s conception concerning this ‘Unity’ underlying Ormuzd and Ahriman. With reference to this point the Greek authors state that the ancient Persians worshipped, and regarded as a ‘Living Unity’, that which lay beyond the light, and which Zarathustra termed ‘Zervane Akarene’. How can we gain a comprehension of what Zarathustra in his teachings meant by ‘Zervane Akarene’ or ‘Zaruana Akarana’?

Let us consider for a moment the course of evolution; this we must regard as of such nature, that all beings tend towards greater and greater perfection. So that if we look into the future, we see more and more of the radiance from the Light-Realms of Ormuzd; but if we turn our eyes upon the past, we realize how the powers of Ahriman, which oppose Ormuzd, are circumstanced; and we then know that with the passing of time, these must be conquered and for ever ended.

We will now picture to ourselves that the path into the future and that into the past each lead to the same point; a conception which present-day man finds most difficult to grasp. Let us take as an example a circle; if we pass along the circumference from the lowest point in one direction, we come to the opposite point above, if, however, we go along the other side, we come to the same point. When we consider a larger circle, then the circumference is flatter, and we must traverse a greater distance in each case. We will now suppose a circle to expand ever more and more, then ultimately the path on either side becomes a straight line, and is infinite. But just before the circle becomes infinite we would reach the same point whether we went by the one path or the other. Why, then, should not the same happen when the circumference is so flattened that the periphery becomes a straight line? In this case the point at infinity on the one must be identical with that on the other, and therefore we must be able to travel to it, from the lowest point in one sense (say, positive), and return as if coming from the opposite (negative) direction. This means that when our conception is infinite, we have a straight line extending without limit on either side, but which is in reality the circumference of an infinite circle.

The abstraction given above lies at the basis of Zarathustra’s conception of what he termed Zaruana Akarana. Here, with regard to time, we look in one direction into the future, in the other into the past, and when we consider an infinite period time closes in upon itself as in a circle. This self-contained and infinite time circle is symbolically represented as a serpent eternally biting its own tail, and into it is woven upon the one side, The Power of Light, shedding upon us continually a greater and greater radiance; and upon the other, The Power of Darkness, becoming ever more and more profound. When we are midway, then is the light (Ormuzd) intermingled with the shadows (Ahriman); all is interwoven in the self-embracing infinite Flux of Time, ‘Zaruana Akarana’.

There is something more about this ancient cosmic conception; its basic ideas were treated seriously, there were no mere vague statements such as:—‘Without and remote from all that is material in this perceptual world, beyond those things which affect our eyes, our ears, and sense organs in general—abides The Spirit’. But it was definitely asserted, that in everything which could be seen and apprehended, therein could be discerned something of the nature of spirit signs, or a manifestation of the Spirit-World.

If we take a sheet of paper upon which are inscribed alphabetical characters, these may be combined into words; but we must first have learnt how to read. Without this ability no one could read about Zarathustra; for they would merely perceive certain characters which could only be followed with the eyes. Actual reading can only take place after it is clearly understood how to connect such characters with that which is within the soul. Now, Zarathustra discerned a written sign underlying all that was in the perceptual world, particularly in the manner in which the stars are grouped in the universe. Just as we recognize written characters upon paper, so did Zarathustra descry in the starry firmament something similar to letters, conveying a message from the Spirit-World. Hence, arose an art of penetrating into the World of Spirit, and of deciphering the signs indicated by the arrangement of the stars, and of finding a method of reading and construing from their movements and order, in what manner and way those spiritual beings that are without, inscribe the facts concerning their activities in space.

Zarathustra and his disciples had a paramount interest in these matters. To them it was a most important sign that Ahura Mazdao, in order to accomplish his creations and to reveal his message to the world, should (in the language of Modern Astronomy) ‘describe a circular path’. This fact was regarded as a sign traced in the heavens indicating in what manner Ahura Mazdao worked, and the relation which his activities bore to the universe as a whole. It is important that Zarathustra was able to point out that the constellations of the Zodiac, taken together as forming a closed curve in space, should symbolize a continuous and also retroactive time flux; and we can realize that there is indeed a most profound significance underlying the statement, that one branch of this time-curve stretches outward into the future, while the other leads backward into the remote past. Zaruana Akarana is that bright band of stars, later known as the Zodiac, that self-contained time-line ever traversed by Ormuzd, The Spirit of Light. In other words, the passage of the sun across the constellations of the Zodiac is an expression of the activity of Ormuzd; while the Zodiac itself is the symbol of Zaruana Akarana. In reality, Zaruana Akarana and The Zodiac are identical terms, just in the same way as are Ormuzd and Ahura Mazdao.

There are two special circumstances to be considered in this connection. First, when the passage of the sun through the Zodiac takes place while it is light, as in the summer. At such time the solar radiance falls full upon the earth, bringing with it the power emanating from those spiritual forces ever flowing outward from the Light-Realms of Ormuzd. That part of the Zodiac traversed by Ahura Mazdao in the daytime, or during the summer, denotes the manner in which He works and weaves unhindered by Ahriman. On the other hand, those Zodiacal constellations which lie far beneath the horizon—dark regions through which we might picture the passage of Angra Mainyus—are symbolical of the Kingdom of The Shadows.

We have stated that Zarathustra regarded Ormuzd as associated with the bright sections of the Zodiac (Zaruana Akarana), while he looked upon Ahriman as connected with the gloom. In what way do the activities of Ormuzd and Ahriman find expression in our material world? In order to understand this point we must realize that the effect of the solar rays is different in the morning from that at noon; varying as the sun ascends from Aries to Taurus, and again during its descent toward the horizon. The influence exerted is not the same in winter as in summer, and differs with every passing sign of the Zodiac. Zarathustra regarded the changing aspects of the sun in connection with the Zodiacal constellations as symbolical of the activities of Ormuzd proceeding from different directions, and from which came those spiritual beings that are both His servants and His sons, and who are ready at all times to execute His commands. These are the ‘Amschaspands’ or ‘Ameschas Pentas’, subservient entities, to each of whom is allotted some special duty.

While Ormuzd controls all active functions in the Light-Realms, the Amschaspands undertake that specific work which finds expression in the transmission of the sun’s light when in Aries, Taurus, Cancer, etc. But the true vital activity of Ormuzd is manifested in the full radiance of the sun, shining throughout all bright signs of the Zodiac, from Aries to Libra or Scorpio. Following the Zarathustran line of thought, we might say:—‘It is as though the evil powers of Ahriman came through the earth from those dark regions where abide his servants—his own Amschaspands—who are opposed to the good genii standing by the side of Ormuzd.’ Zarathustra actually distinguished between twelve different subservient spirit entities; six or seven on the side of Ormuzd, and five or six on that of Ahriman. These are regarded as typical of good or evil genii (Amaschas Pentas—lower spirits), according as to whether their influence comes with the sun’s rays from the bright Signs of the Zodiac, or emanates from those which are in gloom.

Goethe had the subservient spirits of Ormuzd in mind when he wrote the following words at the beginning of Faust in the ‘Prologue of Heaven’:

‘But ye, God’s sons in love and duty,
Enjoy the rich, the ever-living Beauty!
Creative Power, that works eternal schemes,
Clasp you in bonds of love, relaxing never,
And what in wavering apparition gleams
Fix in its place with thoughts that stand for ever!’²

(Trans: BAYARD TAYLOR)

From the above it is apparent that the conception which Goethe formed of ‘God’s sons’ as the servants of the Highest Divine Power, is similar to Zarathustra’s concept concerning the Amschaspands, of which, as already stated, he recognized twelve different kinds. Again, subservient to these Amschaspand entities, according to Zarathustranism, are yet lower orders of spiritual powers or forces, among which some twenty-eight separate types are usually distinguished. These are the so-called ‘Izarads’ or ‘Izeds’; the number of different classes into which they may be divided is, however, indeterminate, being variously estimated from twenty-four up to twenty-eight, and even as high as thirty-one. There is yet a third division of spiritual powers or forces, termed by Zarathustra ‘Ferruhars’ or ‘Frawaschars’. According to our conceptions, the Ferruhars have the least influence of any upon our tendencies and dispositions in the material world, and are regarded as that spiritual element which permeates the great macrocosm, and underlies all perceptual physical activity. They are the reality behind everything of which we are conscious and appears to us as merely external and material.

While we picture the Amschaspands as controlling the twelve forces which are at work during all physical effects engendered by the action of light, and the Izeds, as governing those which influence the animal kingdom, so do we consider the Ferruhars, in addition to possessing the quality above-mentioned, as spiritual entities having under their guidance the ‘Group-Souls’ of animals.

Thus did Zarathustra discern a specialized realm beyond this perceptual universe—a perfectly organized superperceptual world—and his concept was absolutely definite, and in no sense of the nature of an abstraction. Behind Ormuzd and Ahriman he pictured Zaruana Akarana, further the good and bad Amschaspands, below these the Izeds, and lastly the Ferruhars.

Man, as he is fashioned, is a replica in miniature of the great universe, and therefore all forces operative in the cosmos must be present in some manner within his being. Just as the benevolent powers of Ormuzd are expressed during that inner struggle to attain to perfection, and the unclean forces of Ahriman are in evidence while there is gloom and temptation, so do we find also the trace of other spiritual powers—those of the lower genii.

I will now make a definite statement, which when viewed from the standpoint of modern cosmic ideas, is liable to awaken bitter feeling, namely:—I assert that before long it will be discovered and recognized by external science, that a superperceptual element underlies all physical phenomena, and that latent spirit exists in everything that comes within the limits of our sense perceptions. Further, that science will be driven to admit, that in the physical structure of man there is much that is a counterpart of those forces which permeate and spread life throughout the whole universe, and which flow into the body, there to become condensed.

Let us go back to the Zarathustran Doctrine, which in many ways is similar to that of Spiritual Science. According to its concepts, Ormuzd and Ahriman are regarded as influencing mankind from without. Ormuzd being the source of inward impulses toward perfection, while Ahriman is ever in opposition. The Amschaspands also exert spiritual activity, if we consider their forces as being, so to speak, condensed in man, then it should be possible to trace and recognize their action to the point of physical expression.

In Zarathustra’s time, anatomy, as we understand it to-day, did not exist. Zarathustra and his disciples, by means of their spiritual insight, actually saw the cosmic streams to which reference has been made; they appeared to them in the form of twelve cosmic outpourings, flooding in upon man, there to maintain activity. Thus it came about that the human head was regarded by Zarathustra’s followers as a symbol of the inflowing of the seven good, and five evil, Amschaspands. Within man we have a continuance of the Amschaspand flux; how, then, is this flux to be recognized at this much later period? The anatomist has discovered that there are twelve principal pairs of brain nerves, which pass from the brain into the body. These are the physical counterparts, as it were, of the twelve condensed Amschaspand out-flowings, namely, twelve pairs of nerves of extreme potency in bringing about either the highest perfection, or the greatest evil. Here, then, we find reappearing in our present age, but transformed into material terms, that concept which had come to Zarathustra from the Spirit-World, and which he preached to his disciples.

There is, however, in all this a point of controversy. It is so easy for anyone in our day to maintain that the statements of Spiritual Science become wholly fantastical when it is alleged that Zarathustra, speaking of twelve Amschaspands, had in mind something connected with the twelve pairs of nerves which are in the human head! But the time will come when the world will gain yet another item of knowledge, for it will be discovered in what manner, and form the spirit, which permeates and lives throughout the universe, continues active in man.

The old Zarathustranism has arisen once again in our modern physiology. For in the same way as the twenty-eight to thirty-one Izeds are the servants of the Amschaspands, so are the twenty-eight spinal nerves subordinate to those of the brain. Again, the Izeds, who are present in the outer universe as a spirit flux, enter the human body, and their sphere of action is in those nerves which stimulate the lower soul-life of man; in these nerves they crystallize, as it were, and assume a condensed form. And where the Ized-flux, as such, entirely ceases, and the term ‘nerve’ can no longer be applied, is the actual centre where our personality receives its crowning touch. Further, those of our thoughts which rise slightly above mere cognition and simple brain action, are typical of the Frawaschars or Ferruhars.

Our present period is connected in a remarkable manner with the Doctrine of Zarathustra. Through his teachings and by means of his spiritual archetypes, Zarathustra was enabled to enlighten his people regarding those regions which spread beyond the perceptual world, while his imagery was ever as a flowing contact with that which lies hidden behind the veil. With reference to this great doctrine it is most significant that after it had acted as an inspiration to humanity for a long period, always tending to promote greater and greater effort in various directions of cultural progress—only to lose its influence from time to time—there should arise once more, in our day, a marked tendency toward a mystical current of thought.

It was the same with the Greeks after the two methods of approach to the Spirit-World had commingled, for they also, at times, showed a preference for either the mystical or the Spiritual Scientific thought current. It is owing to the modern predominating interest in mysticism that many people find themselves drawn towards the Indian Spiritual Science, or Method of Contemplation. Hence it is, that the most essential and deeply significant aspects of Zarathustranism—in fact, its very essence—hardly appear in the spiritual life of our time, although there is abundant evidence of the nature of Zarathustra’s concepts and his methods of thought. But all that lies at the very base, and is absolutely vital to his doctrine, is in a sense lost to our age.

When once we realize that in Zarathustranism is contained the spiritual prototype of so many things which we have rediscovered in the domain of physical research (numerous examples of which might be quoted), and of others that will be rediscovered later, then will a fundamental chord in our culture give place to one which will be founded upon the old Zarathustran teachings. It is remarkable that the profound attention which Zarathustranism paid to macrocosmic phenomena caused the world to recede, as it were, or appear of less moment; while in nearly all other beliefs with which a flood of mystical culture is associated, the outer world plays an important part, this is also the case in our materialism.

That great fundamental concept concerning two opposing basic qualities, and which recurs again and again throughout the religious doctrines of the world, we regard in the following manner; we consider it as symbolized by the antithesis of the sexes—the male and the female—so that in the old religious systems which were founded upon mysticism, the Gods and Goddesses were in reality, antithetical symbols of two opposing currents which flow throughout the universe. It is amazing that the teachings of Zarathustra should rise above these conceptions, and picture the origin of spiritual activity in so different a manner, portraying the good, as the resplendent, and the evil as the shadows.

Hence, the chaste beauty of Zarathustranism and its nobility, which transcends all those petty ideas which play so ugly a part in our time, when any endeavour is made to deepen man’s conception of spiritual life. Where the Greek writers state that the Supreme Deity in order to create Ormuzd, must also create Ahriman, so that He should obtain an antithesis; then, since Ahriman opposed Ormuzd, we have an example of how one primordial force is conceived as set against another. This same idea finds expression in the Hebrew, where evil comes upon the world through the woman—Eve—but we find nothing in Zarathustranism concerning ills that the world suffered through the antithesis of the sexes.

All those hateful ideas which are disseminated throughout our daily literature, pervading our very thoughts and feelings, distorting the true significance of the phenomena of disease and health, while failing to comprehend the intrinsic facts of life, will disappear, when that wholly different concept, the antithesis exhibited by Ormuzd and Ahriman—a conception so lofty and so powerful when compared with present-day paltry notions—is once more voiced in the words of Zarathustra, and enters to permeate and influence our modern culture. In this world, all things pursue their appointed course, and nothing can hinder the ultimate triumph of Zarathustran conceptions, which will, little by little, insinuate themselves into the life of the people.

When we look upon Zarathustra in this way, we realize that he was indeed a Spirit, who in bygone times brought potent impulses to bear upon human culture. That such was the case becomes evident, if we but follow the course of subsequent events which took place in Asia Minor, and later among the people of Assyria and Babylonia, on down to the Egyptian period, and further even to the time of the spreading of Christianity. Everywhere we find in different lines of thought something which may be traced back, and shown to have its origin in that Great Light, which Zarathustra set blazing for humanity.

We can now understand how it was that a certain Greek writer (who wished to emphasize the fact that some among the Leaders had always given their people instruction in matters that they would only require at a later period in their culture) should have stated, that while Pythagoras had obtained all the knowledge that he could from the Egyptians concerning the methods of Geometry, from the Phænicians concerning Arithmetic, and from the Chaldeans concerning Astronomy—he was forced to turn to the successors of Zarathustra, in order to learn the secret teachings regarding the relation of humanity to the Spirit-World, and to obtain a true understanding of the proper conduct of life. The writer who made these statements regarding Pythagoras further asserts that the Zarathustran method for the conduct of life leads us beyond antitheses, and that all antitheses can be considered as culminating in the one great contrast of Good and Evil, which opposing condition can be finally absorbed, only by the purging away of all evil, falsehood and deceit. For instance, the worst enemy of Ormuzd is regarded as that one which bears the name of Calumny, and Calumny is one of the outstanding characteristics of Ahriman. The same writer states that Pythagoras failed to find the purest and most ideal ethical practice, namely, the one directed toward the moral purification of man, among either the Egyptians, the Phænicians, or the Chaldeans; and that he had again to turn to Zarathustra’s successors, in order to acquire that lofty conception of the universe which leads mankind to the earnest belief that through self-purification alone may evil be overcome. Thus did the great nobility and oneness of Zarathustra’s teachings become recognized among the ancients.

We would here mention that the statements made in this lecture are supported in every case by independent historical research; and we should carefully weigh all assertions coming from the representatives of other sciences, and judge for ourselves, whether or no they are in accord with our fundamental concepts. For instance, take the case of Plutarch, when he said that in the sense of Zarathustranism, the essence of Light as it affects the earth, is regarded as of supreme loveliness, and that its spiritual counterpart is Truth. Here is a definite statement made by an ancient historian, which is in complete agreement with all that has been said. We shall also find as we proceed that many historical events become clear and understandable when we take into consideration the various factors to which we have drawn attention.

Let us now go back to the ancient Vedantic conception; this was based upon the mystical merging of man within his very being; but before he can attain to the inner Light of Brahma, he must meet with, and pass through, those passions and desires which are induced by wild semi-human impulses that are within him, and which are opposed to that mystical withdrawal within the spirit-soul, and into the eternal inner being. The Indian came to the conclusion that this could only be accomplished, if pending his mystic merging in Brahma, he could successfully eliminate all that we experience in the perceptual world which stimulates sensuous desires, and allures through colours and through sounds. Just so long as these play a part during our meditations, so long do we keep within us, an enemy opposed to our mystical attainment to perfection.

The Indian teacher said:—‘Put away from yourselves all that can enter the soul through the powers that are external; merge yourselves solely within your very being—descend to the Devas—and when you have vanquished the lower Devas, then will you find yourselves within the kingdom of the Deva of Brahma; but shun the realm of the Asuras, whence come those malignant ones who would thrust themselves upon you from the outer world of Maya; from all such you must turn away, whatsoever may befall.’

Zarathustra, on the other hand, spoke to his disciples after this fashion:—‘Those who follow the leaders among the people of the South can make no advance along the path which they have chosen, because of the different order of their search after those things which are of the Spirit; in such manner can no nation make headway. The call is not alone to mystic contemplation and to dreaming, but to live in a world which provides freely of all that is needful—man’s mission lies with the art of agriculture, and the promotion of civilization. You must not regard all things as merely Maya, but you must penetrate that veil of colours, and of sounds, which is spread around you; and avoid everything that may be of the nature of the Devas, and which because of your inner egoism, would hold you in its grasp. The region wherein abide the lower Asuras must be traversed, through this you must force your way, even up to the highest; but since your being has been especially organized and adapted to this intent, you must ever shun the dark realms of the Devas.’

In India, the teaching of the Rishis was otherwise, for they said to their followers:—‘Your beings are not suitably organized to seek that which lies within the Kingdom of the Asuras—therefore avoid this region and descend to that of the Devas.’

Such was the difference between the Indian and Persian culture. The Indian peoples were taught that they must shun the Asuras and regard them as evil spirits; this was because through the method of their culture they were only aware of the lower Asuras; the Persians, on the other hand, who found only low types of Devas in the Devas regions were adjured by their leaders thus:—‘Enter the Kingdom of the Asuras, for you are so constituted that you may attain even unto the highest of them.’

There lay within the impulse that Zarathustra gave to mankind a great fervour, which found expression when he said:—‘I have a gift to bestow upon humanity which shall endure and live throughout the ages, and will smooth the upward path, overcoming all false doctrines, which are but obstacles diverting man from his struggle toward the attainment of perfection.’ Thus did Zarathustra feel himself to be the servant of Ahura Mazdao, and as such he experienced personally the opposition of Ahriman, over whose principles his teachings should enable mankind to achieve a sweeping victory. This conviction he expressed in impressive and beautiful words, to which reference is found in ancient documents. These, however, were necessarily inscribed at a later date; but what Spiritual Science tells us concerning Zarathustra and his pronouncements comes from other sources. Throughout all his telling adjurations there rings forth the inner impulse of his mission, and we feel the power of that great passion which overcame him, when, as the opponent of Ahriman and the Principle of Darkness, he said:—‘I will speak! draw nigh and listen unto me, ye that come with longing from afar, and ye from near at hand—mark my words!—No more shall he, the Evil One, this false teacher, conquer the Spirit of Good. Too long hath his vile breath bemingled human voice and human speech. But now I will denounce him in the words which The Highest—The First One—has put into my mouth, the words which Ahura Mazdao has spoken. To him who will not harken unto my words, and who will not heed that which I say unto you—to him will come evil—and that, ere ever the world hath ended its cycles.’

Thus spoke Zarathustra, and we can but feel that he had something to impart to humanity, which would leave its impress throughout all later cultural periods. Those among us who have understanding and will but pay attention to that which persists in our time, even if only dimly apparent, who will note with spiritual discernment the tenor of our culture, can even yet, after thousands of years, recognize the echo of the Zarathustran teachings. Hence it is that we number Zarathustra among Great Leaders such as Hermes, Buddha, Moses, and others, about whom we shall have much to say in subsequent lectures. The spiritual gifts possessed by these Great Ones, and the position which they occupied among men, are indicated, and fitly expressed in the following words:—

‘God sends us Spirits that shine as stars,
From the spheres of eternal love.
May we behold that glorious light,
They reflect from the realms above.’³

• 1. the date of which has been placed at about 1200 B.C.
• 2. Doch ihr, die echten Göttersöhne,
  Erfreut euch der lebendig reichen Schöne!
  Das Werdende, das ewig wirkt und lebt,
  Umfass euch mit der Liebe holden Schranken,
  Und was in schwankender Erscheinung schwebt,
  Befestiget mit dauernden Gedanken.
• 3. Es leuchten gleich Sternen
  Am Himmel des ewigen Seins
  Die gottgesandten Geister.
  Gelingen möge es alien Menschenseelen,
  Im Reiche des Erdenseins
  Zu schauen ihrer Flammen Licht!